The Wolves of Paris (31 page)

He grabbed her arm. “To the tower! Hurry!”

“No, I won’t run.”

“Please, my lady!”

The wolves were getting the upper hand. Two of the six who’d come in had fallen, plus the injured wolf that had menaced her before her husband’s arrival, but four more fought on, one struggling to free itself from Tullia’s jaws, but the other three getting the better of their human foes. Rigord waded in, slashing and biting and kicking with his clawed feet. He threw one man against the wall, and Lucrezia realized with horror that he was going for Tullia. His lips pulled back in a snarl and murder lit up his eyes.

It was because of that night in the library. Cicero and Tullia had driven him from the house. Cicero had died, and now Rigord meant to take care of Tullia.

“No!” she screamed.

Lucrezia jerked free from Martin and tried to fight her way through the battle, but the quarters were too close. Her dagger slashed right and left, but she couldn’t make any progress toward her dog.

Tullia came up with a bloody muzzle. The wolf lay dead, throat open, eyes glazed, tongue hanging from its open mouth. The mastiff turned her head toward Rigord, now looming above her. She threw herself at him.

The two grappled in the air. Rigord fell back, clawed hands pushing at the dog’s snarling, snapping jaws. Her teeth clamped on the wolf man’s hand and he howled in pain and rage. His mouth opened, showing lines of teeth, gleaming and dripping. His head plunged in. The two fell to the ground. Only Rigord came up. Tullia lay on the floor, head torn nearly off.

Lucrezia wailed in grief. She almost reached her husband as he returned to the battle, but Martin and one of the remaining guards grabbed her arms and dragged her back. She lost the grip on her dagger and it fell.

Two wolves remained, facing two guards, but one man had fallen to his knees and the tip of his sword had broken off. The other was backed into the corner, covered in cuts, but still standing and armed when the wolves came at them. Dead men and wolves lay all around them. Rigord roared into the battle.

Lucrezia didn’t see what happened next. Martin and the last guard had her to the stairs and at last she relented. One final, anguished glance at her dead dog, at the carnage in the hallway, then she ran up the stairs, following Martin, with the armed guard struggling up behind. He was one of Lorenzo and Marco’s men, hired to escort their caravan through the Alps and along the long road up France to Paris.

A man screamed below as they rounded the first turn up the tower. Then the sounds of pursuit, claws on stone. Their enemies howled as they climbed. It sounded like two—Lucrezia prayed to God the beleaguered guards had taken at least one of the remaining wolves before dying.

Martin disappeared above her. The door opened with a groan and a gust of cold air that rushed down the tower. He cried for the other two to hurry. One more turn and they’d be there. The enemy was right below them, closing quickly.

Behind Lucrezia, the final guard screamed. She turned to see the wolf had seized his calf. The man flailed with his sword and he and the wolf stumbled. They rolled several steps, still grappling, then disappeared as the stairway curved toward the bottom. Breastplate and gauntlets clanked against the stone as they continued to fall. Rigord cursed somewhere from the darkness below.

Lucrezia reached the doorway. Martin grabbed her arm and dragged her through and into the open air. He turned toward the open entrance, waiting for the last guard.

“Fabricio!” he called. “For God’s sake, man!”

The only answer was a snarl and a dark shape racing up the stairs. Rigord. Fabricio would not be coming.

Martin and Lucrezia lowered their shoulders and drove the door shut, then threw down the crossbar. Not an instant too soon. Rigord slammed into the door and it shook on its hinges.

Paris stretched below them. The frozen Seine lay on one side of the tower, the hard street on the other. Lights flickered behind windows below them, and the heavy odor of wood smoke hung in the air as people huddled at fires to keep warm on this cold, plague-infested night, when wolf howls filled the air. Death stalked the streets and every soul knew it.

The smoke turned the gibbous moon a ruddy orange. The wind gusted her hair, so cold it seemed to suck the breath from her chest and turn her lungs to ice. Inside, she prayed for help as she hadn’t prayed since she was a child.

The door rocked on its hinges. Rigord snarled in rage and tore at the wood with his claws.

“I’m sorry, my lady,” Martin said, his voice heavy and trembling. “I have failed you.”

“Courage, Martin,” she said, though she felt weak with fear of the snarling, scratching creature behind the door. This thing that had once been her husband. “We aren’t finished yet.”

Chapter Thirty-one

Lorenzo and Marco fought their way across the cathedral nave toward Lord Nemours’s side, yelling a warning about the fleeing wolves. Several men lay bleeding or dead. One of them sagged against a pillar with his hand clenched to his gut, which split open from side to side. Another clamped his hand over his neck, trying to hold in the blood that gushed between his fingers. Two men ran for the cathedral doors, fleeing the battle. Faced with the wolves, their courage had failed.

But Nemours stood at the center of a small, but growing knot of men, regrouping for the attack. He shouted courage to his men and their resolve stiffened visibly with every passing moment. This was the man, Lorenzo saw, who had rallied his troops to victory against an overwhelming force of English knights and footmen at Gerberoy.

By the time Lorenzo and Marco reached the provost’s side, the man’s triumph was turning to a look of confusion. He stared after the wolves, who fled deeper into the cathedral.

“Where the devil are they going?”

“They’re escaping,” Lorenzo explained, gasping. “Into the crypts.”

“What?”

“A secret passage. We have to stop them or it will start all over again.”

“You heard him,” Nemours roared to his men. “After them!”

Twenty men gave chase. Burdened by breastplates and helms, they fell behind the two brothers from Florence, who sprinted to the lead, brandishing their swords. They ran over and past dead men-at-arms, priests and monks with shredded robes and gaping wounds. Here and there lay the carcass of a wolf.

The wolves reached the stairway down into the crypt. At least half their number had fallen, or were trapped in small battles throughout the nave, wounded and unable to escape, but a good dozen stood in this knot. These included the biggest, strongest brutes, mostly uninjured, still fighting with a savagery beyond that of any man or beast. Courtaud was with them. Another instant and he would lead them down that hole and into the catacombs beyond.

And then, when it seemed too late to stop them, the wolves turned as one. A collective cry howled from their throats.

The brothers drew short as the wolves raced back toward them, snarling. Shoulder to shoulder, Lorenzo and Marco braced themselves as the first two leaped for them. But then Nemours arrived and suddenly all was a confusion of fur and teeth and steel. Screams and howls. The wolves drove them back step by step.

Lorenzo didn’t understand it. What were they doing? Why didn’t they escape when they had the chance? Was their blood lust so great that Courtaud would sacrifice them all to kill a few more men?

Because now all three sets of doors of the cathedral hung open and men came rushing in. The last part of Nemours’s trap had arrived at last—men from the watch, those who had hidden in the cathedral close, others roused from the gates and walls of the Cité. Dozens poured in. The wolves fought in a ferocious cluster, tearing down men right and left, but two newcomers joined the battle for every one who fell. Men shouted in triumph at their pending victory, even as their comrades continued to fall.

A single, solitary figure crept away from the battle. Almost a shadow, really, it was so cloaked in darkness. Lorenzo almost didn’t see it—wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t been looking for Courtaud, needing to see the pack leader die with his own eyes. The red wolf had torn apart three men in the few moments since the wolves turned, but when a sword slashed across his back, he retreated toward one of the stone columns, where he promptly disappeared. Lorenzo had no idea what evil magic this was, but he was certain the shadow was the pack leader.

“Look!” he told his brother.

Marco stared into the gloom where Lorenzo pointed with his sword. His breath hissed out. A pool of shadow slithered across the floor. The shadow brushed between legs and past battles and nobody paid it any attention. It reached the crypt and disappeared into the darkness below.

“Follow me,” Lorenzo said.

The two brothers fought their way toward the crypt. A wolf flew past, a spear shaft broken off in its side. But if it meant to escape, it chose the wrong way to run. It charged into the middle of the enraged mob still pouring down the center of the nave, which fell upon it with swords and maces.

To Lorenzo’s surprise, Montguillon had regained his feet at the top of the stairs. Using a dagger, the man sawed a strip of cloth from his robe and tied it around his neck to stop the bleeding.

“I thought you were dead,” Lorenzo said. “That wolf was tearing out your throat.”

“It’s nothing.”

Not nothing, exactly. An ugly wound, but not fatal. At least not until it had time to fester.

The prior looked down the steps into the crypt. “Did you see? Some new devilry is at work. The big red wolf turned into a shadow and escaped. He was injured—I have to go after him. Now, before he gets too far.”

“Not alone you won’t,” Lorenzo said. “We’re coming with you.”

“Where is Simon?” Montguillon asked, looking around. “Where is he?”

“I am here, Father,” Simon said.

He’d been to one side, bent over two fallen friars. Lorenzo expected him to be covered in blood and gore like so many of the other survivors. But even though he was only a few feet from the battle raging in front of the choir, he looked untouched.

“Are you going down?” Simon said. “Let me come with you. Together—”

“Stay with the other brothers,” Montguillon interrupted. “Minister to the injured.”

“But I can help you, Father.”

“No. If I fall, only you know what happened here. Tell the subprior. Renew the hunt until every one of these devils is dead.”

Simon gave a slight bow of the head. “As you wish.”

So clean and uninjured. It was almost like the young friar had been hiding in one of the shrines that lined the cathedral, ignored by the wolves and ignoring them in turn.

Lorenzo glanced at Marco to find his brother staring back with a blazing intensity. No words passed between them. None were necessary.

It was Simon,
Marco’s look said.
He is the traitor.

Lorenzo grabbed Simon’s arm as he turned to obey the prior and minister to his fellow Dominicans.

“No, you’ll come with us,” Lorenzo said. “We’ll provide the swords. The Dominicans have the knowledge to help us track this demon and finish him.”

Montguillon started to argue, but the other three were already turning toward the stairs that descended into the crypt. The battle was almost over above, with only a handful of wolves still fighting. But so many men had died, and those last few wolves would go down with terrible difficulty. They had no time to wait for Nemours to regroup, to receive notice that one had escaped, and to send help. It would be Lorenzo, Marco, and the two monks or nobody.

Marco sheathed his sword and grabbed a torch at the top of the stairs. Montguillon grabbed another, and Simon a third. Lorenzo kept his sword in hand. The prior led the four down the stairs, followed by the younger monk, with Marco and Lorenzo behind.

A simple stone room sat at the bottom of the staircase. Torch shadows flickered along the walls. Four separate passageways branched from the stone room, narrow enough they would only get through in single file, and with low ceilings to force them to duck. Lorenzo didn’t relish the thought of chasing a wolf down those passages.

“Which one though?” he muttered. He was still watching the young friar out of the corner of his eye, and caught Marco doing the same.

Simon bent to the ground and gestured for Montguillon to hold down his torch. “Here.”

Blood speckled the stone. It left a trail that led into one of the four passageways. Without waiting for a consensus, Montguillon thrust out his torch, ducked into the passage and hurried forward. The other three followed, with the brothers once again bringing up the rear.

The sounds of battle disappeared behind thick stone walls. The air was damp and smelled of decay.

Niches lined either wall, filled with the bones of the dead. One niche held thigh bones, all separated and stacked like kindling. The next held forearm bones, or the small bones of the hands and feet. Around the next bend they faced row after row of skulls, staring back from darkened eye sockets. The eye sockets seemed to move back and forth as the torchlight shifted the shadows. Mold blackened the walls and turned the stone slimy to the touch.

They walked perhaps two hundred feet through various twists and branches before they came to a gate that blocked an even narrower corridor. The gate had a thick, rusting lock, but the lock was open and dangling, and the gate was open as well. A tuft of gray fur hung from the edge of the gate, as if one of the wolves had caught itself during the mad rush past the gate and left a patch behind.

The stone of the ossuary corridors had been dressed and fitted neatly. It changed on the other side of the gate, more dirt than stone, with the ground rough, as if it had been dug by an army of mole-like men, down here with shovels, stooped and laboring in the dark. This clearly marked the edge of the cathedral walls, and the beginning of the catacombs that riddled the Île de la Cité, the ancient heart of Paris. Some of these tunnels, Lorenzo realized, might have been here for hundreds of years. At one time, Paris had been an outpost of the Roman Empire.

Montguillon held his torch down and scraped a fingernail along the lock. Chunks of rust flaked off in his hand. He came up with a frown.