“How?”

Shaun Wallace gave a reluctant sigh. He was quiet for so long Kelly thought he wasn’t going to answer; he even stopped stroking Fenton.

“The way the devil-lovers of yesterday always tried to do it,” he said heavily. “With their ceremonies and their pagan barbarism. And God preserve me for doing such things, I used to think what I did before was sinful. But there’s no other way.”

“What is the way?”

“We break the living. We make them want to be possessed. Possession is the end of torment, you see. Even with our power we can only open a small gateway to the beyond, enough to show the lost souls the way back. But there has to be somewhere waiting for them, some host. And the host has to be willing.”

“You torture them into submission,” Reza said bluntly.

“Aye, that we do. That we do, indeed. And, mark you, there’s no pride in me for saying it.”

“You mean, Rai Molvi is still there? Still alive inside you?”

“Yes. But I keep his soul locked away in a dark, safe place. I’m not sure you could call it living.”

“And this power you mentioned.” Kelly pressed the point. “What is your power?”

“I don’t know for sure. Magic of a kind. Though not a witch’s magic with its spells and potions. This is a darker magic, because it’s there at a thought. So easy, it is. Nothing like that should be given easily to a man. The temptations are too strong.”

“Is that where the white fire comes from?” Reza asked. “This power you have?”

“Aye, indeed it is.”

“What’s its range?”

“Ah now, Mr. Malin, that’s difficult to say. The more of you that fling it, the further it will go. The more impassioned you are, the stronger it will be. For a cool one such as yourself, I doubt it would be far.”

Reza grunted and shifted back on the bench.

“Could you demonstrate the power for me, please?” Kelly asked. “Something I can record and show people. Something that will make them believe what you say is true.”

“I’ve never known a newspaper gal before. You did say you were from a newspaper, now didn’t you?”

“What newspapers eventually became, yes.” She ran a historical search request through her neural nanonics. “Something like the Movietone and Pathé reels at the cinema, only with colour and feeling. Now, that demonstration?”

“I normally prefer gals with longer hair, myself.”

Kelly ran her hand self-consciously over her scalp. She had shaved her hair to a blueish stubble so she could wear the armour’s shell-helmet. “I normally have longer hair,” she said resentfully.

Shaun Wallace winked broadly, then leant over the gunwale and scooped up one of the long-legged insects scampering over the snowlilies. He held it up in the palm of his hand; a long spindly tube body, dun brown, with a round bulb of a head sprouting unpleasant pincer mandibles. It was quivering, but stayed where it was as though glued to his skin. He brought his other hand down flat on top of it, making a show of pressing them together, squashing the insect. Kelly’s eyes never wavered.

When he parted his hands the prince of butterflies was revealed, wings almost the size of his palms, patterned in deep turquoise and topaz and silver, colours resistant to the red light of the cloud, shining in their own right. Its wings flexed twice, then it flew off, only to be kicked about in the air by the wash of the hovercraft’s powerful slipstream.

“There, you see?” Shaun Wallace said. “We don’t always destroy.”

Kelly lost sight of the delightful apparition. “How long will it stay like that?”

“Mortality is not something you measure out like a pint of ale, Miss Kelly. It will live its life to the full, and that’s all that can be said.”

“He doesn’t know,” Reza muttered curtly.

Shaun Wallace practised a knowing, slightly condescending smile.

It was growing lighter around the hovercraft. Up ahead, Kelly could see the wonderfully welcome glare of pure sunlight striking emerald foliage. A colour that wasn’t red! She had begun to believe that red was all there ever was, all there ever had been.

The hovercraft skimmed out from under the chafed edge of the cloudband. All of the mercenaries broke into a spontaneous cheer.

“What is that thing?” Kelly shouted above the rebel whoops, pointing up at the cloud.

“A reflection of ourselves, our fear.”

“What do you fear?”

“The emptiness of the night. It reminds us too much of the beyond. We hide from it.”

“You mean you’re making that?” she asked, scepticism warring with astonishment. “But it covers thousands of kilometres.”

“Aye, that it does. ’Tis our will that creates it; we want shelter, so shelter we have. All of us, Miss Kelly, even me who shuns the rest of them, we all pray for sanctuary with every fibre of being. And it’s growing, this will of ours, spreading out to conquer. One day soon it will cover all of this planet. But even that is only the first chapter of salvation.”

“What’s the second?”

“To leave. To escape the harsh gaze of this universe altogether. We’ll withdraw to a place of our own making. A place where there is no emptiness hanging like a sword above the land, no death to claim us. A place where your butterfly will live for ever, Miss Kelly. Now tell me that isn’t a worthy goal, tell me that isn’t a dream worth having.”

Reza watched the last of the jungle’s trees go past as the hovercraft reached the savannah. The lush green grassland seemed to unroll on either side of the river as though it was only just coming into existence. He wasn’t really paying much attention; the strange (supposed) Irishman was a captivating performer. “A closed universe,” he said, and the earlier scorn was lacking.

Kelly gave him a surprised glance. “You mean it is possible?”

“It happens thousands of times a day. The blackhawks and voidhawks open interstices to travel through wormholes every time they fly between stars. Technically they’re self-contained universes.”

“Yes, but taking a planet—”

“There are twenty million of us,” Shaun Wallace purred smoothly. “We can do it, together, we can pull open the portal that leads away from mortality.”

Kelly’s neural nanonics faithfully recorded the silver chill tickling her nerves at the naked conviction in his voice. “You’re really planning to generate a wormhole large enough to enclose the whole of Lalonde? And keep it there?”

Shaun Wallace wagged his finger at her. “Ah, now there you go again, Miss Kelly, putting your fine, elegant words in my mouth. Plans, such a grand term. Generals and admirals and kings, now they have plans. But we don’t, we have instinct. Hiding our new world from this universe God created, that comes as naturally as breathing.” He chuckled. “It means we can go on breathing, too. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to stop me from doing that, would you now? Not a sweet lass like yourself.”

“No. But what about Rai Molvi? Tell me what happens to him afterwards?”

Shaun Wallace scratched his chin, looked round at the savannah, shifted the jump-suit fabric round his shoulders, pulled a sardonic face.

“He stays, doesn’t he?” Kelly said stiffly. “You won’t let him go.”

“I need the body, miss. Real bad. Perhaps there’ll be a priest amongst us I can visit for absolution.”

“If what you’re saying is true,” Reza said charily, focusing an optical sensor on the cloudband behind, “then we really don’t want to be staying here any longer than we have to. Wallace, when is this planetary vanishing act supposed to happen?”

“You have a few days’ grace. But there are none of your starships left to sail away on. Sorry.”

“Is that why you didn’t resist, because we can’t escape?”

“Oh, no, Mr. Malin, you’ve got me all wrong. You see, I don’t want much to do with my fellows. That’s why I live out in the woods, there. I prefer being on my own, I’ve had a bucketful of their company. Seven centuries of it, to be precise.”