Sanctus s-1

by Simon Toyne

  Neither do I, Liv thought as she inspected her grimy blouse. She pulled a dirt-roughened lock of hair down from her fringe and glanced over at the window, trying to catch her own faint reflection in the glass. Instead her eyes were drawn back to the thin, dark mountain soaring into the clear blue sky.

  Chapter 70

  Athanasius had been summoned into his master’s office shortly after Matins and asked to accompany him on a task — ‘for the sake of the brotherhood,’ the Abbot had said. ‘A task that you must not discuss with anyone.’

  So here they were, picking their way down a narrow, rubble-strewn stairway, the way ahead lit only by the burning torch in his hand. Occasionally they passed other narrow and mysterious passageways.

  They had been walking steadily downwards for almost five minutes when Athanasius saw a dim glow up ahead. It came from inside an arched doorway that looked newer and more sculpted than its forgotten surroundings. He followed the Abbot into a small cave where two monks stood silently, each carrying a torch of their own. Both wore the green robes of the Sancti.

  Athanasius averted his eyes and noticed another door sunk into the wall, this one made of heavy steel. A thin slot sat to one side of it, similar to the hi-tech locks that guarded the entrance to the great library. The Abbot nodded a silent greeting to the Sancti, reached into his sleeve and removed a magnetic card. There was a muffled clunk. The Abbot pushed the door wide and the three of them passed through. Athanasius stood alone for a moment, then followed.

  The chamber was slightly smaller than the one they had just come from and the air inside seemed warmer, thickened by a fine dust that caught the orange glow of the flambeau. It had an identical steel door built into the far wall, in front of which lay three cocoons of heavy-duty plastic. Athanasius knew immediately what they must contain.

  One of the Sancti unzipped the closest far enough for a head to emerge. A thin trickle of blood ran from a small hole in his temple to his hairline. Athanasius didn’t recognize him, nor the second body. But he knew the third. He looked upon the face of his dead friend and had to reach for the wall to steady himself.

  ‘The cross has returned to the Citadel,’ the Abbot said softly as he too looked down upon the battered face of Brother Samuel.

  For a moment all four stared at him, then, as if on a pre-arranged command, he was zipped back into the bag and the Sancti carried him away. He waited for them to return for the other two bodies. But they did not.

  ‘These unfortunates must be disposed of,’ the Abbot said. ‘I am sorry to have to leave this task to you — I know you will find it distasteful — but I have matters of great importance to attend to, your brothers may not walk in the lower section of the Citadel, and you are the only person I can trust. .’

  He made no move to explain who the men were, or why they were now lying dead on the floor of this forgotten cave.

  ‘Take them to the deserted section in the eastern chambers,’ he said. ‘Drop them in one of the old oubliettes. Their bodies will be forgotten, but their souls will be at peace.’ He paused at the entrance and rubbed his hands together, as if washing them. ‘The door will close automatically in five minutes,’ he said. ‘Make sure you are clear of this room by then.’

  Athanasius listened to his footsteps recede into the darkness.

  The cross has returned to the Citadel. .

  Athanasius recalled the words of the Heretic Bible:

  The cross will fall

  The cross will rise

  He wondered what they had in mind for the defiled remains of his friend. He’d be taken to the chapel of the Sacrament, no doubt; why else would Sancti have come to fetch him?

  But to think he might rise again. .

  It was the logic of a madman.

  He glanced down at the remaining bags, two anonymous corpses in a silent crypt, and wondered what lives they had woken up to that morning and who might now be wondering anxiously at their silence. A wife? A lover? A child?

  He dropped to his haunches and said a silent prayer over each as he zipped them gently back into their plastic shrouds. Then he dragged each of them into the antechamber, fearful that the door might click shut at any moment, and turn the dusty chamber into his own tomb.

  Chapter 71

  Liv sat in the staff room of the city morgue, looking at the picture of her brother and conjuring images from her past. Relating her family history to Arkadian had been like shining a light into it. She remembered now how she had sat Samuel down in her dorm-room and excitedly told him all the things she’d found out on her trip to Paradise, West Virginia.

  She pictured him perching on the edge of the narrow bed, his face, already clouded with pain and sadness, paling to ash as she told him the details of how they had both come into the world. For her it had explained all the unanswered questions about identity that had tormented her throughout her childhood and teens. She had hoped that sharing it would bring him peace also. But her attempt to cool his smouldering self-hatred had only thrown fuel on to it. He already blamed himself for the death of their father. Now she had handed him a reason to blame himself for their mother’s too.

  He had shambled away like a ghost.

  He didn’t speak to her for months afterwards. All her calls went unanswered. She even left messages at his therapist’s office, until she discovered he’d stopped going and started fervent visits to church instead.

  The last time she had seen him was in New York. He had called up out of the blue, sounding happy and vital, just like his old self. He told her he was going on a journey and wanted to see her before he left.

  They met at Grand Central Station and spent the day hanging out and doing tourist stuff. He told her he’d realized some things that had given him a new focus. He said that when someone dies so someone else can live, then that someone has been spared for a reason. They had a higher purpose; the journey he was about to begin was his way of divining what that purpose was.

  She’d assumed the journey would entail climbing a bunch of scary-assed mountains, but he told her that wasn’t the way to get closer to God. He didn’t elaborate and she didn’t ask him to. She’d just been glad he seemed to have found an exciting new direction. She didn’t for one moment think, as she waved him off at the airport, that she would never see him alive again.

  Liv blinked back the tears and looked up at the Citadel, standing like a sliver of night against the spring sky. She felt now the pain her brother must have felt back then. She had never blamed herself for her father’s death or her mother’s, but she blamed herself for Samuel’s. No matter what Arkadian thought, it was her desire for self-knowledge that had led to her discovering the truth about their birth, and it was her thoughtless revelation of it to Samuel that led to his fall from the top of that bloody mountain.

  The sound of the door clicking open snapped her back to the present. She rubbed at the wetness around her eyes and turned to see a bulky plainclothes cop with a round, pasty face and thinning hair the colour of brick. His eyes peered at her from the softness of his face and his hands rested on his hips, opening his jacket slightly to reveal a hint of shoulder holster, and a set of handcuffs clipped to his belt. His shirt strained to contain his belly and a badge rested on it, suspended from a cord around his neck.

  She’d seen a million like him; the insecure kind, who had to let you know they were police, even though they wore no uniform. They were the sort she always cosied up to when working a story, because they liked to talk.

  His brow creased. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah. Just. . having a moment. .’

  He nodded uncertainly. Tried a smile. Gave up and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘Only, I got a squad car out back when you’re ready. I’m going to sneak you out and take you over to Central. We got a gym over there where you can grab a hot shower and a change of clothes.’

  Liv blotted her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. ‘Sure,’ she said, shooting him a smile that was even weaker than his. ‘What’s your
name. .?’

  ‘I’m Sulleiman,’ he said, lifting his photo ID. ‘Sulley, if you want to be friendly.’ She caught a glint of what looked like a chrome-plated.38 sticking out of his pancake holster as she looked at the picture. The flash of the camera had bleached out his face a little and he looked more serious in the picture than in real life, but it was definitely him: Sub-Inspector Sulleiman Mantus, RPF.

  ‘OK,’ she said, satisfied that she wasn’t about to be kidnapped again. ‘Let’s go, Sulley.’ She swept the newspaper from the table and followed him out.

  The reception area was humming as they made their way through it. Two uniformed officers were standing guard by the entrance, checking everyone in and out. Beyond them, Liv saw a news crew, lights on, camera rolling, the reporter standing with her back to the building as she taped her report; or maybe it was live. Liv drifted behind the Sub-Inspector into a hushed hallway leading to the rear of the building. Another uniformed officer stood by a pair of overlapping plastic doors. He nodded as they approached.

  ‘After you. .’ Sulley stood aside.

  The plastic buckled slightly before delivering Liv into what she momentarily mistook for the blinding sunshine.

  Then a woman shouted: ‘Are you connected with the disappearance of the monk?’

  Liv spun round to head back into the safety of the building but the Sub-Inspector grabbed her arm and hustled her towards an unmarked police car a little way down the alley. She dropped her head so her hair fell over her face.

  ‘Are you under arrest?’ the reporter yelled.

  A flashgun exploded to her right and a man’s voice joined the questioning.

  ‘What is your connection with the missing man?’

  ‘Was the theft an inside job?’

  The Sub-Inspector pulled open the rear door of the car, pushed Liv firmly into the back seat and slammed it behind her.

  Liv glanced up just as the interior flooded with light from a camera pressed against the window. She wrenched her head away.

  The car bounced on its springs as Sulley dropped into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Sorry about that.’ He caught her eye in the rear-view mirror as he fired up the engine. ‘It’s amazing how quickly the press catch on to these things.’

  He popped the handbrake and eased away from the pack. The last thing Liv saw as she glanced out of the rear window was the dead-eyed stare of a camera lens looking right back at her.

  Chapter 72

  Kathryn Mann pointed to a spot on the dusty concrete floor of the warehouse and the forklift pirouetted gracefully and lowered one of the master pallets from the C-123 right on to it. She was trying to arrange things so that the next shipment due out, an agricultural supplies drop to one of their projects in Uganda, didn’t end up buried somewhere in the stack. Each master pallet had a thin aluminium skin round it and was the size of two large refrigerators. It was like a massive three-dimensional puzzle, but it beat sitting in the office watching the news with Oscar and waiting for Gabriel to call.

  The truck eased its forks from beneath the pallet and peeled back out to the transport plane. Most of the fertilizer would be flying straight back out again in a few days, with a bit of luck.

  A loud rapping caused Kathryn to look up. Through the narrow avenue of crates she could see Oscar standing at the window, gesturing for her to come over. His expression was grim.

  Kathryn handed Becky her list. ‘Could you make sure these ones stay at the front?’

  ‘Look,’ Oscar said, the moment she walked into the office. He pointed the remote at the TV on the wall and edged up the volume.

  ‘The investigation into the death of the monk,’ the newsreader announced in a tone usually reserved for massacres and declarations of war, ‘has taken a turn for the macabre this morning.

  Sources close to the investigation believe that his body has disappeared from the city morgue. .’

  The picture cut to an unsteady image of a bedraggled woman being led to a car.

  ‘Are you connected with the disappearance of the monk?’ the reporter’s voice shouted. ‘Are you under arrest?’

  The woman looked up briefly, staring directly into the lens before dropping her head and disappearing behind a curtain of dirty-looking hair.

  ‘That must be the girl,’ Oscar said.

  But Kathryn didn’t hear him. She was transfixed by the sight of the plainclothes police officer at Liv’s side. She watched him bundle her roughly into the back seat. Saw the camera tilt up towards his face. Saw him hold up his freckled hand to push it away.

  Then he got in the car and drove her away.

  Chapter 73

  Athanasius was in a daze as he walked to the private chapel for prayers. He was still sweating from the exertion of dragging each inert body through the complex series of tunnels leading to the medieval caverns in the eastern section. He was back in the main part of the Citadel now, but the ordeal still clung to him, along with the faint chemical tang of the body-bags. No matter how hard he had scrubbed his hands in the rainwater sinks of the laundry, he couldn’t seem to get rid of that smell.

  The old dungeons held potent reminders of the church’s violent past: rusted shackles and fearsome-looking pincers the colour of dried blood. He’d known the Citadel’s history, of course, the crusades and persecutions of more brutal times when a strong belief in God and the teachings of the Church had been forged through fear; but he’d thought those times were gone. Now the spectre of that violent past was clawing at the present, like the smell of ancient death that had risen from the oubliette as he’d tipped the bodies into it, one by one. When he heard the brittle crack of them landing on a bed of forgotten bones, he felt something break inside him, too, as if his actions and his beliefs had been pulled so far apart they had finally snapped. As he shivered alone in the cold mountain, the two phrases he’d glimpsed in the Heretic Bible shone in his mind like fresh truths through the darkness.

  He paused outside the private chapel, afraid to enter because of the shame he carried with him. He rubbed his hand distractedly over his scalp and smelt again the antiseptic taint of the body-bag on his sleeve.

  He needed to pray. What other hope did he have? He took a deep breath and ducked through the entrance.

  The chapel was lit by small votive candles flickering around the T-shaped cross on the far wall. There were no seats, only mats and thin cushions to protect bony old knees from the stone floor. He hadn’t noticed a candle burning outside the chapel, but as he entered now he saw it already contained a worshipper. He nearly wept in relief when he saw who it was.

  ‘Dear brother. .’ Father Thomas stood and put an arm around the trembling figure of his friend. ‘What troubles you so?’

  Athanasius took deep breaths, fighting to regain control of himself. It took a few minutes before his heart rate and breathing steadied. He glanced back at the doorway, then into the concerned face of his friend. In his mind, Athanasius debated whether to confide in him or tell him nothing, for his own safety. It was like standing at the edge of a precipice, knowing that if he stepped forward he could never step back.

  He looked deeply into his friend’s eyes, clouded with curiosity and concern, and started to talk. He told him about the visit to the forbidden vault, about the Heretic Bible and the chilling phrases he had glimpsed as the Abbot leafed through it. He told him about the Prophecy the book contained, and then confessed to the terrible task he had just performed. He told him everything.

  When he finished, the two men sat in silence for a long time. Athanasius knew that what he had just shared had endangered them both. Father Thomas looked up. Glanced quickly at the door. Leaned in closer. ‘What were the phrases you saw in the forbidden book?’ His voice barely rose above a whisper.

  Athanasius felt a wave of relief sweep through him. ‘The first was “The light of God, sealed up in darkness”,’ he whispered. ‘The second: “Not a mountain sanctified, but a prison cursed.”’

  He leaned back as Thomas’s i
ntelligent eyes flitted back and forth across the darkened room in time with the fevered workings of his mind.

  ‘I have, increasingly of late, felt there was something. . wrong. . about this place. .’ He picked his words carefully. ‘All this accumulated learning, the product of mankind’s finest minds, hidden away in the darkness of the library, illuminating nobody. I undertook my work here for the protection of knowledge, for its preservation, not for its imprisonment.

  ‘When I’d finished my improvements to the library, and seen how well they worked, I petitioned the Prelate to publish the blueprints so that other great libraries could benefit from the systems we now use here. He refused. He said books, and the knowledge they contain, are dangerous weapons in the hands of the unenlightened. He said if they faded and crumbled to dust in the libraries beyond these walls, so much the better.’ He looked up at Athanasius, his face registering the private pain and disappointment he had kept buried until now. ‘It appears I have built a system that benefits no one but those who seek to imprison that most divine of gifts — knowledge.’

  ‘“The light of God, sealed up in darkness,”’ Athanasius quoted softly.

  ‘“Not a mountain sanctified, but a prison cursed,”’ Father Thomas replied.

  They lapsed into silence again.

  ‘It is both frustrating and ironic,’ Athanasius said at length, ‘that your ingenious security system prevents us from discovering what else that forbidden book contains.’ He dropped his gaze to the flickering flame of a votive candle.

  Father Thomas watched him for a moment then drew breath. ‘There may be a way,’ he said, his eyes now shining with conviction. ‘We must wait until after Vespers, when most of the brethren are dining or retiring to the dormitories; when the library is at its quietest.’

  Chapter 74