by Alex Archer
She had been surprised to see Garin crouching beside the vehicle. There would be time for questions later. Right now she was just glad the band was back together. She grinned at him.
“It’s good to see you.”
He put his finger to his lips.
Annja had caught a glimpse of Roux inside. He wasn’t having tea and biscuits with the madman and his homicidal sister. She resisted the temptation to make some ironic dig about how her white knights had come to rescue the damsel in distress only to wind up needing to be rescued themselves. There’d be time for that later. She gave Garin just long enough to hide himself before she rose.
The guard showed no sign of realizing she was there, even as she stepped away from the car. He was clearly savoring his nicotine-fueled meditation.
She made a show of stumbling to her knees.
This time he looked up.
“Help,” she said in a voice that was barely above a whisper, weak but just loud enough for the man to hear.
She slumped forward and waited as the man grabbed the Uzi and flicked his cigarette to the ground.
He was faster than she’d expected. She lay still, her eyes closed, listening to the sound of boots running across the snow toward her.
She felt the man’s breath on her cheek as he bent down to be closer.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
It was a stupid question, but was exactly what she would have asked. It was a human response to someone who was hurt.
She resisted the urge to open her eyes until she heard the sound of him being hit—hard—and falling. He landed on top of her, driving the air from her lungs.
A moment later the weight was lifted.
Annja scrambled free.
“Well, that was easy,” Garin said.
He relieved the man of his Uzi.
The guard appeared to be dead.
“They’re interrogating Roux,” Annja said, nodding toward the closed door. “What exactly are they chatting about in there?”
“I wish I knew,” Garin replied. “The old man’s not exactly forthcoming at the moment. I think he’s got some noble plan to save your life, but beyond that?” He shrugged.
“So have you boys kissed and made up?”
Garin winced. “Not yet. But at least he isn’t trying to kill me.”
“Would you blame him if he was?”
“Probably not, but I’m not too stubborn to admit we can all make mistakes.”
“Big of you.”
Garin grinned. “I’m just here to try to put things right. You can’t hold that against me, surely?”
“Putting things right by letting Roux sacrifice himself?”
“It’s not about me. It’s not about you. It’s all about Roux. Roux’s the one that this Cauchon has been after all the time. It was about a bigger prize than those papers I stole from the old man’s vault.”
“Talk to me, Garin. I want to know what we’re going up against. I really hate surprises. You should know that by now.”
“He was very secretive about it, but he’s brought a piece of armor here. A breastplate. Joan of Arc’s,” he added meaningfully.
Annja shook her head. It wasn’t a denial; she was trying to understand, to put the pieces together. “But why would he think Roux would have that?” She didn’t like the only answer she could come up with.
“He knows about us.”
“What do you mean, about us?” She frowned.
“The guy must know that there’s a connection between the three of us, and with Joan. That’s what has the old man rattled. All of our secrets are beginning to unravel.”
“How? How is that even possible?” How could Cauchon have discovered this about them?
All Garin could do was shrug.
They weren’t going to learn anything more outside.
Every minute they delayed meant another minute that Roux was alone in there.
“Time for the cavalry,” Garin whispered, holding the Uzi at the ready. He checked that the safety was off and the selector was set to 3-round bursts. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
She didn’t understand until he made a swishing gesture with the muzzle of the Uzi.
Annja reached out and drew the sword into the here and now.
She smiled as she felt the surge of energy flood into her body, pulsing through her skin and bone, bringing her alive.
Garin nodded.
They rushed side by side to the doorway.
“Here goes nothing,” Annja said as she placed her fingers on the door handle. “Let’s hope we get the drop on them.”
“Rock and roll,” Garin said wryly.
54
Cauchon pressed the breastplate close to his chest.
It was a tight fit, even if the man’s emaciated torso was skin and bones.
Roux could only imagine how severe his injuries had been, and what he had gone through during his recovery, but years in the chair had destroyed his musculature. He’d wasted away, lost in the search for knowledge.
“Not a good look,” Roux said, deliberately trying to goad Cauchon into lashing out.
“You still don’t understand, do you?”
“Educate me. Make me understand.”
“This—” he rapped his knuckles off the breastplate over his chest “—is going to get me out of this wheelchair.” He let that sink in for a second. “I am going to walk again. I will be whole. Better than whole. I will invite the demon into me.”
Roux rejected the notion at once. So that was it. The confused fool had pinned his hopes of salvation on a piece of metal, wishing somehow it would conduct whatever he believed was inside Annja—Joan’s demon—into him. He didn’t understand that sometimes a piece of metal, no matter its history, was just a piece of metal.
“That’s not going to happen,” Roux said, sympathetically this time, no gibes, no goading.
Cauchon ignored him. He didn’t want to hear anything that conflicted with what he needed to happen.
“Those papers, the ledgers and lost chapters, the secrets that the Inquisition never wanted released to the public, I have read them. I’ve studied them. I understand them like no one before me. I can see the whole picture, putting together the suppositions and revelations of all of these other, better men, and I know. I know. All I need are things that were touched by people close to her. Things that she came into contact with.”
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“No? You would say that because you are frightened. You would say that because this is your doing, and it will be your undoing. I know. I know,” he repeated. “I will rise. I will. And that scares you, doesn’t it? That scares you down to your core.”
“No,” Roux said, “nothing would make me happier. I never wanted this.”
“You say that, but words are cheap. Anyone can say that. They only have to move their lips and it all comes flooding out, all of the lies. But I have spent years gathering the truth, a quest for understanding. All of those papers, including Gui’s, even Cauchon himself, the real one, the man who signed her death warrant, I have items of his. I have held in my hand a piece of paper that so many other men put their hand to at the time. Holy men frightened of the demon spirit inside the girl. But the thing I needed most, the prize that would make the rites work, was something she had touched herself, something she had held tightly that would have absorbed some of her very essence. And now, thanks to you, I have it. All that remains is to speak the words—words as old as the entity inside her, words that bind them even now, the mirror of the words that saved her soul when the flames burned away her skin.”
Roux looked at him sadly. This wasn’t at all what he’d wanted or expected. He didn’t fear the man or hate him. He pitied him. “And what then? Do you suddenly rise up? Does the demon get sucked out of Annja and drawn here, into you? Is the devil going to materialize and claim us all?” He glanced at the others in the room. “Will we all be drawn into some hellish vortex, stripped of flesh,
shredded and scattered to the four winds? How is this supposed to work?”
He gestured at Cauchon’s sister. She made no obvious sign of making a move.
“Nothing so dramatic,” Cauchon said. “But the essence of Joan will abandon Miss Creed. She will be free of the curse. What happens to the vessel after that? I do not know.”
Roux closed his eyes, trying to gather the strength he needed to face this madness head-on. “It won’t work. There’s no such thing as magic, Patrice. There is no miracle cure for your injuries. I’m sorry. I truly am, but this is madness. She’s not even here. How can you perform any sort of ritual without her?” He knew he was feeding the man’s delusion, but it was another way to buy a few more seconds. Where the hell was Garin?
Cauchon laughed. It was a deep, throaty, totally genuine laugh. “Oh, she is. She’s here somewhere. Did you look out of the window on your drive here? She couldn’t possibly have gotten down off the mountain last night. And my men tell me there is a burned-out wreck where her car went off the road. She’s here. She knew that you were coming for her. She knew that you wouldn’t abandon her here. She won’t leave you to your fate any more than you would leave her to hers. As for the ritual, it is about connecting with that singular moment in time, that one instant when all these things collided. It’s not about where the spirit is now.”
Roux said nothing, still struggling to digest it all.
He fixed on one thing the man had said: there had been an accident. A crash.
Roux had no way of knowing if she was out there still, battered, bleeding, freezing to death, or if she’d been in the car while it had burned. Fire frightened Annja. That was something she’d gotten from Joan. A relic. Like the sword. He’d seen her tossing and turning in her bed, having nightmares, fever sweats, the word fire on her lips.
He couldn’t even begin to contemplate the possibility that his enemy might be right, that the bond she shared with the sword could be severed and leave her helpless, bereft of the protection it conferred. It wouldn’t be the end of the world for her, but it would change the very nature of who she was now and everything she had become. She was as much a part of the blade as it was of her.
What if she was close? What would happen then, if the words truly had some kind of power to them?
Roux had seen too much in his long life to dismiss the otherworldly as impossible; he was walking, living proof that it wasn’t, even if he couldn’t explain how. If she were out there, beyond the farmhouse walls, close enough that if the madman stumbled upon the right words? What then? What would happen if the energy somehow flowed between the sword in her hand and the madman’s tongue? Would she survive? Would any of them?
He wasn’t the kind of man who jumped at shadows and looked for angels and demons hidden in every corner. Not anymore. He’d spent centuries burying that man.
Even so, just the possibility that something, some relic from the old days, could undo what he’d spent centuries repairing, shattering the essence of the blade, ending all of this, sent a shiver to the core of his being. He clenched his fists.
Roux was prepared to pay the price, whatever the price, if it kept Annja far from this, if it kept her safe. He wanted to know that his sacrifice would give her the chance to live brilliantly, and grow old with kids and grandkids, and stories, oh, what stories…
What he didn’t want was to live with the image of her being destroyed in front of his eyes.
But that couldn’t possibly happen, could it?
Matters were out of his hands.
His fate, hers if the impossible were true, rested in Garin’s hands.
And, oh, how he hated that.
He knew Garin well. He knew his strengths and his flaws. He was venal, self-centered, selfish, all of those things, but what he wasn’t was a coward. And when it came right down to it, there was no one better he’d trust his life to. Not that he would have ever admitted that to Garin’s face.
Cauchon held the armor close to his chest, hugging it tightly with one hand while he held one of the pages that Garin had stolen from Roux’s vault.
Slowly, he began to read from the sheet, the tongue a form of medieval French that Roux hadn’t heard spoken for longer than he dared try to remember. Manchon had recorded the rite in his papers, and they’d appeared in part in the missing chapter of Bernard Gui’s Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis—Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Wickedness—where the Inquisitor wrote about sorcerers, diviners and the invokers of demons. That’s what these words were, the invocation of a demon. Manchon had written his own warning besides his tight scrawl that these words should never be spoken out loud for fear that they would conjure up a spirit capable of untold harm to the invoker.
Roux had traced his own finger along those lines more than once, never once daring to vocalize the words because superstitious or not, he wasn’t about to tempt fate.
He grinned at that, and then realized how Cauchon would interpret the smile and stopped.
The two thugs fidgeted at either side of Roux.
They were out of their comfort zone, unsure what they’d signed on for, and no matter what denomination of currency they’d pocketed, neither really wanted to do anything beyond flex a few muscles and look menacing.
The blonde woman was different.
She looked like she was anticipating all hell would break loose.
And it was coming.
It was inevitable.
“You do realize what is going to happen when you finish reading that, don’t you?” Roux asked, but Cauchon showed no hint of even taking a breath, let alone stopping his recitation. He was absolutely absorbed in the words. Lost. He’d obviously learned them by rote, the sounds of the words perfect but stilted, nothing natural about his delivery. “You’re going to kill everyone in this room. Is that what you want?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we’re not going to die,” the blonde woman said.
Roux looked up at her. “You’re right. We’re not. Do you know why? Because it isn’t going to work. This magical passage of verse isn’t going to tear the essence of Joan from Annja, because she’s not possessed by Joan. Joan is long gone. At rest. There is no demonic entity. There’s nothing to release, nothing to summon, nothing to bind. Your brother is sick. Ill.”
“My brother is a great man,” Monique contradicted.
“Are you sure about that? Really sure? Willing to stake your life on it? Because if he is great, if he’s right and I’m wrong, he’s the one in the chair with Joan’s breastplate to protect him. What have you got? What’s going to keep you safe?” She stared at him. “What about those two?” Roux deliberately turned it on the guards, the weakest links. “I mean, their friend’s long gone. You noticed that, right? He slipped out when things went south. Ever think that maybe he knows something that you two don’t?”
One of the men fidgeted uneasily, shifting his balance from foot to foot. Roux knew that he was starting to get under the tough guy’s skin.
“Shut up,” Monique spat.
Not once during that conversation did Cauchon’s incantation falter.
If Garin came through the door soon, it was going to get messy.
It had nothing to do with magic; now that the incantation had started, everyone in the room was on edge, keyed up and ready to go off at a second’s notice. Three of the five had an Uzi in their hands. Not a good combination.
“Still here?” he asked the uncomfortable guards. “You really don’t have to stick around on my behalf. I’m not going to cause any trouble. Go.”
The men didn’t move.
But it was obvious they wanted to.
“Why don’t you wait outside?” Monique suggested. “Nothing’s going to happen here that I can’t handle.” She aimed her Uzi square at Roux’s chest as though to emphasize the point that she had things covered. Roux was absolutely certain she’d pull the trigger. She was the real danger here, not her deranged brother with his head full of mystical nonsen
se.
The two men didn’t need to be given the opportunity twice.
Without another word they both left the room.
Roux faced the black eye of the Uzi.
Cauchon continued his incantation, his voice rising and falling with the rhythms of insanity. The beat behind his words was relentless, on and on, fueled by his obsession.
There was no doubt he truly believed something as simple as this ancient rite could make him whole again.
It was tragic.
“This ends here,” Roux said.
“Oh, I couldn’t agree more,” Monique replied.
55
Annja was caught off guard by the resistance of the door as it jammed in the frame, the wood swollen by the cold. A heartbeat later the door swung inward and she found herself face-to-face with two very surprised gunmen who’d been looking to make a sharp exit.
Beside her, Garin said, “I think we can safely say they’re surprised.”
Even so, they reacted smartly. Instead of taking a step back to raise their weapons in the confined space of the doorway, the first guard pushed his way through, barging past Annja as if she wasn’t there. She wasn’t about to let the second man through so easily. She brought up her blade and saw the sheer panic in the second man’s eyes as he realized she was about to swing her sword.
The first man slammed the stock of his Uzi into Garin’s ribs, sending him sprawling to the floor. He went down cursing. It was better than the alternative. The second man wasn’t so quick.
Annja’s blade flashed through the air, the tip no more than a whisker from the man’s face before she pulled the blow. Almost too late, she noticed just how young he was. And just how frightened. All he wanted to do was to get out of there. That was the only reason he was fighting.
“Please,” he begged, the word little more than a whisper. He released the grip on his Uzi and knelt, lowering it to the ground.
He looked up at her, on one knee, expecting the sword to drop and end it all.
It didn’t.
Annja reversed her swing just in time, the blade whistling past him. The breeze in its wake tugged at his hair. “I can’t let you leave here,” she said.