Sanctus (35 page)

The moment Gabriel saw the open fire door at the back of the room he knew something was wrong. He raised his gun, crunched towards it and looked outside. The Inspector was lying on the ground. Liv had gone.

He stepped out, checking along the perimeter fence for the patrols then grabbed the Inspector under his shoulders, leaned back to drag him inside, and nearly dropped him again when he let out a low, ragged moan.

He hauled him inside, closed the fire door and felt for a neck pulse. He found one, and frowned at the two bullet holes in the front of his shirt. They were ragged and closely grouped. He poked his finger through one of them and touched warm metal. He dragged his finger towards the second hole, tearing the shirt material between them and revealing a black body armour vest beneath with two flattened bullets at the spot where the heart should be. The impact would have been enough to knock him out, crack the ribs maybe, but not kill him.

‘Hey,’ Gabriel said, slapping him sharply on both cheeks. ‘Come on, wake up.’

He slapped him harder until Arkadian’s head finally rolled away to one side and his eyes struggled open. He looked at Gabriel. Focused. Tried to get up.

‘Take it easy,’ Gabriel said, resting a hand on his chest where the bullets had struck. ‘You’ve been shot. If you get up you could pass out again and crack your head. I need to know what car you came in.’

‘Unmarked car,’ Arkadian rasped in a dry voice he didn’t recognize.

‘It’s gone,’ Gabriel said, reaching into his pocket and taking out his mobile phone. ‘Whoever took it is probably the same guy who shot you and left you for dead. I want you to call it in as stolen. It’ll be on the road somewhere between here and the Citadel. But advise caution. The girl’s in the car with him.’

Arkadian looked at the phone and remembered the officer he’d left sitting behind the wheel. ‘The driver?’ he said.

Gabriel looked at him, his face blank. ‘He’ll be in the car too.’ Arkadian nodded, his face darkening. He reached out with his good hand and took the phone. He started to dial the number for central dispatch but managed only the first three numbers before both men froze as something moved, outside in the warehouse.

Gabriel surged forward, moving low across the floor towards the open door, keeping below the line of the windows. The sound came again. Like electrical static, or the crinkle of heavy plastic. He realized what it was a split second before he reached the door and a terrible sound tore through the air – the banshee howl of pain and lament.

His mother was standing just outside the door, holding the tarpaulin in her hand, and staring down at what was left of her father’s body.

Cornelius headed up through the rising mountains keeping a steady few points below the speed limit, wary of his broken wind-screen and the two corpses stashed in the boot. The tail end of the rush-hour traffic still leaked out of the city. Very little was heading in his direction. He made it all the way up the Southern Boulevard and on to the inner ring road before Arkadian managed to report the car he was driving as stolen. He was already easing down the slip road and headed into the Umbrasian Quarter by the time the dispatcher called it out on the radio and instigated a search. Following the daily exodus of coaches and cars after the old town closed its portcullises for the night the Quarter was practically deserted. Cornelius turned into the alley, and brought the car to a stop by the steel door. He tapped a message into his phone explaining where he was, and who was in the car with him.

Then he waited.

After a long minute a deep
thunk
sounded inside the steel door and it started to rise, gradually revealing the dark tunnel beyond. The headlights swept across smooth concrete then rough stone walls as he eased the car forward, following the curve of the tunnel away to the right. Behind him the steel door sank back towards the ground. Cornelius listened to the soothing rumble of the tyres on the uneven floor. It occurred to him that this was possibly the last time he’d ever drive a car or set foot outside the Citadel. He found these thoughts soothing. He had no love for the modern world, or the people who inhabited it. He’d seen enough hell on earth during his time in the army. Salvation lay ahead, away from the world, high in the mountain – closer to God.

The car bounced on its springs at the bottom of the dip then rose up towards the chamber at the end of the tunnel. As the headlights swept down at the top of the rise they lit up two figures standing like phantoms in the centre of the vault. Cornelius pulled the wheel to the right, steering away from the apparitions, before coming to a halt in a cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. He killed the engine but left the headlights burning, the bounced light from the beams illuminating the two figures drifting towards him through the gritty fog. Both wore the green cassocks of the Sancti. Cornelius opened his door, stepped out, and found himself crushed in an embrace.

‘Welcome back,’ the Abbot said, holding him out again at arm’s length and inspecting him like a father greeting a long-lost son. ‘Are you hurt?’ Cornelius shook his head. ‘Then you must change quickly and come with us.’

The Abbot snaked his arm round Cornelius’s shoulder and lead him towards the doorway in the back wall. He stepped through into the small ante-chamber and noticed something on the floor. The Abbot smiled and gestured towards it. Cornelius felt tears prick his eyes as he bent down to pick up the wooden Crux lying on top of the dark green robes of a fully ordained Sanctus.

The phone went dead in Arkadian’s ear. He looked at the display. The signal had vanished. He frowned, partly in frustration, partly because of what the dispatcher had just told him. He looked down at the red mess of his shoulder. He needed to get to a hospital, he needed to call his wife too so she didn’t hear about all this second-hand, but all he’d managed to do was report the car stolen. He rose painfully to his feet, holding the phone in front of him as he cast about for a signal. He heard another fit of sobbing echo through the warehouse and realized he was probably not the only one who needed a hospital. He picked his way across the glass-pebbled floor towards the splintered office door and looked out.

The scene that greeted him was a tableau from a renaissance painting of biblical grief. The broken body of the old man lay on the floor shrouded in a thick plastic sheet shining like silk under the soft glow of the overhead lights. Gabriel was kneeling beside him, his arms cradling his mother’s head against his chest. She wept and wrung the material of his jacket with her hand. Gabriel looked up.

‘The car?’ he asked, in a voice stretched thin by grief.

‘They know where it is,’ Arkadian said. ‘All squad cars have a transponder fitted so they can be found quickly if a radio goes down. The dispatcher said this one must be faulty. She said it looked like it was moving in a straight line across the buildings and streets of the old town before it stopped – right in the middle of the Citadel.’

Gabriel closed his eyes. ‘Then we’re too late,’ he said. ‘No,’ came a ragged voice. Kathryn lifted her head and stared straight at Arkadian. ‘The seeds the monk swallowed! You need to make sure they’re safe,’ she said. Arkadian frowned. No one was supposed to know about them. ‘We think they may be the Sacrament,’ Kathryn explained, sensing his confusion.

Arkadian shook his head. ‘But they’re just common apple seeds,’ he said. ‘We tested them.’

A heavy silence hung in the wake of his words. Nobody moved for long seconds. Arkadian watched Gabriel and Kathryn line up this new information with what they already knew. Then Gabriel leaned forward, tenderly kissed his mother on the top of her head and rose to his feet.

‘If it’s not the seeds,’ he said, moving past Arkadian and into the office. ‘Then it’s the girl. She is the key to everything. She always has been. And I’m going to get her back.’ He crunched across the floor, picked up the black canvas bag from the floor and placed it on the nearest desk.

‘Let me handle this,’ Arkadian said, glancing back down at the phone which now showed one bar. He pressed redial to get through to central dispatch. ‘If she’s been kidnapped and taken to the Citadel they can’t just deny it. We can get the commissioner involved, bring political pressure to bear. Force them to cooperate with the investigation.’

‘They’ll deny everything,’ Gabriel said, opening the bag and reaching inside. ‘And it’ll take far too long. The girl will be dead before any politician gets involved. You said the car was still moving when you spoke to the dispatcher. That means she’s only about twenty minutes ahead. We need to get there fast and get her out.’

‘And how are we going to do that?’

Gabriel spun round in a blur of motion and Arkadian felt a bang on his arm, like a slap. ‘
We
don’t,’ Gabriel said.

Arkadian looked down. Saw a syringe sticking out where Gabriel had hit him. He looked up with shock, staggering backwards as he reached up to try and bat the syringe away. His arm already felt heavy. He hit the wall and felt his legs buckle. Gabriel stepped forward and caught him, controlling his fall all the way to the ground. Arkadian tried to speak but his tongue wouldn’t work.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gabriel said in a voice that sounded liquid and distant.

The last thing he remembered was that the gunshot in his arm didn’t hurt any more.

Cornelius had never been in this part of the mountain before. The stone staircase rising steadily upwards was ancient, and narrow, and dusty from lack of use. The guard led the way, his flambeau sending orange light over the rough walls and the slump of the girl lying over his shoulder, her arms hanging down like the legs of a slaughtered deer. Cornelius could hear no hum of voices, no clatter and echo of distant activity – the usual trapped noise of the mountain. The only thing to disturb the silence was the sound of their own breathing and the steady tramp of their feet pressing onwards and up the relentless staircase.

It took them almost twenty minutes to reach the top and by the time he stepped into the small vaulted cave marking the end of their climb Cornelius was sweating through his new green robes. Candles set into the walls spilled enough light to reveal several tunnels leading away from the cave, each one narrow, and roughly cut. A dim light wavered at the end of the central tunnel and the Sanctus guard headed towards it, his stride still steady despite having carried the girl almost the entire height of the mountain. Cornelius followed, with the Abbot close behind, and had to stoop as he entered, the passage having been cut thousands of years previously by men who rarely grew higher than the wild grass that had once whispered on the great plains surrounding the mountain. He continued forward with his head bowed, fitting reverence for what he knew must lie ahead. It was the
Capelli Deus
Specialis
, the Chapel of God’s Holy Secret – the place where the Sacrament was kept.

As they got closer, the glow at the end of the tunnel increased, throwing more light across the walls and ceiling. It revealed that, far from being roughly chiselled as Cornelius had first thought, they were covered with hundreds of carved icons. His eyes picked out individual images as they slipped past: a serpent twisting round a tree that was heavy with fruit; another tree, this one in the shape of the Tau, with a man standing in the shade of its outstretched branches. There were also crude figures of what looked like women in various states of agony – one being broken on a rack, another screaming in fire, another being ripped apart by men with swords and axes. Each one looked the same to him. They looked like the woman he had imagined in the burkha and seeing their agony brought him a certain peace. It reminded him of a time, a few days before he lost his platoon, when they had stumbled across an ancient temple in the desert scrub off the main Kabul road. Its crumbling walls had been covered with similar hieroglyphics, simple lines worn down by time and weather, depicting ancient and brutal things long forgotten and rendered to dust.

As he continued down the tunnel the icons on the walls grew fainter, as if thousands of years of passage had worn them thin like ancient memories, until finally they melted back into the rock and the passage widened, opening out into a larger antechamber. Cornelius stood up as he emerged into it, squinting at the sudden brightness that glowed hot and red from a small forge built into the far wall. Arranged in a line in front of it, sketched by the Halloween light, were four round whetstones set on wooden frames, and behind them a large circular stone dominated the back wall. It was perhaps a little shorter than a grown man, and looked like an old-fashioned millstone with four wooden stakes jutting from its surface at even points round the edge. The sign of the Tau was carved into its centre. When Cornelius saw it he thought for a moment that this strange stone was the Sacrament and he wondered at its meaning. Then he noticed the deep, straight channels cut into the rock above and below it and saw how the wall behind was worn smooth.

It was a door.

The true Sacrament must lie beyond it.

Down through the dark tunnels, in the lower part of the mountain, the library began to flicker with the lights of returning scholars. One of them belonged to Athanasius. It had taken the guards nearly an hour of searching and checking before they had declared the incident a false alarm and finally re-opened the doors.

The entrance chamber seemed uncommonly bright as Athanasius passed back into it, illuminated as it was by the combined glow of all the monks who now congregated there to gossip and speculate. He saw Father Thomas emerge from the control room, a look of professional concern on his face, followed closely by Father Malachi pecking at his heels like a stressed goose. He looked away quickly, for fear their eyes might meet and their shared secret arc between them like electricity. Instead he clutched the files he was holding to his chest and stared resolutely ahead towards the darkness beyond the archway that led back into the main library and the forbidden knowledge he’d left hidden there.