The Key

‘And how might we stop it?’

He took a deep breath as if preparing to pronounce heavy sentence. ‘We need to cut as deep as we dare and then burn everything we remove. It’s the only way to make sure any disease has gone.’

‘Very well, then I suggest at first light you assemble what men you need and carry out what has to be done. As for the rest of us, we should reassure our brothers that we have inspected the garden and it has sustained some damage from the after-effects of the explosion, but that Brother Gardener has it in hand.’

‘And what if it turns out to be more than that?’ came the nasal enquiry of Brother Axel.

‘Then we will deal with that too. We are stretched thin as it is. I advise that we deal only with the real problems that face us, not the imagined ones that might.’

Axel held his gaze, giving no indication whether he was swayed by his reasoning.

‘You are right.’ It was Father Thomas. ‘We are all tired and apt to jump at shadows. We should remember that, until the elections install new leaders, our brothers look to us for guidance. So we must steady the ship and seek to reassure rather than agitate.’

Athanasius had always been fond of Father Thomas. He spent many an evening with him discussing subjects ranging from philosophy to archaeology and everything in between. He found his company intelligent, rational and calm.

‘The best way to reassure the brotherhood would be to re-instate the Sancti.’ All eyes turned to Brother Axel. ‘It would demonstrate a return to order and instantly calm the mountain’s mood.’

‘But who would elect them?’ Thomas asked.

‘We cannot address the issue of the Sancti until we have an Abbot to propose them or a Prelate to confirm their elevation,’ Athanasius continued. ‘Therefore any discussion of the Sancti must wait until after the elections.’

Axel switched his gaze between Athanasius and Father Thomas, as though tracing a fine thread stretching between them. He turned to Brother Gardener. ‘I will post some of my men at the entrances to the garden in case any inquisitive brothers decide to take a midnight stroll. If there is anything else you need from me, let me know.’ Then he turned and marched away.

Athanasius watched him go, feeling the chill of the rain more keenly. There were clearly two factions developing in the wake of the explosion: the rational and the fearful. And fear was heady fuel for those who might seek to exploit it; it was how the Sancti had exercised their dominance over the mountain for thousands of years. Although his decision to remove them had been born of compassion rather than political ambition, he couldn’t help but admit in his private moments that he was glad they were gone and hoped never to see their return. He had felt a difference in the Citadel since the Sancti had left. It felt freer somehow; as if the air flowed more smoothly. But as he watched Axel reach the edge of the garden and disappear back into the mountain he realized their return could come about sooner than he had imagined, and that he had just stared a rival in the eye.

11

Room 406, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

Liv watched the door swing inwards, revealing the darkened corridor and the shadow that stood there, the white slash of his collar glowing brightly in the gloom. She looked up at the priest’s face. It was set in a practised mask of seriousness and compassion, like he was visiting a bereaved parishioner, or listening to a low-grade confession at the end of a dull Sunday. He seemed so normal, and yet she was terrified of him – terrified and full of an anger that rose up inside her, along with the detuned radio noise in her head. Her fists clenched on the bed, twisting handfuls of starched sheet. So complete was her focus on him that she didn’t even notice the second figure enter the room until the door banged shut behind him.

He was bigger than the priest and several inches taller – though his bearish, stooping posture all but levelled them. His right arm was held tightly across his chest by a sling and his other held two black plastic evidence bags. A pair of intelligent eyes regarded her from above half-moon glasses that clung crookedly to an impressive nose. Liv broke into a smile, her anger melting in the warmth of his gaze. It was the detective who had first called her and alerted her to her brother’s death.

‘Arkadian!’ The last time she had seen him was at the airport, in amongst the carnage when the agents of the Citadel tried to silence them all. She had seen him slammed backwards by the force of bullets. ‘I thought you were …’

‘Dead? Not quite. Obviously I’ve been better, but in the circumstances I’m not complaining.’ He lowered himself on to the edge of her bed, his weight squashing the mattress and tipping her closer. His presence calmed her, almost as much as the priest’s caused her distress. ‘How are you?’

She wanted to blurt out everything that was going through her head, but instead her eyes flicked towards the priest listening in the corner of the room and she held back. She leaned in closer. ‘Why is he here?’

‘That’s a good question.’ Arkadian twisted round on the bed. ‘What’s your name, son?’

‘Ulvi,’ the priest said, looking like a schoolboy who’d just been caught smoking by the headmaster. He cleared his throat and straightened. ‘Father Ulvi ŞimŞek.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Father. Lady wants to know why you’re here.’

The priest looked at Liv then back to Arkadian. ‘It has been agreed that a member of the Church should be present at every interview.’

‘But this isn’t an interview. She’s already given a statement, which I’m sure you’ve either listened to or read a transcript of.’

‘I have to be here, as a representative of the Church.’

‘And why is that exactly?’

The priest’s face flushed at the continued interrogation. It made Liv feel better, seeing his obvious discomfort, but she still wanted him out of the room. ‘The Church founded this hospital and still owns the land it stands on,’ he said. ‘It has been agreed that all persons who were brought from the Citadel will be monitored by a representative of the Church while they remain our guests.’

‘Well then, how about we come up with our own agreement? You give us five minutes to have a little friendly catch-up and we promise not to tell your boss about it. Who’s to know?’

The priest stared at Arkadian. ‘God will know,’ he said, as if that put an end to the matter. ‘I have been instructed to be present at every interview.’

‘Yes, but you see – this isn’t … oh, never mind.’ He turned back to Liv. ‘We’re just going round in circles here. Why don’t we agree to ignore him, like he’s a butler or something?’ He held up the evidence bags. ‘I have something for you. They found it in the warehouse over at the airport. The tech guys have finished with it. Thought you might want it back.’

He dropped one of the bags on the bed. The plastic crinkled in her hands as she loosened the string around its neck. Inside was her battered holdall, the only piece of luggage she’d brought with her on the journey here. ‘Thanks,’ she said, closing it up again. She would wait until she was alone before going through it. She didn’t want the priest’s eyes roaming all over her private stuff. Then it occurred to her that he’d probably already seen it outside in the corridor, before it was allowed into the room. The thought made her feel trapped and helpless. She looked up at Arkadian. ‘There’s a cop outside in the corridor,’ she said.

Arkadian nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Keep an eye on you and the others. Keep the press out.’

Liv smiled. ‘I am the press.’

Arkadian smiled. ‘Then I guess he’s not doing a very good job. Fortunately for everyone concerned, you can’t remember anything.’

‘Yeah, lucky me.’

‘You’ve been through a lot. These things take time.’

Liv glanced at the priest again, weighing up what he might know against what she might want to keep from him.

‘What exactly have I been through?’ Arkadian looked puzzled. ‘Seriously. My memory is so patchy I can’t work out what’s real and what’s not. It would really help if you could talk me through it.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything.’

Arkadian placed the second evidence bag down on the bed, took her hand and started to talk. He started with her brother’s appearance on top of the Citadel, moved carefully through his death and what they found during the autopsy, and finished with the events at the airport where Oscar had died smothering a grenade meant for all of them, Arkadian had been shot and Liv had been knocked unconscious only to reappear a few hours later being carried out of the Citadel by Gabriel. When he had finished, Liv looked across at the priest. He didn’t look back. Arkadian’s carefully told history, delivered in the precise and methodical manner of a seasoned police detective, had blown the mist from almost every recess of her mind. She could now recall everything, all except the one thing she wanted to remember most – what had happened to her inside the Citadel.

‘Thank you,’ she said, squeezing Arkadian’s hand.

‘My pleasure.’ He let go and reached into his pocket. ‘They’ll be letting you out of here soon.’ He handed her a card. ‘When they do, I want you to give me a call. Least I can do is drive you to the airport.’ He looked down at his bandaged arm. ‘Or get someone else to drive us both.’ He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead, reminding her of the way her father used to say goodnight when she was younger and the world was a safer place.

‘You look after yourself,’ he said, getting up and heading for the door.

‘What’s in the other bag?’

‘Something for Mrs Mann,’ he said. ‘She’s just down the hall.’

‘Say “Hi” from me,’ Liv said.

‘I will.’

‘And say “Hi” to Gabriel too – when you see him.’

‘Oh, you can tell him yourself. They can’t hold him for ever, and I’m not pressing any charges, even though he stuck an anaesthetic in me. I feel pretty sure he’ll be out before you know it.’

12

Police Headquarters, Central District, Ruin

Gabriel Mann was shoved head first through a fire door by the same stocky guard who had cuffed his hands behind his back a few minutes earlier. He was in the cell block beneath the main Ruin police building, a maze of low ceilings, uneven walls, and cramped corridors, cut hundreds of years previously from the bedrock of the city. Strip lighting flickered green against grey-painted walls, giving the impression that he was in the guts of a building that wasn’t feeling too well.

Gabriel wasn’t feeling his best either.

He had just left a meeting with his legal counsel who had outlined the charges against him. They had found three dead bodies in a hangar at the airport – a location the police could definitively place him at; two had been shot with a nine-millimetre pistol – his hands had tested positive for gunshot residue that matched spent cartridges found at the scene; he had been caught on camera at the city morgue at the same time as a body had been stolen; and he had assaulted a police inspector with a hypodermic needle loaded with Ketamine. It was this last charge that had undoubtedly ensured his charmless treatment at the hands of the silent sub-inspector. Most of the others would ultimately go away, but it would take time – and that was something he did not have.

He had replayed what he had witnessed in the Citadel over and over in his head, trying to make sense of it. He had no idea why he had been allowed to walk free, carrying the girl out with him, but he knew it was only a temporary escape. Whatever had happened to Liv at the top of the mountain before he had found her, whether she had discovered the Sacrament or not, was immaterial. The Sanctus monks sworn to protect the mountain’s great secret would regroup and take steps to silence her. Liv was in mortal danger, so was his mother, and so was he, and he couldn’t protect anyone while he was locked up in here. Escape was the only option – he just had no idea how he was going to do it.

He’d been checking the building as he’d marched through it, looking for possible means of escape. Every door they’d passed had opened into other cells; some had prisoners inside, most were empty. The interview room had been up a flight of stairs, which meant the cell block was in some kind of sub-basement. The only way in or out was through the automatic gate he’d passed through on his way down.

Gabriel began to slow as he approached his cell but another shove sent him stumbling straight past. He recovered his balance and kept on walking, his mind racing with the implications. He had been kept in solitary so far, which had suited him fine. A new cell could mean new cellmates. Not good.

They continued walking deeper into the maze. Paint bubbled on the walls where salts had seeped through the rock and nobody had bothered to fix it. There were fewer cells here and the ones they passed were all empty. It smelled mustier too. Unused. They reached the end of the corridor and another sharp shove sent Gabriel barrelling through a set of fire doors into a short tunnel chopped cleanly in half by a wall of bars. On the other side was a cell containing a steel toilet with no seat, a narrow bench built into the wall and a man so large he made everything around him seem as if it belonged in a child’s nursery.

‘Hands through the bars,’ the sub-inspector ordered.

The giant took one huge step forward, covering the entire width of the cell, and passed wrists as thick as sprinter’s legs through the bars. His eyes never left Gabriel’s face.

Gabriel was grabbed from behind and slammed sideways into the wall. ‘Make a move and I’ll stick you with the taser, understand?’ The guard’s breath smelled of coffee and cigarettes.

Gabriel nodded and felt the pressure ease as the guard turned his attention to the giant. It had surprised him when the stocky weightlifter of a sub-inspector had come alone to take him to his cell. Now he knew why: one cop meant less witnesses.

He glanced up at the smoke detector and closed-circuit camera bolted to the underside of the ducting that ran the length of the corridor, one of the old kind that produced a fuzzy black-and-white picture but no sound. The feed would be routed to the control room he’d passed on his way through the entrance gate. Another cop was probably watching now, ready to send in backup if anything went down. Except the camera wasn’t pointing at the cell. So no one could see what was happening inside it; and once the sub-inspector had locked the door and walked away, no one would care.

His eyes returned to the hulking figure on the other side of the bars. The giant was staring straight at him with the cold-eyed menace of a cell-block challenge. Gabriel held his gaze, taking him in, knowing now that looking away would spare him nothing. The man’s eyes were set deep in a flat face that was topped off by a surprisingly conservatively cut bowl of blond hair that he might’ve ripped off an insurance salesman to wear as a hat.

Gabriel held the bottomless eyes for another beat then took in the rest of him. He was immense; a caricature of a man sculpted from solid muscle by years of steroids and single-minded aggression. A cotton shirt strained to contain him, sleeves rolled up over meaty forearms. The handcuffs looked small and ridiculous on his thick wrists and, just above them, was something else that set alarm bells ringing in Gabriel’s head. It was the blurry blue image of a jailhouse tattoo. Generally speaking, the larger the tattoo, the more time its owner had spent in prison. This one was huge. But it wasn’t the giant’s evident criminal past, or even his intimidating size, that caused Gabriel the most concern, it was what the tattoo depicted. The huge image – created by pouring ink on his arm and repeatedly sticking a pin into himself until it was fixed there for ever – was a cross. Somewhere in this steroid-fried monster’s dark past he had found the light of God. And now the Church had found him, and clearly sent him on a mission to do their dark work.

Escape was no longer an option, it was a necessity. Once the guard had strolled away down the corridor Gabriel would be on his own, locked in the bowels of the earth, with this God-loving monster – and unless he did something fast, he would never get out of here alive.

13

Room 410, Davlat Hastenesi Hospital

Kathryn Mann stared at the object that had just slipped out of the evidence bag on to the hospital bed.

Arkadian had not stayed long. The memory of the last time they had met had hung too heavy over both of them, so he had made his peace offering and left.

‘We found it among your father’s things,’ he had told her. ‘There’s a message for you in there. I thought you should see it.’

Inside the evidence bag she had found a book, bound in leather with a thong wrapped round a button on the cover to keep it closed. Just seeing it had misted her eyes. It was the same old-fashioned make of journal her father had always used. She reached to the bedside table to retrieve her reading glasses then carefully unwound the thong to loosen the cover and found the note written across the middle two pages in her father’s neat hand:

My dearest Kathryn,

My love and light. I believe my work is over now and my return to Ruin will be for good this time. I hope I am wrong, but suspect I am not. No matter. I have lived long and you have filled those years with warmth and joy. If I do live, I will keep my promise and show you the next step, as I always said I would. If not, then you must discover it for yourself and decide whether to forgive me.

Know only that what I kept from you I did for your sake, and for the safety of my grandson.

Kiss Gabriel for me, and light a candle to my name so I may talk to you still.

All my love, for now and always,

Oscar de la Cruz

Every other page was empty. She reread his note, looking to see if she had missed something, but it remained as opaque as the first time she had read it. What had he kept from her? She had always thought they shared everything, that there were no secrets between them; only now, in death, had she discovered this was not so.

She remembered how, even when she was a small child, he had shared confidences with her, explaining that they were different from other people, that they were descendants of the Mala, the oldest tribe on earth, usurped by another who had sought to destroy them and bury the knowledge they kept. He had shown her their secret symbols, taught her the Mala language and revealed the mission they shared to restore rightful order to the world. But he had kept something from her so important that he had felt compelled to confess it from beyond the grave. Maybe she hadn’t known him as well as she’d thought.

Even the note contained something that jarred with her memory of him. He had always been so particular about words, insisting on precision because they carried the most precious cargo of all – meaning. And yet here was a mistake: he had not asked her to light a candle ‘in’ his name, but ‘to’ it.

Then she realized.

It wasn’t a mistake at all.

When she was a girl he had also taught her how their ancestors had kept their secrets. One method was to record messages on paper using lemon juice instead of ink. When the juice dried it was invisible, but the acids affected the paper so that a flame held against it would darken these sections first and reveal the hidden words on the page. When Oscar had written that he wanted her to light a candle ‘to’ his name so he might talk to her still, he had meant precisely that.

There was another message in the space beneath his signature. All she needed to read it was a flame.

14

Police Headquarters, Ruin

Gabriel’s body flooded with adrenalin as his mind ran through possible scenarios. If he ended up alone in the cell with the giant he would die. He had to do something in the next few seconds, before the guard locked him in. He glanced up at the low ceiling of the cell block, less than a foot above his head at the highest point. Not much room for manoeuvre. Fortunately the guard was short, which gave him a few extra inches, but he was also built like an Olympic weightlifter – and he was armed. As well as a taser he had a riot baton and a can of pepper spray clipped to his belt. At least he didn’t have a gun.

A loud clang echoed in the cramped space as the guard unlocked the gate to the cell. Gabriel stepped slightly away from the wall, his back to the guard, the weight on the balls of his feet and his knees bending slightly to give him a light, central balance.

‘One thousand lira if you put me in another cell,’ he said.

There was a snort from behind. ‘What you going to do, write me a cheque?’

Gabriel shook his head. ‘Cash. Right now.’

He was banking on the cop being an old-school turnkey who wouldn’t baulk at boosting his salary with a bit of freelancing. Cash was a drug to a dirty cop and like any junkie he wouldn’t care where it came from so long as he got a fix.

‘Where you going to get a thousand lira?’

‘My lawyer just slipped it to me. It’s in my right pocket. Take me to another cell and it’s yours.’

There was a pause. Gabriel could almost hear the cogs of the man’s brain working.

He felt something press into the small of his back. ‘Move and you get tasered, straight in your spine. And if that pocket comes up empty, I’m going to keep my finger on the button ’til you piss yourself, understand?’

Gabriel nodded. ‘What about my new cell?’

‘We talk about that later.’

Gabriel sank a little lower to the ground, focusing on a spot on the wall where the uneven surface jutted slightly. He felt the guard’s hand frisking the outside of his pocket, then slip inside to extract what was in fact a business card his lawyer had given him.

As part of his military training, Gabriel had undergone several sessions of ‘torture accustomization’, which included being tasered to see how it affected him. Size or fitness didn’t seem to have any bearing. Some of the bigger guys dropped like sacks of potatoes, while others recovered almost immediately. He’d been somewhere in the middle; not totally incapacitated, but pretty close, so he knew if he got this wrong he wouldn’t get a second chance. A zap to the spine would disrupt his whole nervous system and by the time he recovered he would be locked in the cell with the blond gorilla. He focused on the electrodes pressing harder as the guard leaned down. Timing and speed would be everything. The guard leaned lower, his fingertips touched the business card at the bottom of the pocket. Gabriel sprang.

He threw his cuffed hands to the right, knocking the taser away from his spine. At the same moment he raised his leg, trapping the guard’s hand in the folds of his pocket and kicked hard against the wall using the crevice for leverage. As he rose up, the loop of his arms slipped cleanly over the guard’s perfectly positioned head and he squeezed as hard as he could just as the staccato crackle of the taser ripped through the small space.

Gabriel’s right arm, now tight round the guard’s neck, went slack as 50,000 volts pulsed into it. He felt his grip weaken and pulled harder with his unaffected left arm, dragging the slack one tight where the handcuffs linked them and holding on with everything he had. They stumbled backwards and hit the wall, the jolt driving the electrodes deeper into Gabriel’s flesh. His stronger arm began to slacken and the guard twisted his head away as he felt the pressure ease. He was getting free.

Gabriel let his legs crumple beneath him. They hit the floor hard, the guard getting most of the impact, and the taser jarred clear of his flesh. The moment the strength-sapping voltage was gone Gabriel squeezed with both arms, clamping hard on to the guard’s thick neck. He rolled to his right, moving his weight over him as the dry crack of the charge started up once more. This time it made no difference. Gabriel’s arm was now locked in place and every time the taser crackled it just turned him into a dead weight that pressed down harder on the guard’s neck.