His hand shifted instinctively to his side, to the site of his oldest scar, one not freshly made and bloody, but long-since healed. As he pressed against it he felt something else, buried in the corner of his pocket. He pulled it out and gazed down upon a small, waxy apple, the remains of the simple meal he had not been able to eat earlier in the refectory. He had been too nervous, knowing that in a few short hours he would be inducted into the most ancient and sacred brotherhood on earth. Now here he was, on top of the world in his own personal hell.
He devoured the apple, feeling the sweetness flood into his aching body, warming him from within as it fuelled his exhausted muscles. He chewed the core to nothing and spat the pips into his lacerated palm. A splinter of rock was embedded in the fleshy pad. He raised it to his mouth and yanked it away, feeling the sharp pain of its extraction.
He spat it into his hand, wet with his own blood, a tiny replica of the slender peak he now perched upon. He wiped it clean with his thumb and stared at the grey rock beneath. It was the same colour and texture as the heretical book he had been shown in the depths of the great library during his preparation. Its pages had been made from similar stone, their surfaces crammed with symbols carved by a hand long since rendered to dust. The words he had read there, a prophecy in shape and form, seemed to warn of the end of things if the Sacrament became known beyond the walls of the Citadel.
He looked out across the city, the morning sun catching his green eyes and the high, sharp cheekbones beneath them. He thought of all the people down there, living their lives, striving in thought and deed to do good, to get on, to move closer to God. After the tragedies of his own life he had come here, to the wellspring of faith, to devote himself to the same ends. Now here he knelt, as high as it was possible to get on the holiest of mountains –
– and he had never felt further from Him.
Images drifted across his darkened mind: images of what he had lost, of what he had learned. And as the prophetic words, carved in the secret stone of the heretical book, crawled through his memory, he saw something new in them. And what he had first read as a warning now shone like a revelation.
He had already carried knowledge of the Sacrament this far outside the Citadel; who was to say he could not carry it further? Maybe he could become the instrument to shine light into this dark mountain and bring an end to what he had witnessed. And even if he was wrong, and this crisis of faith was the weakness of one not fit to divine the purpose of what he had seen, then surely God would intervene. The secret would remain so, and who would mourn the life of one confused monk?
He glanced up at the sky. The sun was rising higher now – the bringer of light, the bringer of life. It warmed him as he looked back down at the stone in his hand, his mind as sharp now as its jagged edge.
And he knew what he must do.
7
Over five thousand miles due west of Ruin, a slim blonde woman with fine, Nordic features stood in Central Park, one hand resting on the railing of Bow Bridge, the other holding a letter-sized manila envelope addressed to Liv Adamsen. It was crumpled from repeated handling, but not yet opened. Liv stared at the grey, liquid outline of New York reflected in the water and remembered the last time she’d stood there, with him, when they’d done the touristy thing and the sun had shone. It wasn’t shining now.
The wind ruffled the lake’s burnished surface, bumping together the few forgotten rowing boats tethered to the jetty. She pushed a strand of blonde hair behind her ear and looked down at the envelope, her sharp, green eyes dry from staring into the wind and the effort of trying not to cry. The envelope had appeared in her post nearly a week previously, nestling like a viper among the usual credit-card applications and pizza-delivery menus. At first she’d thought it was just another bill, until she spotted the return address printed on the lower corner. She got letters like this all the time at the Inquirer, hard copies of information she’d requested in the pursuit of whatever story she was currently working on. It was from the US Bureau of Vital Records, the one-stop store for public information on the Holy Trinity of most people’s lives: birth, marriage and death.
She’d stuffed it into her bag, numb with the shock of its discovery, where it had been buried ever since, jostled by the receipts, notebooks, and make-up of her life, waiting for the right moment to be opened, though there never, ever could be one. Finally, after a week of glimpsing it every time she reached for her keys or answered her phone, something whispered in her mind and she took an early lunch and the train from Jersey to the heart of the big anonymous city, where no one knew her and the memories suited the circumstances, and where, if she lost it completely, nobody would bat an eyelid.
She walked now from the bridge, heading to the shoreline, her hand dipping into her bag and fishing out a slightly crushed pack of Lucky Strikes. Cupping her hand against the steady wind to light a cigarette, she stood for a moment on the edge of the rippling lake, breathing in the smoke and listening to the bump of the boats and the distant hiss of the city. Then she slid her finger under the flap of the envelope and ripped it open.
Inside was a letter and a folded document. The layout and language was all too familiar, but the words they contained were terribly different. Her eyes scanned across them, seeing them in clusters rather than whole sentences:
… eight year absence …
… no new evidence …
… officially deceased …
She unfolded the document, read his name, and felt something give way inside her. The clenched emotions of the past years flexed and burst. She sobbed uncontrollably, tears born not only of the strangely welcome rush of grief, but also of the absolute loneliness she now felt in its shadow.
She remembered the last day she’d spent with him. Touring the city like a couple of rubes, they’d even hired one of the boats that now floated, cold and empty, nearby. She tried summoning the memory of it but could only manage fragments: the movement of his long, sinewy body uncoiling as he pulled the oars through the water; his shirt sleeves bunched up to his elbows, revealing white-blonde hairs on lightly tanned arms; the colour of his eyes and the way the skin around them crinkled when he smiled. His face remained vague. Once it had always been there, conjured simply by uttering the spell of his name; now, more often than not, an impostor would appear, similar to the boy she had once known but never quite the same.
She struggled to bring him into focus, gripping the slippery substance of his memory until a true image finally snapped into place; him as a boy, struggling with oversized oars on the lake near Granny Hansen’s house in upstate New York. She’d cast them adrift, hollering after them, ‘Your ancestors were Vikings. Only when you conquer the water will I let you come back …’
They were on the lake all afternoon, taking it in turns to row and steer until the wooden boat felt like a part of them. She’d laid out a victory picnic for them in the sun-baked grass, called them Ask and Embla after the first people carved by Norse gods from fallen trees found on a different shore, then thrilled them with more stories from their ancestral homeland, tales of rampaging ice giants, and swooping Valkyries, and Viking burials in flaming longships. Later, in the dark of the loft where they waited for sleep, he had whispered that when he died in some future heroic battle he wanted to go the same way, his spirit mingling with the smoke of a burning ship and drifting all the way up to Valhalla.
She looked down at the certificate again, spelling out his name and the verdict of his official demise: a death not by spear or sword or selfless act of incredible valour, but simply by a period of absence, clerically measured and deemed substantial enough. She folded the stiff
