Infinite Day (95 page)

The gasps had somehow been transformed into angry murmurs.
But who are they angry with?

The cleric suddenly rose from his seat, his face livid with rage. Waving his staff, he yelled, “You are deranged, D'Avanos! No,
possessed
. Your powers come from the pit! You visited it, stood on the edge of hell. You have their power.”

The chairman coughed. “Prebendant, the charge of . . . demonic possession is unacceptable. You may, if you wish, defend yourself afterward. In the meantime, I must ask you to be silent.”

Fixing the chairman with a look of contempt, Delastro sat down heavily.

Merral continued. “Furthermore, he was not content to leave us behind on Farholme. When we did, through the use of another vessel, finally make it into Assembly space, he personally met us at Jigralt and made sure that Sentinel Verofaza Enand and I were marooned on Lathanthor, an uninhabited Made World.”

Delastro stood up again, his staff clattering against the floor. “I will not stay to be insulted by this demoniac!” He turned toward the door.

The chairman looked at him. “I'm afraid, Prebendant, the doors have been sealed against your exit.” He paused and then, in a tone of fresh assertiveness, said, “It was my decision.”

Merral was about to continue speaking when the door to his left opened and Zak, his hands bound behind him and his smart uniform in disarray, was pushed in. He looked distressed, and Merral felt he was barely recognizable as the once-jaunty soldier. Lloyd, Vero—still awkwardly carrying Zak's gun—and Anya followed him.

Lloyd led Zak into the amplification zone. Then he looked at Merral with an expression of profound satisfaction. “Excuse me, sir. Zak wants to address the stewards.”

Vero seemed to notice that he was holding a gun and, with an oddly embarrassed nod to the chairman, put it on the desk with a stuttered apology and stepped back.

Merral turned to see that Delastro was looking panicky.

The broken figure began. “My name is Zachary Larraine. I have been working for the prebendant. I wish . . .” He looked at the floor for a moment before looking up. “I wish to make a public confession. I wish to confess to . . .”

The pause seemed to go on forever.

“. . . murder.”

Loud exclamations rang out and then died away.

“I murdered Captain Huang-Li of the
Dove of Dawn
. I pushed her over the railing.” He shook his head. “She threatened to reveal everything. I did it on the orders of the prebendant.”

People were standing up now, and the chairman had to call for order. “This is a serious charge. Prebendant, do you wish to comment here?”

Delastro stood up slowly. “The man is clearly deranged. Or possessed.”

“Another demoniac?” the chairman replied, and Merral heard both grief and vindication in the sarcasm.

“Zak, tell them about Jigralt,” Merral said.

“
Jigralt
. Yes, I was there with the prebendant. We arrested . . . D'Avanos and Enand. These two here. And then we dropped them off on a world. There was no intention—at least, not on my part—to hurt them.”

“Was that also on the prebendant's orders?” Merral asked.

Delastro stood up again. “I protest! This is a trial without jury and without precedent.”

Merral looked at the chairman, who shook his head slowly. “As you yourself said earlier, these strange and urgent days permit irregularities. You will have your chance.”

Merral turned to Zak, seeing his head sunk on his shoulders. “I repeat the question: was abandoning us to await the Dominion your decision or the prebendant's?”

Zak threw a furtive glance at Delastro. “It was his. Entirely his.”

“Thank you, Zak, for your clarity,” Merral said. “That's all, Dr. Malunal.”

“
No.
It's not all
.” Zak was speaking again, the words tumbling over each other. “Not at all. I was also ordered—by
him
—to kill Eliza Majweske. She knew too much. She would have stopped everything.”

A universal and synchronous gasp seemed to convulse the room. Merral glimpsed Vero jolt upright and shake his head.

Ethan rose from his chair, his face blanched, and walked around the desk. There he stood in front of Zak and, with a single move, lifted the man's head up so that they were eye to eye.

“And . . . did you?” he asked in slow, shocked words that rang with emotion. It seemed that no one in the entire room breathed.

“
Yes
,” Zak whispered.

A wave of grunts and gasps swept across the chamber. The chairman snatched his fingers away from Zak's face as if afraid of contagion.

“How?”

“With a poison. The prebendant gave it to me.”

Ethan shook his head, and then he swung round to the prebendant. “I take it you deny this.”

The green eyes stared at the chairman, shifted to Merral, and then flickered back. “You don't understand.” Delastro stood up and turned to the assembled stewards. “None of you understand. At all. And
I
do!”

Ethan walked with slow steps back to his chair, sat down, and put his head in his hands.

There was a dense silence as if everyone had been struck dumb, and then Merral heard a tiny, strange, and puzzling sound—the ping of some tiny metallic object striking the floor. Then another identical sound, and then another, and soon a constant tiny ringing.

He looked around, saw one of the stewards reach for her lapel, pull out the pin badge, and hurl it to the ground. He understood.

The chairman looked up with distressed eyes. “What is this evil that here, in this place, we hear of
murder
? I am horrified.” He sighed. “Colonel Larraine, I have one more question of you, and I almost do not dare ask it for fear that I will discover more wickedness. But before God and his people, were Advisor Clemant and K . . . the head of the DAS . . . complicit in these events?”

Zak licked his lips nervously. “I'm not sure, sir.”

Ethan stood up and turned to the table. “K—no, enough of this nonsense—
Kirana
. Before God, the judge of all, I charge you: do you know anything of what this man says? Were you complicit in either the unlawful detention of these two men or the murder of Eliza Majweske?”

The woman hesitated and then shook her head. “No. But . . .”

“But
what
?”

“I should have stood up to him. Should have suspected him.”

Ethan turned to Clemant. “Two murders and an abduction, Advisor. Do you solemnly swear that you had no part in any event?”

For what seemed an unbearable length of time, Clemant stared ahead without answering, and Merral was struck with his smooth round face and his neat dark hair.

He shook his head. “Sir, I am not guilty of any involvement.” His voice was faint and distant. “But . . . I could have . . . stopped the murders.”

The chairman seemed to gaze at him for some time, and Merral read dismay in the expression. Then he spoke again to the gathering. “My verdict is this: Colonel Larraine is to be arrested.” He looked severely at those next to him. “The other three we have named, hear this. These charges are so severe that all of you are stripped from office. You will be taken away from here to . . . a place of separate confinement until such time as we can establish the truth through process of trial.” Ethan took an audible breath. “And, as that portion of the penal code has not yet been written, I'm afraid your incarceration could be some considerable time.”

He gestured to the secretary, and the side doors opened and guards armed with weapons entered. They seized Zak, then surrounded Clemant, the prebendant, and Kirana and began to lead them out.

As Delastro passed his desk, Ethan, apparently on impulse, asked for his staff. The prebendant refused, but the staff was taken from him by a guard, who brought it to Ethan. He took it, put it over his bent knee, and with an effort, snapped it in two.

As they escorted Delastro out, he screamed at Merral, “Deceiver! Monster! Liar!”

Merral watched him and said nothing.

“Son of the devil! Antichrist! You are in league with the powers. That is your secret. You can bend them to your will. You pretend innocence, but I know the reality!”

Then Delastro's gaze seemed to shift elsewhere. “Take revenge!” he shouted, and then with a tug from the guards, he was pulled away through the door.

Merral shook his head.
What should I feel? Pleasure? Hardly; the sins revealed are too great. Relief, perhaps, that some form of justice has been achieved? Perhaps, but no more.

Then he was aware of people leaving their seats and moving toward him.

Mission accomplished. Thank you, Lord
.

Ethan watched as Clemant and Kirana, followed by the yelling Delastro, were escorted out. He briefly wondered who had been ordered to take revenge.
Perhaps it was just wild rhetoric.

He recognized that any pleasure he had felt at the prebendant's routing had been replaced by disgust, horror, and simple relief. He sipped from his water and looked up to see perhaps fifty people all trying to shake D'Avanos's hand.

I really ought to try to restore order.

“Ethan!”

He turned to see Andreas walking toward him with a perplexed and solemn face. “Andreas!”

His old friend clasped his hands. “Ethan, I will say this elsewhere, more publicly and in a better form, but I want to say it now. I have been a fool; I have been deluded. I apologize. I don't understand the spell that man put on me. Anyway, I make no excuses. ‘A fiend.' Sorry.” There were tears in his eyes.

Ethan, feeling extraordinarily moved, hugged him. “A madness came over us all. I don't understand it either.”

He stood back and turned to see how D'Avanos was handling the crowd. His attention was caught by a tall, black-haired woman pushing her way through, a frenzied intensity in her eyes.
Gerry Habbentz—that woman needs help; the anger in her is enormous.

She seemed to be going toward Merral, but apparently, realizing that the press about him was too dense, she approached the desk in front of Ethan, squeezing round the other people. Then she moved back in the direction of D'Avanos. Something made Ethan look at the desk.

The gun was gone.

It was she the prebendant shouted at!

Even before he had fully realized what was going on, he had called out a warning. “Commander, look out!”

Everything seemed to go into slow motion. Ethan saw several things happen at once.

The redheaded woman with the freckled complexion standing behind D'Avanos turned, and as her eyes dropped to Gerry's hand, he saw her mouth open in a gasp. The taller woman reached her and pushed her out of the way with a savage motion of her left hand. To the left, the big man with the cropped blond hair was suddenly charging through, pushing people out of the way, his right hand rising.

D'Avanos was turning around, his face already in profile.

There was the crack of a shot.

Two other shots—sharp, blasphemous—followed, one after the other. Screams.

The tall woman staggered back and then crumpled, and as she fell, Ethan saw her black hair was crimson with wet blood.

Beyond her, D'Avanos, arms flailing high, chest pumping blood, had fallen back against the crowd.

31

L
ate the following morning, an exhausted Vero entered the building that held the offices of the chairman of the high stewards and walked to the welcome desk. The man behind it looked up sharply as he gave his name.

“You're very welcome.” He paused. “Dr. Malunal is waiting for you out in the garden. His office is being—” a look of awkwardness appeared—“redecorated.”

Vero was ushered past two guards and through strengthened glass doors into a compact, high-walled garden that seemed to catch enough of the winter's sun to be just warm enough to sit out in.