The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death (14 page)

I am become a stranger unto my brethren

Mark Andrew sat straight up in the bed, gasping for breath,
clutching at his side. He pulled up his shirt and stared at the
puckered scar there. The wound was healed, but the pain was real.
His breath was coming in short gasps and the room was spinning.
Before he realized where he was and that he had been dreaming, the
door opened and Maxie came in, closely followed by Valentino. He
blinked at them in confusion.

“Watcha lookin’ for? Fleas? Get up, dipshit!”
Maxie already had the shotgun pointed at him. “Time to go.”

Valentino, still dressed in the dark suit,
one eyebrow kicked up in what appeared to be detached curiosity
watched dispassionately. His first thought was that Maxie must have
shown her a recording of the little incident under the table, but
this thought was quickly pushed aside as waves of nausea assaulted
him. He leaned over the side of the bed and puked on the floor…
again.

“What was that performance at my dinner table
about, Mr. Ramsay? You don’t look so tough or amusing now.” She
backed into the hall and shouted for one of the servants.

Mark did not answer her, and Maxie shoved him
from the bed onto the floor.

Mark Andrew pushed himself up slowly, and
pulled his shirt down, trying to will away the effects of the
poison. Maxie yanked him brutally to his feet, and shoved him
toward the door.

Valentino turned and led the way down the
hall, down the back stairway, through the kitchen and outside. Mark
limped along behind her, mentally kicking himself for not escaping
when he had the chance. They followed a brick sidewalk along the
back of the house to a set of double storm doors set at an angle
against the base of the mansion. Mark’s spirits fell completely
into his shoes. The basement! Of course. It was time to go to the
basement. With nothing to lose, Mark turned back suddenly to face
Maxie, swaying slightly on his feet. This might be the last time he
had a chance to escape at all. The man was five feet behind him
with the twin barrels of the shotgun pointed directly at his face.
Cold sweat ran in his eyes.

“Go ahead,” the man eyed him coldly above the
weapon. “Go for it.”

Valentino stopped to look at them briefly and
then continued punching in a series of numbers on the keypad of the
electronic locking mechanism. The lights on the box blinked and the
sound of the lock disengaging echoed hollowly in the silence of the
night.

Mark was no match for shotgun. He turned and
froze again at the sight of the black rectangle in front of him.
The cellar door reminded him of the well from his dream: dark and
forbidding. The half-memory of another such place gave him a jolt.
A stinking place full of people groaning in chains, torch light and
rats. Hell, no doubt. And he was about to go there… again.

Reluctantly, he followed the woman into the
entrance and down a flight of concrete stairs to a surprisingly
bright hallway with a dark blue, tiled floor and florescent lights
overhead. Their shoes clicked on the tiles, echoing through the
stillness. Valentino stopped in front of one of the numerous doors
and paused to unlock it with a key from her pocket. Inside the
room, rows of sterile white florescent lights flickered to life,
illuminating stainless steel lab tables, cabinets and an impressive
array of lab equipment. Alchemy had come a long, long way from the
caves and cellars of old. He caught himself on the edge of the
nearest table and frowned. Alchemy. Alchemy.

“My lab.” Full of pride, Valentino waved one
hand about the room. Pride was a sin. Pride was one of the seven
deadly sins.

“I’m impressed,” he heard himself say. “Which
way to the bloody wolfbane and bat wings?”

“Very funny, Mr. Ramsay. Maxie, would you
please show our guest to the seat of honor.”

Maxie handed her the shotgun and Mark noted
that she held it with professional ease in the crook of her
arm.

Maxie shoved him along to another door beyond
which was a much more inviting office with a large wooden desk,
computer station and a high-backed leather chair. Wooden
bookshelves filled with old leather-bound journals and books lined
the walls. A single cherry wood armchair sat in front of the desk.
This was the seat of honor. Mark was immensely relieved at not
having found himself strapped onto a stainless steel table or a
rack. Valentino stood behind the desk while Maxie pushed him down
in the chair and attached a pair of cuffs to his wrists and the
arms of the chair regrettably removing his ability to clutch his
stomach.

He sat waiting for the latest cramp to pass,
unable to do much more. Already, his arms and legs were growing
heavier as the pain in his midsection increased to an unbearable
stage and then receded. He went over the symptoms in his mind and
tried to decide what type of poison was affecting him. In his
fading condition he finally decided that he must have been a doctor
or perhaps an executioner rather than an assassin…

Merry drifted into view and took up a
position behind the desk. Her normally bright face was marred by a
look of total. Mark was sweating profusely, shaking from continuous
chills and, yet the room seemed unbearably hot. He could feel
rivulets of perspiration running down his face and his neck,
soaking his collar. Even his hands and arms gleamed with a thin
sheen of water as his body seemed bent on evaporating altogether.
The cool air conditioning from the vent over his head brushed his
face, but he still felt as if he were in a sauna.

“Now we can make this as simple or as
complicated as you like, Sir Ramsay,” Valentino spoke to him. Maxie
had the gun again, but held it loosely. Mark was no longer a
threat. “First of all…” she stopped talking and glanced back at the
Pixie. “Merry, for Christ’s sake!” she addressed the sniffing woman
beside her. Merry shifted her gaze from Mark’s face to Valentino.
They were little more than blurs of movement now. “Would you please
stop looking at him like that? You know what we have to do now and
you know why. Straighten up.”

Merry’s brow puckered and she broke into
unrestrained tears.

Valentino sighed and slid onto the desk
facing him. He tried to focus on her, but his eyesight was dimming
and blurring. He shifted his gaze to Merry’s face instead. A much
more pleasant view if it was to be his last.

“Your brother’s apprentice shared his secrets
with me before he left,” Valentino resumed her speech. “One of them
was of particular interest, but unfortunately, Master, Edgard
d’Brouchart, did not impart it to him in its entirety. It is Edgard
d’Brouchart that I want to meet. You know where and how he can be
found. Just tell me how to find Edgard d’Brouchart and I will cease
bothering you.”

Mark found it very difficult to concentrate
on her words. If he had not been feeling such pain in his stomach,
he might have felt very good… very, very good. The poison was in
the soup. She had not been joking. He tried to swallow and found
even that simple action becoming difficult as well. He continued to
stare at the Pixie hoping inanely that he would not drool on his
shirt in front of her. She was beginning to look more and more
angelic against the fuzzy haze behind her and certainly an angel
would not mind if he drooled a bit, would he? She… he… it? What
were angels after all? Male? Female? Did it matter?

He could no longer see the bodyguard and
didn’t know if it was his failing vision or if the man had
moved.

Valentino leaned into his field of vision. He
blinked and drew his head back wobbly on his neck, trying to focus
on her face. “You're probably wondering what is wrong with
you?”

He nodded though there didn’t seem to be much
of a question about it any more. He just wanted her to move so he
could see Merry again. At least he could die with something
pleasant in his mind.

“You know full well that I can’t kill you
with poison, but I can still give it to you just for grins and
giggles. Remember? We may be able to defeat death, but we will
never be able to defeat suffering. I’ve already seen that you can
bleed like a mortal man and you can feel pain like a mortal man.
Think of the unlimited research possibilities… the list is endless…
and the subject would never die… at least not permanently. Just
tell me where d’Brouchart is and I’ll take up my inquiries with
him, otherwise I know people who would be very interested in such a
research subject.”

Mark looked at her whimsically and then
winced when she snapped her fingers in front of his eyes. He could
feel his stomach still hurting, but it didn’t matter any more.
Nothing mattered.

The heat abated suddenly and he shuddered as
the sensation of being dipped in icy water started at his feet and
spread up his legs, finally gripping his heart in a vice
momentarily before traveling rapidly up into his throat, choking
him, making it impossible to draw a breath. He took a perverse
consolation in the fact that, once he was dead, he would have
proved, once and for all, that Valentino was wrong about his
immortality and Miss Meredith Pixie would weep over his body when
they buried him. He was neither immortal nor rational. He would be
dead and then she would feel foolish. He used his last few seconds
of lucidity to smile at Cecile before he slumped in the chair.

“I know you are past answering me now,”
Valentino continued talking to him.

He wished his ears would also stop working.
Would he have to die with her voice ringing in his ears?

“This is just a little preview of what is to
come. I am particularly proud of this potion. I created it to kill
rats. I do hate those bastards. Don’t you?”

Her voice was finally fading. He heard Merry
call his name one time before his ears popped and then there was
silence, though he could still see his lap through a fog. He felt
something warm fill his mouth and he thought his teeth were falling
out in his lap.

“Sir! Sir!” a dirty ragamuffin’s face peered
closely at him in the dim, filtered light.

He slung his head and water flew from his
hair in all directions. New pain stabbed his side as he gasped for
air.

“Up here. Give me your hand,” the boy spoke
to him in Latin.

The urchin reached down one grubby hand and
he stretched his free hand up to take it feebly, nearly pulling the
scrawny boy in the water with him. The boy braced himself expertly
against the rocks in front of him and strained with all his might,
pulling Mark slowly up the rough wall toward the cramped opening in
the side of the well. The sounds of shouts and screams echoed down
the shaft from the street above. He slipped and fell back in the
bloody water and the boy shifted positions to get a better grip on
his arm, pulling off the armored glove in the process.

“Sancta Maria! You must come out of there,”
the boy shouted at him urgently in broken French. “They will be
back for your body. They’ll want to hang it over the wall and put
your head on a pike pole!” The boy was from Europe. Not one of the
natives of Jerusalem.

With a great groan and an even greater
effort, he lifted his foot and planted it on the wall, reaching up
with his other hand to grip the edge of the ledge where the boy
waited frantically. The boy counted to three and he pushed up with
all this strength while the child pulled on his arm. He fell into
the passage on his stomach and the dagger still stuck in his side
pushed deeper, causing him to scream in the boy’s face.

“Get up! Get up! Come on, Master! Sancta
Maria! In the name of God, hurry!” the boy shouted in his face and
tugged on him, refusing to allow him to rest. Mark struggled up on
his knees and used one hand to crawl haphazardly down the dank,
stone hole with the boy pushing him from behind. He could smell the
stench of the dead, the newly dead and the long dead. His chain
mail jingled and grated against the stone over his back. He
clutched the hilt of the dagger in his hand to keep it from moving
as much as possible.

The battle was lost. The city had fallen to
Saladin’s warriors. The sounds of the slaughter in the streets
above were fading as he moved on as quickly as he could into the
ancient stone foundations of the Holy City. The dagger burned as if
it were super heated. Blood ran over his hand and dripped onto the
rock beneath him. He realized that the boy was no longer behind
him, but pushed on as best he could. A few moments later, the boy
was back, more frantic than ever.

“Hurry! Hurry! Don’t stop. The city is
burning!”

Without warning, he was falling again in the
darkness, deeper into the bowels of the catacombs to a lower level.
He tumbled down rough steps, screaming with each bounce he took. He
didn’t think he could make it to wherever they were going before
the knife disemboweled him. The boy was suddenly beside him in the
greenish darkness. The glow from the well’s hidden passage barely
illuminated the child’s dark face. How had he come to be in the
well? Who was he?

“This way,” the boy spoke perfect Latin,
explaining that they would be safe in the catacombs as he pulled
and tugged him.

When he heard the echoing shouts of more
assassins behind them, Mark hobbled after his unlikely rescuer with
one more tremendous effort. A distinctive scraping noise echoed in
the passage. The boy had gone back for the weapon in the face of
incredible danger and was dragging the heavy weapon along with
them. Mark’s feet felt like lead in the wet boots and his armor
felt as if it would crush him. He dropped the chain mail leggings
and the gauntlets as he went. He had his mace, his shield and two
of his three knives. He couldn’t pull off the chain mail hauberk
under the tabard due to the dagger in his side. Tangled in the
small loops, it actually pinned his armor to him. He stopped and
leaned against the wall, gasping for air.