Hotel Contilia, Rome
“I think I’m making some headway here.” Rose sat back, let out a deep sigh, and ran her fingers through her hair.
“Not for lack of effort. You’ve been at it for a while.”
On their return to the hotel room, Rose had sat studying the photographed pages of the Codex Gigas, especially the strange script beneath the newly discovered sketch of the squatting devil. With help online and a couple of phone calls and emails to colleagues, she had established that it was a version of old Akkadian, an extinct East Semitic language that was apparently spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. Akkadian names were first found in Sumerian texts from around the late 29th century BCE, she told him, and around 2500 BCE texts fully written in Akkadian began to appear. Rose was bright-eyed as she described the thousands of texts that had been excavated over the years, conveying everything from mythological narrative to legal texts, scientific works to political reporting, and more. By the second millennium BCE, two forms of the Akkadian language were used in the region, Assyrian and Babylonian.
“The passage we found, it’s got a, I don’t know, malevolent vibe to it. It’s dark, portentous even. I get the chills just reading it, but it’s also kind of exciting.” Her museum brain was hard at work, fascinated by the subject matter.
Crowley tried to ignore the sense of foreboding that crept up his spine. “What’s it all about?”
“It’s very old, it pre-dates Assyrian or Babylonian.” She bit her lip. “It describes a ritual for extracting past lives.”
“You mean exploring so-called past-life memories?” Crowley asked. “I don’t think anything like that is real. Isn’t it just nonsense that crystal healers and psychic mediums use to pull a few more quid from hopeful clients?”
Rose shook her head, eyes glittering, lost in the joy of research and discovery. “Well, not according to this. If I’m right, it not only extracts memories, but causes a person to actually revisit past lives. To somehow psychically re-live them. Of course, I’m almost certainly not getting it all right and these things are always laden with allegory and hyperbole, but that’s the thrust of it.”
“But isn’t that even more hocus-pocus nonsense? Bad enough that a two-bit psychic would try to make up past life stuff for someone. But to actually claim they could do a ritual to have someone experience those lives?”
“That’s what this suggests. And it’s not for two-bit psychics. This is real old-world occult magic.”
“That’s just two-bit psychics from longer ago, isn’t it?”
Rose laughed. “Maybe. Or maybe not. We can’t really know, but this is very old and very well protected stuff. There might be more to it.”
Crowley stood and stretched. “I’m going to take a shower.” The day was beginning to wear on him and, though the historian in him was almost as excited as Rose about what they might have discovered, his brain needed a rest.
He stood under steaming water in the hotel room shower, enjoying the hot sear of it over his skin. The head-clearing steam in the small cubicle refreshed his thoughts, and they soon turned to the beautiful woman with whom he shared this adventure. He and Rose had been sharing twin rooms, too paranoid to have separate rooms, but beyond that everything had been the very model of proprietary behavior. Rose always locked any bathroom door when she went for a shower, taking her clothes in with her. Crowley took his clothes too, to dress in private and not embarrass her, but he always left the door unlocked when he showered. Just in case. He was probably being a fool, but there was no point in literally locking any chances away. Hope sprang eternal, after all.
It wasn’t long before that faint hope evaporated and his mind drifted back toward the strange passage from the Codex. What if Rose was right? What if they had discovered ancient rituals and occult practices? Even if the actual substance of the texts was complete nonsense, the historical significance was intimidating. And the discovery of the real Codex Gigas, surely that was something they needed to make public.
He frowned and tipped his face up into the hot water. They had put those books back in such a hurry that whoever had come looking for them would be in no doubt that the Codex had been discovered. Which meant it would already have been moved. Either in its strange cabinet or in an entirely new receptacle. One thing was certain: wherever it was now, it would be harder than ever to find and searching again would almost certainly prove fruitless. But they had found it, they had touched it. The thing did exist. And they had photographic records of pages the church had tried to keep hidden from the world. That had to account for something.
But was it any help with their current predicament? Had they learned anything that might help Rose to be free of these thugs chasing them all over Europe? For all they had learned, they still had no idea what significance Rose and her birthmark had to those people. At least they might have some information now with which to bargain.
Something crashed in the room outside the bathroom door. Crowley opened his mouth to call out to Rose, ask if she was okay, but some instinct stayed his tongue. As he bit the words back there was a muffled cry and something else crashed over. Crowley’s adrenaline spiked.
A man’s voice shouted, “This is her. Take her.”
Ice rushed through Crowley’s veins despite the still cascading hot water. He left the shower running to mask the sound of his movement and slipped over to the door. Butt naked and burning with rage, he flung the door open and strode into the room. There was no sign of Rose, but two men jumped, startled from their hurried search of the luggage at the foot of the beds.
Their shock turned quickly to amusement at the sight of Crowley, dripping wet, package swinging free, and that bought him the moment he needed to get the better of them. By the time they realized he planned to attack them, his foot was already driving into one man’s stomach in a powerful kick. That one folded over with a whoosh of forced breath and Crowley turned to the other just as that man raised a gun, a snub-nosed revolver only inches from Crowley’s bare chest.
Crowley twisted sideways, batting the man’s arm in the other direction as the gun kicked and barked. Crowley grabbed the gunman’s wrist, pulled it hard across his chest and drove out the elbow of his other arm. His strike cracked directly into the gunman’s jaw and the attacker fell like a sack of rocks, out cold.
The one he’d winded was staggering backwards, still half bent over, clutching his gut with one hand and scrabbling in a pocket with the other. No doubt he was belatedly going for his own gun. Crowley took two quick strides and brought his knee up under the man’s chin. There was a bony clack as the thugs teeth snapped together and his head came up. Crowley tucked in a fast right hook and that one dropped unconscious, too.
Panting with the exertion, Crowley rushed to the hotel room door, but the hall outside was empty. He couldn’t very well start running naked through the building and he was sure Rose would be long gone by now anyway, spirited away by whoever had taken her. The fight had been quick, but it had surely given the abductors more than enough time to get outside. They wouldn’t hang around and he had next to no chance of finding Rose in a crowded city like Rome. His best bet lay with the men on the floor behind him.
He quickly wrenched russet-colored curtain ropes from one window and set about binding the thugs up as they groggily regained their senses. He bound their wrists together, sat them back to back and tied another rope tightly around their chests. He ran to the other side of the room as the men began to groan and protest, pulled down ropes from the window on that side and bound each of their ankles tightly together. One of them tried to kick out, but a solid slap to his cheek quieted him again and Crowley had them trussed up in no time, back to back, their immobilized feet out to either side.
“Where’s Rose?” he yelled into the face of the man who had tried to kick him.
That one clenched his teeth and stared daggers at Crowley. The one on the other side was no more forthcoming.
“Who the hell are you people?” Crowley shouted, shaking them both, repeating himself over and over.
They both remained close-mouthed, not even taking the opportunity to curse him out or tell him they weren’t going to talk. Tough cookies, the pair of them. But Crowley was tougher.
He tore open their shirts, ignoring their rage-filled eyes, checking for tattoos. He had expected to see something similar to the crest and KOSS tattoo he had seen on the soldier in Iraq, but found no ink.
Though they were both marked, in the same spot on the high left side of their chest. Not with a tattoo, but with the scarred welts of a brand, made by a red hot iron. It was a symbol Crowley recognized but couldn’t place, an even-armed cross, each of the four limbs having three tails at ninety degrees to give the design the impression of spinning. At the center of the cross was a double circle. Underneath was a kind of looping set of lines that looked like it might say something, but Crowley couldn’t make it out.
“What’s this mean?” he asked. “Your special little club?”
Again, they remained tight-lipped.
“Where’s Rose?”
The men sneered, beginning to enjoy Crowley’s impotent rage. He ground his teeth, found his phone and snapped a photo of one man’s brand. He sent the image to Cameron, his army intel buddy, with a message asking what it meant, especially if it was a known brand of any gang or organization. What the hell might he do if Cameron found nothing? Intel, even the depths and vast variety the army had access to, could only go so far. A stray thought inserted itself into Crowley’s mind, flashing across his consciousness like a car’s headlights on a dark night. A name. He had heard a name somewhere, thought it might be useful, then forgotten about it. Only now, thinking about Cameron again, did he remember. Where had he been? The voices had been muffled, as if from far away...
The oubliette! That was it. When he had been hiding out in the broken golem, those idiot thugs who had come looking for him had mentioned a name. He racked his memory, and slowly recalled the bones of the conversation.
Why did they leave the rope? Leave evidence they were here?
I guess they were in a hurry. Or maybe they just didn’t care.
What are we gonna tell Landvik?
Landvik? Nothing right now. We’ll have to decide what’s next before we tell him anything.
Crowley smiled. The old brain wasn’t entirely spent yet, even if it did take a while to throw back vital information. He sent Cameron a follow-up text.
Cross check with the name Landvik (sp?)
The phone pinged back almost immediately.
Leave it with me.
Crowley nodded to himself. Good old Cameron. Meanwhile, he would see what these thugs might tell him, whatever it took. He returned to the men tied together on the floor.
“You will tell me what I need to know,” he said, his voice calm and measured now. He had skills of which he was not proud, and had vowed to never use again since his discharge from the armed forces. But for Rose’s sake, he knew he would do pretty much anything.
“I’ve done this before,” he said quietly. “Many times, to my shame. Now tell me. Where. Is. Rose?”
His calmness and threat had no greater effect on the men than his rage, so Crowley stood up straight, nodded as he drew in a long breath. “Right. Let me put on some pants and then we’ll get started.”