Chapter 7
Seven
Mark
I wake just before Tangier with a twinge in my right knee and a cramp deep in my chest. I stretch my leg out carefully before standing and getting my things; I don’t bother trying to do anything with my chest. I already know the two pretty reasons why it hurts.
There are two ways to disappear, or at least to disappear well .
You can vanish—there one breath and gone the next, the kind of disappearing that either happens because you’re very quick or because you have your fingers in a salient digital pie—or you can evanesce over the space of a few hours, dissipating like fog on glass, fading until there’s nothing left for anyone to follow.
For example, anyone who noted the well-heeled British tourist in Fez might have been able to find his name—Trevor Owens—and see that he boarded a train to Tangier.
But the man who stepped off the train in Tangier is no longer blond or well dressed or even British…
he is dark-haired in a worn T-shirt with the tired shuffle of a gig worker.
He will not board a train or a plane or a ferry, and he will not linger, and by the time a red-haired man slips off a freighter docking at Algeciras to pay cash for a car and drive to the French border, Trevor Owens will be little better than a ghost.
I am still prepared to bribe my way out of the messes I left behind in Fez, but honestly, I’d rather not spend the secrets if I don’t have to. I have a feeling I’ll need everything in my treasury before I’m done bringing down Cashel and Ys.
On the freighter, I dye my hair again, change clothes, and slip some cash to the captain before I step onto Spanish soil and strike for the part of town where I’ll be able to find a new phone and a car that doesn’t require real paperwork.
I don’t have to go far—just that scabbed-over seam where the industrial section meets the actual town, the shore where the dockworkers and incoming crew eddy with the unhoused, the unemployed, and police looking for smuggled hashish.
And that’s where I see the news, blaring from a mounted television inside a narrow store selling T-shirts, cigarettes I’m certain are smuggled from Gibraltar, and, most importantly, cheap cell phones.
My Spanish is strong, but it still takes a moment for the chatter of the news anchors to sink in, for me to hear not just the news but the low tones of the people smoking on the steps outside the store.
The pope is dead .
Fuck.
The news report is low on details. They only say that the pope died last night—lingering complications from a prior surgery—and that the funeral is four days from now. The papal conclave will follow quickly after, and then the cardinals will select the new pope from among their number.
The anchor talks about the pope’s ailing health over the last year as the feed cuts to the gathering crowds in St. Peter’s Square.
The camera focuses on a microphone, presumably meant for an imminent statement.
Behind it, the cardinals and bishops stand like a cloud of blackbirds trimmed in scarlet and amaranth red.
I see Cashel at the very edge, conferring with a monsignor with their heads bent.
Whatever Cashel is saying, he’s saying it quickly, the monsignor nodding and nodding as he taps something onto his phone.
When the monsignor inclines his head briefly and strides away, Cashel turns back to face the crowd, his expression one of beatific solemnity, of profound sadness and yet also humble reassurance.
Another monsignor scurries up to the group, all of them turning and shuffling to confer—there is no overstating how complicated the choreography is for a Holy Father’s death, a constant tension of practical and ecumenical demands, all of them overlapping onto a modern media and legal ecosystem—and I watch as Cashel lifts a hand to his jaw and rubs while the monsignor gestures behind him at the basilica.
I don’t need to see any more.
The pope is dead. Cashel has made his move.
I purchase my new phone, activate the eSIM, use the browser to access a surveillance portal protected by multiple layers of authentication. The same portal I used to track Tristan and Isolde to Morois.
I stare at the two dots moving at a train’s speed eastward from Calais. In the direction of Rome.
Shit.
I call Andrea and explain why I won’t be back at Lyonesse tomorrow as planned and ask her to let Dinah and Sedge know too. Then I call my twin.
“This is Trevena,” Melody answers crisply. She’s the newly sworn-in deputy director of the NSA and very busy now. I don’t care.
“It’s me.”
She sighs. “Hold on.”
I hear movement and then the closing of a door. I imagine her in her spacious office, the newly crowned monarch of Fort Meade, ready to shape the world with a flick of her fingertips.
“Okay,” she says. “What is it—and before you tell me, please tell me that you’re not on your way to Rome right now.”
“I’m on my way to Rome right now.”
I hear something between a scoff and a sigh.
“You know Cashel is behind this. This is his play. This is how he gets the ring.”
“More than likely,” Melody concedes, “but what can you do about it, short of assassination?”
I don’t answer.
“Mark,” she says, irritated, like I’m a cat trying to lie down on her keyboard. “ No .”
“I’m not planning on killing him. Yet.”
Another sigh. I think she knows that’s as good as she’s going to get from me.
But waiting to kill Cashel is a practical decision, not an ethical one.
Even I’m not good enough to strike at a Catholic cardinal in his own nest with no plan in place or support nearby.
And I still don’t know how to stop Ys from rolling on despite his death, especially without knowing the identity of the Scales.
I thought I had?—
I thought I had longer to move one or two more pieces across the board, that’s all. A young man’s mistake, except I no longer have the excuse of being young.
“Tristan and Isolde are almost to Rome. I can’t have them tangled up in this, right in the middle of Cashel’s plans.
” My free hand flexes at my side—a nervous habit I’ve never entirely been able to extirpate—and I shake it in irritation.
I’m standing on the side of an empty French highway, staring at a bunch of dead trees and some pine trees that wish they were dead.
“A saint in Morocco told me that Cashel plans to kill Isolde. But if Cashel thinks she’s useful to him still, then maybe he’ll spare her for the time being.
” And the time being is good enough for me—long enough for me to make Isolde permanently safe.
“I’m not going to ask how you got a saint in Morocco to tell you anything.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“And I’m guessing you’re hoping you can leverage yourself as this usefulness somehow?”
“Yes.”
“She was told to kill you.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you willing to risk her trying again?”
My fingers find the scar at the base of my throat. I like the way it feels. A truer sign of her devotion than a ring on her finger or a collar around her neck. A testament in the flesh to what I’ve seen in her eyes. She could have killed me—easily, with my blessing and consent—and she didn’t.
“She won’t.”
“Okay, so you’re going to Rome, you’ll somehow…maneuver…Isolde into being useful to Cashel, and then after that? The florilegium?”
The florilegium is what Melody calls the meticulously assembled dossier and assorted documents on every member of Ys we can find.
A florilegium is typically a medieval compilation of writings by Church fathers, a sort of Catholic anthology, but there is another meaning for the word: a collection of information and illustrations about flowers.
I rather like that idea. That Andrea and I are making a guidebook to all the poisonous, avaricious, and invasive flowers of the world.
“Yes, the florilegium. And Brittany Hill.”
“Oh, yes, the long-standing hunt for Brittany Hill. How’s that going?”
My silence is its own answer.
Melody tuts. “You realize when you punch a name out of someone, it’s bound to be a fake one, right?”
“Okay. Well. My options have been limited lately, so I don’t appreciate the judgmental tone.”
It’s technically true that the name Brittany Hill came after some persuasion , but I still think it’s genuine.
The source I’d been persuading had been hired muscle of Filip Drobny’s—muscle that had been sloppily trained and not paid well enough for silence.
Drobny—a Slovakian warlord who had an understandable, if annoying, vendetta against me—had been one of the power players on Ys’s weapons smuggling side until I killed him in Belgrade a couple months ago.
And it probably goes without saying that the lower levels of any criminal organization aren’t generally filled with people known for their discipline or discretion…
or courage…but that seemed to be especially true of Drobny’s little enterprise.
It didn’t take much at all for Drobny’s man to tell me everything he knew, and with the desperation of someone who didn’t want to lose his molars for a boss who didn’t give a shit about him.
“My unexpected friend told me that Drobny knew if he found someone named Brittany Hill, he could exploit some vital weakness of Cashel’s,” I add. “You know at this point that I can’t ignore any information that might help me.”
“Your unexpected friend ,” laughs Melody. “Okay, so you use the florilegium and the elusive Brittany Hill to bring down an invisible league of arms dealers and whoever else, and at the end of this, what? What happens to you and Lyonesse and your two cheating toys?”
I’ve never told Melody how I imagine the end of this playing out, because I know she won’t accept it. She doesn’t see sacrifice in the same terms I do—she thinks it’s stupid. I think sacrifice is stupid too, yet sometimes stupid is all we have.