“What have you done to my entry system?” Thomas asked, the peevishness in his voice clearly evident.
“It is not your entry system. It belongs to the library and I have locked it.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not want just anybody to be able to gain free access here. I’m sure, with everything the way it is in the mountain, you understand that.”
Father Thomas opened his mouth to respond but Athanasius held his hand up to silence him, mindful that they should choose their battles and this was not the one they needed to win. “That is why we have come to talk to you,” he said. Malachi’s eyes darkened behind the thick pebbles of his glasses and his bushy eyebrows beetled above them. “We have been contacted by the outside,” Athanasius continued. “They have requested that we help develop a cure for the blight.”
“They have a cure?” Malachi took an involuntary step forward, his glasses magnifying the hope in his eyes.
“No. Not yet. They are working on one, and they would like us to help.”
The shadows on Malachi’s face settled back into guarded suspicion. “How?”
Athanasius took a breath and ran his hand over the smooth dome of his skull. He had hoped the carrot of a cure might have been enough to tempt Malachi away from his entrenched and long-held suspicion of the world beyond the walls. He should have known better. “We are all united in suffering,” he said, “and in our desire to prevent others from suffering as we have.” Malachi said nothing. He just continued to stare through the window like a glowing, malevolent ghost. “We have been asked to allow medical teams into the mountain so they might treat our infected and study the disease at its origin.”
Malachi’s eyebrows shot up in outrage. “Outsiders? Inside the mountain? I hope you are not seriously considering this lunacy?”
“Is it lunacy? To want to try and arrest the spread of this creeping death?”
“We have weathered plagues in the mountain before. You should read your history, Brother Athanasius. We suffered and survived our trials then and we shall do so again, and without the need to welcome the world in to gawp at us and what we guard here — our sacred order is more robust than you give it credit for.”
“The plagues of the past are nothing compared to what we face now,” Father Thomas cut in, stepping into the narrow airlock to join Athanasius. “Historically there has always been greater medical knowledge inside the mountain than outside, so there was never any need to look farther than these walls for cures and treatments. We have also historically enjoyed rude health, have we not? But with the march of time and the loss of the Sacrament neither of those things is now true.”
“Yes,” Malachi replied, his fierce eyes turning back to Athanasius, “and whose fault is that? Had the Sacrament remained here then none of this would have happened. If you want to cure this blight that you have brought upon us then I suggest you concentrate on returning the Sacrament to the mountain where it belongs. That is my answer. Bring back the girl and what she stole and we shall see then how things change.”
Athanasius was not a violent man but if the thick glass of the air lock door had not stood between them he may well have struck Malachi right then and there in the middle of his narrow-minded face. The whole world could wither and perish for all Malachi cared, just so long as his precious library remained unsullied and safe. His act of sabotaging the entry system so he could prevent people freely entering his dark kingdom merely proved it: he had effectively pulled up a drawbridge to create a state within a state, with himself and all the other librarians inside and everyone else without.
“Do you intend to stay locked up in there indefinitely?” Athanasius asked, the hint of a plan starting to form in his mind.
“I do indeed, both to protect the library as well as shield my staff from the dangerous tide of lunatic liberalism that seems to be sweeping through the corridors of the Citadel.”
“So I take it you will not even consider this letter or the proposal it contains?”
Malachi looked at the envelope in Athanasius’s hand as if it were a viper about to strike. “I will not even touch it,” he replied.
“Very well,” Athanasius took a step back and rejoined Thomas in the passage. “As you have effectively removed yourself from the community of the mountain you have also disqualified yourself from its governance. Therefore, Father Thomas and I will now vote on this matter ourselves.”
Malachi looked like he was about to explode. “You can’t do that. Any change in the constitution must be voted on and agreed unanimously by all the guilds. And for that you need me.”
Athanasius shook his head. “If you read the Citadelic statutes closely you will see that in fact a consensus is required from all active guilds, as voted for by their chief representatives. And as you have just made abundantly clear, you and your members are no longer an active part of the mountain. So as sole representatives of the still active guilds within the mountain Thomas and I will consider the merit of this proposal alone. We shall inform you of our decision once it is made, of course, out of courtesy. Good day, Father Malachi.”
Then he turned and walked briskly away before Malachi had a chance to respond.
38
The C-130 dropped through violently churning clouds and banked hard to bring it into the wind and onto its approach heading.
“Jesus, would you look at that,” the pilot’s voice crackled through the comms.
Shepherd peered across the cargo space and through the tiny windows opposite. He caught small glimpses of the city of Charleston below, frozen solid and blanketed with snow. He wondered why the pilot sounded so surprised after what he had told them about the weather earlier. It was like this all over the South he had said. A section of midtown slid into view, the taller buildings looking like huge ice crystals that had punched up through the ground, then the plane shifted again, bringing a new view into the windows.
Below him the broad Cooper River snaked through the heart of the city. It seemed low, just a narrow channel winding its way through flat, snow-dusted banks. The USS Yorktown, a World War Two museum ship at permanent mooring just down from the Ravenel Bridge, looked like it was beached on the white flats. Then Shepherd saw cracks in the white that surrounded it and realized what it was. The river wasn’t low at all and the white flats not the banks, they were the river. The whole thing had frozen solid, leaving just a trickle of water running down the center.
The plane leveled off, bringing more of the city into view and Shepherd finally saw what the pilot had seen. It wasn’t the snow or even the extraordinary sight of a frozen South Carolina tidal river that had drawn the exclamation from his lips — it was what was on the river.
East of the bridge and beyond the cracked edge of the ice sheet where the freshwater met the salt of the sea were more ships than Shepherd had ever seen before in one place. Closest to land were smaller vessels and fishing boats, all crammed together so tightly it looked like you could almost walk across the river using them as stepping-stones. Farther out in the deeper water were bigger ships: container vessels, tankers, cruise liners, military ships and even the immense outline of an aircraft carrier. It was an astonishing sight and there was something both impressive and deeply unsettling about it. Just before the plane started its final descent and cut the view entirely Shepherd realized what it was. They all had their bow inward. Every single one of the hundred or so ships was pointing toward land.