Tomb of Relics, page 9
Kelley paced the courtyard, assessing Morgan and Jake with a cool gaze. After a moment, she stopped, her posture changing as if she’d come to a decision. “There is no way for you to reach Anchorite through official channels. But perhaps you can end a cycle that I can’t finish myself.”
She looked up at the citadel. “The Black Anchorite has ruled my family for generations, tied by history and sustained by blood. I’ve tried to end it, but he…” Her words trailed off and in the silence, Morgan sensed years of dread.
Kelley took a deep breath and turned to the leader of the security guards. “Let them in, Zale.”
Zale frowned, confusion flickering over his features. “But we have to protect the citadel.” He looked up at the looming stone tower and lowered his voice to a whisper. “What if they don’t make it? He will demand a sacrifice.”
Kelley reached out and touched his arm. “There has already been so much sacrifice, far more than you know. I have to take this chance — for my sons, for future generations. For me.” She leaned in and spoke softly. “Please. Let them try.”
Zale softened at her touch and Morgan could see there was something between them, even if it had yet to blossom.
He waved his men away. “Back to your stations. I’ll handle this.”
The other guards returned inside the buildings and Zale turned, determination on his face. “I’m going in, too.”
Kelley frowned. “Why? Let them take the risk. You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
Zale shook off her hand and turned to look up at the citadel. “Every time you stepped through that door, I wanted to come with you and help end him. This is my chance.” He gripped her hands. “Let me prove myself to you.”
A sudden chill wind blew over the escarpment, sweeping a tornado of dead leaves up from the orchard. They whirled in the air, twisting into shapes of ruined corpses that reached out with undead hands. As the smell of rot and decay permeated the courtyard, the cry of a crow pierced the air, then many more joined the harsh chorus. Morgan looked up to see a flock of dark birds wheeling above, calling what could have been a warning. Was it for them or for whoever lay within?
“You must hurry,” Kelley said. “Or he will have time to prepare, and remember, things may not be as they seem inside. Stay together.”
Morgan gazed up at the citadel, black stones against a darkening sky as carrion crows circled above. Perhaps a temporary truce was the best way forward until they made it out with the relics and dealt with this Black Anchorite, whatever he might be. She and Jake had faced all manner of adversaries on their missions, and Morgan was ready for this one. As long as Jake was by her side, they could manage whatever might come.
She glanced at Jake, and he nodded in agreement. Together, they fell in behind the security guard.
Zale stepped up to the door of the citadel and bent his head for a moment as if he prayed for strength, then he put his hand against the thick wood studded by iron rivets. It seemed impregnable, but as he pushed the door, it swung open silently. The dark maw of a corridor stretched away before them.
The crows fell silent above and the whirling leaves fell to the stones of the courtyard. Zale held his gun out and stepped warily inside, Morgan and Jake right behind him, weapons high.
The temperature dropped inside the stone walls and a sudden bone-chilling cold made Morgan shiver as the door swung shut behind them. Motes of dust and ash rose from the floor, hanging in the air and clinging to their clothes as they walked on. The flagstones of the corridor were uneven, some half-sunken into the ground, and scuttling insects burrowed blindly in the cracks between as they hid away from the light. It smelled of the aftermath of battle — smoke and blood and fear. A memory of violence sunk deep into the citadel, woven into the fabric of stone and earth beneath.
There were places where the veil was thin, where the line blurred between the living and the dead, the present and other times. Morgan had brushed against such places before on ARKANE missions, but this citadel was peculiar. Time was confused here, its hold on the fabric of life somehow suspended.
An oversized crucifix hung on one wall lit from below, the body of Christ tortured and bloody, his face transfixed in pain, his eyes pleading for release from two thousand years hanging on the tree. But even though the citadel had the trappings of faith, Morgan sensed that no prayers had been spoken here for generations. The air seemed heavy with curses overlaid with a cloying incense that couldn’t hide its dark nature.
“Welcoming place, isn’t it?” The heavy stone around them dampened Jake’s soft words, but Morgan allowed a flicker of a smile to play over her lips. Her ARKANE partner was thankfully irrepressible, even when injured. Perhaps she needed some of those painkillers…
Zale stopped at another heavy door at the end of the corridor, this one etched with faded runes mingled with medieval curses. The door handle was sculpted steel crafted from the rolled blades of vanquished enemies. Morgan and Jake readied their weapons as Zale reached out with a shaking hand.
Before he could touch it, the door opened with a creak.
An old woman stood in the doorway, her eyes opaque as she stared into the air above their heads. Her skin was dry and cracked, shrunken against her bones.
“He’s expecting you,” she croaked with a ragged breath.
She waved them on and as Morgan walked past; the woman looked right at her. The irises in her blind eyes seemed to swirl into patterns of storm clouds where deformed winged creatures flew, talons outstretched, as they hunted their prey in the shadows.
A long hallway stretched in front of them with tapestries hung on both sides, the rich fibers coated with a layer of dust. As they walked past, Morgan recognized the sack of Jerusalem by Crusaders underneath the grime. Knights mounted on horses with red crosses on their armor slashed down at infidels and pilgrims alike, their faces contorted with lust for blood and glory. Heaped bodies lay at the base of the tapestries, each face a portrait of suffering, while maggots squirmed out of bloody wounds and carrion birds pecked at eyes and exposed flesh. A banner of embroidered words hung above the killing field: God will know his own.
The images were so vivid that Morgan thought she could hear the cries of Crusaders ring out across the battlefield, the clash of metal, the thud of horses’ hooves, the screams of the dying. It was as if they were in the midst of battle, the smell of smoke from fires, the stench of blood and voided bowels, the sweat of men and horses as they slaughtered in the name of God.
The cacophony grew louder. The battle was almost upon them, sound and sensation intensifying into a crescendo.
The corridor grew hazy and the tapestries writhed with life. Morgan fell to her knees, overwhelmed with memories of war. She was under fire in the Golan Heights, a soldier in the Israel Defense Force, fighting to stay alive. A flash of light and her husband, Elian, died once more in a hail of bullets, his blood coating her hands, soaking into her uniform.
The bullets came again — over and over — and still, she couldn’t save him. Tears rolled down her cheeks as Morgan cradled Elian’s broken body against her own, another pointless death in an endless war.
The sounds of battle rolled around her in waves, emanating from the tapestries, along with memories of death by fire and torture, bullet and knife, fist and boot. Memories that weren’t hers anymore, but somehow projected from the surrounding walls.
In the depths of the bloody vision, Morgan clawed her way back to the surface, mentally setting aside the past. She had faced such horrors before and lived. The memories couldn’t touch her now.
She placed one hand on the carpet, anchoring herself to the physical world, pushing away the swirling vortex of terror as she fought to escape the strange visions that the citadel projected into their minds. Beside her, Jake reached out for a tapestry with an expression of anguish, tears on his cheeks. Did he see the broken bodies of his family there?
Zale stumbled and put his hands over his ears. “Make it stop,” he moaned. He fell to his knees and bent forward, his head almost touching the carpet as he tried to block out the assault on his senses.
They had to get out of this corridor. There was something in the tapestries or in the air that dragged them into the violent depths of war. But Morgan would not turn back. It wasn’t just the mission anymore. A dark curiosity led her on. She wanted to face the Black Anchorite.
She shook Jake’s arm. “We need to move. Now!”
He blinked, confusion on his face, but as Morgan grabbed Zale under one arm, Jake took the other side. Together, they dragged the moaning security guard onward, through another door at the end of the corridor, and stumbled into the heart of the citadel.
A circular room opened up to a skylight high above, with stone walls bounded by plain Gothic arches. Each led off to separate rooms, most stacked high with books. A mottled rug of black and crimson, the colors of pitch and blood, led toward a fireplace roaring with flame, although somehow the room remained piercingly cold. A gigantic oil painting of the End Times hung on the wall. Demons boiled from the pit of hell, tormenting the damned with spiked claws and sharp teeth, ripping flesh from bone as an uncaring god turned his back on them all.
A robed figure stood looking up at the painting, his stature tall and commanding, a hood over his face. He turned as Morgan and Jake burst in and the firelight flickered over his ravaged face.
14
The Black Anchorite drew back his hood. “Welcome to the citadel.”
His words barely registered as Morgan stared at his ruined visage. His skin was loose against his skull, a patchwork of different hues, as if each pinch of flesh came from a separate corpse in varying stages of decomposition. Some were finely stitched together with the skilled hand of a surgeon, perhaps Kelley herself, whereas others were sutured with broad dark thread that rose in lumps around open sores that wept pus and blood.
His breath wheezed in and out, almost a death rattle, as he held the edge of the fireplace with an arthritic clawed hand, seams of broken skin visible on the exposed flesh.
Zale moaned and as Morgan helped Jake lower him to the ground, everything finally clicked into place. The stolen reliquaries, the links with the biomedical company, the stitched skin. The Black Anchorite was sustained by grafted body parts — a Frankenstein of holy relics, powered by a dark religion.
Morgan remembered how the golem at the Gates of Hell had been enlivened by words of faith. Given the amount of power that religious relics were believed to hold, perhaps they could indeed sustain a body — but for how long?
The Black Anchorite coughed and flecks of yellow pus streaked with blood landed on the carpet in front of him. He licked his cracked lips with a thick tongue of mottled purple and, despite his ancient appearance, there was something predatory in his gaze.
He pointed down at Zale, the security guard now curled on the ground with his hands over his ears, still moaning softly, lost in a battle he couldn’t escape.
“You have brought me fresh harvest, for which I am grateful. His blood will aid the transplantation of the bones of the Magi.”
Morgan tried to raise her gun, but a miasma of smoke and despair rippled out of the battle corridor, surrounding them with mist. It weakened her and made the weapon seem too heavy. She leaned against a stone pillar as beside her, Jake dropped to his knees then crumpled to the floor, his face contorted with nightmares.
In the haze, the Black Anchorite moved faster than Morgan expected, or perhaps her experience of time shifted somehow. One minute he was by the fireplace and the next, he plucked the gun from her hand, his ruined face close to hers.
“You don’t need that here, Morgan Sierra, agent of ARKANE. But there is a way you can save your friends.”
Morgan felt no surprise at his words of recognition. She and Jake had spent many missions searching for relics, some of them currently resting in the vault under Trafalgar Square, some returned to their places of worship. It wasn’t surprising that the Black Anchorite knew of them. It was much more concerning that he had not been on their radar until now.
He threw the gun into the misty shadows and then held out his hand, the weeping sores and stitched pieces of flesh stretching as he waved more billowing smoke over Jake and Zale. Morgan could only watch helplessly, her strength gone, as they disappeared from view into the haze of bloody memory.
The Black Anchorite turned toward her and waved his hand again, the air shimmering around them as his face changed. The ravages of time dropped away and Morgan glimpsed a middle-aged knight with patrician features, his expression etched with a mixture of ambition and regret as he looked out across a war-ravaged landscape.
Smoke eddied around them once more and he was back to an abomination.
“The lines between the ages are blurred here,” the Black Anchorite wheezed. “You see me as I once was.”
“Who are you?” Morgan whispered.
The Black Anchorite sighed. “I was William de Tracy back then, cursed for doing the bidding of my king. After striking down the rebel Archbishop Thomas Becket with my fellow knights, we were exiled to Jerusalem to fight in the Crusader wars. For many years, I searched for a way back and then, in a ruined desert temple, I found the heart.”
He pulled open the front of his robe, exposing his chest. A blackened husk of an organ lay in the center of mottled skin with dark veins curling into what remained of his flesh like some parasitic creature from the depths.
“I have borne it for over eight hundred years and before it lived through me, there were other lifetimes.” The Black Anchorite stared into the smoke, as if gazing into another realm. “I see memories that are not mine. A temple in ancient Egypt as embalmers conjured dark magic into the organs of a king. A desert sacrifice where eternal life was given as a reward for the soul of a princess.” He shook his head. “But the past matters not, only the future.”
He walked slowly along the carpet back to the fireplace and Morgan felt compelled to follow him, the tendrils of smoke swirling about her, pushing her forward. She glanced back, but Jake was hidden, her partner smothered under the thick miasma. She could only hope he still breathed and could pull himself out of the nightmare visions before it was too late.
Demons from the painting of the End Times looked down upon them as the Black Anchorite reached out to stroke Morgan’s cheek. She shuddered as his rough, wet fingers touched her skin, but she didn’t have the strength to flinch away.
“I’ve read about you, Morgan, and all the agents of ARKANE. I have followed your missions with interest and sent my own forces after the relics you discovered. You know how to fight, but you’re not a soldier like the men with you. You’re curious. A seeker. You have a deep thirst for knowledge — and for experience. Time is your enemy.”
His words resonated deep within Morgan, a truth that few understood. The drive to learn new things pushed her into the labyrinth of ARKANE and the fragments of knowledge she gleaned along the way only heightened the exhilaration of their missions. Sometimes she could almost feel the gears spinning as her mind whirled faster than those around her, gathering insights that others missed.
It was hard to explain how perception emerged from experience, but the Black Anchorite understood. His hundreds of years of life gave him the wisdom she craved. His vast libraries of knowledge were testament to his continued desire to learn, but it was the generations of experience that made Morgan’s head spin with possibility.
The Black Anchorite pointed to his ruined face. “You see this broken flesh, but there were lifetimes of strength and virility when my body didn’t require the parts that sustain it now.” He shook his head. “But it’s not enough anymore. The heart requires a stronger body. Its power and memory must live on. So I ask you, seeker, do you want to live for hundreds of years? Do you want precious time to discover the secrets of the world?”
Morgan couldn’t speak, she could hardly breathe.
His words hung in the air like a beautiful flower tainted with poison and part of her wanted to grasp it with both hands and drink in the scent of promise. What could she do with so much time? It would be a dark gift indeed, but she did not have to use it as the Black Anchorite had done. She could pursue a different path, a better path.
“Come.” The Black Anchorite walked on through the smoke under an archway into what looked like a chapel. But as the haze shifted, Morgan saw ancient symbols etched into the stone walls — the Egyptian ankh, the Celtic knot, the ouroboros — all representing eternal life, sought after in every culture.
An obsidian altar stood at one end with a copper bowl on top, burning with a strange fire, adding to the smoke billowing around them with the scent of sandalwood. Next to the fire bowl, the relic of Thomas Becket and the bones of the Magi waited for their transplantation.
Before the altar, two stone slabs lay side by side engraved with the outline of human figures, each with a figure-of-eight infinity symbol in place of their hearts.
The Black Anchorite waved his hand toward one slab, and Morgan found herself longing to lie down upon it. She could rest there. It would cradle her, and the heaviness in her limbs would sink away into the stone.
The pull of dark promise encouraged her, and she climbed onto the slab, lying back with her head resting against the cool stone. Visions swirled around her, the places she could go and the experiences she could have in years ahead, turning the tiny chapel into an expansive future world.
“The relic comes with a promise — and a curse.” The Black Anchorite gazed down at Morgan and intoned, “From death comes life, but life is the price. You will have many glorious years, but life is indeed a price when it goes on for so long. My world passed away and I have long forgotten everyone I loved. I sustained myself with relics but the veil parts more each day and I long to step into darkness. Now you are here, my time is over.”
He sighed and clutched at his chest, stumbling a little as if the organ beat faster to punish his words. He ripped open the robe to expose the black heart, its surface oily with dark blood, the surrounding veins pulsing with life.
