‘OK,’ said Em. ‘So what’s the cipher?’
‘It’s the clef and the scale,’ said Matt. He took the sheet of paper from Caravaggio and stood next to Rémy at the board. ‘I’m guessing the type of clef tells you which letter is an A or whatever, and you take it from there.’
‘It’s a bass clef,’ said Caravaggio.
‘And the scale of C,’ said Rémy.
He began to write letters under the notes, erasing two, inverting them, adding two more, erasing them. He scribbled for a few minutes until he had deciphered the message in the music.
Trust a Scot with your whisky but never your women.
Caravaggio laughed aloud. He reached for Em’s hand. Wordlessly they ran to the doors.
‘Where are you two going?’ Matt shouted after them in bewilderment.
‘When we were digging around in Hadrian’s tomb,’ Em shouted back as Caravaggio heaved open the doors, ‘we found markings on the bricks that matched the markings on the chanter from the Duke of Albion’s tomb.’
Matt and Rémy grabbed their jackets and followed Caravaggio and Em outside. Together, they jogged into the woods, climbing in a line towards the cemetery. The sun was rising over the Cairngorms, and a light autumn breeze was moving in the trees.
‘Your Duke of Albion was the Highlander in the carriage on the day that I died,’ Caravaggio told Rémy and Matt as they climbed. ‘He hinted he was more than just a duke, but I was too close to death to pay attention. When he threw me from the carriage, he took my canvases.’
The door to the duke’s tomb at the base of the Martyrs’ Monument still stood open. Rémy took the lead, retracing the narrow stone steps deep into the hillside. At the crumbled wall outside the crypt, he stopped.
‘The canvas is why the duke had an Animare seal him inside his tomb,’ he said. ‘For extra protection.’
‘I’m getting tired of climbing in and out of tombs,’ grumbled Em. ‘I need a spa day.’
They clambered inside one after the other. Caravaggio went directly to the whisky barrels. With Rémy’s help he dragged one away from the wall. It sloshed. With a shrug, he rolled it towards Matt.
‘Hey!’ said Matt, jumping out of the way.
There were at least six more barrels to go.
‘A little help here,’ said Caravaggio.
The fifth barrel didn’t slosh. Rémy rolled it in front of Caravaggio.
‘Em,’ he said. ‘Do the honours?’
Em shoved the barrel as hard as she could against the wall. The wood splintered on impact, and sawdust spilled on to the ground – along with a battered leather case wrapped in muslin.
Caravaggio gently lifted the case and set it on top of the duke’s coffin. He unwrapped the cotton, then carefully untied the strap of the leather case. Slipping his hand inside, he slowly pulled out his canvas.
‘It smells of peaches,’ said Em.
Caravaggio examined the true Devil’s Interval. ‘Must we destroy this?’ he said wistfully.
‘Oh, man, in a heartbeat,’ said Rémy. ‘It would take a big element out of the prophecy…’
‘I can feel a but coming on,’ said Em.
Rémy pulled a face. ‘Zach’s mom, Orianna. She was very clear about keeping the painting safe, not destroying it. There’s more to this than we realize, I think. We should wait until we know more.’
‘Then that is settled,’ said Caravaggio, kissing Tomas, his angel.
*
Outside, they stood on the hillside and watched the church below light up with strobe lights.
‘Looks like Vaughn and the others have faded back,’ said Matt.
‘I suppose I shall have to throw myself on someone’s mercy,’ Caravaggio said, tucking the canvas away. ‘What about yours?’
Matt snorted a laugh.
Rémy started down the hillside first. ‘Friends,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Time to go face the music.’
Em caught up to him and linked her arm through his. ‘How long have you been waiting to use that line?’
He grinned at her. ‘My whole life.’
We hope you enjoyed this book.
The next instalment in the Orion Chronicles will be released in spring 2018
For more information, click the following links
Acknowledgements
About John & Carole E. Barrowman
About the Orion Chronicles
About the Hollow Earth Trilogy
An Invitation from the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like Rémy, Matt and Em, we’ve altered reality a wee bit in this novel. The Book of Songs is our invention, but the Book of Enoch is not. We conjured up St Mungo’s Castle, the village of Kentigern, the Martyrs Monument and altered the layout of Castel Sant’Angelo, but Peppa Pig and toasted cheese are real. Except for the art under the protection of the Camarilla and Luca’s coronation frieze, the other paintings in the story are in galleries and museums round the world. If you’d like to learn more about the art and the music in Nephilim, please visit www.barrowmanbooks.com.
Caravaggio lived a remarkable life and although we’ve taken obvious liberties, we’ve tried to be true to his temperament, his impetuous and passionate nature, and, of course, his art. Caravaggio’s death is shrouded in mystery, but we do know this: he died in 1610 and a few of his paintings disappeared around that same time. Our imaginations fleshed out the rest. If you’d like to learn more about Caravaggio, we recommend Andrew-Graham Dixon’s A Life Sacred and Profane: Caravaggio and Francine Prose’s Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles.
Every book takes a ‘village’ to create and we’d like to publicly sing praises to ours. Thanks to Lucy Courtenay, our amazing editor, everyone at Head of Zeus, particularly Laura Palmer, Madeleine O’Shea and Suzanne Sangster, and our terrific agents, Gavin Barker and Georgina Capel.
Finally halleluiahs and hugs to our husbands, Kevin Casey and Scott Gill.
With love
Carole and John
2017
About John & Carole E. Barrowman
JOHN BARROWMAN is an actor, a recording artist, a presenter and Carole’s wee brother. He’s best known for playing Captain Jack in the television series Doctor Who and Torchwood and the Dark Archer in Arrow.
CAROLE E. BARROWMAN is an English professor and the Director of Creative Studies in Writing at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and she’s John’s big sister. Carole and John love art of all kinds and wish they could draw as well as Matt and Em. They have collaborated on six books together.
Find Carole on Facebook
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Visit Carole’s website
About the Orion Chronicles
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About the Hollow Earth Trilogy
Long ago, the Order of Era Mina bound all the beasts of myth and legend into the pages of a single tome. They called the prison they had created the Hollow Earth – a nightmare world built to keep our world safe. Over centuries, their Order grew strong: the men and women with the power to bind and animate the magic of this world learned to live in secret among us, watched over by their constant companions, the Guardians. Each Animarus was tasked with the protection of this world. Each Guardian was tasked with the protection of an Animarus. And in time the history of the Order was forgotten, their relics lost, and the Hollow Earth became nothing but a story.
Now, twelve-year-old twins Matt and Emily Calder are about to discover this world for themselves…
All three are available as an omnibus edition:
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An Invitation from the Publisher
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First published in the UK in 2017 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Carole Barrowman and John Barrowman, 2017
The moral right of Carole Barrowman and John Barrowman to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781781856413
ISBN (E): 9781781856406
Jacket images: Shutterstock.com
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