The nurse had clearly realized this too and was working swiftly. He took a fresh pair of nitrile gloves from a box, slipped them over his hands then swapped a new bag of plasma for the depleted one on the drip line. Next he laid out syringes loaded with Vitamin K and Thrombin to promote coagulation in the blood, as well as scalpels to cut free the pus-soaked dressings wrapped round his strange network of wounds. Then he made a mistake. He tore open a fresh package of dressings a little too eagerly and the sound of it ripped through the heavy silence. The thin, blackened lids instantly moved in response. Ulvi and the nurse watched, each hoping the eyes would settle and the thing would remain asleep. But it did not. The head rolled towards them and the lids parted, revealing the hellish eyes beneath. They were bright red, a result of all the blood vessels having burst and bled into the whites. Ulvi stared at them, transfixed by the sight of his brother monk and the demon thing he had become.
The light hurt.
Everything hurt.
When Dragan had first woken, here in this place, he had thought for a brief moment it must be Heaven; he was no longer inside the dark rooms and hallways of the Citadel, so therefore he must have died. But then pain had overwhelmed him, and he knew he was wrong, for Heaven could not contain agony such as this.
In the first few days, when he had realized where he was, he had waited for death — welcomed it even. He knew, through his agonies, that it had to be close — one way or another. Either his broken body would finally give up, or an agent of the Citadel would come.
The law was clear.
The secrets of the Citadel had to be protected.
And he was a Sanctus — a guardian of the Sacrament. There was no way they could let him remain in the world with what he held in his head. So they would bring him back, or they would send someone to silence him, as well as anyone else he may have spoken to.
But he had said nothing.
Not to the doctors, not to the police, not even to the priest who watched over him constantly, stealing into his room from time to time to whisper fresh news of what was happening outside and in the wider world. He wished the priest would leave him in peace. He didn’t care for any of it. He just wanted to keep his soul pure so he could face his God knowing he had kept his oath and carried the secret to his grave.
And he had heard Death in the corridor, shuffling outside his door, teasing him with his closeness, then slipping away and into other rooms to claim other souls. Although he wanted it, yearned for it, Death left him alone.
So he endured, waiting his turn, which could not — praise God — be long. For despite the transfusions of the blood of others, and the drugs that stopped it from flowing straight out of him again, he could feel the life leaking from him, tickling and dripping in the dark wet places between the dressings and his blighted skin where the nurse dabbed and cleansed.
But now he felt differently.
Now he feared the whisper of death at his door. Earlier, when he had drifted out of agonized sleep from a dream where his body was whole and he was back in the cool tunnels of the mountain, he had discovered a dark figure standing in the room with him. At first he had thought the shadow was death, come to claim him at last. But as his ruined eyes cleared and the figure stepped forward, he saw it was just the priest, delivering fresh news.
Death had come after all, it seemed, but not to him.
You are the last, the priest had whispered. The last…
And as he lay pinned down by this news, he had felt strength flowing back into him along with the realization that death was no longer an option. Now he had to live. He did not know who in authority was left in the Citadel but suspected there was no one. Why else had he been left in the hospital to rot without a word? Why else had he not been silenced earlier, unless there was no one to give the order? If the old elite had been smashed, then he was all that remained. He was the only one who could rebuild it again.
He looked down now as the male nurse peeled away the last sticky dressing to reveal his blackened, wasted body beneath. Seeing it was its own kind of agony; the ruined flesh, scored with his ceremonial scars, badge of his holy orders, red and swollen where blood and fluid leaked from him.
He had borne his suffering, as Job had done, and proved his worthiness for the task that had been reserved for him. He had been spared so he could restore the order once more. But a leader needed to be strong and there was only one place where his wrecked body could recover fully. If he were to live at all.
He had to get back to the Citadel.
II
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
25
Babil Province, Western Iraq
Hyde jammed his arm against the roof of the cab as they bounced over ruts in the road carved by recent floods. They had left the main road twenty clicks back and were now deep in the middle of nowhere. Out here there were no trees, no grass, no wind — nothing at all. Even the scrubby storksbill bushes that somehow managed to cling to the ground everywhere else in Iraq had been burned away by the slowly spreading eastern edge of the Syrian Desert. Whatever had once been here had been ground down by time and heat until it was reduced to just two elements — earth and sky — with a hazy smudge marking the place where the two met, as if the finger of God had been run along it, blurring the line between them.
Ahead of him was what he now called ‘home’, a sprawling collection of earth-coloured tents and prefabricated structures clustered together inside a razor-wire perimeter. Two huge earth movers trundled around inside the compound, kicking up dust as they dug a second storage lagoon even though the first one was still empty. At the centre of it all rose the dark, skeletal drill tower, sharp and slender like the spire of a church built to worship money. It reminded Hyde of the spindle of a roulette wheel and, as at every other low point in his life, here he was again, betting on how that spin of the wheel would end, hoping it would fall on black.
They reached the main gate, passed through the double perimeter and into the shade of the transport hangar. It was better equipped than anything he had ever seen in the army. When he had signed on he had been asked to put together a wish list of vehicles and equipment he might need. Being used to army quartermasters cutting any requisition list in half, he had padded the list, adding plenty of stuff he didn’t really need. But he had got the whole lot. Money appeared to be no object for his new bosses, though with the drill still turning dry, he wasn’t sure where the cash was coming from: not from the ground, that was for sure.
The truck stopped and he opened the door to the trapped heat in the hangar, stretching the kinks out of his back as he passed through a set of double doors designed to keep the heat out of the main building and the air- conditioning in.
The mess hall was half-full, men in desert lights eating dinner after a day on the drill. He knew they were coming off a shift because their bright white work clothes, designed to reflect the worst of the torturous sun, were now uniformly beige. He could feel heat radiating off them as he passed their tables, as if they were bricks that had been in the sun all day.
The air temperature dropped a few more degrees as he left the mess hall and entered the office complex, punching in the code to gain entry to his domain — the security nerve centre. The more important people had desks further down the corridor where the air-con stayed constant and you couldn’t hear the noise from the mess hall, but
