Apostate Konstantin

by Max Kramer

  At the moment, those eyes were peering down upon the frail young man, who was doing his unsuccessful best to sink through the solid stone floor of the corridor.

  “What are you doing here child?” Konstantin asked, “You know these levels are restricted until you finish your initiation rites.”

  “Yes sir, I know sir.” The boy replied, “I was sent sir, to find someone.”

  “Who?”

  “You sir.”

  Konstantin felt a flash of irritation. He was never going to get to the kitchens at this rate.

  “By whom?”

  “Sister Brita sent me.”

  Now he was confused. Sister Brita was a third order Franciscan regular, she worked in the infirmary. She very rarely sought out anyone from another order, let alone one of the warrior-monks of the Inquisition.

  “She said it was urgent, sir.”

  Konstantin prayed silently. Lord, deliver me from the histrionics of nurses.

  “Very well boy, I am on my way. His will be done.”

  “His will be done.” The young man parroted, and eyes downcast he scurried back down the passageway he had come, happy to be out from under the monk’s gaze.

  “Boy?”

  “Yes sir?” The child squawked, nearly tripping himself as he spun back towards Konstantin. Konstantin stifled a smile, he knew it would only terrify the youth further.

  “Where did Sister Brita say I should meet her? Is she in the infirmary?”

  “Why no, sir.” The youth blinked feverishly. “She is in her chamber.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Most peculiar. As the child ran off toward the safety of the dormitories, Konstantin resumed his lengthy stride, determined to find answers as quickly as possible.

  Konstantin’s journey took him through ways long and dark, his steps echoing off of unembellished stone and metal. Such was the new Vatican. Little of the original city had survived the Judgment. The conglomeration of Paleo-Christian, Byzantine, Renaissance, and Baroque influences which had made up the ancient complex had been deemed needless excess, and was never rebuilt. No longer was God’s influence shown with fluted columns and gilded spires raised triumphant to the heavens. St. Peter’s Basilica was now an indomitable fortress, designed to repel both foreign invaders and any potential uprisings among the native populace. There had been uprisings, at the beginning, as the Church solidified its position by taking away more and more of its citizen’s freedoms. The rebels never succeeded. From this bastion of Faith, the Church exercised its divine might, bringing salvation to the masses of humanity with an iron fist. Its walls stood thick and strong, and its roots reached miles underground, housing the many orders and sects that comprised the Army of God.

  Currently, the majority of that army was absent, fighting a holy crusade for oil against the Moors in the South. Recently, a great battle had been won in the trenches of that place, and His Holiness the Pope himself had travelled into the heathen lands to accept the surrender of the false prophet. The fortress-cathedral was far from empty however, even with the bulk of the Church’s men-at-arms engaged elsewhere.

  With unerring accuracy, Konstantin threaded his way through the labyrinth of corridors and chambers until he finally reached his destination. The medical personnel maintained their own wing near the infirmary, so that they might be reached easily in an emergency.

  He waited until the hallway cleared before approaching Sister Brita’s door. While private meetings between male and female members of the Church were not forbidden, the circumstances of this parlay were odd by anyone’s standards. Once the hall stilled, Konstantin knocked quietly on the door. It was a solid affair of hardwood bound in iron, yet it swung wide with a touch when unlatched from the inside.

  “Frederick. Please come in.”

  Konstantin acquiesced, stopping a stride away from the room’s only occupant. He had to duck to pass under the uncovered bulb hanging from the ceiling, the windowless room’s only light fixture. The cell was simple, with a military style cot and foot locker cushioned by a faded rug, and a small shelf on the near wall. The shelf contained a tidy medical kit, a dog eared Post-Judgment Bible, a collection of candles to provide light during the City’s frequent blackouts, and various medical books, one of which the sister was in the process of returning. Sister Brita was a tall, slender young woman, with an athletic figure that could only be partially hidden by her sterile white habit. Her hair was fair and, like most sisters of her order, kept short. With her lightly freckled nose and high cheek bones, in another age she could have been a model. Konstantin’s attention as always was drawn to her eyes when she turned to face him. Where his eyes were dark, hers were so light a blue that they seemed washed out, like old photographs he had seen in his travels amongst the ruins outside the city. At the moment, they held more red than blue however, and had the telltale puffiness of recent tears.

  Her obvious distress stilled his tongue before he could remark about the late hour and his hunger. Instead he took her hands and gently sat them both on the edge of her cot.

  “What troubles you Sister Brita,” Konstantin asked, “are you ill?”

  She did not answer immediately. Instead she removed her hands from his and began telling her rosary, avoiding his gaze. After a time, she turned toward him and he was startled by how terrible she actually looked. Her normally smooth skin hung slack and pale, except for the circles under her eyes, which were so dark they almost looked like bruises. She stared into his eyes for a few heartbeats as if searching for some sort of sign before she took a deep breath and began.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you like this Frederick. I know it is late and this is rather unusual, but I need to show you something.”

  Konstantin gestured for her to continue. Slowly, hesitantly, she stood and backed into the far corner, raising her free hand before her, as the other clutched her beads to her chest.

  The temperature of the room dropped perceptibly. Konstantin’s skin began to crawl and it seemed to him as if a multitude of voices whispered, their incomprehensible mutterings tickling the base of his skull. Konstantin’s hackles rose. Sister Brita’s raised hand glowed with an inner light, small cracklings of blue lightning passing between her outstretched fingers and periodically spinning off to dissipate into the rarefied air.

  The Inquisitor’s mouth dropped open. Sister Brita Konstantin had magic.

  Before

  Although there is much disagreement regarding the great cataclysm, as far as we can tell it began with the over-industrialization and inevitable ecological destruction of the Corporate Empire of China, and the economic collapse of the former United States of America which quickly followed. The Chinese gasped their last smog filled breathes with typical stoicism, but the implosion of the last great superpower was devastating for their American subjects. The resulting hyper-inflation and restrictive martial law led to a continent-wide revolution, whose brutality and scope made that warlike nation’s previous civil wars pale in comparison.

  It is unknown who fired the first missiles but retaliatory strikes engulfed the states in a nuclear inferno. Ultimately the entire western hemisphere was lost.

  Though the old world survived the American Armageddon relatively unscathed, radioactive dust, and soot from the fires burning across half the planet blanketed the earth in an impenetrable cloud cover for months, causing a generation long period of nuclear winter.

  Waves of people fled to the equator, the fools. It didn’t matter. The winter found them too. In the end, humanity was forced underground. These came to be known as the Dark Times.

  It was a desperate era. The oldest among us remember the hunger and fear clearly, though we were just children then. The hastily constructed government bunkers had never been meant to be used as permanent residences, nor had they been designed for so many refugees. When we finally ran out of rations midway through our second decade, we ate the mushrooms that grew out of the corpses of our dead. Then we ate the corpses. The scientists said there was no telli
ng how long the winter might last, that it could possibly go on forever. We hoped they were wrong. We certainly couldn’t go on forever.

  The choice was clear for those of us remaining underground. Risk returning to the possibly toxic surface, or stay in our bunkers and starve. On what became day one of the new calendar, for the first time in many long years, we walked above ground. I still recall the gentle kiss of cleansing rain on my upturned face as I left the elevator shaft, their drops mingling with my tears of relief and joy. The rain was warm. It was Spring.

  -Survivors journal

  Name unknown

  2

  No treachery is worse than betrayal by one you love. Bathed in an indigo glow that could not exist, buffeted by winds that were not there, Frederick Konstantin knew betrayal.

  “How dare you…” He hissed through clenched teeth. “This is heresy!”

  Under the weight of his glare the woman faltered, her summoned lightning flickering and then fading.

  “Freddy I didn’t ask for this. You must know that,” She pleaded.

  “Do not call me that!” He thundered, “Don’t you dare call me that, witch!”

  With a wail she collapsed into the corner burying her face in her knees. She still clutched her rosary. “Freddy how can you say that? How can you? You know me, I’m your sister!”

  Swiftly he strode across the room, and standing over her he yanked the cross from her grasp, scattering beads onto the floor.

  “You are a witch, and an abomination. I don’t know what has become of my sister, but you are not her.”

  At his declaration, she began sobbing uncontrollably, hugging her legs and rocking back and forth. Konstantin watched her for a moment before he triggered the intercom beside Brita’s door. Using the intercom, he summoned a contingent of Swiss Guard. If Sister Brita noticed, she gave no sign; she just continued staining the rug with her tears.

  How dare she blaspheme this way? Konstantin fumed. Magic was a tainted gift from the devil; his teachers were very clear in this regard. How could little Brita, the only family he had left, the girl he had helped raise, be a witch? Could that precocious child really be a servant of the Fallen? Konstantin cursed her then for forcing this duty upon him. For duty it was. He was Domini Cane, a hound of God, warrior-monk of the Holy Inquisition. He was charged with routing out the scourge of magic, regardless of where that magic was found. He had condemned politicians, and physicians, women of every imaginable position. Now he must condemn his own sister.

  The guard arrived shortly, and Brita did not resist as she was shackled and dragged out the door. So she went, a figure in white, to places dark and painful. Left behind, a figure in black stood alone, his slumped shoulders bearing the weight of the world.

  Slowly, Konstantin let out a breath he had not realized he had been holding. Reaching upwards, he gently twisted the naked bulb in its socket, plunging his sister’s room into darkness. Without a backwards glance he strode down the hall. No matter how quickly he walked he was pursued by memories.

  He was eleven and she was five and their father had brought them to the park. Smell of fresh cut grass and his father’s pipe. Laughing they chased each other through the playground while their father sat with the old men who played chess and talked about troubling grown-up things. Later he bought them sweet ice from the cart on the corner but Fred spilled his on the walk home. When he cried, she gave him hers. She said she didn’t want any more, though he knew it was her favorite…

  She found the sparrow outside her window. Father said it must have fallen by accident, during the storm. Its wing was broken. Father told her to leave it alone, but she yelled until he let her bring it inside. She cared for it into the spring when it was strong again. She didn’t want to let it go, but father said it was a wild animal and it wasn’t right to take away any creature’s freedom. She yelled again when it flew away…

  Their mother had died giving birth to Brita. Now their father lay dying of the cancer. Konstantin hated the sickroom, hated the smells of disinfectant, and the adults who always spoke in whispers. His father had pulled him close, amid all the scary tubes and machines and made him swear that he would always protect her. That he was the man of the family now. Konstantin swore…

  Konstantin had just been ordained. She had come to the ceremony. They had seen little of each other over the past few years, he with his training and she with her studies. It had been a harsh life growing up under the Order, but he had kept his promise to his father. She had been safe. She kissed him on the cheek then, told him she was proud of him. He had never been so happy. Now he could finally begin fighting back against the evils the Church had taught him about, the magic that he now knew had taken his parents away from him. That year Konstantin killed for the first time…

  Konstantin remembered. When he finally reached his quarters, he shut the door and sat down in the darkness upon his cot. Frederick Konstantin, the immovable veteran of a thousand successful inquisitions held his sister’s cross and cried.

  ***

  Demons are a funny thing. Konstantin found himself battling his, and he was having a devil of a time of it too. Immobile upon the cot, his white knuckled grip on the cross was the only evidence of his internal struggle. Sweat beaded on his forehead and ran to the tip of his nose, to fall to the stone floor below. Hours passed. Finally he let out a deep breath, straightening out of his slumped position. A decision had been made.

  Committed to his course, indecision melted away as he strode purposefully around his quarters. First he shed his robes, revealing plain black fatigue pants tucked into solid black boots that knotted to mid-calf. To this he added a wide belt which carried holsters. The holsters hung low on his thighs, gunfighter style. The handguns they contained were silver. After carefully folding his robes and placing them on his cot, he turned to the simple armoire filling the corner of his room, and selected a long sleeved cotton shirt and a hardened black leather vest. A quick search through his chest of drawers produced three blades, which went into his left boot and up his sleeves respectively. Although he preferred his pistols, there was a war on, and usable ammunition was a precious commodity. There was no guarantee he would be able to reload where he was going. A full length black leather jacket with silver cross-shaped buttons completed the ensemble.

  Suitably attired, Konstantin knelt before his writing desk, opening the top drawer. His hands paused only momentarily before removing the drawer’s contents. Inside were two books, one a simply bound Pope Innocent’s Post-Judgment Bible and the other an enormous edition of the Malleus Maleficarum, guidebook of his order. The Bible went into a pocket of his coat, his sister’s cross into another. The Maleficarum he returned to its resting place. Removing a pair of leather gloves from his coat, he swept out of the room.

  Anyone unlucky enough to be in the halls on his journey jumped to get out of the way. Few would dare approach a warrior-monk of the Inquisition on a mission, let alone one so angry that his grinding teeth were audible from three strides away. Konstantin threaded his way through traffic with the grace of an adder, his wrath held simmering just below the surface. Overhead, powerful speakers perpetually hissed with the rhetoric of his faith.

  Shortly, he was in less inhabited areas, and his speed increased until his coat billowed behind him. Down in the deepest tunnels, Konstantin stopped in front of the steel portal leading to the dungeons, his way barred by two of the omnipresent Swiss Guard.

  “Where is she?” he growled.

  The guards looked at each other, their expressions unreadable beneath their facemasks.

  “Where is who, sir?” One asked hesitantly. Not even the Swiss Guard wanted to court the ire of an Inquisitor dressed for war.

  “The newest witch, you fools! The Sister!” Konstantin shrieked. Frightened, they leapt into action, one punching in that day’s code on the keypad beside the door, while the other beckoned Konstantin to follow down the now open corridor.

  The guard brought Konstantin through a sterile
, well lit hall of solid iron. The dungeons of the Inquisition were legendary. From snatches of whispered conversations that he had overheard Konstantin knew that people believed them to be a primitive place, barely more than dirty stone caves with dripping water and flickering torches. Konstantin had always wondered how people came to believe baseless rumors with such certainty. Of course, no one who had entered these cells ever came out again to disprove them. These dungeons were where the church held those with magic.

  They soon arrived at their destination and Konstantin looked around. It was an unmarked door in a hallway full of unmarked doors. Some were open. Some were closed. He couldn’t tell how the Swiss Guard kept track of where their prisoner’s were. He did not bother to ask.

  “I will speak with her,” he told his imposing companion.

  “Sir, it is standard procedure that no one interact alone with those suspected of the use of magic,” the guard began, “Additionally she has yet to receive her dose, and may prove dangerous.” He was referring to the hallucino-tranq serum used liberally on prisoners of the Inquisition to lower their resistance and nullify their unnatural abilities.

  Konstantin sneered, fixing the man in his unsettling gaze. “Do you think I have something to fear from one such as her then?”

  The man stood for another heartbeat, and then lowered his head. “No sir, of course not. Forgive me.”

  “Just open the door.”

  Turning, the guard pulled a key card from his gear, reaching towards the slot in the wall next to the door. When his back was turned Konstantin struck viciously, punching the giant at the base of the skull, underneath his helmet. His fall reminded Konstantin of a small avalanche he had once witnessed in the Italian Alps.