“Were you afraid of the anomalies?” the baroness asked. “They must have been quite a threat.”
Christel wondered about the baroness by now. In all her time since the anomalies were awakened she must have encountered at least one. She must have known what they were capable of. He ignored the thought though, for now. “Up until then the only anomalies I had actually known were Garn Pallerii and Arlandra. That all changed after Sam and I investigated St. Arial’s Basilica…”
It had been a while since Christel had last been to Surra, however he noticed that not much had changed. As one of the only safe-havens that remained during the war, the city had recovered swiftly after the carnage of the Shemn attacks had faded.
Thanks to the help of a few of Devin Shephard’s inventions, and the manufacturing company that he and Christel had once used to launder money, Noveria’s famous railway network was restored promptly, allowing Sam, Christel and Hazel to travel directly from the city of Eden to the city of Surra. They were amazed to see that Torren – once a grand place upon the southern bed of the great Sandra River – was also well on its way to recovery. During the war, Torren was one of the first cities to fall to Garn’s sudden attack. Christel was there when it happened. He remembered the smoke rising from the smouldering remains of the city, drifting lazily into a grey sky.
Now, as they passed through the checkpoint that marked the border between Rhaetalia and Surra, they witnessed the city in a new light. People crawled about it like ants, and dozens of cranes shot high into the sky like great spires. Strange bulky trucks swept over the surrounding desert carrying all kinds of things, and Christel thought that from afar they looked almost alive. Their colloquial names were sand crawlers.
When the train finally arrived in the station in Surra, Sam led them directly through the dense crowds of civilians and cut through the market district – which was filled with rich smells of perfume and food. On the other side, as they came closer to the centre of the city, the buildings gradually became taller and darker with age.
From afar Christel recognised the two great towers that rose high from the end of Lady Arial’s Basilica. Sam stopped when he saw it too, and they all listened to the chimes of the noon bell. As they approached now they noticed less and less people around. Word from the locals was that people were afraid of the wrath of Arial, the goddess of light.
“Apparently the priests had been keeping an ancient artefact hidden away within the basilica,” Sam explained. “The nature of this artefact had been kept secret by the priesthood for centuries. Even the government didn’t know about it. Now that the priests are dead and the item is missing, we have no way of finding out what the thieves are up to.”
Until recently Christel had been a man of little faith. Being forced to live a life of poverty from a young age, he had always felt the divine cared little for his wellbeing, with the exception of Ayala, the goddess of thieves. But after working with Ariana, the goddess of fate, to defeat Garn and his dark army of shemn, Christel learned that the gods cared only for their divine tasks, and little, in fact, for human beings.
“What interest does the king have in this artefact?” Christel asked.
Sam shrugged. “He obviously knows more then he’s willing to let on. My guess is that he thinks this artefact is some kind of weapon, and with Surra and Rhaetallia expecting him to answer for abandoning them during the war, he most likely wants this weapon out of their hands.”
“And straight into his,” the thief added with a frown.
When at last the trio stood in the street beneath the Arial Basilica, they marvelled at the truth of her greatness. Christel had to tilt his head back to examine the two towers that now soared high above him. The western entrance between the towers was planted firmly within a wall of stone. A colourful stain-glass window above the great doors pictured the naked body of the goddess Arial, with her shining sword and wings of light.
With the eyes of a thief, Hazel, like Christel, examined every piece of the building before her, automatically scanning for any weakness she could find. “Has anyone else investigated the crime?” she asked. “Did they find anything?”
Sam led them inside and explained as they walked. “We are the first official team to investigate. The city guard were only recently able to get the doors open. Apparently the entire building had been sealed up tight by some kind of magic – couldn’t explain it myself.”
As they walked beneath the massive archway they were exposed to the frightening scene within. Stone pillars lined the walls on both sides and yet some had been smashed to dust. The lines of pews that once occupied the floor were also reduced to splinters. Among the mess it seemed as though a battle had occurred, however the victims were the broken bodies of statues. “What is this?” Christel wondered aloud, and he examined the angry face of one of the statues. He noticed gaps in the walls where the statues should have been.
Again Sam shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “I haven’t even tried to make sense of it. All I want to know is how to catch the thieves.”
The sight upon the altar was much more grotesque, and very alarming. To Sam, as an investigator, it was a story of red. The top of the altar was coated in splatters of blood, and a dried up corpse lay face down before it – reeking of death and decay. Sam held a handkerchief to his nose, although it did little to deter the sickly aroma, and he stared down at the poor lifeless body. “This is the worst it, I assure you.”
Christel looked at it in fright, and Hazel was very much the same. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “These aren’t thieves,” she stated. “Thievery demands discretion – this is a disaster.” She glanced back at the scattered statues and broken pews. “What’s more, this wasn’t an ordinary heist. We need to figure out what happened here.”
“What about the altar here?” Christel pointed out the elephant in the room, so to speak. It had been divided down the middle and the centre had opened up like a chest, revealing a pedestal within. “Is this what they stole? Was the artefact here?”
Sam nodded. “Looks that way.’
“Okay,” said Christel, “then we should go back to the start and work this out piece by piece. We’ve a great many question that need answering. First things first, how did they get in?” He directed the question at Sam, however he was mostly just thinking aloud.
Sam pointed at the doors. “There are three main doors. As far as I know they are the only way to get inside from ground level.” To the left and right of the bloody altar were the north and south entrances. Beside each was a display of candles so large that it appeared in daylight like a dead wax forest. Again, above the doors was a massive glowing round window, from which beams of light spread throughout the building. “After a few recent civil conflicts and a raid upon the basilica the priests were forced to lock the doors, after which the building was encased by some sort of magic.”
“Benezian energy?” Hazel asked, as she strolled over to the north door, which was still locked up tight.
“That’s what the team who opened the west entrance said. They said the energy acted as a barrier and instead of deactivating the barrier completely they were able to simply tear a hole in it.”
Christel was quiet for a while, and he made his way to a set of stairs that took him to the second level of the basilica above the pillars. From here he could look down upon the carnage of the statues and the body before the altar. He then turned his attention upwards, and more windows above him shined like amethysts in the sunlight. He found a bright spot, where the light broke through unhindered by the colour of the glass. “Hazel,” he called. “Sam. Come up here!”
By the time they arrived Christel had examined the spot where the window had been broken slightly. It appeared as though the glass had been broken on accident, however the fracture seemed unnatural. Christel suspected magic. Opening the window, he climbed onto the ledge outside and was overcome with a slight sense of vertigo as he peered down towards the ground. He hadn’t noticed how high they had actually climbed.
Using a magnifying glass, Christel examined the scapes where the lock had been picked. “They entered through here,” he said to Sam and Hazel, who remained inside the building. “They must have used some kind of rope gun contraption to scale the wall…” He found a mark where the hook at the end of the rope had scratched against the stone. “Here.” He pointed.
Hazel leaned out the window but didn’t step onto the ledge – she would only get in the way. “What about the barrier?” she asked.
Sam answered. “It took about a dozen men to create a tear in the west entrance, and the reaction almost destroyed the doors. How could they have done the same thing here?”
Christel continued to examine the evidence. “The marks here indicate that there were four people who climbed the wall. My guess is that at least one of them was an anomaly – I mean, who else is able to manipulate Benezian energy like that?”
Sam sighed. “So we’re dealing with an anomaly. Great.”
Christel stepped back inside. “This is where they came in, so we can trace their steps from here.” He moved with the group back down the stairs into the nave of the church.
Now that they had witnessed all – or at least most – of the evidence, they were able to think with more critical minds about exactly what had happened. Their eyes showered once more over the scene of shattered statues, somehow formed into an attack position.
“Our next mystery,” Sam uttered, as he rolled a pale stone head beneath his boot. “Any ideas.”
Christel glanced from the centre of the supposed conflict, and then towards the walls behind the pillars, acknowledging the stone slabs upon which the statues might have been placed. “I don’t know why or how, but can we agree that by some unknown power these statues came to life? Look,” he pointed. “They ought to be standing against the wall. I’ve been to one of the cathedrals in Eden, and there are statues just like these along the walls, but they were still and their faces were calm.” He glanced again at their angry eyes. “Not like this.”
“And what about this!” Hazel was further towards the altar, where the body of the mysterious man still lay. They all wondered who he was, but they endeavoured to tackle this mystery one step at a time. Instead, Hazel pointed to an interesting phenomenon. One of the stone soldiers remained on his feet, and yet a large piece of his torso had been blown away in a fashion that left a jagged diagonal column hanging from the back of his shoulder. To Hazel it seemed as though he had been shot, but the path of the blood that exited the wound was frozen in time. “What did this?” she asked. “I’ve noticed more of these strange jagged shapes in this area…” she gestured towards the area surrounding the altar.
Sam inspected the diagonal column carefully. “This isn’t quite possible,” he suggested, “but this looks to me like a fulgurite.”
“A what?” Christel asked, examining the shape closely himself.
Sam wasn’t a man of science, although he had picked up a few facts during his adventures with Ashley Wilson, who was a great scientist, and one of these involved electricity harnessed from benezian crystals. “It’s kind of like when lightning strikes sand,” he explained. “I suppose it melts it or something leaving these crystallised columns.” His eyes moved onwards towards the walls, where pieces had been chipped out as if by a chisel. “Look at the walls,” he urged them. “There are burns.”
“It can’t really be…” Hazel uttered, not daring to finish her sentence.
Christel sighed, but to his disbelief he was a little excited by the notion; he was careful not to show it though. “We knew from the start that we could expect anything when the anomalies arose, and I guess this is one of them. It appears as though this villain possesses the ability to shoot lightning of out their hands.”
“And I thought Arlandra was bad,” Sam mentioned.
“Well at least we know who, or what, we’re dealing with,” Christel continued. “As for the statues, my guess is that they were some kind of security mechanism designed to protect whatever it is that was stolen. Who knows, maybe the energy that sparked the anomalies also affected these guys?”
“That may be the case,” Sam agreed, “but it still makes no sense to me. I wish Ash were here…”
The statement made Hazel giggle, and Christel couldn’t hold back his smile at such a lovely and familiar sound. “Come now Sam,” she said. “Do you miss having a lady friend that much?”
Sam ignored the jest, and turned his attention to the human victim who remained dead beneath the altar. Christel joined him and for the first time examined the corpse in detail. “Moving on, we have this guy to worry about. We need to figure out who he is, why he was here, and why he’s dead.”
Sam knelt down in front of the corpse. There was a clear wound in the back of his skull and blood and brain matter had oozed out and crusted in his hair. Using his handkerchief, Sam tilted the victim’s head in order to get a look at his face, which had been coated in a thick cherry red from where he had been lying in the pool of his own blood. The man’s eyes were half closed, and were a pale white. It appeared that most of his forehead was missing. “The exit wound,” Sam murmured. “It’s just as I thought. This man was shot in the back of the head, with what looks like a high calibre bullet.” He double checked the entry wound. “Slight burns on his hair,” he mentioned. “A point-bank shot.”
“He’s obviously not a priest,” Hazel pointed out. “Look at his clothes.”
Sam nodded. “The other priests weren’t killed this way.” He stepped away from the body – the smell was quite revolting.
Christel looked at Sam. “How did the priests die?”
“They were hanged, in their sleeping quarters,” Sam answered, and following Christel and Hazel’s puzzled expression he continued. “I know; it doesn’t make sense. One mystery at a time, wasn’t it?”
They refocused their discussion to the victim. “I don’t see how he could have been one of the thieves,” said Hazel.
Sam made a suggestion. “Perhaps he became a liability?”
“Not likely,” Christel corrected him, following the same train of thought as Hazel. “A thief’s team consists of essential members; each assigned to a specific role. Maybe he had enemies within the team, I don’t know, but he definitely served a purpose here before he was killed.”
They proceeded to check the dead man’s pockets, hoping to find something that would identify him. It was then that Sam noticed something interesting upon the man’s forearm. “Look at this,” he pointed to a distinct circular burn, perhaps the size of a coin. “I think I see the edge of a tattoo. This burn is fresh; it could have occurred at the time of death.”
Hazel crossed her arms. “If that’s the case then do you think this tattoo could have identified the man, perhaps marked his initiation into some kind of organisation?”
“Yes,” Sam confirmed. “I think they killed their accomplice and removed his tattoo to cover their tracks.”
“But now we know that these other thieves could have tattoos of a similar nature. It’ll help us find them.”
“But we still don’t know where to look.”
As they spoke, Christel allowed himself another look at the body; specifically, this newly discovered tattoo. Out of habit he flicked open his gold pocket watch and closed it again – not bothering to check the time. His eyes were fixed on the victim’s forearm. He stared at the burn.
Suddenly an image flashed before his eyes in a burst of light, and it startled him immensely. He fell back and shuddered, his chest rising and falling. In that moment Hazel ran to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Christel, are you okay?”
Christel hesitated and then nodded faintly. He wasn’t sure if he truly was okay, or what exactly had happened to him, however he didn’t want to make Hazel worry. All he knew was that when he looked at the victim’s arm, for the briefest of moments, he saw the tattoo. A grey skull with green eyes. Was it real? It had felt painfully like déjà vu. And then, somehow, for some reason, the image had disappeared from his mind, locked away within his subconscious. “I’m fine,” he said. “All this excitement must be getting to my head… I just need a moment.”
“Oh toughen up, Christel,” Sam teased. “I know it’s gruesome but we’ve all seen a body before.”
Christel smiled. “You’re right. Let’s keep working.” But something troubling rested inside him from that moment on. Later, when Sam remained focused on the investigation, and had called in others to help him, Christel found a moment alone with his wife.
Hazel’s eyes glistened like diamonds as they touched the light cast down from the colourful stain-glass window. She turned to Christel and let him hold her. “What is it?” he asked her.
Hazel’s voice was soft so that only her husband could hear. “I know that we wanted to get back into some grand adventure, but I’m starting to think that this is too much. I may be over reacting a little, but these are dangerous people we’re dealing with, and I couldn’t live with myself if you ever got hurt.” Her hand discretely drifted over her stomach.
“We’ve been through worse, but maybe you’re right.” He kissed her, and playfully said, “We’ve had our fun, and we’ve done what we came to do. This is Sam’s fight now, Taellian business, not ours.”
And so they agreed that after identifying the culprits they would step down and leave the entire case alone.
“But that didn’t happen, did it?” said the baroness.
“No,” Christel agreed. “Whether we wanted to or not, we were a part of this. Either way, after examining the body – a man who we learned was Edward Bain – we turned our attention to the vault. At first glance I knew it as unique; it didn’t quite function like other vaults. Of course, the vault doubled as an altar, and for a particular reason. The vault demanded a sacrifice – a significant amount of blood – in order to be unlocked. That’s why Edward Bain was there, and that’s why he was murdered.”
“And the prize?” the baroness urged.
“A book. The Aprillian Codex; an ancient artefact bearing magical properties, written by the goddess of death herself.”
“What did the thieves want with the book?”
Christel frowned as the memory was forced upon him. “To destroy the world, of course.”
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