The Blood Gospel

by Rebecca Cantrell James Rollins

  Erin stepped forward and ran her fingertips across the empty surface of the lectern. She felt the indentation along the top, as if something was meant to rest there, an object roughly of the dimensions described by Rhun.

  “The book was here,” she mumbled.

  “What?” Jordan asked.

  Defeated, she stepped back, her heel crushing another chunk of debris underfoot. She glanced down, shining her light. Fragments of gray rock lay scattered around the pedestal. Focused now, she saw that they were not natural stone, but something man-made. She knelt and carefully picked up one shard.

  Most of the others strewn on the floor were less than an inch thick and ashy in hue. She retrieved a larger piece and rolled it around in her palm, judging the material.

  Gray. Concrete. If ancient, probably lime and ash.

  Could these pieces date to the time of the Blood Gospel? To know for sure, she would have to do a proper analysis somewhere else, but for now she improvised.

  She scratched a thumbnail over one corner and sniffed at the abraded edge.

  A familiar spicy scent struck her deeply, almost causing her eyes to tear.

  Frankincense.

  Her heartbeat sped up. There had been traces of frankincense in the tomb in Masada, common enough in ancient burials.

  But not in Nazi bunkers.

  She fought to keep her composure, kicking herself mentally for jumping on the dais like a lumbering ox, especially after years of scolding her students for the most minor violations of the integrity of a site.

  She turned the shard over. The piece was roughly triangular, like the corner of a box. Frozen in place, as if she were crouching in the middle of a minefield, she studied the other pieces on the floor. Three other triangles rested nearby, along with other pieces.

  What if the triangles were corners?

  If so, maybe they had been part of a box.

  A box that might have held a book.

  She stared up at the empty lectern. Had the marauding Russians come upon what was hidden here? Smashed open what they found and stole what was inside?

  Despairing, she looked to the crucifix for answers. The figure on the cross was as skeletal as a concentration-camp victim, thinner than any representation of Christ she had ever seen. Black nails pinned each bony hand to the cross, and a larger spike had been driven deep through the figure’s overlapping feet. Burgundy paint glistened around his wounds. She moved the light up, drawn to the nearly featureless face, eyes and mouth barely demarcated by slits, the nostrils even thinner—depicted here was a perfect rendition of endless suffering.

  She had an irrational urge to cut the statue down, to comfort that figure.

  Then a sharp pain burst in her hand. She raised it to the light, realizing she had sliced her thumb on the shard from clenching her fist too hard.

  Reminded of her duty, she turned her back on the cross and began gathering the broken pieces from the dais, scooping them up and stuffing them in her pockets. She noted that some had writing on one side, but she would have to decipher them later.

  Jordan noted her work and began to climb onto the stage with her.

  “Don’t!” she warned, fearful of any further destruction to the clues left here by the Russians.

  With enough time, she might—

  Rhun’s shout reached them, full of hopelessness. “The bats are through the door.”

  36

  October 27, 6:04 A.M., CET

  Beneath Harmsfeld Lake, Germany

  Rhun fled from the front edge of a furious storm behind him.

  Wings battered his body; claws and teeth tore at flesh and clothes.

  He burst through the arched doorway, shadowed by Nadia and Emmanuel. The horde of icarops thundered past him, beating by with muscular wings. The mass fled upward and filled the arched dome of the room with fluttering shadows.

  Rhun’s sharp eyes took in the chamber with a glance, recognizing a dark mirror of the Masada tomb, a despoiled ruin of that sacred space. Fury stoked inside him, but fear extinguished it.

  In the center of the room, he saw Erin crouching atop a stage behind a tall pedestal, her face upturned to the bats. Her guardian, Jordan, leaped atop the dais, ready to shelter her. A futile gesture. The soldier could not hope to defeat the number of icarops gathered here.

  None of them could.

  As if knowing this, the icarops horde crashed down upon the exposed pair.

  “Arrêtez …!”

  The single word of command shattered through the hissing screams of the bats and drove back their attack. The black horde shredded apart around Erin and Jordan and wheeled away, flapping to the streaked walls and the ceiling. There, sharp claws scrabbled for pitted roosts. Wings folded over fur, and the icarops hung from every surface. Oily red-black eyes stared down.

  With his first indrawn breath, the stench hit Rhun. He drew breath again. Another smell lurked under the tainted blood of the icarops and the sharp smell of their waste.

  A familiar one.

  Across the chamber, Jordan scanned the room, his shoulders hunched against the fluttering mass above. “Who yelled?”

  The answer came from Erin, who pointed toward the crucifix. “Look!”

  There on the cross, the marble sculpture moved. A head lifted, revealing a ravaged face, skin shriveled tight around hard-edged bone. Erin’s hand rose to cover her throat, as if she knew what hung there.

  Nadia stopped still next to Rhun, and Emmanuel staggered back a pace.

  The Sanguinists knew, too.

  As if obeying a silent command, Rhun rushed forward, flanked by Emmanuel and Nadia.

  On the cross, eyelids opened, rough slits in that leathery visage. And from those cracks, a glimmer of life still shone—the little that remained. The glassy blue stare found Rhun and settled on him with a look of bottomless grief.

  Those despairing eyes left no doubt about who it was that hung on that ghastly cross.

  Rhun filled out the face, crowned it with silver hair, made the sunken lips smile with the knowledge of untold ages. In his mind, he heard that once-vigorous voice explaining the mysteries of history, the destiny of the Sanguinists. In its time, this body had housed a powerful priest.

  Father Piers.

  A friend for centuries.

  The scholar had disappeared seventy years ago on an expedition to find the Blood Gospel. When he had not returned, the Church had declared him dead. Instead, it seemed that the Nazis had captured him, then abandoned him to suffer here for decades.

  Emmanuel fell to his knees in supplication. “Father Piers … how can it be … ?”

  The old priest’s head sagged again, as if he were unable to hold his heavy skull up any longer. Faded eyes found Emmanuel. “Mein Sohn?” he croaked, throat clearly unaccustomed to forming words.

  My son.

  Tears ran down Emmanuel’s face, reminding Rhun that Father Piers had found and recruited Emmanuel into the Sanguinist fold. He was as much Emmanuel’s father as his savior.

  Emmanuel reached toward the blackened spike hammered through the priest’s bare feet. Another nail impaled each palm. Droplets of dark, dried blood caked around his wounds.

  “Careful.” Nadia stood near them. “He’s been secured with silver.”

  Emmanuel pulled on the thick spike that bound the priest’s feet, burning his own fingers.

  Nadia yanked him back. “Not yet.”

  He hissed at her, showing fangs. “Look at him. Has he not suffered enough?”

  “The question,” Nadia said evenly, “is why has he suffered? Who nailed him here and why?”

  “Libri … verlassen …” It seemed that Piers struggled as much with his tongue as with his mind, tripping through various languages as madness danced behind the glaze of his eyes.

  Rhun stared up at the ruins of the Sanguinist scholar. “Take him down.”

  Nadia looked ready to object, but Rhun knelt and gently supported the old priest’s feet. Emmanuel pulled the spike from the priest
’s feet and tossed it aside, then stood, reaching for the hands.

  Piers remained oblivious. His eyes rolled toward the arched roof and its black decorations. “Meine Kinder … they have brought you.” An exultant tone threaded through his feeble words. “To save me …”

  Nadia’s face hardened. She looked in the direction of the battered priest’s gaze—to the horde of the icarops. “It was Father Piers who created these unholy creatures.”

  “Blasphemare?” Emmanuel’s fingers hesitated over the nail that lanced Piers’s left palm. “But that is forbidden.”

  Rhun was less interested in blasphemy than he was in answers. “He had no choice. He must have had to feed to survive all those decades alone on the cross. What else would he have here to feed upon but the bats.”

  He pictured the priest drawing what little sustenance he could from the dark denizens of this tomb, eventually bending them to his will as the decades passed, twisting them to serve him, using their companionship to anchor what little sanity he could retain in this dark isolation.

  Long ago, Rhun had starved himself almost to death in penance. He remembered the pain, and he could not fault Piers for making the icarops in order to survive. It had been the only way.

  “How long has he been up there?” Erin’s face had gone white.

  “Since the Nazis left him, I imagine.” Nadia did not move to help.

  Rhun pulled the nailed spike out of Piers’s right palm while Emmanuel worked on his left. Dark blood flowed down the old man’s hand. Rhun tried to be gentle. The wounded priest had little blood left to lose.

  “What did he do to deserve this fate?” Jordan asked.

  “That is the salient question.” Nadia stood in front of Piers and looked up into his gaunt face, her voice rising. “What did you do to come to be nailed here, Father?”

  The memory of the tomb at Masada sliced through Rhun: the strigoi girl pinned to the wall by silver spikes, the old gas mask crushed under rock. Had Piers broken under torture? Had he told the Nazis where to find the book, what safeguards to expect, what they needed to do to overcome the millennia-old protections and retrieve it?

  Piers whimpered with every movement of the nail. Rhun knew firsthand the pain of silver. Piers had endured the burning agony of silver for almost seventy years. Like Jesus, he had done his penance on a cross.

  The last spike came free, and Emmanuel threw it across the chamber. Rhun caught Piers’s slight weight against his shoulder.

  Emmanuel tore off his own damp cassock, revealing his leather armor, and wrapped the cassock around the ancient priest. Rhun lowered him to the ground. Emmanuel reached for his wine flask, but Nadia stopped him.

  “He’s no longer holy,” she said. “The wine would do more harm than good.”

  Emmanuel cradled Piers in his arms. “What have they done to you?”

  “Blut und bone,” the old man mumbled. “Libri.”

  Beside him, Erin stirred. “Libri? That’s Greek for ‘book.’ Does his crucifixion here have something to do with the Gospel?”

  Rhun knew that it did.

  Erin held out her hand toward Rhun. In her palm rested a shard of ashy stone. “I found these accretions of lime and ash, an ancient form of concrete, broken into pieces around the pedestal. It might be that the Gospel was encased in a block of such stone and someone broke it free, right here in this room. Could Father Piers have been crucified here as the guardian of it, like the little girl in Masada?”

  “Only he knows,” Rhun answered. “And I don’t know what’s left of his mind.”

  “Then heal him.”

  “Such matters may be beyond me, beyond even the Church.”

  Rhun took the shard and examined it. His fingertips as much as his eyes picked out the Aramaic lettering impressed on one side. If his heart still beat, it would have quickened.

  The book had been here. Someone had found it and removed its covering. But had they opened it?

  That could not be. If it had happened, the thieves of Heaven would have claimed its power. But who had taken it?

  He needed the answer—and Erin was right.

  Only one person could supply it.

  “Father Piers?” he intoned, trying to draw a moment of lucidity from him. “Can you hear me?”

  The old man’s eyes slid closed. “Pride … shameful pride.”

  What was Piers talking about? Did he mean the hubris of the Nazis, or did he mean something much worse?

  “How did the Nazis capture you?” Rhun pressed. “Did you tell them of the book?”

  “Es ist noch kein Buch,” Piers whispered through bloodless lips.

  “It is not a book,” Jordan translated.

  “They must have tortured him, Rhun,” Emmanuel said. “Just as you are doing now. We must heal him before you disturb him with questions.”

  “Not yet,” Father Piers said. “Not yet a book.”

  Nadia glanced at the marble walls as if they held windows. “Sunrise comes soon. Do you feel it?”

  Rhun nodded. His body had begun to weaken. Christ’s grace allowed them to walk under the day’s sun, but because of their taint, they were always strongest at night.

  “I like the sound of sunrise,” Jordan said.

  “We can’t take Piers out into the new day,” Nadia said. “He’s no longer blessed by Christ’s blood. The sun would destroy him.”

  “Then we hunker down here.” Jordan glanced uneasily at the ceiling. “It’s not a five-star hotel, but as long as the bats seem calm, I think we can—”

  “He will die before nightfall,” Emmanuel said, and gestured toward the icarops horde rustling on the walls. “Unless he feeds off those cursed creatures.”

  “And I will not allow that,” Nadia said. “It is a sin.”

  “And I will not leave Piers to die in sin.” Emmanuel drew his knife, threatening her.

  Rhun stepped between them and held his hands up. “If we hurry, we can still reach the chapel in Harmsfeld. We can sanctify him there. After that, he can partake of Christ’s blood again.”

  “What if he cannot be sanctified?” Nadia practically spat out the words. “What if he was no pawn of the Nazis—”

  Rhun held up a hand to silence her, but she would not be silenced.

  “What if he sought them out?”

  “We shall see,” Rhun said. Nadia had spoken his deepest fears, that Piers’s intellectual pride had led him into forming an alliance with the Nazis. Rhun knew that pride all too well—and where it could lead even a devout Sanguinist.

  “Into formation,” he ordered the others. “We must reach the church at Harmsfeld before sunrise.”

  Out of long habit, Emmanuel and Nadia stepped into their places, Emmanuel in front, Nadia to his left. Rhun met Jordan’s eyes and jerked his head toward Piers.

  They stepped out of the defiled chamber, through the vestibule, and back into the dark concrete tunnel.

  Jordan gathered up Piers, still wrapped in Emmanuel’s cassock, and followed with Erin close behind.

  “Ich habe Euch betrogen,” Piers whispered. “Stolz. Buch.”

  Rhun heard Jordan translate. “I have betrayed you all. Pride. Book.”

  Emmanuel stopped and glanced back at Piers. Tears shone in his eyes. Rhun touched his arm. Piers had all but admitted it just then, that he had betrayed their order to the Nazis.

  Rhun turned away, trying to understand. Had his friend’s all-consuming desire to be the first to find the book led him into his unholy alliance with the Ahnenerbe? Had the Germans betrayed him in the end? Rhun remembered his addled words. It is not a book. Did those words indicate that the Nazis had failed here somehow? As a punishment, did they crucify Piers?

  No matter the outcome, if Piers had come here of his own free will, they might never be able to sanctify him enough for him to return to the Sanguinist fold.

  Piers cocked his head to the left as they reached the crossroad of corridors. “Sortie.”

  French for “exit.”


  Erin must have understood. He was attempting to direct them to a way out.

  She knelt and drew the Odal rune in the dust with her finger. She pointed to it. “Can you show me where the exit is, Piers?”

  Jordan held Piers so that he could see the rune. The old man stretched one bone-thin finger to the left leg of the rune. Their team had entered through the right.

  “There’s a second exit,” Erin said, looking up hopefully. “In the other leg of the rune. It must be how his bats came and went.”

  Piers closed his paper-white eyelids, and his head fell back on Jordan’s shoulder.

  “If we hurry,” Rhun said, “perhaps we can get him to the Harmsfeld chapel before sunrise.”

  But, even so, a fear nagged at Rhun.

  Was it already too late to save Father Piers’s soul?

  37

  October 27, 6:45 A.M., CET

  Harmsfeld Mountains, Germany

  Bathory gathered her sable-fur coat around her slender form and waited in the dark woods. To the east, the skies had already begun to pale. From the uneasy glances of her restless troops in that direction, it was clear they knew they had only a quarter hour left before sunrise.

  The air had turned bitterly cold, as if night sought to concentrate its chill against the coming day. Bathory’s hot breath steamed from her lips—same as the panting wolf, blowing white into the dark forest. The same could not be said of the rest of her forces. They remained as cold and still as the forest as they waited, but not all were equally quiet.

  “We must go. Now.” Tarek loomed next to her, his mouth curled in a snarl.

  His brother, Rafik, kept tight to his older brother’s legs, his lips still blistered from the intimate moment Bathory had shared with him.

  Bathory shook her head. So far, no word had been radioed from the lookout she had left by the motorcycles. The Sanguinists had not returned that way—and she didn’t expect them to. She was certain this was the place where the rabbits would leave the warren.

  In her gut, she knew it.

  “Never follow an animal into its burrow,” she warned.