The Other Tree Page 7

  “Don’t brood, mate,” said Stace. “Is it a girl? A guy? Bad boscaiola?”

  Emir slotted assorted knives into a concealed rack, lowering it into a suitcase and replacing the false bottom.

  “Do you wonder, about SinaCorp?” asked Emir. “I mean, all this great equipment, but the casualties are still so high…”

  “That’s why the pay is so frickin’ amazing. Danger money, man. Wanna see a picture of my fiancée?”

  “No!” said Emir quickly. “You just…keep packing.”

  The door swung open, and both Emir and Stace had their guns drawn by the time Roman strode into the room, tossing her equipment onto the bed. Bale and Docker followed close behind her.

  Docker’s gaze scanned the tidy room.

  “All ready,” said Emir, zipping up what appeared to be a golf caddy made from Kevlar.

  “There’ll be a slight delay,” said Docker, looking at Emir. He turned to the others. “Await further instructions.”

  * * *

  They had been forced to park the car when the dirt road became just dirt. A horse and carriage could have negotiated this way once, but the path had since been reclaimed by fallen trees and rising saplings. On the drive over here, Chris had brought Luke up to speed with a “SinaCorp is Evil” lecture, complete with illustrations, henchman nicknames, and, in Stace’s case, a printout of his sprawling online profile and engagement photos. She’d had to cut it short after Luke yelled for the third time “Don’t scrapbook and drive!”

  Lyon’s Crossing was a lightly wooded area, smelling of fresh sap and crushed leaves. The dirt here was light and dusty, but when Chris dug a little deeper, it became a rich, crumbly loam.

  “What are you doing?” asked Luke.

  “Nothing,” said Chris, patting the dirt back into place. “Just looking at an interesting plant.”

  They walked quickly through the pale trees, racing against the dying light. The rough pathway steadily narrowed, becoming a faint trail of trampled grass. Insects began to chirp as the orange light sank lower.

  “You say a homeless guy told you about this?” said Chris.

  “You say an eccentric curator told you about this?” returned Luke.

  Perhaps there’s an advantage to throwing money around and having people proffer things on shiny platters, thought Chris as she stumbled over a protruding root.

  She slapped at a hovering mosquito.

  “Do they have dengue fever in Italy?” asked Chris.

  “Did you even read the travel guide aside from the food sectio—”

  Chris drew a sharp breath, and Luke followed her gaze. The grassy hill sloped upwards, and a crumbling structure stood upon the peak, silhouetted against the red sky. As they approached, they could see the remains of a small chapel, built from smooth blocks of pale granite.

  Through the door, they could see that huge sections of the elegantly domed roof had caved in, littering the dirt floor with broken slate. The walls had also crumbled away in places. Inside, four short rows of wooden pews lined a wide aisle, the timber long since rotted into mulch, still bearing the faint odour of frankincense. It looked as though the marble altar had been broken up and carted away, leaving only the jagged stumps of its legs.

  The ruined chapel lay silent aside from the shuffling of crows perched atop the crumbled walls. Chris’s gaze was drawn to the large mosaic above the tabernacle, still vivid beneath the grime. Colourful tiles depicted a large tree standing in a bountiful garden, its branches spread wide across the chancel wall. Glassy red fruit hung from its branches, catching the light of the setting sun.

  “Towards the end, he had Eden motifs everywhere,” said Chris. “Sigils, banners, inscriptions. He started to believe they were protecting him, holding death at bay.”

  There had been a note of detached fascination in Rnynw’s voice as she recounted Abbaci’s final years, but Chris felt a twinge of empathy with the man. Even now, she tried not to think of what Liada must have gone through, feeling the cold, hollow desperation growing as she sank closer to the end, knowing there was no escape, no save, no reset button. Just a final, irreversible end.

  Chris shivered, sweeping her gaze around the chapel.

  “Apparently, he was buried with a custom-made talisman around his neck—” said Chris.

  Luke looked briefly alarmed.

  “But we’re not that desperate,” said Chris quickly.

  Luke trod towards the partially collapsed walls of the chapel, inspecting mosaic Stations of the Cross that bore no resemblance to the events of the crucifixion. Instead, they depicted disturbingly unfamiliar scenes of fire, floods, and bloodied swords. Each station portrayed a different calamity, like glimpses into the mind of a man obsessed with death. Luke pulled out his digital camera and photographed the various mosaics.

  Chris searched the empty alcoves of the chapel, every hollow space now filled with decomposing leaves. She looked up into the small cupola, long broken into a jagged skylight. Sunset tinged the sky a soft purple, and the evening stars were starting to glimmer.

  “There’s nothing Sumerian or map-like in these mosaics,” said Luke.

  There were two kinds of people in the world. Those who looked up, and those who looked down.

  Chris scraped her foot into the damp mulch on the floor.

  A pale smudge shone through the mud.

  She grabbed a fallen branch and began to scrape away the rotting leaves. Seeing Chris, Luke grabbed a fallen slat of wood and did the same, slowly exposing a pale floor, tiled in another colourful mosaic.

  As the sun sank into a hazy smear on the horizon, amber light washed across the chapel floor, finally revealing an intricate design of glazed tiles. The mosaic depicted a large circle, enclosing several concentric circles, marked with irregular lines and obscure pictograms. Above the outer circle, in lapis-blue tiles, were two neat lines of angular cuneiform text.

  “I’ll bet that’s the Sumerian map,” said Chris, unable to suppress a swell of triumph.

  Beneath the map were several short sentences, inscribed in Latin.

  “Abbaci must have added those,” said Luke. “Unless the Sumerians knew Latin.”

  He took several photographs of the chapel floor. As the camera flashed, the crows launched into the air, wheeling across the darkening sky. Luke’s head suddenly snapped up, and he turned to Chris.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  Trees creaked as shadows slowly filled the woods.

  “One of your homeless buddies?” said Chris.

  Luke swept his gaze warily across the trees.

  “Come on.” Chris grinned, already running down the hill. “One all.”

  * * *

  As a car engine revved in the distance, a slim figure dressed in fitted black stepped into the ruined chapel. Soft-soled shoes trod noiselessly across the muddy granite, stopping at the base of the mosaic on the floor. In the darkness, several flashes of bright light burst from the chapel, rousing several homeless people sleeping beneath the eaves of a nearby mausoleum. One raised his head at the sound of a motorcycle engine kicking into gear.

  “Damned tourists.”

  * * *

  In the hush of the hotel suite, Stace stood silhouetted in the balcony doorway. He sharpened a metal stake lazily, watching as pinpoints of light crept across the city in the deepening twilight.

  “You’ll never use that,” said Roman, who was sitting at the desk, studying a scan of the Sumerian tablet.

  “You said that about the electrified slingshot,” said Stace.

  “At least your eyebrows grew back,” said Roman, her eyes fixed on the touchscreen.

  Emir crouched beside Roman, looking at the image of the tablet. A program danced across the screen, lines blinking and sliding in a hypnotic pattern.

  “You read ancient Sumerian?” asked Emir.

  “Optical character recognition,” said Roman.

  “For ancient Sumerian?”

  “Don’t be so public school,”
said Docker from the bed, where he sat with a laptop on his knees.

  “It’s not the writing that’s the problem,” murmured Roman.

  Her eyes shone like glacé cherries as she followed the jagged graphs on the screen, her expression one of intense concentration mingled with displeasure.

  “Both the radio silica and the P-Five scanner indicate the age of the tablet to be somewhere over twenty thousand years old,” she said. “But the Sumerians didn’t start producing cuneiform until fifteen thousand years later.”

  Docker suddenly sat very still, with two fingers pressed to his earpiece. His lips tilted into a small smile. Stace and Roman exchanged a look.

  Docker snapped his laptop shut and rose quickly to his feet.

  “We’re moving out.”

  As Docker swung a backpack over his shoulder, he gave Stace an ominous smile.

  “You might need that stake, after all.”

  * * *

  Nitrogen vapour hissed from the capsule, enveloping the suited-up scientist in a milky cloud. The scientist stumbled back, crashing into one of the tall titanium pods which lined the room.

  Marrick watched from the enclosed observation bay above.

  “He’s new,” assured a thin Japanese man in a business suit.

  Marrick said nothing, but turned slightly as Hoyle entered the bay.

  “Excuse me,” said Hoyle, and waited.

  “I’ll be back shortly,” said the Japanese man with a small bow.

  The door hissed shut as he left.

  “Fountain Forty-Seven have reached the shrine,” said Hoyle. “Will you be joining them?”

  “Wait until they’re inside,” said Marrick. “Keep me updated.”

  “Sir,” nodded Hoyle.

  Marrick watched as the scientist in the lab below started clawing desperately at his suit. He began to flail wildly as a nearby pipe burst into thick, icy clouds, obscuring the bay window.

  Marrick sighed.

  * * *

  In the darkness of the airplane cabin, Chris moved her flashlight across the photograph resting on the fold-out tray. The concentric circles and lines were like crisp ink on the grimy white chapel floor. She leafed through a set of cartographic diagrams she had copied from the library, comparing the markings and lines.

  Maps weren’t usually a problem for Chris, especially if they illustrated the presence of marshes, savannahs, forests, and mountains, and she wasn’t averse to the occasional “Here there be dragons.” She was less keen on conceptual maps, especially thought maps, which she felt were particularly unscientific.

  Chris had now decided that Sumerian maps were also unscientific, lacking any scales, bearings, or accurate representations of the physical world. It reminded her of a picture a chimpanzee had drawn once, when asked to draw a basketball. The ape had drawn a wavy line, following the ball as it bounced across the floor. That picture was probably now in the Guggenheim.

  Chris studied the photograph again—if it was a map of the Persian Gulf, the coastline was unrecognisable. That inlet could have been this, but then that valley would have to be there, which meant that cove wasn’t there at all. There were four lines, which she surmised were the four rivers, and a jagged line that could have been a mountain, but nothing matched existing landmarks in the region. Everything was in the wrong place.

  “I was right,” said Luke, punching letters into a pocket electronic translator. “It’s from the Book of June.”

  Chris rubbed her eyes and peered at the photo Luke was studying. He ran his finger along the Latin words below the Sumerian map.

  “‘The flaming sword was doused, and to the sons and daughters of Adam were the gates unbarred. Thus it came to pass that Man was returned unto his place as keeper of the Garden.’”

  Luke clipped shut the electronic translator.

  “I’m pretty certain it’s Book of June,” he said.

  “How certain were you before we got on a plane to Romania?” asked Chris.

  “It’s not just apocryphal Old Testament. It’s apocryphal Apocrypha. The only place I ever heard it mentioned was at the seminary, and it was more a local legend.”

  “So who wrote it?”

  “I don’t know. It was just a handful of phrases passed down by the older novices. There was the one about the dousing, and then the ‘Love that wears not the face of love, is not divine in the eyes of the Lord.’ Kind of an ancient ‘He’s just not that into you.’”

  “What about the other writing?” asked Chris.

  “Sorry, my translator doesn’t do Sumerian cuneiform. Maybe if you had five grand to spare we could get the version that has Shakespearean Klingon as well.”

  Chris stretched, the joints in her back cracking.

  “Why were you studying at a Romanian seminary again?”

  Luke clicked off his flashlight.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said. “There’ll be a lot of walking tomorrow.”

  Chris watched as Luke curled up beneath the thin airline blanket, as though trying to chase away the dark thoughts with sleep.

  He’s like the opposite of a durian, thought Chris. Underneath the mild, bland exterior, he was bristling with defensive spikes. Furthermore, unlike a durian, which smelled far worse than it tasted, Luke was quite pleasant on the surface. He had a nicely modulated voice, civil manners, and good teeth, but beneath the superficialities was a bitterness that ran so deep she wasn’t sure it could be excised.

  Occasionally, Chris would come across a plant which had rotted so far through that it couldn’t be saved. But as long as there was a branch, a stem, or a bud of new growth that hadn’t been touched by the blight, the plant could be regrafted into a new pot, free from disease.

  Chris glanced over to the figure beside her as she drifted into sleep, wondering if Luke could still be re-potted.

  * * *

  Yelps and cries of horror echoed up the stairs, while museum staff dashed around the corridors of St Basilissa’s Museum. Halbert descended into the hallway and was accosted by a distressed Fabian.

  “They wouldn’t stop! They wouldn’t listen!” blurted Fabian.

  Halbert assumed this outburst was related in some way to the loud clanging noises rising from the basement.

  “Who wouldn’t what?” asked Halbert tersely, swallowing his dread as he descended the stairs to the basement.

  “They had a delivery, and I wouldn’t sign for it, but they said they would deliver it anyway, and they fingerprinted me and I think they took some kind of X-ray.” Fabian clutched at his chest.

  The clanging grew louder, accompanied by soft whooshing sounds. Then Halbert heard the low groaning, like a field of wounded after a massacre.

  “Good God, what is that?” said Halbert, drawing towards the blue basement door.

  “Ravens, sir,” said Fabian. “They had crates of ravens they said were directly descended from the Tower of London, pecked out the eyes of royalty, but they said they had to put them in a dark enclosed space, and we should be honoured to have them, and—and—”

  Fabian blanched at the memory.

  “Oh god, the blood,” he said.

  Halbert pushed open the metal door, and a rush of deep caws and the sound of spattering spilled down the hallway. Rnynw was standing in the empty concrete corridor, her hair askew, facing the sealed red door. There was the occasional thud as something struck the door from the other side, and blood seeped underneath the door, running past her shoes.

  She turned slowly.

  “I think they’re eating the toads.”

  6

  Vardeci Seminary was a modest, three-storey building which sprawled in irregular directions, the legacy of an indecisive architect. It was constructed from roughly quarried sandstone the colour of wheat, giving the impression that the seminary was eternally caught in the morning light. A forest flanked one side, while a rocky walking path wound down the hill on the other side.

  “Is there a reason they don’t extend the road a little
closer?” huffed Chris as she hiked up the stony path.

  “It’s supposed to be good for the soul,” said Luke.

  “But terrible on the knees. Do they hate old people or something?”

  Luke didn’t reply, appearing deeply focused on climbing the steep path.

  He hadn’t been back here since his final profession of the faith, and he had never expected to return. He had arrived all those years ago searching for peace, for escape, for some kind of solace. And in the silence of the meditation, the solitude of prayer, he had found it, for a time. Enfolded in the forest, bedded in winter blizzards, he had felt free of the calamity of the world, safe in a bubble of study and chores.

  But nothing stayed the same.

  “Did I mention the rector might not be completely happy to see me?” asked Luke.

  “Define ‘not completely happy,’” said Chris. “Consider your response in light of the fact that I just climbed the equivalent of a year’s quota of stairs.”

  Chris and Luke slowed as the front door to the seminary opened and a scholarly man in his sixties emerged, dressed neatly in black with a clerical collar shining like a halo.

  “Luke!” The rector beamed warmly as Chris and Luke approached.

  “Father Andreas,” replied Luke, a little stiffly.

  “Please, come in,” said Father Andreas, giving Chris a friendly smile.

  Chris decided that Luke’s concept of “not completely happy” had nothing on how people behaved when they weren’t happy to see Chris. She recalled one lecturer who had set fire to Chris’s essay in front of the class during a heated debate on convergent and divergent evolution. The lecturer had later been forced to apologise to both Chris and the fire department, but took to screaming expletives at Chris during all subsequent encounters, which occasionally made catching the bus quite uncomfortable.

  Chris and Luke followed Father Andreas through a series of clean, sunny corridors. Polished floorboards gleamed, and framed photos of overseas missions decorated the stucco walls. They entered a small, bright study, with books piled neatly on side tables and desks. Father Andreas gestured to several comfortable, overstuffed chairs.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” said Father Andreas, looking steadily at Luke.