The Lazarus Vault

by Tom Harper

  She stood in the station hall and stared at the departure boards. Through her shocked and exhausted eyes, the names blurred into a meaningless void, a nowhere place. Her shoulders ached from the weight of the backpack; she wondered what was inside, but didn’t dare take it out in public. What could possibly be worth so much violence and terror?

  Her mind was drifting. She forced herself to focus.

  You’re carrying something on your back that your father died trying to get hold of, that Monsalvat are willing to kill to get back. Harry might have some friends, but he’s almost certainly dead and you’ve no way of getting in touch with them. You’re on your own.

  Where do you go now?

  XXXII

  Île de Pêche, 1142

  THE COUNT’S CORPSE lies headless on the floor. Blood pools around the altar. At the door, two of our men are battling back the guards who’ve arrived too late. Malegant rips open the lid of the golden reliquary, peers in, then hurls it at the window. The glass cracks; bones and dust fall out of the casket. It’s not what he came for.

  He gestures to a side door in the chapel wall.

  ‘Through there.’

  Four of us follow of him into a tiny vestry. A ring of keys lies on the table. Malegant snatches them up, then leads us out by another door into the courtyard. To our left, the guards are still attacking the chapel. We fall on them like wolves: trapped between the men in the chapel and the men outside, they’re quickly slaughtered.

  I feel something peck my face, too hard for a raindrop. A small crater’s appeared in the wall in front of me, gouged out by a crossbow bolt. I hurl myself to the ground. The man beside me isn’t so lucky: the bolt hits his shoulder, drives through the chain mail and lodges in his back. I think about pulling it out, but it would only make the bleeding worse.

  More missiles rattle around us. They’re coming from the windows in the keep.

  ‘We have to get in,’ Malegant says. We don’t have shields, but Malegant grabs one of the dead guards and hauls him to his feet. He holds the corpse in front of him like a rag doll. Bolts prick it like a pincushion.

  I have a better idea. I tip over a water barrel and roll it up the slope, crawling behind on hands and knees. Halfway to the tower, it no longer protects me: I kick it away and sprint the last few yards to the shelter of the wall. Crossbow bolts clatter off the ground behind me.

  Malegant’s already there, an arrow-riddled corpse beside him. He’s lethal, but I want to keep him close. He has an aura, a sense of invulnerability that I hope will protect me.

  The rest of the men are still back by the chapel. Malegant orders them forward. One of them carries the priest’s silver-bound bible as a shield; another tries to swat away the bolts with an oar. The rest have to take their chances.

  But they’re only there as a distraction. Malegant leads me up a thin flight of stairs to the curtain wall. To our left, a small door goes through to the keep. It’s locked, but one of the keys Malegant took from the vestry opens it.

  The archers didn’t expect us to get through. They’re standing by the windows, taking aim at their targets in the courtyard. Malegant and I have killed two of them before they even notice us. Another turns, a tensed crossbow pointing straight at my chest. If he loosed then, I’d be dead. But Malegant’s aura protects me. Fear makes the crossbowman’s hand quiver: the bolt goes wide, so close the fletches almost brush my cheek. I cut him down.

  Malegant’s dealt with the others. There’s nothing in the corridor now except corpses and blood and unspent missiles – and, halfway down, a pair of double doors.

  We enter into a great hall, with a fireplace in its centre, and wooden benches pushed back against the walls. At the far end stand two high doors, one black as mulberries, the other ivory-white: they remind me of the goldsmith’s chequerboard table in the vault in Troyes. One’s ajar – I can see a white-sleeved arm reaching around to close it. Malegant takes a knife from his belt and throws. The Devil’s with him today. There’s a scream from behind the door as the knife pins the hand to the wood. He can’t close the door now: his own arm’s jamming it.

  Malegant wrenches the door open. The man within gets dragged out in its wake. Except it isn’t a man. It’s the woman in the white dress I saw from the courtyard. Blood’s running down her arm, soaking into the sleeve, spreading towards her elbow. She must be in agony but she doesn’t make a sound.

  I don’t see her face – not as it really is. I’m back in Tourcy, at the chapel on the edge of the forest. Her hair and skin have become paler, her fine dress reduced to a torn shift. Ada.

  Malegant pulls the knife out of the door and slits her throat.

  Strange to tell, all I remember of that moment is what I see through the door. It looks like another chapel, though without saints or crucifixes. It must be built out on a promontory: clear glass windows on three sides look down to the sea, so that the whole room feels like a boat adrift. The ceiling is a rounded vault painted twilight blue, with golden stars in their constellations. At the far end of the room, under the windows, a white stone stands alone on an ivory table. A black lance hangs over it, suspended point down by a rope from the roof-beam. With the window behind showing only mist, it seems to float in space.

  The woman sinks to the floor. Blood blossoms through her skirts like a rose. Something breaks inside me; I raise my sword. Malegant must be expecting it. He spins around – his sword strikes mine with a clang that echoes through the hall like a bell. My blade shatters. All that’s left is a fractured stump.

  ‘Peter of Camros.’ Malegant laughs. ‘I wondered when you’d remember yourself.’

  I don’t know how he knows that name. I’m lost in a cloud, waking from a nightmare into something far worse. I can hear the sounds of fire and slaughter in the distance as the rest of the castle is devastated.

  I hurl the broken sword at his face and run. Across the hall, into the main stair. More of our men are coming up from below – I can’t go down. I go up, chasing around until it ends in an ironbound door that – thank God – isn’t locked.

  After the darkness of the stairs, even the fog is blinding. I’m in an open guardroom at the top of the tower. I stagger across to the rampart. There’s no bolt on the door, no way of keeping them back. Even if I could hold them, there’s only one way out.

  I unstrap my helmet and pull it off. I can hear shouts, feet pounding up the stairs. How long do I have? I try to remove my armour, but the leather knots have shrunk in the wet. I take my knife and cut the cords. The hauberk falls to the ground like a broken chain. The footsteps are close, lots of them. I rip off my quilted coat. I’m left wearing nothing but a thin linen tunic.

  I perch on the battlements. White-capped waves champ below me like teeth. I feel dizzy. The door bangs open.

  I jump.

  XXXIII

  Oxford

  ‘ELLIE?’

  Doug peered out of the door into the darkness. A warm yellow light framed him like a halo; from inside, the mouthwatering smells of frying onion and bacon drifted out. Ellie realised she was ravenous.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course. Are you OK? Why haven’t you been answering my messages?’

  She glimpsed herself in the hall mirror and realised why he looked so shocked. Her face was grey and worn. Underground soot still made a streak above her right eye; tears had left long silver fingers down her cheeks, though she couldn’t remember crying.

  She toppled forward and Doug caught her. He brought her in to his sitting room and made her a cup of tea. He had an old-fashioned kettle that whistled when it boiled; the smells of gas and steam brought back memories of winter evenings in the kitchen with her mother. She started crying again.

  ‘Why don’t you clean up?’

  He took her upstairs and ran a bath. Part of her protested that she didn’t have time, it wasn’t safe. The pressure was like a clock ticking inside her. But she didn’t resist. The water was so hot it made her skin blush scarlet.

/>   She lay there almost submerged, her face sweating in the steam, her hair fanned out in the water as if she were drowning. Doug sat on the floor next to the towel rail. With his fisherman’s jumper and cup of tea, Ellie thought he looked almost absurdly comforting.

  ‘I got your text about your mother. I’m so sorry.’

  He said it cautiously, but he didn’t hide the reproach. Ellie slid deeper into the water.

  ‘When was the funeral?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ It felt like a million years ago.

  ‘I would have liked to be there. I don’t know what’s going on with us, but –’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s – crazier than you can imagine.’ Tears began to flow again, mixing with the sweat on her face. ‘What happened to Mum, that’s not even half of it. It’s …’ She slid down so that the water covered her face completely, then broached the surface again.

  ‘I need you to help.’

  Doug leaned forward. His face brimmed with confusion.

  ‘Can you tell me?’

  She told the story from the beginning, though she didn’t tell him everything. She wondered if he realised, if he noticed the places where the story went inexplicably vague, and if he noticed that those places were always when she was talking about Blanchard. Blanchard was the void at the centre of her story. She saw, as she told it, how little sense it made without him.

  But perhaps it was so incredible that Doug didn’t see the omissions. He listened in silence. When she was done, he had only one question.

  ‘What was it for?’

  Ellie stared at the ceiling. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t dare open the box in public.’

  Doug glanced to the corner, where her bag lay beside a heap of stripped-off clothes. ‘Shall we?’

  She found some old clothes left over from the summer and dressed, adding one of Doug’s heavy sweaters. She liked the weight on her body, his scent around her.

  They drew shut the curtains in the living room and knelt on the floor, like children at Christmas. Ellie opened the bag.

  Was it all for this?

  She could see Doug thinking the same thing. A cardboard box and a leather tube. Could they really be worth dying for? Rain rattled on the windows: a fearful instinct made them both glance towards it. She remembered something Blanchard had once said. Money is a fiction, a suspension of disbelief. Value is only what two parties can agree on at any given time.

  Blanchard thought it was worth killing for. Her father had believed it was worth dying for. That was some sort of agreement.

  Doug slit open the tape on the box with a kitchen knife. Ellie opened the lid. They both stared in.

  London

  Destrier had had some bad days in his life, some very bad indeed, but this was up there. He’d been awake since 1 a.m. and he still hadn’t found Ellie. The lack of sleep he could deal with: the lack of results was a problem. He’d already been to Paris and back that day. He’d waited at the Gare du Nord with his men, watching the passengers drain off the train until it was empty. The phone signal said she was still aboard, so he’d picked up a discarded ticket and talked his way on, pretending to have left his bag behind. He’d found the phone in the luggage rack: the station staff couldn’t understand why he’d be so furious to recover his lost property.

  It had been a long trip back to London to face Blanchard and Saint-Lazare.

  He cracked his knuckles and forced himself to be calm. He didn’t blame himself: he’d never been troubled by guilt. If he felt anything, it was pure rage – rage that these people had disrupted his carefully arranged life. He hated them for it, and the hatred spurred his desire for revenge. He’d find them and tear them apart, make them pay for what they done to him. Find Ellie, get the box back, everything would be fine.

  But he had to do it quickly. It might not be his fault, but it was certainly his responsibility. And the men waiting in the war room on the fifth floor weren’t known for their patience.

  So where had she gone? Not back to Newport – he had men watching. Nor to the Barbican apartment. He’d pulled it apart and found nothing, though he hadn’t really thought she’d be that stupid. Did she have a fallback meeting with the opposition?

  He ran through her recent e-mails and phone calls, looking for anything out of the ordinary. Numbers she hung up on before they answered, calls that lasted under a minute. There was nothing. He had to admit, she’d been clever.

  He paused as he found a number that looked strange. An Oxford dialling code. He entered it onto her phone and got the name straight away. Doug.

  Hadn’t she dumped him?

  He found the recording of the most recent call she’d made to Doug and listened. ‘I love you.’ The giveaway pause. ‘I love you too.’

  It wasn’t much to go on, but he knew he was right. The feeling in his gut told him so. He took the lift to the basement parking and slid into the Aston Martin. He pressed the accelerator: the engine’s growl echoed around the garage.

  His satnav said it would take ninety-seven minutes. He reckoned he could do it in under an hour.

  Oxford

  Ellie squeezed her hands down the sides of the box and lifted out the contents. It was a cube, about a foot square. The surface was black, cold and hard like obsidian, smooth as glass. Ellie twisted it around on the carpet, looking for a hinge or a crack or a lid. All she saw was her own reflection skewed back at her. It was surprisingly heavy, though the weight wasn’t evenly distributed inside. She could feel one side was definitely heavier, which she assumed was down.

  ‘I’ve got a hammer,’ Doug said.

  Ellie didn’t answer. She was remembering her first day at work, two slabs of black plastic left on her desk as if by some lost civilisation or alien intelligence. She rolled the box over to make it right-way up, then stroked her hand across the gleaming surface.

  A red light shone up at them. It was the same as her phone: glowing numbers hovering in the darkness below the surface. Only instead of a keypad, it was a grid of letters, like a wordsearch.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know the password,’ said Doug.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’ve got a friend in the Maths department who does some work on cryptography. He might be able to tell us more.’

  Ellie didn’t bother to correct the assumption he’d made. She could see by the clock on the wall she’d already been here over an hour. The pressure-gauge inside her was redlining again.

  She set the black box aside and pulled the lid off the leather tube. She reached in. A scrolled-up sheet of paper – no, vellum – supple to the touch. She pulled it out as gently as she could and laid it on Doug’s coffee table.

  For the first time since the jaws of the vault snapped shut, she felt a pulse of hope. Finally, something that might be worth something. It looked like a poem, eight lines written on the vellum in a bold, medieval hand that reminded her of Blanchard’s handwriting.

  ‘Is that …?’

  ‘Old French,’ said Doug. She caught the shock in his voice and looked up.

  ‘What? Does it say something useful, some kind of clue?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘The poem?’

  ‘This exact piece of vellum.’ He gazed into her eyes, as confused as she was. ‘I held it in my hands, just like you are now.’

  Ellie stared at him. ‘That’s impossible. I pulled it out of the vault this morning.’

  Doug pointed to a place halfway down the page, where the text nimbly diverted around a small hole in the vellum.

  ‘You know how you make parchment? You pull it tight on a frame, like a drumhead, then scrape it with a knife until it’s paper thin. The edges of the knife are curved, but sometimes a corner catches the skin and nicks it. The tension in the frame means even a pinprick gets stretched to something you could put your finger through.’

  Ellie nodded. She knew.

  ‘But vellum’s expensive, especially in the twelfth century, so you don’t thro
w out the whole sheet just because of a small hole. If you’re the scribe, you work around it – literally. That hole in the eighth line was there when the scribe wrote it, and it was there three months ago when I examined it myself.’

  Ellie still didn’t get it.

  ‘You remember Mr Spencer and his Scottish castle?’

  Did she? So much had happened since then.

  ‘The old man in the wheelchair. The poem he wanted me to look at.’ Doug stabbed his finger at the vellum sheet; his fingertip hovered a millimetre above the surface. ‘This was it.’

  Mr Spencer. The Spenser prize. She’d wondered about it at the time and dismissed it as coincidence.

  The Spenser foundation. Legrande Holdings. Saint-Lazare Investments (UK).

  She rolled up the vellum and slid it back in its tube. It made a hollow thud as it hit the end, a decisive sound. Doug didn’t understand.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what it says?’

  ‘We need to leave.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Anywhere. The man who owns that vault, my client, Michel Saint-Lazare – he must be the same as your Mr Spencer. I don’t know why he got you involved, but he obviously knows all about you. He must know about you and me, too. They’ll come here.’

  She twitched the side of the curtain and peered out at the street. The lines of parked cars stood like sentinels all along the pavement, their wet windows reflecting the orange glow of the streetlamps. Was someone waiting inside one of them?

  ‘There won’t be a train for another hour.’

  ‘No public transport. They’ll be watching all the stations and airports. We’ll need a car.’

  Doug opened his hands and made a hopeless gesture. And? Neither of them owned a car.

  ‘We might be able to hire one at the station.’

  ‘We can’t hire anything. No credit cards.’ She caught the look he was giving her. ‘Don’t you get it yet? These people can snoop everywhere, and if they find us, they’ll kill us. If you think I’m crazy, just say so and I’ll go by myself.’