The Wolves of Paris

by Michael Wallace

  But Nemours stood at the center of a small, but growing knot of men, regrouping for the attack. He shouted courage to his men and their resolve stiffened visibly with every passing moment. This was the man, Lorenzo saw, who had rallied his troops to victory against an overwhelming force of English knights and footmen at Gerberoy.

  By the time Lorenzo and Marco reached the provost’s side, the man’s triumph was turning to a look of confusion. He stared after the wolves, who fled deeper into the cathedral.

  “Where the devil are they going?”

  “They’re escaping,” Lorenzo explained, gasping. “Into the crypts.”

  “What?”

  “A secret passage. We have to stop them or it will start all over again.”

  “You heard him,” Nemours roared to his men. “After them!”

  Twenty men gave chase. Burdened by breastplates and helms, they fell behind the two brothers from Florence, who sprinted to the lead, brandishing their swords. They ran over and past dead men-at-arms, priests and monks with shredded robes and gaping wounds. Here and there lay the carcass of a wolf.

  The wolves reached the stairway down into the crypt. At least half their number had fallen, or were trapped in small battles throughout the nave, wounded and unable to escape, but a good dozen stood in this knot. These included the biggest, strongest brutes, mostly uninjured, still fighting with a savagery beyond that of any man or beast. Courtaud was with them. Another instant and he would lead them down that hole and into the catacombs beyond.

  And then, when it seemed too late to stop them, the wolves turned as one. A collective cry howled from their throats.

  The brothers drew short as the wolves raced back toward them, snarling. Shoulder to shoulder, Lorenzo and Marco braced themselves as the first two leaped for them. But then Nemours arrived and suddenly all was a confusion of fur and teeth and steel. Screams and howls. The wolves drove them back step by step.

  Lorenzo didn’t understand it. What were they doing? Why didn’t they escape when they had the chance? Was their blood lust so great that Courtaud would sacrifice them all to kill a few more men?

  Because now all three sets of doors of the cathedral hung open and men came rushing in. The last part of Nemours’s trap had arrived at last—men from the watch, those who had hidden in the cathedral close, others roused from the gates and walls of the Cité. Dozens poured in. The wolves fought in a ferocious cluster, tearing down men right and left, but two newcomers joined the battle for every one who fell. Men shouted in triumph at their pending victory, even as their comrades continued to fall.

  A single, solitary figure crept away from the battle. Almost a shadow, really, it was so cloaked in darkness. Lorenzo almost didn’t see it—wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t been looking for Courtaud, needing to see the pack leader die with his own eyes. The red wolf had torn apart three men in the few moments since the wolves turned, but when a sword slashed across his back, he retreated toward one of the stone columns, where he promptly disappeared. Lorenzo had no idea what evil magic this was, but he was certain the shadow was the pack leader.

  “Look!” he told his brother.

  Marco stared into the gloom where Lorenzo pointed with his sword. His breath hissed out. A pool of shadow slithered across the floor. The shadow brushed between legs and past battles and nobody paid it any attention. It reached the crypt and disappeared into the darkness below.

  “Follow me,” Lorenzo said.

  The two brothers fought their way toward the crypt. A wolf flew past, a spear shaft broken off in its side. But if it meant to escape, it chose the wrong way to run. It charged into the middle of the enraged mob still pouring down the center of the nave, which fell upon it with swords and maces.

  To Lorenzo’s surprise, Montguillon had regained his feet at the top of the stairs. Using a dagger, the man sawed a strip of cloth from his robe and tied it around his neck to stop the bleeding.

  “I thought you were dead,” Lorenzo said. “That wolf was tearing out your throat.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Not nothing, exactly. An ugly wound, but not fatal. At least not until it had time to fester.

  The prior looked down the steps into the crypt. “Did you see? Some new devilry is at work. The big red wolf turned into a shadow and escaped. He was injured—I have to go after him. Now, before he gets too far.”

  “Not alone you won’t,” Lorenzo said. “We’re coming with you.”

  “Where is Simon?” Montguillon asked, looking around. “Where is he?”

  “I am here, Father,” Simon said.

  He’d been to one side, bent over two fallen friars. Lorenzo expected him to be covered in blood and gore like so many of the other survivors. But even though he was only a few feet from the battle raging in front of the choir, he looked untouched.

  “Are you going down?” Simon said. “Let me come with you. Together—”

  “Stay with the other brothers,” Montguillon interrupted. “Minister to the injured.”

  “But I can help you, Father.”

  “No. If I fall, only you know what happened here. Tell the subprior. Renew the hunt until every one of these devils is dead.”

  Simon gave a slight bow of the head. “As you wish.”

  So clean and uninjured. It was almost like the young friar had been hiding in one of the shrines that lined the cathedral, ignored by the wolves and ignoring them in turn.

  Lorenzo glanced at Marco to find his brother staring back with a blazing intensity. No words passed between them. None were necessary.

  It was Simon, Marco’s look said. He is the traitor.

  Lorenzo grabbed Simon’s arm as he turned to obey the prior and minister to his fellow Dominicans.

  “No, you’ll come with us,” Lorenzo said. “We’ll provide the swords. The Dominicans have the knowledge to help us track this demon and finish him.”

  Montguillon started to argue, but the other three were already turning toward the stairs that descended into the crypt. The battle was almost over above, with only a handful of wolves still fighting. But so many men had died, and those last few wolves would go down with terrible difficulty. They had no time to wait for Nemours to regroup, to receive notice that one had escaped, and to send help. It would be Lorenzo, Marco, and the two monks or nobody.

  Marco sheathed his sword and grabbed a torch at the top of the stairs. Montguillon grabbed another, and Simon a third. Lorenzo kept his sword in hand. The prior led the four down the stairs, followed by the younger monk, with Marco and Lorenzo behind.

  A simple stone room sat at the bottom of the staircase. Torch shadows flickered along the walls. Four separate passageways branched from the stone room, narrow enough they would only get through in single file, and with low ceilings to force them to duck. Lorenzo didn’t relish the thought of chasing a wolf down those passages.

  “Which one though?” he muttered. He was still watching the young friar out of the corner of his eye, and caught Marco doing the same.

  Simon bent to the ground and gestured for Montguillon to hold down his torch. “Here.”

  Blood speckled the stone. It left a trail that led into one of the four passageways. Without waiting for a consensus, Montguillon thrust out his torch, ducked into the passage and hurried forward. The other three followed, with the brothers once again bringing up the rear.

  The sounds of battle disappeared behind thick stone walls. The air was damp and smelled of decay.

  Niches lined either wall, filled with the bones of the dead. One niche held thigh bones, all separated and stacked like kindling. The next held forearm bones, or the small bones of the hands and feet. Around the next bend they faced row after row of skulls, staring back from darkened eye sockets. The eye sockets seemed to move back and forth as the torchlight shifted the shadows. Mold blackened the walls and turned the stone slimy to the touch.

  They walked perhaps two hundred feet through various twists and branches before they came to a gate that blocked
an even narrower corridor. The gate had a thick, rusting lock, but the lock was open and dangling, and the gate was open as well. A tuft of gray fur hung from the edge of the gate, as if one of the wolves had caught itself during the mad rush past the gate and left a patch behind.

  The stone of the ossuary corridors had been dressed and fitted neatly. It changed on the other side of the gate, more dirt than stone, with the ground rough, as if it had been dug by an army of mole-like men, down here with shovels, stooped and laboring in the dark. This clearly marked the edge of the cathedral walls, and the beginning of the catacombs that riddled the Île de la Cité, the ancient heart of Paris. Some of these tunnels, Lorenzo realized, might have been here for hundreds of years. At one time, Paris had been an outpost of the Roman Empire.

  Montguillon held his torch down and scraped a fingernail along the lock. Chunks of rust flaked off in his hand. He came up with a frown.

  “But who opened the lock?” he asked in a low voice.

  Even his whisper carried along the tunnel.

  “Never mind,” Simon said. “Hurry. He’s getting away.”

  As the two friars continued ahead, Marco grabbed Lorenzo’s arm and shot him another look.

  Don’t take your eyes off him.

  Lorenzo nodded his understanding.

  There had been a traitor. Courtaud may carry some dark magic—the ability to hide himself in shadow—but they’d spotted the wolves jumping out of Nemours’s chatelet into the moat. They couldn’t fly. So how had they penetrated the fortress in the first place? How had they crossed the raised drawbridge over the moat, passed between the pair of towers at the gate, and slipped through the lowered portcullis to attack the castle interior?

  Someone must have helped them. Lorenzo had suspected as much for some time, but he couldn’t figure out who or why. It didn’t make sense. Giuseppe had been chained in the dungeon, and everyone else was either a guard or servant, untouched at that point by the wolves, or from the party that had fled in terror along the road while packs of wolves leaped at their sleigh to drag them off and eat them.

  When Lorenzo saw Simon standing there uninjured, untouched by the battle, everything came together. Simon hadn’t faced attack on the sleigh, either. Hadn’t fought the wolves at any time. Why?

  Lucrezia’s letter to the Dominicans was the key—Lorenzo should have guessed it before. To complete her plan and turn her husband into a wolf, unable to change back to human form, she’d needed a correct translation of the Slavonic. A doctor at the university had pointed her to the Dominican monastery of Saint-Jacques.

  Who had done the translation? Lorenzo had assumed it was one of the young monks he’d seen copying manuscripts—perhaps one of them was from the Slavic east, where they spoke the tongue. He had a better idea now.

  Lucrezia’s note had alerted Montguillon to the witchcraft afoot in Paris. It had also given a young friar even more sinister ideas. Simon had the incantation. He searched Saint-Jacques’s own library, perhaps far beyond, and found another copy of the manuscript on sorcery possessed by Lucrezia’s husband. And there was more, wasn’t there? Additional information from the Moravian manuscript, the notes by the monk pursued by wolf men.

  Intrigued by the forbidden knowledge, it seemed that Simon had found a way to contact the wolves. Had put himself in league with their evil schemes. He let them into the chatelet, and opened a passage for them from the catacombs beneath the Cité to the crypts and from there into the heart of the cathedral. In return, they left him alone. Perhaps they had exchanged promises.

  Lorenzo didn’t know how much of this Marco had figured out. Enough.

  “You know your way through these catacombs,” Montguillon said to Simon. “How is that?”

  “The blood, look.”

  Simon lowered his torch. Splatters of red marked the ground.

  “You have a good eye,” the prior said.

  “And I can smell it. The scent is hanging in the air. The red wolf—all of them. They passed this way. It stinks of them. Don’t you smell it too?”

  “It’s dank, but I don’t smell any wolf. Not even bones anymore, but maybe your nose is stronger than mine.”

  Montguillon held up his torch and a strange expression came over his face.

  Not now, Lorenzo thought.

  Why couldn’t the older Dominican keep his doubts to himself for a few more minutes, until they came to the end of this passageway and figured out where Courtaud had escaped?

  “What are you saying?” Simon said.

  “I’m saying I’m curious,” Montguillon answered. “You’re so sure down here in the dark. As if you have been here before.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Lorenzo said. “Hurry on.”

  “No,” the prior said. He gripped his staff tightly in his hands. “Don’t you wonder, both of you? How does this young brother know? There are branches, it leads us deeper. Where are we going and how is Simon so sure of foot if he hasn’t been down here before?”

  “Leave it alone,” Marco said. “Go on, Simon. Find us this beast so we can destroy it.”

  If Simon recognized he’d been caught out, not only by his spiritual father, but by the two Italians, he didn’t show it. Instead, he led them on, moving at a swifter pace. The friar certainly seemed eager to help. And maybe he was regretting his actions now. He’d let the wolves into the cathedral and maybe he was anxious to see them dead so as to hide his crime.

  Lorenzo was inclined to follow. The young man wasn’t armed, except with a torch. Marco and Lorenzo had swords, and even the prior carried his staff. A bigger risk was that Simon would lead them into a trap, but Lorenzo didn’t think so. Courtaud was alone now, and wounded. What kind of trap could it be?

  As they continued, water dripped from the ceiling and ran in rivulets down the wall. A thick, humid miasma coated his throat and nostrils, carrying a muddy, rotten smell like a freshly opened coffin dug up from a church graveyard.

  He was getting ready to order Simon to stop and explain himself when they came around the corner and there he was. Courtaud, the red wolf. Injured and cornered.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Lucrezia and Martin braced themselves while Rigord attacked the door to the tower roof. It shuddered. The hinges groaned where the bolts secured them to the stone. For blow after blow it held. But for how much longer?

  “I lost my dagger,” she said. Her shaking voice betrayed her fear. “Do you have another weapon?”

  “No, my lady.”

  Martin didn’t take his eyes from the shaking door. His sword trembled in his hand.

  “A dagger, a knife? Anything?”

  “No, I am sorry.”

  Boom. The shock echoed through the door. The hinges moved visibly this time. Behind, snarling, clawing. Boom.

  The chill air continued to swirl and bluster. It carried her hair up around her face and flapped her cloak like the frantic beating of a swallow’s wings. If only it were. If only they could leap from the tower and fly away to safety. Instead, only the cold, hard ice of the river on one side and on the other the frozen dirt of the street.

  I’ll do it, she thought. If he breaks through, I’ll hurl myself from the tower. He won’t get me.

  No, that was wrong. Martin had a sword and he would die protecting her. Like Fournier had died, defending the sleigh. And Demetrius in the corridor at the bottom of the tower. And her dear, sweet dogs: Cicero, driving wolves from her house, and Tullia, who threw herself at Rigord in a final, desperate attempt to stop him. Martin may die, but she wouldn’t stand by while it happened. If only she hadn’t lost her dagger, she might give an accounting of herself.

  The pounding stopped. For a moment she dared to hope, then a low, throaty growl came from the other side.

  “I smell your fear.” Rigord’s voice was rusty metal on stone. “The scent of your blood fills my nostrils. The others dead, every one of them. Their flesh fills my belly. They died in terror and pain. Screaming. It sweetens their meat.”
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  Rage, red and hot, filled her head.

  “And where’s your pack?” Lucrezia answered. “The wolves you cultivated, your followers—all gone. Swords through their throats, heads chopped off like vermin. Run through with spears. Dead, every filthy one of them.”

  “I’ll raise a new pack,” he said. “You won’t be so fortunate.”

  “Idiot. You forgot Courtaud. He’s still growing. You’ll be even weaker. He’ll kill you.” She laughed. “No, you’re going to die in this tower. Look! There are men with torches running toward the house. Armed men. Only a few streets away. Up here!” she shouted. “Help!”

  Her words enraged Rigord. He attacked the door with renewed ferocity. Again and again he beat against the solid wood. His snarl turned to a howl.

  It was a lie anyway. There were no men running, no city watch in breastplates and carrying pikes and swords. The streets remained as dark and silent as ever. She only hoped that she’d been wrong about Courtaud as well, that Lorenzo and the others had trapped them like rats within the walls of Notre Dame, to hunt and kill until the pack was utterly destroyed.

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” she murmured. “Shouldn’t have angered him.”

  “He’s coming anyway,” Martin said. “Nothing will change that.”

  No, nothing. When men came, and they certainly would, as these wolves couldn’t destroy the entire city in a single night, they might catch Rigord feasting on all these bodies. The blood lust had consumed him, devoured all reason.

  The door must hold. It must.

  “I smell you!” Rigord shouted. Frustration and anger sounded in his voice. His breath panted on the other side. He let out a low moan that climbed and dropped in pitch until it became a howl that raised the hairs on her neck.