by Jenn Stark
“Keep going along the side of the nave,” I murmured. Fortunately, the day was a busy one. The room seemed to go through a full turnover every ten minutes or so.
We climbed the small steps to the public access area of the nave, at a safe and respectful distance from the high altar. As expected, the view was deeply moving. But it wasn’t what I was looking for.
My own upbringing in Memphis had been sadly lacking in a number of ways, but I’d spent my fair share of time in Catholic churches. It was what had inspired in me a love of the arcane and magical, or so I’d always thought. So much beauty, so much symbolism wrapped up in extraordinary art and artifacts, all to celebrate the greater glory of God. And more to the point, so much consistency from one church to the other.
Without breaking stride, I stepped over the small velvet rope and moved into the sacristy. As I suspected, the small room was lined with closets. And in the closets were vestments. I pulled out a set I figured were close enough.
Max was right behind me. “What are you—” He pulled the vestments out of my hands. “No, you’re too small. You’ll never pass as a man.”
I scowled at him, but I didn’t have time to argue, especially because he was right. “There should be another door on the far side. Look for the cross, the square, the knot, use your imagination, something that matches up with the Templar artwork. Tap on the door if you find it. If not, get the hell out. We’ll have to wait until the Devil moves again to get his position. If you find it, though, go through and stay put. I’ll be right on your heels. You’ve got five minutes before you’re out of there.”
It took him less than three.
When the telltale knock sounded, a group of school children was clustered around the nave, their eyes filled with admiration for the frescoes on either side of the altar and the lovely graceful archways of the ceiling. A schoolteacher spoke of the reasons behind creating such beautiful artwork in such a place, to encourage the faithful to gaze up outward and upward toward the heavens and remember there was something greater than themselves gazing back.
I was just happy not to have anyone gazing at me. I rose from my kneeling position and stepped quickly over to the confessional, then pressed inside, shutting the door quickly behind me. I heard the lock snick back into place and adjusted my eyes.
Max, of course, wasn’t there. Given that the compartment was about the size of a Twinkie, I would have noticed him. Instead I noticed that a slender panel stood ajar against the back of the compartment, letting in a thin sliver of light. I pushed the panel open, stepping into a cool space smelling of age and rock dust, not unlike the chambers below the Vatican. “Thick walls,” I whispered.
Max nodded but held a finger to his lips. He leaned to my ear as he pointed down the narrow passage, which quickly turned into a staircase leading down. “People. More than one.”
We set off along the passageway, Max in his robes, his Ferragamo loafers silent on the stones. My boots did their job as well, and we moved silently, step by step, down the stair and along another passageway. Roughly, I knew we were heading back toward the main gallery we had seen before, but how many levels would we have to go?
And how would we get back up?
A loud rasping scrape reverberated from below us, the sound making my bones grind together. Beside me, Max grimaced as well, and I heard a choked gasp, then a flurry of gritted words, which, quite literally, were all Greek to me.
Beside me, Max’s eyes were rounded. I checked my phone again. The Devil was definitely down there.
But I’d been expecting him to rule the day, not be ruled by it.
Max waved furiously for my phone, and I handed it over to him, frowning as he swiped it to the notes app. He typed furiously, then shoved the device back at me, and I squinted down at the screen to read his words. “If he’s really the Devil, fun fact: one of the myths behind the Sator Square was its use as a demon ward by the Knights Templar. No one knows how.”
The shirring sound started up again, that sound of bone-on-bone agony, but this time I realized it had a resonance, a cadence. It had words. The words of the Sator Square—spoken over and over again, backward, forward, upward, down. It was enough to drive me mad.
And apparently I wasn’t the only one.
“I knew you would come, Aleksander Kreios.” A dark voice floated out over the murmuring words. “And now we’ll see if the dark legends of Sermoneta Sator Square are true.”
By the sound the Devil made after that, I was betting they were.
Chapter Twelve
The cry that tore up through the rocks was cut off short, but it served as enough cover for us to make our way another fifty feet into the passageway, down another flight of stairs, this one far steeper, and along another passageway. The walls and ceiling pressed in on us, but we could manage—myself more so than Max, whose height was becoming a liability. Clearly, the passage had been carved at a time when everyone was built to a smaller scale.
Eventually the corridor widened again to become a kind of gallery—short, stubby columns stretched from the ceiling to a waist-high ledge, allowing a view into a chamber below, which was filled with light. The passage continued forward, but we slowed as the outline of a man became clear, standing at the top of the stairs.
A lone guard in priest’s robe, his long gun equipped with a silencer. I frowned. If he had a gun and a silencer, and their point was to kill whoever was below, then why not get it over with? I had to assume it was the Devil down there making those unearthly guttural sounds, and I had to assume these people knew he’d already escaped once. Why mess around?
Then I peeked around one of the stone columns to the space below. Oh, of course. They wanted to play with their prey first.
Idiots.
But these weren’t the guards of SANCTUS, as I’d originally expected. They didn’t have the same air of military efficiency. The whole religious-motif thing, though, they had down.
Aleksander Kreios was strapped to a stone platform in the middle of the room, his magnificent chest bare, his pants looking very much worse for the wear. He was alone, so whoever had driven him here had either betrayed him or weren’t along for this particular stop on the tour. He scowled at the men above him, but the effect was ruined somewhat by the helmet that encased his head, covering his ears. Even at this distance, I could hear the shirring noise that must be pretty much exploding his eardrums. The priest-like man standing at the base of his makeshift torture bed was adjusting an instrument panel, every turn of the knob making Kreios arc off the bed in misery.
I edged back, wincing, and Kreios’s face turned, his eyes searching desperately. When they rested on me, though, I froze. There was fury and pain there, yes. But there wasn’t any doubt. Not yet. If anything, the magnitude of whatever was pounding his head seemed to make the Devil more exhilarated, like it was its own special kind of drug.
Note to self: Kreios is a whack job.
Our brief connection was summarily broken with another twist of the dial. I could hear the words again, the Sator Square’s apparently meaningless babble repeating, switching back on itself, running forward again.
“Good, good.” The man at the instrument panel nodded with apparent satisfaction, and only then did a second man emerge from the shadows. He spoke in Greek, and Max fitted himself close to my ear, translating on the fly. “You will suffer now.”
“I will kill you now,” Kreios gritted out. “Betrayer.”
“No, you won’t.” The man waved another hand, and the intensity of the volume picked up again. I winced along with Max. What was it about the combination of these words that pricked the senses of those with psychic abilities? “You have no power here. I’d almost given up on you escaping your little cage, but you always do manage to impress. You were foolish to come here, when I had already trapped you once.” He gestured again, and my gaze followed the movement. The Devil’s reliquary sat, opened, on a bench against the far wall.
“What do you want, Barnabus? What
is your game?” Exhilarated or not, the Devil’s voice was ragged, vibrating with pain.
“No games.” The man in the Templar robe smiled. “I’m not foolish enough to believe anything you might say now. Not until you’re broken. But then!” He spread his hands. “Delivering you twice will elevate me to the highest levels of trust.”
“You had our trust.”
“I did!” Barnabus crowed. “And I used it to my advantage. Why do you think I was so eager to help you find your missing Connected in Hungary? And now, once again. The words of the Sator Square burn, do they not? It is not just an old superstition after all.” He paused, grinning down at Kreios. “And you will be very useful to us…eventually.”
Kreios moaned something then, but it was too low for me to hear. Barnabus still seemed pleased.
“We no longer need your help in that manner. Your order is lost, Kreios. There is only one order to follow now. One path to ultimate divinity. You will see this more quickly than most. You will see everything soon.”
“Who?” The word was anguished now, and I tightened my hands into fists.
“Always so persistent in your pursuit of the knowledge. That was in your file too. Your file from before your fall.” He spoke as if he savored the word. “They know everything about you, Aleksander Kreios. They have always known about you. Your abilities were clear even when you were nothing more than another poor stiff working the docks for a day’s ration of bread, laughing in the very face of the war that was brewing atop the sea you loved so much.” The man’s face twisted. “You should never have joined the council. The death of your mentor was unavoidable. Yours was a choice.”
That seemed to affect Kreios more than the pain. He went deadly still. “Don’t speak of him.”
“Still burns, does it? Seeing him gutted, then shut up in that reliquary, buried alive before your own eyes? The lore of that day has been etched into our history.” He shook his head. “But now, it will be different. Now the Devil of the Arcana Council will be laid to rest, and he will not be replaced.”
“Fool!” Kreios’s eyes snapped open, and he glared at the robed man with enough ferocity that his tormenter stepped back, his hands stealing to the heavy cross that hung around his next. A Templar cross, I realized. “The path you follow will betray you even as you betray the watchful gods of old. Balance will be kept, Barnabus. It has always been kept.”
“Do not deceive me, Prince of Lies.” The man made a sharp, cutting motion with his hand, and I felt rather than heard the surge of volume in the device. Pain wrenched through me. Max’s hands now gripped my shoulders, whether for my benefit or his, I didn’t know. “Who else now sits on the council?” the man demanded. “Is it truly reassembling?”
Kreios’s response was also in Greek, but Max didn’t bother to translate it. Another turn of the dial, and I felt the tears on my face before I realized I had shed them.
“Who?”
“All of them,” Kreios spit the words. “The Fool. Magician. The Emperor and High Priestess and our very own pope. You want me to continue? You know the roster as well as I.”
“You’re lying,” the man shot back. “You could never find all the stones to rebuild your unholy church.”
“And you are led from darkness to greater darkness, scrabbling with your bones, your beads, and your unfounded hopes, desperate for a savior who is not coming.” Kreios practically pulsed with an internal fire, and I scowled down at him, remembering the golden reliquary into which he had been forced. Now, under this pain, with his focus so fixed on his tormenter, he almost seemed to be disintegrating. “He will never come, Barnabus. We will not let him.”
“You will stand in his way?” Barnabus stepped forward with new excitement. This apparently was something he hadn’t expected. “None of you have the strength.”
“Is that what you believe?” Kreios’s voice had taken on an air of slippery danger, as if he were luring the robed man toward an open pit full of spikes. And, like the fool that he was, Barnabus took a step closer. Still, he wasn’t a complete loss. With his right hand, he made a twisting motion, and the stooge at the dials twisted the notch again, once more making Kreios rigid.
“Tell me, Aleksander. For the family you have sacrificed, whose cries torment you at night. For the children you have lost to perdition. Tell me and absolve yourself of all your many sins.”
“You dare!” Kreios’s eyes blazed with rage and something else, something not right. They burned too brightly not to eventually explode.
I did a recon of the chamber, because show time was clearly close.
Two men guarded the reliquary, both of them masked. Another pair of guards stood at the second entrance to the room, and I assumed a final guard stood at the bottom of the stairs to this gallery. Six men against Max and myself, and the Devil who even now was starting to look a little too incorporeal for comfort.
I couldn’t afford for him to up and disappear on me. I didn’t know if he’d get sucked back into his box or go poof for good. Or for bad, as it happened.
I reached into my jacket. Beside me, Max already had his gun out. Neither of us had silencers. Hopefully the tours above had moved along.
Wait, I mouthed, as Max’s eyes were trained on my face. Wait.
Barnabus gestured another time.
Kreios cried out in fury one final time and I shoved myself half over the banister of the gallery, picking off the guards at the far wall before dropping all the way through. I hit the ground and rolled, a shot skittering off the floor as I ducked behind Kreios’s pallet.
“Finish it!” Barnabus snapped the order, and the man at the controls dived forward. I launched myself at the cart, shoving it out of the way as I took him down at the knees. I coldcocked him with my pistol once, twice, before looking up to see Max at the bottom of the stairs. He cracked the soldier’s neck against the stone, the skull crunching into the rock, then let the man fall. Barnabus was already running, and I gestured Max after him while I turned to Kreios.
The Devil was barely breathing. The screech of noise from his helmet reverberated through the room, and I pulled a knife out of my pocket, ripping at the wires that held the helmet affixed to the sprawling cart. It seemed permanently attached to the platform, so they had to have somehow gotten Kreios into it without protest. Which would have meant he’d been knocked out. But how?
With the severing of the last wire, a spray of sparks flew across the room, and merciful silence blanketed us. I slumped forward over Kreios’s body, my ears ringing, the abrupt cessation of pain like a benediction. Beneath me, the Devil’s chest was slick with sweat, his own lungs heaving beneath his thickly corded pecs.
As I steadied myself against him, soft words floated down around my ears.
“As pleasant as I’m sure this experience would be for both of us, we may want to wait until we are completely alone, Sara Wilde.”
I jerked back upright as Max appeared in the doorway again, his face grim.
“Gone?” I asked.
“Dead.” He shook his head at my startled expression. “Some sort of suicide pill, frothing at the mouth before I got to him. Stuck in some sort of oubliette, no way out.” Max tossed me a set of keys. “These might be helpful.”
“Don’t count on him being dead,” Kreios gritted out as I grabbed the ring, turning first to the ankle manacles until I found the right one. “Go back for him. Guard the body.”
“Go,” I nodded. I had the second ankle manacle off and was on the left wrist when the chest bar snapped. I narrowed my eyes at Kreios. “You could do that the whole time?”
“Not all of them. And not with that infernal noise. Besides, I rather enjoy you doing it.” He reached up with his right hand as soon as I freed it and used the leverage to push himself down, out of the fixed helmet. I blinked—his head had been shaved bald. It gave him a savage ferocity that, combined with his glittering eyes, made me wonder if he was fully sane any longer. “Accursed Sator Square. Knew this place had one, but shaped
like a wheel…” He shook his head like a bear coming out of hibernation. “Wasn’t prepared for that.”
Max’s curse floated back to us, and Kreios hauled himself off his platform. A quick step, and he collapsed against me heavily. I groaned at the weight, which was several times more than what I’d expected. “What in God’s name did you have for breakfast?”
Kreios ignored me. “Where’s Barnabus?” he asked instead. “The body.”
“He’s gone.” Max came back through the doorway and willingly took Kreios’s weight as I moved to the side of the room for the reliquary. After snapping it shut, I shoved it inside my jacket and zipped the pocked closed, then returned to Kreios’s side.
“So, what?” I asked. “Fake arsenic pill? I hear they sell those on the Internet now.”
“Not fake,” Kreios managed. He kept trying to get his feet under himself, and skidded and slipped instead. “Built up a tolerance. The last in an arsenal of tricks.”
“Stop fighting us,” I bit out when he practically horse-collared me again. He was drenched in sweat, but his skin was ice cold. “What the hell was that helmet?”
“Variation on an old theme, I’m afraid.” Kreios coughed. Blood dripped from his mouth and he wobbled again before leaning heavily on both of us. “A very effective variation. Someone’s been doing their homework.”
“We’re coming up on a door.” Max warned. “It’s open. Gotta be where Barnabus went out.”
“Check it,” I said. “If he’s left us a welcome party, it’s going to get messy.”
But he hadn’t. Barnabus was nowhere to be found in the basement. The door at the far end was locked, of course, but I’d been target practicing on locks for a long time. With a few rounds, it swung open easily. Max went forward several steps before giving the all clear.
“Looks like the storage room for the abbey gift shop,” he said wryly. “Hope they don’t pick us up for shoplifting.”
I eyed Kreios. “He’s not going to be able to make it all the way to the car.”
