She nodded, panting. "Where's Marek?"
Chris got to his feet, peered cautiously around the pillar. "Oh no," he said. And he started to run down the corridor.
Marek staggered to his feet, saw that the Abbot was still alive. "Forgive me," Marek said as he lifted the Abbot onto his shoulder and carried him away to the corner. The soldiers in the courtyard loosed answering volleys at the bell tower. Fewer arrows were coming down at them now.
Marek took the Abbot behind the arches of the covered passageway and placed him on his side on the ground. The Abbot pulled the arrow out of his own shoulder and threw it aside. The effort left him gasping. "My back . . . back . . ."
Marek turned him over gently. The shaft in his back pulsed with each heartbeat. "My Lord, do you wish me to pull it?"
"No." The Abbot flung a desperate arm over Marek's neck, pulling him close. "Not yet . . . A priest . . . priest . . ." His eyes rolled. A priest was running toward them.
"He comes now, my Lord Abbot."
The Abbot appeared relieved by this, but he still held Marek in a strong grip. His voice was low, almost a whisper. "The key to La Roque . . ."
"Yes, my Lord?"
". . . room . . ."
Marek waited. "What room, my Lord? What room?"
"Arnaut . . . ," the Abbot said, shaking his head as if to clear it. "Arnaut will be angry . . . room . . ." And he released his grip. Marek pulled the arrow from his back and helped him to lie on the floor. "Every time, he would . . . make . . . told no one . . . so . . . Arnaut . . ." He closed his eyes.
The monk pushed between them, speaking quickly in Latin, removing the Abbot's slippers, placing a bottle of oil on the ground. He began to administer the last rites.
Leaning against one of the cloister pillars, Marek pulled the arrow out of his thigh. It had struck him glancingly, and was not as deep as he had thought; there was only an inch of blood on the shaft. He dropped the arrow to the ground just as Chris and Kate came up.
They looked at his leg, and at the arrow. He was bleeding. Kate pulled up her doublet and tore a strip from the bottom of her linen undershirt with her dagger. She tied it around Marek's thigh as an impromptu bandage.
Marek said, "It's not that bad."
"Then it won't hurt you to have it," she said. "Can you walk?"
"Of course I can walk," Marek said.
"You're pale."
"I'm fine," he said, and moved away from the pillar, looking into the courtyard.
Four soldiers lay on the ground, which was pincushioned with arrows. The other soldiers had departed; no one was shooting at the bell tower any longer: smoke billowed from the high windows. On the opposite side of the courtyard, they saw more smoke, thick and dark, coming from the area of the refectory. The whole monastery was starting to burn.
"We need to find that key," Marek said.
"But it's in his room."
"I'm not sure about that." Marek had remembered that one of the last things Elsie, the graphologist, had said to him back at the project site had to do with a key. And some word that she was puzzled by. He couldn't remember the details - he had been worried about the Professor at the time - but he remembered clearly enough that Elsie had been looking at one of the parchment sheets from the pile that had been found in the monastery. The same pile that had contained the Professor's note.
And Marek knew where to find those parchments.
They hurried down the corridor toward the church. Some of the stained-glass windows had been broken, and smoke issued out. From the interior, they heard men shouting, and a moment later a party of soldiers burst through the doors. Marek turned on his heel, leading them back the way they had come.
"What are we doing?" Chris said.
"Looking for the door."
"What door?"
Marek darted left, along a cloistered corridor, and then left again, through a very narrow opening that brought them into a tight space, a kind of storeroom area. It was lit by a torch. There was a wooden trapdoor in the floor; he flung it open, and they saw steps going down into darkness. He grabbed a torch, and they all went down the steps. Chris was last, closing the trapdoor behind him. He descended the stairs into a dank, dark chamber.
The torch sputtered in the cool air. By its flickering light, they saw huge casks, six feet in diameter, running along the wall. They were in a wine cellar.
"You know the soldiers will find this place soon enough," Marek said. He led them through several rooms of casks, moving without hesitation.
Following him, Kate said, "Do you know where you're going?"
"Don't you?" he said.
But she didn't; she and Chris stayed close behind Marek, wanting to be in the comforting circle of light from the torch. Now they were passing tombs, small indentations in the wall where bodies rested, their shrouds rotting away. Sometimes they saw the tops of skulls, with bits of hair still clinging; sometimes they saw feet, the bones partially exposed. They heard the faint squeak of rats in the darkness.
Kate shivered.
Marek continued on, until at last he stopped abruptly in a chamber that was nearly empty.
"Why are we stopping?" she said.
"Don't you know?" Marek said.
She looked around, then realized that she was in the same underground chamber she had crawled into several days before. There was the same sarcophagus of a knight, now with the lid on the coffin. Along another wall was a crude wooden table, where sheets of oilskin were stacked and manuscript bundles were tied with hemp. To one side was a low stone wall, on which stood a single manuscript bundle - and the glint of the lens from the Professor's eyeglasses.
"He must have lost it yesterday," Kate said. "The soldiers must have captured him down here."
"Probably." She watched as Marek started going through the bundled sheets, one after another. He quickly found the Professor's message, then turned back to the preceding sheet. He frowned, peering at it in the torchlight.
"What is it?" she said.
"It's a description," he said. "Of an underground river, and . . . here it is." He pointed to the side of the manuscript, where a notation in Latin had been scrawled.
"It says, 'Marcellus has the key.' " He pointed with his finger. "And then it says something about, uh, a door or opening, and large feet."
"Large feet?"
"Wait a minute," he said. "No, that's not it." What Elsie had said was coming back to him now. "It says, 'Feet of a giant.' A giant's feet."
"A giant's feet," she said, looking doubtfully at him. "Are you sure you have that right?"
"That's what it says."
"And what's this?" she said. Beneath his finger there were two words, one arranged above the other:
DESIDE
VIVIX
"I remember," Marek said. "Elsie said this was a new word for her, vivix. But she didn't say anything about deside. And that doesn't even look like Latin to me. And it's not Occitan, or old French."
With his dagger, he cut a corner from the parchment, then scratched the two words into the material, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket.
"But what does it mean?" Kate said.
Marek shook his head. "No idea at all."
"It was added in the margin," she said. "Maybe it doesn't mean anything. Maybe it's a doodle, or an accounting, or something like that."
"I doubt it."
"They must have doodled back then."
"I know, but this doesn't look like a doodle, Kate. This is a serious notation." He turned back to the manuscript, running his finger along the text. "Okay. Okay . . . It says here that Transitus occultus incipit . . . the passage starts . . . propre ad capellam viridem, sive capellam mortis - at the green chapel, also known as the chapel of death - and - "
"The green chapel?" she said in an odd voice.
Marek nodded. "That's right. But it doesn't say where the chapel is." He sighed. "If the passage really connects to the limestone caves, it could be anywhere."
"No, Andre," she said. "It's not."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean," she said, "that I know where the green chapel is."
Kate said, "It was marked on the survey charts for the Dordogne project - it's a ruin, just outside the project area. I remember wondering why it hadn't been included in the project, because it was so close. On the chart, it was marked 'chapelle verte morte,' and I thought it meant the 'chapel of green death.' I remember, because it sounded like something out of Edgar Allan Poe."
"Do you remember where it is, exactly?"
"Not exactly, except that it's in the forest about a kilometer north of Bezenac."
"Then it's possible," Marek said. "A kilometer-long tunnel is possible."
From behind them, they heard the sound of soldiers coming down into the cellar.
"Time to go."
He led them to the left, into a corridor, where the staircase was located. When Kate had seen it before, it disappeared into a mound of earth. Now it ran straight up to a wooden trapdoor.
Marek climbed the stairs, put his shoulder to the door. It opened easily. They saw gray sky, and smoke.
Marek went through, and they followed after him.
They emerged in an orchard, the fruit trees in neat rows, the spring leaves a bright green. They ran ahead through the trees, eventually arriving at the monastery wall. It was twelve feet tall, too high to climb. But they climbed the trees, then dropped over the wall, landing outside. Directly ahead they saw a section of dense, uncleared forest. They ran toward it, once again entering the dark canopy of the trees.
09:57:02
In the ITC laboratory, David Stern stepped away from the prototype machine. He looked at the small taped-together electronic bundle that he had been assembling and testing for the last five hours.
"That's it," he said. "That'll send them a message."
It was now night in the lab; the glass windows were dark. He said, "What time is it, back there?"
Gordon counted on his fingers. "They arrived about eight in the morning. It's been twenty-seven hours elapsed time. So it's now eleven in the morning, the following day."
"Okay. That should be okay."
Stern had managed to build this electronic communications device, despite Gordon's two strong arguments that such a thing could not be done. Gordon said that you couldn't send a message back there because you didn't know where the machine would land. Statistically, the chances were overwhelming that the machine would land where the team wasn't. So they would never see a message. The second problem was that you had no way of knowing whether they had received the message or not.
But Stern had solved both those objections in an extremely simple way. His bundle contained an earpiece transmitter/receiver, identical to the ones the team was already wearing, and two small tape recorders. The first tape recorder transmitted a message. The second recorded any incoming message to the earpiece transmitter. The whole contraption was, as Gordon admiringly termed it, a multiverse answering machine.
Stern recorded a message that said, "This is David. You have now been out for twenty-seven hours. Don't try to come back until thirty-two hours. Then we'll be ready for you at this end. Meanwhile, tell us if you're all right. Just speak and it'll be recorded. Good-bye for now. See you soon."
Stern listened to the message one final time, then said, "Okay, let's send it back."
Gordon pushed buttons on the control panel. The machine began to hum and was bathed in blue light.
Hours earlier, when he had begun working on this message machine, Stern's only concern was that his friends back there might not know they couldn't return. As a result, he could imagine them getting into a jam, perhaps being attacked from all sides, and calling for the machine at the last instant, assuming they could come home at once. So Stern thought they should be told that, for the moment, they couldn't come back.
That had been his original concern. But now there was a second, even greater concern. The air in the cave had been cleared for about sixteen hours now. Teams of workers were back inside, rebuilding the transit pad. The control booth had been continuously monitored for many hours.
And there had been no field bucks.
Which meant there had been no attempt to come back. And Stern had the feeling - of course, nobody would say anything outright, least of all Gordon - but he had the feeling that people in ITC thought that to go more than twenty hours without a field buck was a bad sign. He sensed that a large faction inside ITC believed the team was already dead.
So interest in Stern's machine was not so much about whether a message could be sent as whether one would be received. Because that would be evidence that the team was still alive.
Stern had rigged the machine with an antenna, and he had made a little ratchet device that turned the flexible antenna to different angles and repeated the outgoing message three times. So there would be three chances for the team to respond. After that, the entire machine would automatically return to the present, just as it had when they were using the camera.
"Here we go," Gordon said.
With flashes of laser light, the machine began to shrink into the floor.
It was an uncomfortable wait. Ten minutes later, the machine returned. Cold vapor whispered across the floor as Stern removed his electronic bundle, tore the tape away, and started to play back.
The outgoing message was played.
There was no response.
The outgoing message was played again.
Again, there was no response. The crackle of static, but nothing.
Gordon was staring at Stern, his face expressionless. Stern said, "There could be a lot of explanations. . . ."
"Of course there could, David."
The outgoing message was played a third time.
Stern held his breath.
More static crackling, and then, in the quiet of the laboratory, he heard Kate's voice say, "Did you guys just hear something?"
Marek: "What are you talking about?"
Chris: "Jeez, Kate, turn your earpiece off."
Kate: "But - "
Marek: "Turn it off."
More static. No more voices.
But the point was made.
"They're alive," Stern said.
"They certainly are," Gordon said. "Let's go see how they're doing at the transit pad."
Doniger was walking around in his office, mouthing the words to his speech, practicing his hand gestures, his turns. He had a reputation as a compelling, even charismatic speaker, but Kramer knew that it didn't come naturally. Rather, it was the result of long preparation, the moves, the phrasing, the gestures. Doniger left nothing to chance.
At one time, Kramer had been perplexed by this behavior: his endless, obsessive rehearsal for any public appearances seemed odd for a man who, in most situations, didn't give a damn how he came across to others. Eventually, she realized that Doniger enjoyed public speaking because it was so overtly manipulative. He was convinced he was smarter than anyone else, and a persuasive speech - "They'll never know what hit 'em" - was another way to prove it.
Now Doniger paced, using Kramer as an audience of one. "We are all ruled by the past, although no one understands it. No one recognizes the power of the past," he said, with a sweep of his hand.
"But if you think about it, the past has always been more important than the present. The present is like a coral island that sticks above the water, but is built upon millions of dead corals under the surface, that no one sees. In the same way, our everyday world is built upon millions and millions of events and decisions that occurred in the past. And what we add in the present is trivial.
"A teenager has breakfast, then goes to the store to buy the latest CD of a new band. The kid thinks he lives in a modern moment. But who has defined what a 'band' is? Who defined a 'store'? Who defined a 'teenager'? Or 'breakfast'? To say nothing of all the rest, the kid's entire social setting - family, school, clothing, transportation and government.
"None of this has been decided in the present. Most of it was decided hundreds of years ago. Five hundred years, a thousand years. This kid is sitting on top of a mountain that is the past. And he never notices it. He is ruled by what he never sees, never thinks about, doesn't know. It is a form of coercion that is accepted without question. This same kid is skeptical of other forms of control - parental restrictions, commercial messages, government laws. But the invisible rule of the past, which decides nearly everything in his life, goes unquestioned. This is real power. Power that can be taken, and used. For just as the present is ruled by the past, so is the future. That is why I say, the future belongs to the past. And the reason - "
Doniger broke off, annoyed. Kramer's cell phone was ringing, and she answered it. He paced back and forth, waiting. Trying one hand gesture, then another.
Finally, Kramer hung up the phone, looked at him. He said, "Yes? What is it?"
"That was Gordon. They're alive, Bob."
"Are they back yet?"
"No, but we got a recorded message of their voices. Three of them are alive for sure."
"A message? Who figured out how to do that?"
"Stern."
"Really? Maybe he's not as stupid as I thought. We should hire him." He paused. "So: are you telling me we'll get them back after all?"
"No. I'm not sure about that."
"What's the problem?"
"They're keeping their earpieces turned off."
"They are? But why? The earpiece batteries have plenty of power to go thirty-seven hours. There's no reason to keep them off." He stared. "Do you think? You think it's him? You think it's Deckard?"
"Maybe. Yes."
"How? It's been over a year. Deckard must be dead by now - remember the way he kept picking fights with everybody?"
"Well, something made them turn off their earpieces. . . ."
"I don't know," Doniger said. "Rob had too many transcription errors, and he was out of control. Hell, he was going to jail."
"Yes. For beating up some guy in a bar he'd never seen before," Kramer said. "The police report said Deckard hit him fifty-two times with a metal chair. The guy was in a coma for a year. And Rob was definitely going to jail. That's why he volunteered to go back one more time."
"If Deckard's still alive," Doniger said, "then they're still in trouble."
"Yes, Bob. They're still in plenty of trouble."
09:57:02
Back in the cool darkness of the forest, Marek drew a rough map in the dirt with a stick. "Right now, we're here, behind the monastery. The mill is over here, about a quarter mile from where we are. There's a checkpoint we have to get past."
"Uh-huh," Chris said.
"And then we have to get into the mill."
"Somehow," Chris said.
"Right. After that, we have the key. So we go to the green chapel. Which is where, Kate?"
She took the stick, and drew a square. "If this is La Roque, on top of the cliff, then there's a forest to the north. The road's about here. I think the chapel is not very far - maybe here."
"A mile? Two miles?"
"Say two miles."
Marek nodded.
"Well, that's all easy enough," Chris said, standing and wiping the dirt from his hands. "All we have to do is get past the armed checkpoint, into the fortified mill, then go to some chapel - and not get killed on the way. Let's get started."
Leaving the forest behind, they moved through a landscape of destruction. Flames leapt above the Monastery of Sainte-M
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