Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  Irène filled the glass and then left, in an odd but obvious hurry.

  “What did you do, Votre…”

  “Oh, please, Chloé, call me Conrad. I am about to tell you that I made Irène copiously orgasm, to force her to leave in a hurry. I guess we can now speak on a first name basis,” he chortled, spitting some water, then wiping his mouth as discretely as he could with a napkin.

  Hearing that, the Countess blushed, and then laughed so hard she almost choked on a cherry floating in her pastis. Pierre immediately came to rescue, delicately bending the Countess’ back forward and tapping her softly with the open palm of his hand. She soon recovered. “Merci bien, Pierre!” she started again, having another sip. “Voilà! And part of that treasure…is the Ark?” she asked, fixing her dress and straightening her back.

  “Voilà! And from under the arches that support the bridge, one can get access to the tunnels.”

  “Or could then,” the Countess corrected him. “Many of those tunnels might have collapsed over the centuries; or, if they were found, and dug or destroyed; or they could have been filled with soil or rocks, to build on top of them.”

  “Indeed. But the tunnels are there. And in one of those tunnels, in darkness, the Ark awaits the Day of Expiation,” continued Conrad. “One of the Counts of Blois started the first blood feud of Europe. Richard Lionheart might have protected Jews to some extent—but not his subjects or his successors. Philippe II Auguste was violently anti-Semite. His heirs were brutal with heretics as well. Philippe IV le Bel was not only a Jew executioner but also responsible for the destruction of the Templars alongside Clement V.

  So, well before Hitler was born these lands were awash in blood—both Jewish and Christian—spilled by greedy kings, the Church, or the two working in cahoots.

  On the Day of Expiation, all those tormented souls should, either find peace, or be duped by the Devil and his followers, to then become a force that will make the Gates of Hell crumble, and so unleash the demon hordes on Earth. So, trite as it might seem, if we get to the Ark in time we could preempt what most would call Armageddon—and, if we fail, we shall a have a front row seat to witness it instead.”

  “Are you sure those tunnels have held on until now?” asked the Countess.

  “That, my dear Chloé, we shall only find out by excavating there. But those tunnels are solid. Fulbert, Bishop of Chartres, and his friend Ménard, abbot of Saint-Père, reinforced the tunnel from Saint-Père to the base of the keep around 1005. They had to, given the odd circumstances in which Thibault de Blois (who died in April 1004) had made Ménard abbot. At about the same time, they had the tunnel under Notre Dame started.

  One of those fires forced them to stop before the reinforcement work was complete. The Templars found a manuscript referencing those tunnels, cleared up the rubble in them, reinforced them, and used them to store treasure that Philippe le Bel should never find, no matter how many people he or Clement V might torture, or how vilely,” said Conrad taking a small pause, as if his mind had alerted him of something.

  Indeed, his words were still dying in the room when Tony came, visibly excited, to tell everyone he was ready to start hacking security systems on death camps. He did not, however, tell anyone that earlier on, while Conrad and the Countess and Siegfried and Sól were most animatedly discussing tunnels and Tony excused himself to go to the bathroom, making a supreme effort to keep his mind as foggy as he could, he had messaged Severian. He had done this to ask him if, now that Conrad had implanted a blockade on his mind, it would be possible for Severian to read it somehow. Tony had also begged him not to ask why. Severian had met him on a terrace, explained Tony how, seen his latest memories, made him forget the whole episode, and making himself a supreme effort to shield his presence, managed to come and go without Conrad seemingly noticing.

  Half and hour or so after that, and a heartbeat after Tony returned from the laboratory ready to start performing hacking prowesses, Conrad sensed Severian and Mircea’s arrival.

  Moments later, Sól, Siegfried, David and Haim brought a cart with the two sets of laser projectors, programmed to recreate, at any scale, the sword tip-like symbol Sól had identified in the gold plate. They also brought three boxes, each box for twelve stones, with compartments labeled from 1 to 36— so each stone could be picked at points marked by the laser markers, and unequivocally identified to be then fastened to the tallit David had brought from Lyon.

  At long last, it was time to begin.

  23—The stone collectors

  Since then, three nights passed, feverish nights when only some of the employees at the château would be able to sleep.

  Forced to follow encrypted signals pinpointing the location of several undead stone collectors bouncing through what now seemed a bit of an excessive VPN, Tony was quite a nerve-wreck: the signals bounced so many times, and the vampires moved so fast that coordinating all displacements became a job even seasoned air traffic controllers would have dreaded. There were quite a few close calls: alarms deactivated in a nick of time, visits hidden using still imagery copied to the time stamp a few seconds too late, even a couple of alarms going off and rather unconvincingly cancelled by employees only after Severian glamorized them, and so on.

  The first night—having slept during the day using sleeping pills—Haim and David, while overdosing on caffeine, were practicing their sewing skills with stones from the garden, using a curtain the Countess had provided as test cloth. In her youth, she had learned sewing and embroidery as a hobby, and even tried to help. But, since the stones had no holes in them, the matter at hand was clearly beyond the abilities of any of them.

  So next day the Countess conscripted the help of Barthélemy—a fashionista who does very exclusive, atrociously expensive diamonds embroideries for affluent customers—to teach two of her friends “how to firmly fasten solid stones to cloth”. Initially, he had refused, preoccupied that he was with problems related to his winter collection, but eventually relented—‘an expensive favor for a dear friend’, the Countess called his acceptance.

  But even ‘Barthé’ had to do some massive figuring-out: one thing is attaching geometrically defined, cut diamonds, in an esthetically pleasing way, to some expressly selected fabric; another, quite different, fixing stones of irregular sizes and shapes to one type of predetermined fabric, in ways that provide solid attachment to the stones, but might be esthetically objectionable—even ‘hideous’, in Barthé’s expert opinion.

  Another unscheduled—if not totally unforeseen—inconvenient was that Barthé clearly was more attracted to David than to the fabric, so that required some explicit clarification to avoid recurrent snags as he guided David’s fingers through the delicate task.

  Immediately after this matter was solved, Barthé found a new magnet: if Irène ‘land-surveying’ of Conrad’s nether bulges had been shameless, Barthé’s was merciless. Conrad simply laughed it all off and told him that he wasn’t his type, which caused Barthé to have a small hissy fit, and some self-recrimination words—for a few months now, Barthé had neglected the gym; and, lately, he’d also overindulged on sweets to deal with winter collection anxiety. Once the shock overcome and the self-loathing tirade finished, Barthé proceeded to praise Severian’s beautiful ‘violet’ eyes and massive shoulders. And, after a third failed flirtation attempt, he had another hissy fit and started uncontrollably chomping on patisseries, until there were not even crumbs left on the tray.

  At that point, his mouth finally empty, he started asking too many questions about all this noctambulous activity and the purpose of sewing stones to fabric in such a strange pattern—until, in the end, Severian decided a mind wipe was in order. He calmed Barthé’s winter collection anxiety and reduced the pâtisserie-craving compulsion at the same time—‘a free favor for a frighteningly fabulous fashionista friend’, Severian told the Countess.

  After two feverish days and nights of stone-sewing class and heartache, Barthé departed, less anxious, determined to
diet, delighted the Countess wanted a new robe for a soirée, a charity gala dinner scheduled in a few months’ time—and also surprised she had accepted his advice over combining diamonds and golden pearls, an eccentricity almost sure to cause Countess Chloe’s insurers a hissy fit. But, thanks to Barthé, David and Haim had taken fastening hole-less stones to fabric to a whole new level.

  All was seemingly going well, as hosts and guests at the castle used the next two days to recover from what felt like unimaginably vile jetlag. On the third day, another scorcher, however, a brush fire broke out at a neighboring animal preserve, soon engulfing a large section of forest, a fire they had smelled well before anyone at the castle could see it.

  For David, the ensuing smoke, the noise from firefighters, the helicopters flying overhead and dropping water from a neighboring reservoir over the flames, the terrified animals running madly from the blaze with hideous burns, the journalists and curious people dropping in and asking for directions, the general chaos brought about by the event, had killed the castle’s peace dead. Stressed out beyond endurance, once again, he opted for challenging his claustrophobia, and ran away from both the heat and the racket, to go once more explore the darkest recesses of the Grande Grotte.

  And by so doing, he stumbled on something unexpected, and horrible—so horrible, he immediately returned to the castle, his face pale as a piece of polished white marble, eyes bulging out of the sockets, mouth clenched, hands shaking. Finding the castle turned into a topsy-turvy beehive of strangers, curious onlookers to the now subsiding forest fire, he made a supreme effort to calm down, and started looking for someone familiar.

  As soon as he did find Siegfried and Haim, he told them what he had discovered, and Siegfried immediately texted something to someone. Minutes later, the three of them left the main building, walking fast in the general direction of the Grotte. The Countess checked her phone and called Pierre, and told him to send all visitors away, close the gates and not let any new strangers in, and to turn on the signs at the entrance that read: “Attention Chiens de Garde Méchants. Danger de Mort”, large signs with very suggestive images of vicious mastiffs biting someone’s buttocks—even if, for now, the Countess had no intention of letting the guard dogs loose on the property. At the same time, all the personnel who had not already been sent home as preparation for a possible fire evacuation, was sent home, leaving just a skeleton crew at the castle.

  In the madness of the last few days, nobody had noticed the absence of Irène—and when Pierre eventually did notice, he thought she probably had solicitously gone to help one or a few of sundry rather hunky firemen with their hoses. Lately, to cross into the animal preserve, a whole host of them had been going down the ravines leading from the castle into the river valley. Since unseasonable rains had noticeably swollen the river, fire crews had taken advantage and installed hoses in the river to reduce the need for an endless parade of fire trucks and water bombers. Given that such massive hoses require strong arms to handle, Pierre had reasoned, this must have proved irresistible for poor Irène.

  However, David had found her corpse inside the Grande Grotte, and no sign of any intact firemen—other than a severed penis and a leg. But Irène had two large perforations in her neck, and, down her chin, neck and chest, some dark substance she seemed to have been vomiting.

  Siegfried, David and Haim decided it would be better to take the corpse—and the fireman’s fragments—to the castle, and, only there, decide what to do with them. To do this as discretely as possible, they had carried all those human remains inside one of the tarpaulins normally used at the Domaine to collect olives by shaking them from the trees. And so they did, first ignoring the commotion.

  However, as they were carrying the remains back to the castle, the fire suddenly intensified. A water bomber flew over. The three stopped for a moment to look at the flare-up being air-attacked, at the flames engulfing one truly hellish spot being smothered, at the burning wood hissing and creaking, at the vapor clouds raising, and swerving, and curling as they expanded sideways, transforming the entire neighboring area into something more fitting to foggy Northern France in late Fall than to sunny Provence in late summer.

  Then, as the smoke and vapor dissipated when the wind changed direction, the sun shone through, once again. Gliding sideways propelled by those same wind gusts, the tarpaulin briefly left much of Irène’s body exposed to sunlight. And at that moment, her entire corpse burst into flames, charring much of the other remains piled over and around it. Directly they noticed, the three tried to cover the charring mass, proceeding to carry it all as fast as they could towards the main building, struggling in vain not to look panicky.

  Once there, inside the tarpaulin, only a pile of smoldering ashes and roasted human flesh remained. When Pierre finally got to it, he took one of the pool’s hoses and doused the rather amorphous igneous mass. By then, the four layers of that tarpaulin had been pierced, leaving an elongated irregular hole, and, near its center, barely anything else recognizable than the roasted member of some unfortunate fireman. Poor Irène had now become an unsightly floating blob of cinder, bobbing in one of the swimming pools, plus crumbling bones and a few clumps of ashes still trapped in the tarp, and a silver locket with some partly charred golden hair in it.

  That afternoon, after collecting as much as possible of Irène’s remains, her ashes were buried in one of the niches at the section of the castle’s cemetery usually reserved for long-serving extraordinary employees—an odd burial, made even more unusual by Haim having to officiate, even though Irène, for all her feverish fondness for fondling, fellatio and fornication, had been raised catholic, duly baptized and confirmed. During the brief ceremony, arranged in haste, Haim reminded the small group of mourners Irène was, first and foremost, a human being without malice. He also lamented that the remains of the unknown fireman could not properly be buried since one of the guard dogs had gotten to them first.

  Eventually, as another unseasonal downpour came to drench the area, fire in the neighboring preserve subsided, most visitors deserted the place, TV stations reported a fireman had perished in the blaze and, finally, reporters left. All the while, everyone at the castle, aware of the truth, sat, for a couple of hours, some silent, some sobbing, some maniacally twirling their thumbs and exhaling, trying to understand what David’s discovery might truly mean for them, many terrified, their imaginations running wild.

  In the hours immediately before supper, Pierre, to whom the Countess had given bereavement leave, went immediately back to work instead, convinced the best therapy to cope with his sudden loss would be keeping as busy as possible—turns out, providentially: the rest of the skeleton crew themselves were now acting more like corpses; and even the Countess, ordinarily so blunt and able to deal with strange situations, for once, after sitting haplessly, downtrodden, absentminded for quite a while, had to almost be dragged to the table, having sipped in hours only one small glass of pastis, for hours clutching the locket, tears rolling down her face. Eventually, a lovely—if eerily silent—dinner, with almond cake and more pastis worked its wonders. Following it, the Countess took Pierre to her office, and the two of them, behind close doors, hatched a detailed plan to deal with Irène’s death.

  Their deliberations abruptly ended when Siegfried texted her: “SMC ici”—French for His Majesty Conrad is here. In fact, Conrad had arrived, accompanied by Severian and Mircea. Moments later, seeing into every one of those ebullient minds what had transpired at the castle, the three vampires found out what had happened that afternoon in the minutest details.

  “It seems one of those nights my blood-son visited this place,” Conrad began. “That blackish thing you thought she had vomited probably wasn’t bile. You probably found a true ‘hatchling’: she had been bled and made to drink the blood of my blood-son, and those fragments of a fireman are the typical result of a first feeding from a newborn made by a very old vampire.

  However, it is highly irregular for a maker to f
orce a hatchling into near death. That would be equivalent to a human baby constantly having their pacifier dipped in whisky laced with sleeping pills, so they don’t bother you. I believe leaving a newborn hatchling so close to this place was probably more of a warning, a way for my blood-son to let us know he can get here, if he so chooses.

  Were there no other killings, aside from Irène’s and that of whoever the owner of than penis might have been?” asked Conrad.

  “One of the dogs, Jupiter, was found decapitated, his head ripped off, like a child would decapitate a rag doll in a tantrum, Votre Majesté” Pierre commented, as he refilled the Countess’ pastis.

  “Monsieur would suffice, Pierre. Where is the head?” asked Conrad.

  “We have looked for it, for some time, in vain, Monsieur,” replied Pierre.

  “Thank you, Pierre. I think my blood-son was here indeed. I suspect he didn’t want the poor beast’s fangs wetted with his blood to confirm his presence.

  Now, I wonder if the mind block we have provoked on you all would work in a situation like this. For us, drinking blood is the ultimate form of ‘communion’; and nothing a younger vampire knows can be hidden from an older one.

  I am Geoffroy’s maker, but I am not that much older than him, barely over a century older to be precise. So I don’t know…. He might have done this to spy on us as well.”

  “There is another problem, perhaps, aside from Geoffroy now being aware we are going to Chartres,” added the Countess, “I have checked with my contacts. Summer has its problems. July was a roasting pot, and the Eure River is rather low. But tourists are flocking to the city, regardless of the canicule. Therefore, if your plans require few onlookers or diving into the Eure, August might not be ideal.”