Book of Stolen Tales

PENGUIN

THE BOOK OF STOLEN TALES

D.J. M
c
INTOSH
's
The Witch of Babylon
has been sold in twenty countries, was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, and won a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished novel. It was a national bestseller, an Amazon.ca Best Book, and was named one of CNN's Most Enduring Historical Thrillers. McIntosh is a member of the Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies. She is a strong supporter of Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists. She lives in Toronto.

Also by D.J. McIntosh

The Witch of Babylon

PENGUIN

an imprint of Penguin Canada

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2013

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright © D. J. McIntosh, 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Publisher's note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.

Manufactured in Canada.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

McIntosh, D. J. (Dorothy J.)

The book of stolen tales / D.J. McIntosh.

ISBN 978-0-14-317574-2

I. Title.

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For the children I am blessed to have in my life: Will and Mary Natasha, Brendan, Christian, Madeline, Devon, Sarah, Morris, Louis and Jaycee.

And to libraries that open magical worlds to the child in all of us.

The Book of Stolen Tales is Book Two of the Mesopotamian Trilogy. It takes place in November, symbolized by Nergal, Babylonian god of war and pestilence.

In December 1631, Naples fell dark. Mount Vesuvius erupted, sending burning ash and toxic gas onto the settlements below. One year later, plague swept through the city. The origins of that plague are unknown to this day.

A European Estate, All Souls' Day

F
irelight on the faces of the villagers showed their lust for the burning. They held their torches proudly in front of the captain and his guard. Stunted and malnourished from years spent working in the mines, the villagers leapt at the chance to destroy the noble family's precious property. They fought over who would throw the first firebrand, yearning to see the great estate crumble and burn.

Throughout the day, encouraged by the lord's guard, the villagers set about destroying the garden. They'd ripped up the maze of boxed yew hedges, the cedars clipped into shapes of unicorns and centaurs, and the carefully tended orange trees, bunching them in a ring around the stately home.

The much-admired statue of Eros and Psyche stood under a little arbor thronged with roses, their blossoms long turned a papery brown, but their leaves still verdant after a prolonged summer. The sculptor believed he'd seen the forms of the two lovers in the gray veins of the prized Brocatelle marble. In contrast to the other garden ornaments, this statue had a compelling authenticity. The villagers pried it from its base with brutal force and threw it against the massive entrance doors. They smashed stone outbuildings and piled the rocks on top of the sculpture, demolished wooden stables and added this wreckage to the ring of uprooted trees and hedges. They sealed doors and windows with hot pitch. Enclosed in the circle of vegetation, the great building loomed out of the fog like a pale monument.

The time had come. The captain brought down his hand swiftly and issued the order. His soldiers knelt and raised their muskets. They opened fire. The villagers, unable to comprehend how they had suddenly become targets, froze in shock. Cruel pikes impaled those not felled by bullets. A young man whose wits had not yet left him broke away and tried to crash through the gauntlet of the soldiers' line, but one of the men punctured and gutted the boy's belly with his rapier.

The massacre ended quickly. Bodies lay on the ground like slaughtered lambs. The soldiers heaved them onto the makeshift pyres. The captain's horse, a rare white Camargue tethered to a nearby tree, cried out in terror at the reek of blood.

The captain ordered one of his men to climb through a window broken by the youths and retrieve the prized object. The man returned clutching a small cedar box embossed with a red shield and white cross.

Soldiers added oil-drenched faggots of wood to the mounds of greenery and then joined their captain behind the ring and set it alight. Dense clouds of smoke from the fresh leaves and branches intermingled with the fog, obscuring the red tile roof and grand facade of the manor house.

Pleased by their good service, the captain ordered his aide to gift a gold piece to each member of the guard along with a generous serving of his finest cognac. The aide was permitted to join in, a privilege not normally granted him. The captain toasted his men.

His soldiers threw back their drinks and cheered as the blaze tossed sparks heavenward.

One soldier gripped his throat and sucked in a breath. Cognac could burn when drunk too rapidly but surely not like this. He strained again for air before toppling to the ground. The others followed, stumbling toward the fire, blinded by the poison. Within minutes the entire company lay dying, save one. A soldier who'd cursed aloud when he'd spilled his drink now stood dumbly, gazing at his fallen brothers. The captain pulled a dueling pistol from under his long cloak and shot him through the throat.

The horse flailed in panic, its gleaming white withers slick with sweat, its soft fleshy lips bloody and torn from wrenching at the bit. The captain lashed the animal into submission and mounted, digging his boots into its flanks. He tucked the cedar box into his saddlebag and smiled to himself, anticipating a rich reward from a lord well pleased with the night's work.

The wood was abnormally silent. No rush of wings or predatory growls signaled the waking of its night creatures. The horse, usually a cautious animal alert to the signs of danger, kept up its frenzied pace along the forest trail, focused only on fleeing the smell of murder and fire. A shape like a bloom of ink on parchment spread across their path, darker than the gloom of the night forest and foreign to the natural forms of the trees and plants surrounding it. Both the rider in his reverie and the frightened horse failed to notice the deepening shadow ahead.

Part One

THE PLAGUE DEMON

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival … a survival of a hugely remote period when … consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity … forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings.