The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death (27 page)

He knew that his Brother was in a great deal
of trouble and yet, he had been unable to confide to the Grand
Master the details of what had happened. Even the Grand Master did
not understand what it meant to be the One Who Sees. More aptly
named it should have been the One Who Sees and Feels. If he had
chosen to reveal all he had learned concerning the Knight of Death,
there would have been no hope for Ramsay.

Von Hetz had come to ‘see’ for himself if
there was truly no hope for his errant Brother. Though he knew more
about the members of the Council than he cared to know, he was not
ambitious. If he had wanted, he could have easily learned all their
Mysteries, but he chose not to know primarily because the weight of
the combined knowledge of their secrets would have crushed him.
Treason. Blasphemy. He did not question the Will of God. When he
was satisfied one way or another with Ramsay’s condition, he would
make his recommendations to the Grand Master and the Grand Master
would listen to him. He always did in such matters.

The contention between the Chevalier d’Epee
and Ramsay was a danger to all of them. If he had to take Ramsay’s
secrets and hold them for a while, he would, but not before fully
understanding what had happened to him. What made this particular
situation critically different was that Ramsay would have to be
forced to deliver up his secret before they could kill him. Von
Hetz shuddered at the thought of the gruesome task. He had only
been forced to commit such an act once in his long existence and he
had hoped and prayed never again. He would make certain that
Ramsay’s precious secret was not passed along to the volatile
Knight of the Sword even temporarily. That would never do. Beaujold
did not have the temperament for such a burden and Ramsay’s young
apprentice could not be trusted with such knowledge.

“Spes mea in Deo est,” he whispered into the
wind and drew his cloak tightly about him.

He knew the heart of Mark Andrew Ramsay. A
true and noble Knight, if a bit given to violent outbursts at
times. Sir Ramsay’s thoughts were always first and foremost
distinguishable from the other nine due to the infinitely
multifaceted nature of his mind. The Knight of Death always seemed
to be thinking on several different levels at the same time… except
now. A standing joke among the Brothers was that Ramsay, who
claimed to hate thinking about anything, actually did more thinking
than all of them put together. His alchemical duties required a
great deal of thinking, planning and doing. It made little
difference that the Knight of Death held several collegiate
degrees; he still claimed to be nothing more than a simple
Scotsman. The personal thoughts of the man had always filled him
with dread and he had rarely spent more than a few seconds
concentrating on him. A few seconds was all he could stand and he
never plumbed the depths to the lower levels which strangely
reminded him of the legends on the mariner’s maps of antiquity
which read ‘here there be monsters’.

Whereas the Knight of the Apocalypse’ words
struck dread and terror into the hearts of the other members of the
Council of Twelve, the mere thought of Ramsay left them all hollow
and drawn and if there were monsters in the depths of his mind,
Ramsay could no doubt hold his own with them. The others did not
know how fortunate they were in that they could only think of him.
They could not See his actual thoughts. It had been many years
since he had needed to reach the man and intensely regretted the
need to do it now. Especially in light of the circumstances which
included the involvement of not one, but two women. The others
thought that his own work as Apocalyptic Knight was a dark and
foreboding purpose, with his studies of the ancient scrolls and his
predictions and warnings, but Ramsay’s primary purpose made even
the Apocalyptic Knight shudder. He did not think he could have
borne Ramsay’s occupation for long, but he knew Mark Ramsay would
never stray from his mission, nor abandon his vows, nor profane his
oath without good cause.

Only Simon seemed to have some idea of the
burden Mark Ramsay bore in his head. Something terrifying had
happened to Ramsay and the time had come for a decision. None of
them could last forever; even immortality had its limitations in
the physical form. True immortality of the spirit was a given, but
immortality of the body was not as immortal as one might think or
eventually want. Surely a stone would last throughout the eons, but
not without scars, not without continual danger of being completely
annihilated and changed into a different form. The body could only
heal itself within reasonable limits, but the mind’s capacities for
healing were unknown.

The Ritter von Hetz felt great compassion for
Ramsay, though they did not look on each other as friends. They
were Brothers of the Order of the Red Cross of Gold, but they had
never had anything more than a cordial relationship in all the
years they had known each other. The German Knight felt more
compassion for each of his Brothers than they felt for each other
with the exception of Simon, of course. None of them had the
dubious honor of seeing into the others’ minds. Only he knew what
they suffered because he suffered it with them whether they knew it
or not.

But therein lay the problem at hand. He could
no longer see the thoughts of the Mark Ramsay he had known. These
new thoughts were those of a stranger and the multi-layered effect
was gone. This was someone entirely different from the Chevalier du
Morte of the past. Different, yet the same. It was as if a wall had
been erected between not only himself and Ramsay, but between
Ramsay and his own deeper consciousness. Ramsay no longer knew or
fully comprehended who he was. He seemed almost a man possessed of
multiple personalities now with each one operating at different
times unaffected and unaware of the others. The wall was perhaps
more aptly described as a series of shutters which opened and
closed randomly. He saw radiant light occupied by ephemeral beings
made of mist like what he might expect to see in Simon d’Ornan’s
mind. Then he saw a yawning abyss, full of smoke, darkness and the
glow of hellish fires. Within this unholy place he saw profane
demons of monstrous proportions. He saw beautiful crystal grottoes
with flowers made of precious stones. He saw deep green forests,
almost primeval, filled with shadowy dancing shapes and strange
blue flames. And at one point, he had seen the Great Pyramid at
Giza in the man’s mind. Not the Pyramid as it stood today, but
rather as it must have looked when it was new with the gold
capstone shining in the sun and the white marble casing, polished
to perfection. Beautiful canals and date palm trees had made the
desert around the pyramid look like a lush tropical park. These
were disturbing images and he put them down to dreamstates rather
than conscious thoughts or memories. The Knight closed his eyes,
drew a deep breath and reached for Mark Andrew’s mind one more
time. The near proximity would hopefully lend more clarity to the
visions and he consciously braced himself.

The image of a young blond woman with
brilliant blue eyes immediately sprang to life in his mind. Her
sensuous lips and coy expression made him cringe away from her and
he swayed on the outcropping. He rejected this image and it was
replaced by the same ghastly scene he had seen earlier in the day.
The rain beat down in torrents, lightning flashed and thunder
boomed around him. The wind whipped and roared in his ears. He felt
the cold water running into his face and saw before him the figure
of a woman with dark hair. She stood, eyes wide, drenched by the
storm. He looked down and saw the hilt of the Flaming Sword of the
Cherubim protruding from his stomach. He felt the pain. Saw the
blood washed by the rain. He snapped his eyes open.

It was impossible to say whether these were
dreams, memories or actual events, but Ramsay had been sleeping for
almost seventy-two hours prior. There had been a storm on Friday
night. The night he had first arrived in this strange place. He
looked up into the sky at the few purple and pink clouds that
lingered above the horizon. Had the same woman that had poisoned
him used the golden sword to kill him a second time?

He was awake now and the dark Knight easily
diverted his attention to the present moment that Ramsay was
experiencing. The Knight of Death was pacing the floor. His mind
was in a heightened sense of expectation as if he were preparing
himself mentally for battle. The door opened and the dark-haired
woman entered.

Von Hetz withdrew immediately, not wishing to
experience another moment of embarrassment. The dark Knight leaned
forward against the pain in his head as he let go of his Brother’s
thoughts.

Von Hetz went down on one knee and focused
his attention on the house where he concentrated on a lighted
window near the roof. This was where the physical Ramsay could be
found. He then turned his attention to the south and east, where he
could sense the presence of the three Brothers that the Grand
Master had sent to bring back the Knight of Death. They had finally
managed to locate the last known whereabouts of Anthony Scalia, but
they were inactive at the moment. As he turned to leave the ledge,
he thought he caught sight of another presence. Weaker and
indistinct, somewhere to the south and west. Who else would have
come? He walked back to the narrow, dirt road where a black BMW
waited for him. He folded himself under the steering wheel and
started the car. His mind was full of thoughts. Dark thoughts of
his own.

Simon D’Ornan was the only one of the three
he trusted as far as this mission was concerned. Simon would make
the right decision, but Thomas Beaujold was filled with personal
ire against Ramsay. A hatred that would impair the man’s
professional judgment and jeopardize his moral responsibility for
his Brother’s welfare. Dambretti posed a problem of a different
kind.

Lucio Dambretti and Mark Ramsay had been
companions, friends and antagonists for practically as long as they
had lived. Ramsay had brought Dambretti into the Order upon
returning from the Holy Lands after the fall of Jerusalem. The boy
had apparently saved his life somehow in the midst of the debacle.
Mark Andrew had been young, barely twenty-five at most and
Dambretti had been but a scrawny boy of thirteen or fourteen. They
had been almost inseparable for countless years afterwards, through
numerous campaigns as servant and Master then apprentice and Master
and then Knights on equal footing, until one day Dambretti had
arrived bag and baggage at the Villa in Italy. Something drastic
had happened between them. Something that neither of them was
willing to discuss and the Ritter had never made an attempt to
learn what it was. Some things were better left unknown.

Dambretti had established a residence in
Naples and there he had been for almost four hundred years while
Ramsay remained in Scotland, the beloved home of his youth. They
were still friends. They still spoke to each other warmly enough
upon meeting, but there was an unresolved issue between them. The
entire Council knew of it, but none knew the details and all left
it at that. All, of course, with the exception of the Grand Master,
but von Hetz had managed to elude the man’s curiosity for four
centuries. He would not look into his Brother’s minds to satisfy
curiosity, not even the Master’s curiosity.

One thing the Ritter knew for certain was
that Dambretti would never be able to subdue the Knight of Death if
it came to that. He would not only be outmatched by the Knight, he
would refuse to engage him, even if it became necessary. In spite
of their falling out, the Knight of the Golden Eagle still held
Ramsay in such high regard, it bordered on idolatry to the extent
that a few of the French Knights had made unseemly innuendoes about
them. Whatever had happened between Ramsay and Dambretti must have
sprung from some rash behavior on the part of the Italian.

The pairing of Beaujold and Dambretti was
probably an effort on the Master’s part to balance Ramsay’s chances
of returning alive. Beaujold’s cockiness would not hold him in good
stead against Mark Ramsay's deadly efficiency once the Knight was
in a fit of rage and, for some reason, Beaujold had the remarkable
ability to provoke Ramsay with very little effort. Simon, of
course, was there for mediation, of course, but he felt they were
headed for disaster and he, Konrad von Hetz, would have to try to
stop it before it started.

He drove down the twisting, winding road with
one last thought foremost in his mind. He had to get to Ramsay
before the others. If not, he might have the dreadful duty of
returning three Knights of the Temple to the Grand Master in
boxes.

((((((((((((()))))))))))))

Mark Andrew wandered around the little dormer
room, waiting impatiently for the arrival of John Tellman. He had
already decided not to leave under any circumstances even if the
opportunity presented itself. He would stay and play out
Valentino’s game to the bitter end. Tellman was a pitiful pawn in
her game and he would not want the man’s blood on his hands.
Valentino was trying to maneuver him into another setup for her
‘special hypnosis’. It had come down to one decision: go or stay.
Something told him to stay and without the benefit of any better
point of reference, he had made his choice. Listen to the inner
voice. Always a good way to go when all other means had been
exhausted. Certainly all of his memory would return eventually and
the entire situation would make sense. Supper was long gone and he
was hungry again. If he ever got away, he would head straight to
the nearest steak house and order everything on the menu.

When the door finally opened, it was not John
Tellman, but Cecile Valentino who looked in at him. She carried a
bottle of white wine under one arm and, of all things, a basket of
fruit. He watched her curiously as she closed the door and set the
fruit on the desk.