The Key (20 page)

Blinded by grief, he kept moving without knowing where he was going, intent on just putting one foot in front of the other and distance between himself and the hospital while avoiding the fire crews and anyone else in a uniform.

In the end, his survivor’s instinct brought him to Melek Avenue, a wide, tree-lined street on the edge of the Garden District. It was an address unconnected to him and therefore unlikely to be visited by anyone seeking him out. It was also the home of the one person who knew more about the Citadel and its secrets than anyone outside the mountain. If the book his mother had pressed into his hands could be employed against the Citadel, then she would know how to use it.

Gabriel counted the houses until he reached the one he was looking for. He moved up the steps to the door, checking the street to make sure it was empty, then knocked loudly.

A siren was wailing at the far end of the street, one of the many burglar alarms the quake had triggered, but no one was coming to check. He heard footsteps inside the house and the sound of a drawer being opened in the hallway. The footsteps came nearer, a key twisted in a lock then the door opened sharply and he found himself staring into the beam of a handheld torch and the cold, black eye of a gun barrel. He turned away from the brutal light, and started to raise his hands when a strident voice boomed from behind the light.

‘Gabriel!’ The gun vanished and the torch pulled back to reveal the owner of the voice. Even in the turmoil of the earthquake Dr Miriam Anata was impeccably dressed in her usual pinstriped suit with plain T-shirt. Her straight silver hair, cut in an asymmetric bob, gave her a stern appearance but her eyes were full of concern. Looking into them now made something inside Gabriel give way and he turned from her as his face crumpled in grief.

‘What is it?’ she asked, taking him by the arm and leading him inside. ‘What has happened?’

‘Kathryn,’ he managed. ‘My mother.’

He felt her arms around him, patting his back and shushing in his ear as though he were a child again. He was touched by this act of compassion, coming as it did from such a conventional and reserved person as Dr Anata. He tried to thank her and form words of explanation but none came. Grief had stolen his voice.

The Citadel hummed with noise and echoed with urgent voices in the aftermath of the quake. Most of the monks had been asleep when the tremors hit, shaking them out of their beds and into the corridors where they had ridden the worst of it out. Athanasius was one of them and he had spent much of his time since reassuring other monks that what they had experienced had been a tremor and not another bomb. The lingering smell of smoke from the garden had not helped his cause.

Some of the power had stayed on at least, so there had been enough working lights to quickly assess how much damage had been done. The answer was surprisingly little. It was as if the explosion ten days earlier had already pruned away the weaker parts of the mountain and the earthquake had merely shaken what was left to test how strong it was. A few rockfalls had been discovered here and there, and the library was being checked again to make sure no books had been damaged, but other than that the Citadel seemed sound and was getting back to normal. The rock piles were already being cleared away and many of the monks were returning to the dorms and chapels to continue sleeping or praying.

Athanasius was heading to his cell when he encountered Brother Axel coming down the tunnel towards him, fizzing like a lit fuse. ‘This is your fault,’ he said, pointing a finger at him. ‘First the garden and now this. None of it would have happened if the Sancti were still here and the Sacrament safe.’

Athanasius checked behind him to make sure the tunnel was empty then lowered his voice so it would not carry. ‘This is superstitious talk and does you no credit as a leader of men. You of all people should be instilling calm at a time like this, not fear. We need order, not chaos.’

‘We had order. For thousands of years we had it. And now it is gone in the space of a few weeks.’

‘Order will return,’ Athanasius said. ‘Order
is
returning.’

‘Indeed. You fancy that everyone sees things your way, but I think you are in for a surprise. In times of uncertainty people cling to tradition. And that is what I aim to offer. The elections will soon reveal which way opinion lies.’

Athanasius was about to respond when a sound made them both stop.

It was the Angelus bell echoing up from the tribute cave in the depths of the mountain.

Someone was outside, summoning the Ascension platform so they could be admitted.

Gabriel forced the story out, bit by bit, pushing it past his pain and grief until the details started to flow and his sorrow hardened back to anger. When he had told Dr Anata everything he handed over the diary and sank into the leather sofa, feeling utterly wrung out.

They were sitting in what had once been a grand reception room and was now a well-stocked library with books lining every wall and covering every horizontal surface. With the power still out, the space was lit only by candlelight, creating a sense that the room belonged to the past and not to the modern city wailing outside the heavy curtains draped across the high windows.

Dr Anata stared at the diary, her face white with shock. She had known Kathryn Mann for many years, working alongside her as an unofficial advisor, sharing knowledge and new discoveries on all things to do with the Citadel. She was Mala, like Gabriel’s family, a descendant of one of the two most ancient tribes of men, the other being the Yahweh, the inhabitants of the Citadel who had stolen the Sacrament and used its power for their own ends.

Gabriel could see tears glistening around her blinking eyes as she turned the small volume over in her hands, the silver rings on her fingers catching the candlelight as they moved over the dark leather. Her lips formed silent words as she tried to phrase a question and, when she eventually managed it, her voice was brittle with emotion. ‘Do you think they killed her for … do you think this is what they were after?’

Gabriel shook his head. ‘If they’d wanted the book, the cop would’ve taken it. It felt like a clean-up operation to me, a coordinated move to silence anyone who had been inside the Citadel. Whatever is in the book, I doubt they even know about it.’

‘Have you read it?’

He shook his head. ‘I came straight here. I didn’t know where else to go. I’m sorry if that was … inappropriate. I don’t mean to bring trouble to your door. If you want me to leave, just say.’

Dr Anata tilted her head and glared at him through her half-moon reading glasses, giving Gabriel the sort of magnified look of indignation he had seen her dole out a few times before. The familiarity and honesty of it made him feel better somehow. She unwound the leather binding and opened the cover, angling the book towards the candle so they could both see what was written there.

Dr Anata had spent her life chiselling away at the myths of the Citadel. She had published more books on the subject than anyone living, knew all the legends and lore that surrounded it; so when she turned to the middle pages and saw the symbols forming the shape of the inverted Tau she gasped in shock. Gabriel recognized the heat-blackened writing from games he had played as a child when his mother had written secret messages for him to discover. He shook away the memory and focused on the text, translating in his head the Malan language she had taught him.

‘What does it mean?’ Gabriel asked.

‘It’s a myth – or so I always thought. It’s called the “Mirror Prophecy”, part of the lost knowledge of the Mala, the word of God recorded and passed down in secret by those who sought to preserve the truth.’ She reached out and traced the symbols with her finger, following the inverted shape of the T. ‘It is a companion piece to the prophecy that led you and Liv inside the Citadel. But if that was the Malan equivalent of the first book of Genesis, recording the truth about the beginning of things, the Mirror Prophecy is our version of the Book of Revelation. It speaks of the end.

‘It was believed by the ancients to have been dictated by the gods themselves and recorded in the earliest form of human language as a warning to the future. This symbol, turned on its head, depicts the path we must travel and the choice we will face when we reach the end.’

She traced her finger down the central line of the T. ‘See how the words describe the sequence of events that has already started to unfold:

She turned and fixed him with her magnified eyes. ‘The earthquake proves it. Liv
must
have released the Sacrament.’

Gabriel shook his head, remembering what he had seen at the top of the mountain. ‘I’m not sure. The chapel seemed empty.’

Dr Anata hesitated at his words. She had spent her life chasing down the legend of the Sacrament, knew every theory of what it could be and had come up with several of her own. She had never dreamed that she might one day get to talk to someone who had actually been inside the Citadel, and only Gabriel’s grief prevented her from bombarding him with the questions she had been burning to ask. ‘Tell me what you saw,’ she said, finally giving in to her curiosity.

Gabriel frowned. ‘The Citadel’s smaller than I imagined. Lots of cramped tunnels, like being inside a mine. The chapel of the Sacrament is high up at the end of a long flight of locked stone stairs. The walls are lined with blades, the Tau is at the altar end.’

Anata leaned forward. ‘And what is the Tau?’

‘It’s … it’s a coffin in the shape of a cross, maybe a metre and a half tall. When I got there, Liv was already in trouble. I thought she was dead. The front of the Tau was hanging open and the inside was hollow and filled with spikes like an iron maiden.’

‘And there was nothing inside it?’

‘Nothing.’

Anata nodded. ‘Then she did free the Sacrament. You must have got there after it happened. It means the Mirror Prophecy is already coming to pass. When was the last time we had an earthquake here?’

‘I don’t know. Twenty years ago – maybe longer. It could just be a coincidence.’

‘I don’t believe in coincidences, not with everything that’s already happened. I believe in fate and destiny. Think about the first prophecy: everything it predicted came to pass, line by line.’ She dragged her finger down the new prophecy to where the line of the T split apart. ‘And so will this one. We are already on the path leading to this junction – this choice – one way leading to the light, and the other to darkness.’

Gabriel read the last few lines, struck by the apocalyptic language they contained:

‘So how can we stop it?’

‘We can’t. All we can do is make sure, when the time comes, that we choose the right path.’ She pointed to the middle section. ‘It’s laid out right here.’

Gabriel read the words, ignoring the more esoteric parts and zoning in on what he could understand.

‘What’s the Starmap?’

‘Another myth. In ancient times, when the world was new and ever-changing, the first holy men were supposedly given the gift of language to record certain sanctified truths. One of the things they set down was the location of their most sacred and forbidden site, but because the earth was still shifting and settling they used the unchanging stars as their guide and created the
Imago Astrum
– the Starmap.

‘The place it recorded was where the divine spark took hold – the original Home for all of us – the Garden of Eden. And because the Starmap revealed its location, it became the most coveted artefact of the ancient world. Possession of it was seen not only as an endorsement of a king’s divine mandate to rule over other men but it was believed to bestow great fortune on whoever owned it. Some of the rulers who are known to have possessed it include King Solomon, King Croesus of Lydia and Alexander the Great – all legendary potentates famed for their immense power and huge wealth.

‘As a tribute to the divine fortune the map brought them, each of these great rulers stored a portion of their wealth at the sacred site, believing it would not only please whatever power had brought it to them, but that a site so sacred and cursed would protect their treasure from those who sought to steal it. Certainly much of the huge wealth of these kings was unaccounted for after their deaths. If this location exists – and if it can still be found – it would be the greatest ancient treasure hoard in history. Gold, jewels … Priceless.’

‘What happened to the map?’

‘That’s the question that has been asked by every emperor, scholar and treasure seeker for the past two and a half thousand years. In truth, no one knows. The last recorded mention of it is in the fourth century
BC
, when Alexander the Great died. His kingdom was divided and the Starmap lost. Some believe it was looted and taken to Persia, others that it was hidden away and ended up somewhere within the great library of Alexandria, built in Egypt in the dead king’s honour. The Romans certainly thought so. Julius Caesar burned the library down in pursuit of the Starmap, but never found it. There is even a strong school of thought that the Starmap is the Sacrament, but this text clearly states that they are separate things; two things divided that must one day be united according to this prophecy. I wonder how Oscar came by this.’

She turned to the next page and found her answer. Gabriel read it too, his old anger flaring red when he read the words written on the back of the photograph:

This is what we found. This is why we were killed

They reached the end of the message and realized there must be more. Gabriel pulled the candle towards him, holding the next blank page over the flame and moving it across the heat until a drawing began to emerge showing a sprawling network of tunnels and caves that filled two pages of the diary.