Chapters (56)
- PROLOGUE
- PART 1
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- PART 2
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- PART 3
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- PART 4
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- PART 5
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- FORTY-THREE
- FORTY-FOUR
- FORTY-FIVE
- FORTY-SIX
- FORTY-SEVEN
- FORTY-EIGHT
- FORTY-NINE
- EPILOGUE
Vidaura looked down into her lap. “Is that what you tell yourself?”
“No, it’s just a theory.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is some conscious mind left. Maybe there’s a lot left. Maybe in their more lucid moments they think they’ve gone to hell. Either way suits me.”
“How are you financing this?” she whispered.
I found a bared-teeth grin from somewhere and put it on. “Well, contrary to popular belief, some parts of what happened on Sanction IV worked out quite well for me. I’m not short of funds.”
She looked up, face tightening towards anger. “You made money out of Sanction IV?”
“Nothing I didn’t earn,” I said quietly.
Her features smoothed somewhat as she backed the anger up. But her voice still came out taut. “And are these funds going to be enough?”
“Enough for what?”
“Well,” she frowned. “To finish this vendetta. You’re hunting down the priests from the village but—”
“No, I did that last year. It didn’t take me very long, there weren’t that many. Currently, I’m hunting down the ones who were serving members of the Ecclesiastical Mastery when she was murdered. The ones who wrote the rules that killed her. That’s taking me longer, there are a lot of them, and they’re more senior. Better protected.”
“But you’re not planning to stop with them?”
I shook my head. “I’m not planning to stop at all, Virginia. They can’t give her back to me, can they? So why would I stop?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I don’t know how much Virginia told the others once we got back inside the cranked up virtuality. I stayed down in the mapping construct while the rest of them adjourned to the hotel-suite section, which somehow I couldn’t help thinking of as upstairs. I don’t know what she told them, and I didn’t much care. Mostly, it was a relief just to have let someone else in on the whole story.
Not to be the only one.
People like Isa and Plex knew fragments, of course, and Radul Segesvar somewhat more. But for the rest, the New Revelation had hidden what I was doing to them from the start. They didn’t want the bad publicity or the interference of infidel powers like the First Families. The deaths were passed off as accidents, monastery burglaries gone wrong, unfortunate petty muggings. Meanwhile, the word from Isa was that there were private contracts out on me at the Mastery’s behest. The priesthood had a militant wing, but they obviously didn’t place too much faith in it because they’d also seen fit to engage a handful of Millsport sneak assassins. One night in a small town on the Saffron Archipelago, I let one of them get close enough to test the calibre of the hired help. It wasn’t impressive.