Читать книгу Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower - Simon Toyne, Simon Toyne - Страница 107

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Cornelius stood in the glare of the afternoon sun surveying the heaving throngs of coach parties and other tourists that flooded the wide embankment: people posing for pictures; people congregating around tour guides; people just staring up at the Citadel, lost in their own thoughts. There were plenty of young women; any one of them could be the girl. He stroked the puckered skin on his cheek, picturing his enemy. As he’d laid in the hospital, recovering from the skin grafts in a blur of morphine, he’d thought about her often. He kept seeing her stepping out from nowhere, holding out the bundle of rags, her body shrouded in a burkha that hid all but her eyes and her hands. Sometimes it was a parcel of newspaper she held, like the parcel his mother had wrapped him in before leaving him by the orphanage door and walking in front of an express train to Liverpool. He’d never known her face either. But he didn’t need to know their faces to know what they were. Betrayers all.

Behind him, Kutlar’s ragged breathing and halting footsteps announced his arrival like a leper shuffling from a cave. Cornelius slipped his hand into his pocket and curled it round the grip of his Glock.

‘Which one is she?’ he said.

Liv stared at the letters she had copied from the seeds in their original pairings:

T a M + k

? s A a l

Then compared them to the card she had found in amongst the flowers:

T

MALA

MARTYR

She took her pen and wrote the word ‘Mala’ in her notebook, crossing out the letters to see what she was left with.

Assuming the ‘T’ was the Tau, it left just three letters – s, k and A, and two symbols – ‘+’ and ‘?’. She stared at them, wrote down one final word and the last two symbols, then read what she had written.

T + ?

Ask Mala

The positioning of the underlined symbols made it look right. So did the capital letters at the beginning of each word. Was this the message her brother had sent her? It made some sense. The T was the Tau, the symbol of the Sacrament, and the plus sign could be a cross. The question mark symbolized the mystery of its identity, leaving the remaining two words reading like an instruction – ‘Ask Mala’. She looked up at the Ruinologist.

‘Who are the Mala?’ she asked.

Miriam looked up from the notebook where she had read the words as Liv had written them. ‘I told you that, in the beginning, there were two tribes of men,’ she said. ‘One of them was the Yahweh, the men of the mountain. The other was the outcast tribe who believed the Yahweh had stolen the Sacrament and, by imprisoning it, had usurped the natural order of things. They believed the Sacrament should be discovered and set free – this tribe were called the Mala. They were persecuted by the Yahweh, their people hunted and killed for the beliefs they held. But they kept their faith alive and a secret church grew, even in the shadow of the mountain’s ascendancy. By the time the Yahweh did their deal with the Romans to ‘rebrand’ state religion, they had bled their poisonous hate of the tribe into the language – in Latin ‘mala’ means ‘evils’. But even though the Citadel demonized these people, and burned their chapels and confiscated and destroyed their sacred texts, they could not destroy their spirit.’

Liv felt her skin tighten. ‘Do they still exist?’ she asked.

Miriam opened her mouth to answer but her eyes shifted suddenly upwards. Liv twisted round, saw a large man appear behind her, silhouetted against the bright sky. Her eyes adjusted to the glare and his features began to take form within the darkness of his outline, eyes first – pale, and blue, and staring straight into Liv’s. A nervous tremor fluttered in her chest as she realized who it was.

‘Yes,’ Gabriel said. ‘Yes, we do.’