Three and a half days later Father Sylvester unlocked the nanetic cuffs that bound Mai’s wrists together. Three and a half days, because that was what it took to cross the high plateau and navigate the pass that let them enter the valley of Cocheforet, while black kites circled overhead and bharal, Himalayan blue sheep watched listlessly as they rode past.

And all that time his shakes got worse and his concentration less certain. But he remembered to tidy up after himself all the same. The last thing Father Sylvester did before beginning to descend the gravel track that led down from the pass to the valley floor was kill his horse.

The animal had stopped on a steep spur where angry rock stuck through thin red gravel like broken bone. On top of the rock someone had built a rough stone cairn and daubed it with paint as red as the gravel. The goat’s skull on top of the cairn was weathered to a yellowing ivory.

To the left of the cairn was a small gully with steep sides dotted with wind-stunted scrub juniper. And at the bottom was what looked like an old cartwheel buried under scree that frost and rain had cracked from the gully’s sides; three of the wheel spokes were broken.

Ahead of them was the long narrow valley of Cocheforet and across the valley was his destination. A monastery with red walls and a tiled roof set low on distant rhododendron-covered slopes that rose so high they were eventually swallowed by cloud.

But first there was his horse to deal with. Shooting the poor animal would be easiest. But guns upset Tsongkhapa. And upsetting an infinitely-parallel Buddhist AI with the personality interface of a Bon demon wasn’t a risk Father Sylvester was prepared to take. Getting the unconscious girl and his medical kit through customs had been a miracle of discreet diplomacy and outright bribery, to have risked carrying an unlicensed gun would have been blindingly stupid, and that was something Father Sylvester had never been.

Besides, getting into trouble with Tsongkhapa would be a disaster, which wasn’t an idle consideration. After the girl was delivered… That was a whole other matter but since Father Sylvester would be dead by then he wasn’t prepared to waste energy or thought on it.

Not now.

Despite what the girl thought, Father Sylvester wasn’t instinctively a cruel man. Being harsh took effort and finding the energy to make that effort was becoming more and more difficult. He was even fond of the horse.

There were three ampoules of ketamine left and with clumsy fingers Father Sylvester blasted all three into the neck of the glazed-eyed stallion. And when the animal was still trying to catch its breath after the climb, the priest led it to the edge of the gully.

Father Sylvester opened his wallet and carefully extracted a curl of molywire. Flicking it once aligned the molecules so that the wire suddenly became rigid. One hand gripped the other, to steady it and then-without pausing for thought-Father Sylvester rammed the wire in through the animal’s eye and swivelled his wrist, pulping its brain.

Even as the stallion tried to shy away from him its knees buckled and the animal crashed over the edge of the gully, crushing anaemic saplings as it rolled to the bottom. Broken legs kicked briefly and then stilled. Dust to dust, flesh into earth. It was a ritual so old as to be almost pagan.

Over Father Sylvester’s head crows wheeled in alarm, like a dying twister until still squawking they came to land in the spindly branches they’d left. No one would find his animal until it started to stink, five days at least in this temperature, maybe longer. And even then they wouldn’t find it unless they were looking for it, which they wouldn’t be.

The priest had worked hard to cover his tracks since leaving Vajradala, taking a minor road away from the city, riding through forests rather than take obvious paths round them, avoiding tourist towns as much as possible. No little silver Aerospats had followed him or hung above crossroads to report back what they saw, Father Sylvester felt certain of that.

‘Now you,’ said the priest. He pulled the glass knife from his pocket and stepped towards the girl who scrambled backwards, hands stretched out in front of her as if they’d be enough to keep him away.

‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ promised Father Sylvester, but she didn’t pause until she reached the edge of the gully and then she had to stop anyway. Mai winced when he brought up the blade and she tried to scramble away again, almost slipping over the edge in her panic.

Dried blood. Father Sylvester sucked at his teeth in irritation and wiped the glass blade on the sleeve of his black jacket. Grabbing Mai, he twisted his fingers into her hair until she was unable to move her head and then jabbed the blade between her lips, severing the stitches.

‘Shit head.’ The girl tried to spit at the priest, but her blood-streaked saliva caught in the surgical thread still looped through her swollen lips. So instead of spitting at her captor, the half-Japanese girl made do with pulling the stitches from her mouth, one thread at a time. It might have been worse, Mai thought grudgingly. The bastard could have used plastic skin or cloneDerm… Both of those would have grafted her lips shut, leaving her mouth scarred and in need of real surgery.

Mai knew all about cloneDerm, she’d had her virginity rebuilt a dozen times when she first went to Madame Sotto’s, until she got too acquiescent for it to be convincing.

No one had been around when Father Sylvester had sewn her mouth shut in the VIP lounge at Alicante because they’d had the whole room to themselves. And the priest had issued firm instructions that they weren’t to be interrupted. From the disapproval on the face of the VIP steward it was obvious what the designer-droid thought Father Sylvester would be doing with the weirdly-dressed young girl. But it hadn’t made a fuss. After all, the man had reserved a secure lounge for his own exclusive use and that took serious credit. Father Sylvester hadn’t been doing that at all, of course. Merely pumping Mai full of every antitoxin he knew and feeding her glucose through a straw pushed between her sewn-shut lips. And when that was done he’d put her to sleep for forty-eight hours. Not waking her until after they’d landed on Samsara.

The priest had a strong belief that Mai hadn’t even realised she was off planet.

Head down, still picking surgical thread from her bottom lip, Mai heard Father Sylvester call her and stubbornly ignored him. It was the wrong name anyway. You’d have thought he’d have realised that by now.

‘Joan!’

She did and said nothing. Just waited to get hit again. Only this time he kept his fists to himself and merely watched her. Had Mai known the word political agenda, she might have understood that Father Sylvester was working to a plan. But she didn’t, so instead she dismissed him as some shit-head psycho and put the shaking fits down to a trade-off for the all the drugs he took.

And it was a trade-off too, but not the way Mai thought. Father Sylvester had nanetic C3JD, the network of his brain unravelling and disconnecting as tiny, molecular-level assemblers made a mockery of their name and slowly disassembled every active axon and dendritic nerve in his cortex. His memories and his life were coming apart snip by snip.

A single line of poisoned cocaine, taken carelessly through a rolled prayer sheet had started the rot. By the time he realised it was more than stress that kept him upset and restless it was too late to do anything. Although, as the Surgeon General of the Jesuits had pointed out, it had probably always been too late.

‘Joan,’ he called it again but Mai wouldn’t answer or turn round. Somewhere in what was left of his mind he even sympathised but history didn’t have time for the niceties of an underage Japanese whore trying to hang onto her identity.