G.E. Graven’s
GROTESQUE 
~A GOTHIC EPIC~



CHAPTER 1


Awash in a still mist, the mountain forest seemed a perfect Eden. Clamorous birds fluttered in the canopy, and morning sun bled through the treetops, casting shards of slanted light through the haze. Ever so often, the mist parted for a wandering animal inspecting roots and grubs, only to swallow the creature up once again and become what it had been, an unbroken diaphanous wall. A single leaf spiraled lazily through shafts of sunlight, disappearing into the mist. Another leaf trailed the first, then another. The birds fell silent. 

And so it began. 

The mist began to churn with fleeing wildlife, and leaves, twigs and feathers rained from the trees as flocks of bright birds erupted skyward. The mountains rumbled and trees swayed as the earth tolled like a struck gong. At the peak of that ominous tolling, a stampede of hideous winged beings came surging over the mountain crest. Some, Cyclopes, towered tall as trees. Others, grotesque-like, stood no taller than might a human child. All wore battle dress, their membranous wings flailing in agitation, claws clutching swords and shields. By the thousands, the host of angels, giants, and grotesques poured down the mountainside together as one — a cascading avalanche of ruin. In the forefront of the roaring blaze, a band of angels with wholly black eyes led the descending multitude into the shadowed valley, carving a wide swath along the slope and pressing the forest flat. No living thing remained standing in the wake of that unholy legion. Then, as hastily as it arrived, the Pandemonium vanished. 

A new silence overwhelmed the ravished landscape, as complete as the devastation of only moments before. At length, the gong resounded as the earth began to groan with the passage of a second multitude. Across the mountain now came another legion of angels, clad much the same as the first horde, but unlike enough to warrant being classified as an entirely different species. These creatures resembled large men and women rather than demons; and though their eyes were equally black, they were more intent than incensed. 

The host of creatures paused on the summit of the mountain, surveying the devastation below. The lead angel, Michael, turned and spoke in a voice like a choir of thousands. "A deception is woven here — they remain!" Turning back to the seemingly abandoned slope below, he bellowed, "Semjaza, you shall have no peace! Undo your incantation! Cerberus! Araqiel!" There was no reply. "Show yourselves! By command of the Throne!" the angel roared. 

Two more legions of angels descended from the skies, their numbers nearly blotting out the sun before lighting amongst Michael’s formation. These were the hosts of Gabriel and Raphael. Michael addressed them, saying, "Semjaza and his legions are below. Cerberus has betrayed us as well, since aligning his ranks with those of…"
Abruptly, a fallen tree became the angel Araqiel, revealing her true form even as she hurled toward Michael. 
"Michael!" Raphael warned. 
Michael spun and thrust his sword in the air in a single movement. Araqiel came down on it, swiping at him with her sword and screeching even as his blade impaled her. She crashed to the ground and exploded into an angry swarm of dissolving dust flecks. "Semjaza!" Michael shouted. "Your deception shan’t exclude you from judgment." He stepped into a clearing. "Another gate shall be here," Michael exclaimed, thrusting his sword into the ground. Again, the mountain shook as Michael withdrew the brilliant blade, blood now spewing from a wounded earth. 

At once a scream rent the air, and what had appeared to be a boulder became the stumbling figure of Semjaza, clutching a gaping wound in his chest. "Cerberus!" He cried. "Break the sword! Close the wound!" As Semjaza fell, his spell broke and the landscape transformed. Where fallen trees and boulders had lain in disarray, now the legion of demons stood revealed — thousands of them — crouching on the ravaged mountainside. Instantly, one of them blazed upward along the slope of the mountain: a horrid angel with three dog-like heads, gnashing teeth and the whipping tail of a serpent — Cerberus. Winds gathered with tempest force, and clouds roiled in a quickly darkening sky.
"Ezequeel!" Semjaza cried. "The clouds! Break the sword!" Semjaza then rolled a brief distance, died, and burst into a cloud of dust. The host of Semjaza lunged forth in attack, following Cerberus up the mountainside toward Michael. Calmly, the three legions atop the mountain moved back, knelt and bowed their heads. A black vortex descended from whirling clouds, falling toward the earth. The ground heaved, and a rock rose from the bleeding wound Michael's sword had made. The vortex enveloped the rough stone and scoured it black, shaping and inscribing the stone in a fury of motion. From the chaos emerged a polished rectangle, etched upon its five surfaces with hundreds of rows of intricate circular and linear symbols. 

The emerging monolith turned Cerberus' advance to a rout. The attacking legion turned as one and tore back down the mountain, terror replacing the blood lust in their black eyes, but it was too late. The gate was complete. The fleeing angels slowed as though the air had turned viscous, slowed and then stopped even as they fought to escape. The whirlwind sucked at them, dragging them inexorably to its heart until each one had been swallowed by the monolith. When the last had disappeared, the heart of the monolith burned away, leaving a gaping hole through its center. The vortex ascended into the heavens and the clouds slowed their spin. In the silence, the angels could hear the hiss of steam rising from the new-made gate.

The smooth black monolith was seven feet high by five feet wide by three feet deep, every visible inch of it covered with verses in the language of angels and of God Himself. The glassy black surface of the monolith was as perfectly smooth as the best mirror, and the center hole was flawless in its shape, two feet across and gutting the stone widthwise. The stone seal was perfection.

The kneeling angels rose. Michael turned to Gabriel. "The remaining Nephalim are cloaked in the hills of Uhr." Gabriel stroked his sword and moved up the mountainside. "Gabriel," Michael called up to him. Gabriel looked back over his shoulder. "They must be slain by their own swords," Michael added, "by command of the Throne."
Gabriel turned again toward his destination and bellowed to his legion, "To the valley of Uhr! We seek the Nephalim! No swords!" Gabriel then blazed away with his legion.

"Michael, where has Azazel fled?" Raphael inquired with a voice of many.
"He has flown into the desert mountains of Haradan," Michael answered. "He has sworn an alliance with Lucifael. Azazal has promised her the Throne in exchange for the protection of her greater numbers." Michael inspected the hissing monolith, and then the two of them circled the stone seal as Michael continued. "And Batarel's many legions soon fill her ranks." Michael stopped and turned to Raphael with concern etched in his brow. "If they unite, then Lucifael acquires the numbers she needs to accomplish all that she desires — and she desires the Throne above all else."
Raphael roared to his angels, "We move against Lucifael!"
"She will be ready, but the Throne is with us! Make haste," Michael commanded of all. The remaining angels tore into the heavens, abandoning the standing seal.

And so the seal stood for nearly six hundred centuries, long since concealed by the elements and time as dust settled upon it, and then layers of dirt and rock. Encrusted within the Asian continent, it lay dormant as the decades chased one another like mating Chinese mayflies.

With the fall of the Watchers, those angels who looked after earthly affairs, only Man remained to oversee the good earth. And He did for many generations. Then, whilst tending His gardens, Man happened to discover the buried gate. Knowing it to be of divine origin, He cleared away the centuries and enshrined it, constructing a temple around it. For half a millennia more, He kept the artifact secret, worshiped it and fashioned His life around it — until the day came when He became learned enough to open the seal and yet remained foolish enough to attempt it. 

Central China – June – 1331

Hundreds of pigeons lined the massive roof of an ornate Chinese temple, clucking and pecking one another as they sought to lay claim to more of the sparse ledge space. Again and again, a single bird fluttered from the congested ridge, circled wide, and rejoined the throng, disappearing into the mass. Below the ledge, decades of pigeon excrement had streaked the stone surfaces gray and white. Statues of stone perched atop evenly spaced platforms protruded from the pigeon shelf. Each depicted a grotesque stone beast, four feet high and with membranous, bat-like wings. 

Some of these stone beasts were dragon-like, others part man and part beast, and still others were humanoid but primitive in appearance. Some crouched with wings splayed, some with wings tucked and folded, and then there existed various combinations of the two. Details of the statues and their random posture were so lifelike that they might have been living creatures frozen in stone. They thrust outward in all directions, lining the entire top of the temple. 

The temple itself was notably ancient, comprised of irregular stone slabs hewn a thousand years earlier. Eroded engravings depicting flying demons covered the outer walls of the structure, the most plentiful an icon of a dragon with splayed wings and wholly enclosed by three circles that shared a common center. Three arched entrances lined the temple face, the center arch standing higher than did those on either side of it. Three eight-foot stone carvings of winged lion-like beasts guarded the left edge of each of the arches, and engraved above each of the three arches was a distinct Chinese inscription. Altogether, read right to left, the completed passage could be rendered: ‘Flying Dragon Temple.’ 

Manicured gardens surrounded the temple as humped teak bridges bowed back and forth across a slithering brook. Beyond the Bonsai trees and boulders of the inner garden, orchards of fruit and nut trees and small groves of hardwoods gave way to wilder mountain forests. On the fringe of those arranged gardens and untamed woods, a China thrush perched in an ancient, native ginkgo tree, filling the air with tranquil tones whilst midmorning sunlight dappled paths and pools. 

A row of black-robed monks snaked from the forest, moving solemnly down the stone walkway leading to the building. They drifted like mist down the path with lowered heads and hands clasped before them. They filed silent as death into the temple. Inside, countless candles burned on every horizontal surface, and the sweet smoke of incense spiraled from perforated canisters. Candles and incense combined to lend a thick air of spirituality to the atmosphere inside the temple walls. The silken monks moved through three consecutive chambers, each chamber larger than the one before it. The last of these was vast and its concave ceiling reached high above the priests. Etchings of flying beasts encircled the dome of the ceiling. Countless intersecting lines and inscriptions marked its curved surface, appearing much like a detailed astrological map of the heavens. 

A perfectly symmetrical round hole had been cut into the polished floor in the center of the room. The pit was large, nearly thirteen feet deep. Like the floor of the temple, the cylindrical wall of the hole was smooth and polished, and in the center of the hole, fifteen feet below the temple floor, stood the stone seal. Even with the passing of sixty thousand years, the gatestone stood flawless and unspoiled as the day it swallowed the Watchers and a great part of the heavens. 

Four emaciated priests sat near the edge of the pit hole, with their legs folded and their robes pulled away from their shoulders to reveal narrow chests and thin arms, their decrepit condition  evidence of long periods of fasting. Sweat glistened on their necks and ribcages, and their eyes burned in the bottoms of sunken sockets as they sat like statues, deep in meditation. The procession of monks circled the four priests, then seated themselves shoulder-to-shoulder to form a solid wall around the priests and the pit. As more monks arrived, they formed a second circle, and then a third, until three concentric rings of meditating holy men filled the chamber. In the deep silence, the occasional guttering of burning candles echoed softly through the dome as the sounds of far away thunder. 

Soon three more priests entered the area. Two carried large candles and the third walked between them, this one garbed in robes as red as fresh blood. He carried an ancient, scrolled parchment in his hands. The three priests stopped behind the circle of monks, and the priest in red unrolled the scroll, revealing columns of Chinese writing. The parchment contained translations of the verses that were inscribed on the surfaces of the gatestone. 

Outside the temple, around its grounds, the only sound was the gurgling of the placid stream. The thrush took sudden flight, chasing a bee through the garden flowers. As the beak of the songbird snapped the bee from the air, there was an explosion, and instantly the dome of the temple shattered, sending stone shards hundreds of feet into the air. The concussion was so fierce that it stripped the nearest trees naked of their leaves and fragments of stone and human bones impaled their seared trunks. Enormous chunks of stone hailed down into the garden, snapping branches and pressing craters into the neatly raked earth. Billowing dust and ash raced over the grounds and rolled down the entire mountainside like a hyperactive pyroclastic cloud. 

What was left of the temple glowed with furious heat, cracking the stones left standing. And still, the temperature climbed, until the sides of the smooth pit at the epicenter of the temple liquefied like seeping sap. The seared trees surrounding the temple burst into flame. The unscathed gatestone stood out from the center of the crater. The hole at the heart of the stone turned thickly opaque with a bilious black fog, which began to roil and fume, spilling out of the gatestone like a viscous caustic cloud dense as sulfurous gases. 

The cloud rose from the crater and hugged the ground whilst it drifted beneath the lighter ash. It did not dissipate, but remained collected as a single boiling mass, blighting the garden greenery in its wake. Then, in an unscathed clearing, it stopped and churned in place for but a moment before rolling in upon itself and coalescing at its center. Arcs of light resembling a thunderstorm in deep cumulous flashed through as, deep within the mass, a form took shape. A shadow at first, it evolved to gather density and structure, and finally, flesh-tones. The cloud thinned to expose a nude woman with sprawling membranous wings. Her waist-length hair was red as crimson fire and fine as silk thread. Her eyes and nails were black as the gatestone face, which contrasted with her skin as pale as death. Her angelic beauty stood unmatched even by Eve herself. She was the Dragon, unholy Lucifael, and Mother of Hell. The materialized spirit of Lucifael spat in a voice of many women, "One! Two remain," she smugly declared, surveying the destruction. 

Around her, the dissipating brume revealed the landscape of a nightmare. The temple grounds were a smoking, corpse-ridden ruin. A field of blackness encircled the glowing remains of the temple, and the outer gardens lay flat and singed, dying of thirst. Steam lingered up from the stream, now black with soot and char itself. The Bonsai trees crackled, burning and occasionally one and another fell to ash and cinder where they had stood. 

Lucifael stepped forth and raked a dead pigeon from the ground. She caressed the bird as a caring soul. "Not yet, my dear," she whispered. "Come." The bird jolted to life, its head wobbling as if its neck were broken. She stroked it. "Indeed. Come back, little one." Its eyes eased open and locked with hers. It fluttered and she clutched its neck. She brought the bird to her face, inhaled deeply, and exhaled a thick sulfurous cloud over the struggling bird. Its feathers glowed yellow. 

Within the rancid plume, seeds of annihilation lay ahead for virtually every living thing on earth, for it bore a deadly germ vile enough to rot the face of Asia, and eventually, the greater part of Europe. The germ was Yersinia Pestis  — the very instrument of the Black Death. Lucifael grinned, instructing the bird, "Hear me, little one. Deliver unto Men my word — that I come soon to reclaim what is mine." She tossed the pigeon into the air. It circled and flew south even as Lucifael burst into a cloud of rolling ash, which then transformed into the likeness of a raven. The smoky visage tore across the grounds and dived through the hole of the gatestone. 

Clumsily and irregularly, the pigeon spiraled through the air along the mountainside and out onto the plain. Its shadow grazed the thatch roofs of a tiny settlement, fled across a field, and through a thicket of woods. Eventually, the bird found its way into the heart of a congested village. It fell into a seizure and plummeted towards earth, crushing itself against the slat wall of a building, whereupon it came to rest on the ground behind a fish stand in the bustling village market. As eve fell and the marketplace emptied, none noticed the dead bird, and in the gathering darkness, no one remained to see the sickly pale light that began to emanate from the carcass. 

The pigeon stiffened and grew cold, yet its feathers still shone with an unwholesome yellow glow. Just before first light, a pair of black rats happened upon the corpse. One rat sniffed at its gaping eye whilst the other smelled its anus, and both, finding the carcass fresh, tore into it. Yet, before they had finished with this gruesome feast, a man approached the fish stand, waved away green-backed flies, and slapped a heavy, milk-eyed fish onto the rough boards of the stall. The rats sped away, filled with the disease carried within the flesh of the bird. 

The rats were skillful scavengers, but more efficient still were the parasites that feasted unseen upon the rodents. The bacillus that had traveled to market with the temple pigeon amplified within the bodies of the rats, making them a living stew and witches brew of death for the fleas that infested them. Although not greatly affected by the bacteria, the fleas gorged themselves with infected rat blood, which they promptly regurgitated into the bodies of subsequent hosts as they prepared for the next meal. In the two weeks after the pigeon had fallen like manna into the rats’ marketplace warren, fleas spread the germ to every rat in the village. 

The rats began to die, forcing the fleas to look for healthier food. The disease, too, sought new breeding ground as it decimated the rodent population, and carried forth in the stomachs of billions of fleas, it found that new host — the disease moved to its next victim: humans. 

On this sweet and sunny morning, a young Chinese girl inspected tied bundles of black ginger heaped atop a produce stand a few feet from the landfall of the cursed pigeon. Pointing to a small bundle, the girl asked the old woman who ran the stall what she wanted for it. The woman waggled seven fingers in front of her toothless smile. The girl grinned, accepting: ‘twas a fair price. The woman retrieved the girl’s coins and held out the bundled roots, yet at that moment her young customer shrieked and leapt away from the stall. "A rat!" she exclaimed, her pleasant features twisting with distaste. "It ran over my foot."
The woman laughed, waving a lazy hand in the air. "Only harmless pests," she said, grinning. "They have become bold with so much food lying about, like pets almost." 

The girl reached out to receive her purchase, wishing now to be away from the old crone and her ‘pets.’ Feeling a stinging sensation on her ankle, she recoiled again from the vendor and lifted the hem of her long skirt to reveal a bare foot. She bent over in closer examination, frowning. In doing so, the wide straw hat she wore tumbled to the ground, where a passing merchant trampled it. Laughter burst from the old woman, who seemed to find amusement in the commonest of misfortunes. The girl’s sharp glance only increased the woman’s mirth. 

"If everyone were so unfortunate as you, we’d all be dead by dawn," she cackled. The girl, failing to see the comedy in this bleak philosophy, retrieved her hat and popped it back onto her head. The old woman’s laughter followed her mockingly as she stomped off and disappeared into the crowd with a bundle of ginger, a dirty hat, and a flea’s bite. The bite, small as it was, would prove large enough to swallow nearly half of the known world. 

In only a few days, the ensuing outbreak of disease swept through the Chinese village like a tsunami. The children, closest to the earth and to the animals and insects that crawl across it, were the first to sicken and die. The mortality rate of the infection was bone chilling, soaring to nearly seventy-five percent. The mild winter offered ideal conditions for the spread of the disease, and the coming warmer weather would be yet more devastating to humans, more bountiful for the bacteria. Although happiness in Hell is quite rare, in that moment of tragic human infection, Lucifael capered. Man was ripe. The warm conditions were ideal to offer Death a bountiful harvest, Death who stood ever at the ready wielding a honed and gleaming scythe like a seasoned hired hand poised eagerly to reap of the plenty. 

Those infected with the plague died abruptly, as the germ was thorough in destroying their immune systems. It attacked lymph nodes unto rupture, rendering them useless. The victim’s body had little time to defend itself before it fell, completely overwhelmed. Hemorrhagic blood pooled beneath the victims’ skin in black splotches, and their infected body fluids — blood, sweat, and wastes — carried a horrifying stench. 

The Bubonic Plague was one of Hell’s more clever designs. The breath of Lucifael was devious, and her desire was complete annihilation of her adversaries. Thus the plague was a chemical shape-changer: what it did not accomplish in one form, it achieved in others. The disease changed, and a second wave of infection danced its dark way across the field of human life, and then a third wave. The pneumonic plague infected the lungs of its victims and multiplied there so rapidly that the chest cavity of the hapless victim swelled and filled with blood within days of infection. Though some survived the bubonic plague, pneumonic plague took no prisoners. Worse, the infection was easily transmitted through a cough or a sneeze — death filled the very air. 

The third form of infection proved deadliest of all. Septicemic plague attacked the blood, filling every particle of body tissue with the wildly multiplying bacillus. Victims died within hours, their inside organs literally liquefied in pools of highly infectious blood. Like the lung-borne form of the plague, the septicemic infection was nearly one hundred percent fatal. 

The pestilence spread rapidly from its source and engulfed the countryside. Three-quarters of all surrounding villages and towns now exposed to the plagues were decimated within days. In the following weeks, hundreds of thousands of infected dead lay strewn across open fields because few dared bury them for fear of infection. The fly population soared, the rotting corpses fine incubators for their larvae. In the more developed areas of the country, the stench of blackened, bloated corpses was so concentrated that a dead village could be smelt nearly ten miles downwind. A mass migration commenced as tens of thousands sought refuge in remote, unsettled areas. 

Even in their panicked flight, travelers avoided established roads, which were littered with the rotting remains of people, sometimes entire villages. Rural roads were often blocked by fly-filled carts hitched to dead horses. Death and decay was everywhere. The Plague reigned, and men were its slaves. The Great Pestilence took more than thirty-five million Chinese lives in sixteen hard years, and still it was not sated. The plague marched silently into Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, laying waste to them as it had China, sweeping across entire continents like some vengeful, marauding horde. 
The disease coursed through every vein of Asian civilization, following trade routes that radiated out from the heart of Mongolia. The Silk Road, an ancient caravan route that carried goods of the East to the Mediterranean Sea, now carried Death’s appointed handmaiden toward Europe. Indeed, Death breathed over the land like a foul breeze, tainting the air with the rancid odor of putrefaction. Its unholy stench was ripe enough to anesthetize even the heavens. Thus it happened, as horrible events in history invariably do, that Lucifael’s message rang out across the lands — she would soon reclaim her own.








Chapter 2

City of Avignon, France - 1342

Situated on the banks of the Rhone River, Avignon was the Babylon of the West and the very heart of the Christian Empire in the fourteenth century, a city teeming with tradesmen and soothsayers, drunkards and craftsmen, soldiers and ambassadors, Jezebels and thieves. High ramparts encircled the town to protect it from outside invasion, but with so many people pressed together within its walls, adequate sewage disposal proved a daunting task, and a foul odor hung over the enclosed congestion like an invisible but quite tangible pall. 

The Popes’ Palace rose out of that sea of stench, towering over the land. Built upon a rock for which the Roman Empire had found no use, the looming configuration served as the cornerstone and pontifical throne of the Holy See. The enormous Gothic castle stood as the largest in existence, its fortified walls twelve feet thick and replete with battlements, towers, and arrow loops. The whole of the formation sprawled as a double palace boasting twin quadrangles. Its wings held massive halls, the larger and more significant of them being the consistory, conclave, banquet, and treasury halls. In the bowels of the edifice was a great cellar that housed seemingly countless gallons of wine extracted from rolling acres of papal vineyards and aged in ranks of immense wooden casks. In the heart of the castle were hellish hearths where tens of thousands of bread loaves a day were baked to feed Avignon’s Babylonian hoard. The Popes’ Palace was nothing short of a medieval monster scaled to magnificent proportions, a beast colossal. 

Within the palace there were squirming entrails of corruption, wealth, seated iniquity, power, and great authority, ceaselessly rolling and contracting. Invariably, the castle corridors teamed with cardinals and Curia officials, papal guards and squires, councilmen and lawmen, concubines with lowly gazes, knights and their lords, visiting dignitaries and their escorts, including distinguished relatives and private entertainers of the Pontiff. 

During the reign of Pope Benedict XII, twenty-four cardinals served in the College of Cardinals — Cardinal Blasi was its fiery wolf and disliked by most of the mainstay. One of the youngest cardinals, Jean-Francois Blasi, was a man of good health, standing tall and sporting a head of blonde hair. His most notable feature, disturbing enough, lay in his eyes, one a clear brown eye and the other a blind milky eye worthy of a devil’s return gaze. Only a few of the cardinals tolerated his company outside formal engagements, but a few were all that Blasi required — those cardinals with enough inner-circle influence to serve his needs. Mostly, they were Senior Cardinals who also served within the Pope’s Palace as overseers. 

‘Twas standard practice in Avignon for cardinals of higher stature to be assigned to oversee various wings, halls, chapels, and grounds of the palace. For years, Blasi was the overseer of the Great Cellar. The expansive hold, dug in 1337 and spanning the entire length of the wing housing the Conclave Hall above it, was a subterranean hallway. This enormous underground vault held hundreds upon hundreds of seasoned kegs aging some of the finest wines in Europe. Blasi was responsible for nearly every aspect of their production, grape to keg, including the subsequent storage and safekeeping of the wines. Generally considered as an appointment of grand importance, the winery was responsible for a good portion of the annual revenue of the Papacy. 

Thus, most of those about the palace considered Blasi to be the ‘Cardinal of the Wines.’ Moreover, every connoisseur knew that befriending Blasi was to befriend the Great Cellar. Cardinal Raulin Toussain, the wiry unto being gristly overseer of the Palace Pantry and Boteillerie (the Bottle Storehouse), and the very obese yet delicate Cardinal Lilo Julin, master of the Kitchens and Banquet Hall, considered themselves epicures, and thus each had made certain to cultivate the friendship of the Cardinal of the Wines. Blasi knew well enough why these two courted him, but nevertheless there was at the least an obvious brand of camaraderie amongst them. 

Unlike the much larger College of Cardinals, the Council of the Apocrypha contained only three cardinals: Cardinals Hadour Xavier, Senior councilman, Avit Basiliste, the eldest and most frail, and Edmard Lean, the youngest and most recently appointed of the body. Cardinal Xavier’s service ended with the discovery of his nude and decapitated corpse. A peasant boy discovered his remains in a thicket alongside a road west of Avignon. Scattered in the brush about him lay the remains of his guards, their bodies equally defiled. His murder remained an enigma, and before the rumors of the murders grew stale, Pope Benedict died as well. Though several cardinals insisted that Benedict had been poisoned, and that the string of murders were somehow part of a larger political conspiracy, such speculations were never substantiated. Blasi was closest to the papal wines — and a tyrant to boot — and many suspected him of the poisoning. None were bold enough ever to confront him for fear of his fiery temper, however. 

Less than two weeks after Benedict’s state funeral, the French-dominated Conclave hastily elected another Frenchman, Pierre Roger de Beaufort, who was fifth in succession to the Avignon Papacy. De Beaufort was christened Clement VI. Most of the usual dignitaries were present for the election: the College and Council cardinals, the Secretary General, the Vicar General and Vice-Regent, chief papal officers of the Kingdom of Naples, the more distinguished Bishops, and all the bevy of hangers-on such an assemblage required. An envoy from Philip VI de Valois, King of France, was notably absent, having arrived too late to attend the ceremony. 

The power of this election rested overtly with the College of Cardinals, but as only a few living men knew, the true power of pontifical persuasion lay in the hands of a mere few — namely the Council of the Apocrypha. Over the centuries, the College of Cardinals had evolved its role into an electing body of the Church, now serving the Holy See in much the same manner as any parliamentary organ serves its overall organization. In contrast, the Council of the Apocrypha was a small, veiled and purposefully unrecorded papal body wielding an authority that easily rivaled that of the College. The cardinals of the Apocrypha suffered no dominion, save that of God, and were accountable only to His chosen representative on earth — the Holy Father and Pope. 

The Apocrypha was composed of two distinct levels — the Upper and Lower Councils. The Upper Council consisted of the Pope and the cardinals he appointed, who in turn supervised the abbots and monks of the Lower Council. Since the time of its inception, membership of this Council had varied between sixty and sixty-six members, each appointed by the Upper Council. Appointments to the Council were for life, and new members were given charge only upon the death of an existing appointee. The two of the original three cardinals of the Upper Council — Basiliste and Lean — resided in Avignon in the villa Chateau Rouge. However, the members of the Lower Council were divided evenly between two equal and remote monasteries in the hinterlands of France and Italy. These were the Abbaye des Gardiens, located in the hills of Auvergne Province in France, and the Monastero del Cancello, situated in the mountains of Italy’s Molise Province. 

The Gardiens Abbey of the Lower Council fell under the direction of its resident Abbot, Vonig, whilst the Cancello Monastery in Italy fell under the direction of its resident Abbot, Domingus. Both Lower Council Abbots reported only to the Upper Council cardinals, who reported solely to the Pope — and in secret. These isolated monasteries considered themselves Benedictine, yet were not governed in accordance with Benedictine Monastic Rule. They had become an order unto themselves, which was neither Benedictine, nor Franciscan, nor Cistercian. For centuries, these monasteries had remained disjoined from the monastic rule and fell under the exclusive control of the Council of the Apocrypha. The Council and its two monasteries, with its esteemed circle of servants, were outwardly a kind of ‘holy ghost’ guarding the most ghastly skeleton of the Papal Closet. However, few secrets escaped Lucifael — those of the Council, in particular. 

Thus, whilst Lucifael decimated Asia with her breath-of-death, she was equally occupied with Europe, deceiving two of its nations. Through marriage, France and England crossed royal bloodlines. In short, a king died and England had rightful claim to France — but the devil lay in the details. Nevertheless, the entangled kingdoms found themselves at an impasse and the bell tolled, ringing in of the Hundred Year Wars. The very first of these battles, which would prove to be the most horrific in history, played itself out on French soil and would forever be called the bloody Battle of Crecy. Many would bear witness to the horrors that came to happen on the muggy August afternoon of the battle. 

Crecy-en-Ponthieu, Northern France - August 1346

Only remnants of the storm remained. Thunder rolled off to the west, and lightning lanced into the distant hills. A luminous black raven settled amongst the wind-warped branches of a splay oak, disturbing a few battered leaves. Its black pupils swelled and contracted, cold and mechanical, as if some machine governed the pitch-dark eye. The raven rocked its head and cawed at the retreating thunderhead twice, and then again. Below the oak perch, a column of French soldiers sloshed along a muddy rutted road. 

The Frenchmen — most of them peasants whose hands were more accustomed to wielding axes and pitchforks than swords — were marching to war through the sodden hills of northern France. Their newly crowned king, Philip VI, had told the English dog, Edward III, that France would never share the throne with England, or anyone else, for that matter. France, Philip decreed, was sovereign, and its throne was his alone. Responding to Philip’s cavalier claim with a fit of rage, and thenceforth determined to unseat him, Edward carved a path through France, burning entire villages in his wake. He was intent on inflicting enough injury to force Philip’s downfall, for those within his own ranks to unseat him. When news reached Philip of Edward’s brazen attack, he gathered many of the French lords to march against the invading intruder. 

Philip’s call to arms was so great that Edward, now confronted by the massive French force on the plains above Crecy-en-Ponthieu, refused to engage him and fled north toward Calais. The French were confident and very much anticipated a hasty victory. Philip’s force was enormous, composed of the armies of many lords, and even if made up of mostly peasants, they were more than thirty-five thousand strong and outnumbered the English three to one. The French lords and their knights, however, were easily distinguished from the host of farmers and tradesmen. They were well-mounted, carrying banners and sheathed in heavy armor, and they had the proud bearing of noblemen and the grim determination characteristic of veteran soldiers. 

Long swords, maces and shields clanked against armored mounts, and ranks of pikes bobbed amongst the orderly columns of foot soldiers marching behind crossbow wagons that lumbered over rutted terrain. A thousand saddles creaked; a thousand horses blew and stamped. Shouted commands were relayed from rank to rank as pockets of men sung of the fields and the harvests they had left behind. In the wet August air, the sounds of war made a requiem for men who marched stonily toward their fates. Although the soldiers were brash, presuming a hasty and decisive victory and the taking of many English prisoners, deep within them ran a great unease akin to that of skittish hogs on the eve before slaughter. The shared state of mind betrayed a distinct level of nervousness, spawned more of incorporeal premonition than of any concrete estimation, a dim yet thoroughly distracting awareness running deep through these men’s bones — a sense of impending doom. Even the battle horses discerned the very marrow of it; however, the same luminous black raven, perched well above the battlefield in the gnarled oak, apprehended it best of all. ‘Twas the unseen presence of the Devil herself, and in her company but unseen was another ready angel — Death. 

In the midst of the column of soldiers, two heavily armored knights with armored horses moved shoulder to shoulder. Over their breastplates hung sleeveless jerkins embroidered with identical emblems. The same insignia decorated their saddle blankets and shields. The knights rode under the banner of Lord Amelet of Laon. They were brothers separated by six years who bore the coat-of-arms and distinguished sir name of Blasi. Jean-Jacques and Jean-Rene were the youngest of the three Blasi brothers, and the eldest was Jean-Francios, revered Cardinal of the Wines. 

Unlike Jean-Jacques, an unbridled man, Jean-Rene lived with his wife, Alsae Blasi, and his only son, Michael Blasi, in a chateau on the respected Blasi estate located on the northern outskirts of the town of Reims. Jean-Francois resided in a large papal-owned chateau, the Chateau Rouge, in Avignon. He shared the two-story chateau with several other papal dignitaries, their lavish apartments combined under a single roof. 

Jacques bit the last meat from an apple and tossed it at his brother’s helmet. The core struck Rene’s raised visor and slammed it shut. Rene snapped it up again, exposing a bitter brow yet holding a forward stare. Jacques laughed and leaned forward on his horse for better inspection of his brother’s stubborn expression.
"Come now, Rene," the young man said with a smile. "Laughter raises the spirit before battle. I’m not King Edward, Le Petit!" Jacques slipped a fresh apple from a pouch draped at his side. 

Rene responded coldly. "The men are not prepared for the charge. They are weary from the march."
"I shall run the English into the sea!" Jacques proclaimed, raising his apple on high. "I shall shove an apple in Edward’s mouth and hurl him back across the sea. And since I am your kind brother, Rene, I shall capture an English squire for you," he added with a chuckle before biting a chunk out of the apple.
"They shall position themselves defensively and be prepared for the charge," Rene stated.
"They shall be tired as little girls," his brother countered. "They have seen days of battle. They shall throw down their arms in surrender at the sight of our numbers."
"They shan’t surrender. Both Edward and his Black Prince are with them. Their army shall defend them to the death. You speak foolishly, brother."
"They are tired," the younger man insisted. "They shall surrender. You are the fool, Rene. I shall remind the fool of whom he is after the battle, if there be one."
"You have orders, Jacques. You shall follow them, as will I. His Majesty’s marshal has ordered every banner rest until the men are fresh from a day’s march."
"Look about you, Rene. Look in their eyes — at their spirits! They shan’t rest. Their blood is hot. They shall attack, against orders, even," Jacques replied.
"Many of these men have never tasted battle as we have," Rene reminded him. "And we are bound by orders from Lord Amelet, whose banner flies for His Majesty." Rene spat. "We have orders to rest. We must not move against Edward until we are given the order to move." 

The two men looked over the slow-moving army as a short silence fell between them. The column seemed to extend itself through the uneven terrain forever before and behind them. Jacques turned to Rene, his face twisted by disgust, and said to his brother, "If these simple men place their lives before the Englishmen, most without shield or armor, then so shall I ride and defend them. True to France, so shall any knight. We serve France, and these men are France — I shall defend them!"
"You swore an oath, not to be broken." Jacques stared forward as though he did not hear Rene. "Damn you then, Jacques." Rene growled, snapping his face guard down.
Shortly, Jacques asked, "Shall you ride with France, as well?"
Rene raised his visor and replied, "You have lost your balances, Jacques." 

Jacques grimaced and repeated the question. "Shall you?"
"You’re no knight — an armored fool only."
"Shall you, then?" his brother repeated.
"I shan’t confess to Jean-Francois that I was not beside his foolish brother in battle."
"Yes," said Jacques. "‘Tis as he said: The cross rides with both of us, or with neither."
"Indeed it does," Rene sighed. He turned to Jacques and scolded him. "You leave me little choice. You enjoy that, yes?" Rene’s frown fell away, and finally a small smile crept into its place. "I shall ride with the Fool of France." Jacques laughed and leaned toward his brother. "Look about you. I know men’s hearts, Rene, as do you. These men shan’t rest until they throw Le Petit into the sea. The victory is already ours. Soon enough, we shall have Edward’s head — and his throne. Show our cardinal brother’s cross, that we may charge to victory!" 

Tossing the apple aside and slipping off his helmet, Rene pulled a fine golden chain from beneath his breastplate. It supported the considerable weight of a gem-studded crucifix that had belonged to his elder brother, Jean-Francois Blasi, and was since blessed by the late Pope Benedict XII himself. Francois had insisted that Rene and Jacques carry it with them in every battle. As the moment dictated, it was Rene’s turn to wear the Blasi cross. This was a part of the reason Rene felt compelled to join his brother if Jacques charged. He would not leave his brother to face death alone, and without the cross. Nor would he leave the French army to fight the battle on its own, no matter how foolishly united. He was equally dedicated to his countrymen and to his brother, if in different ways. Both he would defend. Both he would honor. Rene leaned over the side of his horse and handed the cross to Jacques. Jacques kissed the cold metal, bowing his head slightly in reverence. A crash of thunder resonated over the countryside. Jacques laughed and welcomed it as a good omen. Above them, in the boughs of a squat oak, the luminous raven stirred with fluttering feathers. It bolted from its perch toward the northwesterly horizon, toward the armies of the English. 

"In the name of the most high Lord and Saint Denis," Jacques murmured with stony severity. Rene squared back on his horse and repeated the same reverence. He returned the crucifix to its place upon his breast and pulled his helmet on.
Horsemen raced down the column of armies, shouting, "Make ready! Ready your weapons!" The column lunged forward. 

Philip’s army had caught up with Edward, who now had little choice save to turn and fight. The English king had aligned his mounted knights and pikemen on a wide hill near the village of Crecy, archers ranked behind and in front of them and yeomen waiting beside more horses at the rear. Edward held his command from within an occupied windmill atop the hill. 

In a short space, whilst continuing in the direction of northeast, the agitated raven covered an expanse of roughly tilled earth and dived into a secluded thicket, hidden by a scant ridge. The bird’s luminous appearance lit heavily amongst the thistle and yew, its harsh call startling a young English archer who stood relieving himself in the lee. "An untoward sign on an untoward day," the archer whispered, staring at the raven. It seemed to the man that the bird saw him, indeed saw into and through him, and its unnatural gaze pierced his soul. He buckled to his knees, clutching his head as if attempting to keep it from exploding. He huffed and moaned, crumpling to the ground before dying. The bird shrieked and fluttered wildly before it too fell to its death, dropping into the undergrowth in a feathery convulsion. 

As the bird’s dead form hit the earth, the dead archer’s eyes snapped open. He lifted himself from the ground and scanned the hollow. The whites of his eyes were washed away, now shiny and black as a raven’s feathers. He retrieved a longbow that stood propped against a tree trunk, and with a full quiver of arrows slung across his back, he left the grove more filled than he had entered it. Even with his bladder emptied, his heart was brimming — brimming with the black evil that boiled in his unbeating breast. He broke through the thicket to a rigid formation of nearly a thousand archers flanking five hundred men-at-arms. The formation stood positioned atop a point overlooking a shallow valley to the east. Behind them and to the west, thousands more soldiers waited in two perfect squares. The archer took his place amongst the ranks. 

Just as Jacques Blasi had predicted, the French army charged recklessly into the fray before their commanders could restrain them. In the valley, a disorganized mass of shouting men-at-arms, spearmen, Genoese crossbowmen, and mounted French knights rushed toward the ridge occupied by the English. There was no order to the melee, and the men were knocking one another to the ground in their bloodlust, some even impaling themselves by their own inept hands. 

On the English side of the hill, the soul emptied soldier passed between long rows of archers who held longbows high and drawn.
"Steady! Hold," roared a voice of authority.
The living archers, seeing the blackness of his eyes, poured back, their ranks rippling in twain as a parting Red Sea. Stricken, the men whispered to one another, "Move ‘way! He’s the Devil in him!" None moved to stop him as he turned among ranks and marched down the ridge, leaving the English and their position behind him.
"Archer! Return to your post!" The bellowing order came from behind the ranks. The voice was that of Lord Clifford, certain in its power of command, and yet the archer maintained his slow, sure course down the hill. Behind the English formation, gray skies broke and the afternoon sun pierced the clouds. With the sun behind the English, the approaching French forces stood blinded. 

From his station amongst his own bowmen, the Earl of both Warwick and Oxford called, "Lord Clifford, return your archer! Lords, hold your men on the mark!"
The devil-archer slipped an arrow from his quiver, and without breaking stride, drew it deep into his longbow. His black eyes lay fixed on two bright specs near the far end of the valley.
"Archer! Return or be felled from behind," Lord Clifford demanded. The archer continued down the ridge, his dark figure thrown into eerie relief against the chaos of the advancing Frenchmen. Clifford moved his horse forward, followed by his bannerman. He stopped beside one of the archers, growling orders to drop the lone warrior where he stood.
"From behind, my lord?" The bowman asked uneasily.
"I order you: step forth and drop that man! Do it now, archer," Clifford hissed, gesturing furiously toward the retreating figure.
"Indeed, my lord." The archer bowed and moved to a clear position. He drew back an arrow, tested the wind, and launched the bodkin arrow down the ridge. The shaft flew straight and swift, piercing the soulless man’s back and sprouting from the center of his chest. The impaled archer paused a moment, then turned around to face the ridge. The English soldiers saw only a blur as the dead man turned around to face them, almost as if to hail them. No one saw the arrow fly from his bow and up the ridge; no one saw that arrow pierce the eye of Lord Clifford’s young bowman. Only when the bowman crumpled to the ground did they see the black-feathered arrow pushing out from his head. The devil-archer turned and continued down the field, into the roaring gape of the French charge.
"Leave him go!" Clifford spat, staring at the walking dead man. "Archers, find your targets! Be ready on my mark!" But all eyes were on the thing that still walked unaffected toward the advancing French enemy, mindless of the lodged arrow that had pierced through its torso. 

The blast of a primitive English cannon echoed across the field as the first hail of arrows rained down amongst the charging Frenchmen. Men and horses fell beneath the onslaught of the arrows, dismaying the French. The arrow shafts had a brand of bodkin arrowheads, new to battle. Bodkin points were long heavy iron tips capable of slicing through armor, and the English longbows were carved from dense Yew wood and fitted with resilient hemp bowstring that required a draw of a hundred pounds or more and hurled this devastating new arrow with incredible force. The metal suit of the French knights did little to protect them. 

Seeing his men in disarray and falling quickly, Philip ordered them to turn back and regroup. They ignored the order, charging past him and running through the valley like madmen. The Genoese crossbowmen found themselves in a hail of longbow shafts. Too far from the English to hit them, they threw down their bows and fled. Upon seeing this, Philip’s brother, Count D’Alencon, ordered them slain. Thus it happened that, on that day, more Genoese fell in battle at the hands of their French comrades than by the invading English army. 

The soulless archer walked alone on the churning battlefield. Men and horses obeyed the instinctive terror those black eyes inspired, and none would approach the bowman who moved about with apparent unconcern for the arrow that pierced him. He drew another arrow from the quiver on his back, strung and released it in one sure motion. Nearly three hundred yards downfield, the shaft thudded into the earth between the forelimbs of Jean-Jacques Blasi’s horse. Two Genoese crossbow bolts now found their mark in the ribs of the dead archer, and a third impaled his thigh. His black gaze never left its target, and the arrows did not stop him or even slow his hand. Another arrow left his bow before the first was still. This one did not miss. It blazed downward into the collar of Jacques’ armor and pierced his left lung. As he tumbled from his horse, another shaft flashed from the sky, and beside him, Rene heard a disheartening pop as his own mount crumpled beneath him. A black-fletched arrow protruded from between the animal’s eyes. But the dead archer was not immortal. Even as he released another arrow, a crossbow bolt punctured his throat and he finally fell to the ground. Rene jumped to his feet and ran to his brother. Soldiers screamed past them, their mad charge unabated. Rene lifted Jacques’ faceguard, raised his head from the ground, and cradled it in the bend of his arm. His eyes welled with tears — he knew Jacques would not leave this valley alive. 

"Do not, Rene," Jacques said, his face struggling between forced smiles and an expression of pure agony his brother had only seen on the faces of the dying. "I have fallen with honor." He coughed on the bubbling blood in his breath. "I wish to…to kiss the cross….once more."
Rene ripped away his helmet, raised his chin, and jerked on the neck chain until the crucifix tumbled from his breastplate. He fumbled with it, bringing the cross to his dying brother’s lips. Jacques kissed it and he smiled.
"Rene, when you slay Edward, ask the great Jean-Francois de France to pray for me," he whispered. "Swear it."
"I swear, Jacques. And I shall also pray for you, until no breath is left in me," Rene responded with a laugh and a shower of tears. Such was a long-standing jest amongst the brothers — the foolish title with which they had teased their ‘overly serious’ older sibling: Francois de France. As Rene pushed the cross back beneath his breastplate, his brother sighed and died in his arms. 

Across the valley, the devil-archer stirred. His work was not yet finished. The thick crossbow shaft lodged in his thigh broke off with a grisly crack as he rolled and stood to his knees. A hail of arrows peppered his light armor, but his blood did not flow. He strung an arrow and released it. Rene raised his face to heaven, wailing in both grief and defiance, even as his own death flew toward him on black wings. Hell’s arrow streaked toward the earth like a soul damned. It scored Rene through the roof of his screaming mouth, impaling his brain and cleaving his skull. He screamed no more. His body fell across his dead brother’s with an expression of horror on his contorted and bloodied face. His gaping eyes did not see the Genoese arrow that took the damned archer through his skull. The archer fell once again and moved no more. 

The English force had consisted of approximately twelve thousand men, over half of them archers. Men-at-arms stood, centering two spreading flanks of bowmen, forming a precise V of roughly eighteen hundred yards in length. The French force numbered thirty-six thousand. Wave after wave of charging knights — fifteen waves in all — raced into the English funnel of arrows, only to heap themselves upon their dead and the ones dying before them. Between the fleeing Genoese crossbowmen, the sun blinding their eyes and the untrained peasants’ mad screams about the battlefield, the French forces began to fall into complete disarray. The battlefield lay riddled with English arrows that stood out amongst the slain men and animals like stiff barley stalks. In the short space of ten hours, nearly half a million English arrows had rained down from the high ridge and over six thousand French and Genoese fell dead. Surely ‘twas a devil’s dance — and a wicked waltz it was. 

The witching hour was upon him when the wounded Philip retreated. He had little choice but to abandon his injured where they lay. Two kings, as allies to Philip, had fallen in the horrid slaughter, one of them the blind King John of Bohemia. But Philip had no recourse but withdrawal, and Edward took no prisoners. At midnight, his son, the Black Prince of Wales, moved under cloak of darkness, and with long knives, his men slashed the throats of the injured. In all, sixty-six hundred Frenchman and only a few hundred Englishmen died in the battle. ‘Twas a battle in which Lucifael was all too involved from the onset. The credit for the large number of dead was hers completely. Both kings, Edward and Philip, were merely pawns in her much grander game. She was the reigning queen, and unwittingly, two foolish kings jousted as jesters before her. 

Following the battle, Philip buckled. With the aid of two Avignon cardinals as conciliators, a truce between France and England was soon in place. Edward retained occupation of Calais and Philip became frantic. The English had removed chivalry from the rules of battle. Hand-to-hand combat, face-to-face confrontation in a battle pitting one man’s skill and power and courage against another’s had been replaced by what amounted to spearing an enemy from behind. The English longbow was a slap in the face to the Knights’ class. Although French knights scorned it — labeling it as outright cowardice — combat at a distance proved highly effective for smaller armies like Edward’s. And with Lucifael’s intervention, the art of war had changed and dusk had fallen on the glory days of knighthood. 

In desperation, Philip considered seeking out the help of the Holy See and its vast numbers of educated priests, but he required more than prayer of them. He needed finances and a solid counter to the new weapon — the rapid-firing longbow and its armor-piercing bodkin arrow. He needed new strategies to counter the unchivalrous tactics employed by the English as well. He thought that a decisive counter-weapon and definitive counterstrategy in combination might drive Edward out of Calais and back across the Channel. Nonetheless, Lucifael moved against all thrones, bitterly eager, as a wronged yet outwardly ever mastering Queen-of-queens. The throne of the Holy See and the Papal Palace of Avignon were not immune. The Pope, the College of Cardinals, and Apocrypha Cardinals were all equal prey in her game, and she wove her web among and within them all. 

Chateau Rouge - City of Avignon - April 1347

Avignon’s Chateau Rouge served as guarded residence for several College cardinals. A guard stationed at the rear entrance of the chateau shifted his feet — the prickling pain was in his left heel. He searched his boot, yet found no raised tack, no splinter or thorn inside, but he felt a prick like a tiny dagger stabbing at his heel again when he put the boot back on his foot. It would allow him no peace. He studied the dead grounds. Not a soul gave sound in the late hour. With a furtive glance toward the arched entrance of his post, the guard stole into the shrubbery that flanked the thick stony walls of the chateau. He patted his pockets hopefully and grinned at finding a folded leaf of paper in a vest pocket. Leaning against the wall, he unlaced his boot and slipped the paper inside it. He was just retying the laces when the long shadow of a hooded figure fell across him. In a panic, he straightened hastily and nearly fell.
"Guard. You are not at your post," the priest said softly. "Why?"
The guard moved toward the archway, looking chagrined, the shadowed figure also moving to block him. "I heard a noise, Friar," he stammered. "But ‘twas only cocks roosting in the bush."
"Ah, roosting cocks. I see." In better light, the soldier saw the priest as tall and rather burly, with full black hair. He seemed to be eyeing the paving stones, but when his dark eyes flashed over the face of the guard, they were piercing as daggers. "You chase clucking cocks with an unlaced boot?"
"I did not notice it, Friar.
"Ah, I see. You did not notice the loose laces." The soft voice was an eerie contradiction to the flashing eyes, and the combination set the guard’s teeth on edge. "Show me your orders, guard. This instant."
Surprised by the friar’s request — he had been wondering when this unnerving priest would leave him to his duty — the soldier reluctantly bent and removed his boot. He withdrew his makeshift bandage and offered it to the priest.
"In your unlaced boot? Ah." The priest unfolded the paper and stood beneath a wall torch to read it. "Why are your orders in your boot, guard?" 

The guard confessed all. The priest smirked, and returning the folded orders, said, "Then it appears your orders are best when trampled upon. Shall we keep the confession between us?"
"If you would, Friar. And how can I be of assistance, Friar…uhm…" The guard struggled for the priest’s name.
"Sevalle, Archbishop Lou Sevalle. I am here by personal appointment to see Cardinal Jean-Francois Blasi."
"I shall summon the Master-at-Arms. He can arrange an escort." The guard began to turn away, but the priest seized his shoulder in a painful grip.
"I see by your orders that you are new to this post," the big priest whispered. "I gather you wish no stain against you? I need not wait for an escort. I have been here many times and shall find my own way."
The soldier, who was indeed a raw recruit and none too quick in the bargain, felt a haze fall over his mind. ‘Twas imperative that he obeyed his orders, and yet, he felt compelled to allow a strange man into the chateau unescorted — an unthinkable dereliction of duty. However, it seemed imperative that he obey the soft voice too, and the command in the flashing eyes. "Visitors are escorted. I must…"
"Is it possible," the priest interrupted, "that I did not notice you away from your post? Is it also possible that you did not notice me enter? Do hear me, guard — I am but a quiet roosting cock and ‘tis late. I am weary. Do you gather my meaning?"
Looking away, the guard responded, "I gather it. As you say, then. I do not know you. Nor have I seen you."
"A lie in good intent is no ill deed. Well done. I shall see the favor settled thrice as much," the priest said, patting the guard’s shoulder with a sneer the soldier did not see. He disappeared beneath the arched entrance and drifted through the quiet corridors of the chateau. The priest came to a corner, and as he rounded it, his features and dress were abruptly changed, metamorphosed into an altogether different form. Instead of a robe, he wore the battle dress of a French knight. On his chest gleamed the gold and gem-studded Blasi cross. He turned another corner and walked placidly through a stone wall, the armor-clad visage melding into the massive stones without a sound. 

In the bedroom of Cardinal Jean-Francois Blasi, a hanging wall tapestry fluttered briefly as the form of the knight passed through the solid stones of the wall. The cardinal tossed and moaned in his gilded bed, his eyeballs rolling under their lids as they tracked the features of a nightmare landscape. Jean-Francois rolled across the huge bed, trapped in a dream in which he was swiftly falling. Abruptly, he gasped and bolted erect, wide-eyed. Sweat glistened on his brow. The nightmare, when discovered, fled the room. The cardinal’s shoulders slumped in relief, and he lay back on the bed, his eyes slowly closing — but then snapping open again. The nightmare was not over after all. He sat up, his heart fluttering oddly in his chest. There, in the corner of the room, stood the dark silhouette of an armored knight. 

"Who goes there?" Francois hissed at it, terror in his throat. The shadow stepped into the moonlight falling through the open window.
"Jacques," Francois choked. "Is it you, Jacques?" His hands flew to his face in astonishment.
"‘Tis I, Jean-Francois. Have you faired well?" It seemed the knight wore an impish grin.
"I…indeed, I have! I have prayed for you. How are you? And Rene?"
"Rene preaches, as he always has. He deemed it best that I not visit you — he thought it may distress you."
"Oh, no," Francois lied. "Not at all! You must tell him to come. Tell him, Jacques."
"I have come to warn you of a horrible thing, Francois," the knight whispered hurriedly. "France shall fall to Edward of England in the space of but twenty years. Edward shall gain the support of many French lords. He shall come from the west and the north and win the heart of the Burgundy. He shall divide France."
Quite confused, the cardinal replied, "Even with most of the lords of France behind Edward, how might he be victorious? He has no capable army!"
"He shall," the knight said sharply. "He has since sealed a pact with the Devil. ‘Tis the Devil himself who speaks to Edward of the secrets of war! Edward shall take our homeland, Jean-Francois, lest you stop him before his campaign — lest you stop him now." 

Francois’ mind spun. "That is madness! I can not stop such things. If I speak to His Holiness of this, he shall deem me mad," he said. "Can you not stop these events, you and Rene?"
"Only you can stop these events, Francois."
"I can not prevent the will of a king, Jacques. Nor can I command of the Devil. I am merely a servant of…"
"Hear me, Francois." The dark figure was indignant as it stepped closer. "The Council of the Apocrypha, you know of it?"
The cardinal stiffened slightly. Reluctantly, he confessed, "I do, but only bits of the truth. What of it?"
"They hide secrets, a weapon that can destroy the English king. You must take charge of this weapon, Francois. You must release it against him. First, however, you must learn of its proper use. Such knowledge rests in the archives of the Apocrypha, in what some call: the Naramsin Translations. In these pages, you shall learn of the design and workings of this weapon." 

"And how am I to lay hands upon these things?" Francois asked, unconvinced. "The archive is well guarded. And they use words of passage to gain access. I do not know these words, Jacques! The archives are for the Council only."
"The Devil shall whisper this secret in Edward’s ear, and Edward shall come for the Naramsin writings. With them his power shall become greater than even the Holy See. He shall take all of France if you do not heed my words. Francois, you must proceed with this act, if not for France and Church, then for your brothers — that we fell with cause and honor. Even angels fell that the Will of God be done. If others must fall that more may live, ‘tis His Will."
Francois recalled his nightmare. "Others? Who must fall?"
"Even Christ fell that others may live. I must leave, Francois." The knight turned away.
"A moment more!" Francois cried.
The knight turned back, grinning. "You are Francois de France. For the sake of God, save France. Save us all." He turned and disappeared through the wall.
"Wait! No! Jacques! Jacques!" Francois bolted from his bed, chasing the fleeting form.
He ran through his apartment chambers and threw open the door, stumbling into the hallway. "Jacques!" The long corridors lay empty, echoing his brother’s name. 

His brother’s visage had already crossed the corridor, stepped through the far wall and into a priest’s visiting room. He fell to his knees. "Jacques! Come back!" The priest sobbed, and doors creaked open, heavy-eyed guests sleepily poking their heads out of doors. 

A sleeping priest stirred at the cry outside his chambers, but his eyes did not open. His bedside oil lamp illuminated the book of scriptures lying face down on his chest, his hands laced across it. The knight stood at the foot of the bed, staring down at the dreaming man. Slowly the plates of the knight’s armor began to meld and change, blending into the gleaming skin of a lushly made woman, her flesh pale as death. Her eyes and nails were black, her waste-length hair and wide aureoles red as blood. She was the embodiment of pure and shameless Eve, the reason that all men and women were fallen. She was Lucifael. She stood over the priest, smiling. The voices of many women uttered from her pale mouth. "‘Tis a waste of a man to be alone, especially if he is not beneath me, one of my charges doing my bidding. But soon enough."
The priest grimaced, moaning in his dreams, and rolled onto his side. The open scriptures tumbled to the floor, where her bare heel trampled it as she stepped through the outer wall of the Chateau, leaving only a ghost of profane laughter to trouble the holy man in his dream. 

And quite deserving was Lucifael’s laughter — less than a month transpired before the wicked seed took root. 

Chateau Mallow - City of Avignon - May 1347

Unlike Chateau Rouge, which belonged to the College of Cardinals, Avignon’s Chateau Mallow belonged to the Council of the Apocrypha and was the residence of Cardinals Basiliste and Lean. As Lean was in England on a papal mission, the elder cardinal was alone at Chateau Mallow, and Basiliste lay fast asleep in his apartment. Atop his letter desk, a nearly extinguished oil lamp struggled to produce a flame, casting flickering shadows over a nearby quill and inkwell, and over a composed letter that bore these words: 

 
My Dearest Cardinal Lean,

Forgive my lack of fortitude, but the gravest fear has settled upon my soul. I am now convinced that Cardinal Xavier's death was not by chance and dark forces move against us. They seek access to that which we guard. 

I implore you, return to Avignon at once, and together, we shall insist upon an audience with Clement. He must be warned of the dangers. 

Make haste, my friend. I begin to fear for my own safety.

Yours As Ever,
Cardinal Basiliste
 
A brisk breeze killed the flame as the back window eased open to a shifting silhouette. A rouge guard slipped into Basiliste’s bedroom and straddled his chest, slapping a hard hand over the cardinal’s mouth. Then he drew a dagger from his shirt and whispered the questions he had been told to ask. Basiliste struggled, but he was too feeble for the strong soldier. In a baleful whisper, the intruder warned him not to cry out, the cold steel at his neck making the threat plain. The soldier removed his hand and awaited answers. 

In defiance, Basiliste stared at the silhouetted face, saying nothing. The knife moved slowly toward the cardinal’s left eye, leaving a shallow trench of blood. Basiliste gritted his teeth and made no sound. The hand clamped again over his mouth, pressing his head deep into the pillow. With his weight securing Basiliste’s chest, the guard sunk the dagger into the tender flesh beneath the eye. Basiliste screamed through his nose as the knife scraped the walls of his eye socket. The guard flipped the eye onto the floor. When some of the struggle had gone from the old man, the soldier informed him that he still had one eye left with which to bargain. 

Basiliste began to speak immediately, telling all he knew. When he finished, the guard demanded that he repeat the code words of passage to ensure they were correct. Sobbing, he swore he had told the truth. Even so, the knife slipped into the cardinal’s right eye. Again, Basiliste screamed against the cold hand, and again, he was asked to repeat the words. He gasped and stammered — the words were the same. Convinced that he had extracted the information he was hired to collect, the guard shifted himself onto Basiliste’s diaphragm, squeezing the air from his lungs. After the cardinal fell silent, the assassin slipped over the windowsill and vanished into the still eve. 

Some time later, he met his patron in the secret place they’d agreed upon prior to the grisly event. A leather purse changed hands, and the hired killer rode out of Avignon’s west gate and across the Rhone River Bridge; but before he had traveled even a mile, an informed and waiting thief with a broadsword took his head and his purse. The evidence of a vile murder disappeared into the French countryside. And its perpetrator, Cardinal Jean-Francois Blasi, now held the key to the secrets of the Council of the Apocrypha, and consequently, the two closely guarded monasteries: des Gardiens and del Cancello.





Chapter 3


Abbaye des Gardiens – Auvergne Province – Central France

Gardiens Abbey was a walled monastery upon a great stony hill that brooded over the untamed lands of central France. Beneath the abbey, an elaborate labyrinth of catacombs snaked through the bowels of the hill. Friar Ivan Gogu, senior amongst the mendicant brothers of Gardiens, had assumed responsibility for the catacombs upon his arrival at the abbey more than a decade before; and in that span of time, the vast sepulcher had become a kind of stony penance that weighed heavily upon his heart. His coarse robe whispered in the weaving passages as he hurried, keeping ever straight and traveling ever downward. Most friars rarely ventured to such great depths, as attested to by the sparse array of dry torches wedged into the stony walls. The pitch-dark passage had no branching vessels. The hollow artery simply plunged into the earth like some black-bricked road to Hell. The sole purpose of the tunnel was to tap into an underground freshwater spring to provide a pure and plentiful supply of water to the abbey catacombs in even the most demanding winemaking seasons. To that end, far beneath the sunny hillside, the tunnel ended at a single stone-carved room that Gardiens monks called the ‘Well Hole.’ A stone-lined trench divided the room, channeling a swift underground spring. 

From the darkness of the Well Hole, a whimper echoed up the tunnel. The voice was that of a child, and yet, the haunted cry bemoaned the pain of a lifetime of misery. Another sob broke loose but fell stifled, as though sorrow and pride warred incessantly within a tortured and pitiful breast. Gasping breaths followed the choked sobs, then silence – then another outburst of grief. The cycle repeated, echoing in the darkness, like the lament of a vanquished king and the wailing of an aggrieved widow woven together into one immeasurable sadness. 

“Lazarus?” The crying ceased. “Lazarus? Are you there?”
“I am…I am here, Friar. I am filling the bucket.” 
The pitch darkness surrendered itself to the light of a crackling torch held by the monk as he entered the room. He was tall, with broad back and deep chest, and the sadness in his deeply blue eyes belied the jovial smile on his lips. The well-groomed ring of silver hair, which rimmed Friar Ivan’s head like the fallen halo of an angel, complemented his clean and close salt-and-pepper beard. A severely hunchbacked boy rose from the spring, a full pail of water at his feet. He wore a similar robe of rough-woven cloth as the friar, however, with a deep hood pulled forward over his head. A mask of the same material covered the face of the child. Two holes were cut where there might have been eyes, and a small flap of cloth covered the mouth. The dirty covering resembled the mask of a leper with a monk’s cowl draped about it. The boy was an apprentice, yet his quarters were not with the other abbey squires. Lazarus lived here, within the catacombs, in a quaint room that Friar Ivan had appointed for him, replete with a rudely fashioned bed and thick blankets. Although he appeared every bit as old as thirteen years, his slight stature and thin limbs made him appear much younger. Unknown to all the Abbey residents, save himself and Friars Ivan and Odino, Lazarus was a Gogu – the misbegotten child of Ivan Gogu. 

“What troubles you, son?”
“Nothing, sir. I have the water now.”
“Are you crying, Lazarus?” The boy pressed his fingers against his face and the cloth beneath his eyeholes darkened with moisture.
“The hood slips and I can not see. I turn my head and it slips. I open my mouth and it slips. I sleep and it slips. It wears my ears and the laces catch my hair.”
“Then we must make you a new hood. I shall double my efforts on it and make it comfortable. Would you like a new hood?”
“This hood has an odor. It shall no longer wash clean. I know how to make the next one better, Friar. I can show you.”
“Then you shall. You can help me make the next one.” Ivan stooped, and with his free hand, he hugged Lazarus.
“I have a surprise for you, son.”
“What is it?”
“I have discovered a book of animals in the scriptorium.”
“With birds?”
“Yes, the book is filled with leaves about birds – with colorful paintings of them, even.” 
“Might I see it this eve, Friar?”
“Yes, I shall bring it to you. ‘Tis new – from Paris! Yet, I must return it at first light, lest the others find it missing. You may have the book this eve, but firstly we must clean.”
Briefly, Lazarus said nothing, and though his features lay concealed, a pensive air overtook him – his shrouded face turned its burlap gaze on the monk. 
“Friar, may I ask you something?”
“Pray, do.”
“Shall I be ugly when I am grown?”
Ivan sought the boy’s full attention by resting his hand on his shoulder. “Listen to me, son. You are not ugly. You are beautiful. You are not wearing the hood to hide ugliness. You are wearing the hood to hide your beauty from ugliness. Ugliness fears beauty as evil fears the pure heart.” The monk stood abruptly, and after admonishing the child to remain, he stepped from the room, torch in hand. Blackness enveloped the small, hunched figure. After a moment, cautious footsteps stirred the silence. In the black room, Ivan found the boy and squatted before him. “Put the pail down, son.” Ivan felt the floor behind him, found a pebble, and covered it in his fist. He likewise closed his other hand, then presented both to the boy. Ivan lifted his left hand. “What have I got in my hand, Lazarus?”
“A stone.”
Ivan lifted his right hand. “And in this hand?”
Lazarus answered, “Nothing.”
“Can you be certain, Lazarus?”
“I heard you pick up a stone, and then I heard you do nothing.”
“Catch the stone,” Ivan said suddenly, tossing it through the air. In the dark, he listened for the pebble to clink against the floor. It did not.
“Pray tell, what do you hold, son?”
“The stone.”
“And why might it be in your hand, Lazarus?”
“You commanded that I catch it.”
“What you caught was more than a stone.” 
“How is it more?”
“‘Tis a confessor of truth. Now, toss the stone to me.” Ivan felt a small hand in his own and pulled away. “No, son. Throw the stone to me, just as I threw it to you.” Lazarus obediently tossed the stone. There was a clink as the pebble struck the floor.
“Forgive me, Friar. I must toss it again.” 
“No. Be still, son — listen. Why did I not catch the stone?”
“You can not see without light.”
“Indeed. Now, what truth did the stone tell us?”
“A stone can not speak, Friar.” There was the hint of amusement in the child’s voice.
“Yet, it already spoke! When you caught the stone, where I did not, the stone confessed to the whole of the world that you are indeed beautiful. Do you gather my meaning, son?”
“I do,” the boy said slowly.
“Do you?”
“I do, Friar,” he replied before reciting with little passion what Ivan had long impressed upon him. “I am beautiful in my element, in the world in which I am equipped to succeed. Yet, how much longer must we remain in the Abbey?” 
Ivan rose to his feet and pulled the child against him. “Soon enough, we will leave.”
“How soon?”
“We shall be living in Burgundy before the end of year, and you shall never wear the hood again. However, for the moment, we shall stitch you the best one yet. It shall be the last.”
“Can Migual and Thateus have new hoods as well? Theirs also slip. They have told me so.” Both Migual and Thateus were severely deformed squire boys who, unlike Lazarus, had been abandoned on the abbey steps to be taken in and reared by the Gardiens monks. However, like Lazarus, they too wore full leper-like hoods with eyeholes to conceal unsightly disfigurements. The three boys shared a common bond in having identical outward appearances, and together and fully cloaked, they might have resembled a trio of little burlap ghosts. Frequently, Ivan would summon Migual and Thateus to the catacombs to work alongside Lazarus, and as Lazarus had always been confined to the catacombs and spent much time alone, doing this brought Ivan as much if not more joy than it did Lazarus. For the three boys, giant Friar Ivan was the maker of their masks – a savior and face-saver. For Ivan, when these ghost-like children were together and Lazarus burst into laughter, a rare sound in the catacombs, the unexpected and memorable merriment invariably served to still his troubled soul. 

“We shall stitch them new hoods as well. You can give them their new hoods yourself, son. Would you like that?”
“I would.”
“Very well, then. You shall.”
“Can they come with us?”
Ivan took a deep breath before he spoke. “They must remain here, Lazarus. The abbey is their home. The abbey is good for them.”
“Can Friar Odino come?”
Ivan threw his head back and laughed. “Lazarus, really! If we left without Friar Odino, he would chase after us and beat us with a goat.” The child laughed. “Do you wish him to beat us with a goat? Of course Friar Odino shall come with us.”
“Yet, where shall we go?”
“Far, far away from here, Lazarus. Now, hand me the pail. We have much to do.”
“I shall carry the pail, Friar.”
“No. Give me the pail, Lazarus. You may carry the next.” Ivan had retrieved the torch and now held it out to the boy. “You lead the way.”
“The pail is heavy, Friar. I must carry it.”
“I have the pail. Take the torch and lead the way, son.” 
Reluctantly, the boy took the torch and lit the way, feeling awkward that Ivan walked behind him.

Nearly an hour had elapsed as Lazarus scrubbed down ornate wall carvings in the main corridor, which were blackened by years of torch oil fumes and soot. In that span of time, the brimming pail of pristine water had become half a pail of darkened soup as viscous as India ink. Another trip to the well hole was in order. Lazarus lifted the pail and started down the corridor, but he stopped dead upon seeing a black rat race down along the base of the wall beside him. Friar Clodius bumped into the boy from behind, jarring the bucket and spattering a good deal of the filthy slop on the front of the boy’s robe. 
“Move out of the way,” Clodius snarled. He continued past Lazarus, chasing the rat with a long wooden rod.

“Forgive me, Friar,” Lazarus mumbled, continuing down the corridor, looking down at the mess on his robe. He caught up with Clodius, who had the rat cornered between the wall and a wall column. 
“I have you now,” Clodius spoke to the petrified rat. Lazarus stopped behind the friar to catch a glimpse of the rat. Unaware that Lazarus stood behind him, Clodius raised the rod slowly, intending to ram the rat into the corner and kill it.

Abruptly, Lazarus dropped the pail, sloshing dirty water upon the floor and flushing the condemned rat out of the crevice. The filthy liquid splashed over Friar Clodius’ feet and up his robe. Startled, he yelled and turned on the boy, as the rat, now drenched, scurried around a corner and to safety.

“You! You did that intentionally!” he scolded Lazarus. 
“Forgive me Friar, Lazarus replied. He turned the bucket upright, dropped to his knees and hastily sopped up the water around the monk’s sandals. Clodius raised the rod at him, and Lazarus braced himself for the blow.

“Clodius!” Friar Ivan said as he came storming up the hallway. 
Clodius hastily lowered the stick and addressed him. “He threw a pail of filthy water on me!”
“What?” Ivan stopped before them. He studied the mess on both Lazarus’ and Clodius’ robes.
“I cornered a rat and he threw foul water on me to protect it! I demand an apology and punishment issued at once!”
“Lazarus,” Ivan asked. “Is this true?”
“I dropped the pail, Friar.”
“Intentionally?”
“I did, Friar.” Lazarus lowered his head.
“There! You see! I knew it,” Clodius yelled.
“Lazarus? Why?” Ivan asked him as he held his hand up to stifle the other man’s outburst. 

“Thou shalt not kill, Friar,” Lazarus softly stated. Clodius huffed and rolled his eyes in disgust.
Ivan continued. “But that rule applies only to men – not rats, yes?” 
Lazarus shifted his feet and, after a pause, he answered, “I know, Friar, yet…”
Ivan interrupted him. “Then I gather that you might owe the good friar an apology.”
“Forgive me, Friar Clodius. I wish to be corrected now.” Lazarus humbled himself.
Clodius raised his stick again, but Ivan stepped between them and addressed Lazarus. “Your penitence shall be this: to fetch a fresh pail of water and clean the engraved walls. Now, move along.”
“Indeed, Friar.” Lazarus bowed hastily and scurried away with the pail.

Clodius’ mouth dropped. “You already had him cleaning the walls!”
Ivan, a full head taller than Clodius, stepped close to his face and growled, “What affairs do you claim in my catacombs, save chasing rats? Hear me well: you oversee the abbey grounds and I oversee what is beneath them. You correct your squires and I shall correct mine! Now, take your leave at once, Clodius!”
The scolded friar retreated, storming up the corridor, his murmurs echoing in the stone abyss as he hastily departed. “I shall see the boy corrected, Ivan! I now take it to the Abbot!”

“Kindly do! And share with him that you chase rats in my catacombs instead of tending to your own responsibilities,” Ivan shouted back. Clodius refused to reply, disappearing in the gloom.

Clodius was a bitter man. Even the Abbot had little tolerance for him. Fortunately for Ivan, Abbot Vonig looked upon him as the son he never had. In the eyes of the Abbot, Ivan could do no wrong, and all the monks of the abbey knew it. Naturally, to befriend Ivan was to befriend the Abbot, and of course, the wine cellar of the catacombs. Conversely, the surest way to anger Ivan was to mistreat Lazarus, Migual, or Thateus – those fragile squires damned by deformity.
Ivan turned away, finally revealing the grin he had struggled to conceal the entire time. He threw back his shoulders and clasped his hands behind his back like a condemned yet proud prisoner bound for a march into Hell, and he descended deeper into the catacombs, the darkness swallowing him up.
***

Lazarus had long since completed his chores. Ivan tore him from the book of painted birds and saw him to bed, extinguished the few burning catacomb torches, and retired to the dormitory for the eve. Most all of the monks of Gardiens had long since sought their sleep. 

Friar Delon Odino left the monks’ dormitory through a small side door and stole across the mist-covered courtyard for his nightly indulgence. He struck a torch only after he entered the catacomb stairwell. Several goblets later, he was joined in the wine cellar by a sleepy Lazarus. For both, this was quite a routine practice. They enjoyed the suspense of it, the thrill of the illicit. Lazarus knew that he was not to leave his room after Ivan’s departure, and Odino, whose weakness for the fruit of the vine was not the best-kept secret of the abbey, had been warned to stay away from the catacombs after nightfall.

Now, Odino sat atop a workbench, slumped against the cellar wall with his legs spread out before him. Vats of aged wine and kegs of dregs filled the room around him. The air was heavy with the sticky and pungent odor of fermented fruit.

“Ah, Lazarus, my boy. I presumed that you lay sleeping. Come in! Speak!” Odino grinned, waving a half-empty goblet. Aside from Ivan, Odino was the only other monk of the abbey who truly knew the boy. In many ways, the fat, rosy-cheeked friar was like an uncle to Lazarus – uncle and friend. “You did not gather that I was coming?” Odino asked him, the words spilling sloppily from his wine-wetted lips.
“What?” Lazarus asked sleepily.
“With you and Ivan – out of the Abbey.”
“I did not know if you were coming with us or not.”
“And if you leave without me, I shall chase after the both of you and beat you with a goat.” They chuckled together. “In an odd way, I shall miss this abbey.”
“And the wine?” Lazarus asked. Odino cast a disapproving eye at him. Lazarus paced around the room, now a bit more awake, touching every thing within arm’s reach as he went, heading nowhere but around again, in child’s play.

At length, Odino again spoke. “I have noticed a fire burning in you the past days – your blood is hot. You wish to be free of these catacombs, yes?”
“I wish to see the world – outside of books and beyond these walls. And birds — I wish to see live birds flying, not like the dead one you brought me.”
Odino burst forth with a hardy laugh. “You still have that rotting thing?”
“I opened its wings and it fell to pieces. I wrapped and laid it in one of the crypts. Did Friar Ivan tell you when we shall leave for Burgundy?”
“Soon enough, boy. Soon enough.”

After a short pause, Lazarus asked, “Friar, may I ask you something?”
“Indeed.”
“Are you a bit concerned about leaving the Abbey?” Lazarus searched his face for any message that might be conveyed there beyond whatever words the friar might choose.
“The routine has grown stale. I can not keep up with the days.”
“What shall we do then, without the abbey?”
“Well, for one thing, we shan’t have to live the order of the day. Does that not please you?”
“I suppose. I do not know.” Lazarus lowered his hooded head.
“Of course, you do not. ‘Tis all you know, these catacomb walls and the same dreary routine, but you shall see, soon enough. You do not belong down here – your father knows it well. He sees what I have seen for some time now: a bird fluttering in its cage.”
“What bird?” Lazarus looked about the cellar. “Where?”
“You are the bird and the abbey is the cage,” Odino stated matter-of-factly.

Lazarus leaned against the table beside Odino. “Does the wine taste as it smells, Friar?”
“Even better.” The monk smiled and toasted the boy with a flourish before drinking deeply from the rough wooden cup.
“It smells bad. It must taste so, as well.”
“After a few cups, one does not dwell upon taste.” Odino wiped a sleeve across his grin and held the empty vessel out to the boy. “Help a fat and tired fool, my boy.” Lazarus took the cup.
“Why do you drink the wine more than the other monks, Friar?” Lazarus asked, approaching a wine keg.
“First Timothy, 23 of 5?” Odino said quickly. 
The boy did not hesitate. “No longer be drinking water, but a little wine be using, because of thy stomach and of thine often infirmities.”
“Once more, boy. This time in Latin!”
Lazarus replied obediently, “Noli adhuc aquam bibere sed vino modico utere propter stomachum tuum, et frequentes tuas infirmitates.”
Odino laughed, stopped abruptly, and snapped his fingers. “Not that barrel! This one, boy,” Odino stated, pointing to another keg. Lazarus moved to a nearer keg and carefully filled the cup. 
“‘Tis all the same, I gathered. Why, this barrel, Friar?”
After Lazarus returned and gave the goblet to Odino, the monk asked him, “Luke, 39 of 5?”
Again, the boy did not hesitate. “And no one, having drunk old, doth immediately wish new, for he saith, The old is better.” Odino rolled with such a hearty laugh that he sloshed wine all over the cellar floor. Like a confused dog, Lazarus cocked his head to one side and froze as a statue whilst Odino collected himself. Then Lazarus asked, “What is it? I speak it correct.”
“Indeed, you do – as you always do, Lazarus. Yet just now I have discovered the secret of it,” the monk sputtered, still shaking with restrained jollity. “As I see it, you have a small scriptorium of very tiny books beneath that mask of yours. And you turn their leaves with your nose.”
“I have no tiny books, Friar,” Lazarus plainly replied.
Odino laughed at the boy’s earnestness. “Then how do you do it, boy – recite every word as you do?”
“I can read.”
“Others can read too, and yet, words do not remain in their minds as they do in yours. How might you read something only once and know it forever? None in this abbey can do it. In all of my days, I know of none, save you. Tell me the magic of it.”
“I only recall it, Friar.”
“Of course you do, boy.” Odino sighed. “And only the Lord knows the depth of such an uncommon blessing as yours.” Again, he toasted Lazarus before gulping the last of the wine from his cup. Then he thrust the goblet toward Lazarus for refilling, but the boy had turned away and was facing the cellar entryway.

Lazurus turned back to Odino. “Friar, someone approaches! Perhaps three, I gather.” Odino scooted off the workbench as if his ass were aflame. He waddled to the back wall and hid his goblet behind a vat. Lazarus moved to the other wall, pulled the torch from its bracket, dipped it in the oil pot and extinguished every feature in the cellar – the room fell black as pitch.
Odino searched in the darkness with arms waving in the direction where he last saw Lazarus. “Come here, boy. Lead me,” Odino whispered.
“Lead you where, Friar?”
“Shush. Mind your tongue. Lead me out of here. I can not see,” Odino hissed impatiently, feeling through the air for Lazarus.
“Where do you wish to go?” Lazarus asked, gently taking Odino’s hand.
“Blazes of Angels! Anywhere, boy! Get me out of here!”
“To a crypt, then?”
“Yes, a crypt! At once!” Odino hissed.

Lazarus led Odino out of the wine cellar and down the black passage. “Here, Friar,” he whispered, guiding Odino’s hand to a thick iron handle. The monk pulled open the heavy door, gesturing in the darkness where he had last heard the boy’s voice.
“Inside! Make haste!”
“I am in here, Friar.” The voice came from behind him now, inside the sepulcher.
“Lazarus,” Odino whispered, pushing the door closed, “How can you know so much and yet gather so little?”
“I do not gather your meaning, Friar.”
“Of course not. You can read from pages in your mind, yet you do not see my meaning?”
“I did not know where you wished to go, Friar.”
“Ah! Then, you do gather my meaning.”
“You did not tell me where you…”
The catacomb doors opened and Odino cut him short, “Shush, boy. They are coming.” Three monks marched down the tunnel just far enough to fetch torches and a pail of oil, and just as quickly, they left again. After hearing the catacomb door close, both Lazarus and Odino slipped from the crypt. Lazarus returned to his room, and Odino, still drunk, followed the walls out of the catacombs and returned to his dormitory quarters.

Elsewhere, in a quaint second-story cell of the monks’ dormitory, Ivan lay fast asleep. Through a narrow open window, a swelled moon revealed the sparse contents of the room: a bed with a wooden cross upon the wall above it, a writing desk lined with books, and a small crate of Ivan’s worldly belongings. Silence permeated these meager quarters.

Then a flapping of wings broke the dark stillness, and a luminous raven shone atop the windowsill, its cold eye frozen on Ivan. The room chilled immediately and Ivan’s breath churned a fog. At once, the raven leapt into the room before transforming into a nude woman who strode across the floor on bare feet.

Lucifael slung her long hair and halted at the foot of Ivan’s bed. With pitch eyes and a coy grin, she ogled him. “Fate joins us again,” she whispered. She swept a black fingernail over him. “Stay sleeping, my love.” Ivan grimaced, now encased within a sensuous dreamscape. “And this time our seed shall mend history, corrupting you at the same time.” She eased aside his coverings, undid his garments and caressed his paler parts. “And I shan’t lie below you.” He groaned as his condition became presentable, and she mounted and rode the bare horse. The fog of Ivan’s breath quickened like the snorts of a galloping steed, his eyes rolling wildly beneath lids locked in sin. And in that short space of devil-sown lust, just as a hundred monks have suffered since, yet another Gardiens friar fell from grace.

First light came as it always did, too soon for several of the senior friars of the abbey, and far too soon for Friar Odino after an eve’s pilgrimage to the wine cellar. Long before most of the dormitory woke, the senior monks fell into their routine tasks – care for the horses, preparation of morning meals, and various other duties that required them to be the first to start the day. Ivan’s predawn call-to-arms was breathing life back into the abbey catacombs. He would be joined by his permanent catacomb squire, Lazarus, who proved himself by making and replacing, lighting and extinguishing, the many catacomb torches. Between the two, the tunnels remained in pristine condition for the heavy monk-and-squire traffic that each day offered.

Troubled by his dreams of the previous night, yet unaware of the visit of the raven spirit, Ivan embraced his daily routine. From beneath his bed, he retrieved a wooden bowl draped with a cloth – his untouched meal from the prior eve. He left the dormitory with a flaming torch and the food bowl, crossed the dark abbey grounds, and entered a long building that held the catacomb entryway. He strode down its corridor, turned a corner, swung open a wooden door, and descended a stone staircase with torch on high. His stride was long and deliberate as he entered the catacombs, his rough robe flickering in the torchlight like a homespun curtain dancing in the breeze of an opened window.

As the monk drifted deeper into the ancient winding tunnels, arched recesses appeared between fluted columns of carved stone along one wall. The walls of the recesses consisted of elaborately carved grotesque figures. The strange tableaux stood, blackened with centuries of torch smoke, depicting hideous combinations of humans and beasts. There were knights with the heads of birds or dogs, demons and beasts of prey with human faces, creatures with horrific features and fur-covered, humanoid limbs. In all the hundreds of figures, there was a single constant – each bore a pair of bony wings, like those of bats. The ghastly wall sculptures were an aggregation of aberrations that only the damned and demented might appreciate. The friar had often wondered what possessed some long ago occupant of this dark labyrinth to make such a marvel of evil and despair.

Further down still, the carvings gave way to smooth walls in which were embedded a series of wooden doors, entrances to crypt rooms housing the mummified remains of privileged papal dignitaries: former abbots, friars of the Lower Council, even a few bishops and other nobility. The friar took to the right at one fork and at another to the left. The catacomb now opened into a maze of tunnels, twisting away in every direction. Ivan wove a familiar path through the labyrinth of stone blocks and chiseled subterranean rock, though his deep blue eyes were distant, drowned in a dark and troubled sea.

After a time, he stopped beside a narrow entryway. Securing the torch in a niche in the wall, he leaned into the darkness and spoke. “Lazarus, I bring more food. First you eat, then we light the torches.” He retrieved a slender wax wick from a pocket in his robe, lighting it on the torch. He slipped into the room and applied the wick to an oil lamp resting on an upturned oak keg. Dim light filled the tiny room, exposing a small plank bed set against the wall. On it sat a sleepy Lazarus, his hood off, his fists rubbing his eyes. The boy yawned, exposing a set of canine fangs, thick and blunt. 

Lazarus’ brow was heavy and his jutting jaw resembled that of a lower order of primate. At the peak of his forehead, running back along the center of his skull, were ridges that grew increasingly larger as they disappeared behind his head and joined precisely with his spine. But these lay mostly hidden, concealed by a thick mat of wild black hair that hung to the boy’s shoulders. Unlike the other resident cleric boys, his crown remained unshaven. Lazarus’ eyes were of such a piercing indigo blue that they appeared almost black in the dim light of the lamp. From the sides of his head, two folds of skin rose abruptly and then lay backward, resembling oversized, hairless bat’s ears rather than those of a boy. His appearance was more strange than hideous, his odd features somehow mythical and perhaps even alluring in an almost unholy way. A loose-fitting robe sprawled over the boy’s thin shoulders, eventually gathering about his ankles. Course burlap socks wrapped his feet, the bottoms frayed and caked black with grime trampled from the tunnel floors.

Ivan stood frozen for an instant, eyes wide, then stepped toward the plank bed so forcefully that the sleep-dazed boy cringed back against the wall. “Put it back on,” the monk ordered harshly. “This very moment!” Ivan set the bowl down with a clatter and searched the room. “Where is it? You are to wear the cowl always, boy! Do you hear me? Always!” The monk’s distracted gaze was gone, and in its place was a tortured expression that Lazarus thought must be anger, though it was not.
Ivan’s stern scolding awoke him fully, and the boy obeyed, reaching behind himself to retrieve the hood from the bed, complaining as he slipped the mask over his head. “Friar, I can not sleep. The cowl turns and covers my breath.”
Ivan sat beside him, and Lazarus turned his head so that Ivan could tighten the laces on the back of the hood. “No matter. You must wear it always. Turn up the cloth flap over your mouth, if you must, but leave the face-cowl on.”
“Might I wear the new cowl, Friar?”
“‘Tis not ready. I am stitching it, still.” Ivan worked his fingers down the leather laces, periodically tightening them, whilst Lazarus aligned the holes with his eyes. “It shall be ready soon,” Ivan said, his voice losing some of its hardness. “Now, keep these laces drawn tightly, and this one shan’t turn so. Ah, I see. Your hair is a bit too full. We shall thin it when I finish the new hood.” Tying the cords off firmly, the monk rose from the bed. “There, tight again. If you remove it again, then be certain I shall discipline you for it, Lazarus. Now, here. Eat.” Ivan retrieved the bowl and set it in Lazarus’ hands. 

The monk moved over to the doorway and leaned against it. Now and again, he peered out of the room and back at Lazarus, as if keeping guard over the boy. He watched as bits of bread soaked in goat’s milk disappeared under the hood. Shortly, Ivan pulled the torch from the wall. “I shall prepare the torch wrappings. Meet me in the wine cellar when you have finished,” Ivan stated, stepping out of the doorway.

Lazarus called to him, “Friar, may I ask you a question?”
Ivan returned “What is it, son?”
“Why does the gatestone scream?”
“Scream? Why do you say that it screams?”
“It feels louder than I have ever recalled, as if it were in my very room.”
“I do not wish for you to think about that…thing, Lazarus. Leave it alone. You are not to know it exists. Think of something else, perhaps birds, trees, or the big rolling rivers of which I have told you. Consider even angels in all of their purity. Can you do that for me?”
“I shall, Friar.” Ivan was about to leave the cell when the boy called after him again.
“Can birds fly as high as angels? To Heaven, even?”
“No, Lazarus.” Now the monk sounded only tired. “Heaven is for Man, not for the beasts of the earth or the fowls of the air.” Then he added, “Do not mention the gatestone again. Not to anyone.” 
“Friar – am I a Man?”
“You are still a boy. You have much to learn, but one day… Enough questions. Eat. And remember what I speak of the gatestone – do you gather me?”
“I do, Friar.” Lazarus turned back to his food as Ivan disappeared.
***

Aboveground, in the empty cathedral, a black beetle emerged from a hollow and scurried across the stone floor toward the sanctuary. It crossed the chancel through the last light of a morning moon and ran against the slab upon which the altar sat. Between the floor and the slab ran a thin crevice, and the beetle searched for an entrance roomy enough for its winged and hunched back. At once, its motion ceased. Frozen, it flipped onto its back. The insect had found not an entrance but an exit, and seeping from that crevice was a living darkness. 

The curious beetle was swallowed in the pitch shade that radiated from far below, spreading up and straight through the flagstones like light – yet this was the antithesis of light, a darkness more fell than any starless night. Where the blackness touched, there was nothingness, and even shadows of the moon seemed bright by comparison.

As this most unholy darkness reached the edge of the sanctuary, a blast of dust accompanied the noise of a steady hiss that originated from beneath the altar stone, blowing like a volcanic vent. An acrid, sulfurous substance corrupted the air as a pale gas ebbed from the crevice and began to gather form, roiling whilst growing increasingly dense. The shifting mass bolted upward, weaving and spiraling through flying buttress columns and circling the ceiling like a trapped housefly. Then it dived, strafing the sanctuary with tendrils of oily, noisome cloud before disappearing down a corridor of clergy dressing rooms.

In a corner of a dressing room, heavy against the floor, the cloud gurgled as the mist thinned, revealing a darkening mass that grew within. Bone, ligament, tissue, and skin congealed, ending with a hawk-like screech that ripped through the silent corridors of the cathedral. — just like hundreds of times before. Another grotesque was born, another Eljo offspring delivered through the Gardiens monolith. The child was of an ancient and beastly breed, old as the dawn of Hell and spawned only from the carnal union of Man and an angel wicked enough to deliver such an aberration of Creation. The grotesque was a female, nearly human in form, and comparable with a girl of six or seven years in size and stature. Aside from silver hair, her appearance was a perfect mirror image of the squire boy, Lazarus.
***

From the eye view of a bird in flight, the cathedral abbey formed the shape of a cross, with a vertical main hall intersected by a pair of spreading wings. There were three sets of external double doors: the main entrance, positioned at the base of the cross, and others at the outermost of each wing. The sanctuary lay at the heart of the cross, atop the monolith. The confessionals and the penitence and flogging rooms lined the head of the cross. The sacristy, vestry, and practical rooms stood housed in the left arm of the cross, and an oratory of terraced seats formed the right arm. 

The dark hours of predawn flew by, and steady clanging haunted the countryside as the bell tower ushered forth another day of ora et labora – prayer and work. In the dim light of dawn, long formations of monks drifted through a thin mist toward the oratory wing of the cathedral. A clinking noise of outer door latches shattered the crypt-like peace within the church. An acolyte cleared a path with a smoking censer, swinging the perforated metal ball to and fro like a pendulum. Long rows of terraced wooden seats faced one another across a wide center aisle. The foremost seats were flush with the floor, whilst the rear rows pressed against the walls. Each seat, save designated guest seats nearest the back walls, belonged to but one monk. The columns of priests broke apart, and each man found his way to his respective place. 

Together, Friars Ivan and Odino stepped up and shuffled down the same aisle. Only a few seats down, Ivan stopped and whispered over Friars Clodius and Greville, “Find any more rats, Clodius?” Clodius replied with a defiant glare. 
 
Ivan smirked and moved on as Odino stopped and patted the top of Greville’s head. “He has managed to find Greville, here!” The sour monk slapped Odino’s hand away. 
 
Odino chuckled and followed Ivan as Greville growled after him, “Your day comes soon enough, Odino!”
 
“Pay them no mind,” Clodius consoled Greville with high chin and stiffened lip. “Even without the Abbot, we shall see both of them humbled.”

As he sat several seats down, Ivan noticed the occupied seat below him and broke into a grin. “Nicholas!” A hearty sun-tanned young friar looked up and smiled at him. Absent from the abbey for several months, Friar Nicholas remained stationed as the town priest of the nearby village of Murat. 
 
Nicholas spoke, “The prodigal monk returns!”
 
Ivan chuckled and asked, “How fare the good people of Murat?”
 
“They are in sore need of guidance.” Ivan nodded in confirmation. 
 
Odino approached and, spotting Nicholas, he halted abruptly. “Do my eyes deceive me?”
Odino rushed forward, Nicholas arose, and the two monks embraced. 
 
“Tis good to see you again,” Nicholas replied.
 
Odino whispered mischievously in his ear, “And how fares the lovely widow of Murat?”
 
Nicholas sighed and shook his head at the floor. “She tries my faith, brother.” They snickered as nearby heads turned to reveal expressions of utter constipation. The two friars collected themselves and sat. The bell of the abbey tower tolled and the assemblage fell quiet.

From a front row seat, a young friar rose and stepped toward a podium that was in the center of the aisle. Atop the podium sat an open oversized binding of the Holy Scriptures. The young monk rounded the prop, bowed respectfully, and kissed the book. He cleared his throat, rested a pointing finger in its pages and read aloud, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who…”

“Screech!” The priest grabbed the podium and turned about, searching intensely for the origins of the horrid voice that pierced the air. More than a hundred pairs of wide eyes darted past him and toward the Sanctuary. Mouths dropped. Nearly all of the monks had heard that sound before, yet they wore identical expressions of confusion.

Abbot Vonig leapt to his feet, scowling, all eyes directed upon him. “I expect all but the Lower Council to return to the dormitory. At once!” Nicholas and a hundred other frightened monks jumped to their feet and found their way to the door. The Abbot called after them, “Prostrate yourselves in your cells and repeat your acts of contrition ‘til I bid otherwise!” Thirty-three senior monks remained, including Ivan, Odino, Clodius and Greville.

When the last priest had exited and closed the cathedral door, Vonig turned to scrutinize the remainder of the congregation of astonished faces. His own countenance glowed with anger and was twisted in disgust. More screeches echoed. As Vonig’s burning eyes swept across the rows of monks, craning heads drooped and curious eyes fell hastily to examining the floor.

“Which of you is responsible? Confess yourself!” No priest confessed. Vonig turned and stormed to the podium. “Very well, then. Take your positions!” Instantly, they obeyed, knowing the routine that followed: With each new grotesque born, all paid the price. They always did, and they would pay now, just as they would many times to come. As one, the Lower Council friars rose, stepped down from the terraced rows, and gathered in the center aisle. Each dropped to his knees, clasping his hands in the small of his back.

Before the Sanctuary, the three investigators braced themselves and swung the door open — nothing. The monks stepped carefully into its dim interior. Save a few robe-draped statues, pedestals, and other religious artifacts, the room stood empty. “Hiss!” Their heads popped up to discover the grotesque with wings spread and wild silver hair baring fangs and perching on a stony ledge near the ceiling. She let fly a torrent of angry sounding words, strange and exotic to the ear – the language of angels.

Glaring over the podium at the shaved crowns of heads humbly bowed, the Abbot turned his attention to the book before him. He flipped through its pages, his neck and ears glowing red in anger as screeches and foreign words still rumbled. One of the three investigators returned, clasping a flesh wound on his jaw. Blood seeped between his fingers and dotted the floor. “Leave us,” the Abbot responded. “Tend your wound.” The monk bowed and left a considerable trail of red toward the cathedral door whilst shouts and screeches attested to the continued struggle in the Sanctuary.

Shortly, his two companions approached, wrestling with a struggling grotesque wrapped in a monk’s robe. The Abbot stopped them at the podium and they held her against the floor. Muffled yet insistent, she continued her running harangue of angelic condemnations.

Vonig stabbed a finger onto the scriptures and screamed over her and his congregation, “And the Lord said: Go, get thee down, for thy people have corrupted themselves!” His rage thundered through the flying buttresses of the ceiling. The Abbot stole a glimpse at the priests’ long faces. A seemingly strange calm fell over him, his features changing in tune with an altogether different mindset. Gently, he closed the book, patted its cover, and stared at it.

He heaved the book from the podium, raised it high, and hurled it. The book crashed to the floor between the monks. Leaning over the podium, he bellowed as the protestations of the grotesque punctuated his tirade, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me! Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in the heavens, in the earth, or in the waters beneath the earth! Thou shalt neither bow down nor serve them, for I am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me!”

Vonig beheld them intently, but as a father to his wayward sons, trying to convince himself that these were not evil men. As their Abbot, their failure was his failure, their guilt his guilt. Nevertheless, men are men, holy or not, the Abbot told himself. Even as Adam desired a woman’s loins, lust is lust, in wicked heart or pure, even as a writhing snake knew Adam’s loins. From monkey to monk, desires of the flesh lay seared into the blueprint of Creation. This new grotesque confirmed Vonig’s belief that Man would continue to obey the Laws of Creation even at the expense of his own laws of faith. 

The Abbot rounded the podium and strode amongst them. “You!” He kicked a monk. “What shall I do with the thing?”
 
The startled priest responded, “I know not, Abbot. ‘Tis not mine.”
 
“All of them are yours,” Vonig scolded him. “You are a Council friar!” He moved to another. “You! Where shan’t I go with it?” 
 
The second replied, “Atop the church?”
 
“And why not?” The Abbot matter-of-factly questioned.
 
“‘Tis full.”
 
“Indeed. ‘Tis so.”
 
“Perhaps the Notre Dame?”
 
“Oh, but they desire no more.”
 
A third monk spoke up, “Abbot, I know of holy ground to the north – a new cathedral. Might we send the gift to…”
 
Vonig spun about and cut him off, “No! No more of them leave the grounds of the Council monasteries! We have every order of the Holy See convinced that Gardiens and Cancello are filled only with master stone smiths, sculpting these…these gifts! Would that we might master ourselves. No, not gifts. Sins! Yours, sealed in stone! Enough!” The monk broke his gaze from Vonig’s piercing glare. Vonig turned and paced between them, “Gather this much. The statues are but timeless records of your sins – records in stone that shall earn you a just claim to Hell. And this woman spirit of the gatestone…”

Immediately, a flood of carnal images flashed through Ivan’s mind, perverse mental pictures of his dreamed union with Lucifael, and he realized that the midnight tryst had been no dream as he had first fancied.

“She is alluring, is she not? Ripe and willing? And oh, so eager to please…” Vonig’s voice echoed throughout the chamber.

Ivan’s eyes flew wide open and settled on the bound and struggling grotesque, as the full realization of the unwitting part he had played in its creation nearly overwhelmed him.

“And when you earn damnation, perhaps this mistress of your lust shall greet you in Hell and comfort you as she once did on earth. Yet, since she shall no more have need to tempt you with her lurid charms to see you fall, perhaps she might comfort you in her true form –that of a hideous serpent or a dragon. And if the woman-spirit is really the Devil himself? Oh, indeed, perhaps he might comfort you in ways you can not even gather. Perhaps he can defile your body whilst you scream – have his way with you – forever. Oh the imaginative ways that he might do so, the many torments. Can you even count them, the infinite ways that shall make even the hardest man weep the tears of a frail girl, all the whilst burning, forever screaming in the fires of Hell?” Vonig scowled over the lot of them. He retrieved the Scriptures from the floor, kissed it, and strode back to the podium. He slammed it down, his wrath echoing throughout the cathedral.

Ivan knew that his confession would only jeopardize Lazarus’ safety, and as any righteous and protective parent would do, he obeyed his instincts and offered nothing.

The Abbot slapped the sweat from his forehead and bellowed, “There are idle hands amongst us! I shall see them busy again, building a new bell tower for the Abbey!” He raised his head and searched the dim upper regions of the cathedral wing. He clasped his hands, and in a composed voice, he shared his vision with them. “It shall be taller and deeper. It shall be larger at the base than the top and shall have terraces enough to hold a thousand grotesques. First, there must be sunlight — the tower shall rise high enough into the heavens that the sun never sets on these stone demons. If need be, the tower shall pierce the clouds. Secondly, the tower must stand on hallowed ground — one of you shall be locked inside the tower, praying at all times, and you shall toll the bell as penitence for the remainder of your days. In that way, the tower shall become more hallowed even than our cathedral. Lastly, for warding off Evil, we shall make the tower round, so that your abominations face every direction. The Devil shall see your stone grotesques from every hill and valley on earth and shall fear these grounds. Now, you might say to me that erecting such a tower is not possible. If so, my reply to you is simple: You shall show me why it is not possible by your labors, by building it. Pray, what say you now?”

“Screech!” The grotesque thrashed about as the two friars wrestled with it. Ivan clenched his jaw more tightly to hold back the words that might escape, the truth of his unwitting transgression.
 
“Rise,” Vonig yelled. The monks stood as one.
 
“This grotesque shall be exposed to the sun at first light and so be made into stone. Then I shall have it transported to Italy, to Cancello, for placement. With it, I shall send a letter to Abbot Domingus, directing that henceforth any grotesque born in his monastery shall be sent here. From this time onward we shall bear our sins and those of our brothers. Now, to the bathhouse. Bind and place it under close guard until the morrow.” With a curt wave of the hand, he dismissed the two monks and they carried the straining grotesque out of the church. 
 
He then turned his attention back to the monks, “As you are well aware, since we found the grotesque this morn, this carnal union certainly occurred sometime last eve. If none of you fathered it, I expect each of you to speak with the priests and squires who serve under you. If one of you discovers who fathered this demon, I expect you to inform me immediately. And I need not remind you that this meeting is for Lower Council friars only. Speaking of Council matters or mentioning the gatestone is punishable by death.” Vonig pounded the podium. “I shall have my Abbey back! Now, leave my sight!” As one, the Council friars turned and filed toward the door. With that, the Abbot lowered his head and rubbed his temples.

Last in line, Ivan was about to step through the door when Vonig called after him, “Friar Ivan!” 
 
Ivan stiffened and turned slowly, his heart in his mouth. “Yes Abbot?”
 
“Do you wish to confess something?” 
 
The moments that passed between the question and the answer seemed as long as days to Ivan. “No Abbot.”
 
“Really?” More days passed. “Do you deny there is a rat in your catacombs?”
 
“A rat?”
 
“Thou shalt not kill?” Vonig said, a tired smile creeping over his face. “If only my monks saw their duty as clearly as your catacomb squire.”
 
“Yes, Abbot,” Ivan replied.
 
“You may go.”
 
Ivan bowed and hurried out of the cathedral, heavy in heart with his newly discovered sin.





Chapter 4


City of Avignon – May 1347

The afternoon air hung thick with the smell of rain, and the western sky lay black. Cardinal Lean arrived in Avignon from England, blustering into the courtyard of Chateau Mallow in a heavily guarded carriage. Dust churned around the striding entourage only to be swallowed up by larger whirling dust clouds born of the encroaching storm. Lean sat forward and peered out of a window as the coach neared the entrance, and he discovered that some members of his advance guard wandered about dazedly. 

Lean’s escort captain spurred his steed forward, toward the chateau entrance. He reigned in his horse and hailed to his nearest man. "Sergeant! Have you secured the grounds?"
The sergeant looked up with a drawn expression of disapproval. “Captain, we have; however — one of the cardinals — we found him just as he is.”
“Just how,” the captain asked, quickly dismounting his horse. 
Lean bolted from the carriage, holding a hand on his wide-brimmed hat as he tipped it against the wind. The captain and three other escort guards joined Cardinal Lean and the party entered the chateau. Upstairs, the noise of a steady hum intensified as they neared Cardinal Basiliste’s bedchamber. They swept into the room and froze. Several of them moaned and averted their gaze. Cardinal Lean pulled out a handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth as a guard ran to the open window and retched. 

Before Lean, a black and bloated Basiliste lay in bed whilst his face entertained a clinging mass of yellow jackets. The insects streamed back and forth through the open window, lugging stung maggots away from the hollows of his head. The dead cardinal was unconcerned, as he lay rigid and putrid, his eyes drying upon the floor like a pair of dirty coins. 

Lean was not a man to dote upon such intricacies. He examined the room, his eyes coming to rest upon the parchment leaf lying on the desk, and stepped forward in haste to inspect it. Lean lifted the parchment of the cardinal’s last words, which were addressed to him. Shortly after, the party exited the chateau as hastily as they entered. Lean scanned the letter as he marched. "The Apocrypha! Rush like the wind!" he growled whilst ducking into the coach. "Mount, at once!" the captain bellowed to his guards as he leapt into the saddle. Men hurried for their steeds. The captain spurred his mount to the head of the party. The carriage lurched and catapulted forward. Lean tore his eyes away from the letter and shuddered. With a charging army of twenty-four troops, the cardinal rode west over the Rhone River Bridge, away from Avignon and toward the Apocrypha, toward a monstrous thunderhead swallowing up the horizon. Lean’s attention, however, was consumed with his grave responsibility to the Council of the Apocrypha, and to Pope Clement, who remained ignorant of all matters concerning the Council. 

With Cardinals Xavier and Basiliste murdered, Lean was the last surviving Upper Councilman. Everything that the Council kept cloistered for nearly five centuries now rested on his shoulder. And though canonical law decreed that the Vicar of Christ — the ruling pope — was the highest ranking member of the council, Lean knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to approach Clement directly. Previously, as a cardinal, Clement had argued fervently against any proposition to which, in his eyes, stood to strengthen the position of the Council of the Apocrypha. Clement had always felt that the Council undermined the authority of the College of Cardinals, and Lean entertained no hope that the man had changed his colors since becoming the ruling pope. Nevertheless, he was determined to secure a visitation with Clement, even by force, if necessary. And if it came to that, he was prepared to justify such an act of insubordination by doing something that had never been done before in the history of the Apocrypha Council —removing the evidence from the archive of the Apocrypha and presenting it directly to Clement in person. 

Lean and Clement were opposites in character. In a word, they clashed. Both were quite aware of their disparate natures. Lean was a man of few words, modest, apprehensive, and sincere. Clement was tactless and impatient, enjoying the luxury and social lifestyle of his office. As pontiff, his demeanor was more that of the debonair monarch than the austere messenger of God. When conversations between them did occur, they were formal, brief, and largely uneventful. In the four years since the advent of Clement’s ascension, Cardinal Basiliste had approached the pontiff repeatedly regarding matters of the Apocrypha. Each time, he had been refused an audience on the grounds that more urgent matters demanded Clement’s immediate attention, such as new palace construction, affairs of state, finances and taxation. Clement had neglected to appoint new members to the Upper Council, even after the death of Cardinal Basiliste, and his inaction had caused the once-powerful body’s influence to wane. It seemed to Lean that this was almost certainly deliberate neglectfulness on Clement’s part, and yet, Lean now had little choice but to force himself on Clement and remind him of his responsibility to the age-old body of the Council of the Apocrypha. 

The Council’s Apocrypha had been constructed in 1334 by order of Pope Benedict XII, who, despite voicing aspirations to return the papacy to Rome, removed all papal records from the Vatican to the new stronghold in France. The tomblike building lay in the vast, damp valley of the Rhone, surrounded on three sides by steep ravines that lay shrouded in second-growth woods and thorny brush. To the east, the ramparts of Avignon towered over the river valley gorge, but just to the west, the grandeur of the city dwindled — along with its stench. 

Less than an hour elapsed before the heavily guarded coach bearing the seal of the Church of Rome labored up a steep, rutted path screened by tall stands of evergreens. The stone battlements that rose darkly beyond the trees were as black as the sky behind them. Suddenly the winds reversed and turned to ice, followed by flashes of lightning and great rolls of thunder. In only a few moments, fat raindrops had paved the way for torrential rains. Lean’s entourage struggled up the narrow mudslide of a road. Several mud-caked guards dismounted and pressed against the back of the carriage to urge it forward. They heaved it out of puddles and moved onward, inch by inch, foot by foot. Lightning illuminated the road ahead whilst outlining the ever-looming silhouette of the Apocrypha. 

No window interrupted the stony exterior of the imposing block fortress. Its single entrance was attended, day and night, by watches of Council guards, men hand-picked by the Upper Council for their strength of body and will, and for their unwavering loyalty. Even the rigid protocol of King Philip’s Royal Guard was lacking by comparison. Within those guarded walls lay words of scripture known but to few living men, including: the complete, once-scriptural, books of Enoch, Jubilees, Giants and others; ancient scrolls written in tongues not heard on earth in a thousand years; artifacts of the long-destroyed Grecian Library of Alexandria; Assyrian clay cylinders that detailed the years following the Great Flood and confiscated from Jewish temples in the earliest crusades; and much more. The Apocrypha’s archives held all the existing secrets of the Church, and held them close. 

Lean sought material that lay contained in four specific bindings — texts that the cardinal knew nearly by memory. Although it was against his better judgment to remove anything from the Apocrypha, he could fathom no better approach to the task that lay before him: to convince Clement of things that no sane man would dare believe to be truth. 

The first of the four bindings, the largest of them, was the Statue Physique. It contained detailed descriptions of the Council monasteries and their two gatestones. It also contained the history of each. The first gatestone was unearthed in 876, during the reign of Pope John VIII. Located in current Molise Province in Italy, the excavation site was also an ancient Samnite settlement known as Aescernia. The second gatestone was discovered in 877, under Pope Stephen VI. Found in current Augergne Province in France, the monolith sat atop a stony hill south of the Loire River. 

The second of the books was the Council Proclamations. It listed the historical membership of the Apocrypha Council. It listed every pontiff and councilman ever to serve the Upper and Lower Councils. It also contained the Council’s bylaws. 

The third binding was the Reformation Exclusions and was scribed by Pope Benedict XII in 1336. These were special amendments or exclusionary clauses to the papal bull: the Redemptor Noster. It allowed the Apocrypha Council to govern its two monasteries in ways that it saw fit. 

The fourth and last of the texts sought by Lean was the Naramsin Translations. These frail bound pages dated back three centuries and were collectively named after their author, Naramsin, a recorded Gardiens cleric who, through dedicated service, had managed single-handedly to decipher the French monolith. The translations represented a Latin rendering of the strange language carved upon the faces of the French stone. And since the etchings on the Italian stone were identical, the Naramsin papers served as translation for both gatestones. 

Lean knew that any of the four texts might serve to awaken the unconcerned pontiff to the real danger at hand, yet it would take all four to bring the man under Lean’s, and thus under the Apocrypha’s, control. He must be made to see the truth, if the Council was to survive. Lean’s carriage came to a halt, and he peered out of its portal to see silhouettes in a driving rain as they gathered in two ranks to flank a pair of massive iron-strapped doors, the entrance to the Apocrypha. 

Within the Apocrypha and behind its great doors, wall torches illuminated a score of resolute guards lining the corridor entrance. On the other side of it, spear butts pounded against the door, followed by a muffled command. "Open, by command of His Eminence, Cardinal Lean of the Apocrypha Council!" 

Two guards removed iron bars and strained themselves to open the doors. Cardinal Lean and his captain bustled through, drenched completely from the heavy rain. The guards bowed as the two passed, and the doors closed behind them with a resounding thud. Never breaking stride, Lean and the captain disappeared into the dim hall, leaving a trail of water that dripped from their garments upon paved stones, which mirrored quivering reflections of the torch flames of the corridor. 

As Lean stepped around a corner and neared the end of a hallway, six guards abruptly made their presence known. They stood before a tall richly ornate door covered with intricate carvings, embossed with shimmering metal plating, and studded with precious stones. In Greek letters, the word APOCRYPHOS lay inscribed above its keystone. The door sergeant stepped forward, hand raised and