Black Madonna

16

It wasn’t easy frying to find any sign of a place of access beneath the rubble. Most of the walls had been shattered, and heavy stone lay everywhere. There were bodies, badly mangled, and Geraint had to look away from them. To his surprise, Kristen seemed less squeamish, though she obviously disliked what she was seeing. Her previous life on the streets of Cape Town must have been far harsher than he’d ever fully comprehended.

“Ah, here,” Streak said at last. “Here are the steps leading down into the dungeons, master.”

The trapdoor had been shattered and rubble was piled up in the stairwell below. A haze of dust and vaporized plaster gave the depths the impression, indeed, of some macabre Victorian underground labyrinth or prison straight from a Fuseli drawing. The twin flashlights of Geraint and Streak lit the gloom. They showed the first of the bodies at the foot of the steps. Stepping carefully over it, Streak led them on.

They found him within moments, his perfect suit covered in dust, the man lay sprawled on the floor, groaning. There was no blood visible on him, but his left leg was crooked at a horribly unnatural angle and it was obviously broken. He looked up at them, pain distorting his face.

“You murderous bastards,” he spat at them.

“It wasn’t us, matey,” Streak said cheerfully. “It’s true we came to, well, force a way in. But we never fired a shot at the place. Sure, Juan here blew that truck full of Jesuits back down the bill. But it not for us, it would be them talking to you now. And somehow, I don’t think they’d be offering you the morphine shot I’m considering giving you for the pain. That leg looks terrible.”

The man looked at them with the eyes of a frightened animal, exhausted and in agony, but with an even greater pain than the simply physical; the painfulness of hope in an impossible situation.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“Sure we are,” Geraint said. “You know who we are, I’m sure of it-you didn’t even ask who we were when we met. You think we could create that magic that smashed your bathers? You think we’re that powerful?”

Gianfranco looked full of doubt for an instant, and then a spasm of pain from his shattered leg made him cry out.

“For pity’s sake give me that shot,” he begged.

“After you talk,” Streak said implacably.

“No.” Geraint was adamant. “Give him the shot.”

“Are you crazy? He’ll talk. With that pain, anyone would. We’ll get what we want!” Streak protested. Gianfranco could say nothing. His arms moved to clutch at his agonizing, smashed limb, and then drew back since the pain of clutching it would be even worse than the pain of just lying where he was.

“Tell me what I want to know and you get the shot,” Streak said urgently, kneeling over the man.

“Give him the shot, man, and do it now!”

“Frag off!”

“I’m paying you and you’ll do what I damned well tell you to!” Geraint yelled furiously, his face reddening in anger. He rarely lost his cool, but when he did the Celtic temperament was fearsome to behold. Streak stared back at him defiantly, and then gently put the patch on the man’s throat. Within seconds, the cocktail of opiate, endorphin, and anti-trauma colloids was surging through his jugular, into his heart, and spreading sweet relief into the tortured flesh of his leg. Geraint knelt down to see how he was.

“The Lady bless you,” the man said fervently. He gripped Geraint’s hand in his own and sighed in relief.

“Fragging bleeding heart,” Streak snarled. “We could have had what we wanted by now”

“It wasn’t us,” Geraint said. “It was NOJ. Those hands above the building-you know their sign.”

“I know it,” Gianfranco whispered, his head dulled with the drug. “I couldn’t be sure who you were with. You could have been in with them.”

“Why would you think that?” Geraint asked.

“You’re a member of the British government and you ask me that?”

It was true, Geraint thought. Even his own boss seemed to jump at their call. It wasn’t so surprising that Gianfranco should think that.

“We have to get him out of here,” he told Streak.

“There’s no rush” the elf said. “There aren’t going to be swarms of French police or army up here for a while. This is the back of beyond. Slot, there are even border bandits in this region. It’s virtually Sardinia up here. Ain’t that right, guys?”

“Sure is,” Juan said laconically, picking at his teeth with a match.

“Just do it,” Geraint said wearily. Streak looked resigned and flipped open the top of his Comm unit.

“Let’s get the ears up here,” he said. “It’ll be faster that way. He’s in no shape to be carried three flicks or more.”

“Who are you calling?” Geraint asked. “There’s no one left outside, only Xavier, and he’s no nearer the cars than we are.”

“No, but he’s got the remotes and you didn’t travel in his car” Streak grinned suddenly. Computer mapping, topology analyzers, autopilot, and his machine’ll be here in five minutes. We can put the sleepers on the roof rack until we get back to ours.”

“Like I say then, just do it,” Geraint said. Though it was still not yet midnight, his body said it was five in the morning after a very, very bad day.

The car turned up, gliding driverless up the hill, as swiftly as Streak said it would. As they shambled out toward it, Geraint’s eye was caught by a flash of color among the blackness of shattered stone under the lightless sky.

Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered, staring down at the statue. Incredibly, it had somehow survived among the ruins of the conservatory. Knocked from its pedestal by the force of the blasts that had demolished the building, it seemed remarkably pristine and unmarked. The paintwork was oddly gaudy, and it looked like a cheap Curio sold in those shops that vend plastic icons and bottles of Lourdes water to the faithful and those bereft of intelligence or aesthetic discernment.

“That’s the very figure. lust as we saw her.”

He remembered the spirit who’d invaded his flat and delivered the warning to them. Lying at his feet was a replica of that figure, staring back at him as if defying the might and brutality of all those who had destroyed her shrine.

“Joan of Arc.”

He almost crossed himself. He felt somehow compelled to make an apology to her, a sign of appeasement, but he stopped himself because he knew it was wrong. Not wrong to make an apology, but wrong to make the sign of the cross.

He didn’t understand that, and he knew it mattered; and when he turned away, he was troubled by it. But Streak was trying to squeeze everyone into the car, and he had to walk away and involve himself with that.

But he did not forget it.

They decided to risk staying in Clermont-Ferrand for the night, not least because they didn’t want their unconscious and injured to have to make the trip to Toulouse at this hour, and arriving in a major city in the shape they were in would surely attract attention. The risk was that those who’d raided the chapel-or their companions-might come looking for those who’d defeated them, and Clermont was too close for comfort.

“We can’t move this guy,” Streak said. “We probably shouldn’t move Michael either, not with a bump to the head; and I always get uncomfortable around mages who get drained. They always tell me not to frag around with them. I don’t like staying here, but I reckon we have to. Until Michael comes around, at the very least.”

Geraint left the elf to organize matters here and went to tend to Gianfranco. A second painkilling shot had left the man dazed and confused, but it was obvious he needed serious medical help. He would be permanently crippled, or even die, if he didn’t get expert medical help shortly.

“Gianfranco, we’re going to get you to a hospital,” he said quietly to the Italian. The man nodded and clutched Geraint’s hand again to express his thanks.

“But look, you owe us, really you do. You would have been killed like the others if we hadn’t turned up here tonight. And we really only wanted to talk peaceably. You turned us away.”

The man said nothing for a few seconds, and then looked up in absolute torment

“I cannot talk,” he said wretchedly. “You don’t understand”

“I understand quite a lot. I understand that you had me tracked and sent a spirit to warn me off, smashing its way into my own home. Just for starters.”

“We didn’t harm anyone,” the man protested. “You killed Serrault, our mage.”

“That was an accident,” Geraint said, aware that the man had a fair point. “Serrin says he was heavily drained from ritual magic and shock killed him.”

It wasn’t true, but he had to lie. Time was short.

“We saved your skin. You can give us something.”

The man said nothing. Geraint thought of another tack and guessed that this time, he just might have some luck.

“And look, Gianfranco, Streak would have made you talk before the shot. And you would have talked. Yes, you would.”

The other man’s eyes met his and confirmed the truth. “So, you owe me twice over. The Inquisition came after us. Kidnapped two of us, drugged them and took blood for ritual magic, threatened to kill us. We need to know why. They killed your people, and they’d have killed us too. We want to know how to stop them when they try again. It’s not an unreasonable thing to ask.”

The man groaned again, the last residues of pain numbed by doses of the drugs that were weakening his resistance. Geraint hoped they weren’t also making him unable to explain himself.

“I’m not a senior figure,” he pleaded in a cracked voice. “Them is much I don’t know.”

“The book. You sent the book,” Geraint guessed. “Why?”

“As a message.”

“How was it a message?”

“It was a clue. To the nature and location of the man Seratini was seeking. The one you seek,” Gianfranco managed to say.

“How was it a clue? I don’t understand,” Geraint said plaintively.

“The topic. Water…” Gianfranco’s eyes were beginning to flutter now, the drugs obviously taking over his mind and senses.

“Who is he, Gianfranco? I have to know” Geraint pleaded.

For a second, the man’s vision cleared and a mixture of base cunning and intelligence shone out at the Welshman.

“There is one statue left in the city,” he grinned, and his grip of Geraint’s wrist relaxed as he fell into a narcotic slumber.

“Damn,” Geraint cursed. He got back to his feet and turned away. The scent of coffee greeted his senses. It wasn’t his newly discovered favorite, but at this time of night it smelled awfully good.

“If you want to get him to a hospital now, we’ve got to leave at once,” Streak said. “We go to Toulouse, dump him at the airport, ring security from the plane, take off and get home. We can’t risk anything else. If I drive him to Toulouse they’ll ID him, get a trace to Rennes-le-Chateau, and then the police will descend on Clermont.”

“Actually, given what’s happened up there they’ll be doing that anyway,” Geraint said. “Think about it. There’s a village up there. Someone must have noticed that the place has been flattened by now, not to mention all that magic lighting up the night sky and a few score corpses littering the farmlands.”

Streak’s eyes widened. “Frag me! I never thought of that. These bloody French villagers. What a damned nuisance they are!”

He was absolutely serious. Geraint almost doubled up in laughter, and the elf saw the funny side and laughed himself.

“Well, then, we’ll have to pack up and move out whether we like it or not,” he said briskly. “Come on, people, time to book. Back to Blighty. Job done. Game over.”

The other samurai were already packed and ready to leave. Juan cheerfully waved the credstick Geraint had. given him.

“A pleasure,” he said. “Work for you any time, Your Lordship. You can always trust a British aristo, I say.”

“That last fragger stuffed us,” Xavier growled.

Juan shrugged. “Yeah and look what we did to his boyfriend.”

Geraint started checking through his mental files for who they might be referring to, then decided he really didn’t want to know. The pair of samurai left, with one last goodbye and a complicated handshake with Streak that seemed to portray torture as some kind of friendship ritual. At least, it would have been torture if normal sinew and muscle had been involved,

“We’re ready.” Kristen said simply. Almost unseen, she’d packed everything they had, even weaponry, into their bags. Geraint had to smile. A clear head in a crisis was a valuable quality to have in a team member.

He looked doubtfully at the car, and then at Streak. “We can fit three recumbent people into that little thing?”

“Just. However, I hope you two are good friends. Either you’re going to have to sit on his lap, missy. or you go in the boot.” The elf avoided the playful kick the girl aimed at him. “No, honestly, I mean it.”

Geraint got to the doorway of the bedroom just in time, or he’d never have known what happened. Hovering above the man on the bed was a ghastly imp-like form, a wrinkled creature of spirit and yet tangible, almost earthy. It drew a long pin from which some corrosive liquid dripped and drove it through Gianfranco’s ribcage and into his heart.

The imp turned, looked at him, spat, and disappeared. There was a smack as air rushed to fill the gap it had left.

To the Weishman’s utter horror, Gianfranco suddenly jerked into an upright position on the bed. His eyes bulged in their sockets, and his tongue protruded from his mouth, blackened and swollen. Flecks of gray foam sputtered on his lips, and his hands clutched at midair in a final spasm of agony.

Then he screamed.

Clermont-Ferrand is in strange territory. Southwestern France has more than its fair share of tales of lycanthropes, hauntings, malign spirits, and other unseen horrors of the night. Grisly deaths don’t really cut it, not on their own. It needs more than that to make tongues wag in this part of the world.

They say in Clermont, and in villages around it, that you could have beard the scream five kilometers away, and people who live that far out confirm it.

Geraint reeled back into the living room, his head full of nightmare, guts churning, heart beating like a hammer on an anvil in Vulcan’s realm. For a moment, he actually wondered if this was what it was like to die of shock. A stunned elf was looking at him, white-faced, next to him a girl whose face mirrored the expression, the two of them clutching each other for support. They just managed to keep each other from falling over.

When they began to calm down, the three of them tottered to the doorway and opened it to get the cold, fresh night air into their lungs.

“Let’s get the frag out of here,” Streak croaked. “I don’t want to know what happened, man. I just don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. I don’t ever want to know.”

He was barely coherent, but at least he could speak, which was more than the others could. And, somehow, they had to get two unconscious bodies into a car and drive away.

The third body they no longer had to worry about.