Читать книгу Storm of Ash - Michelle Kenney - Страница 7

A feral Outsider hunting a feral Insider. There was a rhythm to it. Except Hominum chimera was clever, always travelling north of our beat.

We knew from the outset that though there were many ways to track Lake, trapping her would be another matter entirely. Her powerful Nemean lion prints were clear enough; the North Mountain snow made them gleam like ice-dusted runes, while a brave last stand of arid trees, split and broken by her aggressive marking, pointed onwards like wretched ghouls. From time to time, we also came across a scattering of mountain goat tracks, enough to make me wonder whether her volatile chimera nature was morphing again.

But it was always the long black veins of scorching that offered the real evidence. Evidence that, no matter how buried her humanity, Lake still found comfort in being close to Arafel. Close to us.

I couldn’t voice the urgency I felt to find Lake, but August seemed to understand anyway. There was something deep within me, some primeval instinct that needed to face her and acknowledge our bond. That she was the key to finally understanding the Voynich was beyond doubt – she was Cassius’s alpha weapon of mythical proportions, yet Thomas had somehow bound us with an older connection too. Cassius called it an antidote, a complex protein that would provide some level of control over which of her mythical natures dominated, but I had a suspicion it bore another name, that this was the real legacy for which Grandpa had prepared me.

And I cared. More than I could put into words. Ever since Lake had taken a knife to Max’s throat in the tunnels beneath the City of Dust. Back then she looked just another hungry, scraggy child in a dirty headscarf and smoke-grey tunic – no different from the rest of the Prolet children we were trying to rescue. And yet, her veins pumped with a biology more complex than any other creature of Cassius’s bestiary. Which made her nature a complete mystery because Hominum chimera was also an ancient prophecy. Or curse. Depending on which way you looked at it.

The truth was Lake was entirely unique. And even though Cassius didn’t hold the final genetic coding for the hybrid creature, she was clearly a dangerously close match. According to legend, Hominum chimera was the mother of all mythological beasts, the one hybrid creature believed to be stronger, faster and more agile than her only existing counterpart. Nature. But while Aelia had always suspected the Voynich of hiding a last secret, it was only when August journeyed to Europa that we all learned of Lake’s real potential.

‘There’s an ancient myth that Hominum chimera is capable of triggering a sequence of natural disasters, culminating in the eternal fire of damnation.’

August’s words looped in my head. An eternal fire of damnation seemed so easy to dismiss as mythological rhetoric, and yet I knew better now. There was something in Lake’s serpentine eyes that reached back through the dust of years, to a time when myth and reality were separated by only the thinnest of veils.

Legacy or lunacy, Cassius’s ambition had never been clearer. It was all about power to redesign the natural world, and now that he had The Book of Arafel, Thomas’s secret research decoding the Voynich, it was nearly within reach.

Arafel was nearly within reach.

All that remained was the keyword to operate the cipher and, if he was looking to replicate Hominum chimera perfectly, a certain annotated, aged diagram. It was the same fragile page I’d rolled up and inserted into a certain treehouse dart tube for safekeeping, the last present Max made for me. To get it Cassius would have to slit the feral throat around which it was hung.

I lifted my hand to the precious tiny dart tube. Thomas’s clue had been there the whole time, a simple faint abbreviation on the same page as Thomas’s Hominum chimera sketch.

REQ.

It wasn’t until August mentioned its appearance in the tomb frescos beneath the ancient Colosseum that I guessed at its true significance. REQ was an abbreviation for Requiem, or Mass for the Dead, and a warning, through the sands of time, from the original medieval scribe of the Voynich Manuscript.

Five hundred years later and against all the odds, Thomas had worked out it was also the only keyword to operate the Voynich cipher, the same cipher he drew out on the floor of the first treehouse in Arafel. Our treehouse. I thought of my mother’s living area, of the old reed mat that had always covered what we believed to be our ancestor’s first crude map of Arafel. Little had we known we’d been walking over the only existing key to the world’s most dangerous genetic heirloom.

Now it was a knowledge that burned, in the same way my blood burned every time I imagined Lake’s heavy double-lidded eyes peering out of the crevices and caves of the North Mountain landscape we scoured. Ancient, powerful eyes that watched us track and hunt, from the icy dawn until the fireflies danced.

Biding time.