Sanctus

by Simon Toyne

  Kathryn could feel panic rising inside her like whistling steam.

  She had no idea how long she had left before the van exploded. She scanned the passage frantically for a way out, her mind screaming with her desire to survive.

  Think dammit!

  The tunnel was curved. It was possible the shape of it would protect her from the direct force of the blast. She pictured the shock wave travelling down the narrow space, throwing her against the steel shutter like a hammer on an anvil. She needed to get down, tuck into the wall as tightly as she could, and offer the smallest possible area for the blast to act upon. She hopped over the bike and dropped to the ground, noticed the helmet still hooked over the handlebars, yanked it free and jammed it on to her head as she rolled to the left where the curve of the tunnel might deflect some of the blast. She hit the smooth upright of the wall and tucked herself into the gap where it met the floor, her frantic mind casting about for anything else she should do. In the confines of the helmet her breathing was deafening.

  She snatched a quick breath.

  Pinched her nose.

  Blew hard into her sinuses.

  Chapter 138

  The boom echoed through the mountain like thunder shaking free from the ground. In the darkness of the great library it sent books tumbling from shelves and dust drifting down from the vaulted roof. Athanasius looked up in a numbed daze. It was as if the mountain had read the words over his shoulder and shuddered at what it discovered there.

  He reached out, folded the waxy pages back inside the volume of Nietzsche and rose from his seat. He needed to know if what he had found buried in the smudged words of the dead language was true. His faith depended on it. Everybody’s faith depended on it. He walked down the passageway towards the central corridor, stepping over all the books that had been shaken to the floor, oblivious of the chaos around him and the raised voices puncturing the deadness as he approached the entrance. He felt detached from himself, like he had become pure spirit unfettered by the constraints of his physical self. He passed into the entrance chamber and drifted across the hallway towards the airlock, barely aware of the wailing librarians tearing their hair as they surveyed their ruined library.

  The smell of smoke hit him the moment he stepped out of the airlock and into the corridor. It had an acrid, bitter quality – like sulphur – and mingled with the clamour of confusion and fear echoing up from the lower corridors. Two monks wearing the brown cassocks of the guilds hurried past, heading down into the mountain towards the source of the smoke. In his mind Athanasius imagined them scurrying towards a crack in the rock from which the foul smoke now poured: A crack filled with brimstone and fire.

  He turned and walked in the opposite direction, heading up the mountain towards his own revelation. He knew this path was forbidden and would probably lead to his death, but somehow this did not frighten him. He could not live in the cold shadow cast by the words he had just read. He would rather die discovering they were not true than live suspecting they were.

  He ducked into a stairwell and followed the steps as they curved towards the upper landing of the lower mountain. At the top he turned into a cramped hallway with several other passageways leading off it. At the far end the red-coloured cassock of a guard stood by the doorway that led to the upper part of the mountain. He had no idea how he was going to get past him, but in his heart he felt sure that, somehow, he would.

  He realized he still had the book in his hand containing the stolen pages of the Heretic Bible and raised it to his chest now like a talisman. He took a couple of steps towards the guard and saw him look in his direction just as another doorway opened halfway down the landing. Another guard emerged into the narrow hallway, his hood pulled low over his face.

  Then the lights went out, plunging the hallway into total and impenetrable darkness.

  Chapter 139

  Liv woke thinking of thunder.

  She opened her eyes.

  Hundreds of pin-points of light quivered before her in the liquid darkness. She focused. Felt the cold hard ground tremble and settle beneath her. Saw candle flames reflected in lines of mirrored blades shivering to stillness against a dark, stone wall. Then she saw something else, lying on the floor. A body, naked from the waist up, familiar lines standing proud and grotesque on the surface of its faintly glowing skin.

  She reached out for him, ignoring the pain in her head that came with the movement. Her outstretched hand touched a face as cold as the mountain and rolled it towards her. A low animal moan escaped from her throat. Despite the violence of his death, and the brutal medical enquiries that had followed, Samuel looked serene. She pulled herself across the floor towards him, hot tears scalding her eyes, and rose up to kiss his face. She pressed her lips against his cold skin and felt something shift inside her. Then everything lurched as she was grabbed from behind and pulled violently away from her brother.

  Gabriel spotted the guard moments before the lights went out.

  He dropped down in the sudden darkness, jarring his arm and sending pain screaming through his body. He choked it down and forced himself to move silently across the black corridor, towards the far wall, reaching out with his good hand but careful to shield the gun so it didn’t clatter against the stone when he found it. His left hand remained buried in his sleeve, throbbing with pain but still clutching the PDA. He had stolen a glance at it just before entering the corridor. The signal from the transponder was coming from somewhere beyond the door at the end of the corridor, the one the guard had been standing by.

  The back of his hand touched the cold, stone wall and he dropped lower, levelling his gun at a spot ahead of him in the black where he had last seen the guard. Behind him a rising confusion of voices echoed up from the depths of the Citadel: some calling for lamps, some for help, others for hoses to feed water down to where the mountain was burning. He could feel the panic. Nothing unsettled people like the smell of smoke.

  He kept the gun steady and with his free hand held the PDA out towards the centre of the corridor and slightly in front of him. His arm screamed as he willed his thumb to search for the button to turn on the display. He found it. Pressed it. And the cold glow of the screen lit up the corridor as the PDA tumbled from his hand to the floor. The guard was not by the door. He was crouched over to the left, his gun pointing down the corridor. He fired twice, aiming above the light source, probably going for a headshot, the sound deafening in the stone confines of the corridor.

  Gabriel fired with his own silenced weapon, watched the guard twitch then slump back against the door, his gun clattering to the ground. He sprang forward using the glow from the PDA to light his way and kicked the gun away from the guard’s hand. He reached for his neck with his good hand, feeling for a pulse, but keeping a tight grip on his gun in case he found one. He found nothing. His hand skimmed across the rough surface of the cassock, skirting the warm wetness of the chest wound until he found what he was looking for.

  He tracked back, picked up the PDA and wedged it in the claw of his left hand, directing the light towards the heavy studded door. The keyhole was in the centre. Gabriel slotted in the key he had taken from the guard, twisted it and leaned against the door, revealing a flight of steps behind it heading up into the dark of the mountain.

  Chapter 140

  Samuel’s body wrenched from Liv’s view as she was yanked to her feet and whirled round to face a grotesque figure standing close by in the darkness. It stared at her, with grey eyes shining above a thick beard, its upper body glistening darkly with blood running from cuts that were both fresh and familiar. ‘The marks of our devotion,’ the Abbot said, following her gaze. ‘Your brother bore them too – but he could not bear our secret.’

  He twitched his head towards the darker end of the cavern and Liv was jerked round to face the blackness. She twisted her head to the right, hoping to catch sight of her brother. A hand grabbed her hair and forced her to face forward. ‘Search the darkness,’ the Abbot commanded. ‘
See for yourself.’

  She looked.

  Saw nothing but shadow. Then a breeze seemed to blow through her body as something took form in the gloom.

  It was the shape of the Tau, at least as high as she was and just as solid. As her eyes continued to make sense of the darkness, the breeze strengthened and brought with it a whispering sound, like the wind moving through trees. She could feel it flowing through her, gently rinsing away her pain.

  ‘This is the great secret of our order,’ the voice behind her said. ‘The un-doer of all men.’

  The hands pressed her closer and more details emerged. The main upright was about the width of a small tree, though its surface was flatter and made of something darker than wood. At its base was a rough grille from which something seeped into channels cut into the stone floor. It reminded her of the sap she’d seen oozing from the dying tree outside the hospital in Newark. Where this sticky substance flowed, thin vines had somehow taken root, their tendrils snaking up the strange, uneven surface of the Tau. Her eyes drifted up, following the vines past raised joints in the surface where crudely beaten iron plates had been welded together to make the central pillar. The breeze strengthened, carrying with it now the warm, comforting scent of sun-toasted grass. She arrived at the place where the central upright met the thinner arms of the horizontal crosspiece; then saw something else – something inside the shape – and the shock of it drove the breath from her lungs.

  ‘Behold,’ the Abbot whispered, sensing her discovery. Liv stared at the narrow slit cut into the dull metal surface of the Tau – and the pale, green eyes that stared back at her. ‘The secret of our order. Mankind’s greatest criminal; sentenced to death for crimes against man – but unkillable. Until today.’ He stepped into view and pointed at the floor where Samuel’s body lay crumpled and discarded. ‘The cross will fall,’ he said, shifting his finger to point at Liv. ‘The cross will rise,’ his hand swept over to the Tau, ‘to unlock the Sacrament, and bring forth a new age, through its merciful death.’ A sharp metallic snap echoed through the chapel as he undid a clasp on the side of the cross. ‘She who once robbed man of his divinity will now restore it.’ More sharp snaps cracked through the air until the front of the structure shifted and swung slowly open, dragging an agonized, animal shriek from the woman it contained.

  The Tau was not a cross, it was a metal coffin filled with needles, each one shining darkly with the same wetness Liv had thought was sap. Now she saw the terrible truth. It was not sap but blood, leaking from hundreds of evenly spaced puncture marks on the frail and naked form of the woman inside it. She was young. More like a girl than a woman, yet her long hair shone white in the darkness, sticking in thick coils to a body mired with blood and gouged with ritualized wounds, each one terrible and familiar.

  ‘The scars we bear are reminders of our failure to rid the world of its evil,’ the Abbot chanted, as though he was reciting a prayer. ‘The rituals we practise keeping it bloodless and weak until justice can finally be done.’

  Liv looked into her eyes. Green like a lake, and wide like a child’s, yet fathomless and silted with pain. Despite the grotesqueness of the situation Liv experienced a rush of intimacy with her, as if the chapel was just a room, and the girl before her just a lost friend from childhood. Looking at her now was like encountering a version of herself, like catching an unsuspecting reflection staring up from a deep well. It was as if the soft breeze that flowed out of her, carrying with it the scent of grass, connected them somehow. The green eyes stared deep into hers, and she felt laid bare and accepted; seen but not judged. And like a window they let Liv see too. And she saw everything in her, and her in everything. She was the desolation of every woman who’d wanted to be a mother but had never become one. She was Liv’s own mother screaming in agony as she gave her own life for that of her two children. She was all the hearts that had ever been broken, and all the tears that had ever been shed. She was woman, and woman was her. Their pain was her pain, and hers was unimaginable. And Liv saw all this and felt a yearning to just reach out and give her the simple comfort of her touch, as though she was the mother and the tortured child pinned inside the vicious cross was hers, lost in a nightmare too long to measure. But her unseen captor held on too tightly and her hand was not hers to command, so she reached out with what words she could muster.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, blinking away tears that spilled unchecked down her face. ‘Shhh. It’s all right.’

  Eve’s limpid green eyes held hers for a moment, then she smiled the faintest of smiles and sighed like something released, then Liv felt something press into her hand. She looked down. Saw the thin blade of a dagger tapering away from her palm into the darkness.

  ‘Fulfil your destiny,’ the Abbot said, holding her hand tightly in his. ‘Rid mankind of its great betrayer.’

  Liv stared at the slender blade, the horror of why she had been brought here suddenly manifested in its cold point. She tried to drop it, revolted by its intended purpose, tried to twist it away but the hands that held her were too strong. Samuel’s words rose up in her frantic mind as she struggled against the men who held her.

  If others die for your sake then God has spared you for a reason.

  She’d often wondered what her reason in life was, but she knew this was not it. This exquisite, tortured woman could not die. Not by her hand. She looked up into the pale, elfin face, felt the breeze flowing through her, the smell of toasted grass stronger now as the sound it carried changed to something liquid, like ripples on a shore, that seemed to wash through her, bringing strange comfort and a rush of memories.

  She saw herself sitting by the lake with Samuel in the sun-bleached grass of her childhood, listening to their granny telling stories from their Nordic past.

  It’s not supposed to be obvious to just anyone, Arkadian had said about the message scratched on the seeds.

  It was meant for you.

  The smells and the memories it brought now made everything terrible and clear. ‘Ask’ had not been an instruction. It referred to the legend of Ask and Embla – the first two humans. The message Samuel had sent her was:

  Ask + ?

  Mala T

  The Tau and the question mark both underlined because they were the same thing. The Mala cross – the Tau – was Embla. The Sacrament was Eve.

  Chapter 141

  When Cornelius had seen the green eyes staring out at him from the slit in the Tau, he’d thought for a shocked moment it was the woman in the burkha, brought here by some miracle. Only when the Abbot had revealed her identity did he realize the true marvel of the Sacrament. She wasn’t just the woman in the burkha, or the mother who had abandoned him as a newborn – she was the fountainhead of all female treachery.

  Eve had to die, for the crimes she had committed against man and against God; it was the only way to rid the world of her poison, and somehow the squirming girl in his arms was the key. He felt her struggling, saw the dagger in her hand twisting away from the symbol of his hatred trapped inside the cross and, without thinking about his actions, he shoved her forward with all his strength, slamming her into Eve.

  Liv gasped at the impact and breathed in an ancient smell, like rich earth, and the promise of rain. It was the smell of Eve and it comforted her. She could feel the dagger between their bodies, held tight by their embrace and rendered useless by it; but she also felt the burning sensation of pain. It was coming from her throat and her right shoulder where the force had driven them on to the spikes inside the Tau.

  She heard angry instructions from behind her and felt herself yanked back as quickly as she had been shoved forward. She gasped as an astonishing pain ripped through her, felt wet warmth gush from her neck and spread down across her chest, then her legs buckled and she slid to the stone floor.

  The Abbot watched her fall and saw his dreams topple with her.

  He looked up at Cornelius with murder in his eyes and reached for the dagger in his Crux. Then a sound made him
stop.

  It was a soft sound, like surf on shells, and it had come from Eve. He turned to face her. She was sobbing. The bottomless green eyes were turned downward to the crumpled form of the girl and her slender shoulders shook. He watched a tear fall through the darkness and disappear into the slowly spreading puddle of the girl’s blood.

  Then another sound tore through the chapel, a scream so powerful both the Abbot and Cornelius clamped their hands to their ears to block it out.

  It was like the splintering of a great tree, or the crack of a shifting glacier. It was the song of the siren – and it was filled with grief and anger.

  The Abbot stared at Eve through the force of the scream, defying her fury. Then, just as the terrible howl started to subside, he saw blood begin to flow from her wounds. It started as a trickle but grew steadily faster, dripping from the puncture holes all over her skin and flowing from the deeper ceremonial cuts on her arms and legs. He watched in wonder as it ran down her body, flowing far more freely than he had ever seen it, into the stone channels where Liv’s blood also ran.

  She’s dying – he thought with a swell of triumph.

  Then Eve spoke, in a voice that was more air than substance.

  ‘KuShikaaM,’ she said, like a soothing whisper aimed towards the ground where the girl lay bleeding. ‘KuShikaaM.’

  The girl looked up from the floor, like a child looking up at her mother. Then she smiled, and as her eyes gently closed – so did Eve’s.