Chloe was lying beside him: he could see her dress, her shoulder and part of her face. Her eyes were open, but she was looking away from him.

  Grim didn’t really understand what was going on. It seemed to him that if he just made a bit of an effort, he could stand up. He needed someone to help him, give him a nudge to get him started, and then the numb stupor would release him. But there wasn’t anyone to help.

  The sun seemed to have moved across the sky a bit. And then he felt another prick, in his leg this time, and the paralysis instantly disappeared. He turned his head and saw that Chloe had revived too.

  She was almost on her feet when she suddenly got a blow in the back that sent her sprawling in the dust again. Grim had the impression that the sun had gone behind a cloud. He looked up.

  Half the sky was blanked out by the armed horsemen towering over him. There was an entire cavalcade behind them, and Grim and Chloe were blocking its way.

  Obviously someone very important was travelling in it. He was being guarded by Ganjaberserks from the Slava garrison – grey-bearded giants with dusty false dreadlocks and short bone pipes in their mouths. They were dressed in camouflage battlesuits with black armour and carrying heavy spears. One of the riders had just dug Chloe in the back with the blunt end of his spear – and now he was turning it round to strike with the sharp end. The berserks killed without a second thought, so Grim froze in horror.

  Suddenly a brief command rang out and the berserk lowered his spear. The line of horsemen parted, and they moved off the road.

  ‘Get up!’

  Grim and Chloe scrambled to their feet.

  There in front of them was a black motorenvagen – with a long wheel-base and folding roof, the most expensive kind. Only top brass could have one like that. But the men sitting in it weren’t Global Orks – they were morose Right Protectors, wearing black cloaks. Another motorenvagen was standing a bit further away – also black, even lower slung and more imposing, only with a closed top. And towering up even further away was a red palanquin covered in gold spastikas with a wonder-working Visage of Manitou hidden behind a curtain. It was held up by sweaty musclemen in velvet shorts, four on each handle.

  The top of the second motorenvagen opened smoothly, folding into a shell behind the seats. Skipping in his zeal, one of the court secretary eunuchs, dressed in a heraldic body stocking and a cockerel mask, immediately darted over to the door.

  The man sitting in the motorenvagen was …

  Grim couldn’t believe his eyes.

  Sitting there in the motorenvagen was Torn Durex, the Urkish Kagan and sovereign ruler, the great hero of seven wars. On his left, sprawled out on the back seat, was his sweety-boy favourite, his little face smeared with candy. On the Kagan’s right, glittering with gold chains, was a rubber woman, the kind they make in Big Byz. The Kagan didn’t like women, everyone knew that. It was merely a status symbol, a declaration of tolerance and willingness for intercultural dialogue.

  The leader’s sullen face, with its sideburns trimmed on a slant and grey bags under the eyes, boded no good at all. He raised one hand and yawned, straightening up his body, encased in a long, black silk frock coat.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  The secretary sagged down to bring the beak of his mask closer to his lord and master’s ear, and started talking in a low voice, pointing to Grim and Chloe.

  The wrinkles on Torn Durex’s face smoothed out and he laughed.

  ‘In the road?’ he asked.

  The secretary nodded.

  Torn Durex looked at Grim appraisingly, as if he was pondering whether to take him on as a pageboy. Grim noticed that the Kagan’s favourite was looking at him intently too. Durex shifted his glance to Chloe, then back to Grim, and evidently changed his mind.

  ‘Scram!’ he said, waving his hand.

  And then something unexpected happened.

  ‘J’accuse!’

  The words rang out over the road in an imperious tone.

  Frightened as Grim already was by what was happening, this frightened him even more. No one dared to speak in that tone of voice in the Kagan’s presence.

  No one except discoursemongers.

  Everyone in Urkaine knew that exclamation, whistling and cracking like a whip. They frightened children with it, because it brought death in its wake. ‘J’accuse’ meant ‘I accuse’, only not in Church English, but the language of some other ancient tribe, from which the discoursemongers traced their lineage.

  A man who had appeared out of nowhere walked quickly towards Chloe – he must have approached the procession while all eyes were fixed on the Kagan.

  The man was tall and radiated majesty, although he was dressed very simply, even poorly, in a cassock of sackcloth belted with rope. The majesty was supplied by silver curls down to his shoulders and an aquiline nose. That was how knights and heroes looked.

  Somehow Grim was immediately reminded of an ancient coin with a gold border – the ‘One Oiro’ from the Museum of the Ancestors, which had the outlines of two human figures merging together stamped on it, with their arms and legs spread out to the sides. There was so much freedom and proud dignity in the design that the coin obviously hadn’t been minted in Orkland or even Byzantion. The explanation on the card read: ‘The so-called “Vitruvian Sodomites”, an engraving by Leonardo da Vinci’. Despite the denunciatory caption, the coin had made a powerful impression on Grim. And this discoursemonger aroused pretty much the same kind of feeling.

  He himself was apparently quite agitated by what was happening – his lower jaw was trembling slightly, as if he was pronouncing tiny little words very fast, and his eyes glittered brightly. He was holding a staff with a curved handle and a leather strap wrapped round it. When he raised his arms the gap in his robe revealed a bulletproof vest chosen to match the colour of the cassock precisely. Only the upper people had those.

  The Kagan said nothing, staring morosely at the stranger – according to the rules of etiquette he would have dishonoured himself by responding to a preamble like that.

  The cockerel-secretary was the first to recover his wits.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked coming to his sovereign lord’s aid. ‘What are you doing in the land of the Urks and by what right and authority do you block the way of the Urkagan?’

  The man took a step towards Chloe and put his free arm round her shoulder.

  ‘I shall answer you,’ he roared, raising his staff even higher. ‘I am a philosopher. But if you do not understand what that word means, then for you let me be simply a concerned passer-by. A passer-by who has no authority other than that granted by his own conscience …’

  Grim noticed that the man wasn’t looking at the cockerel-secretary, but in a completely different direction – into empty space above the forest. He guessed the camera must still be hovering somewhere over there. It finally became a little bit clearer what was happening.

  ‘But though I may have no authority, I have news!’ the man roared in a well-trained voice. ‘News that will not be to your liking. Your band of torturers and murderers shall do no harm to this child, and not one more tear shall fall from these eyes of blue!’

  Grim thought that it obviously wasn’t him who was being talked about – his eyes were yellowish-grey. And then he saw the man gradually turn Chloe towards the invisible camera and nudge her to one side, so that Grim was left behind her. And an ancient Orkish instinct suddenly told Grim that in order to survive, what he had to do now was not run away from the camera, but stay in the frame any way he could. He took a step forward and stood beside Chloe. The discoursemonger gave him a dark look, but there was nothing he could do. Meanwhile his voice carried on rumbling melodically across the road:

  ‘Every man is born free, as Manitou conceived him! And I cannot, I will not stand silent when some monster, some insatiable, malicious beast, tramples down the bright festival of childhood with the black tyre of his limousine, bought with the tears of countless widows. I do not know – although it would indeed be extremely interesting to know, and without further delay – how much longer the free world will put up with this dark strangler of freedom, pretending that it does not notice the innocent tears and the blood spurting straight into our optical devices! Nothing can justify the mockery of defenceless innocence, no plugs in indifferent ears will muffle the pounding of a child’s heart, tossed to the dogs and the pigs to be devoured! Today I accuse the Orkish Urkagan of being his own people’s executioner. How long will we carry on pretending not to notice the atrocities committed by this pervert, this serial killer, this psychiatrist’s dream and most dangerous of sadists? But I do not wish to speak any more of this degenerate, because he makes me feel sick. I wish to save this … This … These youngsters, whose harsh homeland has denied their right to childhood and youth … I proclaim that henceforth they are under the protection of Byzantion! They are granted the right to enter Big Byz!’

  He pointed to the distant dark sphere in the sky, at the same time turning his head to the side. There was nothing but roadside bushes where he was looking, and Grim realised the discoursemonger was simply displaying his noble profile to the camera.

  ‘No one can talk like that to the Kagan!’ the cockerel-secretary whispered in amazement.

  The stranger turned his visage, radiant with transcendent joy, towards the secretary for an instant and then turned away again towards a section of sky that was empty – for those not in the know.

  ‘And who does speak to him anyway, this Kagan of yours?’

  It seemed to Grim that everything suddenly went very quiet.

  The Kagan remained gloomily silent, looking straight ahead. But this was too much for the cockerel-secretary.

  ‘Dishonour!’ he gasped, pulled his teeny little sword out of its scabbard and started walking towards the discoursemonger.

  The stranger waited calmly, with his staff raised high in the air and his face still set in the same confident smile of a man unafraid to die for his words. And just when Grim thought that was about to happen, there was a crack in the sky, and the familiar red threads sliced the cockerel-secretary in half. Tall fountains of dust rose into the air on all sides.

  Everyone standing on the road froze.

  But a second later everything started moving.

  The first to dart off was Chloe – she tore herself out from under the man’s arm and ran for it.

  Then the soldiers surrounding Durex’s motorenvagen came to their senses – they pulled out their weapons and went for the man. But as soon as they reached the secretary, floating in a red puddle, they were cut down by the same blurred red arrows – although the soldiers were moving quickly, the cannons pulverised their rush with ease. A cloud of dust rose up over the road, so thick that the Kagan’s motorenvagen was almost completely hidden, the heap of shattered bodies on the ground grew higher and the man, still standing there smiling in the same way, raised his staff toward his attackers.

  Grim finally realised this was the right moment to get off the road. There was no one holding him back. He dashed past the berserks, who were trying to restrain their frightened horses, and hurtled into the forest. After running for a few minutes, he stumbled over a root and fell. He stayed there, lying where he had fallen, trying to control his wildly pumping lungs.

  For a while he heard shooting behind him. Then it stopped.

  After waiting for half an hour, he walked through the forest and out onto the road. The ambushed column was behind an outcrop of the forest. He couldn’t see the corpses from there.

  ‘Chloe!’ he called.

  He was afraid to shout loudly, but even so he decided to try just once more.

  ‘Chloe!’

  ‘I’m here!’ he heard her answer.

  Grim saw a figure detach itself from the line of the trees and Chloe came out onto the road about a hundred steps ahead of him. Grim set off towards her, screwing up his eyes against the sun.

  He had already opened his mouth to start telling her about the nightmare he’d just seen, when it turned out the nightmare had no intention of ending just yet.

  A transparent shadow quivered behind Chloe’s back. Then a triangular hole appeared in empty space and a tapering set of steps extended downwards out of it. The discoursemonger in the brown cassock appeared in the hole, then walked down and before Chloe even noticed him, swept her up in his arms and tossed her into the black triangle.

  Grim went dashing after him, but the discoursemonger was already climbing the steps. Grim managed to grab hold of his leg, but lost his balance and almost fell. The discoursemonger looked down at his feet. The sun lit up the hair cascading over his shoulders, and for a moment Grim thought it was some sun-god looking down from the heavens at him here on the earth. And then the sun-god pulled his foot free, raised it – and shoved Grim into the dust with his sweet-smelling sandal.

  CHAPTER 3

  I mean, the shots were simply astounding. One series for eternity, with the sun blazing straight into the camera over the ranks of soldiers with their pikes. And another, without any fancy flourishes, for the news.

  I was recording simultaneously on all media, and now I had almost a minute on temple celluloid, with one frame showing Torn Durex lounging in his motorenvagen, with his shoddy rubber woman (not even animated, and its skin was the cheapest kind of bioplastic), the wild-looking bearded warriors with their weapons raised, and the kids standing in front of them. And Chloe had turned out especially well, because she kept blinking her immense eyes all the time, trying to turn on the tears, but she just couldn’t, and it looked as if she really didn’t understand where she was and what was happening. And her Orkish paint-job was just right – those zigzags on the forehead are the coming fashion with our youngsters too. That will be good for the empathy, any sommelier can see that.

  The bearded Orks were spot-on too.

  The Orks have two types of elite guards, two brigades that are supposed to form up on the right and the left of the Kagan – the ‘Right Protectors’ and the ‘Ganjaberserks’ (they don’t call them ‘Left Protectors’ because Orks believe the left side is unclean). In combat terms they’re more or less equally matched, but the Ganjaberserks’ pipes, beards and dreadlocks make them look a whole lot more impressive. It was lucky for me that they were the ones who started dealing with the children – Right Protectors wear long black cloaks with spastikas, and they look more like priests than soldiers.

  Grim also ended up in the shot, which I hadn’t been trying for at all. But there were about fifteen seconds with Chloe fluttering her eyelashes all alone, right beside a jagged spearhead, with a slightly blurred Kagan in the background. They could cut Grim out now, or they could leave him in the shot, with an eye to the gay audience – he was really quite handsome. But I don’t decide things like that.

  And then that clown Bernard-Henri sprang into the thick of the action – to be quite honest, I’d completely forgotten about him – and started running through his routine. I’d never seen him so zonked before, but I had to film it – it’s my job, after all. Basically, he gave the young Orks a quick hug and waved his staff at the soldiers, and that’s the moment when he should have got off the road. Everything would have ended neatly – the Kagan’s no fool, he understands very well what’s going on. But the blockhead overdid things, and I had to fire.

  I can’t stand working in conditions like that – it’s like an elephant having to dance in a china shop. At all costs I had to avoid hitting the Kagan or the young Orkish couple who’d already been photographed on temple film. And obviously I couldn’t fire at Bernard-Henri either, although I almost wanted to. There was only a narrow gap left between him and the Kagan, so I had to fire my cannons through that, and naturally there was no guarantee about the ricochets passing dangerously close to the automobile.

  ‘Get out of the directress, you cretin,’ I shouted to Bernard-Henri over the comms link.

  But it was as if he didn’t hear me – or maybe he’d just switched off his comms unit. I was already thinking I’d end up snuffing the Kagan and lose my job – but I was saved by a lucky fluke.

  The Kagan was on the comms link, too, at the time – and although he knew no one was supposed to fire at him, he got scared. As soon as the shooting started, he huddled up against his rubber woman. It was a pure reflex response, because he’s an experienced man and knows how he should behave in front of the camera. But it looked funny.

  And after that things got even funnier.

  ‘Directress’ is our professional jargon word: it means a free corridor for the line of fire, and members of the production team have to keep out of it. But the Kagan, the stupid Ork, decided that must be what people called rubber women, and he was spoiling my camera shot. So he promptly flung himself aside. And just in time – one of the ricochets passed straight through his rubber bimbo and red dye splashed out of her in all directions. That immediately told the attentive viewer a great deal about the Kagan’s intimate preferences. The folding roof of his motorenvagen started moving up, but it was too late already.

  Only then did Bernard-Henri realise it would be a good idea to get off the road, and quick. A circle of guards bristling with sharp pikes closed round the motorenvagen with its roof up, and the procession crept on along the road, straight over the bodies – in order not to break formation. Bernard-Henri was still brandishing his staff in the air, but I wasn’t filming him any longer. And since no one was attacking Bernard-Henri now, I didn’t have any reason to carry on firing.

  When the Orks had passed by, there were at least forty soldiers’ bodies lying on the road. They were black, trampled underfoot, and they looked terrifying, there was no point in filming that for the news. The youngsters who’d been saved were nowhere to be seen – they’d managed to sneak off.