Rogue Angel 54: Day of Atonement (21 page)

And yet…how could it be anything else?

Roux was right. There was no such thing as coincidence, meaningful or otherwise, and not when it came to something like this.

Looking at the pages again, she realized what the madman upstairs believed, as incredible and ridiculous as it was: that she was possessed by a demon, and that demon was the same entity that had possessed the Maid of Orleans all those centuries ago.

That changed everything.

She couldn’t just wait for this to play out anymore.

“Roux?” The man’s voice left his mouth as a shout, arriving as a whisper. Roux stared down the hill at him. The wind and snow whirled around his blurred outline, transforming him into something almost ethereal.

“That’s my name,” Roux replied, taking another stumbling step in the snow. He was cold to the bone, despite being dressed for the elements.

The man held a hand out to help him take the next few steps. Roux took it with gratitude, glad of the firm grip that both supported and stabilized him until they were looking at each other eye to eye.

“This way,” the man said.

The shape of a building emerged through the snow with each stride.

The church of Sant Joan de Caselles.

The church was dedicated to a different Joan, predating the Maid’s time, but Roux had
always
felt like it was the right place to hide the breastplate. He could never have explained why, what link it was he felt with the place, but he had always known he needed to hide her armor, and
where. Now, though, for the first time in centuries, he was beginning to think he had made a mistake and that it should have been smelted down all those years ago.

They turned the helping hand into a handshake.

“Is it still safe?” he asked.

“But of course, my friend,” the man said. “Still safe.”

Roux did not know the guardian’s name; that was part of the arrangement. He could never give up what he didn’t know. The man, like his father and his father before him down the generations, had been entrusted with the safekeeping of the armor.

He had spoken to this man only once before today, or maybe it had been his father. Sometimes it was difficult to be sure with normal lifespans feeling like mayfly-years to him. There had been a time when he had received a letter once a year, posted from anywhere in the world, that always said the same thing, one word:
safe
. Nothing more.

Roux followed him to the church.

A lamp burned on the altar, casting a dull glow at one of the windows. It looked bleak in this weather and yet it still remained a haven, a place of tranquility.

The door opened under the lightest pushes, swinging open. He’d been wrong, it wasn’t a lantern. At least twenty votive candles burned on the altar table.

The man shook the snow from his long coat and hung it on a hook near the door.

Roux didn’t remove his.

The man wore the vestments of a priest, as had been the case with the first keeper to whom Roux had first entrusted the armor.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Roux asked.

“I am in here every day. If it was ever to be disturbed, I would know about it, believe me.”

Roux nodded. He knew that the man was right. He
had chosen the hiding place carefully. He struggled to remember the name of the first priest who had colluded with him and was now old bones somewhere in the ground outside the church.

“I never expected to meet you,” the man said. “I never thought anyone would actually come. I know that my predecessor was never visited.”

“Did he tell you what you are guarding?”

The man shook his head. “I don’t think he knew, even at the end. He had his suspicions, as have we all, but all I know for sure is that the box is well preserved, and has not been opened for a hundred years or more.”

“You’ve never wanted to know what was inside?”

The man shrugged. “At first, maybe, idle curiosity, but then it just became part of the many rites and rituals that are part of the job. You carry them out without question knowing that there has to be a meaning or a purpose to everything that you do. Beyond that, it doesn’t really matter, only that you preserve the rite.”

Roux wasn’t sure he believed the man.

“Have you been told what’s inside?” the man asked.

It took Roux a moment to realize that, of course, the man couldn’t possibly know that he had been the one who had first placed the box in its hiding place. Obviously he assumed that Roux was a descendent of that man, just as the priest was a successor of the first caretaker.

“I know what’s inside,” he said, neither lying nor completely telling the truth.

The priest nodded, but didn’t press further. The man understood the meaning of the word
discretion
and wouldn’t push for more just because of curiosity. He walked the length of the church, a small chapel never meant to service more than the spiritual needs of a small
mountainside community. Now, under the snow, the landscape bore the scars of the leisure industry.

The priest stopped at the lectern and placed a tight grip on it before he took a deep breath. Wood grated on stone as the structure began to move, slowly, inch by inch, until it was freed from whatever held it in place and then slid smoothly until the floor beneath it was completely exposed.

Roux watched as the younger man knelt and used a key to scrape away the accumulated grime from the joins in the stone; again, not rushing, carrying out the act with a significant amount of reverence. Like those before him, he had never considered the possibility that the box might leave his care.

Eventually a catch was revealed.

The man looked up at Roux.

“Would you like me to open it?”

Roux nodded.

He had waited a long time for this moment, and had thought to wait a lot longer, so he could wait a few seconds more.

A sudden fear rose in his chest: all it took was for one of the priests down the long line to have failed him and everything he was trying to do here was undone. What if someone opened the box only to find it empty? What then? What could he do to help Annja? How could he buy her life? Or would he be forced to walk away and leave her to her own fate? He’d told himself a thousand times over the past twenty-four hours she was big enough to take care of herself. But…

Stone ground against stone as a piece of the newly exposed floor began to shift from its resting place. Considering how many years it had set in place, it was a miracle
of fishes and bread proportions that the ancient mechanism still worked, Roux thought irreverently.

The priest managed to get a grip under the exposed edge of stone and slowly a slab began to rise, even if just a couple of inches.

Dust trickled and fell into the space below, landing on the dark hidden shape.

And then it was free.

The priest lifted the slab and moved it to rest against the lectern.

He stood back, allowing Roux the opportunity to retrieve the box himself.

He had always remembered it being a little larger than it was. Funny how the memory played tricks on you, he thought. The box was less than two feet wide, only a little longer than that and less than a foot deep.

Roux peeled away the cloth that protected it while it was in its resting place, a piece of sacking that had at some point replaced the material he had carefully wrapped it in the first time it had been hidden away.

The box itself barely looked older than the day he had buried it. He had seen chests that had been buried for far less time and suffered far more from the effects of damp, mold and insect attack, but not this one. If there had been an escutcheon protecting the simple keyhole, that would have pitted and decayed, regardless, but the chest lacked protection or ornamentation.

Roux reached into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys he always carried with him.

Sometimes he thought that keeping things hidden would not be a bad thing. Too many of those items could prove dangerous in the wrong hands.

The breastplate itself wasn’t something that was a danger to the world at large, a rallying point for fundamentalists
looking to start another Holy Crusade, but in this case it could prove fatal for Annja if Cauchon didn’t keep his word. Or if he did, and tried the rituals Manchon and Gui extolled. The box, like Pandora’s, could never be closed once he’d let its secrets out. Was he really prepared to do that? Even for Annja?

“Do you want me to leave you?” the priest asked. “If you need some privacy…”

“It’s fine,” Roux said. “It’s only fair that you should see what you have spent your life protecting, even if I can’t tell you what it truly represents. With luck, it may yet be returned for your safekeeping.”

The man nodded, but showed no sign of moving any closer.

Roux felt for the right key, knowing its shape within the bunch without needing to see it; some things were burned onto his soul.

He paused as he slipped the key into place in the ancient lock, and felt the tension as it engaged, hoping that the mechanism itself hadn’t corroded or fused together. It wasn’t a sophisticated lock; the lock had never been meant to protect it. That was why he had gone to such lengths to hide it.

The key moved smoothly, needing only the slightest amount of force to turn.

Roux held his breath as he lifted the lid, his heart skipping a beat as he saw the piece of red silk he had used to cover the armor, still undamaged, as pristine as if it had been placed there yesterday.

He folded back the edge of cloth, so fine in texture compared to the sacking that had provided the first layer of protection, to reveal the breastplate.

The metal beneath possessed a strange glow in the candlelight, as if there was a sheen to it that might not
be seen in normal light, making it seem almost magical. It still bore the scars of battle, and the leather straps that had once held it to the young woman’s body were all but dust. They were of no consequence. Beneath it lay the other smaller object, essential if he were to make his trap work. He closed his hand on it and palmed it away into his pocket without drawing any attention to it.

“It looks very precious,” the priest said, his voice reverent.

A sudden breeze entered the church, threatening to extinguish the candles.

Roux had been concentrating so much on the box and its contents that he’d almost forgotten that he wasn’t alone, taken aback by the simplicity of the statement.

“It is,” said a voice from the doorway.

Annja felt the life returning to her muscles.

She closed her hand around the nail scissors, prepared to use them. Something so sharp, punched in hard, could do serious damage, even if she didn’t take the woman unawares. She didn’t need her sword to take care of a threat like Monique. Annja had dedicated a lot of her life to physical training, sparring, learning the fighting techniques of martial artists, hand-to-hand as well as with weapons. She was more than a match for anything the woman could throw at her. And on top of that she had the sword.

She worked her joints again, keeping the muscles supple.

In the distance, she heard the sound of a car engine starting.

She couldn’t tell if it was the truck she’d arrived in or the car she’d seen in the open garage. It didn’t matter. It had tilted the odds very much in her favor.

Everything in those notes and papers, a mixture of ancient ideas and a twisted imagination, had obviously
convinced Cauchon to believe he could separate her from the spirit of Saint Joan that somehow possessed her. Yes, there was a bond between them. Roux had explained his belief after she’d grasped the shattered sword and made it whole again, but even then she had never quite swallowed all of the more mystical aspects of Roux’s beliefs. Some things she knew were undeniably true. The sword for instance was proof of that. But there were still gaps that she constantly tried to bridge with concrete understanding without seeing the big picture because she was in the thick of things.

In Cauchon’s mind, she was sure, there was no happy ending for her.

Annja rubbed her shoulder one last time before reaching out for the familiar grip. She drew it gently and smoothly from the otherwhere, the blade crystalizing into existence before her eyes. One moment there was nothing, a ghost of a sword, and then the weight solidified, taking on substance and form, its molecular structure attuned to hers, the vibrating in time with her flesh on a quantum level. She was the sword. The sword was Annja. Smiling, she let it return to its resting place.

She climbed the ramp to examine the door.

It was considerably sturdier than she had hoped; this was no re-formed fiber door that one good kick could break down. This was a solid, thick century-old cured timber that was intended to keep fire at bay. It was fitted with a heavy mortise lock. It was old—if not as old as the door itself, still not something that had been fitted purely because they intended on holding her hostage down here. Cauchon valued his privacy. It was as simple as that. Even in a place as remote as the farmhouse, he did not want to risk being disturbed by anyone while he devoted himself to his obsession. But then, who in their
right mind would try to break into a house out here in the middle of nowhere?

How had her captor made the connection between Roux and Joan of Arc? How had he made the further connection to her and the sword? She had a lot of questions and very few answers. The only thing she knew for sure was that he had made the connections and he’d brought Garin into this, too. He was pulling their strings, all three of them, manipulating them. And that sounded like a very dangerous situation.

She had nothing with which to pick the lock, and nothing to get at the screws that held the hinges in place. It was as secure a prison as any that could be improvised.

She imagined being trapped down here with a raging fire. It wasn’t something she really wanted to contemplate, but there was a smoke alarm and the sprinkler system set into the ceiling. Could she use them to her advantage? Even if she could scavenge everything she needed to start a fire, would anyone come if the alarm went off, or would she be left to burn?