We Will All Go Down Together (36 page)

Though she herself might have once been able to repatriate back into Faerie, the True Sidhe would never accept even the least human of her children as part of their twilight world. And
that
, laying the Three Betrayed entirely aside, was what had really driven her to move Dourvale through space and time, to strike her bargain with the Sidderstane clan, to continue on as head of the
brugh,
even while her brood slipped away from her, tempted by the 21
st
century’s distractions.

One more unwelcome truth in a lifetime of such. For no matter how scared Mac remained of his mother’s family—enough to run like hell whenever he saw them or thought they’d seen
him
—he felt sorry for them, too. He just couldn’t help it.

Funnily enough, it was Blandina who’d told him about the guy he finally turned to—Professeur Therrien-Poirier. Nobody knew what to make of him, exactly; people just called him “Le Prof.” Ran a store called Curia on Queen Street, very West, just across from the Mental Hospital. Paid big bucks for odd goods and wasn’t particular about knowing where anything came from, originally, as long as there was a market to sell it back to.

So when Mac drifted in there near the end of yet another fine October day, unrolling the topmost page of Mother Eulalia’s manuscript onto Le Prof’s front counter, he had to admit it seemed a pretty ironic move. The real sort of irony, rather than just the “slightly annoying coincidence”/Alanis Morissette kind.

Le Prof took one look and almost spit his coffee all over the irreplaceable vellum’s heavily illustrated text before swallowing hard instead, and pulling out one of those jeweller’s microscoping extendo-monocles.

“
Codex Ordo Sororum Perpetualam
,” he read, out loud. Then, switching languages: “‘Now ’ere I will tell a great and most excellent mystery, to all you who gain access to this account—the true and secret reckoning of ’ow our Blessed Perpetua’s martyr-day vision was discovered and finally fulfilled, granting certain martial virgins victory over Death and the Devil. . . .’”

Mac nodded. “Good translation; hope you’re not planning to go through the entire thing right here, though. Gets a little dry near the middle.”

Le Prof’s head whipped back up, magnified left eye goggling lopsidedly. “You ’ave it all the way to the middle?”

Well, that’ll teach you to make jokes.

Le Prof traced a sentence halfway down the page, with one semi-shaky finger. “Hmmm. So they exist, eh?
Les Soeurs sanglantes
, legendary sect of monster-killing nuns. Their name-saint a Roman matron converted by Christian slaves, condemned to the arena for her faith. . . .”

“. . . where, the night before she’s supposed to get raped to death by bears or whatever, she dreams she wrestles the Devil, gives him the holy hammerlock, then marches out to die, all smiling. Later, some big Church bugaboo gets a hold of this hallucination, decides it’ll make a good recruiting pitch for getting other impressionable young ladies to go die for Christ in the War against the Other, and—yadda yadda yadda, amen, ad infinitum. The whole supernatural vigilantism
raison d’être
, tied up in a big
Deus lo volt
package.”

“Spoken like a true ex-Catholic.”

Mac shrugged. “Look, I’ve just heard it before, a
lot
. So anyhow, you interested?”

“
Beaucoup. Absolument.
And the rest?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“
Très bien
. Nevertheless, considering how angry they must be with you,
Père—Frère?”

“Just ‘mister’ does me fine these days, thanks.”

“—I might expect you to be more careful who you show this to.”

“Want to tell on me? I can give you the extension number. But seriously, Prof—we both know their charter has strict provisions against killing real people. Which means the only one in serious danger here is . . . me.”

Le Prof squinted at him. “So that’s true too,
hé
? What we hear about
la famille Roke
, I mean.
Et vous, une demi-fée au sein de l’Église
, how could you ’ave expected to get away with it?”

Mac smiled, tightly. “Because I did?” he suggested, at last, which Le Prof seemed to find hilarious.

“Perhaps we should step in the back,” he invited, when he’d managed to stop laughing. “Afternoons are always slow—just turn the sign,
s’il vous plaît
. I make coffee.”

The caffeine in question was exactly as paralyzingly strong as Mac had expected. He took light sips to minimize the damage and let Le Prof ramble on about the difficulty of getting “real” French Roast anywhere outside of Quebec (cry me a river), if haematite really hurt Fae as much as cold iron (yes, but not quarter-Fae, which explained why Mac would even answer such a potentially damaging, leading question), whether or not the Druirs still had access to their famous Stane (far as Mac knew, though it wasn’t like any of them ever toted it around outside the
brugh
).

The talk eventually devolved into a longish quiz session about exactly which mouldy Fae goldies Mac could personally replicate—walking through walls? (Thankfully not.) Paying for things with leaves? (He wished.) Seeing dead people, etcetera? (Unfortunately.)

“And what about dream-projection,
l’hypnotisme, comme un mirage
—the glamour?”

“Glamer,” Mac corrected. “With an ‘ER.’”

“
Quelle est la différence
?”

“Not much, I guess; it’s a Scottish thing. But yeah, okay, I’ve got some of that, too.”

“Enough to walk away with something, but convince the people you took it from they still ’ad it? For a little while, at least?”

“Depends. What was it you had in mind?”

“A piece of luggage, like a . . . ’atbox?” Adding, helpfully: “
Mais
pas pour un chapeau, vous comprenez
.”

Mac looked at him for a minute. “You sure you couldn’t just take the manuscript?”

“We both know I cannot pay you its true worth—no one keeps that sort of cash around, even if
les Soeurs
weren’t looking for it. And this,
c’est très facile pour vous
, all things considered. . . .”

(
Yeah, right.
)

Though Mac tried his best to keep the sigh he felt building subvocal, Le Prof was maybe a bit more canny than he came off.

His voice dipped, assuring Mac: “One trip, in and out. Four businessmen at the airport, waiting to pick up the luggage they ’ad to check—slip a bag the same size down beside it, then walk away.”

“And they don’t notice they’ve got it wrong?”

“Not ’til you’re out of range. Not ’til it’s too late.”

Saracen would have known if this old bastard was lying. Then again, Saracen would probably have
assumed
the guy was lying right from the start and acted accordingly.

“Luggage,” Mac repeated, finally.

Le Prof sketched something roughly square, maybe nine by twelve by nine inches deep. “This big, about,” he said, unhelpfully.

“What’s inside?”

“They call it the Cornerstone, foundation of their Order.”

“Who does?”

“The suits, the luggage-waiters. They’re Crusaders, Poor Knights of the Temple of Solomon—Templars.”

The sure way you can always tell when somebody’s fallen off their rocker rather than just stood up temporarily,
Mac remembered the Jesuit whose influence had steered him towards that Order (Fr. Henry Gowther, a fellow Maritimer with a brogue so thick his sermons occasionally lapsed into incomprehensibility) telling him,
is when they start talkin’ about the Templars. It’s like the universal sign for oh my Lord, we’re one slip of the tongue away from macramé and shock treatments.

It did hurt to think about Fr. Gowther, even now, and however slightly—a dull ache, rather than a sharp sting. For
we never feel so uncomfortable as in the presence of those we’ve sinned against.

“Templars, like armour-wearing Templars?” he asked Le Prof. “Like monks with swords?”

“Not in public, I don’t think.
Mais, peu importe
. You obviously ’ave no problem pissing off martially trained religious people. . . .”

“There’s a big difference between a bunch of nuns sworn to protect humanity and a heretic order trained to exterminate infidels on sight. Or did you just mean those people in Scotland who like to dress up in white sheets with red crosses for Solstice?”

Le Prof gave him a long look. “
. . . Le second, bien sûr,
” he replied.

“Uh huh. So what’s in the box?”

“A mummified severed ’ead.”

“John the Baptist?”

“
Non, câlisse! C’est le dernier grand-maître du temple
, Jacques de Molay.”

“And that’s not creepy at
all
.
Or
supernatural.”

“Did I mention it’s covered in gold and jewels?”

Mac took a second. “No,” he said, at last. “That part you skipped.”

Mac knew the story; everybody did. The Church had its own fairy tales—and the Templars, with their meteoric rise and hubristic fall, made for one of the best.

Ever since Christianity’s infancy, the desert had been seen as a metaphorical furnace in which to test one’s faith, a Hell-hob to harrow and bake upon without ever actually having to breach the thin skin between Wide and Narrow worlds. Maybe because Jesus came from Judea, historical breeding ground of prophets and martyrs—but from John the Baptist on, it became a meeting place for everybody bent on taking their principles to extremes unpalatable in more civilized climes.

Desert on desert threaded with veins of fertility, a rich soil bordered by rivers or seas, fed with blood and bones—Two Veins, the Country of Roots, the Country of Fighting. Mesopotamia and all its environs: Persia, Macedonia, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Jerusalem itself. The Holy, Promised Land.

You might wonder, as Mac often did, why a truly good God would deed already-occupied land out from under the unwitting feet of its occupiers. But at the end of the day, Jerusalem—like everything else—was more than certainly His to give away.

Or so the nine knights led by Hughes de Payens must have believed in 1118, when they decided the chivalry of Europe had been corrupted by too much luxury. Godfroi de Bouillon had freed the Holy City from its Moslem yoke, but the kingdoms of Outremer remained fragile, and the fault for that must obviously lie with themselves: their weak, sinning worldliness, so unworthy of God’s grace it turned the red cross at their shoulders to the mark on a leper’s cloak, slippery with secular grossness.

Under the guidance of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and the authority of Pope Innocent III, the Templars were granted complete independence from all authorities. They took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, swearing never to yield one foot of ground to their Saracen enemies and never to retreat unless facing odds of more than three to one. Soon, Saladin himself ordered his armies to shout a new battle cry whenever these monks with swords raised their black-and-white banner:
Templars, come to death!

The Order survived, however, and flourished. They built a chain of fortresses, stretching from Cyprus to Castile, from which to defend any Christian who required their services. They grew chary with their lives. They grew rich, despite their vows. And as their power waxed in Europe, it waned in the Holy Land that birthed them, their impregnable fortresses falling, one by one—until, when Acre was taken in 1291, the Templars achieved an almost Orwellian purity: the only purpose of their power, now, was power.

In 1306, King Philippe le Bel of France took refuge from mobs of unhappy citizenry in the Templars’ Paris fortress. The Order’s current Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, might have thought himself munificent for showing Philippe the treasure so many had entrusted to the Templars’ safekeeping. But his trust was betrayed a year later, on Friday the 13
th
of October, when nine hundred Templar knights were arrested in France alone, and turned over to the Avignon wing of the Holy Inquisition.

Under torture, the Templars confessed to spitting on the cross and denying God, to practising unnatural vices, to worshipping either a black cat which spoke in a woman’s sweet voice, a snake, or a demon named Baphomet, as well as roasting babies to feed any or all of these idols. Their power was broken, their Order disbanded, their wealth confiscated. Fifty-four of them, all of whom later recanted their confessions, were burnt at the stake as heretics.

In 1311, Philippe and his lapdog anti-Pope convened a council of one hundred and fourteen bishops at Vienne, where he intended that the Templars be utterly condemned. But when they asked,
Who will dare to defend these men?
they were startled by the sudden appearance of nine knights in full regalia—Templars who had somehow escaped arrest, presenting themselves in the knowledge, they said, that God would protect the innocent.

These men were, no doubt, amongst the mass of Templars publicly exhibited on a platform in Paris before being condemned to perpetual imprisonment in chains. Jacques de Molay—so heartened by their defiant display that he too recanted his false confession—was burned alive. With his last breath, the nine knights heard their Grand Master curse his murderers forever.

Examining all the evidence, it seemed unlikely that the Templars really
were
worshipping the Devil when their persecution began. Yet from Mac’s point of view, by the time of de Molay’s death, a few might well have decided it was worth burning in hell to avoid burning on earth.

In the Connaught Trust’s stacks, Mac had read texts that claimed those same nine knights later bribed their way free from the anti-Pope’s dungeons—blind and maimed and penniless, locked in a double darkness of enduring hate and vengeful ambition. Similarly, there were rumours that the body of Jacques de Molay, somehow failing to burn
entirely
to ash, might also have not been buried completely intact, afterwards; testimony gathered over the subsequent centuries tracked his head’s appearance as centrepiece at Sabbats and séances, from Montmartre to Mogadishu.