David Morrell: The Covenant Of The Flame

The stream kept falling. At once, she burst through an opening, was hurled from the water, and flipped through air. The pressure of dropping made her chest heave. She gasped uncontrollably. Her lungs expanded, air rushing down her throat. The next thing, she struck a pool, propelled beneath it by the thunderous thrust of a waterfall. When she clawed to the surface, her arms thrashing weakly, she breathed in desperation and gradually realized that there were stars above her, that she was outside in the sweet spacious night, that she was close to the rim of the pool.

A moment later, in a frenzy, she pivoted to search for Craig. His body floated toward her. Urgent, she swam and grabbed him. He raised his head, coughing, spitting out water, while she tugged him toward the rim of the pool. They lay on a grassy bank.

But Craig kept coughing, choking. He vomited water. In a rush, she turned him onto his chest, moved his head sideways, checked to make sure that there were no obstructions in his mouth, and pressed her hands on his back, squeezing his lungs, sensing water escape from his mouth. He coughed repeatedly. Then gradually his spasms diminished.

He began to breathe freely.

Only then did she slump back, exhausted. The air smelled fresh and clear. The moon and the stars were glorious. Despite the thunder of the waterfall, she heard a nearby stream flowing from the pool, trickling over rocks toward the valley.

Craig moved his head to study her. He coughed again and clutched her hand. 'Thanks.' He managed to smile.

'Hey, it took two of us to get out of there.' She returned his smile, her heart swelling with relief that he was alive.

Then she, too, coughed up water. She shivered so bad that her teeth chattered.

Side by side, they held each other, trying to regain their strength.

Five minutes later, Craig roused himself. That water was so icy…' He shook uncontrollably.

'Hyperthermia?' Tess frowned.

hat's right.' He continued shaking, worried. 'In these wet clothes, even on a warm night in June, we're both so chilled we could die from exposure. We have to get warm and dry. Soon.'

Realizing the danger, Tess hurriedly glanced behind her toward the valley. No, she thought, we can't have survived what we did, only to freeze to death. At once she mentally thanked God. 'Everything's fine. No problem.'

'What? The nearest village is probably miles away. We'd get delirious, fall asleep, and die before we managed to walk there, assuming we could even find it.'

'I still say no problem.' Painfully cold, Tess trembled from her head to her feet.

'You think all we have to do is rub two sticks together and build a fire?'

'No. Someone already did that for us. In fact a lot of people.'

Puzzled, Craig turned to follow her gaze and let out his breath in wonder. Below them, across the fields in the valley, dozens and dozens of bonfires glittered in the darkness. Their glow was splendorous.

'The feast of Saint John. I'd forgotten,' Craig said.

'Like tiny pieces of the sun. For once, flames are going to help us.' Tess managed to stand, trembled, and reached for his hand. 'Bright flames. Not dark. Come on, babe.'

It took all her strength to raise him. Arm in arm, huddled against each other, clinging for warmth, they staggered down a grassy slope toward the fires.

'At least the stream washed the blood from our clothes,' Tess said. 'I guess in a way… It was like a baptism. Except that the second baptism canceled the first. The second was truly purifying.'

'The thing is, our problems aren't over,' Craig said.

'I know. Father Baldwin. What made you realize that he didn't want us to escape?'

'Just a hunch, but in my line of work, you learn the hard way to respond to hunches. I figured we ought to wait and see how much he wanted to find us in the rubble. Obviously he thinks we're a threat because of the secrets he told us.'

'Right now, I don't care about his damned Inquisition. All I want to do is keep holding you. It feels so wonderful to be alive.'

'Good fighting evil.' Craig shivered. 'In this case, it's hard to tell the difference between them. Both are evil. I'm sure of this – as soon as the Inquisitors learn we're still alive, they'll come after us.'

Tess hesitated. 'Maybe not.'

'You've got a plan?'

'Sort of. I'm still thinking it through. But if they do decide to come after us, I'm ready to fight them. As far as I'm concerned, they committed an unforgivable sin.'

'Because they turned against us?'

'No. Because they blew up the paintings. I'll always remember them – the deer, the bison, the horses, the ibex, the bulls. So awesome, so magnificent, so irreplaceable.'

At the bottom of the slope, Tess noticed shadowy figures and realized that they were villagers huddled around a fire, holding their crosses woven from flowers and stalks of wheat. The villagers frowned at Tess and Craig, suspicious. But she raised her right hand, still wet from the stream, and touched it to her forehead, her chest, her left and right shoulder. The villagers nodded and motioned for Tess and Craig to sit.

The fire quickly warmed them, drying their clothes. Tess and Craig continued to hold each other lovingly and remained there throughout the night, sometimes dozing, only to waken and stare again, as if hypnotized, toward the power and magic of the flames.

Alexandria, Virginia.

With Craig's comforting presence beside her, Tess stood in a cemetery near the city's outskirts and stared at her mother's grave. Tears misted her vision. The funeral had been yesterday, six days after she and Craig had escaped from the caverns and two days after they'd returned from Spain.

Much had happened. Following the night at the bonfire, their Spanish companions had escorted them across the valley to the nearest village. There, with great difficulty because of her unfamiliarity with the language, Tess had managed to use a phone and eventually contact the American embassy in Madrid. Her report had caused a half-dozen helicopters to arrive by mid-afternoon, American and Spanish officials accompanied by armed guards hurrying out. From then on, she and Craig had been questioned repeatedly. They'd shown the investigators the obliterated, former entrance to the caverns. They'd taken the investigators to the waterfall that had saved them.

Soon other helicopters had arrived, bringing more investigators and guards. The interrogation had continued well into the night. After a few hours' sleep and a meager breakfast, Tess and Craig had wearily answered further questions, continuing to repeat the story that they'd agreed on before Tess had phoned Madrid.

The story was the core of Tess's plan to protect themselves from both the Inquisitors and the heretics. More than anything, she wanted to tell it to reporters, to make sure it was publicized, but when reporters did arrive, she and Craig were taken under guard via helicopter to Bilbao and then to Madrid, where the questioning continued at the headquarters of Spain's intelligence service, distraught American CIA officials joining in.

Reporters managed to learn enough from unnamed sources to publish and broadcast the story. It spread quickly around the world. Under pressure from numerous governments, Spanish and American officials finally admitted the truth of what they'd dismissed as rumors. America 's vice president and the presumed future president of Spain indeed had been assassinated by terrorists while showing two American guests various cultural and geographical features in the province of Navarra in northern Spain.

The terrorists remained unidentified.

What the accounts did not include, of course, was the increasing frustration with which the grim investigators questioned Tess and Craig.