by Alex Archer
From somewhere outside Annja heard a deep rumbling sound. It built like thunder, increasing as the entire structure of the farmhouse began to tremble.
“What the hell is that?” Garin asked, finger on the trigger.
Roux was on his feet before he answered.
Annja didn’t hear him as Monique was also standing.
The woman, desperate for any weapon now, had grabbed the fireplace poker and was slashing about wildly, trying to drive Garin away from her brother.
Annja wouldn’t reach her in time. She acted on instinct, the sword an extension of her own arm.
The sword left her hand, turning end over end as it sailed toward its mark.
The woman dropped her makeshift weapon as the blade pierced her chest and sunk into the plaster of the wall behind her, pinning her in place, a look of absolute horror twisting her lips as she died.
Annja looked down at her hand and the sword was there, back in her grasp.
She heard rather than saw the woman slump to the floor, and looked up to see her blood smearing the wall with its sticky trail.
Outside the thunder gathered.
Only then did her brain register what that sound meant.
“Avalanche,” she said.
59
Annja returned the sword to the otherwhere and wrapped an arm around Roux’s shoulders. “Lean on me,” she said. It was an order. “We’re getting everyone out of here. Now.”
“Go while you have a chance,” the old man said.
“Stop trying to be a martyr,” she told him.
The air was full of a gathering anger, close, overbearing.
They didn’t have long. Minutes. Seconds.
She helped Roux to the door.
Garin hadn’t moved. He stood over Cauchon, the muzzle of the Uzi pressed against his head while the madman cried out again, once more in the grip of some unseen image.
She looked back over her shoulder at him.
“Go,” Garin urged. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“Don’t do it, Garin,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
Annja half dragged, half carried Roux outside.
He stumbled twice, still disorientated from the blow he’d taken to the head.
Again she heard the not-so-distant rumble from the mountain. She didn’t dare risk so much as a glance at the slopes. She didn’t want to know how close that crushing death was until they were in the car and moving.
Outside, the young guard Annja had knocked unconscious was starting to stir. He pressed a hand to the side of his head.
She looked back at the doorway.
There was no sign of Garin.
He was taking too long.
She yelled for him to hurry.
She heard a crack—an unmistakable sound. It was like a gunshot echoing off the mountaintops. A moment later Garin emerged from the house. He was carrying something in his hands. It took her a second to realize it was the breastplate. He’d wrestled it away from Cauchon’s shoulders. As he neared, she saw that the straps had been cut.
He looked at the young man struggling to get to his feet, and said, “One question, and be careful how you answer. Are you going to be foolish about this or can I buy out your contract?”
The young guard shook his head, not understanding.
“I’ll give you a thousand euros for the day. You work for me now,” Garin said. “Deal?”
The young man nodded slowly.
“Good. Help her get him inside the vehicle. We’re getting out of here before the mountain comes down around us.”
Garin opened the driver’s side door and slid behind the wheel, tossing the relic into the backseat as if it were an item of no value whatsoever.
Everything was taking too long.
The ground beneath them trembled, the entire mountain shaking.
The young guard slipped Roux’s arm around his neck and helped support him as Annja tugged at the rear passenger door. Together they helped Roux inside, slamming the door behind him.
It was as if the peak was falling apart.
Great slabs of snow and ice moved in slow motion, throwing up clouds of white powder each time they caught a ridge or created another crack in the surface.
Annja tried to judge the distance—half a mile, maybe, but the avalanche was picking up speed and heading in their direction.
Was it possible their gunfire had started the landslide?
It had to be.
The magic that Cauchon had been trying to summon couldn’t be the cause…that was crazy, Annja thought. There was no such thing as sorcery.
They had to get out of there as quickly as they could.
Annja raced around to the other side of the vehicle, clambering in the back beside Roux.
“Get in!” she shouted at the young man who stood there, trapped in a moment’s indecision even though he’d taken up Garin on his offer. Garin pulled away before the young guy was even in the seat, the door still open.
Annja reached over and helped Roux buckle up before fixing her own seat belt. She had a flashback to the last time she’d been in a vehicle on these slopes.
“Is someone going to tell me what just happened back there?” Garin asked.
For a while the question hung in the car, unanswered.
Garin drove hard, double declutching, hitting the corners faster than was safe but absolutely in control, years of defensive driving paying off. He negotiated each twist and turn at speed, racing the avalanche down the mountain.
Finally Roux broke the silence. “His real name was Patrice Moerlen. I killed him twenty years ago.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Annja said.
“Hush. If you want me to tell the story, I’m telling it my way. I watched him die. Or thought I did. He came to see me at the chateau with proof about me, having pieced the puzzle together. He was a bright young man, a journalist with a promising career. I only wanted to warn him off. I was prepared to buy his silence. We arranged a meeting. He didn’t show. He was run down on the streets of Paris as I tried to reach him. It was a tragedy. An accident. I left, assuming he was dead. I shouldn’t have done that.
“Somehow he survived. His sister, Monique, identified someone else as his corpse. She looked after him for twenty years. All the while he stewed, plotting his revenge, looking for something that could do what the doctors couldn’t, make him walk again.”
The vehicle bounced as it took a bend on the road and the mountain shook again.
Annja looked out of the back window.
“It’s getting closer,” she said, then looked ahead, seeing the point where the avalanche was going to swallow the road. “We’re never going to make it.”
“Of course we are,” Garin said, ratcheting up through the gears. “Trust me.”
She nearly laughed.
Nearly.
“So, what then?” she asked Roux. “He spent the rest of his life plotting some mad revenge and it drove him out of his mind?”
“Delusion. Obsession,” the old man agreed. “But he wasn’t a million miles away from the truth, I think. Or at least the truth as better men tried to describe it.” He told her about the discoveries that Bernard Gui had made all those years ago, hunting witches and practitioners of the dark arts, chasing demons.
“Add that to Manchon’s theory—Manchon was the court scribe whose notes Garin, ah, shall we say liberated, for now. He was a very deluded man who had witnessed the execution of Joan at Rouen, seen her sword shattered and swallowed the wild claims of the real Cauchon, who used devilry and demon possession as a way to explain why men, good men, normal men, would follow a woman into battle, which was about the most unnatural thing he could imagine.”
“And the breastplate?”
“Joan’s.”
That said it all.
“This was hers?”
Roux nodded.
“So you gave him something that had been close to Joan’s heart, feeding the delusion?”
>
He shook his head. “If I’d even thought that far ahead, I would have offered him this.” His hand closed around the crucifix that circled his throat. “I took it from her body after they burned her. It was unharmed. Undamaged. But I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to give him what he wanted to get you out of there.”
“Why did he want something of hers? What am I not understanding here?”
“He believed that there was a demon inside you that he could draw into himself, capturing whatever it is of Joan that exists in you.”
“You didn’t think…that he might be right? That there might be something of her in me…something that these incantations could release?”
Roux shrugged. “It was a calculated risk. I don’t believe in magic.”
Annja sat in silence as she tried to take it all in, but she couldn’t get through the insanity of it.
“Hold on tight, folks, this is going to be uncomfortably close,” Garin warned.
Annja looked through the window. The avalanche was carrying its massive weight of snow and ice down the ravine where the burned-out truck lay. In the moving mass she was sure that she caught sight of parts of Cauchon’s house as the whole thing was swept away. Against the backdrop of raw elemental power on display, bricks and mortar stood no chance.
She redirected her attention away from the oncoming snow to Garin.
“Did you…?” She couldn’t finish the question.
“It would have been mercy if I had,” he said.
“Did you?”
He didn’t answer her.
Instead, he yanked down hard on the wheel, the snow chains biting into the surface as the 4x4 slewed around a tight bend.
There was a man on the road up ahead, struggling with his unresponsive car.
Her Good Samaritan.
“Stop!” Annja yelled.
Garin slammed on the brakes. The 4x4 yawed, spitting ice and grit.
She threw the door open and called, “Get in!”
He looked up, fear etched in his face.
“Everything I have…everything…is here. I should stay.”
“You’ll die,” Annja argued.
“I know,” he called over the churning wind and snow chasing down the mountain. “Go with God,” he said. “I’ve made my peace. I want to be with my love again.”
“Listen to the man,” Garin said.
He didn’t wait for her to decide. He slammed the 4x4 into gear and put his foot down, the sudden movement nearly hurling Annja from the car.
She watched the old man face the mountain, amazed that someone could stand there so calmly, ready to embrace death.
She couldn’t have done it.
The snow hit the road no more than twenty feet behind them.
Garin didn’t slow for a second, not until they were safe on the outskirts of Pau.
* * * * *
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First edition May 2015
ISBN-13: 9781460381267
Day of Atonement
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Steven Savile for his contribution to this work.
Copyright © 2015 by Worldwide Library
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
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