Читать книгу Bestselling Conspiracy Thriller Trilogy: Sanctus, The Key, The Tower - Simon Toyne, Simon Toyne - Страница 16

The same sun that shone down on this slowly advancing army of tourists now warmed Samuel, lying motionless more than a thousand feet above them.

The feeling crept back into his limbs as the heat returned, bringing with it a deep and crucifying pain. He reached out and pushed himself into a sitting position, staying that way for a moment, his eyes still closed, his ruined hands flat against the summit, soothed by the primordial chill from the ancient stone. Finally he opened them and gazed upon the city of Ruin stretched out far below him.

He began to pray, as he always did when he’d made it safely to a peak.

Dear God our Father …

But as his mouth began to form the words, an image surfaced in his mind. He faltered. After the hell he’d witnessed the previous night, the obscenity that had been perpetrated in His name, he realized he was no longer sure who or what he was praying to. He felt the cold rock beneath his fingers, the rock from which, somewhere below him, the room that held the Sacrament had been carved. He pictured it now, and what it contained, and felt wonder, and terror, and shame.

Tears welled up in his eyes and he searched his mind for something, anything, to replace the image that haunted him. The warm, rising air carried with it the smell of sun-toasted grass, stirring a memory; a picture began to form, of a girl, vague and indistinct at first, but sharpening as it took hold. A face both strange and familiar, a face full of love, pulled into focus from the blur of his past.

His hand shifted instinctively to his side, to the site of his oldest scar, one not freshly made and bloody, but long-since healed. As he pressed against it he felt something else, buried in the corner of his pocket. He pulled it out and gazed down upon a small, waxy apple, the remains of the simple meal he had not been able to eat earlier in the refectory. He had been too nervous, knowing that in a few short hours he would be inducted into the most ancient and sacred brotherhood on earth. Now here he was, on top of the world in his own personal hell.

He devoured the apple, feeling the sweetness flood into his aching body, warming him from within as it fuelled his exhausted muscles. He chewed the core to nothing and spat the pips into his lacerated palm. A splinter of rock was embedded in the fleshy pad. He raised it to his mouth and yanked it away, feeling the sharp pain of its extraction.

He spat it into his hand, wet with his own blood, a tiny replica of the slender peak he now perched upon. He wiped it clean with his thumb and stared at the grey rock beneath. It was the same colour and texture as the heretical book he had been shown in the depths of the great library during his preparation. Its pages had been made from similar stone, their surfaces crammed with symbols carved by a hand long since rendered to dust. The words he had read there, a prophecy in shape and form, seemed to warn of the end of things if the Sacrament became known beyond the walls of the Citadel.

He looked out across the city, the morning sun catching his green eyes and the high, sharp cheekbones beneath them. He thought of all the people down there, living their lives, striving in thought and deed to do good, to get on, to move closer to God. After the tragedies of his own life he had come here, to the wellspring of faith, to devote himself to the same ends. Now here he knelt, as high as it was possible to get on the holiest of mountains –

– and he had never felt further from Him.

Images drifted across his darkened mind: images of what he had lost, of what he had learned. And as the prophetic words, carved in the secret stone of the heretical book, crawled through his memory, he saw something new in them. And what he had first read as a warning now shone like a revelation.

He had already carried knowledge of the Sacrament this far outside the Citadel; who was to say he could not carry it further? Maybe he could become the instrument to shine light into this dark mountain and bring an end to what he had witnessed. And even if he was wrong, and this crisis of faith was the weakness of one not fit to divine the purpose of what he had seen, then surely God would intervene. The secret would remain so, and who would mourn the life of one confused monk?

He glanced up at the sky. The sun was rising higher now – the bringer of light, the bringer of life. It warmed him as he looked back down at the stone in his hand, his mind as sharp now as its jagged edge.

And he knew what he must do.