Now she stepped aside as Klosterheim began to back away from the advancing albino. ‘I shall not be threatened, Monsieur! Arioch! Lord Arioch of the Seven Darks! Aid me, I beg thee. Arioch, thou promised me…’
’Lord Arioch’s promises are of a practical and volatile nature, also,’ declared Zenith, the slender sword still pointed at Klosterheim’s throat. ‘It surprises me that you did not consider this when laying out your equation for this particular adventure. There are only a few for whose blood and souls he has no appetite at all.’
’But you forget, monsieur. That blade and your master feed on souls as well as blood.’ Klosterheim’s smile was bitterly sardonic. ‘Nein?’ With a quavering laugh, somehow even more disgusting than any previous expression he had given, he folded his arms and challenged Zenith to stab him.
If anything, the albino’s smile chilled the onlookers’ blood more than the other eternal’s laughter. Without hesitation, Monsieur Zenith stepped forward in an elegant fencer’s movement and his delicate black blade took Klosterheim in the throat.
For a second the ex-priest continued to laugh and then his eyes widened. He clutched at himself, at the shivering blade. He gasped. He groaned. He staggered backwards towards the very edge of the moonbeam road and hung there, swaying, as blood bubbled from the wound Zenith had made. ’Nein!’ he said again, this time without any form of irony, only with the most appalling fear. ‘Nein!’
He realised suddenly where he stood and made an attempt to regain his balance, but it was too late. His deep-set eyes burned with terror, lighting that cadaverous head with an unholy fire. Begg and the others could not tell what emotion they witnessed, but they would agree that it was emotion.
‘How can this be?’ Klosterheim spoke in the old High German of his youth. ‘How-?’
‘You forgot, Herr Klosterheim.’ With a lithe, sudden movement Zenith resheathed the black blade. ‘My sword is capable of conferring souls as well as stealing them.’ He stepped forward again and his hand was light on Klosterheim’s chest as he tipped him, gently, off into the void above the pulsing Balance. ‘And only a creature with a human soul, no matter how corrupt, can enjoy that moment of forever, poised between eternity and oblivion, which comes with the end of everything. Meanwhile, I send you to consider that thought for as long as you shall last. Which, of course, shall be until the end of Time.’
And then Klosterheim was falling backwards screaming, to join those others who hung in the void, like flies in a web, conscious and frozen in the instant before their deaths.
Monsieur Zenith turned with a bow. Reaching out, he kissed Mrs Persson’s hand. ‘Well played, madam. Our plan was almost foiled by these good-hearted fellows.’ He inclined his head towards Begg and Sinclair.
‘You two had planned all this?’ Sinclair found himself torn between rage and relief. ‘All of it?’
‘Most of it,’ declared Mrs Persson, advancing towards the famous pathologist. ‘Really, Doctor Sinclair, we had no intention of deceiving you or your colleagues. Neither did I expect to be detained by them, so very likely you saved my life by arriving when you did. From then on I thought it the best strategy to pretend to ally myself with Klosterheim, at least until Monsieur Zenith made his somewhat belated appearance. We really did not know you would have either the powers of deduction or the sheer courage to reach this place. Then, when you did turn up, I for one was rather baffled. It seemed that everything Monsieur Zenith and myself had worked out was threatened.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘Happily, as you see-’
‘Klosterheim, for all his evil, did not deserve such a fate,’ declared Begg gravely. ‘And neither did those others.’
‘Oh, I assure you, dear cousin, they do indeed deserve everything.’ Zenith looked down into the void to where the great Balance still swayed. ‘And this affair is probably not yet over, though your part is certainly done.’ Then, with a casual movement of his wrist, he threw his swordstick after the man on whom he had just conferred life and a kind of death at the same moment, and turned to guide the two men back in the direction from which they had come. ‘Quickly. The thing that is my sword is not so easily defeated in its ambitions.’
Begg hesitated, demurring, and Zenith’s face became a mask of urgency. ‘Hurry, man! Hurry! If you value your soul!’
From somewhere below there now sounded a voice more terrifying than anything they had yet heard and, blossoming upwards, they saw a huge, bloody black cloud rising, rising like a wave which, instinctively, Begg knew must soon engulf them. The noise grew until it deafened them, causing bile to rise in their throats, and at last Begg obeyed his cousin. Grabbing Dr Sinclair’s arm, he turned and ran, Mrs Persson and Zenith the Albino immediately behind him.
The moonbeam road quivered and trembled beneath their feet, as if they experienced a powerful earthquake. Still they ran, knowing that not only their lives but their eternal souls must be the price of any further hesitation…
… Until suddenly a deep calm settled over them and a silvery whiteness had sprung up, forming a kind of wall, and they were once again in the catacombs they had left behind for what seemed millennia.
Monsieur Zenith straightened his silk hat on his head. ‘I shall miss that cane,’ he said. ‘But I know the exact place I can buy another in the Galerie du Baromètre. Come, Mrs Persson, gentlemen. Shall we return to the Arcades de l’Opéra? I think we have a rather extraordinary adventure to celebrate.’
EPILOGUE
His shoulder thoroughly bandaged, Bardot was the last to join the four men and one woman who shared an outside table at L’Albertine the following day. He was received with a great sense of celebration as the hero of the hour. ‘Without you, my dear Bardot, we should perhaps even now be enjoying the fate of our Nazi antagonists. As it is, the arrest of Colonel Hitler took the wind out of the Freikorps insurgents, who were indeed massing to enter the tunnel to take them directly into Paris. The Hindenburg made a successful mooring at the Eiffel Tower and spent a tranquil night there. The Star of Judea was returned. Even now negotiations to found a new Jewish homeland in Bavaria are proceeding and it is fully expected the exodus to Southern Germany will begin some time towards the end of next year!’ Seaton Begg clapped his French colleague on his good shoulder and ordered him an Armagnac.
The autumn sun was rising high in a golden sky and the great fountain in the centre of the arcade was falling in dark blue and green sheets against the verdigris, marble and tile of the statuary. There was a tranquil, leisurely quality to the day which Begg agreed he had not experienced for some time. It was as if the atmosphere were created by the capture of Hitler and his men.
‘Illusion though it might be, my friends,’ murmured Commissaire Lapointe, ‘it seems to me as if our world is about to embark upon a new era of peace and prosperity. Call me superstitious, if you will, but I believe in our defeat of the Nazi gang and their subsequent fate, we achieved something. Do you follow my meaning, Sir Seaton?’
Begg permitted himself a small smile. ‘We can hope you are right, my dear commissioner. But you are of another opinion, I think, Taffy.’
Dr Sinclair did his best to make light of his own thoughts. ‘It was that Balance,’ he said. ‘Something was going on down there which terrified me. And the manner of Klosterheim’s death – well, I still have difficulty sleeping when I think about it.’ He glanced almost shyly at Monsieur Zenith, who leaned back, taking a long puff on his Afghan cigarette.