Jon Grimwood - redRobe

‘She’ll be killed,’ Kate said.

‘No,’ said Axl as he pushed back his chair and slung the snubPup’s neoprene sling over one shoulder, ‘the Cardinal’s not like that.’ Others were, though… Axl was about to wonder where that thought had come from when Kate’s face twisted into a sneer. But what started out as bitter laugh ended up a swallowed sob.

‘Not like that. . . ?’

She didn’t say anymore and she didn’t need to. No one had been able to explain why Cardinal Santo Ducque had let Joan walk out alone into a crowd of feral children, without her guards. Although that hadn’t stopped everyone from CySat to the Emperor Maximillia herself from speculating.

If Axl had to guess why the Cardinal had failed to keep Joan II safe, he’d guess it was because Joan didn’t want to be safe. She hadn’t come to Mexico to hide behind a fortified fence in the Sasrario in Day Effé or at the Villa Carlotta ...

The Cardinal was as powerful as any other metaNational CEO of a regional fief. Maybe more, at least he could play the moral dimension when realekonomik failed. But not even control of a yearly income bigger than the GDP of most subSahal national debts could change the fact that Joan was his boss.

Manoeuvering was one thing, full-on rebellion was not the Cardinal’s way. And the old bastard wasn’t stupid enough to try. Losing battles was the fastest way to lose authority. And nothing on earth would made the Cardinal fight a war he already knew was lost before it began.

Joan however… Axl remembered the marble steps, the absolute certain acceptance that death was coming. Her enemies might have chosen how but she’d chosen where.

‘Look,’ Axl’s voice was flat, hard. He held up one hand. Most truths were better left unsaid—that was his view anyway—and the reasoning behind Joan’s death was one of them. But if Kate wanted facts she was going to get them.

‘She went there to die,’ said Axl; ‘I know, I’ve been inside her head.’

Kate froze, mid-breath. One hand still clasping a chair, knuckles going white where they gripped the wood of the chair back. What had been anger changed to shock as questions backed up, log-jamming each other in their need to get asked and spilled over into the only question Kate really wanted answering.

‘Why?’

Axl shrugged. ‘Maybe she’d got bored.’

And maybe he was just being a bastard for the sake of it. Joan had known she was going to die, though, and an elite SWAT team from the Cardinal’s Guard couldn’t have saved her…

Nor, once that shot was fired, could an automated combat stretcher or an immediate airlift to the nearest hospital, had either been possible. Curare acted too fast. The kill was a professional job, well done. . . Cranks were ingenious and fanatics, well, fanatical but that hit had been organised, orchestrated.

‘Face it,’ said Axl, ‘if Joan died it was because she didn’t want to be saved.’

It was only will-power that stopped Kate slapping him but Axl stepped back anyway, to let her sweep past him, head erect and back ramrod stiff as she walked through the open door and headed for the main stairs that led towards Mai’s room.

Axl wished he could say what hit him most was the fall of Kate’s long dark hair or the proud way she kept her shoulders pulled back, but it wasn’t. What took him by the throat was the shape of those perfect breasts beneath her shirt and the fact her tears were entirely silent.

Colonel Emilio, defMoma, the Peruvian kids with big eyes and bigger guns all vanished during the night while Axl sat guard on Mai, taking their Honda GyroBykes with then. Behind them, PaxForce left firepits that still smoked, stinking outdoor latrines and SERIOUS tagged in gloPaint on a dozen already-decrepit buildings.

And everyone in Cocheforet was ecstatic about their leaving except for Axl, who didn’t know whether to be worried or just plain relieved.

Now Axl had left Cocheforet too and both the village and valley were half a day behind him. For Axl that was life’s one small blessing. Nothing could make him go back to that Inn or the jumble of crude shacks slung along a track that went precisely nowhere. Leon, his customers, the snot-nosed, dirty-arsed Tibetan children, all had lined up in silence early that morning to watch Axl and Mai ride through, followed after by Kate, Ketzia and Tukten. Of those last three only Kate and Ketzia had horses. At the back of the small group traipsed Louis, looking close to tears again. Hatred for Axl rose from the small crowd like steam.

Even the strays dogs had fallen silent.

Not one of that crowd wouldn’t have knocked Axl from his horse given even a fifth of a chance. But the Browning snubPup that rested across his saddle had reduced even Leon to the status of a sullen spectator.

Maybe they’d intended to attack and lost their nerve or maybe the villagers had never got beyond thinking about it but all they did was spit and mutter. One stone hurled accurately or the steel edge of a spade swung into the small of his back would have been enough. Riots had been born from less. But they were ‘fugees, Axl reminded himself. Helpless, hopeless ... It was hard to know who held the other in most contempt.

Kate wasn’t riding to keep Mai company, she’d told Axl. She was going to Vajrayana to lodge a formal complaint. Those were the words she used. Axl wasn’t surprised. Most of the women he’d fucked would have told him they intended to have his head, but Kate had a complaint to lodge.

Axl shrugged. Let her lodge it. And if Kate, Louis and Ketzia held him responsible for all that had happened, let them. He wasn’t afraid of the machete that dangled unsheathed from Ketzia’s hip, of Kate’s cold disdain or Louis’s open hatred.

As for Tukten, he was glued to Mai’s side, jogging beside the saddle of her shaggy pony as if he’d finally found his place in life. Besides, not even Tsongkhapa would go against a properly conducted arrest. Axl had been given a job to do and finally he’d done it. Everything else had been killing time.

He had nothing to regret, so what gave with the sparsely-layered acid trance that rolled into his head like mist from the steep slope around him… ? Axl didn’t know. But no matter where he looked or what he thought, he couldn’t shift it.

Kicking his mare forward, Axl kept climbing towards a deep split in the rock face, the reins to Mai’s mountain pony wrapped tight round his wrist. He hadn’t bothered to ask how a village that the night before could only produce one pony, and that in the face of a gun, had suddenly found two extra animals for Kate and Ketzia. The answer was too obvious. Axl was an outsider. And everyone who wasn’t from Cocheforet was an enemy.

It didn’t seem worth pointing out to Kate how lightly her precious village had got off. There were safety zones back on earth where no buildings still stood, where every child had been found binned and bagged in a corner, their throats cut.

No men in Cocheforet had been forced at gunpoint to sodomise their daughters, no mothers had to choose between biting off the testicles of their fathers or their sons. Not one person had been disembowelled, buried alive or hosed with gel from an unlit flame gun and then forced to light a match. There were no body pits for outside observers to dig up and divide the number of toes by five to reach a tally of the dead.

Axl was as angry as he was shattered. Just how angry he found it hard to admit. The problem was, it wasn’t really with them.

Hoofs slid as Axl’s mount hit a stream flowing so shallow across rock as to be almost unseen. The landscape was cold and quiet and all the rock near the summit was black. At noon, an eerie mist had rolled down the scree-strewn mountain side and promptly vanished after filling everyone’s lungs with wet air. And by afternoon Axl’s spine ached and the inside of his thighs burnt from where they chaffed against his damp saddle. More worryingly, the countdown inside his eye had hit 96.00.00 and promptly changed colour, from white to pink. Now Axl was ignoring it as he intended to ignore it the next time it jacked itself up a colour code.