The Lost Crown of the Knights Templar

33 Hell Hath No Fury

Nina’s skin chafed off where the ropes cut into her. The men of the Militum were not foolish enough to use thick rope on such a small woman, so the thinner cord played hell on her joints. She expected the heat to kill her soon, long before anything else would, but she was in for a level of suffering she had not known before (save for the time she was exsanguinated for an immortality elixir in England).

“Ayer, please!” she cried, but she could not hear him anymore, nor could she effectively discern which hooded figure he was. There were only six men present, but Nina felt as if she was at the mercy of an entire army of beasts. They put her down on the floor, their expressionless masks leering down at her, while up above their heads the high ceiling gathered up a cloud of smoke before the four chimneys allowed it passage out.

“Oh sweet Jesus,” she sobbed, making sure to revel in the coolness of the cement under her before being burned to death. One of the men nodded at the others. Suddenly their voices filled the massive hall, as it did that night when they sent off their dead brothers. But this was a different aria, a sacrificial hymn just for Nina. The words in Latin and ancient Greek reverberated in the hollow space around them as the bellow of the goat’s head fire challenged the power of their sound. Had it not been a song for a slow death, Nina would have thought it rather beautiful.

“Ayer, please, think again!” she screamed. An iron clap ensued as the cogs of a giant steel wheel began to grind. “Oh my God!” she hollered hopelessly to their beautiful canto that serenaded her into a hellish oblivion. She recognized the terrible sound of grinding metal she’d heard that first night. Now she knew what it was, and what it was for.

Mercifully, one of the men cut loose the joining rope behind her, separating her wrists and ankles so that she could hang only by her ankles. Her back stretched out in relief as her feet were hoisted up, painfully dragging her upward until her body was hanging upside down, free of the floor. Nina yelped relentlessly in pain, hoping to lose her mind before the real torture began.

As she dangled upside down in the sweltering heat that prompted her eyes to water, she barely managed to see. But what Nina ultimately saw made her wish that her eyeballs would pop first. Opposite the abhorrent giant sigil of Baphomet that she was already acquainted with, another icon was present. It was horrific. Thankfully the hoisting motion twirled her unevenly spread bodyweight as she moved, and she slowly spun the other way to face the burning sigil instead.

I never thought I would prefer to see this! she thought. My God, to know that this ugly thing is the last thing I will see on earth…

The hydraulics ceased with a jolt and Nina’s suspended body rocked uncontrollably in mid-air over the six congregated below, still singing in layers of harmony and melody. Her screams sounded like soprano compliments to their hymns, a choir arrangement that would bless any demonic ear with its potency.

Under the strain of the jerking motion her injured ankle had dislocated, evoking even more shrieks from her. A dead sensation crossed her lips as the blisters began to form. Her temperature was rising already. Slowly her body started to turn back to the hideous image she had tried to avoid, but with her shaking it was bound to happen.

Nina stopped screaming. Shock took hold of her as the heat and pain played second fiddle to a wave of excruciating headaches. They were born from her inverted position, the blood in her head agitated by the searing heat around her. But in her docile state of trauma, Nina stared at the terrible vision on the other side of the hall.

The mummified body of a decapitated woman sat on a throne of crude iron and steel, the rivets rusted into the metal where it fixed the body to the throne. It reminded Nina of a locomotive engine, as if the mummy were consumed by the fixtures, deteriorated by weather and wear. In the leathery skin between her breasts was a symbol, but decay had distorted it beyond recognition.

“Oh Christ!” she shouted in the din of the voices and fire, when she realized that it was an idol representing Baphomet’s well-known image. “That is where I am going to be put? Holy Mother of…”

The singing stopped abruptly with the tap of a staff by the leader. Nina arched her neck to look down at them. “It’s not a staff,” she muttered to herself, panting wildly as her heart threatened to explode in her chest. “It is a scythe.” Her eyes bulged under the pressure of the worsening migraines but she wanted to see where the blade went. The head of the idol was missing, and if her body had to take its place, she had to be beheaded!

She looked at the seated atrocity. “That is where the Head goes!” she whispered in astonishment. “They replace the head of the woman they sacrifice with the Crown of the Templars… the mechanical Head made by Pope Sylvester!”

Nina could not take anymore. The blood had gone to her head, inducing an insuperable coma she could not fight. She could hear the sharp, serrated blade sing as it came for her throat, but her mind kept going to sleep. “N-no-oo,” she slurred.

At once all hell broke loose in the gargantuan chamber under her. She tried to open her eyes, but only her ear could report on the ensuing chaos when a group of men stormed inside with the thunder of semi-automatic weapons.

Before Ayer could move, his hood was ripped back. The steel kiss of a Beretta barrel advised him not to try anything. A rough hand tore his mask off. Before him stood Sam Cleave, looking like he was tapped of patience and mercy. “Nice to meet you in the flesh, Ayer,” he said, following up with a devastating punch that broke Ayer’s nose.

“Sam, we can’t locate the citadel. We’ve been to over thirty-eight buildings that look right, but they all turn out to be museums, places of prayer, or ruins,” Purdue sighed on the transmission. “Did you manage to get Nina?”

“Aye. Got walloped off my feet when she woke up and saw me. Long story. But she is with Dr. Hooper now,” Sam informed him. “He was on a short holiday with family here, would you believe?”

“So you made a deal with the Militum?” Purdue asked. Sam looked up at Ayer, Gille and the two other survivors tied to chairs opposite him at the kitchen table of their compound in Cork. “Not quite. They’re down to four members at an old industrial plant near the local Irish Hellfire Club, where they keep their goats.”

The armed men Sam had borrowed from the Brigade Apostate chuckled at his mockery of the idol. “No sign of Toshana?” Sam asked Purdue.

A hard sigh came over the speaker. “It feels like I am never going to get back at her for what she did. Thanks for taking that goddamned contract with you. I don’t want her to invoke any rights from that thing while we are trying to apprehend her.”

“Invoke is the right term. Steer clear of her charms, Purdue,” Sam advised, aware of the futility of his suggestion. “Just be careful.”

“We’re okay. I have five men, all they could spare, but they are armed and ready to breach the Black Sun’s citadel,” he said, but paused before finishing his sentence with a weak, “if we ever find the bloody place.”

Ayer sat up, as did his father in the chair at his side. They looked at one another.

“Mr. Cleave, we know what you are looking for,” Ayer declared excitedly. One of the Brigade’s men approached Ayer to shut him up with the butt of a gun, but Sam stopped him.

“What do you know? Purdue, hang on a second,” Sam asked the beaten up leader.

“The Order of the Black Sun operates sometimes from a citadel in Medina,” he cried.

“We know, old boy,” Purdue said over the speaker.

“But it is not theirs. It belongs to an affiliate of theirs,” he related, “some German nobleman called, I think, Geiger?”

Purdue could be heard catching his breath on the speaker. “I know that name. Why do I know that name? Wait, is it Geier, perhaps?”

“That is the name, oui!” Ayer affirmed. “It is marked in what looks like Hebrew lettering, but it is not Hebrew,” he revealed, “it is a name, disguised in the script. All you have to do is read it in plain language.”

Sam frowned, shifting in his chair to face Ayer. “What name?”

Ayer gave a smug chuckle. “Take me with and I’ll show you. Otherwise you will just kill us before you go.”

“Déjà vu,” Sam told Purdue. “Same lines, different villains.” Sam sneered at Ayer across the table.

“We are not villains,” Ayer’s father remarked.

“You were about to kill someone very fucking close to me in cold blood, you son of a bitch!” Sam growled.

“And if you did not know her? Would we be villains? You are the villain, Cleave!” the old Templar spat angrily. His son had to whisper for him to calm down, but the generally agreeable man refused to back down this time. “You are the villain. When we finally caught that snake Toshana, you sided with her! You killed my…” he broke down, still insisting on finishing his story, “…my other son to save that filthy, evil woman! You are the villain, Cleave! My youngest son is dead. His brothers-in-arms, good men, are all dead because you killed them and you killed them… for her? For her!”

“Come on, Papa,” Ayer consoled. Being tied up, he could do little to soothe his father’s pain. “Calm down. We’ll get her back.” He looked at Cleave with hate burning in his eyes. “Even if it kills me, I’ll avenge my brothers. Crown — or no Crown.”

Sam could not argue that he could also be someone’s boogeyman, someone’s villain, a killer of sons, of husbands and fathers, a maker of widows. The old man’s sobs hit Sam like a Mack truck, but he dared not show it. A lump grew in his throat. How had he never seen this? How did it never occur to him that even the bad guys in the story were sometimes victims of other bad guys who think they are good guys?

Sam got up and stormed out, calling back to his men, “I’m going to check on Nina.”

He was so upset that he had forgotten about Purdue waiting on the line. Purdue finally said, “Alright, lads. We’ll wait for you to get here. I am sending one of my Irish squads to collect you and fly you to Medina within the next four hours. Is that right for you?”

“Yes, Monsieur,” Ayer responded. “From our side, you will have four allies.”

“Thank you,” Purdue said. “Over and out.”

“Nina appeared from the hallway, having heard it all. She could barely walk, but Dr. Hooper had put a brace on her ankle to stabilize the fracture so she could move around. Wrapped in a blanket, she shuffled around the doorway to look the Militum survivor in the eye. While the old man was still sobbing silently, the others regarded her without a flinch.

“Hey! Hey!” Sam cried out, coming back from her room when he had found her absent. He put his arm around her, protectively. “Don’t come in here.”

But Nina said nothing. Her head was pounding like a hammer on an anvil and her skin was riddled with little blisters, making her ache under the blanket’s weight and fibers. When she’d awoke, after she’d slapped Sam for abandoning her to near certain death, he’d told her everything that had happened in Jerusalem. With bloodshot, swollen eyes, she looked at the maniacs who strung her up like a pig for the slaughter. “You are all on my shit list,” she rasped, her voice raw from the heat, smoke, and screaming. “I will never forgive you for this, but tomorrow I will be your ally.”

“Are you daft, woman?” Sam gasped.

Nina looked at Sam with a vengeful expression that left him cold. “That bitch killed Father Harper, right? I am going to help these beasts, Sam,” she said with conviction, pointing at the four remaining members of the Militum, “and I want to see her sit on that goddamn throne.”

Ayer smiled. “Done.”