Grace gestured to herself. “A magical mystery like this? You’d just leave it?”
“If you asked me to,” said Asanti.
And the thing was, Grace believed her. Which only made the original question more complex.
Asanti gathered herself and stood. “You don’t have to answer now. I don’t want to take up more of your time than I have to. But I wanted to ask.” She paused at the door. “Is there anything else you need that I can get for you? Books? Shoes?”
Grace shook her head. Asanti left.
Lost in thought, Grace barely noticed as the room gradually lightened with the rising sun.
• • •
Menchú was an early riser, and used to coming into the Archives before the rest of his team. Or occasionally—if Liam or Asanti had been drawn in by a particularly intriguing area of research—coming in before the other members of his team realized they had worked through the night. Still, at seven in the morning he usually had the corridors of the Vatican to himself.
Today Sansone waited for him outside the Archives.
“Buongiorno,” he said.
Sansone did not bother with pleasantries. “There’s a meeting of the selection committee tasked with choosing a permanent replacement for Cardinal Varano. You need to be there.”
Menchú sensed a trap. “Why? The committee is a formality. Once His Holiness confirms Monsignor Angiuli’s promotion to cardinal, the committee will approve him as a matter of course.”
Sansone shrugged. “Hopefully.”
“Hopefully?” asked Menchú. “Don’t tell me someone from outside the Society wants the job.” Yes, it was a quick route to a cardinal’s biretta, but anyone ambitious enough to care about that was usually put off by the utter lack of official recognition for the post, or the stipulation that the head of the Society was forbidden from ever becoming Pope.
“Not that I’ve heard,” said Sansone.
“Then why is it so important that I attend a meeting of a committee on which I do not serve and whose decision is already a foregone conclusion?”
“Because if we don’t appear in the next few minutes, someone will call Asanti and tell her that the meeting is taking place.”
Menchú took a moment to consider his next words carefully. “I take it you are the reason that she is not already aware of it?”
“I am sure it was a bureaucratic oversight. You know how these things can happen.”
Menchú paused. Was this maneuver just an example of Sansone’s occasionally brute-force approach to political expedience, or was she aware of the tension between Asanti and him as of late? And if she was, how did she know? There had been no implication that she had followed Balloon and Stretch’s example and put Team Three under surveillance, but then again, Sansone wouldn’t have allowed herself to get caught.
It was also possible that politics before morning tea were making him just a little paranoid. “Asanti has been a close friend and coworker for many years,” he said. Just because she and I are having a disagreement doesn’t mean that I’m going to let you throw her to the wolves.
“And she will thank you for this. Trust me. Now come on.” Sansone’s exasperated sigh was easily translated as: What kind of amateur do you think I am?
Suspecting this was a decision that would come back to haunt him, Father Menchú allowed himself to be led away.
• • •
To Menchú’s great relief, someone on the committee had had the forethought to request a tea and coffee service in consideration of the early hour. Menchú gulped his first caffeine of the morning from a delicate porcelain cup and spared a thought to wonder if the china pattern had been originally selected by a Vatican functionary or by some medieval pope’s mistress. The committee was gathered in a room filled with furniture that in any other city in the world would have been in a museum. Here, a mismatched set of nineteenth-century chairs had all found their way around a massive seventeenth-century table, and the resulting room arrangement was now known as “Conclave 2.” Alas, even Latin couldn’t make a meeting room exotic. Menchú also noted that Sansone did not leave a polite chair between them when she sat down, but placed herself immediately to Menchú’s left. Apparently, they were here to present a united front. Just as well, since Menchú still had no idea what he was supposed to be doing.
Sure, in theory it was a good idea to have members of the Society actually present and weighing in on who the permanent head of their organization should be. The Society was rather slight in the personnel department, at least as far as such things went inside the Church. Three (formerly four) teams, each with a titular leader who reported to a monsignor. The monsignors in turn reported to a cardinal. The cardinal answered only to His Holiness the Pope and God, not necessarily in that order, though if the cardinal had to take recourse with either one, something had gone horribly wrong.
Most groups within the Church would have added three to a half-dozen more layers of hierarchy between the bottom and the top. The demands of secrecy and expediency had created a streamlined system of oversight which Menchú appreciated—most of the time. But it did leave them a bit at loose ends when the time came to fill an administrative vacancy. Monsignor Angiuli could not serve on the committee, as he was the chief candidate for the post it was seeking to fill. The other monsignors were—by custom and definition—the top alternate choices, and so were not considered impartial selectors either. Which meant the committee itself was composed of two Vatican clerks, a senior monk, and a sister whom Menchú suspected had been roped in because their orders provided housing for two members of his team, and a handful of others who hadn’t ducked fast enough when someone had come around looking for volunteers. Oh, and a cardinal—because you always needed a cardinal—an ancient Vatican careerist there to formally approve of whoever was to be promoted to the brotherhood in red.
The cardinal in question had just concluded a short invocation to ask the blessing of the Trinity upon the group’s deliberations when the committee was joined by another observer: Monsignor Fox, the man in charge of overseeing Team One. At his entrance, Sansone lifted an eyebrow toward Menchú as if to say, “You see?”
Actually, Menchú didn’t see. Until Fox began to speak.
In contrast to Angiuli, Fox was a broad and solid man, edging toward his later middle years without any of the expected softening in his build or manner. Like the team he was responsible for, he was blunt, direct, took no prisoners and left no survivors. The language of diplomacy, when he tried to use it, fell from his mouth like poorly fitting castoffs. “Begging the indulgence of this committee,” Fox began, then discarded the attempt. “The breach of Team Four’s vault was dangerous, stupid, and should never have been authorized.”
The silence that greeted this pronouncement was both awkward and profound. A woman in a habit cleared her throat. “This is not an oversight committee, Monsignor.”
“Yes,” put in a gray-suited functionary, “and the excursion of which you speak was duly approved and authorized by—”
“By Monsignor Angiuli,” Fox finished. “Who is unwilling to say no to anything proposed by his former team. Archivist Asanti is shamelessly taking advantage of this leniency and a general lack of control in order to turn Team Three into a… laboratory for her own pet projects. The Society has been tasked with keeping magic locked out of our world, and where that is not possible, destroyed or contained. If my colleague is not willing to maintain that line, it is my opinion that he should not be confirmed in his interim position.”
Sansone leaned toward Menchú, taking an unused tube of sugar from his saucer and murmuring, “This is why you needed to be here.”
Menchú knew his cue, signaled that he would like to speak, and took the floor.
“With respect to Monsignor Fox, I believe he is misrepresenting the current situation within Team Three and the Society. The tide is rising. What we have done for hundreds of years may no longer be sufficient, or even wise. Archivist Asanti believes, and I agr
ee with her, that we cannot afford to sit on top of mysteries that we do not fully understand. In the case of Team Four’s disused facilities, I mean ‘on top of’ very literally.” That this change scared the hell out of him, Menchú kept to himself.
Sansone picked up this thread in her turn. “If I might add …” Menchú relaxed into his seat and noticed several others in the room sag slightly, perhaps with the growing suspicion that the committee would have to order in for lunch.
2.
The meeting did not quite make it to lunch, although only because several members of the committee abruptly remembered that they had urgent appointments or other duties when the Vatican worker came in to clear the second round of coffee and pastries.
Sansone walked at Menchú’s elbow as they left the room and returned to the Society’s wing.
“You handled that well,” she said.
“For someone who isn’t a politician?”
Sansone made a disdainful noise. “Leave dissimulation to the professionals, Arturo. You’ve always been political. You’ve just never concerned yourself with Society politics before.”
“Have you been reading my dossier?”
“Who do you think wrote your dossier?”
“Then you’d know that getting away from politics was a benefit of becoming a member of the Society, not a drawback. I certainly didn’t join to further my aspirations for power and glory within the Church.”
“No,” said Sansone, “you did it for the same reason you do anything that matters. You had a calling. I respect that. But your habit of using Team Three to do what you felt called to do, asking forgiveness instead of permission and letting us or Team One clean up the mess, only worked because you had Angiuli and Asanti running interference. Now Angiuli doesn’t have the bandwidth and Asanti has a shiny new toy. You’re going to have to do your own maneuvering if—”
Asanti strode around the corner, rapidly closing with them, and Sansone let the thought die, unfinished.
“You know,” said Asanti to Sansone once she was close enough for her quiet words to carry, “I would be happy to run interference if I were informed of the occasion and the need.” She nodded to Menchú. “Arturo.”
Menchú took a breath and reminded himself that no matter how annoyed Asanti might be, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Not technically. “Asanti, good morning, if barely.”
“Barely morning or barely good? Why wasn’t I informed that there was a meeting of the selection committee?”
Sansone stepped in. “Menchú didn’t know about the meeting until I dragged him off before his first mug of tea. If you’re going to be mad at someone, be mad at me.”
Asanti glared. “Menchú vouches for you, but your team went rogue under your supervision. Either you can’t keep track of your people, or you tacitly approved of what Desmet and De Vos were up to. Either way, you were willing to feed them to the dogs in the end. And now you’ve decided to insert yourself into our team as well? No need to worry, I have plenty of mad for both of you.”
Sansone didn’t blink. “Monsignor Fox is on the warpath over Team Three breaking into Team Four’s facilities, and he’s decided that it’s your fault. If you’d shown up, it would have been like placing a lightning rod in the middle of the storm.”
“Given that it was my idea, blaming me is only appropriate.”
“Then the hit will come later, and you can have the fight you seem to want. But I desire Angiuli to be confirmed as cardinal as much as both of you do, and you getting into a pissing match with Fox doesn’t help that happen.”
Asanti looked to Menchú.
He sighed. “For what it’s worth, that is what happened in the meeting. I probably should have let you know, though.”
“Yes,” Asanti said. Then, she paused. “I’m sure you’re able to accurately assess the politics of the situation. If you say that my presence would not have been an asset, I believe you. But I resent the implication that if you had explained all of this to me beforehand I would have insisted on going anyway. I thought we trusted each other, Arturo.”
With that, Asanti turned on her heel and strode away down the corridor.
“That could have gone better,” Menchú observed to her retreating back.
“It isn’t like I gave you much of an option when I dragooned you into this,” said Sansone.
“Thank you,” Menchú told her. “But I am an adult. I know how to send a text message.”
Disquieted, Menchú took his leave of Sansone and made his own way back to the Archives. As he walked, he reflected that Sansone was not often wrong. She had certainly read him accurately. The Society and their work was a calling. The Church as well. All the bureaucracy that came along with them both? Well, it was better to have the support and structure than not, and the resources of the Vatican were useful often enough to make the annoyances worth it. In the end, it was the work that mattered.
• • •
Menchú was last to arrive in the Archives that morning, and Sal could not help but notice that he did not greet Asanti as he passed her desk. It was possible that it didn’t mean anything. They might have already seen each other, or he could have pressing business. But as both spent the morning engrossed in what could only be described as busywork, the tension in the room began to mount. While the two were not outwardly hostile to each other, they were aggressively civil, and that was just a little too “let’s not fight in front of the children” to be comfortable.
Sal approached Liam’s desk. “You have got to find us something to investigate. Menchú is going nuts with all of the politicking, and he and Asanti really need to not be in the same room for a while.”
Liam let out a breath. “What do you want me to do? The Orb is throwing off nothing but static, Sansone hasn’t given us anything, and all my usual sources are quiet.”
“Then look past your usual sources. Scour the internet. I don’t care if it all turns out to be a big load of nothing in the end. We just have to get back to normal, and the quickest way to do that is to get out there and do our job.”
“Our job of chasing down fake leads?”
Sal crossed her arms and pinned Liam with a raised eyebrow. “Are you telling me that the only way you can find real magic to investigate is to either use more magic or Sansone?”
Liam glared. “Low blow, Brooks.”
Sal left him to his computer. “I don’t play fair. I play for keeps.”
• • •
By the next day, the amazing powers of data-mining and many, many cups of coffee had led Liam to a genuine lead.
“There’s something going on in Antakya.”
“All right,” said Sal, “I’ll play the ignorant American: Where is Antakya?”
“Turkey,” said Menchú. “Any details on what ‘something’ is?”
“I got a ping on an urban legends board about a possible new photo of the Slender Man, which was nothing at all, but once I was looking in the area it turns out there is a lot of weird stuff going on. A spike in false alarm calls to the police. The hospitals are reporting patients with anxiety and panic attacks, or hallucinations. Specifically hallucinations of ‘a man with a donkey,’ which is a weird thing to just be in the zeitgeist. And the reports are still coming in.”
“Any official response from the authorities?”
“It doesn’t seem to be dangerous yet, so the locals are mostly telling people that it’s all in their heads and everything is normal.”
“That’s good, at least,” said Grace.
“Why?” asked Sal.
“Fewer people in our way.”
“And fewer people who can figure out that there really is something going on and start a panic,” added Liam.
“It does sound like you all should check it out,” said Asanti.
Sal really did not want to derail the train of potentially getting the team back to work and, hopefully, normalcy, but the question of local authorities triggered something in the cop section of her brain. �
��Do we have to let Alexandria know that we’re coming or anything? I mean, this is more their part of the world than ours, and it isn’t like they don’t know about magic.”
Asanti gave Sal a look which she translated as that’s adorable. “Sal,” she said, “the library at Alexandria is a library. We are an archive.”
Sal suspected that there was probably a world where a sentence like that made sense. She didn’t want to go there. Still, she pressed, “But there are places we aren’t allowed to go. Like China.”
Menchú stepped in. “Yes. But no matter how close Turkey is to Egypt, it wouldn’t matter, because the Society always has jurisdiction in locations of significance to the Roman Empire. Antakya was formerly known as Antioch.”
“Major trading city of the Empire from ancient times all the way through the rise of early Christianity,” added Asanti.
Menchú shot her a look and muttered, “Thank you for that.”
Sal hurried to break the tense silence that followed. “So that’s why there are so many Saint so-and-sos of Antioch.”
Liam snorted, but ran with the distraction. “What do you know from Saint anyone? I thought you were a Proddy.”
Sal gestured to the room around them, and by extension, the Vatican itself. “Hello? I’ve been working here for more than a year now. You pick stuff up.”
Asanti rolled her eyes and made shooing motions at the three of them. “Go pack your bags. I’ll get one of the ducklings to arrange your flights.”
Menchú and Asanti, Sal noticed, did not say goodbye or make eye contact as he left the Archives. Still, as she went to check her go bag, Sal’s heart felt lighter than it had in weeks. They had a lead. They were off to investigate weird shit and put a stop to it. Just like old times.
3.
The emergency vehicles had all converged on a street in one of the older sections of Antakya. Stone houses stood right up against the road, one next to the other, presenting an unbroken wall to outsiders.
Without Menchú having to say a word, Grace parked the van a few blocks away from the emergency cordon so that they could approach on foot without being noticed by the officers tasked with keeping curious onlookers away from the scene. She didn’t have to look to know that he would have slipped his collar into his pocket as they left their vehicle, transforming himself from a priest into a tanned man in a black suit. Grace liked that she didn’t have to think about these things. In her life, where wars could start in the space between blinks, it was good to have touchstones to rely on. What if …
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