Simon Toyne - The Key

A few kilometres further along the main road they had found a goat track running north into the desert and followed it until the read-out on the jeep’s sat-nav told Gabriel he had finally arrived at the coordinates where his father’s life had ended. He had memorized them twelve years ago, always knowing that he would end up here one day, often running through them in his head like a mantra or a spell to keep his father’s memory alive.

He switched off the engine and stepped outside, surveying the flattened dish of desert. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. There were no graves to mark the site, no structures remaining to show there had ever been anything here other than rock and dust.

He’d often wondered how he would feel when he eventually got here. He had thought that coming here might make sense of the anger and abandonment he’d felt for most of his adult life. But standing here now he felt nothing. If anything, it served to emphasize how powerless he was against the merciless flow of the universe. His father had died out here and Gabriel had not been there to save him; now he was here with someone else who needed saving and he had no idea how to do that either.

Hearing the sound of the jeep door opening behind him, he turned away so Liv would not see the tears brimming in his eyes. He didn’t want her to show him any pity when he deserved none. He had failed once and was failing again.

But instead of joining him, she walked away, up the bank of the wadi towards a spot on the horizon, her eyes looking up towards the stars.

‘Liv?’ he called out, but she didn’t answer. She kept walking, her gaze fixed on the sky. ‘Liv!’ He moved across the sand and stepped in front of her, grabbing her shoulders to snap her out of her trance.

She blinked and looked at him as if she had just been shaken awake.

‘Where are you going?’

She pointed up at a snaking line of stars hanging low in the sky. ‘The dragon,’ she said. ‘I was following the dragon.’

Gabriel followed the line of her extended arm, recognizing the constellation she was pointing at. She was right — it was Draco, the dragon. The dragon was everywhere, it seemed: in the prophecy, in the madman’s account of how his father was killed — and now even in the sky.

‘Let’s get back to the jeep,’ he said, aware of how cold it was getting and how she was starting to tremble. ‘We can follow the dragon in that. It will be quicker.’

‘That way,’ she said, pointing back up at the sky.

‘Whichever way you want,’ he said, steering her back to the car. He was losing her, he could feel it. Things predicted in the prophecy were coming to pass.

As he helped her into the passenger seat he heard a sound like a bird cheeping in the night. Gabriel climbed back in behind the wheel, slamming the door against the night wind. The noise had been his phone and he checked the caller ID before answering. It was Arkadian.

‘I think I’ve found something,’ he said before Gabriel even had a chance to speak. The detective revealed what he had discovered about the oil operation called Dragonfields, then supplied map coordinates. Gabriel fed the information directly into the sat-nav and set it to calculate a route.

Another dragon, Gabriel thought. Coincidence or destiny?

When the sat-nav finished its calculations, it answered the question for him. An arrow on the screen showed the direction the coordinates lay in, pointing in the exact direction Liv had been walking.

The oil operation was less than thirty kilometres away, somewhere in the wastelands of the Syrian Desert, following the constellation of the Dragon.

Athanasius had always hated the dark. When he had given his life to God and first entered the Citadel it had never occurred to him that he was also consigning himself to a life of darkness. The tunnels had been vastly improved during his time there, with electric lighting now used throughout most of the mountain, but the forbidden upper sections he now stumbled through had changed little in hundreds of years. In his haste to get here he had not brought a torch and was having to use the glow from the phone screen to guide him. It struck him as apt in many ways that the bright photograph of the prophecy was lighting his path towards the one man trying to thwart it.

He reached the upper section breathless and perspiring and held the screen to his chest to cut out the light. For a moment his eyes were blind, but as they slowly adjusted he could see a glow ahead of him. It was coming from one of the smaller tunnels to his left, not the one leading to the chapel of the Sacrament as he had expected. He followed the telltale light, keeping his own covered and feeling his way along the wall until he came to a forgotten, dusty corridor dotted with piles of rubble that showed how poorly it had been maintained. The glow was coming from a partially open door halfway along it. There was also a breeze, sweet-smelling after the trapped air of the stairwell, and it drew him towards the door.

The source of the glow was a flambeau that had been slotted into a niche in the wall. It guttered in the night breeze that flowed through a loophole cut in the outer wall. In his mind, Athanasius had imagined he was at the heart of the mountain. It had not occurred to him that the higher he climbed, the narrower the mountain became and the closer to its edge he would be.

Dragan was standing by the opening with his back to the door. At first Athanasius thought he must be praying, but then he turned and he saw the phone clutched in the black, leathery grip of his hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Athanasius asked, realizing from his own experience the significance of his position by the open window.

Dragan snarled, his spare hand reaching for the wooden T-shaped crux in his belt. He pulled it clear, revealing the ceremonial dagger inside and lunged at him. Athanasius spun away, grabbing the burning torch from the wall and holding it out in front of him to keep him back. Dragan regained his footing and kicked the door shut, sealing the room. They circled each other, neither one advancing or retreating, clear in the knowledge that only one of them was going to leave here alive.

‘I am trying to put right all the things you have ruined,’ Dragan said, ‘by returning the Sacrament to the mountain. The moment it was removed, everything started to die: first the Sancti, then the garden, and now everybody else. The Lamentation will strike you too; do not think you will be spared. I am trying to save your life too by doing this.’

‘And what about the girl, what about her life? Is she an acceptable sacrifice?’

Dragan scoffed. ‘The Bible is full of sacrifice made for the greater good. Christ himself sacrificed his own life.’

‘Christ gave his life for the benefit of everybody.’

‘And the restoration of the Sacrament to the Citadel will do the same. Look around you: earthquakes, disease… look at me — ’ He pulled up the arm of his cassock to reveal his withered, blackened arm. ‘All of this has come about since the Sacrament was released.’

‘Not true. There have always been earthquakes. There has always been famine, and drought and global epidemics. Shutting an innocent girl into a mediaeval cross full of needles to trap the divine spirit she carries inside her is nothing that we, as men of God, should be party to — whatever the cost to ourselves. I have read the Heretic Bible. I know the true history of the Sacrament and I know the true history of this mountain.’ He held out his own phone, showing the photograph of the Mirror Prophecy and placed it on the ground between them. ‘I know you believe in what you are doing. But there is another way. We have a chance to put things right. Read what it says and see for yourself.’ He stepped back and put the flaming torch to one side.