Mallory wondered what Stefan meant by this, but he didn't have time to consider it for Roeser ran up, looking more worried than Mallory had ever seen him.
Blaine recognised it, too. 'What is it?' he barked.
'No sign of the perpetrator, sir,' he replied. His lips had grown thin and white. 'But the storerooms have been ransacked.' He looked from Blaine to Stefan and back. 'All our supplies have been destroyed.'
The assault on the walls began soon after, with a ferocity that took them all aback. Mallory could hear the clattering against the gates even from outside Blaine's office, where a council had been hastily convened. When Roeser made his announcement, Mallory had seen Stefan blanch for the first time. They all knew what it meant: starvation on a mass scale within days. They were already at a low ebb; there wasn't much chance of hanging on longer without any food at all.
The voices echoed dully through the office walls while Mallory thought of Sophie and whether all that potential would ever be achieved. He didn't fear death. For so long, it had almost felt as if he had been shuffling through life in a dream, simply waiting for the end to turn up. Now that it had, he wasn't surprised. But he was sad that he might not be there for Sophie, as she had hoped.
There were still options. He considered dropping over the cathedral walls and attempting to dodge the hellish creatures beyond; he guessed one or two would try that before long. Oddly, he still had hope; that surprised him. He thought hope had long since been excised from his system.
The council had been talking for a good hour. Mallory stretched his legs, then slid down the wall to sit for a while, no longer caring if Blaine emerged to castigate him for not standing tall and erect as a knight should. He knew they'd only brought him along because they didn't want him passing news of the crisis to anyone else.
Through the window he saw fire erupt against the eastern wall. Part of the masonry crumbled, and the regular crew of guards and knights who manned the defences every evening set about desperately trying to shore up what was left.
As he watched, two things struck him: firstly, that the enemy appeared to know of events within the cathedral — the attack had clearly coincided with the murder and the destruction of the supplies; and secondly, not only had the enemy grown stronger, but the defences had also grown weaker. It was this that intrigued him the most. On the surface there should be no rational reason why the cathedral's defences were starting to fail. But what he had learned over the previous weeks about the nature of the Blue Fire hinted at the reason.
The earth energy, whatever designation was chosen for it, was a power of the spirit, strengthened by belief. To the pagans it was the essence of nature. To Christians it was the spirit and power of God. The same force, different ways of approaching it. The same undeniable pathway to the numinous.
If belief gave it a charge, that explained why certain places became sacred — churches, stone circles, hilltops, springs — sites where the Blue
Fire was already strong and made more potent by worshipping humans, creating a spiritual atmosphere that was ripe for connection with the divine.
And as the Caretaker had told him, the cathedral had somehow become supercharged; that had kept the enemy at bay for a long time. But now the rejuvenating faith of the brothers was being knocked by successive blows — the murders, the siege, the diminishing supplies. The site was slowly losing its power. If things carried on the same way, if the brothers found out they had no more food, soon the walls would fall completely and the supernatural forces would sweep across them all.
Of course, we might have starved to death long before then, he thought wryly. But the Adversary had been very clever: it had all been linked.
He was disturbed from his deep thoughts by the door swinging open and heated conversation spilling out into the corridor. Wearily, he pushed himself back to his feet.
Stefan marched out, hands behind his back, his face dark with determination. 'Do what I say. This is the only way. We have the ultimate obligation. If we fail… if God's light goes out because we turned away… because we weren't strong enough… then we will be damned for all eternity.' He marched straight past Mallory as if he wasn't there.
Blaine followed him out, unusually angry. There had obviously been some disagreement. He paused by Mallory. 'If you do anything to destroy morale, anything at all, I will personally break your fucking neck,' he said, quietly and coldly. He turned to Roeser. 'Organise the teams. Everyone works through the night. We'll punch the tunnel through by tomorrow or someone's head will roll, and it'll probably be yours.'
Daniels, Gardener and Miller were gathered together in the dorm, clearly on edge. Miller jumped up anxiously when Mallory entered. 'What's going on?' he blurted.
Mallory wondered how much he could tell them without prompting Blaine to carry out his threat.
'There are all sorts of rumours flying around,' Miller said; he couldn't keep still.
Gardener sucked on a roll-up, on the surface the picture of calm, but Mallory could see from his eyes that he was troubled. 'They've cranked us up to the highest alert,' he said. 'Summat's up.'
'Are they sending us out to fight those things?' Daniels looked drained, his face puffy as if he had been crying. Mallory could see he had been crushed by what had happened to his boyfriend and what that had made him face within himself.
'Gibson's dead.' Mallory dropped wearily on to his bunk and closed his eyes.
'Oh, no!' Miller whined.
'The same as before?' Daniels asked.
'The same.' In the dark behind his eyes, with their disembodied voices floating around him, Mallory made another connection; they were coming thick and fast, each prompting another. Everything had been planned from the beginning. They had been lured to Bratton Camp so they could bring that terrible creature back. A hidden assassin to strike from the inside while the hellish forces attacked from without. How very clever. How pathetically stupid they all seemed in comparison; a stupidity born of arrogance. Even after all that had happened, they still thought they were top of the pile, better than anything else in Existence. They weren't, not by a long way.
But it was the words of the Caretaker that struck him the most: Look to your hearts. And then he thought of the severed hand he had seen at Bratton Camp, seemingly belonging to one of them, yet apparently not. Now he could guess what it all meant: the thing was inside one of them, somehow, regenerating what was lost; or perhaps even it was one of them, putting on skin and bones and face like other people put on a suit of clothes.
That was how they had brought it back. That was how it survived on the sacred ground of the cathedral where no other supernatural creature could walk, the ultimate fifth columnist.
He looked at the faces surrounding him: Daniels, Gardener, Miller, and then thought of Hipgrave locked in his little room in the infirmary. He had spent hours with all of them since the return and they had all seemed perfectly human: flawed, wrapped up in their own little troubles. How well it hid. How could he ever tell which one of them it was?
'What's up with you, lad?' Gardener was watching him carefully. 'You're looking at us as if you've never seen us before.'
Desperately, he tried to recall where they all had been at the time of the murders. They had been with him on the walls when Cornelius's body had been discovered… but when he had been murdered? And Julian, where had any of them been when he died? Hipgrave had certainly been locked away when Gibson was killed. Or had he? Perhaps he was free, loose in the cathedral.
'I'm just tired,' he said, closing his eyes again.
Who could he trust? Gardener was hardened by life, but there was humanity burning inside him. Miller was bright and innocent, all his emotions on the surface. Daniels might have been temporarily broken by what he had seen earlier, but his love of life still shone beneath that. Even shattered, sad Hipgrave, unable to live up to his ambitions, was basically a good man. How could it be any of them?
'Are you all right?' Miller asked, concerned.
But what he did know was that if he gave any sign he suspected, he wouldn't stand a chance. 'Fine,' he said. 'You know they're punching the tunnel through tomorrow, hopefully? Putting a lot of steam behind it. Working through the night.'
'Why?' Gardener asked suspiciously. 'For the last few days they seemed quite happy letting us munch through spuds while they took their time.'
'Maybe they finally realised time's running out,' Daniels said.
The snow stopped falling some time during the night, but by then everywhere was blanketed by a covering
