Kathryn Mann sat in her office on the second floor of the town-house surrounded by piles of paperwork in a variety of languages. As usual her door was open to the hallway and through it she heard the footfalls on wooden floors, phones ringing and fragments of conversation as people drifted in to start the working day.
She’d sent someone back to the orchard to pick up the volunteers. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts and feelings for a while, and right now she just couldn’t face another earnest discussion about dead bees. She thought of the empty hives in the light of the monk’s death and it made her shudder. The ancients had been big on the omens contained in the uncharacteristic behaviour of animals. She wondered what they would have made of the supernatural events that were taking place in the world today: melting ice caps, tropical weather in formerly temperate zones, unprecedented tidal waves and hurricanes, coral reefs poisoned by acidic seas, disappearing bees. They would have thought it was the end of the world.
On the desk in front of her lay the field report she’d rescued from the passenger seat of the minibus. It had done little to lighten her mood. She’d only read half of it and already knew that it was going to be too expensive to fund. Maybe this was just one more bit of the world they were going to have to let wither and die. She stared hard at the carefully annotated diagrams and charts outlining initial building costs and projected tree growth, but in her head she was seeing symbols etched on to fragments of slate, and the shape made by the monk before he fell.
‘Did you see the news?’
Startled, Kathryn looked up into the bright, clear face of a willowy girl beaming at her from the doorway. She tried to remember her name but the turnover of people in the building was so rapid she never trusted herself to get it right. Rachel maybe — or was it Rebecca? Here on a three-month placement from an English university.
‘Yes,’ Kathryn replied. ‘Yes, I saw it.’
‘Traffic’s rammed out there. That’s why I was late getting in.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Kathryn dismissed the confession with a wave and returned to the dossier. The morning’s news, which hung so heavily around her, was clearly just an inconvenience for most people — something to be gossiped over, wondered at and then forgotten.
‘Hey, you want a coffee?’ the girl asked.
Kathryn looked back up at her fresh, untroubled face and suddenly remembered her name. ‘That’d be great, Becky,’ she said.
The girl’s face lit up. ‘Cool.’ With a whip-crack of auburn pony-tail she turned and ran down to the kitchen.
Most of the work carried out by the organization was done by volunteers like Becky; people of all ages, giving freely of their time, not because of any religious obligation or national pride, but because they loved the planet they lived on and wanted to do something to look after it. That’s what the charity did: brought water to places that had dried out; planted crops and trees in land that had been blighted by war or poisoned by industry; though this was not how Ortus had started, and it was not the work it had always done.
Her desk phone rang.
‘Ortus. Can I help you?’ she said, as brightly as she could manage.
‘Kathryn,’ Oscar’s warm voice rumbled in her ear. Instantly she felt a little better.
‘Hey, Daddy,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘I was praying.’
‘Did you hear?’ She didn’t quite know how to frame the question. ‘Did you hear that he. . that the monk. .’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I heard.’
She swallowed hard, trying to hold back the emotion.
‘Don’t despair,’ her father said. ‘We should not give up hope.’
‘But how can we not?’ She glanced up at the door and lowered her voice. ‘The prophecy can no longer be fulfilled. How can the cross rise again?’
The crackle of the transatlantic line filled the long pause before her father spoke again.
‘People have come back from the dead,’ he said. ‘Look in the Bible.’
‘The Bible is full of lies. You taught me that.’
‘No, that I did not teach you. I told you of specific and deliberate inaccuracies. There is still much in the official Bible that is true.’
The line went silent again save for the rising hiss of long-distance interference.
She wanted to believe him, she really did; but in her heart she felt that to carry on blindly hoping everything was going to be OK was not much different from closing your eyes and crossing your fingers.
‘Do you really believe the cross will rise again?’
‘It might,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to believe, I admit. But if you’d told me yesterday that a Sanctus would appear from nowhere, climb to the top of the Citadel and make the sign of the Tau, I would have found that equally hard to believe. Yet here we are.’
She couldn’t fault him. She rarely could. It was why she wished he had been around to talk to when the news had first broken. Maybe then she wouldn’t have thought herself into such a melancholic state.
‘So what do you think we should do?’ she asked.
‘We should watch the body. That is the key. It is the cross. And if he does rise again, we need to protect him from those who would do him harm.’
‘The Sancti.’
‘My belief is they will try and reclaim the body as soon as possible, then destroy it to end the prophetic sequence. As a Sanctus he will have no family, therefore no one will step forward to claim him.’
They both lapsed into silence as they contemplated what might happen if this came to pass. Kathryn imagined him lying in a dark, windowless room somewhere inside the Citadel as somehow, miraculously, his broken body began to mend. Then out of the shadows hooded figures started to emerge, green-clad men with daggers drawn and other instruments of torture to hand.
On the other side of the world her father pictured similar images, though his were not drawn from imagination. He had witnessed with his own eyes what the Sancti were capable of.
Chapter 22
Athanasius had a profound dislike for the great library.
There was something about its trapped, anonymous darkness and labyrinthine chambers he found deeply claustrophobic and sinister. Nevertheless it was there the Abbot had summoned him, so it was there he now made his way.
The library occupied a system of caves about a third of the way up the mountain, chosen by the original architects of the Citadel because they were sufficiently dark and well ventilated to prevent sunlight and damp fading or corrupting the ancient scrolls and manuscripts. As the caves had filled with more and more priceless texts, it was decided that the preservation of such treasures could no longer be left simply to the darkness and a dry breeze, so a schedule of improvements had begun. The library now occupied forty-two chambers of varying sizes, and contained easily the most valuable and unique collection of books anywhere in the world. There was a standing, somewhat bitter joke among international religious scholars and academics that it was the greatest collection of ancient texts no one had ever seen.
Athanasius approached its solitary entrance with his usual feeling of gnawing unease. A cold blue light swept across his palm as the scanner checked and verified his identity before a door slid open, allowing him into an airlock. He stepped inside and heard the door slide shut behind him. His claustrophobia deepened. He knew it would not leave him until he had exited the library. A light blinked above a second scanner, indicating that the airlock was doing whatever it needed to do to ensure no tainted air accompanied him into the hermetically sealed world beyond the final door. He waited. Felt the desiccated air already sucking moisture from the back of his throat. The light stopped blinking. A second door slid open and Athanasius stepped into the library.
The moment he passed through into the darkness, a circle of light grew and enveloped him. It extended just a few feet in every direction and matched his movements exactly, keeping him at its centre as he strode across the reception hall towards the archway leading into the main body of the library. As well as the carefully controlled
