The sound was closer now, coming from the west.
The itch crawled over him like fire ants and he rode the waves of it, clamping his arms to his sides to stop his hands from clawing at the prickling skin. When the itch subsided a little he tipped his head on one side to keep his profile low and slowly raised his eye above the line of the bank.
Two white, flatbed pickups were kicking up dust as they bounced across the desert a couple of hundred yards to his left. Their windows were smoked black and the 50-caliber guns mounted on their backs were manned by soldiers wearing red-and-white-checked keffiyeh around their faces. They were Syrian Army — border patrol.
He slid back down the bank, shaking with the effort of just staying silent. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest and never get up again. But he couldn’t. The patrol had changed everything.
He could backtrack, move away from the border to reduce the risk of being found by the patrols; but that didn’t mean he would be hidden from the people they were seeking. He could try and find one of the alluvial caves that honeycombed the desert and crawl deep underground into a tomb of his own making; that would deal with the buzzards at least. But it wouldn’t account for the human traffic. Other people would seek the same shelter, hiding from the heat and the men with guns. And he could not risk being found.
He lay there for a long while, shaking from the fever, as the inevitability of what he must do grew in his mind. There was only one place he could go, one place on earth where the blight would pose no threat.
He waited a long time, until he was sure the patrol had gone, then led the horse along the gulley, keeping low, looking for better cover. The sun was at its full height now and burned mercilessly into his agonized skin. After a few hundred feet that felt like miles he found a partial cave scooped out of the softer rock, big enough for him and his horse, and fell into the stifling shade, clenching his whole body against the blazing itch. He waited out the worst of the day, preparing himself for the journey he must make. Somehow, he had to evade capture and the company of others and find his way back to where the blight had first started and where he knew it already prospered.
He had to get back to the Citadel. He had to go back to Ruin.
9
Liv chose a spot a good distance outside the perimeter fence and led by example, working by hand now that the earthmovers were no use, breaking through rock and dirt baked hard as brick. It felt good to disappear into mindless work after all that had happened to her. Her previous life seemed like an abstract collection of memories now, something she could as easily have read in a book, not experienced herself. It was hard to imagine herself as that person now, the career journalist, subway-surfing through the morning rush hour with a skinny latte in one hand and a smartphone in the other, on her way to yet another assignment, another deadline, flicking through the IKEA catalog and the Sunday supplements at the weekend. It was an existence she had spent a lifetime building, only to have fate dismantle it in a matter of days.
They finished digging the graves as the afternoon sun was dipping low in the sky and carefully placed the bodies in the bottom of the hole, enemy next to enemy, united in death — all but one. While most of the men had been busy with the communal grave, some of the riders had dug another a little way off and it was to this that they now carried the body of their leader, the one they called Ash’abah — the Ghost. They laid him to rest, said their silent prayers.
After the graves were filled, most of the riders left too, taking their horses and melting away into the desert.
Liv stayed by the grave of the Ghost. She had known him for less than a day and yet in that short time he had taken considerable risks on her behalf and ultimately laid down his life to protect her and Gabriel. She looked down at the mound of dirt and felt a rush of terror at the oblivion of it all. She looked around for something to mark the grave, anything that might signify that someone noble and important had died here. The larger grave was marked by a pile of broken rocks taken from the ground during the digging, but she wanted something more distinct for the Ghost, something that had clearly been put there by man, not nature. She tried to think what Gabriel would do and when she reread his note she had her answer.
“You okay?” The voice surprised her and she turned to find Tariq close by, his AK-47 assault rifle resting across his crossed legs.
“Yes,” she said. “Come with me. I might need your help.”
The Operations Room had been looted since the last time she’d been there. The large topographical map still filled the back wall but all the smaller maps and anything else portable or valuable enough to take had gone. The solid block of carved black granite where she had found Gabriel’s note lay where she had left it, half-buried in discarded paperwork and scrolls of seismic-data printouts. Liv swept them aside, revealing the carved letter T in the center of the stone with smaller symbols surrounding it: the dots outlining the constellation of Draco; a symbol of a tree; a simple human figure. Someone had taken a rubbing of both sides of the stone and she was momentarily distracted by it, picking up the curl of paper and staring at the dense symbols lifted from the other side of the stone. There was something in them, something calling to her like a distant voice. She folded the sheet, slipped it into her pocket and grabbed hold of the chipped edges of the stone, hauling it across the table with arms that were already exhausted after an afternoon of hard digging.
“Let me,” Tariq said, taking it from her and hugging it to his chest.
“Thanks,” Liv said, “follow me.”
The Starmap thumped down onto the Ghost’s grave, the weight of it pressing into the loose earth, the carved T-shaped cross standing out in the center of the stone. It seemed appropriate somehow, marking his grave with the Tau, a religious symbol from before the great religions had even been born. There would be no mistaking the significance of this grave now, or the importance of the person who rested here.
“I need to go and see to the horses,” Tariq said. “You should come inside the compound; it’s getting dark and it’s not safe for you out here.”
“I’m fine. I’ll just be a minute.”
Tariq nodded and drifted away, leaving Liv alone by the grave.
She stared down at the stone. Most of the text was on the other side of it, but she reached into her pocket and pulled out the rubbings she had found in the comms room, her eyes seeking the sheet containing the symbols that were now hidden.
The text was written in two languages. One was the lost language she had been able to understand when she was carrying the Sacrament. She concentrated on the symbols and discovered that, even though the Sacrament had left her now, she could still understand it:
The Sacrament comes home and the Key looks to heaven
A new star is born with a new king on earth to bring order to the end of days