She shook her head slightly. “The rest of who?”

“The rest of the village. Every motherfucker I could find who was an adult there the day she died. I got a datarat in Millsport to run population files for me, names and faces. Everyone who could have lifted a finger to help her and didn’t. I took the list and I went back up there and I slaughtered them.” I looked at my hands. “And a few others who got in my way.”

She was staring at me as if she didn’t know me. I made an irritable gesture.

“Oh, come on, Virginia. We’ve both done worse than that on more worlds than I can remember right now.”

“You’ve got Envoy recall,” she said numbly.

I gestured again. “Figure of speech. On seventeen worlds and five moons. And that habitat in the Nevsky Scatter. And—”

“You took their stacks?”

“Josef and the priests’, yes.”

“You destroyed them?”

“Why would I do that? It’s exactly what they’d want. Oblivion after death. Not to come back.” I hesitated. But it seemed pointless to stop now.

And if I couldn’t trust Vidaura, then there was no one else left. I cleared my throat and jabbed a thumb northward. “Back that way, out on the Weed Expanse, I’ve got a friend in the haiduci. Among other business ventures, he breeds swamp panthers for the fight pits. Sometimes, if they’re good, he fits them with cortical stacks. That way, he can download injured winners into fresh sleeves and tip the odds.”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“Yeah. For a fee, he takes the stacks I give him, and loads their owners into some of his more over-the-hill panthers. We give them time to get used to the idea, then put them into the low-grade pits and see what happens. This friend can make good money running matches where it’s known humans have been downloaded into the panthers; there’s some kind of sick subculture built around it in fight circles apparently.” I tipped my coffee canister and examined the dregs in the bottom. “I imagine they’re pretty much insane by now. Can’t be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you’re fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there’s much conscious human mind left.”

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.

I don’t know how much Virginia Vidaura told her surfer colleagues, but the presence of the priest in Kem Point alone made it very clear that we could not return from a raid on Rila Crags and stay on the Strip. If the New Revelation could track me this far, so could others far more competent.

As a sanctuary, Vchira Beach was blown.

Mario Ado voiced what was probably a general feeling.

“You’ve fucked this up, dragging your personal crabshit into the harbour with you. You find us a solution.”

So I did.

Envoy competence, one out of the manual—work with the tools to hand. I cast about in the immediate environment, summoned what I had that could be influenced and saw it immediately. Personal shit had done the damage, personal shit would haul us out of the swamp, not to mention solve some more of my own more personal problems by way of a side effect. The irony of it grinned back at me.

Not everyone was so amused. Ado for one.

“Trust the fucking haiduci!” There was a well-bred Millsport sneer behind the words. “No thank you.”

Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow.

“We’ve used them before, Mari.”

“No, you’ve used them before. I steer well clear of scum like that. And anyway, this one you don’t even know.”

“I know of him. I’ve dealt with people who’ve dealt with him before, and from what I hear he’s a man of his word. But I can check him out. You say he owes you, Kovacs?”

“Very much so.”

She shrugged. “Then that should be enough.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sierra. You can’t—”

“Segesvar is solid,” I interrupted. “He takes his debts seriously in both directions. All it needs is the money. If you’ve got it.”

Koi glanced at Brasil, who nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “We can get it easily enough.”

“Oh, happy fucking birthday, Kovacs!”

Virginia Vidaura nailed Ado with a stare. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Mari. It isn’t your money. That’s safely on deposit in a Millsport merchant bank, isn’t it?”

“What’s that supposed to—”

“Enough,” said Koi, and everyone shut up. Sierra Tres went to make some calls from one of the other rooms down the corridor, and the rest of us went back to the mapping construct. In the speeded-up virtual environment, Tres was gone for the rest of the day—real-time equivalence in the outside world about ten minutes. In a construct, you can use the time differential to make three or four simultaneous calls, switching from one to the other in the minutes-long gaps that a couple of seconds’ pause at the other end of the line will give you. When Tres came back, she had more than enough on Segesvar to confirm her original impression. He was old style haiduci, at least in his own eyes. We went back up to the hotel suite and I dialled the discreet coding on speaker phone with no visual.

It was a bad line. Segesvar came on amidst a lot of background noise, some of it real/virtual adjustment connection nutter, some of it not. The part that wasn’t sounded a lot like someone or something screaming.