by Simon Toyne
‘So why return now?’ Liv asked. ‘What is so significant about my brother’s death that brings you out of hiding and makes others want to kill me?’
‘Because when I escaped I carried that stolen slate fragment in my hand and the knowledge in my head to translate it. It revealed the first few lines of a prophecy foretelling a time when the Sacrament would be revealed and proper order would be restored. The cross will fall / The cross will rise / To unlock the Sacrament / And bring forth a new age.
‘It gave us hope. Then twenty years ago another piece of the prophecy was found. The man who discovered it was called John Mann.’ He looked across at Kathryn, whose bright eyes seemed to dim at the mention of his name. ‘My daughter’s husband. Gabriel’s father. It was in a collection of fragments forming part of a book. From the few pieces he found, John worked out that it described an alternative creation story to the book of Genesis. But news of his discovery reached the Citadel. They have informers everywhere. The dig site was remote. There was a brutal attack, by whom we do not know for sure, but we can guess. We never found his body, or the material he had discovered.’ Oscar blinked and looked down, his silence saying far more than any words. The room went quiet as each of them became lost in their own remembrance, the flickering screen of the forgotten TV the only thing that moved.
‘My father died seeking the truth,’ Gabriel said. ‘And not all of the fragments he found were lost. He had taken precautions. The most important one stayed safe. We put it together with the piece my grandfather had taken and found a fuller reading of the prophecy.
The one true cross will appear on earth
All will see it in a single moment — all will wonder
The cross will fall
The cross will rise
To unlock the Sacrament
And bring forth a new age
Liv listened to the words and saw the image of her brother standing on the summit of the mountain making the sign of the Tau with his body. He started to topple.
The cross will fall.
She looked down at the drawing in her notebook and her eyes lit on another fallen cross, the one on her brother’s side marking the place where she had once been joined to him. Her hand rose up to the site of her own scar.
The cross will rise.
She looked up at Oscar.
‘There’s something you should know about me and my brother,’ she said. Then she stood up, and in an echo of Oscar’s earlier gesture, started pulling up her shirt.
Chapter 103
Athanasius and Father Thomas entered the Roman section of the library and stood for a moment, searching the darkness and the deadened silence for any signs of occupation.
The Roman section was one of the largest of the older vaults and contained, amongst other treasures, all the apostolic documents that had been collated into the first Bible. Consequently the individual auras of light that accompanied them through the vast darkness had now dimmed to a burnished copper. The only other light in the chamber came from the thin filament of guide lamps embedded in the stone floor. Apart from that, the chamber appeared to be empty.
Athanasius glanced at Father Thomas, then turned and headed away down the first row of shelves. As he hurried down the dark passageway his breathing became more rapid, the desiccated air sucking moisture from his mouth until it was as dry as the scrolls in honeycombed stacks all around him. He reached the end of the passage and came to a junction where another corridor jutted away to the right and continued along the length of the wall, parallel to the central corridor. He stopped and looked back along the path he had just come down. At the end he could see the orangey circle of Father Thomas’s light, wavering like a distant candle in the darkness. He kept his eyes fixed on it and started slowly walking up the new corridor. He passed the edge of the bookcase and saw it reappear in the distance as Thomas matched his pace. By this method, Thomas had suggested as they’d plotted in the chapel earlier, they should be able to see anything in the passageway between them silhouetted against each other’s light. With luck it would speed up the search.
They continued their steady pace, each row of scrolls, parchments and carved tablets revealing itself then passing quickly into darkness as Thomas’s light blinked on and off like a distant lighthouse. With each rhythmic flash the glow dimmed a little more until Athanasius had to squint to make out the distant blob of light. The fading light also created the illusion that Thomas was getting further away, and gave Athanasius a mild feeling of panic. He hated the library at the best of times — and this was very far from being that. It was as this concern rose up, threatening to cloud his mind with irrational fear, that he rounded the edge of another bookcase and saw it — a ragged human form, silhouetted in Thomas’s distant light, about halfway down the row.
Athanasius stopped. Peered at it. Tried to discern whether or not it was moving. Thomas must have seen it also for his light remained steady at the far end of the row. Athanasius took a few shallow breaths to steady his nerves then stepped forward, moving silently, narrowing the gap between himself and the apparition. He saw Thomas’s orange blob of light wobble and start to grow as he did the same. Thomas reached the shadow first. ‘Brother Ponti,’ he exclaimed, loud enough for Athanasius to hear, ‘it’s you.’
Athanasius watched the stooped form of the blind caretaker appear out of the darkness a few feet in front of him, illuminated by the spill from Thomas’s light.
‘Who else,’ Ponti rasped in a voice dried by dust and darkness.
Even in the sudden warmth of the shared light everything about Ponti seemed white and bloodless, like the spiders and other pale creatures that somehow managed to live in the permanent darkness of the mountain.
‘I wasn’t sure,’ Thomas continued amiably. ‘I was just running a routine test and a query came up against your trace. The system didn’t seem to recognize you. Did you log in properly?’
‘Same way as always,’ Ponti said, holding up a thin hand in front of milky eyes.
Athanasius edged closer, saying nothing, carefully placing his footfalls so he made no sound. He watched the edge of his own light creep towards the spectral form of the caretaker until it passed over him and he was almost close enough to touch.
At that moment, back in the control room, the program Father Thomas had installed activated. Anyone looking at the main screen showing the floor plan may have noticed the three dots converging in the Roman vault, but they would not have noticed anything out of the ordinary about them. In fact Father Thomas’s program had just switched the identity of two of the dots, so the main security system was now tracking Athanasius as if he were Ponti — and vice versa.
In the vault Athanasius stood stock still and held his breath. He’d said nothing and made no noise, yet Ponti, sensing something, turned and stared straight through him with pale, sightless eyes. He raised his head like a rat sniffing the air and made to step forward when Father Thomas caught his arm.
‘Could you do me a favour,’ he asked, pulling him gently away down the tunnel of books. ‘If you’ll just step back through the entrance sensor I’m sure the system will re-acquire you and correct itself.’ Ponti continued to stare blindly at Athanasius as he was eased away, then turned and obediently shuffled off.
Athanasius felt relief flood through him as he watched them walking away, but it was short lived. He watched the warm orange bubble bob away down the narrow tunnel, with Thomas and Ponti at its centre, carrying the comforting sound of their voices with it until that too was smothered by the strange acoustics. The light got smaller until finally it slipped away on to the main corridor, leaving him suddenly alone in the silent darkness of the library.
Chapter 104
For the second time that day Liv finished relating the strange circumstances of her birth and waited for the reaction. She examined the three faces opposite her staring at the cruciform scar on her side.
‘The cross will rise,’ Oscar whispered, ‘to unlock the Sacrament.’ His eyes flic
ked up and met hers. There was something close to wonder in them. ‘It’s you,’ he said.
Liv pulled her shirt back down, feeling suddenly exposed and shy. ‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Only, I have no idea what the Sacrament is so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to “unlock” it.’
She sat down and turned to the page in her notebook where she’d copied the letters and re-read the message she’d found in them. When she’d written it down she thought she was on to something. But it had proved to be just another dead end. The Mala had no more idea what the Sacrament was than she did. She suddenly felt unbearably tired, like someone had opened a sluice gate and flooded her with weariness.
‘Were the letters scratched on to leather, like the phone number?’ Gabriel asked.
‘No,’ she said, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘They were scratched on seeds.’ She stopped rubbing and looked up to discover everyone staring straight at her.
‘Seeds?’ Oscar repeated.
She nodded. The old man’s body seemed to contract in a moment of deep concentration, then he breathed out and reached across the desk to pull the computer keyboard towards him. ‘During my time in the Citadel,’ he said, opening a browser window, ‘I did learn some of their secrets.’ He typed something into the search box and hit return. An image started downloading on the screen. It was a patchwork of greens, greys and large areas of blue. As it sharpened it manifested itself as a satellite photo of Eastern Europe. Oscar clicked on an area of the picture. The image zoomed into a section of southern Turkey until the screen showed a dense network of streets radiating out from something large and dark at its centre.
‘This is a satellite image of Ruin,’ Oscar explained, ‘taken in the 1980s. Before then all aircraft were forbidden from flying over the city.’ The image continued to sharpen. Liv leaned in closer to the screen as the picture stopped downloading. The Citadel sat at the centre. It was oval in shape and completely black except for a large area of dark green close to the centre. ‘After NASA published this photograph they lifted the ban,’ Oscar explained. ‘Even the Citadel’s jurisdiction does not yet extend into space.’
Liv focused on the patch of green.
‘What is it,’ she asked. ‘A lake?’
‘No,’ Oscar replied, zooming the image as close as it would go.
‘It’s a garden.’
Chapter 105
Athanasius picked his way through the silent library, his hands reaching out for unseen obstacles, his eyes fixed on the thin line of lights set in the stone floor. Like all who lived in the mountain he was used to the dark, but not like this. A soft white noise seemed to dance at the edge of it, like swarms of silent bees that dispersed the moment he tried to look at them.
He stole a glance behind him, checking nervously for the glow of someone who might have ventured this deep into the library. He saw nothing — just the quivering movement at the edge of his vision and the thin thread of lights stretching away like a crack in the blackness. He turned back, his heart beating so loud in his ears he could hear nothing else, not even the muffled tread of his own feet as they stole across the stone floor. Up ahead he could see the floor lights curve away to the right then disappear. It was where the pathway turned into the final corridor that ended at the forbidden vault. He walked towards it, stepping only on the faint scratch of light in the floor like a wirewalker who knew a step either side would plunge him into the abyss. He followed the curve into the corridor. Stopped.
Ahead of him the thin lights continued to stretch out in a wavering line until, after roughly thirty feet, there was nothing. Athanasius moved forwards, counting his paces as he went, drawn to the awful darkness at the end of the light trail. He counted twenty-eight paces, reached the end of the line, then turned and walked back, twenty-eight paces to the entrance to the corridor. As he counted he recalled Father Thomas’s earnest face explaining how he could get round his own security system, but there was nothing he could do once Athanasius was inside the forbidden vault. Once he stepped over the threshold the silent alarm would sound and he would have a maximum of two minutes before the guard arrived.
Athanasius walked back and forth along the corridor, counting the paces to and from the vault, his arms stretched out by his sides as he walked, keeping his balance in the dark. When he was satisfied his escape route was clear he stood once more at the point in the floor where the lights ended and the darkness began, feeling like a man standing on a cliff’s edge, preparing to jump.
He pictured the room that lay in front of him: the stone lectern in the middle of the floor; the twelve recesses cut into the cave wall behind it, each one filled with a black box containing the jealously guarded secrets of their order. He figured it would take him a minute to put everything in the vault back the way it was and escape up the corridor. This gave him sixty seconds to find the book. He pictured the Abbot taking it down the day before — three across, two down. In his mind he ran through the actions he had to perform once inside the room. Sixty seconds wasn’t long enough — but it was all he had.
He stared ahead into the darkness, aware of the white swarms closing in from the edge of his vision. He took a deep breath. Blew it out slowly. Started counting down from sixty in his head.
And stepped forward.
The guard looked up as the high-pitched alarm sounded. He was off his chair and unlocking the desk before Athanasius had even managed to feel his way to the far wall of the forbidden vault.
Inside the guard’s cabinet was a Beretta, a couple of spare clips and a headset with a single telescopic eyepiece protruding from the front. The guard grabbed everything and smacked the first clip into place as he pushed through the door into the main entrance hall.
Father Malachi rose from his chair, his face a mask of concern as he saw the guard moving towards him with the gun in one hand and the night-vision goggles in the other.
‘Give me one minute,’ the guard said, slipping the gun into his sleeve and heading through the archway and into the main library.
Athanasius felt his way across the wall, counting the recesses as he went. Three across. Two down. His hands reached inside the cold niche. Closed around the smooth box.
He lifted it out and placed it on the floor. His fingers fumbling at the sides for the catches on each edge.
He found them.
Opened the box.
Felt the cold smooth rectangle of slate inside. His fingers fluttered over it. Traced the carved outline of the Tau, then moved on to the edge and opened the book.
No alarm sounded within the library but everyone knew what it meant when they saw the russet gown of a guard swooping down the corridors with his hand hidden in his sleeve.
Standard procedure was to make your way directly to the entrance and wait until someone gave the all-clear. Scholars looked up now, closing their books automatically and watching the guard’s halo of light dim as he surged deeper into the vast darkness of the library. Father Thomas was one of these observers. He stood by Ponti, his own circle of light disguising the fact that the blind caretaker now had one of his own, and watched in silence as the guard cleared the medieval section and entered the hall of venerated texts leading to pre-history.
‘Trouble?’ Ponti asked, sensing the tension the way a dog senses ghosts.
‘Possibly,’ Father Thomas replied. In the distance he saw the guard raise his arm and pull the night-vision goggles over his head. He took two more strides, then, as he entered the hall of the apostles, his aura of light winked out.
Chapter 106
Liv peered at the pixellated circle of green on the monitor. The resolution was too low to make out any detail but she imagined the outline of trees and bushes in the slight variations between the blocks of colour.
‘One of the great historical mysteries of the Citadel,’ Oscar said, his voice rumbling through the silent room, ‘was how it miraculously managed to survive years of siege with no food.
‘I spent my first year apprenticed to t
he gardeners: clearing weeds, planting new beds, helping to bring in the fruit harvests. One of my jobs was watering the grounds. We did this from large cisterns that collected rain and waste water from inside the mountain. Sometimes it picked up mineral deposits as it flowed through the stone channels turning it red, so it seemed you were watering the earth with blood.
‘Whatever was in it made the soil incredibly fertile. Anything grew in it, even though the garden lay in a crater and was in almost permanent shadow. Once, whilst clearing away some long grass, I found an old rake part-buried in the soil. Green shoots were beginning to spring from its wooden handle.’ He looked up and reached for the computer keyboard. ‘This garden has nourished the Citadel throughout history,’ he said, opening a browser window and typing. ‘The green cassocks of the Sancti reflect this — as does the name they used to be known by — The Edenites.’ He finished typing and hit return. The satellite photo disappeared and another page started to open. ‘Some think this name refers to the age of their order, dating back to the dawn of man. Others, however, believe it has a more literal meaning, and that the Tau is not a cross at all.’
The page stopped downloading. Liv stared at it, the image now filling the screen mingling powerfully with the implication of Oscar’s words.
