by Simon Toyne
‘And how are we going to do that?’
Gabriel spun round in a blur of motion and Arkadian felt a bang on his arm, like a slap. ‘We don’t,’ Gabriel said.
Arkadian looked down. Saw a syringe sticking out where Gabriel had hit him. He looked up with shock, staggering backwards as he reached up to try and bat the syringe away. His arm already felt heavy. He hit the wall and felt his legs buckle. Gabriel stepped forward and caught him, controlling his fall all the way to the ground. Arkadian tried to speak but his tongue wouldn’t work.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gabriel said in a voice that sounded liquid and distant.
The last thing he remembered was that the gunshot in his arm didn’t hurt any more.
Chapter 127
Cornelius had never been in this part of the mountain before. The stone staircase rising steadily upwards was ancient, and narrow, and dusty from lack of use. The guard led the way, his flambeau sending orange light over the rough walls and the slump of the girl lying over his shoulder, her arms hanging down like the legs of a slaughtered deer. Cornelius could hear no hum of voices, no clatter and echo of distant activity — the usual trapped noise of the mountain. The only thing to disturb the silence was the sound of their own breathing and the steady tramp of their feet pressing onwards and up the relentless staircase.
It took them almost twenty minutes to reach the top and by the time he stepped into the small vaulted cave marking the end of their climb Cornelius was sweating through his new green robes. Candles set into the walls spilled enough light to reveal several tunnels leading away from the cave, each one narrow, and roughly cut. A dim light wavered at the end of the central tunnel and the Sanctus guard headed towards it, his stride still steady despite having carried the girl almost the entire height of the mountain. Cornelius followed, with the Abbot close behind, and had to stoop as he entered, the passage having been cut thousands of years previously by men who rarely grew higher than the wild grass that had once whispered on the great plains surrounding the mountain. He continued forward with his head bowed, fitting reverence for what he knew must lie ahead. It was the Capelli DeusSpecialis, the Chapel of God’s Holy Secret — the place where the Sacrament was kept.
As they got closer, the glow at the end of the tunnel increased, throwing more light across the walls and ceiling. It revealed that, far from being roughly chiselled as Cornelius had first thought, they were covered with hundreds of carved icons. His eyes picked out individual images as they slipped past: a serpent twisting round a tree that was heavy with fruit; another tree, this one in the shape of the Tau, with a man standing in the shade of its outstretched branches. There were also crude figures of what looked like women in various states of agony — one being broken on a rack, another screaming in fire, another being ripped apart by men with swords and axes. Each one looked the same to him. They looked like the woman he had imagined in the burkha and seeing their agony brought him a certain peace. It reminded him of a time, a few days before he lost his platoon, when they had stumbled across an ancient temple in the desert scrub off the main Kabul road. Its crumbling walls had been covered with similar hieroglyphics, simple lines worn down by time and weather, depicting ancient and brutal things long forgotten and rendered to dust.
As he continued down the tunnel the icons on the walls grew fainter, as if thousands of years of passage had worn them thin like ancient memories, until finally they melted back into the rock and the passage widened, opening out into a larger antechamber. Cornelius stood up as he emerged into it, squinting at the sudden brightness that glowed hot and red from a small forge built into the far wall. Arranged in a line in front of it, sketched by the Halloween light, were four round whetstones set on wooden frames, and behind them a large circular stone dominated the back wall. It was perhaps a little shorter than a grown man, and looked like an old-fashioned millstone with four wooden stakes jutting from its surface at even points round the edge. The sign of the Tau was carved into its centre. When Cornelius saw it he thought for a moment that this strange stone was the Sacrament and he wondered at its meaning. Then he noticed the deep, straight channels cut into the rock above and below it and saw how the wall behind was worn smooth.
It was a door.
The true Sacrament must lie beyond it.
Down through the dark tunnels, in the lower part of the mountain, the library began to flicker with the lights of returning scholars. One of them belonged to Athanasius. It had taken the guards nearly an hour of searching and checking before they had declared the incident a false alarm and finally re-opened the doors.
The entrance chamber seemed uncommonly bright as Athanasius passed back into it, illuminated as it was by the combined glow of all the monks who now congregated there to gossip and speculate. He saw Father Thomas emerge from the control room, a look of professional concern on his face, followed closely by Father Malachi pecking at his heels like a stressed goose. He looked away quickly, for fear their eyes might meet and their shared secret arc between them like electricity. Instead he clutched the files he was holding to his chest and stared resolutely ahead towards the darkness beyond the archway that led back into the main library and the forbidden knowledge he’d left hidden there.
Chapter 128
The scrape of the steel fuel can echoed through the warehouse as Kathryn dragged the last of them across the floor to where the white van was parked with its rear doors open. She was sweating from the strain and urgency of the work, and the muscles in her arms and legs burned with the effort, but she welcomed it. It helped distract her from the deeper pain she felt.
Gabriel jumped down from the van, grabbed the fuel can and hoisted it into the back to join the large pile they’d collected from around the warehouse: sacks of sugar; rolled-up blankets; stacks of polypropylene water pipes and plastic sheeting. anything that was explosive or flammable and would create lots of smoke when it burned. It was all packed neatly around a central stack of white nylon bags with KNO3 stencilled on the side. These contained potassium nitrate, the nitrogen-rich fertilizer that had been on its way to the Sudan. They were now going to serve the cause in a different way.
Gabriel pushed the last fuel can into place near the edge of the pile then looked back through the open doors at the haunted face of his mother. She looked exactly like she had after his father had been killed: grief mixed with anger and fear.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.
She looked up at him. ‘Neither do you.’
He looked at her, and realized the pain in her eyes came not only from what had already happened, but from what still might. He jumped down. ‘We can’t just leave her,’ he said. ‘If the prophecy is right, and she is the cross, then she could change everything. But if we do nothing — then nothing will change, and all that has happened here will have been for nothing. And we’ll spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, because they will torture her. They’ll torture her, discover everyone she’s spoken to, then they’ll kill her and come looking for us. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hiding. We have to finish this now.’
She looked up at him with liquid black eyes. ‘First they took your father,’ she said. ‘Now they’ve taken mine.’ She reached out and laid her hand on his cheek. ‘I can’t let them take you.’
‘They won’t,’ he said, wiping a tear from her cheek with his thumb. ‘This isn’t a suicide mission. I became a soldier after Dad died so I could fight them in other ways. Academic arguments don’t change anything, and protests outside cathedrals don’t shake the walls.’ He glanced at the contents of the van. ‘But we will.’
Kathryn looked up at him. Saw his father standing there. Saw his grandfather. Saw herself there too. She knew it was pointless arguing with him. There was no time anyway.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
He leaned forward and kissed her gently on the forehead — long enough for it to count, not long enough for her to think it was goodbye. ‘OK,�
� he said, reaching into the back of the van for the black canvas bag. ‘This is what you do.’
Chapter 129
The Sanctus guard let the girl’s body slip to the ground next to the forge then reached up and took a thin metal rod from a hook on the wall. He laid it in the heart of the fire and started pumping the bellows, filling the room with the fire’s rhythmic roar. The forge glowed brighter, throwing yellow light across the whetstones in front of it. The Abbot moved to the nearest one, shrugging his shoulders out of his cassock and letting it fall to the floor. Cornelius looked at the network of scars on his body.
‘Are you ready to receive the knowledge of the Sacrament?’ the Abbot asked. Cornelius nodded. ‘Then do as I do.’
He unsheathed the ceremonial dagger from his wooden Crux and began working the foot-pedal to set the sharpening stone spinning. He laid the edge of his dagger on the stone and started to work the blade backwards and forwards, his eyes fixed on the sharpening blade. Cornelius shrugged out of his own robes and felt the heat of the fire on his skin. He removed the dagger from his Crux and started his own wheel spinning.
‘Before you enter the chapel,’ the Abbot said, his voice rumbling under the hiss of the bellows and the grinding stones, ‘you must receive the sacred marks of our order. These marks, cut into our own flesh, remind us of our failure to carry out the pledge our ancestors made to God.’ He lifted his blade from the stone and held the edge up to the light. ‘Tonight, thanks to your great service, that pledge will finally be honoured.’
He turned to Cornelius and raised the point of his dagger until it rested at the top of the thick raised scar running down the centre of his body. ‘The first,’ he said, pushing the blade into his flesh and dragging it down towards his stomach. ‘This blood binds us in pain with the Sacrament. As it suffers, so must we, until all suffering ends.’
Cornelius watched the blade slice through the scar until blood dripped down the Abbot’s body and on to the stone floor. He held his own dagger up. Pressed it into his own flesh. Pierced his skin with its point. He dragged it downwards, shutting his mind to the pain, willing his hand to obey him until the first incision was done and blood ran hot from his own mortified flesh. The Abbot raised his dagger again and made the second cut at the point where his left arm met his body. Cornelius did the same, dutifully mirroring this and every cut the Abbot made, until his body bore all the marks of the brotherhood he was now part of.
The Abbot finished the final cut and raised the bloodied tip of his blade to his forehead, wiped it once upward, turned it, then wiped it once across, leaving a smeared red Tau in the centre. Cornelius did the same, remembering Johann as he did so and tears ran down the pale, puckered skin on his cheek. Johann had died a righteous death so that their mission could succeed. Because of that sacrifice, he was about to be blessed with the sacred knowledge of the Sacrament. He watched the Abbot slide his dagger back into the wooden scabbard of his Crux and step over to the forge. He lifted the metal rod from the heart of the flames and carried it across to Cornelius.
‘Do not worry, Brother,’ the Abbot said, misreading his tears. ‘All your wounds will soon heal.’
He raised the glowing tip of the iron and Cornelius felt the dry heat approaching the skin of his upper arm. He looked away and remembered the bloom of the explosion that had burned him once before. Felt the searing agony again as the branding iron pressed against him. He gritted his teeth, clamping down on a scream, willing himself to endure it as the smell of his burning flesh corrupted the air.
The iron was removed, but the pain remained, and Cornelius forced a look at it to convince himself it was over. He sipped shallow breaths, looking down at the charred and blistered patch of flesh that marked him now as one of the chosen. Then he saw the flesh start to harden, knit together and heal.
A grinding sound scraped through the flickering darkness, dragging his eyes away. The guard was heaving against the wooden stakes in the huge circular stone, rolling it along channels worn smooth by millennia to reveal a chamber beyond. At first glance it appeared to be empty. Then, as Cornelius’s eyes sank into the blackness, he saw candlelight flickering inside.
‘Come,’ said the Abbot, taking his arm and leading him towards it. ‘See for yourself. You are one of us now.’
Chapter 130
Athanasius scanned the swirling darkness in the Chamber of Philosophy; looking past the edges of his own contained light for the glow of others.
There were none.
He hurried over to the bookshelf halfway down the room and reached over the collected works of Kierkegaard where his fingers closed round the slim volume of Nietzsche. He withdrew it and slipped it under his sleeve, not daring to look at it as he hurried away from the central corridor towards the reading tables stationed at the quiet and private edges of the chamber. He found one against a wall, buried amongst the most obscure and unsought titles, checked the darkness once more, then laid the book gently down on the desk top.
He stared at it for a moment, as if it was a mousetrap about to spring. It looked suspiciously isolated on the bare desk so he reached across to the nearest shelf, took down a few more volumes and laid them beside it, opening some at random. Satisfied with the makeshift camouflage of study he had created, he sat down, checked the darkness one last time, then opened the volume to where the folded sheets of paper lay. He removed the first one, carefully unfolded it and pressed it flat against the desk.
The page was blank.
He reached into the pocket of his cassock and removed a small stick of charcoal he had rescued earlier from the Abbot’s fire. He ground it against the desktop until he had a small pile of fine, black powder then, very gently, he dipped the tip of his finger into it and began to rub it back and forth across the greasy surface of the paper. As the dust found the gaps in the wax, small black symbols began to rise from the creamy blankness, until two dense columns of text filled the page.
Athanasius looked down at what the dust had revealed. He had never seen so much of the forbidden language of Malan collected into one document before. He held his breath as he leaned forward, as if the merest gasp might blow the words from the page, and started to read, translating in his head as he went.
In the beginning was the World
And the World was God, and the World was good.
And the World was the wife of the Sun
And the creator of everything.
In the beginning the World was wild,
A garden teeming with life.
And a being appeared, an embodiment of Earth,
One to bring order to the garden.
And where the One walked, the land blossomed,
And plants grew where there had been none,
And creatures nested and prospered,
And each was given a name by the One
And took what it needed from the Earth and no more.
And each gave itself back to the Earth
When its life was done.
And so it was through the time of the great ferns,
And the time of the great lizards,
Even to the dawn of the first age of ice.
Then one day man appeared — the greatest of all animals.
Close to being a god — but not close enough for him.
And he began to see not the great gifts he possessed
But only those he lacked.
He began to covet that which was not his.
And this made an emptiness inside him.
And the more he yearned for that which he had not,
The greater this emptiness became.
He tried to fill it with things he could possess:
Land, chattels, power over animals, power over others.
He saw his fellow man and desired more than his share,
He wanted more food, more water, more shelter.
But none of these things could fill the vast emptiness.
And above all else he wanted more life.
He did not wa
nt his time on Earth
To be measured by the rise and fall of the sun,
But by the rise and fall of mountains.
He wanted his time to be immeasurable.
He wanted to be immortal.
And he saw the One. Walking the Earth.
Never ageing. Never withering.
And he became jealous.
Chapter 131
Gabriel climbed into the cockpit of the cargo plane and looked through the windshield. In the distance the van’s brake lights flared red as it slipped past the guardhouse and pulled out on to the road. He figured it would take his mother about thirty minutes to drive to the Citadel and get into position. Once he was airborne it would take him less than ten.
He sat in the left-hand pilot seat and scanned the controls. He had flown second seat several times, but not for a while, and never solo. The C-123 was not designed for a one-man crew. When fully laden it weighed sixty thousand pounds and needed two strong men hauling on both sticks to shift it through the air. Landing was the hardest part, especially with a full load in a cross-wind: at least that wasn’t going to be a problem.
He raced through the pre-flight checks, dredging his memory for the procedures drummed into him during his military training, then heaved on the flaps and rudder to remind himself of their weight. They were heavier than he remembered. He engaged the brake, pumped the fuel and pushed the starter button. The stick shuddered in his hand as the starboard Double-Wasp engine juddered then coughed into life with a spluttering roar. The port engine followed with a belt of black smoke and he felt the braced power of the props straining against the stick, impatient to push the plane forward. He feathered the throttle down a little then slipped on a headset, hit the comms and hailed the tower. He gave his call-sign and heading and requested clearance for immediate takeoff.