The Tower (39 page)

‘Good,’ Cooper said. ‘Call me again when you’re clear. I have news. God has smiled on our mission once more.’ Carrie eased the station wagon to a halt then cut the engine. ‘Check your emails. I have sent you instructions of where you should go next. I just found out where Dr Kinderman is.’

Neither Athanasius nor Father Thomas had seen Father Malachi since he had opposed their plans to help the infected of Ruin. Since then Malachi had removed himself and the rest of his guild entirely behind locked doors. There were now two distinct societies within the mountain, those fighting the blight and caring for those who had it, and the black cloaks in the library.

They knew they were still there only because the supplies that were delivered weekly to the airlock were always collected, and because whenever one of the black cloaks became infected they were left outside the door, tied to a board to stop them from tearing themselves to pieces, their howls serving as an alarm to bring someone running. Athanasius found this inhuman and un-Christian and it made him furious whenever he thought of it. But now was not the time to pick that particular fight. They were here because they needed Malachi’s help.

He had agreed to talk with them at Vespers and the bell rang now, echoing six times through the tunnels of the mountain, showing that the appointed hour had arrived.

‘Do you think he’ll come?’ Thomas whispered, studying the still darkness of the library through the window of the airlock.

‘He’ll come,’ Athanasius replied. ‘I dropped hints in my note that we had acquired a document that may have some bearing on our current plight. There’s no way he could resist taking a look at something like that. However I’m sure he will first make us wait.’

Athanasius was right. They stood there for nearly ten minutes before a light finally appeared in the distant dark, flickering as it moved towards them.

‘There’s something wrong with the lights,’ Thomas whispered.

Athanasius peered at the still distant figure and realized he was right. Instead of the usual follow light, Malachi’s journey towards them was illuminated solely by a candle lamp. He held a hand in front to shield it and walked slowly to stop the flame from snuffing out. Thomas and Athanasius watched his steady progress, realizing as he drew nearer that the month of isolation inside the library had not been kind to Malachi. His pale skin, pallid and translucent from a near lifetime spent out of the sun, was flaking around his nose and mouth and his eyes were circled with red as though he had hardly slept.

‘Thank you for agreeing to speak with us,’ Athanasius said the moment Malachi stopped the other side of the locked door, huffing and perspiring from his long walk. ‘Is there some problem with the lighting?’

‘No,’ Malachi replied. ‘I have simply turned it off. Those of us who still cling to the sanctity of the old ways have agreed to shun the corrupting influence of modernity, in all its forms.’

Athanasius nodded as if this was a perfectly reasonable response. ‘And how are things with you and the others of your guild?’ he asked, before Thomas could lose his temper.

‘We are dying, thank you – slowly but steadily.’

Yes
– Athanasius thought –
we hear them screaming each time you abandon them, and then burn them for you once they are dead.

‘What about you,’ Malachi countered, ‘did your little coup achieve anything? Has the bringing of civilians into the Citadel and trampling on thousands of years of venerated tradition been rewarded with the discovery of a miracle cure?’

‘Not yet – but we are making progress.’

Malachi’s eyes brightened. ‘Really? What sort of progress?’

‘One of the infected has been successfully nursed back from the brink of death, a civilian. He seems to have developed a form of natural immunity to the disease. The doctors are now working to try and extract a vaccine from his blood.’

‘Really – a vaccine? And is he fully recovered, this – civilian?’ He said this last word as he might utter the word ‘snake’.

‘Not fully recovered, he is improving but still weak. He has been removed to the Abbot’s private quarters to rest and allow the doctors to conduct further tests. It is a vital period in their search for a vaccine, they must try to understand the reason for his recovery. At the same time, in our own way, we too are desperately trying to understand the blight better. I mentioned in my note that a certain document has come into our possession, a prophecy that was originally carved on a stone long ago.’

‘Yes, do you have it with you?’

‘Not exactly. We have a facsimile of it. A detailed photograph showing both sides of the stone.’

Malachi’s eyes grew larger behind the pebbles of his glasses. ‘Show it to me.’

‘I was hoping you might allow us into the library, so we can study it together and utilize the huge wealth of resources and reference material to try and decipher its meaning.’

The magnified eyes clouded with suspicion and flitted between the two of them as if he suspected some kind of trap. ‘Why don’t you give the document to me and I will see what I can make of it? You know I am familiar with all the ancient languages collected here. I have studied them and decoded many. If this stone is written in any of these then I will be able to recognize and translate it without need for further study or research. I might be able to tell you what it says right now – if you show it to me.’

Father Thomas and Athanasius exchanged a glance. They had expected this and, though neither of them liked it, they had little choice but to agree. Time was too pressing.

‘If we show it to you, you must share what you see in it.’

‘Of course.’

‘Whatever it contains affects us all.’

‘Indeed.’ Malachi was fidgety, the candle shaking in his hand with anticipation.

Thomas opened his jacket where the laptop was secreted. He opened it and held the screen towards Malachi. Cold blue light lit up the librarian’s face, turning it into a grotesque, glowing mask that appeared to float beyond the window in the door, the eyes pecking information from the screen like hungry birds. ‘It’s Malan,’ he said, studying the first image.

‘That’s what we thought,’ Athanasius replied, sensing Malachi’s deliberate evasion but choosing not to challenge him on it. ‘What about the second image?’

Malachi’s eyes flitted across the screen but he said nothing. Thomas closed the laptop abruptly, prompting Malachi to look up as though he had been slapped.

‘You promised to share your thoughts. If you do not honour your side of the bargain then we will not honour ours.’

‘Of course, my apologies, I was just trying to – to get a sense of it. It’s written in two different languages – three if you consider the constellations might also be telling part of the story.’ Athanasius nodded, he had not considered this, but it made sense. The proto-cuneiform section he had been able to partly understand was linked by a line as well as by meaning to the extra star marked in the constellation of Taurus. ‘Can you decipher any of it?’

‘I’m sure I can – but I will need to see it again and study it a little longer.’

Athanasius paused. Malachi was a slippery, self-interested character at the best of times. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but the moment I think you are holding something back from us, we shut it again and walk away. Understood?’

Malachi nodded and attempted a smile that looked monstrous in the wavering light of his candle. Thomas opened the laptop again and turned it to face the window in the door. Malachi’s eyes crawled over it hungrily. ‘It’s very old, reminiscent of proto-elemaic but not the same. There is a symbol here for the Citadel, also one for death and another that refers to disease or a plague …’

Athanasius glanced at Father Thomas. They had been right. The stone did predict what was happening here. ‘What else?’

Malachi shook his head. ‘It is hard to render it into a formal sentence. It is impressionistic rather than narrative.’ His eyes continued to scan the symbols. ‘Maybe if you leave it with me I can cross reference it with some of the other elemite documents in the library from the same period and arrive at a clearer meaning.’

‘No. If we need to use other resource material to decode it then you must let us into the library so we can work on it together.’ Malachi didn’t respond, his hungry eyes wide and unblinking as they slipped down the text. He reached the bottom and visibly flinched as if he had been struck.

‘What is it?’

‘The man who came back from the dead, did he ride here on a horse? Did he ride out of the wilderness?’

Athanasius recalled conversations he’d had with Gabriel about his long journey back to the Citadel. ‘Yes.’

‘And what is this man’s name?’

Athanasius frowned. ‘His name is Gabriel. Now tell us what it says on the stone.’

Malachi shook his head. ‘It’s … I’m not sure … I’ll need to –’ He started to back away, eyes wide and fixed on the laptop.

‘Tell us what it says.’

He looked up at them, his eyes full of fear. ‘I need to check some things,’ he said, still backing away. ‘I need to be sure, before I –’

‘Malachi!’ Thomas closed the laptop, but all it did was release Malachi from the spell of it. He turned and started moving away.

‘MALACHI!’ Athanasius called after him. But it was too late, he was already gone, almost running into the solid blackness until his flickering candle disappeared entirely.

Corporal Williamson and his crew made impressively short work of the gates. They had found some chains and dragged them to their truck outside the fence. The chains were fixed by one end to the tow bar and the other to the main support posts while everyone else dug away at the foundations with shovels, picks and whatever else they could swing. When
Williamson figured they’d dug far enough he fired up the engine and eased it over to where the earth fell away and used gravity and the weight of the truck to rock the posts clean out of the ground. Then they got to work on the rest.

Williamson took command, tasking some of his men to decommission the cannons up in the towers and the rest he split into teams to coordinate the demolition effort. Using a series of interpreters relaying Williamson’s orders they got everybody working together, some digging at the post foundations, others cutting the wire and rolling it into bundles. Liv had been stationed at one of the posts and was snipping away at the ties with an industrial-sized set of wire cutters. She felt deep satisfaction at how quickly the different groups had gelled into one unit, everyone working together, everyone suffused with a sense of urgency by the column of dust growing steadily in the east, marking the approach of the newcomers.

‘Those soldiers, they’re very good at this,’ she remarked to Tariq who was hacking away with a pickaxe at the concrete foot of the post she was working at.

He leaned on the axe handle and wiped the sweat from his face. ‘They should be,’ he said, ‘they’re USACE – United States Army Corps of Engineers. These guys are used to taking things down and building them up again. It’s what they’re trained for.’

Liv frowned as a thought began to form in her head. ‘Don’t you think it’s odd that exactly the right people seem to arrive here just when they’re needed? When the water was poisoned some water experts turned up out of nowhere with all the right equipment to test it. Then these guys show up just when the need to dismantle this place suggests itself.’

‘The goat herders too,’ Tariq nodded over at the nomads who were now quite happily being ordered about by the soldiers.

‘How do they fit in?’

‘We have plenty of dried food but hardly anything fresh. In the desert the goat is the best source of fresh milk and meat. Those goats are as important for the sustainability of this place as the water.’ He frowned as something occurred to him. ‘What about Azra’iel and his riders, how do they fit into your theory?’

Liv contemplated this for a moment then shook her head. ‘They were not drawn here by the call of this place like the rest, they were led here by Malik. They shouldn’t have been here. And they died.’

Tariq turned back to the column of dust in the east, close enough now to make out three white trucks at the base of it, their outlines shimmering and breaking up in the heat haze. ‘So who is coming now?’ he asked, more to himself than anyone else. ‘What do we need here that we haven’t got already?’

Liv followed his gaze. ‘Whoever it is they will be met with a welcome and not a closed gate,’ she said.

She continued to watch the shimmering vehicles drawing closer, emerging from the liquid air until they crunched to a halt in a cloud of fine dust. The driver’s door of the lead vehicle opened and a man got out. He was tall and olive-skinned, but not Arabic looking. Gentle eyes surveyed the ring of welcoming faces then looked past them through the ruins of the gate to the compound beyond and the fountain of water. ‘What is this place?’ he asked in accented English that placed him as Italian or maybe Spanish.

Liv stepped forward, fixing a smile on her face ‘We’re not quite sure what this place is really, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, but there’s plenty of room and plenty of water and you’re very welcome to stay.’

More doors opened and others stepped out into the desert, a mixture of Arabic, European, mature and young, six of them in all, two to a vehicle. Then Liv spotted something on one of their sleeves, a logo that looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place. ‘What is it that you all do?’ she asked.

The driver of the lead vehicle turned his gentle eyes on her and smiled. ‘We work for Médecins Sans Frontières,’ he said. ‘We’re doctors.’