“Yes. I do. I have faith. Really I do.”

“Would you like me to tell you of the serpent beast? Would you like me to show you your own heart and set you free?”

“Yes. Please. Please show me.”

“Good. I think that is my role now the portents walk abroad. Now the dead are risen to fight the last battle against the living and the time of the Light Bringer draws near. I have been blessed, Luca, truly blessed with His strength. My belief in Him brought me back, me alone out of all the millions who are possessed. I am the one God’s Brother has chosen as His messiah.”

When the tributary river finally spilled into the Juliffe it was a hundred and thirty metres wide. Villages had claimed both banks, buildings gleaming inside their safe enclave bubbles of white light. By now Chas Paske was used to the striking fantasy images of halcyon hamlets dozing their life away. He had passed eight or nine of them during his slow progress down the river. All of them the same. All of them unreal.

Warned by the twin coronae ahead he had sculled his little boat back into the middle of the river, fighting the thick gunge of melding snowlilies every centimetre of the way. Now he was in a narrow channel of vermilion light which fell between the two pools of native radiance, crouched down as best he could manage.

His body was in a poor way. The nanonic medical packages had been exhausted by the demand of decontaminating his blood some time ago; now it was all they could do to stop the blood vessels they had knitted with from haemorrhaging again. His neural nanonics still maintained their analgesic blocks, delivering him from pain. But that didn’t seem to be enough any more. A cold lethargy was creeping into him through his damaged leg, syphoning his remaining strength away. Any movement was a complicated business now, and muscles responded with geriatric infirmity. Several times in the last few hours he had been stricken by spasms which vibrated his arms and torso. His neural nanonics seemed incapable of preventing or halting them. So he lay on the bottom of the boat gazing up at the throbbing red cloud waiting for the ignominious spastic twitches to run their course.

At these times he thought he could see himself, a tiny shrivelled black figure, spreadeagled on the bottom of a rowing dinghy (like the one he thought he had been stealing), being borne along a sticky white river that stretched out to a terrible length. There was nothing around the river, no banks or trees, it just wound through a red sky all by itself, a silk ribbon waving in the breeze, while far, far ahead a speck of starlight twinkled with elusive, enticing coyness. Skittering voices on the brink of audibility circled round him. He was sure they talked about him even though he could never quite make out whole words. The tone was there all right, dismissive and scornful.

Not quite a dream.

He remembered, as he sailed on gently, his past missions, past colleagues, old battles, victories and routs. Half the time never knowing who he was really fighting for or what he was fighting against. For the right side or the wrong side? And how was he supposed to know which was which anyway? Him, a mercenary, a whore of violence and destruction and death. He fought for the ones with the most money, for companies and plutocrats, and sometimes maybe even governments. There was no right and wrong in his life. In that respect he had it easy, none of the big decisions.

So the river carried him on, that white band flowing through the red sky, ever onwards. The voyage was his life. He could see where he had come from, and he could see where he was going. Destination and departure were no different. And there was no way to get off. Except to jump, to drown in the vast guileful sky.

That will come anyway, he thought, no need to hurry. The old resolve was still there, among the superficial self-pity and growing concern over his physical state, still holding together. He was glad of that. Right to the bitter end, that’s where he was heading. The star glinted strongly, virtually a heliograph. It seemed nearer.

No, not quite a dream.

Chas jerked up with a start, rocking the boat hazardously. The twin villages guarding the tributary mouth were behind him now. He was out on the Juliffe itself. There was no sign of the Hultain Marsh which made up the northern side. The river could have been an ocean for all he could tell. An ocean paved with snowlilies as far as his enhanced eyes could see. This was their meridian, the end of their continental crusade. They were packed four or five deep, crumpled up against each other; decaying now, but wadded so tight they formed a serried quilt. It was a perfect reflector for the carmine light falling from the cloud, turning his world to a dimensionless red nebula.

The flimsy boat creaked and shivered as the current forced it deeper into the floating pulp. Chas gripped the gunwale in reflex. He had a nasty moment when something popped and splintered up at the prow, but the hull was so shallow it was squeezed up rather than in. He was sure it was riding on a patina of rotting leaves rather than actual water.

For all their stupendous mass, the snowlilies had no effect on the river’s unflagging current. The boat began to pick up speed, moving further out from the southern bank with its near-continual chain of villages and towns.

Now he was sure he wasn’t going to capsize, Chas relaxed his grip, and eased himself down again, breathing hard at the simple exertion of lifting himself. Up ahead the massive ceiling of red cloud became a bright tangerine cyclone with a concave heart, its apex hidden by distance. He could see the gravid billows of stratus being torn out of their constricted alignment, sucked over the lip to spiral upwards in a leisurely procession. It must have been twenty kilometres across at the base: an inverted whirlpool which drained away into the other side of the sky.

He realized its sharp living tangerine hue came from a fierce light shining down out of its secret pinnacle. Below it, the city of Durringham gleamed in empyrean glory.

Gaura floated through the floor hatch into the Lady Macbeth ’s bridge. He took care not to move his neck suddenly, or his arms come to that; his whole body was one giant ache. He had been lucky not to break anything in that last agonizing burst of deceleration. Even watching the starships attacking the station he hadn’t felt as utterly helpless as he had then, lying flat on the groaning decking of the lounge feeling his ribs bowing in, while blackness tightened its grip on his vision. Three times he had heard bone splintering, accompanied by a mental howl—it was impossible to make any sound. Together the Edenists had toughed it out, their minds embraced, sharing and mitigating the pain.

When it was over he hadn’t been alone in wiping tears from his eyes. Aethra had followed their entire heart-stopping plummet into the ring, showing it to them. He had thought the end had surely come, for the second time in an hour. But the Adamist starship’s exhaust had obliterated the ring particles as it crashed below the surface, eliminating any danger of collision; and the captain had matched velocities perfectly (for the second time in an hour), slotting them neatly into a circular orbit buried right in the middle of the ring. The swarm of pursuing combat wasps and their submunitions had impacted seconds behind them, kinetic explosions tossing out a ragged sheet of fire. None had penetrated more than a hundred metres below the surface.

It had been an astounding piece of flying. Gaura was very curious to meet the person who had such sublime control over a starship. It rivalled the union between a voidhawk and its captain.

There were three people standing on a stikpad around one of the consoles, two men and a woman, talking in low tones. It didn’t help Gaura’s composure to see that it was the youngest, a man with a flat-featured face, who had the captain’s star on his ship-suit shoulder. He had been expecting someone . . . different.