The Heretic: Templar Chronicles Book 1 (6 page)

The driver in the lead van parked behind a small grove of trees to the left of the cemetery, shielding it from the manor house that served as the commandery’s main operations center. The other parked just behind the first. Eight figures emerged from the vehicles, all of them dressed in the same dark robes. Two reached back into the rear vehicle and dragged out a young woman, her hands bound behind her back and a gag in her mouth. The drugs they’d given to her made her docile, but also required that she be supported on either side in order to walk. A few of the men carried shovels. Two of them lugged large duffel bags over their shoulders while another led a young black Labrador on a leash. Logan was attired in a similar manner as the others, though his robe was made of finer materials and it had a number of Kabalistic symbols sewn into it in gold thread.

He listened for a moment to the sounds of combat drifting through the night air from the direction of the manor house and smiled in satisfaction. All was going according to plan.

He gave the signal, and the group moved out among the gravestones, their flashlights briefly illuminating the face of each marker before moving on to the next, obviously seeking one in particular. With eight of them looking, it took less than ten minutes.

While those with the shovels went to work on the grave, piling the dirt beside the headstone, two others began to lay out large circles made of salt from the supplies drawn out of the duffel bags, one circle around the grave itself and another several yards away on a bare patch of earth. Each circle was precisely nine feet in diameter, and both were left temporarily incomplete.

Logan stood to one side, watching. When things were ready he gave the command for the dog to be brought forward and placed inside the second circle, where it was laid on its side on the ground and its legs tied together. The drugs it had been given earlier kept the dog docile and quiet, despite the restraints.

The diggers reached the coffin. One of them climbed out of the open grave and helped the circle-makers erect a block and tackle set over it. The loose ends of the rope were thrown down to those below and secured around the coffin they had just unearthed. Five minutes later it was raised high enough to be dragged over the lip of the pit and settled on the ground beside it, well within the circumference of the salt circle. One man stepped forward and, with a small hammer and chisel, smashed the latches that held the black-lacquered lid closed.

Logan smiled with satisfaction.

It was time for the ritual to begin.

The woman was brought forward and deposited next to the casket, where one of the men knelt to tie her feet. Her drugged senses barely registered the change.

As the rest of the men stepped away from the casket and moved to stand behind the smaller circle several yards away, one of them took up a handful of salt and closed the circle that now surrounded the casket and the woman. He then rejoined the others, sealing the entire group inside a circle of their own.

The use of the circle as a protective barrier was as ancient as the practice of magick itself. Once activated with the appropriate incantation, the salt barrier would withstand even a direct attack by an inhabitant of the lower planes and should easily protect the Council members from the revenant the Necromancer intended to raise. While the circle around the coffin itself should keep the revenant safely trapped behind its barrier, redundancy was a tactic only ignored by the foolish when performing magick of this caliber, hence the additional circles around the participants themselves.

Logan used more of the salt to draw a series of Sumerian symbols around the inner circumference of the circle, symbols that a month ago he hadn’t known even existed. When he was finished, he used the small remaining portion of salt to close the circle behind him, sealing himself, his assistant, and the dog inside its protective barrier.

The assistant readied the rest of the equipment; set up a small folding table, covered it with a swath of fine silk, and arranged the bowls and the obsidian athame, or ritual knife, in the necessary sequence. The dog was next. It was tied down to the tabletop, its legs stretched in both directions, leaving its belly exposed. As the other man worked, the Necromancer considered the rite he was about to perform, a rite that, without the tutelage of the Other, he never would have been powerful enough to handle. Nor would he have had the aid of the men around him, men who had been seduced by his connection to the demonic and joined him in forming the Council of Nine. Yet the Other needed them as well, needed human servants to carry out those tasks that it was prevented from handling on its own, like invading the holy ground of a Templar commandery. It was a partnership made of a mutual desire and greed for power, one that Logan fully understood and encouraged. When it was all said and done, he would be that much more powerful, more capable of carrying out his own plans of conquest.

For him, power was the ultimate reward.

Now that he had it, he knew that he would do anything to keep it.

Anything.

He stepped over to the table. The assistant had finished with the necessary preparations, having added two golden bowls, an incense burner, and a variety of herbs to what was already on the table.

As his assistant set a heady combination of belladonna, mandrake, henbane, and opium burning in the incense dish, the rest of the Council began to chant. The chanting started softly at first, a low, sonorous drone, that gradually built in volume and timbre until it became a strange, high-pitched keening that picked at the nerves. The sound rose and fell, fell and rose, dancing along the wind’s edge like a bird of prey.

An electrical tension filled the air, similar to that felt before a summer storm, yet what was looming was far less benign than such a simple act of nature. A wind kicked up suddenly, sliding amongst the gravestones, hissing in sibilant whispers as it grew in strength, setting the ends of the Council members’ robes fluttering in its breeze.

When the song was at its height, the wind howling around him as if in counterpoint, Logan raised the obsidian knife high over his head.

With one sudden, downward swing, he slashed the canine’s throat.

Blood flowed, hot and wet in the night air.

The assistant stepped in with the smaller of the two bowls, catching the streaming liquid.

Logan used his knife again, this time on the dog’s exposed stomach, slashing it open from stem to stern, working quickly so that he could complete the ritual before the dog died. Setting the knife down on the table, he turned back and plunged his hands inside the still-warm carcass, drawing forth handfuls of entrails. These he smeared liberally about his face and neck, breathing in the thick scent of death and the coppery smell of freshly spilled blood, using the physical senses to activate his arcane ones, linking him with the realm of the dead.

With a snap, power suddenly flooded through his body, and he grinned at the sheer thrill of wielding such might.

He felt it coalesce in the air around him like a living, breathing creature, and with a sharp thrust of both his arms, he flung it outward to strike the exposed coffin.

Logan laughed aloud, heady with power.

*** ***

Templar Knights Stan Gibson and Neil Jones had been separated from their unit in the confusion of the surprise assault on the commandery and found themselves wandering on the outer periphery of the battle.

“What is that?”

Gibson turned his head and glanced toward where his partner was pointing. Across the lawn near the old cemetery, a bright glow of greenish-colored light could be seen playing across the grounds.

Curiosity got the better of them.

Moving carefully and staying in the trees as much as possible, the knights crossed the distance to the cemetery. They approached the gates slowly, using hand signals to inform each other of their intentions. Jones slipped through the gate first while Gibson covered him with the shotgun before following behind.

They could hear voices, chanting in a strange tongue, the sound rising and falling with the wind like some insane chorus, causing the hair on their arms and the backs of their necks to stand at attention.

Cautiously, they moved closer.

*** ***

Surprisingly, the spirit he was calling forth fought back with a power almost equal to his own.

Logan could feel the spirit resisting his call to return to its former body, fighting his commands to cross the barrier and answer his summons. Frustrated, the necromancer increased his efforts.

It quickly became a battle of wills, Logan’s arcane power pitted against the righteous nature and faith of the former Templar Knight, each side refusing to give in. Power spit and crackled inside each of the circles like hot grease on a grill, and the smell of burning ozone filled the air. The Council chanted, the Necromancer forced more of his power back down the link that connected him to the shade, and still the knight sought to avoid being called from his rest for so nefarious a purpose.

As a result, the energy began to spill over, no longer affecting just the target grave but those in the immediate vicinity as well, seeping down into the earth to affect coffins on all sides. Where the bodies inside them were too decayed to support their return, the indistinct forms of apparitions began to appear, hovering over their gravestones or rising slowly out of the ground. Their lack of physical form fueled both their hunger for life and their anger at the living. When mixed with the Necromancer’s potent magick, they became not ghosts but spectres, vile creatures with a desire and craving to bring harm to the living.

There were hundreds of them, and the cemetery grounds gave birth to more and more, swelling their ranks, as the Necromancer continued to pour more and more energy into the confrontation.

The Council ignored the presence of the spectres, knowing they’d be safe locked within their protective circle.

In counterpoint to the Council’s chanting, the ghosts took up an unearthly screeching of their own, warbling and weaving in syncopation.

At that moment, Gibson and Jones appeared from out of the darkness and walked into full view of the necromancer, the Council, and the spectres.

Nothing they had been taught could ever have prepared them for the sight.

*** ***

“Freeze!” Gibson cried out, as they stepped into view. The muzzle of his gun was locked on the tall figure off to his right, which seemed to be the source of the green light.

“Mary, Mother of God” Jones whispered.

Following his partner’s gaze, Gibson looked to his left.

The dead stared back at him.

A young man stood just a few feet away, one side of his head crushed like an aluminum can, his eyes bulging from the pressure. Nearby stood another man, the whiteness of his bones gleaming through his decomposing flesh. There were hundreds more of them; some nearly perfect, so that you wouldn’t have known they were dead if you’d passed them on the street, some so corrupt and decayed that they were barely recognizable as human.

Some they knew.

Around them hovered those phantoms that had returned from the other side only to find that their bodies could no longer contain them. These wraiths were less distinct, flashes of ghostly luminescence that flickered in and out of existence. Gibson could see that their faces were strangely distorted, as though they had been twisted and pulled in different directions at once. They stared out at him through dark, eyeless sockets, and from out of their mouths came a high pitched screaming.

For a moment, no one moved.

Then the dead came at them in a rush.

Gibson and Jones opened fire.

They might as well have been whistling “Dixie” for all the good it did them.

Gibson’s shotgun knocked several of the revenants off their feet with its sheer power, but those behind simply charged forward over the bodies of their brethren without hesitation even as those that had fallen struggled to get back to their feet. The spectres were immune to the officer’s bullets and quickly swarmed forward.

“Get back!” Jones yelled, and Gibson nodded his understanding, though he could barely hear him over the sound of the dead. The two men turned to run, only to find that the dead were on all sides.

The end came quickly.

Something spectral clawed at Gibson’s face, opening a large furrow in his cheek, while at the same time a sudden pain flared in his leg. He looked down to find a revenant with its rotting teeth clamped around his ankle. When he lowered the shotgun to blast the creature into obscurity, others rushed forward, grasping at him.

Gibson went down in a pile of bodies, his screams rising to join those of the dead.

Jones’s pistol went silent at that point as he used up the last of the ammunition he was carrying. He hurled it at the face of the first revenant that got close enough, then stuck out with his fists and feet, as the dead swarmed over him.

*** ***

The spectacle over, the Necromancer turned his attention back to his task. He could feel the spirit weakening, could feel the struggle shifting in his favor, so he reached down for his reserves and poured more energy into the fray.

And won the struggle.

A moment later the lid of the coffin was thrown violently open from the inside.

A hand, spotted with mold, was thrust up into the night air.

“Arise!” the Necromancer commanded, and the revenant inside the casket obeyed, forcing itself upright to stand on wobbly legs.

As it stepped clear of the casket, its gaze fell upon the woman lying bound and gagged at its feet.

With a cry of both anguish and hunger, the creature threw itself upon the offering and began to feed.

Logan laughed aloud at the sight, uncaring.

CHAPTER SEVEN

They were awoken before dawn with the report of another attack, this time in Ohio. Less than twenty minutes after being informed of this new development, Echo Team was airborne, headed for the site of the latest confrontation. Driven to the airport by the same novice who’d delivered the note, they found one of the Order’s Gulfstream IV aircraft waiting for them, courtesy of the Preceptor. Within moments of their arrival the group boarded the plane and took off.