Sanctus

who first made fire and sharpened sticks to protect themselves against the wild beasts, they wanted exactly the same things: and the mountain existed even then, and so did the holy men within it. And those simple tribesfolk, who just wanted to live a little bit longer and not get sick, they worshipped those people, not because of some clever rumour, but because the people in the mountain lived a long, long time, and disease did not touch them. Tell me, when you think of God, what image comes to mind?’

Liv shrugged. ‘A man with a long white beard.’

‘Where do you think that image comes from?’ She turned the bottle round and pointed to the picture of the Citadel on the label. ‘The earliest man looked up at this mountain and saw occasional glimpses of the gods who lived there; men with long hair and long white beards. Old, old men in a time when you were lucky to live past thirty.

‘This water is exported all over the world, has been since Roman times when the emperors first found out about it. You think they shipped it all the way back to Rome ’cause it tasted nice? They wanted what every man has always wanted, and kings more than most: they wanted more life. Even today a person can expect to live on average seven years longer in Ruin than in any other major capital city and people still come here in their thousands and get cured of all sorts of things. These things are not rumour. These things are fact. Still think there’s nothing there?’

Liv dropped her eyes down to the ashtray. Her ten-year nicotine addiction did seem to have vanished since arriving in Ruin. Miriam was right, there had to be something there. Samuel would not have dragged her into all this if there was no point to it; and he wouldn’t have scratched those letters on the seeds unless they pointed to something. The question was, what?

She turned to the page in her notebook where she’d copied the letters. Looked at them again. And like the sun breaking through clouds, she recognized something new in them.

Chapter 94

Cornelius stood in the glare of the afternoon sun surveying the heaving throngs of coach parties and other tourists that flooded the wide embankment: people posing for pictures; people congregating around tour guides; people just staring up at the Citadel, lost in their own thoughts. There were plenty of young women; any one of them could be the girl. He stroked the puckered skin on his cheek, picturing his enemy. As he’d laid in the hospital, recovering from the skin grafts in a blur of morphine, he’d thought about her often. He kept seeing her stepping out from nowhere, holding out the bundle of rags, her body shrouded in a burkha that hid all but her eyes and her hands. Sometimes it was a parcel of newspaper she held, like the parcel his mother had wrapped him in before leaving him by the orphanage door and walking in front of an express train to Liverpool. He’d never known her face either. But he didn’t need to know their faces to know what they were. Betrayers all.

Behind him, Kutlar’s ragged breathing and halting footsteps announced his arrival like a leper shuffling from a cave. Cornelius slipped his hand into his pocket and curled it round the grip of his Glock.

‘Which one is she?’ he said.

Liv stared at the letters she had copied from the seeds in their original pairings:

T a M + k

? s A a l

Then compared them to the card she had found in amongst the flowers:

T

MALA

MARTYR

She took her pen and wrote the word ‘Mala’ in her notebook, crossing out the letters to see what she was left with.

Assuming the ‘T’ was the Tau, it left just three letters — s, k and A, and two symbols — ‘+’ and ‘?’. She stared at them, wrote down one final word and the last two symbols, then read what she had written.

T +?

Ask Mala

The positioning of the underlined symbols made it look right. So did the capital letters at the beginning of each word. Was this the message her brother had sent her? It made some sense. The T was the Tau, the symbol of the Sacrament, and the plus sign could be a cross. The question mark symbolized the mystery of its identity, leaving the remaining two words reading like an instruction — ‘Ask Mala’. She looked up at the Ruinologist.

‘Who are the Mala?’ she asked.

Miriam looked up from the notebook where she had read the words as Liv had written them. ‘I told you that, in the beginning, there were two tribes of men,’ she said. ‘One of them was the Yahweh, the men of the mountain. The other was the outcast tribe who believed the Yahweh had stolen the Sacrament and, by imprisoning it, had usurped the natural order of things. They believed the Sacrament should be discovered and set free — this tribe were called the Mala. They were persecuted by the Yahweh, their people hunted and killed for the beliefs they held. But they kept their faith alive and a secret church grew, even in the shadow of the mountain’s ascendancy. By the time the Yahweh did their deal with the Romans to ‘rebrand’ state religion, they had bled their poisonous hate of the tribe into the language — in Latin ‘mala’ means ‘evils’. But even though the Citadel demonized these people, and burned their chapels and confiscated and destroyed their sacred texts, they could not destroy their spirit.’

Liv felt her skin tighten. ‘Do they still exist?’ she asked.

Miriam opened her mouth to answer but her eyes shifted suddenly upwards. Liv twisted round, saw a large man appear behind her, silhouetted against the bright sky. Her eyes adjusted to the glare and his features began to take form within the darkness of his outline, eyes first — pale, and blue, and staring straight into Liv’s. A nervous tremor fluttered in her chest as she realized who it was.

‘Yes,’ Gabriel said. ‘Yes, we do.’

Chapter 95

From where Kutlar stood he could see the whole of the embankment curling around the base of the mountain to a row of stone buildings in the distance promising all kinds of spa treatments to heal and revive.

‘She’s not here,’ he said.

Cornelius let go of the gun in his pocket. Kutlar was stalling, he was sure of it. He opened the notebook and looked at the wire-frame map of the embankment. The two arrows almost overlapped at the centre, pointing directly to where they now stood. ‘She is here,’ he said, removing his phone from his pocket and quickly copying in Liv’s number from the search box.

He stepped forward and pressed the call button, dropping the phone down so he could listen for the sound of a phone ringing. He walked closer to the shrine, filtering out the murmur of the crowd, and heard something in front of him.

He cocked his head to one side and his eyes caught a tiny movement as the sound came again. It was down on the ground, in amongst the flowers, buzzing like a large trapped bee. Cornelius squatted down and shoved his hand into the soft petals. His hand closed around the hard plastic case of a phone. It vibrated once more as he pulled it out, leaving a crater in the surface of the flowers. From his own phone he heard a robotic voice asking him to leave a message. He cut the call and scrolled through the menu of Liv’s phone, checking the call logs, the address book, the text messages. They were all empty.

Someone had reset the phone and abandoned it.

Miriam watched the bearded man walk quickly away from the shrine. She saw him stop by the far wall, talk to another man, and look down at something that appeared to be a small laptop. Gabriel was right. They had been tracking the girl’s phone signal.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out her own phone. She headed off, towards the row of health spas and away from the men with the laptop. She switched her phone off, thought about dropping it into one of the bins