The Key s-2

by Simon Toyne

  Kathryn broke off, the starkness of the phrase puncturing her emotional resolve and bringing forth the hot tears she had been holding at bay. She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She could not bear to think of him writing this lonely note like a condemned man facing the prospect of his own death. She wiped her eyes again then replaced her glasses and continued reading…I hope the fulfilment of the first prophecy shines a light on this second so that it may now help you on your journey towards restoring the rightful order of things. I spent many evenings musing about the meaning of it, but without knowing what the Sacrament is, it always remained a riddle. For my part, there is one thing I can shed some light on. During my brief time in the Citadel I chanced upon something that I think may be the Starmap mentioned here. It came into the library with the same consignment of relics as the fragments that formed the first prophecy. It too had the Tau symbol on it, as well as what looked like constellations and directions written in a language I could not understand. I intended to study it further and learn what language it was written in, but I never had time. Soon afterwards I learned that my presence was suspected in the Citadel so I stole the slate fragments and fled. I would have brought the Starmap as well, but it was too heavy. I knew if I tried to swim the moat with that weighing me down I would sink. So I did the next best thing. I hid it. I didn’t want the Sancti and their kind to benefit from whatever knowledge it contained so I put it somewhere they were unlikely to find it. My hope is that it rests there still and that with the first prophecy fulfilled you may now have free access to the Citadel yourselves and, by following the map I will outline, you will finally retrieve it.

  Then the message ran out.

  Kathryn looked at the next blank page. There had to be more here than she’d had time to reveal.

  She flipped back to the first symbols she had revealed and read the first few lines again.

  The Key unlocks the Sacrament

  The Sacrament becomes the Key

  And all the Earth shalt tremble

  The Key must follow the Starmap Home

  There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon

  The full phase of the moon lasted just over twenty-eight days. Assuming that the evacuation of the Sancti from the mountain marked the moment of release for the Sacrament, then ten days had already passed. She read the rest of the message with a growing sense of dread.

  Lest the Key shalt perish, the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper, marking the end of all days

  She wondered at the sickness that seemed to have struck the Sancti. Could this be the blight that was mentioned? In the chaos of the ER when she had first arrived at the hospital she had glimpsed what it had done to the monks — the blackened skin, the blood-red eyes, the bleeding. If that spread out into the world it would be like the darkest vision from the Book of Revelation, turning all men into the image of demons. She looked at the blank page, restless with a desire to know what else was written there. It would be a whole day before the sun swung round again and shone back through her window, a day she could not afford to lose. She felt the weight of what she had just learned and the frustration of knowing that it was locked in this room with her, with the clock already ticking.

  Ten days gone.

  Eighteen remaining.

  22

  The lift door opened and Liv experienced a surge of panic. After days locked up in virtual isolation the noise and volume of people milling around the reception area was overwhelming. She had found a baseball cap in her bag and pulled it over her head now to hide her face a little, then forced herself out of the lift and across the worn mosaic floor towards the reception desk. She scanned the signs crowding the walls, seeking one that might offer a clue, but they were all in Turkish.

  ‘Patients’ property?’ she asked the receptionist.

  A taloned finger pointed to a door by the entrance. She headed over, glancing outside as she passed the main door. It had been raining and the low afternoon sun shone off the wet pavement. A news truck was parked on the opposite side of the street, a cameraman and a reporter sitting in the cab smoking and talking while they waited for something to happen. She didn’t want to be ambushed leaving the building and end up on the evening news again. She needed to stay under the radar — for the time being at least. There had to be another way out of here.

  The patients’ property office was tucked away in a dark cupboard with stacks of paperwork rising up from every horizontal surface and teetering precariously along the length of a narrow counter that cut the room in half. A young and bored-looking man sat behind it, steadily working his way through a large pile of folders with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man. Liv showed him the plastic tag around her wrist with her name and admissions number on it and he hefted a pile of folders under his arm and sloped off into the dark valley of shelves that stretched away behind him. Liv glanced at the door, listening to the muted sounds of the reception area beyond, ready to make a run for it at the first sign of marching boots. Her escape had been easier than she had expected. She had thought either the cop or the priest would have done more to stop her, but the surprise of her departure had clearly caught them both off guard. That didn’t mean she was free and clear though. They would undoubtedly both have been straight on the phone to their superiors and might be looking to detain her again even now. She needed to be cautious.

  The clerk returned from the dim archives carrying a cardboard container. She signed for it and pulled the lid off, recoiling at the sight of the clear plastic bag stuffed with her old bloodstained clothes.

  ‘Rubbish over in corner.’ The clerk pointed to a large portable waste bin with a yellow plastic sack bulging beneath it. Liv carried her box over and lifted the lid with her free hand. Inside were five or six other bags containing similarly blood-ruined clothing. She wondered why the hospital didn’t just bin the stuff themselves. Then saw the disclaimer on the underside of the lid and understood. It was an insurance thing. It said if you threw away anything of value it was officially your fault. She added her bag of dried gore to the others and let the lid bang shut.

  The only other thing left in the box was a creased white envelope containing some pieces of folded paper and a few hundred Turkish lira. She had no idea whether that meant she was rich or if it was merely enough to buy a cup of coffee. Either way, it was better than nothing. She stuffed the envelope into her holdall and left the box on the countertop. ‘Thanks,’ she said, fastening her bag and preparing herself for the outside world. The clerk said nothing, merely carried on rolling his boulder of paper uphill for all eternity.

  Liv opened the door and scanned the people milling about in the reception area. The main entrance was out because of the news crew camped in front of it. Right now she needed to remain low key and draw minimal attention to herself. There had to be another exit. She locked on to a couple of guys in hospital greens walking away from her. There was something about their body language that caught her attention. It was relaxed, unhurried. One of them reached up to his breast pocket and she saw the telltale rectangle straining against the green material. She knew then, with the finely tuned instincts of a reformed smoker, that they were heading for a cigarette break. And, unless there was a smokers’ room somewhere in the hospital, that meant they were heading outside.

  She fell in line behind them as they passed through a set of double doors into a shabby corridor, matching her steps with theirs so they wouldn’t hear her, but they were too preoccupied to notice the petite blonde woman following them. They reached a fire exit at the end of the corridor and leaned against the locking bar to open it, already fitting cigarettes into their mouths. Liv skipped along to catch up and slipped through the door after them. ‘Hi!’ she said, looking down an alley to where the main street was visible.

  ‘Main entrance that way,’ one of them grunted, pointing back down the corridor.

  ‘I can get out this way though, yes?’ Liv was already march
ing away towards the street. She didn’t wait for a reply.

  The alley opened up on to a wide street with two lanes of traffic all heading in the same direction. She walked against the flow, squinting against the glare and looking for a cab. At least the rain had stopped; cabs were always harder to come by when it was raining. She saw an empty one, waved it down and slid gratefully into the back seat.

  ‘ Nereye? ’ the driver asked.

  ‘Airport,’ she said, buckling herself in.

  ‘Which one?’ He switched to English with the ease of someone who made his living in a tourist town.

  ‘The busiest,’ she said, sliding low in the seat. ‘Whichever has the most flights out of here.’

  23

  Ortus Offices, Garden District, Ruin

  Ajda Demir squinted out of the fourth-floor window at the bright evening, holding her hand up against the reflected glare from the wet streets. The movement reflected in the glass, drawing her attention to the transparent version of herself hovering like a spectre in front of her. The story of the past week was written on her face: dark circles under her eyes, her forehead creased with worry, silver hair escaping from the usually immaculate confines of her scraped-back bun. She reached up and carefully smoothed it down, as if this small act could somehow return everything to order.

  Turning from the ghost of herself, she surveyed the chaos that had been brought into her ordered world. The room she was in resembled a small classroom, with strip lights overhead and desks in lines that usually housed a mixture of fundraisers and aid workers who quietly ran one of the charity’s larger projects based in central Sudan. Following the explosion at the Citadel, however, all that had stopped. Ortus accounts had been frozen worldwide pending a full enquiry into why the head of the charity had taken a truckful of fertilizer, donated in good faith by a large, well-respected conglomerate, and used it to try to blow up the world’s oldest and most sacred monastery. For the past week a team of investigators had been camped out here, checking through the company accounts and records, searching for proof that the charity was a cover for a church-hating terrorist organization. They had found nothing, of course, but it didn’t matter. The PR fallout had been immense. As well as fielding press calls and fending off reporters, Ajda had been busy compiling a steadily growing list of the various companies and funding bodies who were severing their ties with the charity. The towering heap of boxes before her, all of which needed re-sorting and filing away, was a physical manifestation of the huge mess the organization was now in.

  But it wasn’t the extra work that was making her soul heavy. It was the invisible cost, the unquantifiable ripples that this mess had caused. Through gaps in the piles of boxes she could see photos and maps pinned to the blank walls showing the projects that had been obscured by this investigation: a water sanitation and filtration system in the Sudan; a partially built new school in Sierra Leone; freshly ploughed fields in Somalia that had previously been sown with nothing but landmines. The people in these countries were the real victims. They wouldn’t understand why their shattered lives were no longer being rebuilt.

  Ajda felt the pressure of the day weighing upon her and listened out for thunder, hoping it might roll down from the mountains to clear the air. Instead she heard something that made her eyes widen and her skin go cold. It was the creak of a foot on a floorboard — there was someone in the building with her.

  She listened for further noises, hoping for the call of a familiar voice or the sound of a conversation. But there was nothing. Everyone had gone for the day. She had locked the front door herself after the last person had left.

  It came again: the creak of a floorboard, followed by a soft click.

  It had come from somewhere above her, where no one was supposed to be. The first four floors of the building were taken up by offices. The fifth was the private apartment of Kathryn Mann, whose family had once owned the whole building. These days she ran Ortus and ‘lived above the shop’, as she put it. But she was not in her flat, she was in hospital.

  Another sound.

  Softer now, like a drawer being opened.

  Ajda stole across the floor on light feet, using the noises from above as cover for her own movement. She reached the door to the stairwell and looked up at the fifth-floor landing.

  One of the skylights was open.

  The faint noises of activity continued to float down from above, too careful to be innocent, too loud to be ignored. Ajda crept up the stairs, keeping to the wall where the stair treads were firmer and less likely to creak. The door to the apartment was open. Beyond it a light was on. She paused for a second, uncertain what to do next. The sound of a filing cabinet ratcheting open overrode her fear. Whoever it was, they were going through private files, and that she wouldn’t stand for. She strode up the final few stairs and crossed the landing to the door.

  Inside the flat a uniformed cop was on his knees by a filing cabinet.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Ajda said, in a tone clearly meant to convey the exact opposite.

  The cop removed something from beneath the drawer then stood up and turned round.

  ‘Hello, Ajda,’ Gabriel said, walking across to the large floor-to-ceiling bookcase.

  Ajda had to fight back an uncharacteristic urge to rush over and hug him. ‘I… I thought you were in jail,’ she said.

  ‘I was.’ He squatted down, reaching for a black calfskin-bound copy of Jane Eyre on a lower shelf. ‘And now I’m not.’

  He pressed the spine of the book and the whole lower quarter of the bookshelf sprang open with a soft click. Ajda thought she’d known every inch of the office, but she had not been aware of the false panel and the cupboard concealed behind it.

  A loud hammering from the ground floor made them both spin round.

  ‘That’ll be for me,’ Gabriel said, unplugging a fax machine and lifting it out of the cupboard. ‘Please don’t answer it.’

  The hammering continued in the sort of aggressive and persistent way that meant either police or debt collectors were outside the door. Ajda realized what must have happened and immediately felt fearful. Gabriel and his mother were good people. She’d worked with them both for long enough to know that much. A week ago she would have felt compelled to go and let the police in if they’d come calling. But after watching them trash her offices and trample underfoot the good names of those who worked there, she had changed her opinion. They could hammer until their fists bled: she would not let them in.

  Gabriel laid the fax machine on the floor and turned it over. On the back were sockets for the phone line and power cable as well as a keyhole. Gabriel took a small key from the envelope he had found under the drawer, twisted it in the lock and lifted the top of the unit off. Inside, the electronics and working parts of a real fax machine had been squashed into about a third of the area. The rest was filled with stacks of different coloured passports and plastic bags containing bundles of currency in various denominations. Ajda saw dollars and euros as well as Turkish lira, Sudanese pounds and what looked like Iraqi dinars. There was also a thick stack of credit cards. ‘What is all this?’ she asked, her ordered world crumbling a little further.

  Gabriel pocketed three of the passports and all of the cash. ‘A lot of my work out in the field is under the radar,’ he explained, quickly sorting through the credit cards. ‘Many of the most needy people in the world are governed by the most corrupt. If we played by the rules, we’d never get anywhere, and the weakest people wouldn’t stand a chance. I’m afraid I have to bend the rules from time to time in order to get things done.’

  The hammering started up again downstairs, joined now by the sound of the reception phone ringing.

  ‘I don’t expect you to do anything you’re not comfortable with,’ Gabriel said, taking her gently by her shoulders. ‘And if you want to go down and let them in, that’s OK. None of this is your fight. But my mother’s in danger and I want to help her, and you could help me.’

  The hammering stoppe
d as abruptly as it had started and the phone stopped ringing. Ajda looked up into Gabriel’s earnest eyes and smiled.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’

  24

  Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

  Dusk brought the evening meds rounds in the hospital.

  With one room now empty they were quicker than usual and Father Ulvi was eager to get them out of the way so he could concentrate on what else he had to do that night. He fiddled with the loose beads in his pocket as the nurse checked Kathryn Mann. Then they locked the door and headed to the last room at the end of the corridor.

  The male nurse pushed the trolley slowly towards it, his large frame making surprisingly heavy work of the task. Ulvi knew it wasn’t the bulk of the mobile drug cabinet that slowed his progress but a bone-deep reluctance to step into the room and face what it contained. He had to admit there was something about the monk’s appearance that even he found unsettling. In the course of his own work he had witnessed some stomach-churning sights — savage knife attacks, burn victims, a whole freak show of human bodies warped beyond recognition by torture and violence — but even he had never seen anything like the patient in room 400.

  Ulvi entered the room first, holding the door for the reluctant nurse to follow, being careful not to look at the bed until he had to. He could hear dry breathing, shallow and furtive, as though the thing lying there was stealing air. He closed the door, then turned to face the bed.

  The sight never failed to shock him. The most striking thing about the monk was the colour of his skin. Where it was visible beneath the yellow stained dressings that covered most of his body, it was totally black, though Ulvi knew from his briefing notes that the man lying before him was a white Serbian monk named Dragan Ruja. He looked as though he’d been scorched or dipped in crude oil, so deep and dark was the colour of the skin hanging loosely on his shrunken frame. Whatever his disease was, it had gnawed him away, decomposing his living form until it was closer to that of a corpse. He resembled the mummified bodies they occasionally dragged from the mountains; climbers who had lost their way and slowly been desiccated over months or even years by wind and ice until nothing was left but a sunken, hollowed-out approximation of the living things they had once been. Except the mountain dead were brought to the morgue, not the hospital, and they did not watch you as you entered the room; or shrink away as cotton wipes dabbed at the rot that still oozed steadily out of them.