Our leaders were not monsters, so they could not think like monsters. Now, you have appointed yourself judge, tribunal, prosecutor and executioner; the one to condemn all humans, innocent and guilty alike, to live in Hell; the one destined to right the wrong brought about by a few monsters, who by now are probably already burning in Hell. And to do that, you have joined those who deny G-d, those idolaters who worship Nature with their mouths and destroy it with their deeds. You, who were once a Templar, trying to make Israel a suburb of Rome, now are trying to turn Earth into a suburb of Hell.
Is that the Justice you seek?”
“Silence, human! My Justice is the only justice my fellow Templars can ever hope for. You shall remain human but become my slave, and this shall end now!” growled Geoffroy opening his jaws again, now spreading them hideously apart, like a snake, preparing to cut the choker’s latticework with the dagger, ready to bite David’s neck immediately afterwards.
Seen death draw near, David had begun reciting the Viddui, tears rolling down his eyes, seeing images of Debbie, and the children he might never watch grow up, when suddenly, a deep female voice that seemed to come from every corner of the room spoke, her words like thunder: “Yes! This shall end now!”
It was Lilith, who, out of nowhere, had appeared right behind Geoffroy, and grabbed him by both wrists, forcing him to release David. Then Geoffroy, visibly shaken, had suddenly snapped his jaws shut, started to cry, and finally fallen to his knees.
As suddenly as she had appeared, without another word, Lilith inexplicably released him, seemed to vanish, and, before anyone could react, reappeared, now holding Conrad by both wrists. “You father to son blood bond is now forever broken. Your farce is now over, and your time is up, Conrad of Montferrat. You have chosen to act like God, and decided when Hell should engulf the realm of the living and the undead. You have deceived so many, and killed so many, claiming you shall avenge the Templars—using your bloodson as an excuse, and pagan rituals to damn the followers of Wotan. I do not excuse the sins of the Church or the Crusader kings or the Templars themselves, for it is for a Higher Power to rule on that matter. Neither is it up to you to enslave those souls, forcing revenge on those who might have forgiven, or killings in the name of those for whom life is precious.
Now, since you so ardently burn with this sacred fire to take everyone to Hell as a matter of Justice, your swift justice unable to wait for That of God, it shall be fitting—and just—you be first to arrive there, and share in my brother’s fiery hospitality!” she finished.
In what seemed like an instant of weightlessness and absolute darkness, followed by a flash of painfully blinding light swirling all around them—and before Conrad could say a word—he and Lilith had then collapsed into a vortex, a whirlwind of disintegrating waves of light and darkness that briefly sucked most air out of the room. They were simply gone, suddenly gone, vanishing with a dull thud. An eerie silence followed, broken by the sound of water dripping in a few puddles, here and there, in the tunnel, and the air, ululating as nature reclaimed the void.
“How…how…how…did…the Mother know?” mumbled Geoffroy, his eyes shedding blood tears, resting his body weight against a block protruding from the wall. “She…She...is not supposed to be omniscient…and She dwells on a higher plane, does She not? Why would She look out for a wretched servant, a sinful servant, a slave like myself?”
“The Mother knows, and I doubt any of Her children are to Her any more or less miserable than others. A bit like David said quoting Bram Stoker, perhaps. But I know exactly how She knew…” demurred Severian.
“How?” asked David, his voice breaking, barely mended from strangulation and terror.
“Remember Irène’s death?” Severian began. David nodded, as he instinctively put some distance from Geoffroy. “The Countess mentioned that Adolphe, the maçon—the ‘stone mason’—and his boyfriend Loïc, the gardener, became Irène’s best friends. She said Irène felt ‘protected’ by them, not ‘judged’ like she was by other people working at the castle, then added: “Irène finally had found a new family, two brothers really—two brothers she would have followed to the end of the world,” so I began wondering…would she follow either of them to the cave, to the Grotte, where you found her turned into a newborn vampire, slumbering, smote by the sun…Now, since neither Adolphe nor Loïc were present at our discussions, and any castle employees who could be had been essentially implanted with both a barrier preventing their minds from being plundered and instructions forbidding them to discuss the matter—something neither you nor I were told about, but I could detect—it was possible, if not all that plausible, that Geoffroy had come to the castle, checked every single person, discovered those who did not have a mind block, found who they were related to by bonds of trust, and used that to induce ‘someone not present at our discussions’, hence without a mind block, to lead someone who was present—such as Irène, or Pierre—into the cave, to get the information anyway, by drinking their blood.
At the castle, Pierre trusts very few people; but there are two or three he does trust. However, his absence would not only have created a far bigger splash, but also have caused great pain to Countess, far greater than Irène’s loss. Now, Conrad had feelings for the Countess; and, conveniently enough, Irène tended to disappear at odd times, to satisfy her libido. She was beautiful and the park rangers, the police, the firemen, the military, all knew she was always ready to relieve their occupational stress.
So, at first, I assumed serendipity: she escaped to the cave for a quickie, and found a quick death. The pieces of a man found alongside her seemed to point to that explanation—all too conveniently. So I went to check Adolphe and Loïc. Perhaps Conrad had been so thorough he had decided to block their brains as well, hence serendipity would win the day. The problem: Adolphe had a mental block, but Loïc did not. So I grazed him—drank some of his blood—and discovered he had been used to take Irène to the Grotte, by telling her that a fireman she had the hots for—but had spurned her for being so…insatiable—finally wanted to ‘do it’ with her. The human remains you found at the cave alongside Irène probably belonged to him. What was left of him wouldn’t have been enough to determined if he had been glamorized, and by whom. Moreover, his remains also burned when Irène combusted.
Tony had a conversation with Conrad that raised some questions in his mind, questions he worked hard to repress. And he asked me to get inside his memories…”
“Despite the mind blockade?” asked David.
“When there is a will and an old enough vampire, there is a way,” Severian replied. “So I speculated…what would have happened if Conrad had not set Geoffroy free as he told us? Why would he lie about that? Why was the blood in the ‘symbol of origin’ not from Normandy or Burgundy but probably from Piedmont? Vampire blood and human blood differ, but there are still ways to check for ancestry. As they used to say in those days in Piedmont, “wherever the lion’s hide will not stretch, it should be eked out with patches from the fox’s skin”: we could have been duped, to go chase the fox and forget the lion.
What, finally, if a real Templar could be turned into a sort of Nazi executioner—much the same as modern day neo-Nazis, who pretend to be “Crusaders” do—by someone who hated both the Templars and the Catholic Church; who didn’t care about Nazis or Jews but, instead, saw them both as pawns; and who would use wandering souls, victims of a monstrous Holocaust, to bring about the Final Judgment of all humans, living, dead, or undead? And not any Templar, mind you, but an undead Templar who—Tony’s mind told me—was now the ‘Oracle’ leading an Order tasked by the Church with destroying all evil?
Mircea and I meditated on it. We had to know. So, we ransacked Conrad’s castle.
To an Elder such as Conrad, an attack by anyone other than a rival Elder would have seemed unfathomable. That’s why he was so angry when we were about to start on our way to Chartres: the oldest truce between Elders—the one he desperately needed to hold, to b
e sure no one else capable of peering inside his mind would, so discovering his deception—was now over.
Perhaps his centuries old arch-nemesis had actually finally decided to stand on his way. But Conrad was now almost ready to succeed and could not stop our quest. He had studied runes, he had procured the most evil sorcery books available, he had deceived the neo-Nazis, he had salvaged most of ashes of Jacques de Molay and used to talk to them to validate his vendetta and the enslavement of his first blood child, Geoffroy; he had killed and made his blood son kill, convinced the souls of those innocents would become like a sacred wind that would blow open the Gates of Hell. In short, he was so close to success he almost could see the trumpet sounding announcing the Final Judgment.
So, he was forced to improvise—which he detested. Mircea and I discovered and stole his diaries and sometime soon will have to explain our actions to the Grand Council of the Elders. Regardless, I’m glad we did. We also stole de Molay’s ashes, so he could be given a proper burial, all things considered, after seven centuries.
Given our findings, I called on the Mother, informed Her and She decided we should try to beat Conrad at his own game, and save Geoffroi de Charney— “Geoffroy” as Conrad called him—by breaking the bond between him and his maker before his maker could use it to damage him. The Mother can do this, against the will of the maker—but only when maker and the blood child are in close proximity. Now Geoffroy would be able to go back to being ‘the Oracle’ that leads Tony’s Order, and helping the Church expiate some of its past misdeeds with present good work.
On the more pressingly immediate, however, with Conrad gone, all the worse instincts of the Wotanists he riled will run wild, and the souls trapped by this deception will still try to achieve their ultimate goal, the coalescing into a sacred wind. In short, we’re still in grave danger. In fact, before the Mother left—taking Conrad to the Abode of Evil with Her—she let me know that, attracted by the stones you have fastened to your tallit, those souls will soon converge to this place. That is why we should now proceed as fast as we can, hopefully with Geoffroy’s help.”
As they spoke, not even the first faint red and gold glow of dawn could yet be seen over what once was the land of Kidinnu, the dusty sienna hills of Babylon. At the same time, in the Master Bunker of Odessatron, in Bavaria, twelve men sat on a very long table, surrounded by portraits of III Reich Nazis. The men were all seated in massively ornate oak chairs with the NSDAP eagle, the Parteiadler, at their tall backs, all chairs leather-upholstered and profusely inlaid with gilded brass Nazi symbols; but only one of those chairs, more like a regal throne, noticeably larger than the others, was gilded: the one for the man who sat at the table head, right below the imperious gaze of an enormous portrait of Adolf Hitler, a man dressed now exactly as Hitler was in that painting.
In front of him, and, likewise, of all others, there was a runic circle, that of Armanen Futharkh. Inscribed in it, Solomon’s shield, in the pentagram form; and in the pentagon at its very center, a welded image of the stickman, kneeling perpendicular to the surface, each image oriented so each faced one particular runic symbol—Ar, Th, Os, Laf, Fa, Hag, Is, Tyr, Laf, Eh, Rit—forming the name of Hitler, in sequence; and the runic circles so oriented that all stickmen pointed at the pentagon in front of the man in the gilded throne—which, instead of a stickman, had over it a Mein Kämpf, bound in human skin, Jewish human skin.
In an adjacent room, a group of underlings was monitoring the feed from a private satellite, showing high-resolution images of Notre Dame of Chartres under the moonlight. One of the men in that room discretely bent his head sideways and whispered into the ear of to the one next to him: “Do you really think the Führer’s soul shall return tonight and inhabit the Grand Master from now on, forever?”
That very moment, cracking a riding crop against the back of the offender’s chair, an imperious voice behind them, commanded: “Silence!” and both the whisperer and his colleague contritely lowered their heads and shut up.
At the same time, another group of neo-Nazis had gathered in Heidelberg’s Heiligenberganlage-Thingstätte, in the “Heiligenberg”, the ‘sacred mountain’, not to celebrate a late Walpurgisnacht as many thought—since police forbade torches around May first—but, although carrying torches, were flaunting the law in a big way and seemed about to officiate something a bit more ominous. Many of those Fackelkinder (torch-bearers) were also watching, on cellphones and tablets, the same satellite feed showing Chartres cathedral. One of them was overheard saying: “Let’s hope they succeed before the police gets here!” “You can always claim this is art, you coward!” replied another. Another, wearing sunglasses, was texting the BKA/AbST, as discretely as she could, from the tree line.
30—The Final Sprint?
“You shall have my help, both of you,” replied Geoffroy. “But understand I might be disoriented for a while. Thanks to Conrad, I escaped being burned alive at the Île aux Juifs—the Island of the Jews, irony of all ironies. Then, he saved me and collectively glamorized an entire group of people lusting for carnage, so they would watch me burn when I didn’t. But, once he turned me, he expunged most references to my former self, instilled doubt on my own value, and gradually, made me his virtual slave. I was his investment, or so it might seem. Since I was born to the blood, 705 years ago, not once was I free from my maker. So, this is new to me. I am relieved, but also feel lost, and probably will be slightly disoriented for a while. Less than a month of my human death Clement V died in agony, and a few months later King Philippe was killed while hunting. Instead of appeasing him, that made Conrad angrier. Many times he said those two monsters were but the symptom of a disease, a disease that must one day be cured: human arrogance and lust for power, the same disease that had cost him his kingdom.
In any case, I should strive to speak English from now on. So…my abject apologies for brutalizing you, Dr. Leib. You now know it wasn’t my intention, but now you dread my proximity all the same. Would…could you ever forgive what I almost did to you?” finished Geoffroy, letting the dagger fall on the floor.
David timidly nodded, still shaken, shuddering like the dagger’s blade quivered after it bounced on a piece of old marble slab. Slowly, however, he started gathering his wits, looking around, unsure of what to do next. Eventually, startled by the sound of dripping onto a slew of little puddles, he bent down, reached for the dagger, grabbed it and sheathed it, while Geoffroy and Severian simply observed him. Geoffroy then softly nodded and offered his hand to help David incorporate, but David remained there, eyes glazed, looking at Severian, his mind still suffused with horror and doubt.
Smiling for the first time in centuries, Geoffroy looked ready to say something conciliatory, or perhaps apologetic, once again; but before he could, David started howling, like a wounded beast. Seemingly unable to rise again, he kept desperately trying, and trying, and trying, and his knees obdurately failing him. Forced to lie on the floor, he then curled up in fetal position, clasping his hands behind his head, elbows close to his chin, and started rocking his body, slowly swinging his head to the sides, and moaning and groaning.
For a long moment, the two vampires watched him, impassively, keeping their distance, in complete silence, silence interrupted only by the monotone droning of water dripping nearby, eerily echoing in the tunnels, and the occasional wailing and moaning of the breeze above, carried into the depths by the lead pipes. Left to his own devices, listening to those haunting sounds, even if with great difficulty, David finally unwound, pressed his aching back against the wall, and finally asked, in a whisper: “Is he gone? Is he really not coming back?”
“Yes, he is gone,” replied Severian, shaking his head reassuringly, “and he’s not coming back.” David’s face relaxed somewhat. “When I first invoked her,” Severian explained, getting ever so slightly closer to David, “the Mother expected the ‘Freer of Souls’ to face formidable headwinds, deception, and mortal danger. She also told me that, should the human destined to
release those souls fail, the Gates of Hell wouldn’t merely open: they would crumble, forevermore, unleashing the End of Days. That’s why, by giving me more of her blood—while warning me against abusing this privilege—She provided me with the means to invoke her in a far simpler way. And that’s why, rather than staying here and risk a struggle that might accidentally kill David—when Conrad intended only me to die, to then deceive him and use him to unleash Hell on Earth with absolute certainty—I went to call on Her. Sorry if I fumbled at the time. Shielding my presence from both Geoffroy and Conrad required a big effort on my part, and that made invoking Lilith a lot harder.”
“In any case, glad you figured out a way,” said David, his face far less tense.
“Are your tallit, and your stones, and your shards of the Tables, intact?” asked Geoffroy, almost whispering, clearly treading as lightly as he could.
David nodded, now finally incorporated and, his hands still shaking, shone his flashlight, directing the beam to a compartment inside the ‘giant transparent suppository’: “Yes,” he replied, exhaling a long relieved breathe, “Yes, they are intact. We can breathe easy: the tube is badly splattered with mud, but anything inside it seems perfectly safe. ”
“Well,” said Geoffroy, “this domed chamber seems to have some good ventilation, indeed. Look at all the saltpeter hanging from the ceiling.” David almost smiled.
“Ah, yes!” agreed Severian, “I have seen it being used to make gun powder for cannons once or twice over the centuries. So, David, are you well enough for us to continue or you need to rest some more?”
“My knees, wrists, ass, shins, flanks, arms, back and neck ache like hell,” David chuckled, “but otherwise, I’m fine. Let’s do this, and get out of here a.s.a.p.”
“All right, then!” agreed Geoffroy.
“The two ‘undies’ have in their computers our best estimates for the Ark’s precise location, obtained—as Irène would put it, by ‘connecting Saint Apollinaire’s hole to Aaron’s rod’—and using all remaining information Sól extracted from the golden sheet and the silver cylinder,” said Severian.
Quest for the Ark Page 32