Sanctus

twice, aiming above the light source, probably going for a headshot, the sound deafening in the stone confines of the corridor.

Gabriel fired with his own silenced weapon, watched the guard twitch then slump back against the door, his gun clattering to the ground. He sprang forward using the glow from the PDA to light his way and kicked the gun away from the guard’s hand. He reached for his neck with his good hand, feeling for a pulse, but keeping a tight grip on his gun in case he found one. He found nothing. His hand skimmed across the rough surface of the cassock, skirting the warm wetness of the chest wound until he found what he was looking for.

He tracked back, picked up the PDA and wedged it in the claw of his left hand, directing the light towards the heavy studded door. The keyhole was in the centre. Gabriel slotted in the key he had taken from the guard, twisted it and leaned against the door, revealing a flight of steps behind it heading up into the dark of the mountain.

Chapter 140

Samuel’s body wrenched from Liv’s view as she was yanked to her feet and whirled round to face a grotesque figure standing close by in the darkness. It stared at her, with grey eyes shining above a thick beard, its upper body glistening darkly with blood running from cuts that were both fresh and familiar. ‘The marks of our devotion,’ the Abbot said, following her gaze. ‘Your brother bore them too — but he could not bear our secret.’

He twitched his head towards the darker end of the cavern and Liv was jerked round to face the blackness. She twisted her head to the right, hoping to catch sight of her brother. A hand grabbed her hair and forced her to face forward. ‘Search the darkness,’ the Abbot commanded. ‘See for yourself.’

She looked.

Saw nothing but shadow. Then a breeze seemed to blow through her body as something took form in the gloom.

It was the shape of the Tau, at least as high as she was and just as solid. As her eyes continued to make sense of the darkness, the breeze strengthened and brought with it a whispering sound, like the wind moving through trees. She could feel it flowing through her, gently rinsing away her pain.

‘This is the great secret of our order,’ the voice behind her said. ‘The un-doer of all men.’

The hands pressed her closer and more details emerged. The main upright was about the width of a small tree, though its surface was flatter and made of something darker than wood. At its base was a rough grille from which something seeped into channels cut into the stone floor. It reminded her of the sap she’d seen oozing from the dying tree outside the hospital in Newark. Where this sticky substance flowed, thin vines had somehow taken root, their tendrils snaking up the strange, uneven surface of the Tau. Her eyes drifted up, following the vines past raised joints in the surface where crudely beaten iron plates had been welded together to make the central pillar. The breeze strengthened, carrying with it now the warm, comforting scent of sun-toasted grass. She arrived at the place where the central upright met the thinner arms of the horizontal crosspiece; then saw something else — something inside the shape — and the shock of it drove the breath from her lungs.

‘Behold,’ the Abbot whispered, sensing her discovery. Liv stared at the narrow slit cut into the dull metal surface of the Tau — and the pale, green eyes that stared back at her. ‘The secret of our order. Mankind’s greatest criminal; sentenced to death for crimes against man — but unkillable. Until today.’ He stepped into view and pointed at the floor where Samuel’s body lay crumpled and discarded. ‘The cross will fall,’ he said, shifting his finger to point at Liv. ‘The cross will rise,’ his hand swept over to the Tau, ‘to unlock the Sacrament, and bring forth a new age, through its merciful death.’ A sharp metallic snap echoed through the chapel as he undid a clasp on the side of the cross. ‘She who once robbed man of his divinity will now restore it.’ More sharp snaps cracked through the air until the front of the structure shifted and swung slowly open, dragging an agonized, animal shriek from the woman it contained.

The Tau was not a cross, it was a metal coffin filled with needles, each one shining darkly with the same wetness Liv had thought was sap. Now she saw the terrible truth. It was not sap but blood, leaking from hundreds of evenly spaced puncture marks on the frail and naked form of the woman inside it. She was young. More like a girl than a woman, yet her long hair shone white in the darkness, sticking in thick coils to a body mired with blood and gouged with ritualized wounds, each one terrible and familiar.

‘The scars we bear are reminders of our failure to rid the world of its evil,’ the Abbot chanted, as though he was reciting a prayer. ‘The rituals we practise keeping it bloodless and weak until justice can finally be done.’

Liv looked into her eyes. Green like a lake, and wide like a child’s, yet fathomless and silted with pain. Despite the grotesqueness of the situation Liv experienced a rush of intimacy with her, as if the chapel was just a room, and the girl before her just a lost friend from childhood. Looking at her now was like encountering a version of herself, like catching an unsuspecting reflection staring up from a deep well. It was as if the soft breeze that flowed out of her, carrying with it the scent of grass, connected them somehow. The green eyes stared deep into hers, and she felt laid bare and accepted; seen but not judged. And like a window they let Liv see too. And she saw everything in her, and her in everything. She was the desolation of every woman who’d wanted to be a mother but had never become one. She was Liv’s own mother screaming in agony as she gave her own life for that of her two children. She was all the hearts that had ever been broken, and all the tears that had ever been shed. She was woman, and woman was her. Their pain was her pain, and hers was unimaginable. And Liv saw all this and felt a yearning to just reach out and give her the simple comfort of her touch, as though she was the mother and the tortured child pinned inside the vicious cross was hers, lost in a nightmare too long to measure. But her unseen captor held on too tightly and her hand was not hers to command, so she reached out with what words she could muster.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, blinking away tears that spilled unchecked down her face. ‘Shhh. It’s all right.’

Eve’s limpid green eyes held hers for a moment, then she smiled the faintest of smiles and sighed like something released, then Liv felt something press into her hand. She looked down. Saw the thin blade of a dagger tapering away from her palm into the darkness.

‘Fulfil your destiny,’ the Abbot said, holding her hand tightly in his. ‘Rid mankind of its great betrayer.’

Liv stared at the slender blade, the horror of why she had been brought here suddenly manifested in its cold point. She tried to drop it, revolted by its intended purpose, tried to twist it away but the hands that held her were too strong. Samuel’s words rose up in her frantic mind as she struggled against the men who held her.

If others die for your sake then God has spared you for a reason.

She’d often wondered what her reason in life was, but she knew this was not it. This exquisite, tortured woman could not die. Not by her hand. She looked up into the pale, elfin face, felt the breeze flowing through her, the smell of toasted grass stronger now as the sound it carried changed to something liquid, like ripples on a shore, that seemed to wash through her, bringing strange comfort and a rush of memories.

She saw herself sitting by the lake with Samuel in the sun-bleached grass of her childhood, listening to their granny telling stories from their Nordic past.

It’s not supposed to be obvious to just anyone, Arkadian had said about the message scratched on the seeds.

It was meant for you.

The smells and the memories it brought now made everything terrible and clear. ‘Ask’ had not been an instruction. It referred to the legend of Ask and Embla — the first two humans. The message Samuel had sent her was:

Ask +?

Mala T

The Tau and the question mark both underlined because they were the same thing. The Mala cross — the Tau — was Embla. The Sacrament was Eve.

Chapter 141

When Cornelius had seen the green eyes staring out at him from the slit in the Tau, he’d thought for a