Coldbrook (Hammer)(162)

The Inquisitor took his arm and steered him across the room towards a door. It was set in an ornate archway, a beautiful structure that sickened Jonah with its intricacy and the care that must have been taken in creating and maintaining it. They find time for beauty while doing their best to destroy, he thought. He pulled free of the Inquisitor’s grip and turned to face the three robed people, hating them for their casual manner, shaking with anger. The trigger in his pocket seemed to call to him, urging him to explode the disease through his heart and set himself to bite.

But the Inquisitor grasped his shoulder and pulled him on, and as Jonah reached one hand into his pocket the room lit up.

Again Jonah shrugged the Inquisitor’s hand from his shoulder and turned around. The smooth circular stone glowed briefly and brightly, and the metal rods rose swiftly from the floor, accompanied by a gush of silver steam. As the glow died down, two shapes appeared within the metal circle, forming on the stone.

How many feet to wear that stone down so much? Jonah wondered. But then the shapes manifested some more, and all conscious thought was ripped away by shock.

This new Inquisitor was a woman, but there the differences ended. She still wore the familiar robes, the strange mask that leaked steam, the bulbous goggles that hid her true eyes, and the scalp hat which Jonah had started to believe had become a part of the Inquisitor he knew. Beside her on the stone stood a tall man. He was perhaps several years younger than Jonah, and thinner. But it was him. Face contorted with fear, limbs shaking, blood running down across his neck and chest from a wound beneath his left ear, eyes wide and disbelieving, mouth slack and dribbling. But still Jonah.

Me, Jonah thought. That’s me. Another me. A similar, alternate me. And the first thing he did was to try and see whether this new Jonah clasped something in his pocket, something that might perhaps explode and mist the air of this wretched room with disease-laden blood.

But there was nothing except terror to this man, and Jonah wondered how much his world and life differed from his own.

‘You . . . you . . .’ the other Jonah said, and Jonah smiled at him.

‘Don’t be scared,’ he said. ‘Wendy wouldn’t like that.’

‘Wendy,’ the terrified man said, and his shaking seemed to lessen.

‘Deus nobiscum sacri itineris,’ the woman Inquisitor said, and the robed woman behind her desk responded.

Jonah’s Inquisitor grabbed his arm again and pulled him towards the deep arched opening. He pushed him close against the door and stood back, and Jonah lifted both hands to his face, tucking the nut-sized ball into his mouth between teeth and cheek. Because something was going to happen.

Flames erupted from holes around the fine stone arch. They stripped away his clothing, so quickly that by the time he registered that the flames did not burn they had faded away. His clothing and shoes lay in a scorched pile around his feet.

Brighter, heavier flames came, searing away his body hair and then coating him with a layer of something fluid and yet dry.

Jonah stroked the ball with his tongue, and looked down at his pale old-man’s body, denuded of hair and speckled here and there with moles and other imperfections. They won’t see, he thought, looking at the fine raised scar on his chest. They won’t see . . . and if they do, that will be my time. But if they don’t, my time is not yet.

He laughed softly, wondering what Wendy would make of him now. He’d always been hairy, and she’d sometimes called him her Sasquatch. Then he gasped as seven glass needles were fired at him. He felt the rush of something entering him at each penetration point, and a warmth spread through his body, flushing his torso and then filtering out into his limbs. The darts fell away to shatter on the floor.

‘Your body is cleansed,’ the Inquisitor said. ‘Time now for your soul.’

The door whispered open in front of them, ancient oak sliding into the wall. Jonah closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, gathering himself, and it was memories of Wendy that he used to clasp hold of his identity. He could not afford to lose himself here, not for an instant. He could not let fear overcome him, nor weaken him. I am Jonah Jones, he thought, and as the Inquisitor led him from the room towards whatever might lie beyond, every memory he had ever treasured solidified in his recollection, and his determination to succeed grew stronger by the moment.

The door opened onto a hallway fifty feet across, a marble-clad area that stretched out from left to right. To his right Jonah saw the hallway fading into gloom, but two hundred feet to the left was a wide opening, beyond which gorgeous blue sky and blazing sunlight were visible. Elaborate sculpted fountains lined the centre of the hall, the musical mumble of falling water perhaps there to calm the people walking by. The high vaulted ceiling was decorated with complex and beautiful paintings – the Virgin Mother cradling her baby child, the scene at Calvary with characters named in ornate writing, a Concert of Angels, and a collage of holy men marching across lightning-streaked clouds. As Jonah realised that these holy men wore facial masks that looked terribly familiar, he registered just where the crowds thronging the hallway were coming from, and where they were going.