by Simon Toyne
The Abbot finished his report and the old man’s eyes released him and fixed instead on a spot somewhere in the darkness above the bed. His long hair and beard were wispy and whiter even than the sheets that covered him like a shroud. His only movements were the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest and the quiver of arteries pulsing weakly beneath the paper-thin skin.
‘A sister?’ the Prelate said finally.
‘Not yet confirmed, your holiness, but nevertheless a source of grave and immediate concern.’
‘Grave and immediate concern . . . for her, perhaps . . .’
The Prelate’s speech was fractured into small clusters of words, each sentence broken every few seconds by the respirator as it pushed air into his tired lungs.
‘I’m glad your holiness agrees,’ the Abbot replied.
The sharp eyes turned on him once more.
‘I have agreed nothing,’ the Prelate replied. ‘I assume by this visit . . . where you bring me nothing . . . but bad news . . . and question marks . . . that you wish for me . . . to grant you permission . . . to silence the girl.’
‘It would seem prudent.’
The Prelate sighed and returned his gaze to the canopy of darkness above his bed.
‘More death,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘So much blood.’
He took several deep breaths and the hiss of the respirator rose to fill the silence.
‘For thousands of years now,’ he continued in the same halting manner ‘we have been keepers . . . of the Sacrament . . . a secret that has been handed down . . . in an unbroken line . . . from the original founders . . . of our church. Dutifully . . . we have kept the secret . . . but it has also kept us . . . It keeps us still . . . locked away from the world . . . demanding so much sacrifice . . . so much blood . . . just to keep it hidden. Do you ever ask yourself . . . Brother Abbot . . . what is our purpose here?’
‘No,’ he replied, unsure of where the question was heading. ‘Our work here is self evident. It is God’s work.’
‘Do not patronize me with seminary platitudes,’ the Prelate said with surprising energy. ‘I am not a fresh-faced novice. I mean our specific purpose. Do you really believe it is God’s pure work we do here?’
‘Of course.’ The Abbot frowned. ‘Our calling is righteous. We shoulder the burden of mankind’s past for the sake of its future.’
The Prelate smiled. ‘How blessed you are, to have such confidence in your answer.’ His eyes drifted upwards once more. ‘As death creeps nearer . . . I must confess . . . things look very different to me . . . Life shines . . . in strange ways . . . once lit by death’s dark light . . . But I will be cured of life . . . soon enough . . .’
The Abbot began to remonstrate, but the Prelate raised his almost transparent hand to silence him.
‘I am old, Brother Abbot . . . too old . . . As I approach my second . . . century, I feel . . . the burden of my years . . . I used to think . . . the long life, and staunch . . . health one enjoyed . . . as a result of living . . . inside this mountain . . . was a blessing . . . I believed it was proof . . . that God smiled upon us . . . and upon our work . . . Now I am not . . . so sure . . . In every culture . . . and in all of literature . . . long life is ever portrayed . . . as nothing more . . . than a terrible curse . . . visited upon the damned . . .’
‘Or the divine,’ the Abbot said.
‘I hope you are right . . . Brother Abbot . . . I have given it . . . much thought of late . . . I wonder . . . when my time finally comes . . . will the Lord be pleased . . . with the work I have done . . . in His holy name . . .? Or will He be ashamed . . .? Will all my life’s efforts . . . prove to be nothing . . . more than a bloody exercise . . . in protecting the reputations . . . of men who have long since . . . turned to dust . . .?’
His voice trailed away with a dry rattle and the dark eyes flitted across to a pitcher of water by his bed.
The Abbot poured a glass and lifted the Prelate’s head to it, helping him take tiny sips between the relentless insinuations of the ventilator. Despite the oppressive heat, the Prelate’s head felt inhumanly cold. He laid it carefully back down on the pillow and returned the glass to the table. When he looked back, the Prelate’s eyes were focused once more on the patch of nothingness above his bed.
‘I stare death in the face . . . every day . . .’ he said, studying the darkness. ‘I watch him . . . and he watches me . . . I wonder why . . . he keeps his distance . . . Then you come here . . . talking soft words . . . that do little to hide your . . . hard desire for blood . . . and I think to myself . . . perhaps Death is cunning . . . Maybe he keeps me alive . . . so I can grant you . . . the powers you request . . . Then your actions will provide him . . . with far fresher souls . . . than mine to sport with . . .’
‘I do not desire blood,’ the Abbot said. ‘But sometimes our duties require it. The dead keep secrets better than the living.’
The Prelate turned once more and fixed the Abbot with his unwavering gaze.
‘Brother Samuel . . . may disagree . . .’
The Abbot said nothing.
‘I am not going to . . . grant your wish . . .’ the Prelate said suddenly, his eyes crawling over the Abbot’s face, feeding on his reaction. ‘Locate and monitor her . . . by all means . . . but do not harm her . . . I expressly forbid it . . .’
The Abbot was stunned.
‘But, Your Holiness, how can we let her live if there is even the smallest chance she knows the identity of the Sacrament?’
‘I doubt . . . she knows anything . . .’ the Prelate replied. ‘Having a telephone number . . . is one thing . . . Having a telephone . . . another thing entirely . . . Do you really think Brother Samuel . . . would have had time . . . to make a call . . . between learning our great secret . . . and his unfortunate death . . .? Are you really so eager . . . to take a life . . . on the basis of such . . . a slender possibility . . .?’
‘I do not think we should take even the smallest chance, when our order is at risk. The Church is weak. People don’t believe in anything any more. Any revelations now about the origins of their faith may destroy everything. You have seen within these walls how some react when the Sacrament is revealed to them, even after they have been carefully screened and prepared. Imagine if it were revealed to the world? There would be chaos. With respect, Your Holiness, we need to protect the Sacrament now more than we ever have. The future of our faith may depend on it. This girl is too dangerous to live.’
‘All things must end . . .’ the Prelate said. ‘Nothing lasts forever . . . If the Church is weak . . . then maybe all this . . . has come about for a reason . . . Maybe it is time . . . for us to put ourselves . . . in the hands of fate . . . Let the dice fall . . . how they may . . . I have made my decision . . . Tell my attendants . . . I wish to rest . . . And close the door . . . as you leave . . .’
The Abbot stood for a few moments, not quite believing either that the interview was over, or that his petition had been denied. He watched the Prelate staring upwards like the carving upon a tomb.
Would that you were already in one, he thought as he bowed his head and backed slowly away from the bed before slipping from the stifling room.
Outside, the Apothecaria hovered in the gloomy hallway.
‘Leave him,’ the Abbot said as he stormed past. ‘He wishes to be alone with thoughts of his legacy.’
The white cassocks exchanged puzzled looks, not sure what the Abbot meant. By the time they turned to ask him, he was already at the bottom of the stairway.
Old fool, the Abbot thought as he threw open the door and surged past the guard. No wonder our beloved church has become so weakened, with such a man at the head.
He welcomed the chill of the mountain and mopped sweat from his brow with his sleeve as he made for the great cathedral cave, where the denizens of the mountain would soon be heading for Vespers.
Locate her and monitor her.
The Prelate’s words echoed in the Abbot’s mind, taunting him. B
ut there was one piece of information he had kept back. When he’d spoken to the girl he’d heard a Tannoy in the background. She had been at an airport. She was coming to Ruin.
He’d locate her all right, and put her somewhere she could be monitored very closely. And the moment Death finally finished toying with his master, he would deal with her in his own way.
Chapter 41
Robbery and Homicide was calmer now. It was just after six o’clock in the evening. Quiet time, except for the steady clatter of keyboards being pecked by one-fingered typists. People didn’t tend to commit robberies or murder in the afternoon, so it was a good time to catch up on paperwork. Arkadian sat at his desk and frowned at his computer. His phone had hardly stopped. Somehow the press had got hold of his direct line and it rang every two or three minutes with someone new asking about the case whose file currently filled his screen. The chief of police had also called him personally. He wanted to know when they could issue an official statement. Arkadian assured him he’d have one as soon as the witness checks came back. And that was why he was frowning.
Following his conversation with the girl he’d run the name she’d given him through the various personnel databases and managed to build up the beginnings of a dossier on Samuel Newton. He’d found his birth certificate at least, though even that seemed incomplete. It confirmed that he’d been born in a place called Paradise, West Virginia, to an organic horticulturalist father and a botanist mother, but the name of the infant was recorded simply as ‘Sam’, not ‘Samuel’. Several other parts of the form were blank, including the column recording the child’s sex, but his search had also thrown up an associated death certificate – recording the sad fact that his mother had died eight days later.
His first few years were sketchy and a lot of the usual documents Arkadian expected to find were missing. A collection of assorted newspaper clippings picked up his story aged nine and charted the development of his precocious mountaineering abilities. One included a black-and-white photo of the young Sam clinging to a precipitous rock he had obviously just conquered. Arkadian compared the image of the skinny, grinning boy with the head shots he had taken during the post-mortem. There was definitely a resemblance.
According to the last of the newspaper clippings, dated nine years later, it seemed that young Sam’s climbing skills had led indirectly to the death of his father. One spring, as they were driving back from a competition in the Italian Alps, their car had spun out of control during a freak blizzard and slid into a ravine. Both father and son initially survived the crash, though they had suffered some pretty significant injuries. Sam had woken up with snow coming in through a broken side window, not really remembering where he was or how he’d got there. His arm hurt like hell; other than that he felt cold, but OK. He discovered that his father, though awake and fairly alert, was bleeding from a large gash in his head. He was also trapped under the twisted wreckage of the dashboard and complaining that he couldn’t feel anything from the waist down.
Sam had wrapped his father as warmly as he could with whatever he could find in and around the car, then made his way up the wall of the ravine in search of help. It had taken him quite a while to scale the icy rock face because he was fighting a raging blizzard and the arm he’d described as ‘hurting like hell’ was actually fractured in two places. He eventually managed to climb back up to the road and flag down a passing truck.
By the time the Medivac team arrived, his father had lost too much blood, been in the cold too long and slipped into a coma from which he never recovered. He died three days later. Sam was just eighteen. He flew back to the US with his climbing trophy in his hand and his father in a box in the hold.
Arkadian had also managed to track down a passport application made when Sam had first started travelling the world on climbing expeditions. In a section headed ‘Distinguishing Marks’ the bearer was described as having a lateral scar at the base of the ribs on the right-hand side of his body; a scar in the shape of a cross. Arkadian felt that he’d found his man; yet there was still a lot that didn’t add up.
Standard procedure for victim identification required that checks be carried out on any person stepping forward to identify a body, a necessary precaution to prevent false witness. When Arkadian had run the checks on Liv Adamsen of Newark, New Jersey, he’d discovered all the usual stuff: where she lived, her credit history and so on, none of which was particularly noteworthy. But the deeper he’d looked, the more puzzled he’d become.
Two things in particular rang alarm bells in his naturally suspicious mind. The first was her occupation. Liv Adamsen was an investigative reporter working on the crime desk of a large New Jersey paper. This was bad news, particularly on a case as public and newsworthy as this one. The second was less of a problem and more of a mystery. Despite the fact that Liv had correctly identified the dead man and reacted as a sister would, there was not one single record, in all of the checks he’d carried out, of any kinship. As far as Arkadian could establish from the complex paper trail weaving its way back through Samuel Newton’s life, there was absolutely no evidence at all that he had a sister.
Chapter 42
The Lockheed Tri-Star shuddered as the Cypress Turkish Airlines flight took off from London Stansted en route to the furthest edge of Europe. The moment the wheels left the tarmac the wind took over and the aircraft lurched as if unseen hands were trying to tear it apart and fling it back down to the ground.
It was a large plane, which was comforting; but it was also old, which was not. It still had aluminium flip-top ashtrays in the arm-rests that rattled as the plane wrestled its way upwards. Liv eyed them now, imagining a time when she could have calmed her nerves the old-fashioned way. Instead she tore the top off a packet of pickled ginger, the remains of an overpriced sushi takeaway she’d grabbed during her stop-over, and popped a sliver under her tongue. Ginger was good for stress and helped reduce travel sickness. She folded the top of the packet and squirreled it away for the journey. She had a feeling this flight would test its reputation to the hilt.
She chewed the ginger slowly and glanced around at her fellow passengers. The cabin was only half-full; it was a particularly unsociable time of night. The old Lockheed lurched again as a fresh gust shoved it sideways. She could see the port wing from her window. It appeared to be flapping, albeit stiffly. She forced herself to look away.
She had hoped to get some sleep during this final leg of her journey, but there was absolutely no chance of that while crash anxiety continued to light up her nerve endings. She pulled out the other purchase she’d made during her stop-over – a travel guide to Turkey.
She flipped to the index. There was a whole chapter devoted to Ruin and a map reference. She turned to the map first. Like most people, she only had the vaguest idea where Ruin was. The ancient city, and the Citadel in particular, were like the pyramids in Egypt: everyone knew what they looked like, but few could pinpoint them in an atlas.
A triple-page fold-out showed Turkey, stretching like a bridge between mainland Europe and Arabia, hemmed in top and bottom by the Black Sea and Mediterranean respectively. The grid reference drew her to the right-hand side of the map, close to the border where Europe rubbed shoulders with the biblical lands of the Middle East.
She spotted two airport symbols to the north and south of the city of Gaziantep – where she was due to land in around four hours – but she couldn’t see Ruin. She checked the reference and looked again. It was only after a few minutes’ close scrutiny in the gloom of the cabin that she found it – west of the uppermost airport, where the Eastern Taurus mountains started to rise, right in the fold of the page and almost totally obscured by the straight black line of the grid. It struck Liv as bitterly apt that her brother should choose to hide away in such a place; somewhere so well known yet so obscure, nestling enigmatically in the crease of a map.
She flicked through the book until she found the chapter on Ruin and started to read, sucking up facts about the place
she was heading to, logging and arranging them in her journalist’s mind until they started to form a picture of the city where her brother had lived and died. It was a major religious centre; that made sense, given what Samuel had said to her the last time she’d seen him. It was also the world’s oldest place of pilgrimage, owing to the health-giving properties of the waters that bubbled plentifully from the ground, ice melt from the mountains that surrounded it. That made sense also. She could imagine him working as a mountain-guide, hiding under a borrowed name somewhere well off the beaten track while he sought the peace he’d set out to find.
I want to be closer to God. That’s what he’d said.
She’d often wondered at these words in the silence that followed his disappearance, torturing herself with the darkest possibilities of their meaning. But somehow she’d known, even as that silence stretched into years, that he was alive. She’d still believed it even when the letter from the US Bureau of Vital Records had told her otherwise. And now she was following the path he had trodden, to find out about the life he had led there. She was hoping the Inspector would be able to point her to where he’d lived and maybe some of the people who’d known him. Maybe they could give her some answers, and fill in the blanks that echoed in her mind.
She turned the page and stared at a photograph of the old town clustered at the base of the soaring mountain. The caption beneath identified it as The most visited place of antiquity in the world and supposed repository of a powerful, ancient relic known as The Sacrament.
On the page opposite was a brief chronicle of the Citadel, expanding on its incredible age and outlining its constant presence throughout human history. Liv had assumed the Citadel was a Christian shrine, but the text revealed that it had only aligned itself with Christianity in the fourth century following the Roman emperor Constantine’s conversion. Prior to that it had been independent of any organized religion, though it had exerted a huge influence in almost every ancient belief system: the Babylonians had considered it the first and greatest Ziggurat; the Ancient Greeks worshipped it as the home of the gods and renamed it Olympus; even the Egyptians held it as sacred, the Pharoahs journeying across the sea to the Hittite empire to visit the mountain. It was even believed by some that the great pyramids of Giza were attempts to recreate the mountain in the hope that the magical properties of the Citadel could be reproduced in Egypt.