Two Templar Knight bodies lay slaughtered at the exit of the chamber, behind several dozen fighting Swiss Guards. It appeared as though some of the army had already broken through into the passageways beyond.
Arawn undoubtedly one of them.
Richard looked about, formulating a plan to break through and go after the fey lord, when a sudden blast of magic shook the underground to his left.
Ennio Rossi, the portal knight of Rome, fought the bulk of the Templar Knights, his long Arthurian knife Carnwennan a blur as he wove countless spells and sent them against his enemy.
Even with magic, Ennio had little effect.
And like the Swiss Guards, he would ultimately fail without aid.
Decision made, Richard cocooned himself in stronger magic. The Templar Knights were spread out in an arc, trying to break through at any weak spot and exploit it. To hunt Arawn and protect the Vatican, Richard would have to do the same. He cast the magic of the Dark Thorn into a spot thinned of Templar Knights. Not expecting a rear attack, many of them wheeled about confused, weapons drawn and Grail tubes in their mouths. He burned away their white mantles to the armor beneath, going for the leather pouches, trying to maim those who lost their protection.
They responded quickly, rushing him, no fear in their eyes.
He saw his danger almost immediately. Even though several Templars succumbed to the flames, there were too many. As under Caer Llion, he would fall to the power of the Grail. And this time no one would capture him. He would be outright killed.
Ennio acted, taking advantage of Richard’s surprise attack. He screamed orders, sending the Swiss Guard to help carve a path. Well trained to carry out orders, the Guards concentrated their firepower in one area—the weak link Richard had attacked. Templar Knights staggered back from the barrage. The Grail overcame the damage as quickly as it came but the dazed soldiers were frozen by the assault, unable to fight.
The opening was there.
Adrenaline lending him strength, Richard broke through, blasting the stunned Templar Knights aside, suddenly at the side of the Italian knight.
“Get out of here, Rick!” Ennio roared in a thick accent.
“What can I do?”
The portal knight’s face was streaked with blood and his shirt was saturated with sweat. The long knife in his hand glowed. “There is nothing. Find John Lewis Hugo!”
“Where did he go?!” Richard yelled in the tumult.
Ennio sent fire into a group of Templars who had killed several Swiss Guardsmen at the same time, tossing them away. Reinforcements quickly filled the gap.
“He gained the catacombs long minutes ago, with others!”
Not knowing if it would work, Richard closed his eyes and slammed the butt of the Dark Thorn into the floor. The stone shattered as the staff entered it.
“What are you
doing
?” Ennio hissed.
“Hoping I am right.”
As he had done outside Caer Lion, Richard focused, this time on the body of John Lewis Hugo, knowing more explicitly this time what he hunted. He focused on the ruined face, miscolored eyes, pale skin, and black clothing. In seconds he had his quarry firmly fixed in his mind. Concentrating, the knight called upon the Dark Thorn to locate the fey lord wherever he had gone.
The power snaked from the staff into the ground like a hound unleashed, upward into the catacombs and beyond.
He knew where Arawn now stood.
“Go!” Ennio yelled. “I will not last long!”
Richard hesitated for only a moment, nodded farewell to the young knight, and sprinted for the entrance. Giving a look back, he heard Ennio call out a retreat, ordering the Swiss Guard back into the catacombs to defend where the tunnel narrowed. The knight wove a spell as he went, his fingers dancing upon his blade. Pebbles and dust fell from the ceiling. With every word Ennio uttered, the cavern quivered more and more, the sound becoming a deep resonant rumble as if an earthquake gripped the underground.
The portal knight intended to bring the rock down upon the Templar Knights—and obstruct the entrance into Rome.
As the trembling in the rock quickened, a manic assault from a wedge of Templar Knights broke through the retreating Swiss Guards. The red crosses on their chests broke through the purple uniforms to come directly at Ennio.
Richard started forward, a warning frozen on his lips, but it was too late.
“Ennio!” he roared.
Swords fell into Ennio Rossi, over and over again. The knife in his hand vanished. The knight crumbled beneath the Templar Knights and their weapons.
The shaking of the underground ceased at his death.
“Fall back!” Richard roared.
The Templar Knights were a white and red swarm, their clothing ragged and their armor beaten, but the men within alive and vibrant. The retreat of the Swiss Guard drove them onward. As the Templar Knights hacked their way through the front lines of their foes, the defense of the Vatican retreated toward him in the corridor, eventually blocking the way into St. Peter’s like a cork in a bottle.
Richard fled the cavern, leaving the defenses of the Vatican behind. The Swiss Guard would have to be enough.
Following the path of the Dark Thorn, Richard ran. The world changed from bland cave walls to those riddled with chiseled holes bearing coffins or the dusty bones of the long dead. After numerous passages, the torches of the lower levels gave way to a flight of stairs highlighted by the soft glow of electric white light above. Richard slowed, knowing he had to be careful. It was a chess game, but one where a poorly decided move would result in death. Although the Dark Thorn had cemented in his mind where the fey lord had gone, he did not want to fall prey to a Templar Knight left behind.
Ascending the stairs, Richard kept his guard up.
He stepped from the dank quarters below into a warmer room with a rounded stucco ceiling. A massive white marble sarcophagus with decorative corners lay pushed away from the wall where he now stood, a rock door once concealing the entrance to the crypts below.
It was the tomb of Queen Christina of Sweden.
He followed the Dark Thorn into the next room where red rope stanchions cordoned off another chapel where potted blooming plants surrounded a plain marble slab covering a grave. Richard read the Latin and the dates inscribed in the stone.
Pope John Paul II lay interred within.
Richard knew where he was. He stood within the Vatican Sacred Grotto.
The knight moved on. The Sacred Grotto was more elaborate in architecture and design as he went, a separate entity from what had been below. Various symbols from Christian antiquity joined sophisticated crypts, the importance of those interred humbling despite his misgivings for the Church. Popes and other dignitaries were buried within feet of him, men and women who had devoted their lives to the Catholic Church. The ancient world he had only seen in photographs unfolded, the birthplace of Catholicism in the bowels of Vatican Hill, a world tucked away from Rome and all Richard knew.
He breathed in the stale air and hurried onward.
Seattle felt a lifetime away.
Richard took a final flight of broad stairs and, stepping through a last doorway, entered St. Peter’s Basilica.
He paused, dwarfed. Moonlight infiltrated the interior of the massive basilica through windows set in its dome, highlighting the beautiful artwork and statues beneath. Richard stared at the wealth, annoyed at the grandeur. Above the door he had emerged from the statue of Saint Longinus towered from its niche in one of the main pillars, the centurion who stabbed Christ carved by Bernini into marble relief, his sight restored and gripping the Holy Lance. Ahead of Richard the Baldicchino rose to an unprecedented height, its bronze canopy shielding Saint Peter’s Tomb beneath it.
No one was about. It was deathly silent.
Moving on, he saw a bronze statue of Saint Peter, his left hand holding two keys to his heart, the right hand blessing those who looked upon him.
Richard gritted his teeth. Peter had formed the Vigilo. It was the Vigilo who had failed at protecting the Grail and its secret, leading to Plantagenet and his war. Richard hoped Bran could correct one of those mistakes.
Richard would correct the other.
He ran full out, his footfalls barely echoing in the vastness. Richard would have to risk entering into a trap to end Arawn quickly. The sightless eyes of a dozen different saints watched him pass. He paid them no heed. Tiny among the opulence of Renaissance and Baroque architecture, Richard kept the Dark Thorn before him, the details supplied by the staff fixed in his mind, revenge driving him on.
Before he got to the five massive doors leading into the vestibule and out into St. Peter’s Square, Richard broke right under an arch where the monument to princess Maria Clementina Sobieska had been erected over a doorway.
Richard knew the door led to the roof and dome—and to the Pope’s private attic story studies above.
The bodies of two Templar Knights blocked his path.
They were about twelve feet apart, one where Richard now stood, the other within the frames of the doorway. The horror of death was frozen on each face: the bodies had been dismembered by a blade that had cleanly cut through muscle, bone, sinew, and arteries—one had lost his legs below both knees, the other lacked an arm and had a large gash in his armored chest revealing torn metal, shattered ribs, and a bloodied lung.
The pouches containing the Grail water had been punctured.
Richard stepped over the Templar Knights, sweating freely now, and glanced in the doorway and up into the reaches above.
No one waited in ambush that he could see.
He climbed the staircase, leaving the gruesome scene behind. He took the stairs two at a time, eyes ever ahead. Bolstered by the magic of the Dark Thorn, Richard ascended as quickly as his legs would carry him.
Halfway up, he encountered another body: a Swiss Guard.
The soldier lay limply upon the stairs, eyes staring sightlessly, dead from multiple stab wounds.
Richard continued.
Coming to a platform where another set of stairs continued to the roof, Richard deviated to a side entrance leading into the interior of the basilica and the multiple rooms not allowed entry to tourists that looked down upon the Square. The door, which appeared as though it had once been locked, had been pushed off of its hinges, hanging crookedly aside. Four bodies of Templar Knights and Swiss Guards lay intertwined, their lifeblood pooling together and drying upon the stone floor, the remnants of a battle that had recently transpired.
Richard stepped between hacked limbs into a grand hallway.
Like the eastern façade of St. Peter’s, the corridor he found himself in was more than a football field in length. Beautifully wrought chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, chasing away shadows. The wall on his left featured luxurious tapestries and paintings; seven doors broke up the opposite wall, between which tall statues of previous pontiffs stood, bearing scepters of office.
Dead bodies lay strewn about in the hallway.
Leading to one door.
As he moved around them as best he could, a soft gurgling came from one of the bodies near a statue that had been sliced in half from shoulder to other knee as though it were butter. The Templar Knight died slowly, the man slashed through his abdomen, the rent armor and white mantle soaked in blood.
Richard knelt but there was nothing he could do.
“Pleeasse…millloord…”
Richard watched the man’s passing. The warrior gulped his own blood, struggling to find breath, before finally dying.
The knight stood and ran his hand over the dissected statue. The marble had been hewn in two by some instrument that could cut through stone. Whatever had destroyed the effigy had also cut through the armor of the knight with ease.
“Open the Vault now!” the voice of Arawn raged from an open doorway nearby.
“We will not step aside!”
Gripping the Dark Thorn with conviction, Richard entered a room full of tension. Arawn and two Templar Knights surrounded two older men draped in black robes of the Church who were pressed against the only wall devoid of a bookshelf. Arawn gripped a kneeling Swiss Guard by the front of his uniform, holding a long dagger to his neck, but his harsh gaze never deviated from the older of the two Churchmen.
Pope Clement XV and Cardinal Vicar Cormac Pell O’Connor.
Danger pointed at the head of the Catholic Church. No matter how Richard felt about the Pope, his presence prevented Richard from unleashing the power of the Dark Thorn erratically. It added a risky dimension to the situation. Like the Cardinal Vicar, Clement held a sword in front of him, the length of the blade bright where blood slicked it. Both men were positioned defensively before the Templar Knights beside Arawn, far from any protection Richard could create.
“If you do not open the Vault, I will kill this man, his soul’s death on your conscience,” Arawn growled, twisting the point of the knife into the neck of the Guard. “The magic on the other side of this wall drew me here. Make way!”
“His sacrifice for upholding the laws of our Father in Heaven will be rewarded upon his entry,” Clement grunted. “What of your own?”
Arawn said nothing. Clement noticed Richard then, his lined face filling with a mixture of annoyance and hope. Arawn followed the Pope’s stare, his burned face darkening.
“Come to join me at last, Heliwr?” he asked, grinning.
As the Templars spun to confront the newcomer, Richard steadied his resolve.
“No. I have come to end your reign.”
“You are late then,” Arawn said. “I have survived to this room. By day’s end, the Vatican and all within it will be mine.”
“The Word will never allow it, John Lewis Hugo!” the Cardinal Vicar countered.
“Cormac Pell O’Connor,” Richard explained. “What you believe to be Hugo is in fact the ancient fey lord, Arawn, having set wheels in motion centuries ago to destroy the Vatican and the world of man, using Philip Plantagenet to meet his own ends and build an army for a different conquest entirely.” Richard paused, instead looking at Arawn. “Even now the Tuatha de Dannan fight
your
army in Annwn.”