Black Madonna

by Carl Sargent

  “Fragging bleeding heart.” Streak snarled. “We could have had what we wanted by now”

  “It wasn’t us.” Geraint said. “It was NOJ. Those hands above the building–you know their sign.”

  “I know it.” Gianfranco whispered, his head dulled with the drug. “I couldn’t be sure who you were with. You could have been in with them.”

  “Why would you think that?” Geraint asked.

  “You’re a member of the British government and you ask me that?”

  It was true, Geraint thought. Even his own boss seemed to jump at their call. It wasn’t so surprising that Gianfranco should think that.

  “We have to get him out of here.” he told Streak.

  “There’s no rush” the elf said. “There aren’t going to be swarms of French police or army up here for a while. This is the back of beyond. Slot, there are even border bandits in this region. It’s virtually Sardinia up here. Ain’t that right, guys?”

  “Sure is.” Juan said laconically, picking at his teeth with a match.

  “Just do it.” Geraint said wearily. Streak looked resigned and flipped open the top of his Comm unit.

  “Let’s get the ears up here.” he said. “It’ll be faster that way. He’s in no shape to be carried three klicks or more.”

  “Who are you calling?” Geraint asked. “There’s no one left outside, only Xavier, and he’s no nearer the cars than we are.”

  “No, but he’s got the remotes and you didn’t travel in his car” Streak grinned suddenly. Computer mapping, topology analyzers, autopilot, and his machine’ll be here in five minutes. We can put the sleepers on the roof rack until we get back to ours.”

  “Like I say then, just do it.” Geraint said. Though it was still not yet midnight, his body said it was five in the morning after a very, very bad day.

  * * *

  The car turned up, gliding driverless up the hill, as swiftly as Streak said it would. As they shambled out toward it, Geraint’s eye was caught by a flash of color among the blackness of shattered stone under the lightless sky.

  Well, I’ll be damned.” he muttered, staring down at the statue. Incredibly, it had somehow survived among the ruins of the conservatory. Knocked from its pedestal by the force of the blasts that had demolished the building, it seemed remarkably pristine and unmarked. The paintwork was oddly gaudy, and it looked like a cheap Curio sold in those shops that vend plastic icons and bottles of Lourdes water to the faithful and those bereft of intelligence or aesthetic discernment.

  “That’s the very figure. just as we saw her.”

  He remembered the spirit who’d invaded his flat and delivered the warning to them. Lying at his feet was a replica of that figure, staring back at him as if defying the might and brutality of all those who had destroyed her shrine.

  “Joan of Arc.”

  He almost crossed himself. He felt somehow compelled to make an apology to her, a sign of appeasement, but he stopped himself because he knew it was wrong. Not wrong to make an apology, but wrong to make the sign of the cross.

  He didn’t understand that, and he knew it mattered; and when he turned away, he was troubled by it. But Streak was trying to squeeze everyone into the car, and he had to walk away and involve himself with that.

  But he did not forget it.

  * * *

  They decided to risk staying in Clermont-Ferrand for the night, not least because they didn’t want their unconscious and injured to have to make the trip to Toulouse at this hour, and arriving in a major city in the shape they were in would surely attract attention. The risk was that those who’d raided the chapel–or their companions–might come looking for those who’d defeated them, and Clermont was too close for comfort.

  “We can’t move this guy.” Streak said. “We probably shouldn’t move Michael either, not with a bump to the head; and I always get uncomfortable around mages who get drained. They always tell me not to frag around with them. I don’t like staying here, but I reckon we have to. Until Michael comes around, at the very least.”

  Geraint left the elf to organize matters here and went to tend to Gianfranco. A second painkilling shot had left the man dazed and confused, but it was obvious he needed serious medical help. He would be permanently crippled, or even die, if he didn’t get expert medical help shortly.

  “Gianfranco, we’re going to get you to a hospital.” he said quietly to the Italian. The man nodded and clutched Geraint’s hand again to express his thanks.

  “But look, you owe us, really you do. You would have been killed like the others if we hadn’t turned up here tonight. And we really only wanted to talk peaceably. You turned us away.”

  The man said nothing for a few seconds, and then looked up in absolute torment

  “I cannot talk.” he said wretchedly. “You don’t understand”

  “I understand quite a lot. I understand that you had me tracked and sent a spirit to warn me off, smashing its way into my own home. Just for starters.”

  “We didn’t harm anyone.” the man protested. “You killed Serrault, our mage.”

  “That was an accident.” Geraint said, aware that the man had a fair point. “Serrin says he was heavily drained from ritual magic and shock killed him.”

  It wasn’t true, but he had to lie. Time was short.

  “We saved your skin. You can give us something.”

  The man said nothing. Geraint thought of another tack and guessed that this time, he just might have some luck.

  “And look, Gianfranco, Streak would have made you talk before the shot. And you would have talked. Yes, you would.”

  The other man’s eyes met his and confirmed the truth. “So, you owe me twice over. The Inquisition came after us. Kidnapped two of us, drugged them and took blood for ritual magic, threatened to kill us. We need to know why. They killed your people, and they’d have killed us too. We want to know how to stop them when they try again. It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask.”

  The man groaned again, the last residues of pain numbed by doses of the drugs that were weakening his resistance. Geraint hoped they weren’t also making him unable to explain himself.

  “I’m not a senior figure.” he pleaded in a cracked voice. “Them is much I don’t know.”

  “The book. You sent the book.” Geraint guessed. “Why?”

  “As a message.”

  “How was it a message?”

  “It was a clue. To the nature and location of the man Seratini was seeking. The one you seek.” Gianfranco managed to say.

  “How was it a clue? I don’t understand.” Geraint said plaintively.

  “The topic. Water . . .” Gianfranco’s eyes were beginning to flutter now, the drugs obviously taking over his mind and senses.

  “Who is he, Gianfranco? I have to know” Geraint pleaded.

  For a second, the man’s vision cleared and a mixture of base cunning and intelligence shone out at the Welshman.

  “There is one statue left in the city.” he grinned, and his grip of Geraint’s wrist relaxed as he fell into a narcotic slumber.

  “Damn.” Geraint cursed. He got back to his feet and turned away. The scent of coffee greeted his senses. It wasn’t his newly discovered favorite, but at this time of night it smelled awfully good.

  * * *

  “If you want to get him to a hospital now, we’ve got to leave at once.” Streak said. “We go to Toulouse, dump him at the airport, ring security from the plane, take off and get home. We can’t risk anything else. If I drive him to Toulouse they’ll ID him, get a trace to Rennes-le-Château, and then the police will descend on Clermont.”

  “Actually, given what’s happened up there they’ll be doing that anyway.” Geraint said. “Think about it. There’s a village up there. Someone must have noticed that the place has been flattened by now, not to mention all that magic lighting up the night sky and a few score corpses littering the farmlands.”

  Streak’s eyes widened. “Frag me! I never thought of t
hat. These bloody French villagers. What a damned nuisance they are!”

  He was absolutely serious. Geraint almost doubled up in laughter, and the elf saw the funny side and laughed himself.

  “Well, then, we’ll have to pack up and move out whether we like it or not.” he said briskly. “Come on, people, time to book. Back to Blighty. Job done. Game over.”

  The other samurai were already packed and ready to leave. Juan cheerfully waved the credstick Geraint had. given him.

  “A pleasure.” he said. “Work for you any time, Your Lordship. You can always trust a British aristo, I say.”

  “That last fragger stuffed us.” Xavier growled.

  Juan shrugged. “Yeah and look what we did to his boyfriend.”

  Geraint started checking through his mental files for who they might be referring to, then decided he really didn’t want to know. The pair of samurai left, with one last goodbye and a complicated handshake with Streak that seemed to portray torture as some kind of friendship ritual. At least, it would have been torture if normal sinew and muscle had been involved,

  “We’re ready.” Kristen said simply. Almost unseen, she’d packed everything they had, even weaponry, into their bags. Geraint had to smile. A clear head in a crisis was a valuable quality to have in a team member.

  He looked doubtfully at the car, and then at Streak. “We can fit three recumbent people into that little thing?”

  “Just. However, I hope you two are good friends. Either you’re going to have to sit on his lap, missy. or you go in the boot.” The elf avoided the playful kick the girl aimed at him. “No, honestly, I mean it.”

  * * *

  Geraint got to the doorway of the bedroom just in time, or he’d never have known what happened. Hovering above the man on the bed was a ghastly imp-like form, a wrinkled creature of spirit and yet tangible, almost earthy. It drew a long pin from which some corrosive liquid dripped and drove it through Gianfranco’s ribcage and into his heart.

  The imp turned, looked at him, spat, and disappeared. There was a smack as air rushed to fill the gap it had left.

  To the Weishman’s utter horror, Gianfranco suddenly jerked into an upright position on the bed. His eyes bulged in their sockets, and his tongue protruded from his mouth, blackened and swollen. Flecks of gray foam sputtered on his lips, and his hands clutched at midair in a final spasm of agony.

  Then he screamed.

  Clermont-Ferrand is in strange territory. Southwestern France has more than its fair share of tales of lycanthropes, hauntings, malign spirits, and other unseen horrors of the night. Grisly deaths don’t really cut it, not on their own. It needs more than that to make tongues wag in this part of the world.

  They say in Clermont, and in villages around it, that you could have heard the scream five kilometers away, and people who live that far out confirm it.

  Geraint reeled back into the living room, his head full of nightmare, guts churning, heart beating like a hammer on an anvil in Vulcan’s realm. For a moment, he actually wondered if this was what it was like to die of shock. A stunned elf was looking at him, white-faced, next to him a girl whose face mirrored the expression, the two of them clutching each other for support. They just managed to keep each other from falling over.

  When they began to calm down, the three of them tottered to the doorway and opened it to get the cold, fresh night air into their lungs.

  “Let’s get the frag out of here.” Streak croaked. “I don’t want to know what happened, man. I just don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. I don’t ever want to know.”

  He was barely coherent, but at least he could speak, which was more than the others could. And, somehow, they had to get two unconscious bodies into a car and drive away.

  The third body they no longer had to worry about.

  17

  It was a distinctly jaded huddle of people who managed to bluff and shuffle their way through the apparently equally tired and more than disinterested security at the Toulouse airport. They’d already soaked Michael’s jacket with a generous dose of brandy and proclaimed him dead drunk to account for his unconsciousness. Serrin, in contrast, had made a fairly swift recovery during the drive, surprising them all, though he was still not entirely himself. He seemed vacant, not attending to his surroundings, but he was able to talk coherently and seemed to be suffering no more than physical fatigue. Coffee from a flask, and a nip of the brandy left over from anointing Michael, had had a powerful restorative effect on him.

  Streak talked them through without incident, and they were just fastening their safety belts in the Yellowjacket when a pair of airport security guards came racing up to their chopper.

  “Oh, drek.” Geraint said. Streak frowned, but had no choice but to push open the chopper door again.

  “You forgot to sign this.” one of the men announced. proffering a form that looked as if it had outgrown “triplicate” and was now heading for double digits.

  “Yes, and this.” the other one grinned.

  “Yeah, yeah, it’s chill. Sorry, we were in a hurry. Guess I forgot.” Streak said, managing to sound bored as he signed the top copy with a pen borrowed from one of the men. That pen, when it found its way back to the officer, was wrapped in a high-denomination French banknote.

  The man smiled broadly. “That will do nicely, monsieur.” he said, and the pair retreated slowly back to their concrete watch-house.

  “I was so busy trying to be casual I forgot the bleeding bribe.” Streak explained once he’d closed the door of the aircraft. “Sorry.”

  “Thank God that was all.” Geraint said. He was overtired and jumpy. Of them all, he alone had seen the malefic spirit that had killed Gianfranco, and the sight had seared his nerves.

  “London?” Streak asked again. Apparently no one had heard him the first time.

  “Guess so. I’m too tired to think of anywhere clever.” Geraint said feebly.

  Streak turned briefly to his fellow elf, but Serrin had his nose buried in paper. With Michael still unconscious, the mage had apparently decided to take over the task of plowing through the morass of data he’d unearthed in his investigations. His brow furrowed, he ticked off something on one page. then resumed chewing the end of his pen absentmindedly as he scanned the next. Beside him. Kristen gazed absently out the window, apparently mesmerized by her light-spotted reflection.

  “Can’t go back to London . . . some mad Shi’ite ragheads have nuked it!” Streak announced loudly.

  “Hmmm.” Serrin said, chewing hard.

  “Does he often get like this?’ Streak asked no one in particular.

  “Uh? What?” Serrin said, suddenly looking up.

  “Never mind.” Streak said wearily as he prepared to taxi off. “It doesn’t matter.” He pulled on his headset and hailed the tower, asking for clearance and a runway The engines kicked into life, straining and purring like barely house-broken leopards.

  When they were airborne, and heading up above the lights of the night-shrouded French city, Geraint turned to Streak with a look of real gratitude.

  “Thanks.” he said simply. “Seriously. We weren’t in too good shape back there.”

  “All part of the service, mate.” Streak said amiably leaning gently on the stick to start the copter into a long turn toward the north. “I’ll stick it on me bill for later.”

  They fell to talking then Streak speaking of his mercenary life in hot spots around the globe, Geraint risking telling the elf something of the politics and intrigues that had created or exacerbated those incidents. A few times Streak whistled between his teeth at the mention of some exceptionally perfidious treachery or double-dealing behind the scenes. In the back, Serrin had his arm around Kristen but his eyes and his mind were on the papers and images before him. His wife gazed away into the darkness, but it was difficult to say whether she was seeing her dark reflection, the occasional yellow light from far below that glided eerily through it, or anything at all. Michael slept on peacefully.


  * * *

  London seemed gray even before dawn, not needing the drab morning light to pronounce its grayness. Slowly falling rain reduced visibility to an uncomfortably short range, and Geraint’s anxiety mounted steadily until at last they were safely back on terra firma.

  “I don’t like the idea of Mayfair” he said to Streak. “Who knows who’s watching the flat now?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that myself. Do you know old Carney over at MagSec?” Streak asked.

  “Certainly.” Geraint said. The officious but highly respected midranking officer in the magical security subdivision of the Ministry of Defense was known to a lot of Foreign Office officials who had important foreign contacts they needed to keep hidden during their stay in London.

  Streak smiled. “Well, your man Carney owes me a favor.”

  “Carney owes you a favor? Are you sure? Of course you are; ignore my stupidity. Well, well I never.” Geraint was dumbfounded. Was there no end to this elf’s hidden depths? Horace Walter Arbuthnot Carney never owed anyone favors. They owed him. He had enough favors coming to him to be king one day, or so went the joke.

  “Just don’t ask why.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” Geraint said fervently.

  “Carney has safe houses.” Streak pointed out. But it’ll cost you. Cashing in a favor with Horace means I’m losing a major fallback.”

  “Whatever it takes, Just make the call.”

  “You know, mate, you’re getting to say that an awful lot.”

  “It’s because you’re so damnably resourceful, my man.” Geraint was smiling now, his spirits lifted. If they could find a bolthole in one of Carney’s secure houses, the Inquisition wouldn’t be a problem. The Pope himself couldn’t get in.

  Streak rubbed his chin, and then his eyes. “Jesus H, but I’m seriously knackered myself. Any of that brandy left?”

  “Just enough for the two of us to get steamed out of our heads.”

  “Ahem.” There was a small cough from behind them. They turned to see Kristen grinning back at them, Serrin’s sleeping head in her lap.

  “Don’t forget me.” she said quietly, glancing down to make sure she wasn’t disturbing her husband. “You got any rags, Streak?”