Jack Templar and the Lord of the Demons (The Jack Templar Chronicles Book 5) (13 page)

T
he monks took
our swords and checked us for other weapons. They were thorough, even removing Daniel’s fake nose to look inside. As a last bit of business, one of them took a small bar of iron and pressed it against our foreheads. They pulled it away and inspected our skin. Once this was done, we were allowed to follow the old man down the hallway.

“I apologize. My guards can be a little overzealous,” the old man said. “There have been demons who sought entrance here already disguised as you.”

“You mean they said they were me?” I asked

“More than that. They took your shape. They sounded like you. Acted like you. One of them even made it to this level before he was discovered.”

“The iron,” Daniel said. “It burns demon flesh.”

“Precisely,” the old man said.

“So if you know we’re not demons, why take our swords?”

“Just because you’re not demons doesn’t mean you aren’t creach imposters,” an intense looking monk walking behind us said gruffly.

“This is Sebastian, Captain of the Guard,” the old man said. “He’s not one for taking chances.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know your name.”

The old man turned, an eyebrow arched. “Interesting.” He glanced at Sebastian as if there was something meaningful about this. I didn’t like the look and wondered if I’d just given the Captain of the Guard the proof he needed to run me through as an imposter.

“But I am Jack Templar,” I added quickly. “I can prove it.”

The old man leaned in, peering into my eyes. I held my ground even though his stare made my knees weak. I tried to swallow, but my throat was suddenly too dry. Finally, he spoke.

“No need. I know it’s you,” the old man said. “If we had more time I would have liked to have you try to prove it. It would have been interesting. Can any of us really prove who we are? What we are doing here on this Earth?” He leaned forward. “You say you can prove who you are? I would have liked to see that trick, indeed.”

The man turned and continued to walk.

I breathed a sigh of relief and followed, Daniel right behind me. “I still don’t know your name.”

“I know,” he said. “You are who you say you are, but whether that means you are someone to trust is another matter entirely.” He scratched his beard absently. “But I suppose it cannot hurt too badly, given what you’ve come here to do. You may call me Master Adem.”

“Master of what?” Daniel asked.

“I quite often ask myself the same question.” The old man laughed, making it clear he had no intention of elaborating further.

As we walked, I noticed this level was the same as those below us. A bare, stone hallway that curved in a circle around the circumference of the building. Only on this level, across the hall from each boulder we passed covering the stairway down, was a door formed by a block of stone raised off the floor and recessed into the ceiling above. I guessed that these doors were somehow connected to the pulley system with the boulders. It seemed that the door on the interior could only be open if the boulder sealed the stairway to the lower level. It was ingenious. No one below could come up and enter the interior door, and if someone was already on this level, they couldn’t escape back down the stairs.

Ingenious except for the fact that Daniel and I were the ones trapped in the building. With no chance of help from the others.

Master Adem passed by the first two open doors and then entered the third. We followed him in, surprised to find a second hallway nearly the same size as the first. Only this hallway wasn’t flat like the outer one. Instead, this one had a steep slope upward heading around the building’s core in a counter-clockwise direction. Dim lights were attached to the walls in staggered intervals, giving this part of the building a much darker and creepier feel that the outer ring. Master Adem turned to his right and started the uphill climb.

“Not much farther now,” he said.

I wanted to ask him a dozen questions. How did he know I was coming? What was the nature of this place and the strange army of monks garrisoned here? Most important, what had he meant when he said my friends and I were going to die? That last question was really starting to bother me the more I thought about it.

Too bad the old man didn’t give me a chance to ask. His pace quickened, and I had a hard time just keeping up with him on the steep incline. If I hadn’t already been out of breath from the climb, the strange doors would have taken my breath away.

They were made of a dark metal with every inch carved and molded in intricate detail, the figures stretching out from the surface in three dimensions. As I looked closer, I saw a story being played out.

The top of the door, barely visible in the dim light, was the upper world, symbolized with great trees and fields of wheat and corn. Only a tenth of the way down, a dividing line separated that world of living from the world of the dead shown down below. The rest of the door showed different levels of the Underworld, each one worse than the one before. It showed men and women bound in shackles, their heads down. It showed them drowning in pools of fire. Terrible winged creatures with massive claws chased and devoured others.

Master Adem knocked his cane against the door. “And this is where you want to go,” he said, shaking his head as if he were disappointed in me.

I looked over the door again, soaking in the thousand ways it showed someone could die a grisly death in the Underworld. “Uh, not really,” I said. “But it’s where I
need
to go to do my duty.”

Master Adem nodded. “Ahh, yes. To do your duty, come what may?”

“Are you monster hunters?” Daniel asked. “Members of the Black Guard?”

Master Adem chuckled at the question. Even Sebastian standing next to him had a smile cross his face before restoring his menacing look.

“No, no,” he said. “We are not of the Black Guard. You might say we are related in a way. Sympathetic brothers in the same cause.” He reached out a gnarled, wrinkled hand toward me, bent painfully so that he pointed at my chest. “But if you truly feel you must do your duty, monster hunter, then you should know what you are getting yourself into.”

He nodded for Sebastian to open the gate. The Captain of the Guard shot me a disapproving look, and I had the unsettling feeling that if he were left to his own devices he might just stuff his two visitors into a hole somewhere. One thing was certain, he didn’t look like he appreciated playing tour guide to us at all.

Master Adem rapped his cane against the gate a second time, and Sebastian finally moved forward and pulled a key from a chain hanging around his neck. He inserted the tip into the mouth of one of the men in the sculpture, a poor soul with his mouth stretched wide in a soundless scream. It was a clever way to hide the keyhole, but it made me shiver seeing the key extruding from the man’s mouth that way.

Surprisingly, after Sebastian turned the key, the doors swung open smoothly with the barest touch. They must have been perfectly balanced. I made a mental note in case we had to escape through those same doors later that we would be able to get them open in a hurry if needed.

Then all thoughts of escape left me as I walked through the doors and saw what was on the other side.

W
e stepped
through the doors onto a small platform, the monks filing in behind us and marching up a walkway to our right. I wasn’t watching them though; my attention was fully taken by the sight in front of me.

The center of the monastery was hollow. We perched on a wood walkway around the top of a massive circular open space that extended from the roof straight down into pitch-black darkness below. The interior walls of the monastery were raked and pockmarked from battle. Black scars from fires laced the surface. Work teams attached to rickety scaffolding repaired cracks and holes blasted into the rock, their torches the only lights at the lower levels. Up where we were, wood buildings clung to the inside of the monastery wall, built out on stilts over the chasm. It reminded me of a National Geographic magazine I’d seen about mountain climbers who camped out overnight as they climbed Half Dome in Yosemite. They bolted in right on the rock face and slept in sleeping bags suspended hundreds of feet in the air. Looking down into the deep black beneath us, I guessed the drop down here was significantly greater.

As if reading my mind, Master Adem pulled a flaming torch from the bracket in the wall near us. Without warning, he flung it over the edge. Daniel and I leaned forward to watch its trajectory out into the chasm and then falling, falling, falling.

Past the work crews. Past the spot where the monastery walls gave way to natural rock. Down farther and farther, looking smaller and smaller, it plummeted into the chasm until it was no more than a pinpoint of light before disappearing altogether.

“Come,” Master Adem said. “Accept the hospitality of an old man. There will be time for plunging to your death in the chasm later.”

The old man turned and walked up the path the monks had taken around the wall.

“Cheery old fart, isn’t he?” Daniel said.

“Let’s hear him out.”

The gate behind us slammed shut, and the sound echoed throughout the open space, lingering as the noise bounced down into the depths like the torch had done.

“Like we have a choice,” Daniel said.

He was right. Still, I was hopeful that Master Adem would be willing to help us. He may not have been part of the Black Watch, but certainly he and the monks were a fighting force of some kind. I wondered if he might even be willing to lend me a few men to go with us to the Underworld.

We started up the wood walkway extending from the monastery’s smooth outer wall, cantilevered over the chasm below and curving up higher towards the ceiling. As we walked on it, the wood bent and creaked under our weight. I chanced a quick look over the edge and felt the world spin from sudden vertigo. Stepping closer to the wall, I tried my best to keep away from the edge.

The path passed one of the buildings on stilts. We entered a long room brightly lit with candles and set up with rows of tables with benches for seats. At one end, a steaming pot hung over an open fire. The smell of vegetables and cooked meat hung in the air. I suddenly realized how hungry I was.

“Sit,” Master Adem said. “We will break bread together and I will answer your questions. Those I can, in any case. You strike me as the kind of young man who has more questions than there are answers in the world.”

We sat, and a monk with a nasty scar from his ear down to the corner of his mouth delivered bowls of hot stew in front of us. It smelled awesome, but I didn’t touch the spoon next to it. Master Adem nodded knowingly. He reached out for his own spoon and took a bite. “You see, no poison,” he said. “Besides, if we wanted you dead, it would be easy enough to do without going through the trouble of poisoning your food, don’t you think?”

Daniel lifted his spoon, took a big bite, and I followed suit. I have to admit, it was the best tasting food I’d ever eaten. I wished T-Rex could be here. If anyone would enjoy it, it would be him.

“Did you travel here alone?” Master Adem asked. “Just the two of you on such an important quest?”

I tensed up, wondering if the old man had somehow read my mind. I tried not to show it. “Just us,” I said. “Better to travel small and go unnoticed.”

Master Adem laughed. “You should have shared that wisdom with your four friends in the village,” he said. “They are provisioning for a long journey. Even the young children in the village we use as spies know they are there. Not exactly quiet about it.”

I felt my face flush at being caught in the lie. “I’m sorry, I didn’t –”

Master Adem waved my apology away. “No, it is good that you are careful. That you are slow to trust. It will serve you well if you decide to go through with your plan.”

“What can you tell us about what’s down there?” Daniel said. “Is it really a door to the Underworld?”

Master Adem smiled, but it was thin and filled with sadness. “The Underworld? Yes, that is one of the names for this place. Sheol. The Shadowlands. Purgatory. Damnation. Abbadon. Gehenna. All these are correct, and yet all are wrong. It is the way of man to name things they do not understand.”

“But is it where I will find the Lord of the Underworld?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” Master Adem said. “He’s there. Bound and tied to the place, unable to break free into the world where he longs to be. He reigns in his realm of fire and darkness with a merciless hand, biding his time, waiting for his chance to escape.”

“What keeps him there?” I asked.

“Old magic,” Master Adem said. “From long before the Knights Templar and the Black Watch. From a time when your precious Jerusalem Stones held a different name and served a different purpose.”

I felt excitement stir in my chest. “Will you tell us?” I asked. “Explain how they came to be?”

The man laughed, a deep throaty sound. “How they came to be?” he said. “I could no more tell you how the sun came to be. But I will tell the part of their story that I know.” He pushed his bowl of stew away and rocked back on the bench, closing his eyes as if seeing a faraway place. “Centuries ago, before the Templar Knights dug into the sacred chambers of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and found the stones, there was a great war over who would possess them. Back then they were called many names, but the history of the time refers to them most often as the Signet Stones.”

“I’ve never heard them called that,” I said.

“It’s an ancient name,” Master Adem said. “Its origin is uncertain. But the same can be said of many things. Of many people.” His attention seemed to wander, lost in a different memory.

“You were telling us about the Signet Stones,” I said.

He slammed the table with an open hand, spilling the bowl of stew. His nostrils flared and his eyes lit up in anger. “Don’t you dare to condescend to me, boy!” he bellowed. “You think you can treat me as an old man who’s lost his wits!”

I held my hands up, shocked by the outburst. “No, I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Master Adem took a deep, settling breath, then gave me a weak smile. “As I was saying,” he continued, acting as if nothing had happened, “there was huge battle over the Stones, for even at that time it was clear they held a power unlike anything to be found under the sun or in deepest shadow.”

Daniel and I shared a look, both picking up on Master Adem’s odd way of speaking.

“Creatures of both dark and light coveted this power. The battles fought over them ranged across the surface of the known world. At the center of it was Shaitan, one of the names for the creature who now calls himself the Lord of the Demons. He was one of the strongest of the dark creatures, but that wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to rule over all things, both living and dead.”

“How long ago was this?” Daniel asked.

“Nearly as ancient as memory itself,” Master Adem whispered.

“But he wasn’t successful,” I said.

“No, the only thing that the powerful fear are others becoming more powerful than they are themselves,” Master Adem continued. “Creatures of light and dark rose up against Shaitan, defeated him, and cast him down to the Underworld, binding him there with old magic that cannot be broken.”

“Except by the Jerusalem Stones,” I said. “That’s why they were hidden.”

Master Adem looked up, surprised. “Yes, this is correct. They were kept together because their power kept Shaitan at bay, but hidden so that others would not be tempted by their powers.”

“But what powers did the Stones have?” I asked. “After all this time I only know that combining them will enable me to confront Ren Lucre and rescue my father from his dungeons.”

“But you know the story of how the Stones fell into the hands of the Knights Templar and how they used them to become one of the strongest powers in all of Europe?” he asked.

“Yes, and how Tiberon gave up the location of the Stones to Ren Lucre.”

“A matter for which you allowed him to redeem himself, from my understanding,” Master Adem said.

I nodded but said nothing, not wanting to remember the vision I’d experienced of when Tiberon first betrayed the Black Guard and then was cursed to live in exile.

Daniel leaned forward. “If Ren Lucre had the Stones when the Templar Knights fell, why didn’t he use them to rule the world then? I was taught that he gave one to each Creach Lord in exchange for his rule.”

“You were taught wrong,” Master Adem said. “Ren Lucre’s veins are full with the ancient blood of the vampire Vitus from ancient Rome. But his heart is still filled with the poisonous ambition of man. Given a choice, he would never have given up the Jerusalem Stones,” he said. “The night the creach stole them, the Lords were there to take their own. None of them were strong enough to take them all.”

“But I thought Shaitan couldn’t leave the Underworld,” Daniel said.

“He can still send his minions,” Master Adem said. “He can possess the minds of those humans who are already cruel and vile and see the world through their eyes. No, that night Ren Lucre brokered the peace between the Creach Lords so they didn’t tear each other apart for the Stones. But his thirst to possess them all has never left him.”

Master Adem stood from the table. Against the wall, two monks, his personal guard, stepped forward and took a position behind him.

“Come with me,” he said. “There is something you should see.”

We followed the old man down the length of the room, the few monks sitting at the benches staring us down with menacing looks. It seemed they weren’t very happy with the intrusion of strangers into their world.

“Who are these men?” I asked. “They aren’t really monks, are they?”

“They are called Il Cento, The One Hundred,” Master Adem said. “Actually ninety seven now.”

“What happened to the three missing?” I asked.

Master Adem shook his head sadly. “They are no longer with us. Come, I will show you what became of them.”

We passed through a door and found ourselves back in the central open space, so large that it felt like being outside at night.

The walkway ended in a small platform that jutted out over the pit below. The far end of the platform had no railing, and Master Adem stood at the very edge, waving us forward.

“Anything make you think this old guy is a little nuts?” Daniel whispered.

I ignored the comment, but part of me agreed with him. It was hard to tell whether Master Adem intended to help us or try to stop us from our quest.

I walked up to him, staying a step back from the edge.

“This is what happened to our three missing brothers,” Master Adem said. “Three of my finest volunteered to enter the pit and seek out the gate to the Underworld. Their goal was the same as yours, find the Jerusalem Stone held by Shaitan and return to the surface with it. But they never returned.”

I could feel the sense of loss in the old man as he stared into the hole. But I also felt a tickle of concern in the back of my mind. If Master Adem had sent men to recover the Jerusalem Stone, it meant he wanted it. For the first time, I wondered if we were competing for the same thing.

“Why did you want the Stone?” I asked, deciding just to hit the issue head on. “What use is it to you?”

Master Adem looked at me as if I were soft in the head. “To reduce Shaitan’s power, of course. Look around you, boy. We are guardians, committed to standing vigil over this portal. The problem with doors is that they serve as both an entrance and an exit. There are reasons to leave the entrance open, but there are certain things that must not be allowed out into the world. We stand guard here for that reason.”

“Is that what the battle scars on the walls are from?” Daniel asked. “From battles waged here?”

Master Adem held up a hand. “Up there, that’s what I wanted to show you.”

Daniel and I both looked up. The entire ceiling was a mesh of heavy iron bars bent into long curves and welded together to form a mighty dome suspended over the pit. On closer inspection, I saw that – just like the boulders back in the hallway staircases – the dome was suspended from above by a heavy chain.

I quickly calculated the width of the dome at the base and deduced that the dome hadn’t been used in years. If it were to come crashing down to cover the pit, it would scrape the buildings and walkways right off the sides of the circular walls. It looked measured to fit over the chasm perfectly.

“What’s that for?” I asked, impressed with the sheer enormity of it.

“When things come up from the depths, testing our defenses, testing our will, we send them back to the pit from which they came,” Master Adem said. “That is for the day when we can’t defeat them. When they try to overrun us through sheer numbers.”

“Why are you showing it to us?” Daniel asked.

“Because I know where your quest takes you,” Master Adem said, his tone vacant and lifeless. “I do not think you will be successful. In fact, I highly doubt you will survive your own deaths, let alone outwit Shaitan and return with the Jerusalem Stone.”

“What do you mean survive our own deaths?” I asked, not liking the old man’s tone one bit.

Master Adem nodded toward the two Il Cento guards who stood nearby. From within their monk’s robes, they each pulled a sword. I was alarmed for a second before I realized the weapons were the ones they’d confiscated from us earlier. They handed them to Sebastian who then walked them over to us, holding them by the blades, the handles pointed toward us. Sebastian hesitated, clearly uncomfortable giving our swords back to us in front of the man he was meant to protect.