The Key

73

Athanasius heard Brother Gardener before he saw him.

The sound of his low lamenting echoed along the hushed corridor leading down to the isolated caves of the hospital. There was something about the noise that made him want to cover his ears and flee, as if the moans of some poor, damned soul had leaked out of hell. It was a sound of torment and madness and it drilled into the most primal part of his brain where his deepest fears lived.

He reached the corridor where the wards and isolation rooms were located and found the right room simply by following the sound. Then he took a breath, swallowed drily and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

The first thing he saw was the ghostly figure of an Apothecaria standing vigil. Beyond him, the naked figure of Brother Gardener lay writhing on a bed. He had been stripped to his loincloth and bound to the metal frame by thick canvas straps the colour of bleached bone stained brown by something wet and oozing. His skin bubbled with boils and there were deep gouges and angry welts where he had clawed at them with such violence that it looked as though he’d been attacked by an animal. Even now his fists clenched and unclenched as if craving to scratch the terrible itch that drew the awful lament from his foam-flecked mouth.

The Apothecaria turned as Athanasius made to enter and held up a surgically gloved hand to stop him from coming further. As Athanasius withdrew to the corridor, he stepped forward to join him, closing the door and shutting out the worst of the noise. Only then did he remove his mask. It was Brother Simenon, one of the more senior of the medical practitioners. He pushed past without saying a word and started walking up the corridor.

‘What ails him?’ Athanasius asked, falling in step behind him.

‘We don’t know. At first I thought it might be the same thing that struck down the Sancti, but that was more like haemorrhagic fever. This is something different entirely. We’ve taken blood and samples of the discharged fluid from the pustules, but so far none of the tests have proved positive for any known diseases. There are symptomatic similarities with smallpox, which is why we’ve brought him here to the isolation wards, but it’s not an exact match and I personally don’t think that’s what it is. There are also indicators of bubonic plague, but these diseases are extinct or extremely rare, so it’s unclear how he could possibly have contracted either.’

‘He was clearing the garden,’ Athanasius said, remembering the last time he had seen him.

‘Yes, the tree blight. I had thought of that, and it’s the most likely cause. There are some forms of fungus and mould spores that can rapidly attack the human immune and respiratory system. These can provoke a massive allergic reaction that produces mycotoxins, or they cause mycosis, which is effectively a gross fungal infection. Because of the skin condition, I suspect what we have here is mycosis, though I’ve never heard of anything that can bring it on so rapidly. We’re hoping we can find an example of the blight and test its toxicity, but as I understand the gardeners were ordered to burn all evidence of it.’

Athanasius nodded, thinking of the black infected smoke rising up into the clear air. ‘What about the other gardeners?’

Simenon stopped by another large door. ‘That’s what I’m most concerned about.’ He opened the door on to the largest ward in the hospital complex.

The room was narrow and vaulted, like a large cellar, with four beds lined up on each opposing wall — eight in total. Each bed contained a monk. They looked up in unison as the door opened and Athanasius saw the collective fear in their eyes. It was the entire garden detail, brought here under quarantine. Three more Apothecaria were in attendance, surgical masks covering their faces and blue nitrile gloves on their hands as they interviewed each monk in turn, looking for some early-warning symptom as well as taking numerous blood samples.

‘We thought it best to isolate anyone who came into direct contact with the tree blight, until we can rule it out as the cause of whatever has infected Brother Gardener.’ The wailing coming from down the corridor rose again, as if he had responded to the mention of his name. Everyone in the ward heard it.

One of the youngest monks, lying in a bed closest to the door, started weeping openly. He sank into the hospital sheets like a child hiding from the dark and stared through the open door towards the corridor as if the thing making the sound was coming for him next.

Simenon pulled the door closed and hurried back up the corridor, reaching into his pocket for a syringe and some sedative.

‘And if it is the tree blight,’ Athanasius asked, ‘how soon before they start showing the same symptoms?’

‘Brother Gardener was the first to come in contact with it and symptoms manifested themselves in less than twenty-four hours. So if the blight is the cause, and any of the garden detail have been similarly infected, then we will know soon enough.’

Simenon fixed the face mask back in place as he arrived outside the door. ‘My prediction is that we will know within the next couple of hours. If the others are clear, we can literally breathe more easily and do what we can for Brother Gardener. If they have it, then what we have already done here will hopefully be enough to contain the spread. But there is a third potential outcome. If this thing proves to be something more virulent and contagious, some airborne pathogen that passes from host to host merely by proximity, then all of us in the Citadel, every last one of us, has already been exposed. We were all there, last night in the cathedral cave, when Brother Gardener dragged in the first infected branch and dropped it at the altar.’

Athanasius pictured the branch breaking as it hit the stone floor, the dry dust, caught in the light, rising from the crumbling wood like a wisp of smoke.

‘Tell me,’ Simenon asked, ‘you were in the garden at the start of the clear-up operation. How many trees were infected? Was it just one or two? Was it confined to certain areas or certain types of trees?’

Athanasius shook his head gravely.

‘It was everywhere,’ he said, realizing the dark implication of Simenon’s careful question. ‘Almost every tree had been affected.’