“No.” He hesitated. “That’s my dad. For a book.”
“Really? Who is he?”
“You wouldn’t know. Edward Marriner.”
Her jaw actually dropped. Ned felt the familiar mix of pleasure and embarrassment. “You messing with me?” she gasped. “Mountains and Gods? I know that book. We own that book!”
“Well, cool. What will it get me?”
She gave him a suddenly shy look. Ned wasn’t sure why he’d spoken that way. It wasn’t really him. Ken and Barry talked that way to girls, but he didn’t, usually. He cleared his throat.
“Get you a lecture on the baptistry,” she said. “If you can stand it. I’m Kate. Not Katie, not Kathy.”
He nodded his head. “Ned. Not Seymour, not Abdul.”
She hesitated, then laughed again. “All right, fine, I deserved that. But I hate nicknames.”
“Kate is a nickname.”
“Yeah, but I picked it. Makes a difference.”
“I guess. You never answered…how’d you get in?”
“Side door.” She gestured across the way. “No one’s watching the square on that side. Through the cloister. Seen that yet?”
Ned blinked. But he couldn’t say, after, that any premonition had come to him. He was just confused, that’s all.
“The door to the cloister is locked. I was there fifteen minutes ago.”
“Nope. Open. The far one out to the street and the one leading in here. I just came through them. Come look. The cloister is really pretty.”
It began then, because they didn’t get to the cloister. Not yet.
Going across, they heard a sound: metal on metal. A banging, a harsh scrape, another bang.
“What the hell?” Ned murmured, stopping where he was. He wasn’t sure why, but he kept his voice down.
Kate did the same. “That’s the baptistry,” she whispered. “Over there.” She pointed. “Probably one of the priests, maybe a caretaker.”
Another scraping sound.
Ned Marriner said, “I don’t think so.”
It would have been, in every possible way, wiser to ignore that noise, to go see the pretty cloister, walk out that way afterwards, into the morning streets of Aix. Get a croissant and a Coke somewhere with this girl named Kate.
His mother, however, was in the Sudan, having flown far away from them, again, to the heart of an insanely dangerous place. Ned came from courage—and from something else, though he didn’t know that part yet.
He walked quietly towards the baptistry and peered down the three steps leading into that round, pale space. He’d gone right past it when he came in, he realized. He saw eight tall pillars, making a smaller circle inside it, with a dome high above, letting in more light than anywhere else.
“It’s the oldest thing here,” whispered the girl beside him. “By a lot, like 500 a.d.”
He was about to ask her how she knew so many idiotic facts when he saw that a grate had been lifted from over a hole in the stone floor.
Then he saw the head and shoulders of a man appear from whatever opening that grate had covered. And Ned realized that this wasn’t, that this couldn’t be, a priest or a caretaker or anyone who belonged in here.
The man had his back to them. Ned lifted a hand, wordlessly, and pointed. Kate let out a gasp. The man in the pit didn’t move, and then he did.
With an air of complete unreality, as if this were a video game he’d stumbled into, not anything that could be called real life, Ned saw the man reach inside his leather jacket and bring out a knife. Priests didn’t wear leather, or carry knives.
The man laid it on the stone floor beside him—the blade pointing in their direction.
He still didn’t turn around. They couldn’t see his face. Ned saw long—very long—fingers. The man was bald, or had shaved his head. It was impossible to tell his age.
There was a silence; no one moved. This would be a good spot to save the game, Ned thought. Then restart if my character gets killed.
“He isn’t here,” the man said quietly. “I was quite sure…but he is playing with me again. He enjoys doing that.”
Ned Marriner had never heard that tone in a voice. It chilled him, standing in shadow, looking towards the soft light of the baptistry.
The man had spoken in French. Ned’s French was very good, after nine years of immersion classes at home in Montreal. He wondered about Kate, then realized she’d understood because, absurdly, as if making polite conversation—with a knife lying on the stone floor—she asked, in the same language, “Who isn’t here? There’s just a Roman street under there, right? It says so on the wall.”
The man ignored her completely, as if she hadn’t made any sounds that mattered in any way. Ned had a sense of a small man, but it was hard to tell, not knowing how deep the pit was. He still hadn’t turned to look at them. It was time to run, obviously. This wasn’t a computer game. He didn’t move.
“Go away,” the man said, as if sensing Ned’s thought. “I have killed children before. I have no strong desire to do so now. Go and sit somewhere else. I will be leaving now.”
Children? They weren’t kids.
Stupidly, Ned said, “We’ve seen you. We could tell people…”
A hint of amusement in his voice, the man said dryly, “Tell them what? That someone lifted a grate and looked at the Roman paving? Hélas ! All the gendarmes of France will be on the case.”
Ned might have grown up in too quick-witted a household, in some ways. “No,” he said, “we could say someone threatened us with a knife.”
The man turned around, inside the opening in the floor.
He was clean-shaven, lean-faced. Dark, strong eyebrows, a long, straight nose, a thin mouth. The bald head made his cheekbones show prominently. Ned saw a scar on one cheek, curving behind his ear.
The man looked at them both a moment, where they stood together at the top of the three steps, before he spoke again. His eyes were deep-set; it was impossible to see their colour.
“A few gendarmes would be interested in that, I grant you.” He shook his head. “But I am leaving. I see no reason to kill you. I will replace the grate. No damage has been done. To anything. Go away.” And then, as they still stood there, more in shock than anything else, he took the knife and put it out of sight.
Ned swallowed.
“Come on!” whispered the girl named Kate. She pulled at his arm. He turned with her to go. Then looked back.
“Were you trying to rob something down there?” he asked.
His mother would have turned and asked the same thing, in fact, out of sheer stubbornness, a refusal to be dismissed, though Ned didn’t actually know that.
The man in the baptistry looked up at him again and said, softly, after a moment, “No. Not that. I thought I was…here soon enough. I was wrong. I think the world will end before I ever find him in time. Or the sky will fall, as he would say.”
Ned shook his head, the way a dog does, shaking water off when it comes in out of the rain. The words made so little sense it wasn’t even funny. Kate was tugging at him again, harder this time.
He turned and walked away with her, back to where they’d been before. By Saint-Catherine’s chapel.
They