He had agreed to talk with them at vespers and the bell rang now, echoing six times through the tunnels of the mountain, showing that the appointed hour had arrived.
“Do you think he’ll come?” Thomas whispered, studying the still darkness of the library through the window of the air lock.
“He’ll come,” Athanasius replied. “I dropped hints in my note that we had acquired a document that may have some bearing on our current plight. There’s no way he could resist taking a look at something like that. However, I’m sure he will first make us wait.”
Athanasius was right. They stood there for nearly ten minutes before a light finally appeared in the distant dark, flickering as it moved toward them.
“There’s something wrong with the lights,” Thomas whispered.
Athanasius peered at the still distant figure and realized he was right. Instead of the usual follow light, Malachi’s journey toward them was illuminated solely by a candle lamp. He held a hand in front to shield it and walked slowly to stop the flame from snuffing out. Thomas and Athanasius watched his steady progress, realizing as he drew nearer that the month of isolation inside the library had not been kind to Malachi. His pale skin, pallid and translucent from a near lifetime spent out of the sun, was flaking around his nose and mouth and his eyes were circled with red as though he had hardly slept.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak with us,” Athanasius said the moment Malachi stopped on the other side of the locked door, huffing and perspiring from his long walk. “Is there some problem with the lighting?”
“No,” Malachi replied. “I have simply turned it off. Those of us who still cling to the sanctity of the old ways have agreed to shun the corrupting influence of modernity, in all its forms.”
Athanasius nodded as if this was a perfectly reasonable response. “And how are things with you and the others of your guild?” he asked, before Thomas could lose his temper.
“We are dying, thank you — slowly but steadily.”
Yes—Athanasius thought—we hear them screaming each time you abandon them, and then burn them for you once they are dead.
“What about you,” Malachi countered, “did your little coup achieve anything? Has the bringing of civilians into the Citadel and trampling on thousands of years of venerated tradition been rewarded with the discovery of a miracle cure?”
“Not yet — but we are making progress.”
Malachi’s eyes brightened. “Really? What sort of progress?”
“One of the infected has been successfully nursed back from the brink of death, a civilian. He seems to have developed a form of natural immunity to the disease. The doctors are now working to try and extract a vaccine from his blood.”
“Really — a vaccine? And is he fully recovered, this — civilian?” He said this last word as he might utter the word snake.
“Not fully recovered; he is improving but still weak. He has been removed to the abbot’s private quarters to rest and allow the doctors to conduct further tests. It is a vital period in their search for a vaccine; they must try to understand the reason for his recovery. At the same time, in our own way, we too are desperately trying to understand the blight better. I mentioned in my note that a certain document has come into our possession, a prophecy that was originally carved on a stone long ago.”
“Yes, do you have it with you?”
“Not exactly. We have a facsimile of it. A detailed photograph showing both sides of the stone.”
Malachi’s eyes grew larger behind the pebbles of his glasses. “Show it to me.”
“I was hoping you might allow us into the library so we can study it together and utilize the huge wealth of resources and reference material to try and decipher its meaning.”
The magnified eyes clouded with suspicion and flitted between the two of them as if he suspected some kind of trap. “Why don’t you give the document to me and I will see what I can make of it? You know I am familiar with all the ancient languages collected here. I have studied them and decoded many. If this stone is written in any of these then I will be able to recognize and translate it without need for further study or research. I might be able to tell you what it says right now — if you show it to me.”
Father Thomas and Athanasius exchanged a glance. They had expected this and, though neither of them liked it, they had little choice but to agree. Time was too pressing.
“If we show it to you, you must share what you see in it.”
“Of course.”
“Whatever it contains affects us all.”
“Indeed.” Malachi was fidgety, the candle shaking in his hand with anticipation.
Thomas opened his jacket where the laptop was secreted. He opened it and held the screen toward Malachi. Cold blue light lit up the librarian’s face, turning it into a grotesque, glowing mask that appeared to float beyond the window in the door, the eyes pecking information from the screen like hungry birds. “It’s Malan,” he said, studying the first image.
“That’s what we thought,” Athanasius replied, sensing Malachi’s deliberate evasion but choosing not to challenge him on it. “What about the second image?”
Malachi’s eyes flitted across the screen but he said nothing. Thomas closed the laptop abruptly, prompting Malachi to look up as though he had been slapped.
“You promised to share your thoughts. If you do not honor your side of the bargain then we will not honor ours.”
“Of course, my apologies, I was just trying to — to get a sense of it. It’s written in two different languages — three if you consider that the constellations might also be telling part of the story.” Athanasius nodded, he had not considered this, but it made sense. The protocuneiform section he had been able to partly understand was linked by a line as well as by meaning to the extra star marked in the constellation of Taurus. “Can you decipher any of it?”
“I’m sure I can — but I will need to see it again and study it a little longer.”
Athanasius paused. Malachi was a slippery, self-interested character at the best of times. “Very well,” he said, “but the moment I think you are holding something back from us, we shut it again and walk away. Understood?”
Malachi nodded and attempted a smile that looked monstrous in the wavering light of his candle. Thomas opened the laptop again and turned it to face the window in the door. Malachi’s eyes crawled over it hungrily. “It’s very old, reminiscent of protoelemaic but not the same. There is a symbol here for the Citadel, also one for death and another that refers to disease or a plague…”
Athanasius glanced at Father Thomas. They had been right. The stone did predict what was happening here. “What else?”
Malachi shook his head. “It is hard to render it into a formal sentence. It is impressionistic rather than narrative.” His eyes continued to scan the symbols. “Maybe if you leave it with me I can cross-reference it with some of the other elemite documents in the library from the same period and arrive at a clearer meaning.”