millstone with four wooden stakes jutting from its surface at even points round the edge. The sign of the Tau was carved into its centre. When Cornelius saw it he thought for a moment that this strange stone was the Sacrament and he wondered at its meaning. Then he noticed the deep, straight channels cut into the rock above and below it and saw how the wall behind was worn smooth.
It was a door.
The true Sacrament must lie beyond it.
Down through the dark tunnels, in the lower part of the mountain, the library began to flicker with the lights of returning scholars. One of them belonged to Athanasius. It had taken the guards nearly an hour of searching and checking before they had declared the incident a false alarm and finally re-opened the doors.
The entrance chamber seemed uncommonly bright as Athanasius passed back into it, illuminated as it was by the combined glow of all the monks who now congregated there to gossip and speculate. He saw Father Thomas emerge from the control room, a look of professional concern on his face, followed closely by Father Malachi pecking at his heels like a stressed goose. He looked away quickly, for fear their eyes might meet and their shared secret arc between them like electricity. Instead he clutched the files he was holding to his chest and stared resolutely ahead towards the darkness beyond the archway that led back into the main library and the forbidden knowledge he’d left hidden there.
Chapter 128
The scrape of the steel fuel can echoed through the warehouse as Kathryn dragged the last of them across the floor to where the white van was parked with its rear doors open. She was sweating from the strain and urgency of the work, and the muscles in her arms and legs burned with the effort, but she welcomed it. It helped distract her from the deeper pain she felt.
Gabriel jumped down from the van, grabbed the fuel can and hoisted it into the back to join the large pile they’d collected from around the warehouse: sacks of sugar; rolled-up blankets; stacks of polypropylene water pipes and plastic sheeting. anything that was explosive or flammable and would create lots of smoke when it burned. It was all packed neatly around a central stack of white nylon bags with KNO3 stencilled on the side. These contained potassium nitrate, the nitrogen-rich fertilizer that had been on its way to the Sudan. They were now going to serve the cause in a different way.
Gabriel pushed the last fuel can into place near the edge of the pile then looked back through the open doors at the haunted face of his mother. She looked exactly like she had after his father had been killed: grief mixed with anger and fear.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said.
She looked up at him. ‘Neither do you.’
He looked at her, and realized the pain in her eyes came not only from what had already happened, but from what still might. He jumped down. ‘We can’t just leave her,’ he said. ‘If the prophecy is right, and she is the cross, then she could change everything. But if we do nothing — then nothing will change, and all that has happened here will have been for nothing. And we’ll spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, because they will torture her. They’ll torture her, discover everyone she’s spoken to, then they’ll kill her and come looking for us. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hiding. We have to finish this now.’
She looked up at him with liquid black eyes. ‘First they took your father,’ she said. ‘Now they’ve taken mine.’ She reached out and laid her hand on his cheek. ‘I can’t let them take you.’
‘They won’t,’ he said, wiping a tear from her cheek with his thumb. ‘This isn’t a suicide mission. I became a soldier after Dad died so I could fight them in other ways. Academic arguments don’t change anything, and protests outside cathedrals don’t shake the walls.’ He glanced at the contents of the van. ‘But we will.’
Kathryn looked up at him. Saw his father standing there. Saw his grandfather. Saw herself there too. She knew it was pointless arguing with him. There was no time anyway.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Let’s do it.’
He leaned forward and kissed her gently on the forehead — long enough for it to count, not long enough for her to think it was goodbye. ‘OK,’ he said, reaching into the back of the van for the black canvas bag. ‘This is what you do.’
Chapter 129
The Sanctus guard let the girl’s body slip to the ground next to the forge then reached up and took a thin metal rod from a hook on the wall. He laid it in the heart of the fire and started pumping the bellows, filling the room with the fire’s rhythmic roar. The forge glowed brighter, throwing yellow light across the whetstones in front of it. The Abbot moved to the nearest one, shrugging his shoulders out of his cassock and letting it fall to the floor. Cornelius looked at the network of scars on his body.
‘Are you ready to receive the knowledge of the Sacrament?’ the Abbot asked. Cornelius nodded. ‘Then do as I do.’
He unsheathed the ceremonial dagger from his wooden Crux and began working the foot-pedal to set the sharpening stone spinning. He laid the edge of his dagger on the stone and started to work the blade backwards and forwards, his eyes fixed on the sharpening blade. Cornelius shrugged out of his own robes and felt the heat of the fire on his skin. He removed the dagger from his Crux and started his own wheel spinning.
‘Before you enter the chapel,’ the Abbot said, his voice rumbling under the hiss of the bellows and the grinding stones, ‘you must receive the sacred marks of our order. These marks, cut into our own flesh, remind us of our failure to carry out the pledge our ancestors made to God.’ He lifted his blade from the stone and held the edge up to the light. ‘Tonight, thanks to your great service, that pledge will finally be honoured.’
He turned to Cornelius and raised the point of his dagger until it rested at the top of the thick raised scar running down the centre of his body. ‘The first,’ he said, pushing the blade into his flesh and dragging it down towards his stomach. ‘This blood binds us in pain with the Sacrament. As it suffers, so must we, until all suffering ends.’
Cornelius watched the blade slice through the scar until blood dripped down the Abbot’s body and on to the stone floor. He held his own dagger up. Pressed it into his own flesh. Pierced his skin with its point. He dragged it downwards, shutting his mind to the pain, willing his hand to obey him until the first incision was done and blood ran hot from his own mortified flesh. The Abbot raised his dagger again and made the second cut at the point where his left arm met his body. Cornelius did the same, dutifully mirroring this and every cut the Abbot made, until his body bore all the marks of the brotherhood he was now part of.
The Abbot finished the final cut and raised the bloodied tip of his blade to his forehead, wiped it once upward, turned it, then wiped it once across, leaving a smeared red Tau in the centre. Cornelius did the same, remembering Johann as he did so and tears ran down the pale, puckered skin on his cheek. Johann had died a righteous death so that their mission could succeed. Because of that sacrifice, he was about to be blessed with the sacred knowledge of the Sacrament. He watched the Abbot slide his dagger back into the wooden scabbard of his Crux and step over to the forge. He lifted the metal rod from the heart of the flames and carried it across to Cornelius.
‘Do not worry, Brother,’ the Abbot said, misreading his tears. ‘All your wounds will soon heal.’
He raised the glowing tip of the iron and Cornelius felt the dry heat approaching the skin of his upper arm. He looked away and remembered the bloom of the explosion that had burned him once before. Felt the searing agony again as the branding iron pressed against him. He gritted his teeth, clamping down on a scream, willing himself to endure it as the smell of his burning flesh corrupted the air.
The iron was removed, but the pain remained, and Cornelius forced a look at it to convince himself it was over. He sipped shallow breaths, looking down at the charred and blistered patch of flesh that marked him now as one of the chosen. Then he saw the flesh start to harden, knit together and heal.
A grinding sound scraped through the flickering darkness, dragging his eyes away. The guard was heaving against the wooden stakes in the huge circular stone, rolling it along channels worn smooth by millennia to reveal a
