Touch of Darkness (23 page)

She stood gazing toward the top of the mountain, and she shook her head.

"An entrance to the underworld. It's said that's the way to hell." As if she'd been pushed, Sister Maria Helvig staggered sideways. "Oh, all right, Sister Teresa! I'll tell them the other story. There's no need to be so snappish." With a martyrish sigh, she added, "It's also said that it's a secret escape route used by the royal family of Ruyshvania in case of emergency. They say it passes under the mountain and comes out on the other side, in Hungary. But the story about the way to hell is certainly more colorful, isn't it?"

Rurik liked Sister Maria Helvig. He liked her childlike exuberance, her refusal to judge and condemn the pagans who had worshipped here so long ago. "It's very exciting, Sister. Where do the royal family live?"

"The Dimitrus are all dead now. Or so people say. But they lived right up there." Sister Maria Helvig pointed toward the top of the mountain.

His instincts stirred. "What happened to them?"

"They were murdered. Twenty-five years ago, the night was bright with the fire and shrill with the screams."

He scrutinized Sister Maria Helvig, who spoke softly, remembering.

He scrutinized Tasya. Still she stared up the mountain, her usually animated face without expression.

"The sisters say to tell you—this tree was ancient, tall, green, the symbol of the royal family. They burned it, too, and that night, all Ruyshvania mourned." Sister Maria Helvig crossed herself, and her lips moved silently.

Tasya heard her. She turned her head. "We'd better go."

But he had to be sure. "Tasya, look at that cave. When we're done, I'd like to map it. Are you in?"

Tasya glanced at the hole in the ground, then, as if caught, stared without blinking. "That cave does lead to hell, and I won't follow the path no matter what the peril—or the reward." She looked at him, her chin firm and her eyes so blue they looked like chips of the winter sky. "I've been in that cave before. I am a part of the royal family. I escaped through the caves. I'm the last remaining Dimitru on earth, and now you know all my secrets—and you hold my life in your hands."

Chapter 23

"The sisters suggest you would like a tour of the abbey." Sister Maria Helvig stood in front of the cloister, as chipper as ever, just as if the three of them hadn't made a trip to old, bad memories and back.

"Of course. If the icon is here, there has to be some way to figure out where." Rurik sounded absolutely confident, a man who had probably never heard screams or smelled burning flesh, and who thought hell was in the afterlife.

Sister Maria Helvig held up one hand, and cocked her head as if listening. Then she said, "Time is getting short."

Tasya glanced at the sun. It had dipped to the west, and she didn't want to be up on this mountain when it got dark.

"The sisters suggest that you, young man, look
around the grounds and in the outbuildings." Sister Maria Helvig took Tasya's hand. "This young lady and I will look in the chapel."

Rurik got a funny expression on his face, sort of like he was relieved, and also not at all surprised. "Good plan."

Tasya was glad to see the back of him. Right now, she resented him and his family back in Washington and his clear conscience and his self-assurance so
much,
she could scarcely look at him.

They paused in the doorway of the chapel. It was narrow and tall, with stained-glass windows set high on the walls, and broken pews set among the whole ones. Spiderwebs festooned the ceiling and hung on the chandelier, but the altar was spotless; the altar cloth was embroidered with gold thread, clean, white, and so thin, so old.

Sister Maria Helvig blessed herself with holy water from the font, then dipped her fingers again and etched a cross on Tasya's forehead. "It's better if I do it," she said. "You're too angry at God to do it for yourself."

True—but how did Sister Maria Helvig know? "I always thought the icon should be in here." She led Tasya down the aisle toward the front. "The boys get to have all the fun, and I think it would be nice if one of us girls had some for a change. So you find it."

"Any idea where to look?"

"I have lots of ideas!" Sister Maria Helvig clasped her hands together. "I thought—what?"

She looked at one of the invisible someones beside her. "What?" Tasya asked.

Sister Maria Helvig sighed heavily. "Sister Catherine insists I can't help you."

Tasya bit her lip. This was not the time or the place to say, "Bullshit," nor was Sister Maria Helvig the person to whom she could say it. But she wanted to.

While Sister Maria Helvig watched, Tasya walked to the altar and looked at the floor, the walls, the ceiling. She paced up first one side aisle, then another. The chapel was old stones and crumbling wood, and if there had at one time been an arrow and a sign saying icon here! it was long gone.

"Perhaps if you sat down and thought about it," the nun suggested.

Tasya suspected her suggestion was nothing more than an attempt to make her spend time in religious contemplation, but she wasn't getting anywhere on her own. The old training couldn't be denied; Tasya genuflected and slid into the pew close to the altar. "If you need me, call me." Sister Maria Helvig drifted toward the back of the chapel, her habit rustling in the quiet.

Tasya sighed and looked around. She'd been here before, a child looking up at the lines of nuns. . . . Her eyes slid almost shut.

She existed in that state between waking and sleeping, when nothing made sense . . . and everything was possible. Her mind floated free of her body. She looked down at herself, poor thing, slumped exhausted in the pew. Her hands rested palms up in her lap. Her chin leaned on her chest. Her eyes were closed.

She could see a tree, its branching reaching up to the sky, its leaves coolly green and promising. She
heard a man's voice. . . .
Tasya, little one, as long as you live, that oak will never die.

But the oak did die. It died a fiery death.

She lived. She lived for vengeance, and for her vengeance to be complete she needed the icon.

It was close. So close. .

The light of her consciousness spread out in all directions, searching for the key, and the lock to put it in.

Some force tugged the light toward the altar.

That made sense, but Tasya had looked all over the chapel . . . yet the light sank, and sank, onto the floor and into the cracks between the stones where once-hard mortar had crumbled into dust.

Someone was buried beneath the altar.

Of course. Rurik and Tasya's adventure had started in a tomb in Scotland. It would end in a grave in Ruyshvania.

The light found a treasure chest, a match to the one in Scotland.

And the light hovered there. Waiting.

I don't have a key!
Tasya floated in the chapel, arms outstretched.
I can't use what I don't have!

And
all at once, she was wide-awake and on her feet.

She did
too
have the key.

Sure for the first time in this whole journey, she fumbled for her backpack. She dragged it up off the floor by her feet. Placed it on the pew. Unzipped the main compartment. The key wasn't there. It wasn't in the side compartment. It wasn't in the stupid little compartment for the cell phone, or the one for the business cards, or the Velcro pocket for the pens. It wasn't in the mesh zip for the overnight change of clothes, or the padded computer compartment.

Frustrated, she pushed her hair off her forehead. Someone had stolen it. "No," she whispered.

It had to be here. She lost stuff in here all the time.

She groped the bottom of the backpack. The
sides . . . and in the water-bottle pocket, she found
the shape she'd been looking for. That of a long, rust-encrusted steel blade.

But it wasn't a steel blade.

All the way through Europe, the artifact had been rattling around in that pocket on the outside of her backpack. It had been smacked against doorframes, dropped on the floor, stored in overhead bins at the bottom of piles of luggage. As she opened the pocket, flakes of rust, large and small, made a grinding noise in the zipper, and when she delved inside, her hand came out red with rust—and she held a key.

The teeth were now clearly visible beneath the crust formed by a thousand years of being hidden in the ground on the Isle of Roi.

"Did you find it?"

She whirled to see Sister Maria Helvig sitting in the pew behind her. The old nun was smiling, as always, and nodding.

"Yes. I had it all along." Tasya showed it to her.

"Of course you did."

"And I know where the icon is."

Sister Maria Helvig's gaze shifted to the stone floor on the altar.

So the good sister had always known the icon's location.

"Will you take the icon?" she asked.

"Of course! That's what I came here to do." Tasya edged out of the pew.

"For your revenge?"

Tasya stopped. "How did you know that?" "I see my sisters around me. They wait for me to join them."

She sounded so convinced, Tasya turned, half-expecting to see a line of nuns dressed in black and white, seated in the pews.

"But I'm not dotty." Sister Maria Helvig turned to the side and spoke to ... no one. "Am I?"

Maybe she wasn't crazy or senile. Maybe she saw things that no one else saw, but were there. Maybe she knew things no one else knew. . . . Tasya walked to the sister's pew, grasped the finial tightly. "Will I succeed?"

Sister Maria Helvig pushed her glasses up her nose, and looked solemnly at Tasya. "You don't understand anything at all. You're involved in a great battle. Good and evil hang in the balance, and the actions of every person, no matter how small, will make all the difference."

Tasya waited for more. More enlightenment, more specifics, more anything.

But the nun tucked her hands into her sleeves and bent her head, and Tasya couldn't tell whether she was praying or asleep.

"All right, then." Tasya went up to the altar. Carefully, she placed the key on the railing, and knelt on i the granite.

As she'd seen in her vision, the grout was long gone. The stones were loose. Large stones, the length and width of her forearm, squared off by master masons and worn smooth by generations of the faithful. With her fingers, she pried the first one up.

Dirt . . . and bones. Bones picked clean by time.

She'd come to the right spot.

She pried up another stone, and another one. She bent a fingernail back to the quick, and held back a curse.

Not here. Not with Sister Maria Helvig listening.

The bones were old, covered with shreds of a wool burial shroud dyed brown by long contact with the earth. The man, when he'd been alive, had been tall and broad. His femur was long and thick; his hip bones were sturdy. Someone had crossed his hands over his chest. Finger bones were scattered among his ribs, one still wearing a hammered gold ring.

Tasya paused, disappointed and panting. She'd thought he would be holding the treasure chest.

"Keep looking." Sister Maria Helvig's voice floated faintly from the pews. And then, so faintly Tasya almost didn't hear her, she said, "There's no time left."

Tasya looked around. "No time for what?"

The nun didn't reply, but still sat with her head bent.

The stone over 'the king's head was four inches
thick and half the length of Tasya, and probably
weighed half a ton. Briefly she considered calling
Rurik to help, but she'd seen his reluctance to come
into the chapel. So she wouldn't call him, nor would she pray for
help from a god in whom she'd lost faith so many
years ago. Instead, she did what she always did, and
depended on herself. Saying, "Brace yourself, Sister, this is going to be
loud," she used the rocks on either side of the grave as a firm foundation for her feet.

Sliding her hands under the edges of the huge headstone, she labored to lift one end. The other remained firmly braced on the ground. The muscles in her arms and stomach screamed under the strain, yet slowly, slowly the monument rose. She got it almost to the halfway mark. . . . Almost there . . . almost. . . she was going to drop it. She had to drop it. She had to!