by Tom Pugh
“Run,” he yelled above the snapping flames. Durant grabbed Aurélie, half carrying her up the fallen bookshelf.
Smoke writhed across the chamber. Flames curled around the entrance, poking into pigeonholes. Longstaff heard Spina scream, even above the sound of tortured timber.
Durant pushed Aurélie into his arms.
“Go.”
The Frenchman turned back. He clambered down the shelf, fell on the bag of scrolls and books.
Longstaff ran, Aurélie beside him, leaping from shelf to shelf. He heard the scrape of wood on stone as the smooth outer wall of the library slipped into water. Please God, let it float. The sluggish current was taking hold as they leapt aboard. Longstaff turned.
“Gaetan!” Where was he? There, bent double beneath the heavy bag. Already, a clear yard of water had opened up between the island and the gently bobbing shelf. Durant threw the bag. Longstaff leaned forward and hauled it aboard. Durant jumped, landing with his legs in the water and scrambling onto the makeshift raft.
Longstaff looked past him, at another shadow in the darkness – Sparrow. He half caught her, half fell beneath her on the wildly rocking raft. Durant laughed.
“A fitting end for the Lord’s hound,” he said. “Killed by a dog.”
The underground river flowed smoothly round a bend in the tunnel and the Library disappeared. They heard the fire’s snap, shelves collapsing – a sound like the end of the world – and then silence. In his jerkin, Longstaff found his tinderbox and one of Durant’s candles. He looked at Aurélie by the light of the weak flame, saw the hurt and fury on her face.
“We have Durant’s bag,” he said. “There must be two hundred scrolls in this section of shelf. More than people have found in a century scouring monasteries and castles.”
The river gathered speed. Water slapped insistently against the sides of their raft. Longstaff felt a change in the air, heard a whisper in the distance. He did not look at Durant or Aurélie, did not want them to see the fear in his eyes.
The air began to press. Longstaff swallowed to unblock his ears. A rising wind blew out his candle, leaving them in darkness. It was close now, nearly upon them.
“The bag,” shouted Durant. “Hold onto the bag.”
Longstaff closed his fist around a clutch of thick laces. He reached for Aurélie. There was a crash, an eruption. Water whipped his face – cold water; a second river ran through these tunnels, an angry river that hurtled into them with the force of a storm.
The wide shelf rose on its side, Longstaff felt himself slipping. He had Aurélie by the waist, pressed her to him as they tumbled under. The bag was above, his world an unfathomable tangle of limbs and water. The weight was terrible, as if planets had been hung from his ankles, a vast pressure building in his chest, choking him.
He fought to raise Aurélie, heard her vomit a non-stop stream of water and curses. The bag was low in the water, Durant sprawled across the top. Longstaff heard Sparrow whine in pain as he fought the current, rolled onto his back, feet striking jagged rocks. The darkness was total. He could hear the shelf ahead of them, crashing through the tunnel, slowing then speeding away. The water’s roar grew louder. Longstaff’s head sank, pulled under by the heavy, waterlogged jerkin. As he raised his arms, pushing Aurélie clear, he thought of the campaign medals hidden in the lining. Fallen comrades marched before him. He saw the parlour at Martlesham, Aurélie beside him in front of the fire. Saw his own blue eyes in his father’s face. It’s no disgrace, dying for your faith.
The world flattened. Aurélie became a sketch, a dozen strokes in charcoal. Longstaff heard the soft murmur of an infinite number of voices, growing louder. The roar on the far side of silence. He smiled, about to breathe the water when the tunnel narrowed, catching the bookcase in its teeth.
Durant grabbed his jerkin as the bag crashed into the shelf. They struggled upright, felt their way along the side of the bookcase, pulling the bag between them. But the water was rising, already up to Longstaff’s waist, slamming against the obstruction. He heard timber screaming, buckling.
“Hurry,” he pushed Aurélie against the smooth side of the tunnel. Her fingers found a ledge. Longstaff made a thief’s ladder with his hands, heaving, hauling himself alongside, the wound in his thigh burning in protest, arms and shoulders shaking with exhaustion. He hoisted Sparrow and the soaking bag, with Durant pushing from below. The Frenchman scrambled up as the river redoubled its furious assault on the bookcase. They heard it splinter in the darkness. And then it was through, borne away on the black torrent of foam.
The ledge had not been carved by nature. Longstaff’s fingers ran through grooves that could only have been made by men. How long had it been here, running beside them in the darkness?
“Do we go back,” yelled Durant, “or press on?”
Longstaff had no desire to return through the maze of dark tunnels and broken corpses. He helped Aurélie to her feet before lifting the water-logged bag onto his shoulders.
“Stay with Gaetan. Don’t let go of him.”
They walked in darkness, feeling their way. The roar of the river grew even louder – there were rapids here, perhaps a waterfall – and then began to fade as the path swung away. Longstaff could hear Durant and Aurélie ahead of him. He did not know how long they walked, just kept putting one foot in front of the other, one hand pressed to his thigh, fingers caked in drying blood, pain reduced to a dull ache. He remembered Vescosi’s words – There must be a second entrance. Slim hope to hold against the night, the deathly silence, broken only by the exhausted shuffle of their feet, Sparrow’s low panting, the wet straps chafing at his shoulder.
He saw the shadow of movement. The darkness had been absolute for so long he thought his mind must be playing tricks on him. There. A smudge of grey against the black; the hint of a silhouette. Sparrow loped ahead of them, towards the light at the end of the tunnel. She chased her tail in the gloomy beam, barking madly, startling a colony of bats. Durant pushed past, clawing through briar and bracken, scattering leaves and sticks, forcing his way towards green grass and blue sky.
Longstaff staggered into sunlight, dropped Durant’s sodden bag and looked round. An hour past dawn on a cloudless day. They’d emerged on the side of a steep hill. Safe, for the moment. They’d survived death by burning and drowning, escaped God’s warriors and the tunnels below. No one was following – Schoff and the rest of Spina’s men must believe them dead. A valley lay below, a river running towards the sea.
Aurélie sank to her knees, stared at the bag, breathing hard as she pulled at the straps and raked through the ruined contents. Sodden clumps of parchment fell away from wooden rollers, ink leached from the pages of forbidden Gospels. Longstaff lifted one of the scrolls. It fell to pieces in his hands.
“Something must have survived.”
Tears rolled down Aurélie’s cheeks. “All gone,” she bit her lip. “Giacomo died for nothing.”
Her look warned Longstaff to stay away. He continued searching through the bag. A scrap came away in his hand. He laid it on a flat stone, hoping the sun’s warmth might reverse the passage of time. A gust of wind flipped it into the air.
Durant shivered and turned away. Longstaff stared at his narrow back, sharp shoulder blades visible through the shirt. This wasn’t the time to ask what Vescosi’s final word had meant: Calais. Aurélie seemed to have forgotten it entirely.
“Giacomo died to save our lives.”
Aurélie began to cry as she remembered the man who’d shown her how to think. She accused herself of failing him. What if she hadn’t let Schoff capture her? What if she hadn’t smashed the panel bearing Mars’ crossed spears? Longstaff did not follow her lead. He knew there were accusations he could level at himself – Spina had been right; there’d been too many coincidences, too many occasions when luck had favoured them – but that could wait for another time.
Gently, he gathered Aurélie in his arms. They were lucky to be alive. She seemed so small against his
chest. Her protector was dead, home destroyed and her dream reduced to ashes in the caves below. He stroked her hair, and slowly gave way to exhaustion.
CHAPTER 38
They slept, protected from the sun’s rays by overhanging leaves. It was mid-afternoon when Longstaff stirred, woken by the sound of crying. He lay on his back, listening as a note of anger wove itself into Aurélie’s sobs, grew louder, burst in a brief thunderclap of rage.
He rolled onto one elbow. She sat with her head in her hands. Durant was nearby, watching with a helpless expression on his face. What do we do now?
Longstaff pressed Aurélie’s hand, remembering a man chained to the ground, others leashed together like dogs, women bound to stakes. Spina had travelled south with fourteen men. He and three others were dead in the Devil’s Library, which left ten. Too many under normal circumstances, but Mathern Schoff thought they were dead.
“We came to find a library,” he said. “To put an end to Spina and his men. It’s time to finish what we started.”
He looked at Durant. The Frenchman nodded.
They climbed out of the valley, took a bearing at the summit and tracked back to the clearing where they’d left the horses. Longstaff’s big grey with the cast in one eye, Durant’s high-stepping animal, Aurélie’s palfrey and Vescosi’s sway-backed chestnut. They were thirsty, angry at having been left so long, but still there; Schoff hadn’t found them, probably hadn’t thought to look.
Longstaff signalled quiet, creeping through the trees. This time, no twisting coil of smoke appeared to lead him to the cave; Spina’s Hounds had stopped the narrow mouth with rocks.
There was no sign of Aurélie when Longstaff returned to the clearing. Durant was looking at the heap of medical equipment. He glanced at Longstaff’s thigh, told him to sit and lower his trousers. He cleaned the wound with iodine and sewed the edges together.
“How many this time?”
“Ten.”
Longstaff nodded, shrugging out of the jerkin; there was no sign of Sir Nicholas Bacon’s letter, stripped away in the tunnels below. He took the needle and thread, repairing the tear in his trousers while Durant removed the scrolls from his pack. They were ruined – dried in lumps the size of Longstaff’s fist, flaking like an old man’s scalp.
Aurélie appeared, wearing fresh hose and tunic. Her face was pale, cheeks red from scrubbing at the tears, eyes hard and flat when she saw Durant.
“No,” she snapped. “We’re not leaving them.”
The Frenchman didn’t argue. He’d cast his doublet aside before reaching the Devil’s Library. He shrugged into the plague coat, bright strips of colour strange in the gloomy clearing. Longstaff made space in his saddle-bag for a dozen herbs bound with ribbon, powders in thin leather bags, pastes in tiny glass jars. Durant found room for his bone-saw and phlebotomy cups in Vescosi’s pack.
They led the horses to a stream, knelt beside them and drank their fill of the brackish water. The trees were thinner here, undergrowth sparse as it gave way to the bleak plateau. Longstaff produced soldier’s rations; a cheerless supper staring up at the conical hill, waiting for night to fall. Durant reversed his coat of seven colours. Aurélie stripped and oiled her musket, while her teacher ran a whetstone down the katzbalger’s sharp edge.
They rode in moonlight, leaving the horses at the base of the hill, climbing in single file, creeping through Jupiter’s deserted temple. Longstaff saw a length of chain among the rubble, wrapped it round his shoulders before starting down the stairs.
The sentry was stationed halfway between temple and village. Longstaff crawled near, dropped the chain around his neck, put a knee in the small of his back and crushed the windpipe.
“Nine,” he whispered in the darkness.
He led them away from the steps, across the face of the hill, angling down to a point above the small fishing village. He’d been this way before; less than three days ago, though it felt like weeks. Durant and Aurélie followed him to the same shallow ledge. Carefully, the three of them peered down.
Six men in monk’s robes, working by the light of a bonfire. Two standing beside a table, picking over bits of worked silver, golden rings, copper broaches, melting them down in small crucibles. The remaining four piled driftwood and sticks of furniture against the church’s wooden sides.
“What are they doing?” whispered Aurélie.
Longstaff and Durant exchanged a look. “Getting ready to dispose of the evidence. They won’t want word of this reaching Rome.”
Longstaff heard the low intake of breath as she caught his meaning.
“But… ”
Durant put a hand on her shoulder.
“That’s why we’re here.”
“The men are locked inside,” Longstaff pointed at a shadowy figure, chained to the hard earth. “Most of them, anyway. And the women and children are in the caves.” He gave Aurélie his matchlock musket and tinderbox. “First yours, then mine, then yours again. Fast as you can, Aurélie.”
He rose with the first light of dawn, spinning the chain around his head.
“Be careful,” Aurélie placed the musket-stock against her cheek, closing one eye.
They scrambled down the cliff of twisted stone. One of Spina’s men turned to stare, wood falling from his hands, mouth open in slack-jawed disbelief. Longstaff released the chain, humming through the still air, wrapping round the monk’s neck.
Two men ran at Durant. He heard the crack of musket fire, saw one of them drop. The second crouched, looking round in terror. Longstaff kicked him in the head. The remaining pair were running for the caves. Aurélie fired again, winging one; he tripped on the hem of his robe and fell heavily.
As Longstaff disappeared into the dark tunnel, Durant looked at the men lying in the village square. There were times he despaired of life, rarely more than now as he cut their throats.
Seizing a torch, Longstaff ran through sluggish air, black smoke eddying against the low ceiling. Someone tried to block his way. The face was familiar; two days ago Longstaff had spared this man’s life in the ruined Temple of Jupiter. He parried a feeble stroke and cut him down without mercy.
“Three.”
He pressed on, entering a womb-like cavern. Two dozen women and children cowering against the far wall. Schoff stood in front of them, flanked by two men in monk’s robes. He was smiling, gesturing at a water-barrel, inviting the women to drink.
Longstaff thought of the wood piled against the church. He shook his head as the full horror of Schoff’s plan dawned on him. Fire for the men, poison for the women – the loyal lieutenant, determined to remove all traces of the master’s failure.
“Bastard,” he spat.
Schoff spun, eyes widening. “I watched the Library burn. You’re dead.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
Face contorting in rage, Schoff screamed at his two men: “Kill him!”
Longstaff charged, not giving them time to separate. He threw his torch at the nearest, who flinched, sword-arm rising to protect his face. Longstaff rolled and took him in the belly.
“Two,” he stepped back, loosening his shoulders, waiting for Schoff’s last man.
The monk attacked bravely, swinging his sword in a whistling arc. Longstaff let him come, body and blade in perfect harmony, slipping inside a wild slash and burying the katzbalger in soft flesh. He stood back, watching as the man’s chin dropped to his chest, hands lifted to the stomach. The knees gave way and he collapsed slowly to the ground.
“One,” said Longstaff.
Schoff stood beside the barrel. “I am a man of God.”
Longstaff sheathed his sword. “I’m not going to touch you,” he gestured. “Drink.”
A woman, with a scar down one cheek, stepped away from the crowd. Her face was calm as she claimed the dead monk’s sword, then turned on Schoff.
“No,” said Longstaff. “Let him die by his own hand.”
She ran fingertips along the sharp edge before placing the point agai
nst Schoff’s chalk-white throat. “Choose,” she whispered.
“I am Elect, predestined for heaven. Spill one drop of my blood and you’ll spend eternity in Hell,” he kicked the barrel over. The woman set her feet, hands cupping the hilt, jaw clenched as she pushed the weapon home.
*
Durant knelt beside the wooden church, sword discarded for a scalpel, probing the lock.
He nearly had it when a tide of women flooded round, desperate for their menfolk, rushing at the building. The men roared in reply, demanding freedom, hammering at the stout walls with their fists.
Durant forced himself to take a deep breath, closed his ears to the shouts and rotated his wrist with painstaking care. The lock sprang open.
Men came streaming out, taking wives and sisters in their arms, lifting wide-eyed children on their shoulders.
Durant stepped away, ignored, mind’s eye conjuring images of these people as they might have been; charred flesh, lungs black with smoke. Two unsmiling men were staring at him and he closed his coat, hiding the bright strips of colour.
Longstaff appeared from the caves. Aurélie ran to join him.
“Are you hurt?”
Durant snorted. The Englishman was filthy – blood leaking from his thigh where the stitches had come apart – but the blue eyes were as steady as ever. Durant felt a sudden, irrational surge of rage. Guilty conscience, he told himself, lifting fingertips to his chest.