Chương 137: 127. Anávasi

A barrier that admits and never releases is not a wall. It is a snare, and a snare keeps whatever walks into it, the worthy and the fool alike. When you close a site against what it holds, stand outside the seal before you draw it, and leave the key in a living hand. — Codex of the Long Watch, Operational Directive The four gathered near the shimmering veil. A curtain of warped air hung where the passage climbed away into the dark.

"So what happens when we try to cross it?" Steve said.

"I'd rather not get a jolt or be transported to another dimension." The barrier is neither an electric conduit nor a transportation medium, Archie said. Arthur bent over and picked up a small pebble. He tossed it through the barrier and the pebble clattered on the steps on the other side of it.

"Looks safe enough," he shrugged. Donna put her hand through the shimmer and held it there. She stood with her arm pushed through it to the elbow, turning her wrist, palm up, palm down.

"Nothing," she said.

"Warm on this side. Cool on the other. No resistance either way."

"Which raises the question, why in the world did the wolves not go up through the stair?" Arthur said.

"If that thing was smart enough to throw a column at us, then it would be smart enough to figure out how steps work." They could not, Archie said. The barrier admitted movement in one direction while the anomaly was active. Entry only through the secondary passage. The distortion held the passage open for descent and shut for ascent. This is why the anomaly shed its overflow through the seaward mouth and never into the compound above you. The thing you killed was penned by the same architecture that fed it.

Steve had come up beside Donna with Harrow still in his hand.

"A one-way walk down a set of stairs," he said.

"That is what I said about the lycanthropy myth. Papa-Damianos cut the return out of Pausanias because a story where a man comes back home does not sell a one-way door." He lifted the rod towards the shimmer.

"The stair itself only went one way. Nobody he sent down could have climbed back up, even if they wanted to."

"And now it is open both ways," Arthur said. The core is dead. The fold that held the passage is relaxing with the rest of it. It is merely a stair. Steve looked at it a moment longer.

"So it is a fire exit," he said.

"In through the front, out through the back, and the management would prefer we did not."

"We are the new management," Donna said, and stepped through the shimmer. • • The stair was worked stone, the same restored masonry that they had seen all through the anomaly. But as they climbed it changed. The pale dressed blocks gave way slowly to rougher stuff, older mortar, a stretch of poured concrete with a rusted reinforcing bar showing through where the ancient work stopped and something from the last century took over.

They were climbing out of the hill that was being changed into a temple from the myths and into something that was only ever a church cellar. The treads narrowed. Where two of them had walked abreast at the bottom, near the top Arthur had to turn his shoulders to bring the bag through. The stair ended at a door. It was made from old wood, iron-banded and hung in a frame of dressed stone. Petros had stood on the other side of this door and watched a priest close this very door on nine people.

"This is it," Arthur said.

"The other side of this is the church." • • Donna lifted the latch. The door swung silently towards them on hinges that had been oiled and the smell of the compound came down to meet them. Cooking meat, woodsmoke and old incense. They came up into the back of the church. The undercroft opened into the nave through a low stone arch, and they could now see what Petros had described. The iconostasis was still standing. The saints were still on it, in their rows, with their hands raised.

And somebody had drawn a blade across every face. Four cuts in a fan, the same mark the men outside would be wearing in red on their chests. The faces had been ruined and the screen had been left standing, which was worse than tearing it down completely. Late-morning light fell through the open main door and lay in a bar across the stone floor. Arthur adjusted the bag on his shoulders and followed Donna through the nave to the porch.

She stopped in the doorway and he came up beside her and looked at the compound of Papa-Damianos for the first time. The yard was as Petros had described to them at the kitchen table. The wall had been raised head-high and capped with rubble and dressed stone stripped off the ruined theatre below. Lean-to shelters ran along the inside of it. Perhaps thirty people were in the compound and three of them were children.

They were sitting against the wall, mending, cooking, doing the small work of staying alive one more day. A stone altar table stood in the open centre. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Arthur saw Donna scan the children before her eyes moved to the sentries. They were easy to find. They wore the white tabard with the red border and the four red slashes. They carried blades and stood where they could see the gate.

Four on the wall had their backs to the yard. Three were among the shelters and two at the gate itself. Then a woman near the stone altar looked up and saw four strangers standing in the doorway with blood on them and weapons in their hands. She screamed and the yard turned. • • Everything stopped and for a long moment nobody moved. A big man came out of the shelter beside the altar table. He was grey and broad, his black cassock remarkably clean.

Petros had described the tears and the open arms and the voice that carried. Arthur had somehow expected a smaller man. His eyes moved from face to face, and then down, to the blood, to the weapons and finally to the core light still faintly visible through the leather of Steve's pouch. His face changed. Arthur had braced for anger, even violence; he had not braced for joy.

"They have come up," Papa-Damianos said. His hands were shaking and his eyes were enormous. He reached for Arthur's arm and Arthur let him take it, because the grip was not threatening. It was the grip of a man touching something he had prayed for.

"You prayed for a sign. Here is your sign. Four of them, come up out of the sacred ground on their own two feet," Papa-Damianos said to the compound.

"They went down, and they have come back to us lifted. Look at them. The holy place has remade them and sent them home." People were getting to their feet along the wall. A young man near the fire had both hands pressed to his mouth. Behind the altar table a woman began to weep, the same joyful terrible weeping Petros had told them about. An old man went down on his knees. Sarah stepped forwards.

"There is no holy place underneath," she said, in Greek, and then repeated it in English for the others. Her voice was steady and carried across the yard without effort.

"We came in through the bottom. Through the seaward passage. We came to end this." Papa-Damianos shook his head, the smile coming back to his face.

"You have been down into the holy place," he said.

"It has laid its hand on you and you are afraid of it. That is not a shameful thing. Every soul that comes near the divine is frightened at the first touch." He opened his hands to her.

"Tell them. Tell them about the wonder." She held his gaze.

"What is underneath your church is a saturation anomaly. It has been feeding on the people you sent down that stair. None of them ascended. None of them transformed. They were eaten, and the thing that ate them is dead, because we killed it."

"What we saw were wolves," Sarah said.

"Wolves that fed on people until they stopped looking like wolves. The biggest of them is lying on the floor down there with its skull crushed in. There is no god under this hill." Sarah pointed at the floor.

"There is a hole full of animals that eat what you send them."

"You are mistaken or you are lying," he said.

"I have seen them. We have all seen them. They walk the hill in their new bodies. I have watched them from this wall with my own eyes." Arthur heard a sound and looked to the walls. Two tabard-wearers had come off their posts and were walking towards the group with their hands on their weapons. Others were watching.

"Those are wolves," Sarah said.

"Mutated wolves. The anomaly breeds them. What you saw walking on the crest was not a transformed man. It was a predator with enough human pattern bled into it to walk upright. You were creating those abominations by feeding them people." Papa-Damianos took a step back from her, his whole body trying to reject what his ears were hearing.

"I knew a doctor once who told me there was no God," he said.

"I know the argument. You have come here with your instruments and your education to explain the miracle. I have heard it before."

"This is not theology," Sarah said.

"The creature that killed the people you sent down is lying on the floor of the chamber below this church. You can go and look at it." A man in a tabard stepped between them.

"She is lying," the man said to the yard.

"Nobody comes back up those stairs. She came down from the road and climbed through a window."

"I will not argue scripture with you," Papa-Damianos said.

"I have stood at this door every week for three months and I have watched people go down those steps and I have watched them rise. I have held their hands. I have said the words over them. I have seen what they become." The tears were gone. His voice was steady and his eyes were clear. He looked past Sarah, to Arthur, then to Donna and finally settled on Steve's pouch, where the light from the progenitor's core was still coming through.

"What is in that bag?" he asked.

"The core of the thing you were feeding," Steve said defiantly.

"The heart of your god." The armed individuals at the perimeter are moving to intercept, Archie said. Six on the wall. Two approaching from the gate. I recommend concluding this conversation. Papa-Damianos's face changed and this time what came through was rage.

"The servants of the silent gods," Papa-Damianos said in a snarl. Then he lifted his head and addressed the yard.

"I told you they would come. When the work was near its end, when the door stood ready to carry the last of you home, the old enemy would send its servants to shut it. Here they are." He pointed an accusing finger at the four of them.

"They have gone down into the holy place and defiled the sanctuary, and now they stand here and tell you it was always a lie." Papa-Damianos paused, and when he spoke again there was iron in his voice.

"They are frightened because they have seen that our gods are true. Why else would four people go down into the dark to kill a god they swear is only a wolf? They have stolen the heart of the sanctuary." The tabards were moving, drifting in off the wall and out from the shelters, closing the yard down towards the church, unhurried men who knew what to do and were waiting on nothing but the word.

"Arthur," Donna said. She had not lifted the axe.

"I am not going to cut a road through a churchyard full of hungry people. Tell me we came up here for something better than that." The eight are the structure. Remove them and the belief has nothing to stand on. The rest will not hold without him.

"Listen to me. All of you, listen." Sarah had turned from the priest to the yard. She was speaking Greek now, pleading. A doctor telling frightened people to go home or to stand back. That nobody had to die this morning. That the man in the cassock had lied to them. She had tears in her eyes. A woman with a child in her lap shifted back, an old man put his plate down and turned towards another. Papa-Damianos saw it too. He saw doubt beginning to travel the yard, and he did the one thing a man like him could do.

"They have come to silence our God," he said.

"Do not let them." A man with an iron bar came off the wall first and the tabards came behind him with their weapons drawn, unhurried no longer. Arthur brought Breakwater off his shoulder and set his feet on the flags of a churchyard he had never wanted to stand in.