Inquisitor (Orion Chronicles Book 3)

by John Barrowman

  ‘And the violin?’

  ‘A man must pay his debts.’

  55.

  Under Construction

  After fading back into the Kelvingrove gallery, Matt marched ahead trying to make sense of why not that long ago Caravaggio had been fading with a violin.

  ‘Are we leaving now?’ Caravaggio inquired as they hurried back through the museum corridors.

  ‘I need access to the internet first,’ said Matt, walking to the stairs.

  ‘That interesting library on your computer device?’

  In the museum’s office suite, Caravaggio settled down for a nap while Matt logged in to the Orion database through the local network. An ‘Under Construction’ screen came up. He tried again. Same thing. He took off his jacket and refreshed the screen. The user of this computer had the Guardian news page on view. The first headline took Matt’s breath away.

  ‘Michele, you have to see this.’ Matt picked up a magazine from the desk, rolled it up and threw it at the artist’s head.

  In one swift move, Caravaggio was on his feet, knife drawn. ‘Che diavolo…’

  ‘There’s been an explosion at the RA in London.’

  They both stared at an image from a news helicopter of the black hole at the east wing of the Royal Academy.

  ‘The Council Chamber,’ said Matt. Fear gripped his throat. ‘Jeannie and Vaughn are there.’

  ‘Orion headquarters, Auchinmurn Abbey and the Council Chamber?’ said Caravaggio. ‘This is bad news, my friend.’

  Matt read on. ‘They’re blaming a gas leak. No loss of life or any serious injuries. But the press wouldn’t know about the Council Chamber…’ He leaned back in the desk chair, trying not to panic. ‘It explains why the Orion database is down. We’re in damage control.’

  Caravaggio struck the down arrow as if the key had offended his honour. ‘This is all Luca Ferrante,’ he growled. ‘He attacked Orion HQ. You saw him attack the Abbey with your crazy eyes. And now he has hit the Council Chamber as well.’

  ‘Three places at about the same time. How is that even possible?’ Matt asked, struggling to understand.

  ‘Time is a human construct,’ Caravaggio pointed out. ‘And Luca’s not human.’

  56.

  Picasso Baby

  When Animare had first banded together with Guardians for protection during the Middle Ages, a painting within another painting was uncommon. And so during the Renaissance the most powerful of Animare took it upon themselves to create ‘gallery paintings’, through which they could travel. From then on, prominent Animare in each period had created one or two travel paintings. Vermeer had been the most prolific. One of Orion’s first assignments on behalf of the Order of Era Mina had been to build an international database of these travel paintings.

  Matt opened the database. It looked like a subway map, except instead of images of stations, thumbnails of the paintings appeared. Three options to get to London lit up the screen. The first route involved a Turner painting of the sea.

  ‘Avoid that one,’ advised Caravaggio. ‘I’d rather not get wet.’

  ‘What about your old friend, James Guthrie?’ Matt suggested. ‘His painting here in the Kelvingrove gets us directly to Tate Britain in London.’

  ‘Must we?’

  ‘I thought you two got along fine when you last visited.’

  Caravaggio sighed. ‘Oh we did.’

  Matt caught a whiff of deception in Caravaggio’s response, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it. They needed to get to London and find Em and Remy.

  They headed through contemporary art towards the Guthrie paintings. Caravaggio was struggling to focus, marvelling as they went.

  ‘What the devil is that?’ he said as they passed an angular painting full of colour.

  ‘A modernist work,’ said Matt, towing him on. ‘You wouldn’t like it in there. Your body would be rebuilt in triangular fragments and your legs and feet would be all wrong. There’s a reason Picasso and his like aren’t on the travel maps.’

  Inside Guthrie’s Hard At It, they ducked under the artist’s white umbrella. When Guthrie saw Matt, he handed him a note.

  ‘It’s from Em,’ said Matt.

  We’re at the Professor’s. Come quickly.

  London

  57.

  Downtown Train

  The evening’s trains running underground from Charing Cross station shook Alessandro de Mendoza’s lair. The vibrations took a while to adjust to.

  ‘It’s been my home for many years,’ Alessandro told Em and Rémy as they each took a seat in the abandoned World War Two air-raid shelter deep under the city. ‘The regular tremors of the tiled walls gave a rhythm to my life that I have welcomed.’

  A rattling knocked a stack of tattered paperback mysteries and an empty plastic water jug onto the filthy concrete at Em’s feet.

  ‘Northern Line,’ Alessandro remarked. ‘Are you sure your brother and the artist will come?’

  ‘They’ll be here,’ Em said confidently.

  Almost before she had finished speaking, Matt and Caravaggio ducked into the Professor’s underground lair.

  ‘Sorry, got here as fast as we could,’ said Matt a little breathlessly as Em hugged him tight and Rémy clapped him on the back.

  ‘A happy gathering, I see.’

  Em ran to hug Vaughn, who had appeared under the blue tarp that covered the entrance to the shelter. He was carrying an M&S shopping bag packed with food and drink.

  ‘I came as soon as I got your message that everyone would be here, Alessandro.’ Vaughn released Em, ruffled Matt’s hair and nodded to Rémy. ‘But if you ever disobey my orders again, I’ll bind you myself. What the hell were you thinking? You weren’t supposed to be there. You could all have been killed.’

  That was the second time Em had heard that expression in as many hours.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you and Alessandro know more than you’re letting on?’ she said.

  In the following silence, Caravaggio lifted a packet of M&S sandwiches from Vaughn’s bag and removed the cellophane. ‘Modern cuisine,’ he said through a mouthful. ‘It’s a marvel.’

  Vaughn nodded at Alessandro.

  ‘Orion knew Luca was coming,’ Alessandro began. ‘He took out the Royal Academy as well as Kentigern and Auchinmurn. But as we have said, you weren’t supposed to be there. None of you.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Orion let Luca destroy the vaults and the Royal Academy?’ echoed Em at last, her voice faint.

  Vaughn sighed. ‘We knew the Camarilla was planning an attack. We decided to let it play out, to let them think we are no longer a threat to their final plans.’

  ‘But Rémy and I almost died! And the art…’ Em’s voice shook. ‘Jeannie was at the Royal Academy, at the Council meeting. Is she all right?’

  ‘Jeannie is fine,’ said Vaughn shortly. ‘We took a risk, OK? In our defence, none of you should’ve been anywhere near the vaults. You all should have been in the Glasgow safe-house.’

  ‘We saw him do it. Me and Rémy. And the peryton…’ Em trailed away. She hoped the peryton had survived the battle.

  ‘I saw him too,’ Matt said quietly, fiddling with his sunglasses. ‘But now that I’m thinking about what happened, he could have taken us out. Instead, he unleashed a hellhound to chase us off like he was playing with us.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Vaughn, dumping out the bag onto the makeshift table, ‘after what happened at the Castel Sant’Angelo Jeannie and I decided that if we wanted to stop the Camarilla once and for all, we needed to know where the portal is located and destroy it, and to do that we needed to let the Camarilla believe that we are no longer a threat.’

  Rémy rubbed his hands over his head. ‘Let me get this straight. You’re saying that the only way to find the portal and destroy it is to let the Camarilla open it first?’

  Vaughn glanced at Alessandro before nodding.

  ‘Wait,’ said Em, her anger rising, ‘what do y
ou have planned next? Are you going to just give them Rémy and the sacred chord?’

  Alessandro straightened up to face Em’s anger. ‘Of course not, the sacred chord remains safe in the Duke of Albion’s vault, but we have always thought the Camarilla had other means to its endgame. All we did was remove a few obstacles to see what would happen—’

  ‘And when we knew Luca was wavering in his support of the Camarilla, we had to take the chance to bring him to our side,’ Vaughn cut in.

  ‘We’re playing nice with a Nephilim too?’ said Em, thinking of the powerful Nephilim, of the damage he’d wreaked on the Abbey. She thought about the battle at Castel Sant’Angelo, and those terrible moments deep underground in Rome. Luca Ferrante: the enemy. Luca Ferrante: the friend. Either way he was dangerous.

  ‘We are,’ said Vaughn. ‘Or we’re trying to, but then Luca stole Bosch’s tryptich.’

  ‘That’s where the lyre’s hidden,’ said Rémy.

  Vaughn nodded. ‘We have to assume he knows the lyre is in the third panel, and hope he gives it to us, and not to the other side.’

  Caravaggio stood up. ‘You are such fools. Of course, he’ll give the lyre to the Camarilla, and then he’ll come for me and exact his revenge for my part in Sebina’s death.’

  ‘Sit down, Michele,’ ordered Alessandro. ‘Eat. It’ll keep your mouth busy.’

  Matt pulled his hair back from his face. ‘I just have one question.’

  ‘What?’ said Vaughn.

  ‘How does Orion know so much about what’s happening inside the Camarilla in Rome?’

  Vaughn glanced at Em before answering. ‘Because Zach is undercover at the highest level of the Camarilla.’

  Em dropped her glass. It shattered on the hard concrete floor, and it was several moments before the space quietened.

  ‘Are you kidding me,’ howled Em. ‘The bastard turned my hair to snakes in Chicago. I haven’t forgotten.’

  Vaughn’s face was expressionless. ‘Zach is on our side. For what it’s worth, it killed him to hurt you.’

  ‘I bet it did,’ Em snapped.

  ‘Snakes in the head in return for a snake in his heart,’ chided Caravaggio.

  ‘He and his mom did save me from suffocating in the Titian painting,’ said Rémy, trying to diffuse the tension. He sat on the edge of Alessandro’s bunk. ‘But if Luca gives the Camarilla the lyre—’

  ‘Does the Pope wear a hat?’ said Caravaggio under his breath.

  ‘—then Alessandro’s right. They must have another way to open the portal to Chaos and bring forth the Watchers.’

  Alessandro stepped in front of Rémy who was flipping through Annie’s journal. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘That we need to find another way, too.’

  58.

  Sound and Vision

  Another train rumbled overhead, knocking a bottle of whisky from its cardboard shelf. Caravaggio lunged and caught it before it crashed to the concrete. ‘That would have been a damn shame,’ he said.

  Rémy was buried in his mom’s journal, anxiety etched across his brow while Matt was reading one of Alessandro’s paperbacks in the corner, and Vaughn was stretched on the bunk with his eyes closed, thinking. Alessandro was pacing in front of Rémy.

  ‘What happened to the boy you rescued from the Inquisitor in Spain all those years ago, Alessandro?’ asked Em, sitting next to Rémy and trying not to dwell on the news about Zach. ‘You’ve never told us much about him.’

  ‘His name was Cadjo,’ said Alessandro quietly. ‘But that’s another story for another time. Some secrets are ours to keep.’

  ‘Musica vivificat mortuos,’ Em said absently.

  The irritation faded from Rémy’s expression. ‘Why did you say that? That phrase is everywhere in my mom’s journal.’

  Em held Rémy’s startled gaze. ‘It just came into my head when Alessandro was talking. Last time I was in the Jacob Lawrence painting, recovering from Zach’s snake attack by the way, the phrase was on the mirror on the wall.’

  ‘You must have caught the tail of my memory,’ said Alessandro, sadness clouding his eyes. ‘Cadjo learned the phrase from his family. I taught him how to say it in Latin. It became our motto of sorts.’

  A sudden blast of energy hit Em from the Professor, flashing a series of rippling images like a flip book in her imagination. She grabbed a sketchpad and pencil from the table and started to draw, her fingers sketching furiously, the heel of her hand shading and smudging, her imagination creating a faint halo of light above the page. Nothing animated. She was in control. After a few minutes, breathless, she sat back, her cheeks rosy red, a thin sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  ‘I just saw this in your head, Alessandro,’ she said.

  She had animated the images in a series of panels, each one moving the way she’d seen them in her mind, each panel drawn in a photographic detail that was astonishing. One after the other they rose a few centimetres off the surface, like a comic in 3D. The images showed an underwater shipwreck with the trunk of a tree growing through the middle of the deck, its branches shooting out through iron manacles that waved in the water like limbs. Starting in the second panel and running the rest of the page, the tree transformed into an angel with brown skin, black eyes, and gold-flecked wings rising out of the murky depths. The angel was playing a pitch pipe.

  Alessandro stared at it fascinated. ‘In the slave markets in Seville, I heard men and women tell of such an angel and a lost ship. It must have come into my mind when I was speaking of Cadjo. I believe your mum wrote of it in her journal.’ He glanced at Rémy. ‘It was the ship that carried your ancestor, the first Conjuror to the Americas.’

  Alessandro closed his eyes and placed his hands together against his lips. A train trundled along a nearby tunnel, breaking the silence with the screech of its airbrakes. Everything in the lair shook again.

  ‘The story began like this,’ Alessandro said after a moment. ‘When this ship sailed from Seville, the men and women left standing on the blocks began to chant. The chant became a song so beautiful it brought tears to everyone’s eyes. I asked an old woman chained to an iron stake on the dusty ground what the song was about. She told me it was a lamentation, a song for the dead. The ship was doomed. I asked her how she knew that. She said because the devil was on board.’

  *

  Without understanding why, the music filled Rémy’s mind as Alessandro described it. A song, pure and perfect and magical. He heard his mom singing in his head, saw her dancing across the cracked linoleum of their Chicago kitchen, the room ablaze in light, her voice rising to a crescendo that had brought a young Rémy to his knees. With the song still sounding in his head, he flipped through the journal’s middle pages. ‘My mom noted multiple versions that the Dupree women told each other down the centuries about how the first Conjuror came to America. Ah, here it is.’

  Rémy cleared his throat.

  ‘“The first Conjuror came to America in a slave ship. In 1797 a lone ship drifted up a tributary of the Mississippi. Alonzo Blue, overseer of the Dupree Plantation, spotted the two-decker bobbing in the choppy water. As word spread of the ship’s strange arrival, the field slaves vanished into their damp huts, closed their shutters and shoved pellets of hardtack into their ears. It was as if they knew what was coming.”’

  ‘Alonzo Blue eventually took over the plantation,’ he explained, looking up from the journal. ‘He’s another ancestor of mine.’

  Em nudged him. ‘Keep reading.’

  Rémy did.

  ‘“Then at dusk the voice of an angel singing a wordless aria could be heard, like the fluting sound of the breeze through the sugar cane, or the delicate notes of the harpsichord in the big house’s front parlour. The music floated from the ship in a pulsing silver mist, above the moss-draped oaks, through the rubber trees dripping with wet lichen, dipping and darting across the indigo fields until it reached the party at the plantation house, where handsome guests were sipping sweetened rum from tulip-s
haped glasses on the wide veranda.

  At the cool touch of the mist, the guests’ fingers twitched, their limbs stiffened, their eyes fluttered and their glasses fell to the wooden planks of the porch. The women’s ears trickled blood on to the lace of their white cotton dresses. The men’s collars sliced into the throbbing veins in their necks. Only then did the music stop.”’

  Rémy paused to catch his breath. ‘I could never figure out the next part. It’s a series of numbers and a name that looks like… Douglas?’

  Em tapped a yellow line highlighting the word mist. ‘Why is that highlighted?’

  ‘It means my mom made some kind of annotation.’ Rémy turned to the pocket at the back of the journal and took out a handwritten note. WNG16324.

  ‘It’s a catalogue number,’ said Vaughn.

  He used his phone to access the internet and an image of a painting came onto the screen. It took a few minutes to download since they were underground.

  Jacob Lawrence’s The Visitors gazed at them.

  ‘We need to return to this painting,’ Rémy said. ‘Could it be any more obvious?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone should go anywhere except back to the safe-house in Glasgow,’ said Vaughn, rousing from the bunk and looking worried. ‘If Luca has already given the lyre to the Camarilla, Rémy’s too vulnerable out in the open.’

  ‘No,’ said Rémy, his voice full of determination. ‘If I can’t go to Rome, then I need to follow this trail. I have to see where it leads.’

  Alessandro rested a hand on Rémy’s shoulder. ‘I took an oath a long time ago to protect you, Rémy. Let me come with you.’

  Rémy shook his head. ‘Not this time,’ he said. ‘This is my story to see through to the end.’

  ‘I’ll go with him,’ said Em. ‘No offense, Professor, but a Conjuror and an Animare are stronger than a Guardian and a Conjuror. Besides, I know the family in Lawrence’s painting.’