The torchlight flickered on the mound of gold, which was broader than his arms could stretch. As he made for it he seemed to hear an exhalation like a chorus of stealthy breaths, but glaring about showed him no adversary, just the colossal obsidian torch-bearers. It must have been a wind in the crevices of the fortress, Kane decided, and its significance dwindled as he gazed upon the mass of wealth.
Midas might have laid his aurifying hands on every item. Golden swords lay among shields and armour of the same substance. Heavy necklaces were draped over plates of gold and aureate masks that seemed to frown at their own abduction. What ancient ceremonies might they have seen? Countless doubloons added to the riches, and Kane thought they alone could have ransomed a royal dynasty. He stooped to gather handfuls, and as he let the coins slip through his fingers he felt as if the fortune had transformed him into a colossus, able to play with golden coins as a child plays with grains of sand. The last doubloon fell with a delicate chink on the hilt of a sword decorated with a circular face that seemed immersed in its own mystery, and as Kane made to sift the wealth afresh he heard another sound.
It might have been an echo of the tinkling of coins. It was thin and chill, little more than an inhuman whisper. It was somewhere beyond the treasure, closer to the throne. Was it among the fallen king’s regalia? As Kane peered towards the corpse, wondering if a rat was feasting on the dead flesh, he saw the prone form begin to shift as though it was preparing to crawl to reclaim its wealth. This was simply a trick of the treacherous light, but in a moment Kane saw what he was hearing: the formation of crystals. The stain beside the head and the crown was no longer red. It was white.
A shiver passed through Kane. Some change had overtaken the room, sucking out all the stagnant heat of the African night. He raised one hand to breathe into the palm. Not only did he see his breath, but for an instant his fingertips glimmered white, outlining every whorl. The gelid clutch of the air felt too similar to fear, and Kane glared about the room in search of some more substantial adversary to challenge than shadows and ice. As though in answer to his unvoiced wish, something came at him.
It resembled breath turned black. It streamed from the mouths of the stone colossi and whirled in ebon skeins around him. With it came a Babel of shrieks and shrill whispers. Kane felt surrounded by a whirlwind that spoke, though in no words that he could comprehend. He spun about, slashing at the ropy darkness, but his swords could discover no substance. As he staggered to a halt the blackness rushed away from him.
It raced in two tattered streams over the fallen king, whose robes were furred with frost now, and converged on his throne. Kane saw a shadow seated there, drawing its shape from the blackness. The thin shrieks and the insidious whispers and whatever remnants of humanity had emitted them were engulfed by the presence, as if they were assuaging some inhuman hunger. The last scraps of the unnatural darkness vanished like wisps of mist in sunlight, but it was not the sun that turned the throne room pale as death. It was ice.
The presence seated on the throne was flanked by bodies that might have been unholy tributes – almost a dozen crucified men. They had been flayed as well, and stalactites of blood dangled from the exposed flesh. Their faces were distorted by grimaces of agony and terror, so that even in the sourceless icy light that had overwhelmed the flickering of torches, Kane did not immediately recognise the corpses of his men. Rage blazed through him as he turned his gaze on the figure enthroned between them.
It was abnormally tall, and robed from head to foot in black. If it had a face, that was concealed in the depths of a hood. Just the hands were visible, their long pallid fingers tipped with claws as cruel as any predator’s. Was it bone that glimmered within the hood, and was there a glint of pitiless eyes? Kane was not to be daunted. He took a step forward, lifting his rapier to point at any heart his adversary had. “What are you?” he demanded.
The figure reared up like a wave of blackness. It threw out one splayed hand, which resembled bone imperfectly transformed into flesh, and then it spoke. The roar that emerged from the depths of the cowl contained no words. The onslaught of sound was so thunderous that although Kane saw the mound of gold quake with it, he could not hear the movement for the aching of his eardrums. The roar grew louder and less bearable as its breath reached him. It smelled as though an ancient sepulchre had been opened – it smelled of things so long dead that they ought to have been dust. It was so frigid that the air in front of Kane visibly shuddered like thin ice. The breath threatened to render his bones as brittle as shell, and it leached all the power from his muscles, which trembled like the air. As he collapsed to the floor Kane barely avoided falling prone by supporting himself with both hands on the hilt of the rapier.
He crouched like a beast at bay and glared his hatred at his assailant. At last the lethal breath relented as the figure towering before the throne gave Kane his answer. “I am the Devil’s reaper,” it pronounced in a voice that resonated like the tolling of a great bell. “I am here to claim you, Solomon Kane,” it said, and other voices whispered its words as though souls trapped in the hooded darkness were compelled to imitate their master. “Your deal is done.”
“What deal?” At least Kane was capable of speech, even if his limbs were no more use to him than an infant’s. “I made no deal,” he snarled.
“There was a deal.” The edges of the cowl fluttered as if whatever face lurked within was about to appear from its lair. “And your soul is the price,” the voice decreed. “It was signed away in the blood of the first man you killed.”
For a terrible instant Kane remembered who that had been. The voice and its words seemed to resonate deep in his guts as it proclaimed “Your life of murder and greed is over.”
The imminence brought Kane back from his memory, and he struggled to lever himself to his feet. “You cannot take my soul,” he said in outraged disbelief.
“Bow your head before me!” Once more the figure thrust out its hand, and a freezing gale assaulted Kane, shivering through every limb. “The Devil will have his due,” the figure vowed, and the enslaved voices whispered confirmation.
Kane had been forced to lower his head, which felt weighed down by ice. He fought to lift it as he saw an elongated flame reflected dimly by the amber stone on which he knelt. He sensed heat as fierce as the cold had been. His head wavered erect, and he saw what confronted him. It was worse than fire. The hooded figure held a sword that might have been withdrawn that very moment from a furnace.
The blade was molten, yet it retained its shape. As it dripped gouts that flared on the stone floor it constantly renewed its substance. It could have been forged only in Hell, and perhaps it had been designed as a hint of the eternal torments it presaged. Kane felt the infernal heat settle on him before the cowled figure raised the blade high to cleave Kane’s skull.
Not just rage but the heat gave Kane back his strength. He rose on one knee and brought up his crossed swords to meet the descending blade. The impact shook him, but he held his stance. “You may tell your master,” he shouted, “I am not yet ready for Hell.”
His faith raised him to his feet, still parrying the blade. “The Lord protects me,” he cried.
“Fool!” The syllable seemed to vibrate through the flaming blade, and Kane felt the heat spread through his own swords. “He has abandoned you,” the hooded figure told him, and within the cowl Kane seemed to glimpse the grin of gleeful bone.
The words felt like a wound too deep for any earthly weapon to deal. The diabolical heat coursed through the hilts of Kane’s swords, searing his fists. He fought to maintain his grip even as he saw the blades begin to drip metal. He struggled to hold back the blazing sword of his adversary, but at last, with a bellow of pain, he had to open his hands. The distorted remains of his weapons clattered to the floor, and the molten blade swooped down at him.
A backward lurch saved him. White-hot drops of metal spattered the mound of gold and blackened the floor where Kane had just stood. The point of t
he flaming blade slashed through the air scant inches from his face, and he felt as though Hell was reaching for him. “On your knees,” the hooded figure thundered, and a single stride brought it far too close to him, swinging the sword in a great arc.
Kane ducked but would not look away. As he felt the heat of the blade pass over his scalp like an infernal benediction, he saw the dawn touch the window beyond the throne, limning the image in the stained glass. It was universal and eternal – an angel battling a demon. The hint of the dawn reminded Kane how high the window must be. He thought of a man falling from a height, and all at once he seemed to be facing his destiny. “You will never take my soul,” he vowed and sprinted for the window.
The hooded figure whirled about, and the blade slashed at Kane, dripping fire. It missed him by inches, and at once he heard his pursuer at his back, trampling over the strewn gold. Kane’s desperate leap carried him through the stained glass. The peacock colours shattered before his face, and there was no knowing which had belonged to the angel, which to the demon. The sliver of sun that had cleared the horizon shone in his eyes, and then he plummeted into darkness, where waves tossed like a sleeper in the throes of a nightmare. Above him he heard a voice so huge that it might have been using the throne room for a mouth. “You cannot escape us,” it said. “Your soul is damned.”
THREE
As the last amen of matins echoed through the cloisters, Kane gazed out of his cell. Beyond the window, around which a few sprigs of holly were pale with frost, the world resembled a charcoal sketch. Mist lay on the lake that surrounded the island on which the monastery stood. Leafless trees protruded from the water, where the only signs of life were two immobile silent crows perched among the gnarled branches. A scattering of snowflakes drifted through the air to lie for a breath on the water before vanishing. They might have been scraps of the sky, which hid the sun and which was as white as the mist that masked the land on the far side of the lake. The view reminded Kane that the world was only God’s sketch for perfection. It seemed as austere as the monastery itself, and austerity was where God was to be found most in the world.
A discreet bell began to peal, and Kane turned away from the window. Stripping to the waist, he plunged his hands into the basin that stood next to his unadorned bed. The frigid water felt like not just a penance but an essence of the rigours of monastic life. Both its isolation and its simplicity – the absence of any hint of idolatry, or anything that could have been construed as such by the investigators of the Reformation – had enabled the monastery to survive. Its remoteness was as comforting to Kane as his sense of the unemphasised presence of God. He was bathing his face when he heard a knock at the door of the cell, and a voice spoke his name.
He turned to see Brother Fletcher and a young monk, who bore a tray of simple fare – bread, cheese, beer. The youth was visibly nervous. His gaze ranged about the cell, taking in the piles of scrolls and the bulky theological volumes Kane pored over late into the night with only a candle for illumination. He seemed to gain some necessary reassurance from the large stone crucifix beneath which Kane had placed the bed. “Who’s the novice?” Kane enquired.
“This is Brother Thomas,” Brother Fletcher said. “He joined us only a few days ago.”
“Welcome,” Kane said, which failed to nerve the youth to look directly at him. “Welcome, Brother Thomas.”
He had grown used to calling these men brother, although it was a word he had believed for many years that he would never choose to utter. The novice laid the tray down on the solitary table, beside the heavy tome that had been Kane’s midnight reading, and then he ventured to face Kane. In a moment he was staring openly at the prayers and symbols – some occult, some religious – that were inscribed on Kane’s chest, and the tattoo of a cross that spanned his back. “Those marks,” he breathed. “Do they really protect you from Satan?”
Kane prayed they did – they and the sanctity that surrounded him. Before he could speak he was forestalled. “Mind what you name in this holy place,” a new voice said.
Brother Thomas’s hand flew to his mouth, where he made a hasty sign of the cross. His dismay was fleeting, almost schoolboyish, but Kane’s was more profound. The abbot had appeared in the doorway, and his warning seemed to imply that the monastery was less sacrosanct than Kane yearned to believe. “I would like to speak to Solomon alone,” the abbot said.
Brother Thomas hurried out of the cell without a backward glance, and Brother Fletcher followed more sedately. For a moment the abbot only gazed at Kane, who saw pity and determination in his eyes. “Walk with me, Solomon,” the abbot said.
He was silent while he waited in the corridor for Kane to finish dressing. He said no word as they walked through the cloisters, where the undecorated columns and the simple arches of the windows seemed to betoken an age that had been closer to God. The abbot remained mute as they emerged from the monastery and crossed the grounds. Throughout the seasons Kane had sought peace beneath the trees – in the renewal of foliage that surely symbolised a promise of eternal life, in the grassy summer shade that elaborated on the promise, among the countless autumnal tints of leaves that seemed to whisper of serenity as breezes that heralded winter found them. Now the ground was hard and white as the marble of a sepulchre, and icy winds had picked the trees clean of leaves. Their twigs resembled twisted icicles, and their branches were mossy with snow, which filled the cracks in the bark of the trunks as though to emphasise their more than human age. It seemed to Kane that even the abbot’s face – gaunt and pale with his advancing years, and stubbled with a thin white beard – had been gripped by the uncommonly severe winter. The abbot halted beside the perimeter wall, which was encrusted with snow, and gazed at him until Kane wondered if he was expected to speak. At last the abbot said “Once again we heard your cries at matins, Solomon.”
“My dreams,” Kane said. “They haunt me still.”
“You would do well to heed what your dreams tell you. I do,” the abbot said.
He turned along a barren avenue, and Kane could only follow in the hope of solace. In his waking hours the monastery gave him a refuge from his dreams, but now the abbot’s exhortation had brought them to the surface of his mind. The most dreadful of them showed two figures at the edge of a high place – the kind of height where Satan had brought Christ to tempt Him. In every re-enactment one of the figures was thrown from the cliff. Sometimes it was Kane who pushed him, and sometimes the falling man was Kane, but one element was constant: worse than jagged rocks brought the fall to an end – Satan was waiting to claim the souls of both men. “My dreams tell me only that I am damned,” Kane muttered.
The abbot glanced sharply at him as a monk with a lidded basket passed close to them, on his way to grub any vegetables he could extract from the stiffened earth. “God protects his own,” the abbot said.
“But I am not one of his own, am I?” Kane saw the monk tramp through the gateway to the vegetable plots, and might have thought he was watching his own future retreat from him – a potential future that he could have grown to deserve. “My enemies are ever watchful of me,” he said.
“You still defile our sacred texts.” The abbot’s frown was etched as deep as cracks in bark. “You corrupt your flesh with them,” he said. “Men are being burned for less.”
“This place and these prayers...” Kane touched his breast as if he were laying his hand on a holy object. “These symbols,” he said. “They are all that keep me from that gaze.”
The abbot hesitated and then took hold of Kane’s shoulder. His grip was firm but impersonal, and there was regret as well as purpose in his eyes. He guided Kane along the rough path into the gardens, where the blades of two axes were buried in a block of wood. The sight was unwelcomely reminiscent of battle, and even the trellises that flanked the path put Kane in mind of an encampment, of frameworks awaiting tents. He was attempting to recapture his sense of sanctuary when the abbot moved to face him. “These months you have been here,
Solomon,” he said, “I’ve felt a shadow growing over us.”
Nothing in the gardens cast a shadow now, and all at once it seemed unnatural, as if shadows were secretly massing while the sun was buried by the impenetrable clouds. “These are dark times,” Kane said uneasily.
“I have prayed for guidance, and I was answered.” The abbot fixed Kane’s gaze with his, not unkindly but resolutely. “You must leave us, Solomon,” he said.
“Leave?” Surely the abbot could be placated; Christ had been merciful to sinners such as Kane, after all. “But why?” Kane said. “I live here in solitude. I do no harm to any man.”
The abbot inclined his head. “I’ve renounced my power, my evil ways,” Kane reminded him. “I am learning to be a man of peace.”
“I believe that to be so.” The corners of the old man’s eyes winced, as if he had been troubled by an unexpected ache. “But your future is not here with us,” he said.
“How can you do this to me?” Perhaps another species of reminder would succeed where pleading failed. “I have given all my wealth to the church,” said Kane.
“And of course we are all grateful for your generosity.” Nevertheless the abbot seemed offended by Kane’s attempt to buy redemption – to make his gift into a price. The traces of regret were fading from his eyes as he said “But you must understand –”
“Father.” It was a word Kane had thought he might never use again. He seized the abbot’s arm, remembering barely in time how frail the old bones must be. “Father,” he repeated like a prayer. “Do not make me beg. This place is a sanctuary to me.”
He saw that the abbot needed no reminding – that he might even resent it. His gaze was unwavering, and Kane could only make a final plea. “Where would you have me go?”
“You must go home.”
Solomon Kane Page 2
