Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, Father Sylvester began to pick his way down the steep path towards the distant village below. And after a few seconds, the girl followed. They were halfway down before the priest remembered to put back her cuffs, only this time he left her hands at the front in case she fell. It was as close as Father Sylvester would ever come to showing her a kindness.

‘This is Joan?’ The small fat man who stood at the top of the stone steps leading up to the monastery sounded doubtful and Father Sylvester tried to look at the shivering child with fresh eyes. He couldn’t. Too few memories were backed up in what was left of his brain for him to see anything clearly.

Father Sylvester nodded abruptly. ‘This is the girl.’ He pushed Mai forward, then gripped her shoulder when she stumbled. ‘And her name is Joan.’ When Mai opened her mouth to protest the fingers became vicelike, digging hard into a nerve in her neck.

‘Release her.’ The words that interrupted him were firm: not cross or bullying, just spoken by a woman who was used to being obeyed, and obeyed immediately. She spoke Spanish.

Father Sylvester released his grip.

‘Good.’

The woman came slowly down the steps towards them, tall and black-haired and somewhere in her late twenties. If she was shocked at Mai’s filthy clothes she didn’t let it show, though her smile faded when she looked at Mai’s face and found dark pupils dilated with drugs, fear or fever. Damaged goods weren’t what Kate Mercarderes needed.

Sweat had stained under the arms of Mai’s canvas jacket and the now-tattered crepe bandages on her legs were obviously soiled. But it was the bruises darker than lipstick around her mouth that sparked fury in the woman’s eyes.

‘What happened?’

‘He sewed my mouth shut,’ said Mai sensing an ally, ‘with a needle.’

The tall woman looked at Father Sylvester and though his face hardened he couldn’t quite meet her gaze. ‘It was necessary,’ he said. ‘You know it was necessary.’

‘And her wrists?’ Katherine Mercarderes said abruptly. ‘Was that necessary too?’

‘He thought I might escape,’ said Mai. She held her wrists out to the woman. ‘Please, my fingers hurt...' She swallowed a sob. ‘Everything hurts.’

‘Life does,’ said Kate, then caught herself and forced a smile. ‘Still, Louis can find you new clothes, a bath, some food…’ She nodded to the small fat man still stood at the top of the steps who beetled back inside the house, head down.

A bath? Father Sylvester wanted to howl but restrained himself. Surely Kate realised… There wasn’t time to pamper the brat. Kate had to realise that. Besides, all they needed was the brat’s body and they didn’t need that for long…

‘Patience,’ Kate ordered.

‘I don’t have time for patience,’ said Father Sylvester. ‘I’m dying.’

‘You think I don’t know that?’ Kate said. ‘You think I’d forgive you this if you weren’t?’ She nodded at Mai, who stood swaying with exhaustion. And then Kate caught herself again and touched the priest gently on the shoulder. Seeing someone she’d known since childhood. Someone she’d loved as a child and trusted as much as she’d trusted the Pope. But also someone she was planning to betray.

‘You have the relic?’

The what… Father Sylvester looked briefly puzzled and then nodded, pointing to the bead-and-feather talisman round the girl’s neck.

Kate raised her eyebrows but she didn’t say anything further and she made no attempt to touch the precious soulcatcher. No matter how much she wanted to, Kate didn’t dare.

‘Release her hands.’

The priest muttered something in Latin and the cuffs dropped to the ground like lifeless plastic snakes. They were two-use only, the kind issued to airlines, not supposed to he used for anything longer than a ten hour flight.

Red weals ran around Mai’s wrists, oozing clear liquid. In any other situation, Kate would have fired up a medical Drexie box or relied on mediSoft to brief proprietary assemblers. As neither of these existed in Cocheforet she’d have to make do with what she’d brought with her, which was a bit all-purpose.

‘Salve, I suppose,’ Kate said thoughtfully. What she meant was that in a tiny vacuum-sealed pot she kept a colony of BayerRochelle spiders that could stitch shut the thread holes at a molecular level, clearing away dead white blood cells and repairing torn flesh. But she made it sound like she was offering Mai some ancient herbal extract mixed with pig fat.

‘Come with me,’ she put her arm round the girl’s shoulders and steered her towards the steps.

‘Wait...'

The woman stopped but she didn’t turn round and she didn’t let go of the girl’s shivering shoulders. ‘She’s having a bath and then she’s getting some rest. Look at her! You think we can work with her in this state?’ Together, Kate and Mai began to climb the steps.

Done, was it? She had to know it wasn’t… Whatever she told him.

The water was cold as glacial melt, the splash of a high waterfall echoing off the rock face that surrounded the deep mountain pool. Above Father Sylvester the sky was dark and starless. A black arc of nothing that stretched across the heavens like void. No people could have looked up at that night sky and imagined it held eternal mementoes of ancient heroes. No angels hung silent and unseen overhead listening to the celestial music of the spheres.

It was an absence made absolute. No place could be more fitting for him to die. Father Sylvester had spotted the foam-flecked foss, the thin fall of water, on his ride up to Escondido and though he couldn’t see where it fell to earth, he’d guessed rightly that there’d be a mountain pool. Cold and private, like the few thoughts left in his mind.

The girl was his legacy to Kate and she could make of the foul-mouthed child what she would. Whether it was success or failure no longer worried him. He wouldn’t be alive to see either.

And the child wasn’t much, but she was all they had.

Father Sylvester had hoped to be present to see Mai give up the dreams he’d put into the child’s head, but if Kate wanted to move at her own speed then she had that authority. Though her speed was too slow for an old man with only hours to live. So he’d come here to die, lead by Clone who understood the need for these things.

Clone wasn’t a friend of Father Sylvester’s, but he was no longer an enemy. The mute and tongueless ox of a man had long since made his peace with Father Sylvester just as he had reached resolution with Joan, may God overlook her undoubted sins.

Using his glassblade, Father Sylvester shaved off his beard and cut away his hair and greying ponytail as grief demanded. Ashes he’d already had enough of to last a lifetime. He wore no jewellery. And his steel cross of five nails crudely brazed together was where he’d left it, on the pillow of his bed for Kate to find.

The gutting out of the Vatican bank accounts had been Joan’s secret and his doing. He set up the discreet shell companies and blind trusts, switched money from account to account, using everything from Bajan datahavens to free-trade orbitals.

Between them they’d dug out the foundation of gold on which the Papacy had always stood and quietly spent it as the money always should have been spent. On food for the poor, on medicine, but mostly in airlifting the destitute and starving out of warzones and into transit camps where they could be shipped to Samsara. And while there were still ‘fugees in need, Joan had kept spending money to ship them and Tsongkhapa had kept receiving their numbers until the money was gone. And by then WorldBank and the IMF were already closing in.