‘How will we know?’ I ask.
‘It’s at sundown. I read it. Soon! We can walk up with the other pilgrims.’
I peer into the main street to make sure it’s safe for us to move. Mattiolas is approaching, at the centre of a large group of wailing pilgrims. He holds an ancient piece of timber and gazes down at it, his eyes becoming giant circles.
Suzan runs out to grab his arm. ‘Ramberti has Serafina! You have to go and find her!’
He continues staring at the piece of timber.
I join them. ‘Take some knights and rescue her! I have to get to Temple Knoll!’
Mattiolas ignores me. His feet pace evenly along the stones of Via Dolorosa’s upward curve.
‘Mattiolas! We’re talking about Serafina! Your wife! What’s wrong?’
‘Look,’ Mattiolas says, his tone dreamy. ‘A piece of the true cross.’
He holds the timber closer, not seeing the mischievous demon that swings from it like a pendulum. ‘I’m walking the way of the cross. It wants me to go to Temple Knoll.’
‘Mattiolas! Think! The cross can’t want you to go anywhere!’
A knight runs to him and Mattiolas laughs, clutching the timber more closely with his left hand. With his right, he pulls his sword from its scabbard. ‘You won’t have it!’ he yells at the strange knight.
The knight runs too quickly. His eyes are as wide as Mattiolas’s. He is just as fascinated by that old piece of wood.
He runs right into Mattiolas’s sword.
Neither reacts to the impact, not even the knight who is clearly fatally injured. Mattiolas doesn’t move until the other knight collapses at his feet. Then he steps backwards, tearing his sword from the knight’s convulsing body. His eyes never leave the piece of wood.
Its demon giggles.
Suzan
Luca grabs his friend’s arm. ‘Mattiolas. It’s Luca. You have to stop this. Serafina needs help!’
But something else is happening. The sun is low over the Western Wall. Time is passing. And it’s Mattiolas and his ridiculous piece of timber that have the pilgrims’ attention.
Mattiolas turns to Luca. His eyes are locked in focus. ‘You won’t have it,’ he says again, and raises his sword.
This time it’s pointed at Luca.
‘Luca! Mattiolas is under a charm! Thanatos has enchanted all the demon relics to summon people up there!’ I pull Luca’s arm. I know he won’t fight his friend while Mattiolas is possessed like this, but I need to get him away from here. ‘Come this way!’
I run to a nearby open arch, turning only to make sure that Luca is following. He is, his face even paler than before. The arch leads to a set of steep steps. We race up them to a new vantage point on the stones of Jerusalem’s rooftops. From here, the city is exposed with all its glories and the injuries of its recent assault.
‘It’s demons making him act that way,’ I say. ‘Luca, you know that’s true. We can save him by stopping Thanatos.’
There are many ways to Temple Knoll, both through Jerusalem’s winding streets and over its connected rooftops. Mattiolas and his group of bewildered pilgrims walk the streets. Luca and I walk the roofs in the day’s last sunlight, careful not to slip. The sky is alive with awe-inspiring colours of gold and red, like the world is a furnace, with clouds roiling above.
Thanatos stands outside one of the great mosques on Temple Knoll, his arms raised into the air as he calls thousands and thousands of demons to this terrible vespers. He grows as he waves his arms, the way demons grew to possess the people who drank horse blood, all those moons ago. Now he’s the height of two men and radiates a terrible, icy beauty.
Around him, demons dance and roar with glee. The ground is littered with the relics they’re tethered to, icons and preserved bones. While we watch, more pilgrims enter the plaza and lay down the relics they’ve carried for years, not understanding that this delivery was always the real purpose of their journey. They step back, looking dazed, not realising that they’re waiting to die, and for their bodies to be possessed.
‘Here we are!’ Thanatos says. ‘As I promised.’
‘Now,’ demons chant. ‘Now. Now. Now.’
‘Soon,’ Thanatos says. ‘The time is nearly right.’
Mattiolas and the crowd emerge from the street behind us. He’s carrying that ridiculous piece of timber. Each pilgrim has with him or her a relic that drags an eager demon.
‘No! Mattiolas!’ Luca cries.
‘Thanatos has their attention. That’s part of the charm,’ I tell Luca. ‘He’s visible to everyone now. We can use that. I know how to expose him.’
I flip through the book’s pages, looking for the charm we used on Eser, and begin reciting:
To unmask a demon in disguise use ginger to expose its eyes.
Red ribbon next will make it halt.
Sprinkle its silver skin with salt.
Then cinnamon, nettle, apple seeds will end the shadow that it needs.
Mugwort, plantain, chamomile remove from it the skill of guile.
A mirror then completes the matter.
Trap the mask and watch it shatter.
Beware!
With no true life, no real thing dies (but it’s powerless without disguise).
Doing my best to keep concealed and with my fragment of mirror in hand, I cross towards Thanatos. I reach into my pouch for saved pinches of ginger and cinnamon and mix them with apple seeds saved from Ramberti’s palace.
Arms raised, his sleeves falling like theatrical curtains, Thanatos continues addressing his riveted audience.
‘We’ve waited centuries since learning what happens here! Some of us waited millennia before that, waiting to learn! Thirty moons ago, we were finally called!’
I pull the red ribbon from my pocket.
‘A great explosion in the sky!’ Thanatos continues. The air around him moves with his exaggerated gestures; little whirligigs whiz around and lift the smaller demons up into the air. Suddenly, a whirlwind starts near me—it catches my breath.
It catches the ribbon and pulls it from me, whisking it away.
I gasp. The ribbon! The charm! Desperately, I look around to see where it’s gone. Then I notice there is red fabric everywhere. Red from blood. I tear a strip of worn and blood-stained linen from the corpse nearest me, and feel the warm fizz of a charm starting to work.
‘One that humans barely noticed, but one that called us from around the globe!’ Thanatos continues. ‘Every demon who could come is here!’
As close now as I can get without being seen, I stand behind the pillar of a ceremonial archway and hold a mirror in the direction of Thanatos’s face. More loudly, I repeat the charm.
Thanatos freezes, peering into the crowd. He must sense something is happening, that something has changed. I withdraw further behind the pillar. Very slowly, Thanatos backs away.
‘This is our day, our hour…’ he says. But he is wrong.
I walk closer and recite the charm again.
Mugwort, plantain, chamomile remove from it the skill of guile.
A mirror then completes the matter.
Trap the mask and watch it shatter.
After repeating the charm a third time, I hear a cry. I have to look. Thanatos has his hands over his face. I stride towards him and catch his face fully with the mirror before tossing it onto the ground. Demons scatter, leaving empty circles around us.
The mirror splits into several pieces. For one moment, each piece shows Thanatos in a different colour: red, blue, green, yellow, grey, black.
I raise my foot and stamp the glass fragments into the ground. ‘Our hour! Our time!’ Thanatos cries.
Then he throws out his arms and screams as the mirror shatters.
I’ve never heard a scream like it—and, since leaving Cappadocia, I have heard many screams. Thanatos’s is loud and high. Its echoes seem to stretch from one of Jerusalem’s walls to the other, and round and round like the screams of a thousand beings. His eyes grow,
swelling into enormous pools of fire. He looks for me, seeking me out. I throw a handful of salt at him. He raises his hands as though to cover his face, but when he pulls his hands away, layers of skin come along with them.
Around the square, demons who’ve been squealing their excitement are silenced. I throw more salt, and more.
Layer after layer of Thanatos’s mask is flayed from him. The wind darts in and whips away great silvery sheets of false skin that disintegrate like the mirror. His illusion is over. Demons who have been pouring into the square begin to back away.
When the noise has dissipated, I’m left standing beside a small, skinny—no, a skeletal old man. Flakes of skin continue to droop and peel from his misshapen bones. His clothes also change as the enchantment wears off. Now, he’s wearing a long black robe, and carrying a scythe.
He is Thanatos, the demon of death.
‘Suzan,’ he says. ‘I underestimated you.’
I’m pretty certain he can’t hurt me now. ‘Is this why you’ve come all this way?’ I demand. ‘Is this why you want a human body? Because, underneath the magic you’re as…pitiful…as this?’
Thanatos looks down at his skeletal arms with their thin casing of pasty, loose skin. Unlike Eser he seems to have kept his wits when he lost his disguise, but his fury has abated with his youthful appearance. His bones are loose. When he opens his mouth to speak, the ligaments won’t tighten. He has to raise one hand, finger bones dripping rag-like skin, to force his jaws to close. ‘I did not expect to be defeated by a girl.’
‘You’re not as wise as you imagine.’
Thanatos turns, and in the scratchy voice of an old man calls out, ‘Demons! You can still perform the charm! You just need to be tough!’
Nearby, Mattiolas casts away the piece of timber he’d been clutching. ‘Serafina!’ he cries.
I step to him and grab his arm. ‘Last time I saw her, she was at Ramberti’s palace. Near where we passed you before. Do you remember?’
Mattiolas nods and runs down the Via Dolorosa.
I turn back to Thanatos just in time to see him flee.
Luca
Suzan did that.
She defeated Thanatos.
I am awestruck. The girl I met fleeing for her life from a stone convent, the girl who carried her entire world in a basket, has just exposed and subdued the most powerful demon of all.
She looks at me, and turns her hand over. It looks like she’s dropping dirt over the shattered glass at her feet but I know it’s the ingredients she listed.
‘Thanatos was all about display and show,’ she says. ‘Demons envy us. Now we need to deal with the others. They still want what Thanatos promised.’
I remember the prediction that all enchantments will end once Thanatos reaches Temple Knoll. I look at the book, open in Suzan’s hands, half scared the text and images will have disappeared.
But the words are still there. Suzan grabs a handful of our spices, mixed with salt, and reads,
Kenodoxia, demon of pride, and your minions, I call you into this book.
Suzan raises a hand to her mouth and expels a puff of air, blowing spices at the gathered demons.
Philargyria, demon of greed, and your minions, I call you into this book.
Suzan lets out another puff.
Pazuzu, demon of rage, and your minions, I call you into this book.
Another puff of spices colours the air.
Tristitia, demon of gloom, and your minions, I call you into this book.
Around the plaza, demons that have been attached to other relics are suddenly freed by the power of Suzan’s recitation and her gathered ingredients. The silvery cords that bind them stretch and snap and fade. All around us, demons of different sizes and shapes look confused, then alarmed.
Invidia, demon of envy, and your minions, I call you into this book.
Edicitas, demon of gluttony, and your minions, I call you into this book.
Asmodeus, the demon of lust, and your minions, I call you into this book.
‘This is why demon names matter!’ she cries. She reads the lines again. ‘I can call them!’
Then another strange thing happens. The silver strands begin to grow again. They grow in two directions: from the demons themselves—and from the turning vellum pages.
Suzan repeats her calls to the different species of demons. I join her in mixing handfuls of spices and salt and tossing them into the air around the book, then stand back and watch as the two sets of silver cords find each other. Demons give a jerk as the cords that bind them connect them to the book.
Some squeal, others yell and squawk. Maybe they sense what’s about to happen.
The silver cords shrink and tighten. The demons are pulled closer to the book. Silver skin floats off them when the salt hits them, just as Thanatos’s mask floated off him. Dozens, hundreds of them. Thousands. Every demon whose relic was brought to this square. It reminds me of when I first noticed the silver cords all that time ago, in the Collegiata in San Gimignano.
The threads sprouting from the book continue to pull. They pull the demons with them. The demons don’t want to come. They leap into the air and flap their wings in a vain attempt to fly away. They scrabble on the ground, clawing at the dirt. They wrap their limbs around stone pillars. The silver coming off them catches in the breeze and rises before falling like metallic rain. Suzan continues reciting while they shriek and try to flee.
But they can’t escape. The book’s pages rustle and the silver cords shorten. Little by little, step by step, squawk by squawk, the demons are pulled towards the book. Suzan begins her recitation for a fourth time, a fifth.
What will happen when we run out of cinnamon? I try showing her our limited stock, but her eyes are glazed over. She is spellbound herself.
Everything speeds up. The demons who were closest reach the book and are sucked into it. The pages rustle more loudly as these demons are absorbed into the vellum. It seems as though they’re about to be pulled right through the book—then they are stopped, and frozen on its pages.
Suzan recites as I ration the cinnamon and the book pulls and pulls until no silver cords are left. It pulls until the air is clear, the ground littered only with abandoned relics, and the only audible cries are human ones, from Saracens trapped in Al Aqsa. I’ve run out of cinnamon, but no demons remain in the square.
Suzan has read them into the book.
She looks at me with shining eyes. ‘The book can’t be enchanted in the same way as other objects. Its magic is the power of words! I need to call Thanatos as well!’
She tries to call him, but there’s no response. That must be why he fled, so he would be too far away when she called his name.
Footsteps crunch, coming from one of the city streets. I spin to see another procession, banners flying. It’s Ramberti, on his way to the mosque where all those thousands of people have sought sanctuary.
Thanatos has fled, exposed, but Ramberti doesn’t know that. Ramberti still believes there’s a demonic deal to see him crowned King of Jerusalem. Now, we need to stop him.
I reach for my sword. ‘The enemy I need to defeat has never changed,’ I tell Suzan. ‘It’s human. It’s always been Dragonus Ramberti.’
Ramberti leads the pilgrims across the plaza. All their swords are drawn. I run to him. His brows lower and his eyes narrow when he sees me. ‘Luca. Thanatos told me you’d bring the book. I see you’ve abandoned your ugly nun. It doesn’t matter. I’ll find her and she can read for me later.’
I glance at Suzan. Now that charms have worn off, Ramberti sees her true face for the first time. He doesn’t seem to recognise her. She raises her hands and touches her skin, as if she’s unsure what she looks like.
Ramberti waves his hands to indicate the open square in front of us and laughs. ‘What can you do? Thanatos himself supports me. Before sundown I’ll be King of Jerusalem.’
Around and behind him, pilgrims continue their march towards Al Aqsa. ‘You must stop them
!’ I say. ‘Thanatos has fled, Ramberti. You can free all those people.’
Ramberti blinks. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Your plans won’t work!’ I continue. ‘Your deal with Thanatos is over. Even if he was here, do you think the Princes would allow it? Bohemond and Tancred will stop you being king. Their own greed won’t allow it.’
‘What they want doesn’t matter. I’ve planned this with Thanatos for a long time. I’ve planned this very carefully.’ He turns and raises his voice, and the medallion around his neck. ‘Thanatos! I need you. I have a surprise for you, too.’
The vellum sheets in the book begin to flutter. I think of all the demons recently captured within it. I wonder if there’s a place in the pages for someone who is mortal.
‘Thanatos has fled,’ Suzan repeats.
Ramberti looks around, then straightens his shoulders. It must be apparent to him that Thanatos isn’t here. ‘I don’t need a magic charm to be made King of Jerusalem. I just need human beings to agree that I am.’
‘You think people want you to be king?’ I demand. With one sweep of my arm, I take in the square before us and the mosque. The pilgrims who arrived with Ramberti are battering at its doors now, while the Saracens within cry and beg for mercy.
Ramberti smiles. ‘Here comes your cousin.’
With a purposeful stride, Narlo reaches us. ‘Where’s Thanatos?’ he demands. ‘He’s meant to be here now. I have news.’
‘Well, you can tell me instead,’ Ramberti orders. ‘You know we were working together.’
Narlo scratches his head, deciding. ‘I have news. The Princes are dead. Raymond and Bohemond both. The only way to keep Jerusalem is to declare that Ramberti is king.’
I spring forwards. ‘Coward! You’re lying!’
Narlo unsheathes his sword and lunges at me. More furious than I have ever been before, I meet his thrust with a forceful blow. Narlo falls flat on his face.
The Book of Whispers Page 31
