She’d never seen a file like it. The earliest pages were sheets of parchment, still supple and smooth to the touch; they gave way to a stiff and brittle paper with an ivory sheen, that gradually softened into creamy writing paper and finally to regular A4 office paper. Some of the paper felt thin and grey, and she supposed that came from wartime. It was like looking at tree rings, history written in cross section.
But she needed the present — and she found it almost at once, a sheet of paper at the back headed ‘Vault Access’. Underneath was a list of strange words, foreign and archaic. Or, argent, azure, gules, vert … Each had a four-digit number beside it.
She closed the safe and jogged down the hall to the lift. When she slid Blanchard’s card into the invisible slot in the panel, the button for the sixth floor started to glow.
Her hand hovered in front of it, trembling. The ruby on her finger smouldered like a dragon’s eye. On her wrist, the seconds ticked by.
She stabbed the button.
With the merest tremor, the lift began its descent. Past the basement and the sub-basement, then a long eternity when it was nowhere. Ellie began to wonder if it had stopped, if some hidden sensor had betrayed her deception. Her heart twitched with panic; she gazed at the buttons, overcome with a desperate urge to push them and turn the lift back to the world above. But it was too late.
She didn’t feel the lift stop. The doors glided open, revealing the golden room with its treasures so tantalisingly unguarded. Every piece triggers an alarm. But what else might trigger it? She approached the jewelled cup on the plinth in the centre of the room. A movement in the glass made her flinch, but it was only her own ghostly reflection. She unzipped her top and pulled out the key.
Four carved beasts peered from the corners of the plinth: a dragon, a horned serpent that she thought might be a cockatrice, a griffin and a basilisk. Ellie knelt and peered in their mouths. At the back of each stone throat, a small keyhole invited the key. She slid it into the serpent, just as Blanchard had done. Her arm tensed as she reached in, as if the stone jaws might come to life, spring shut.
Nothing happened. The key fit the lock perfectly. She felt the mechanism bite as she began to turn. It was working.
Or was it that simple? It occurred to her that all the vault’s defences were built on illusion. It didn’t block your way: it invited you in, tempting you to betray yourself. The sixth floor that lay three storeys underground; the unprotected treasures on the shelves around her; the door hidden back where you’d come from.
Every piece triggers an alarm.
She eased off the lock and withdrew the key. Trying to stand where she’d stood before, she examined the cup in the case. It looked different to last time. Halfway up, the stem swelled out in a golden bubble, decorated on four sides with inlaid coloured stones. Ellie was sure the stone facing her before had been emerald green; now it was white, a fat pearl.
The cup had turned.
She circled the plinth, poring over the cup. The other stones in the stem were yellow — she thought it might be amber, though in fact it was a diamond — and a blood-red garnet.
She tried to remember a lecture series she’d been to at university, a wizened old professor who might have come straight from a monastery scriptorium.
Griffins were the guardians of gold.
Basilisks had a white spot on their head like a diadem.
The cockatrice had black eyes. Or were they red? Her memory faltered; she looked to her phone, but of course there was no reception down there.
You don’t even know that any of it corresponds at all.
Her heart thudded inside her chest; with every beat, she felt time racing away. She had to make a decision.
She put the key in the basilisk’s mouth and turned.
Perhaps, somewhere else in the building, an alarm went off or a light began to flash. In the deep vault, Ellie had no way of knowing. Behind her, she heard the hiss as the false door in the lift slid back to reveal the rugged wooden portal behind.
She checked her watch: almost two hours gone. She’d have to hurry.
The Aston Martin raced down the A12 towards London. The road was almost empty at that time of night; the needle hovered well above a hundred miles an hour. Inside, Destrier was barking orders to a chastened security guard. He’d gone to Blanchard’s office but found nothing, the door locked, the light off. That worried Destrier even more.
The line beeped to announce a new message. ‘Just find her,’ he shouted. He hung up, then glanced down to read the message.
He nearly drove off the road. He slammed the brakes and the rear end started to fishtail on the slick tarmac. He spun the wheel and swerved back, almost into the path of an oncoming lorry. Its horn blasted through the cold night, falling away like a dying breath.
Destrier eased his speed down to ninety while he gathered his thoughts. He glanced at the message again, hardly believing his eyes. Where the hell was Blanchard?
01:29: Card 0002 entry to FLOOR 6
Ellie had brought a head-torch, but she didn’t need it. The hidden lights glowed into life the moment she crossed the threshold. She moved down the ancient aisle, scanning the vaults above for watching eyes, cameras or beams that would trap her. She saw nothing.
She crossed the transept and reached the back of the vault, under where the old church’s altar must once have stood, before the religion of wealth replaced the religion of charity. She thought of the mosaic half-buried in the floor, and wondered what older, darker faiths had flourished here before that. The iron doors glared at her like dead eyes in the furrowed walls.
Here, time becomes space.
She knew, without ever having being told, which vault it was. She remembered it from her visit with Blanchard: the two double doors in the floor painted with the Monsalvat crest and a steel keypad beside it. A black eagle on a red shield with a white chevron, clutching a golden spear. She looked at the piece of paper she’d taken from the Lazarus file.
Or, argent, azure, gules, vert …
Her last contact with Harry had been a CD and a book, delivered in a free newspaper again as she walked past Moorgate Tube station. She bought a portable CD player and sat outside in the Barbican listening to it. High walls of pebbledash and distressed concrete soared all around her. Ornamental water gushed out of a pipe into a series of ponds; wells sunk in the concrete revealed fragments of the medieval walls deep below the twentieth-century monument.
Harry’s voice spoke through the headphones. ‘All the vault codes at Monsalvat are based on heraldry. Each colour in the crest is allocated a number, which changes weekly. You’ll get the numbers from the file. Then you have to determine the correct formulation of the crest, which gives you the order. You’ll find everything you need to know in the book we’ve given you.’
Ellie had read the book like an eight year old, hiding under the duvet with a torch long after she should have been asleep. It taught her a new language, a new grammar — escutcheons and lozenges, charges and tinctures. She learned the difference between engrailed and enfossed, between metals and furs. She marvelled at the precision of it, even as she despaired of its intricacy. But she learned it.
Gules a chevron Argent, overall an eagle displayed Sable, armed and holding a spear both Or.
She consulted the paper from the file and found the numbers that corresponded to the colours. Each had four digits, sixteen in total. She entered them on the keypad, praying she’d remembered the medieval terminology correctly.