We Will All Go Down Together (40 page)

Mac heard the kid give a wail as Saracen scooped it up, efficient but uncaring, like he was toting an animate watermelon. And: “Thank you,” he told Lady Glauce, turning to join him—only to stop short as she laid those too-thin hag-fingers lightly on his arm, nails long enough to hurt, even when she didn’t want them to.

“Answer me ane thing yet,” she asked, voice lower than he’d heard it thus far, as though she feared someone beyond the roster of usual suspects might be listening. “Why did thou think tae do it, Maccabee? Tae vow thysel’ tae He whose name I canna e’en speak here, in the depths of my ane house?”

Such desolation in her tone!
It must’ve really hurt her,
Mac realized, for the first time.
To hear what I’d become. Like I was disowning her, them . . . everyone. Everything I—

(am)

“I can’t remember, anymore,” he said, at last. “I’m sorry, but that’s the truth. Not even if I . . . meant it or not.”

Lady Glauce considered him, salt-sculpture face seeming to soften ’round its edges, almost imperceptibly. “Oh, but I ken thou must ha’, my bonny lad,” she murmured, quieter still. “For look thee, there’s nae a one amongst us can lay hand upon thee, e’en Enzemblance, much as she may pretend otherwise. Which proves th’art still in His grace, whether thou look’st tae be, or no’.”

(What?)

“Mayhap He’d e’en take thee back, if thou but thought tae ask Him.”

(
What?
)

But then the wind had Mac in its clutches again—he twirled like a tumbleweed, carried forth on its current. The baby’s squalling weight pressed hard into his side, arm closing to cradle it without thinking; Saracen’s hands (one with six fingers, the other five) dug deep into the small of his back and pushed ’til Mac felt his vertebrae strain. Gave a mocking laugh, thrilling as a bird’s cry, if far less human.

Then Mac found himself stumbling back out of another wall entirely, “hatbox” and baby brandished before him like a shield, into the cramped back space of Le Prof’s shop.

“Ah,” Le Prof said with a remarkable lack of surprise. “
There
you are, at last;
vous, vous êtes diablement en retard.
”

Mac nodded, head swimming. “What . . . time is it?”

“Just after four—
du matin
,” Peering closer: “
C’est à ça que ça ressemble?
”

“Now, yeah. You mind?” Mac offered him the kid, moving to dump the “hatbox” onto the nearest welcoming surface—the same dusty coffee table where he’d drunk that crappy French Roast, what seemed like half a year ago. Ever the great host, Le Prof almost immediately dumped
M. de Bébé
into a nearby tray full of dusty rags and assorted wrapping paper.

That’ll make for a great litterbox,
Mac thought, sourly.

“Okay,” he said, straightening up once more. “There’s your loot—I’d sell it pretty quick, you don’t want monks in suits up your ass. Where’s my money?”

Le Prof seized his prize greedily, with both hands, shrug-pointing Mac in the right direction. “Over there, in the register. Where else would you expect me to keep it?”

Mac hadn’t really given it much consideration, so it wasn’t like he really had an answer to that one. But when he made towards it, he slammed bodily up against some sort of invisible wall, while another—equally impenetrable, equally unseen—slammed into him from behind, butterfly-pinning him between two panes of killing-jar glass. Barely able to turn his head, he tried to cast an agonized glance Le Prof’s way, getting nothing but a smarmy Canadjun-Gallic smirk in return.

“. . . whaaah?” Mac asked with stunning articulacy.

“Oh, just a little something I worked up,” Le Prof said, working away at the “hatbox’s” lock. “
Un sort pour attraper les fées
 . . . some ’aematite arranged clockwise overtop
le Gran Tetragrammaton
. Like a fairy ring, but in reverse.” He shot Mac a classic retailer’s glance of appraisal, like he was sizing him up for a price tag. “As for ‘why,’
Père
—well,
pourquoi pas? Vous êtes une vraie denrée—très pure et très dispendieuse.
And since I already ’ave a buyer for
one
rare, formerly ’oly item. . . .”

But the box just wouldn’t open, no matter how he fiddled with it. Annoyed, he switched over from gloating to cursing in
jouale
, sawing away at the offending latch with his pocket-knife until something went “pop.”

Carefully, Le Prof opened the lid, disclosing . . . a mummified severed head. Which was, indeed, covered in gold and jewels—though there’d been a few shortcuts taken, like gilding the pouched and sunken face itself instead of fitting it with a genuine reliquary mask. Its longish hair and sparse beard alike were woven with chain-strung Outremer coinage, empty eyes set with one massive ruby and an equally massive diamond; two filament diadems bound the half-shattered skull back together under an emerald-and-sapphire-scaled casque helmet, with the helmet’s lip forming a neat little shelf that elevated the unevenly trimmed area where neck and jaw should meet far enough to set the artefact upright on any given flat surface, so what was left of its uppermost vertebrae and spinal cord hung down in a creepy, little pigtail.

“
Merveilleux,
” Le Prof whispered to himself, though Mac might not have chosen quite the same descriptor. Trapped and unable to speak, however, all he could do was watch Le Prof wander away past where the baby-Templar kicked and flailed, rummaging for his phone . . . which also meant he couldn’t possibly have managed to warn him about what was about to happen next, even if he’d wanted to.

The ruby and diamond were set less
inside
the head’s sunken sockets than
on top
of them, gold wire-bound, like a pair of crude snap-apart spectacles. Now they shivered and lifted away, one by one, each giving a tiny chime. Beneath, the dim up-rolled excrescences Jacques de Molay had once seen through, poached like eggs by the process of being burnt alive, seemed to fill up with shadow; that darkness, in turn, spilled out and over their fixed and staring rims, rising to encircle the head itself like a crackling anti-halo.

Yeah,
Mac thought.
That can’t be good.

And what about that dull, dry, tiny voice emerging from the Grand-Master’s hard black lips, spiralling up between his broken teeth, a ghost in a shell, whispering through Hell’s keyhole?

As though in answer to Mac’s question, Le Prof put the phone back down halfway through dialling it and turned back, brow wrinkling. He approached the coffee table slowly, bent to listen, ear dipping almost to the head’s mouth. Stretched out one reluctant hand to touch—

—and almost fell back, ass over teakettle, when he realized that the head was actually
vibrating
from the inside—its phantom vocal cords contracting, spinal tail skritching at the glass, carving a swish through the dust.

“
Baise-moi, câlisse, tabernacle!
”

Pass, thanks,
Mac thought. As the head’s whisper rose by mere decibels, coalescing into an even rawer, darker form of French—

Aidez-moi, champions
, de Molay “said,” words echoing inside both their minds at once.
Vim patrior. Je souffre la violence. Aidez-moi, mes fils du temple, venez à ma rescousse, je prie. . . . 

A burning smell; the sound of armour clashing, a dull drumbeat. The wall above Le Prof charred, fraying away in the shape of a man’s shadow as he stepped through—one Mac thought he recognized, even before the face behind it became clear.
Cordellion Federoi, that’s ’is name. One of the Kissed.

“
Me voici, maître,
” the Templar leader told his Order’s Cornerstone, and grasped Le Prof—too amazed to do much more than huff out a single startled breath at such presumption—by both shoulders, effortlessly flipping him up against the already-resolidified plaster. Then held him there with one elbow to the throat, contemptuously easy, as he drew his ceramic machete.

Le Prof’s eyes bulged out even farther, almost to their strings. He shook all over, stammering—“But—I thought you were . . . ’ow it wasn’t true, what they burned you for. . . .”

“Not
then
, no. But—”

—now? Definitely.

Thus confirming what Mac had suspected all along: that the surest way to make a bunch of monks swear their souls over to the Devil was to accuse them, inaccurately, of doing that very thing. And then kill their Grand-Master, throw them into jail, torture them . . . 

Still: You really think the Devil answers his own phone, Sir Burns-in-Hell-a-Lot? If you talked to anybody, it was probably talked to his “people;” see how far that gets you, when you try to renegotiate the terms of your contract.

As the blade pressed into Le Prof’s throat, he wheezed: “
Mais—le demi-fée, c’est lui le véritable voleur!
’Ave your revenge on ’im, take your ’ead, and go!”

But: “
Deus lo volt,
thief-master,” Cordellion told Le Prof, mildly. “As the sin was yours
in utero
, so will our recompense be charged first to your account, as well.
My
god requires it.”

“Oh
non, NON
—”

Mac shut his eyes, so he wouldn’t have to see what followed. He felt the spell drop away from him by degrees, chopped off in mid-pulse, along with Le Prof’s life; both walls of air sprang apart in unison, returning him to Curia’s back-room floor so heavily his knees popped with the strain, even as Cordellion let Le Prof drop. Collecting the head, he moved back towards Mac, smiling pleasantly.

“And you, thief’s thief . . . what
is
your name?”

Mac pulled himself to his feet, stretching painfully.

“Maccabee Roke,” he replied. “I think you got my text.”

Under the sunglasses, Mac saw the Templar’s seared-blind eyes widen, ever so slightly. “Ah, yes. So you knew your—patron, here—would cheat you, and left me details on where to find him after that charade at the airport, to prevent it from happening.”

Mac shrugged. “I thought he might try, sure; no great stretch of the imagination. Besides which—occurs to me that if anybody here really
needs
that thing you’re carrying, it’s probably you boys.”

“This is our Grand-Master,
M’sieu
Roke—a damned saint, made unholy relic. You’d do well to accord him the respect he deserves.”

“Who says I don’t?” Mac bowed to the head, curtly, while the room filled up with scowling Templars—these ones came in through the front door, at least, instead of through the wall. Two of them took hold of Le Prof’s corpse, sketched sigils, which lit and wounded the air around it, then used a few more neat gestures to crush it telekinetically down for transport, like a bruisy-wet piece of origami: flattened the skull with a finger-pop; dislocated all four limbs, “tying” arm to leg forwards, then backwards; tuck-broke the neck like a turtle’s, then twisted the spine one more time like a meat Transformer, reducing person forevermore to object.

Cordellion didn’t turn a hair of his well-coiffed ponytail. And this time, Mac made himself watch it all—because, as Fr. Gowther would’ve put it, there was no good reason he could think of to let himself not have to.

“You’ve precious little gag reflex for a man of the twentieth century,” Cordellion noted, approvingly. “A retort to the Living God: we like that.”

Mac looked down. Replied, dimly: “Thanks.”

(
I guess.
)

When one of the other Templars went to scoop their former compatriot up from where he lay, crying and messing himself, however, Mac heard himself snap—“Nope, that stays here. Guy gets a do-over. Let him pick his own friends, this time ’round.”

“Perhaps so,” Cordellion agreed, waving the Hell-knight in question away. Then paused on his way out to ask Mac: “Has the dead man any heirs, do you reckon, M’sieu?”

“That’d be a big
je ne sais pas
.”

“And you don’t want any sort of payment from
us
, of course, for your part in revealing the Grand-Master’s kidnapper. . . .”

“Not so much. Why?”

They met each other gaze to gaze, quarter-Fae Beelzebub blue to brand-kissed off-white, more scar showing than cornea. “Because, if so,” Cordellion suggested, at last, “then whatever remains must surely be yours, by right of seizure. A place of trade—neutral ground, potentially, as long as one worked to keep it so. Good to occupy, surely, for a man with a foot in several worlds at once.”

Now it was Mac’s turn to gape.

“What—like the shop?” He asked, finally. “Run Curia, is that it? Me?”

Cordellion shrugged and turned away, hiking his mentor’s gold-plated skull like a football. Throwing back, before he finally let the front door close behind him—“One might do far worse,
hein
? As one almost did.”

Which was . . . true enough.

Shrugging, Mac opened up the register, took his pay—and found Le Prof’s key ring lurking underneath the change drawer. Studied it a long minute before stuffing it inside his coat pocket and hefting
M. de Bébé
; two more “gains,” equally ill-gotten.

“C’mon, squawky,” he told the kid. “Let’s go hook you up with a free lunch.”

At the Connaught Trust, they made Mac wait almost an hour after two junior novitiates took his little “donation” away, cooing over it from both ends, before finally ushering him into a tiny sitting room to see both the woman he’d texted earlier—Mother Eulalia, war-leader of the
Ordo Sororum Perpetualam
—and the one he’d’ve run ten blocks in any given direction to avoid: Sr. Blandina, her very self. In the fine and furious flesh.

“I knew it,” she said, crossing her arms.

But: “Of course you did, dear,” Mother Eulalia pointed out, calmly. “He left his name at the desk downstairs, for goodness’ sake. Always a pleasure, Fath . . . Mister Roke.”

“Mother.”

“Oh, please!” Blandina scoffed. “Your
mother’d
be living under a hill, if your father hadn’t managed to paste them both against a semi. We all know what you are—”

Suddenly at the end of a very long and exhausting rope, Mac felt rage whip up inside him, and spat it back out at her like bile. “
So you’ve said
, Sister. Thanks so much for the big slice of Do As You Would Be Done By pie, too; you bake that yourself, or order in?”