Maybe he’d never be pure enough of heart.
Instead he’d sought out another avenue, pouring over books wider in nature, tracing back from the grail quest to wider European mythology. There were innumerable false relics bandied around the continent and within Britain itself and any number of them looked interesting. He’d taken the books with him to his arctic trips and in a private display of geekery, catalogued the references on the laptop and sorted through for likely objects. There had been only sparse focus on artifacts in Deus prior to the present conflict with the horsemen and that meant there were a lot of unpursued leads.
It had been in a very ancient Latin text – which he’d found Tracey could actually translate for him – that he had found mention of Gabriel and an artifact in a cathedral somewhere in England. It had taken some time to narrow down the prospective locations, but thanks to some notes scribbled in margins by some probably long dead hunter who was much cleverer than him, he was sure he’d gotten it down.
What had happened to said smartarse hunter after they’d figured out the information didn’t really bear thinking about, either he’d get there and it would be gone or they’d have died in action. He wasn’t sure which alternative appealed more.
And so he’d found himself on the ******** roof of a vast cathedral in the middle of the night in a downpour regretting the idea to do this right now, tonight of all times. Daytime in the sun would have been preferable. He felt like the ******** batman, clad as he was in his mission cloak, anonymous thief in the dark.
Stone crumbled in his hands as he climbed the ornate stonework and he might have considered that the last person to touch said stone was its sculptor if he wasn’t so fixated on the thread of hope that they had been REALLY ******** good at their job. Even with his weapon augmented endurance and strength it was hard going and it was high.
And he was right, their charge was all about the leap and the fall, if there was one thing he did often it was falling.
He hauled himself up into the windowless frame and flopped undignified onto dust covered rotted wood flooring, coughing up a storm, he lay there anxiously, waiting for the dust to settle or the floor to give, but nothing did, the only sound he heard was the low persistent hiss of the rain and the irritable creak of warped wood. He stood cautiously, bracing himself for everything to drop away but nothing did. The hallway beyond was riddled with damp patches where black mould had taken hold on the building and the stone was slick with slime and other unthinkable goop. He tried not to touch it, or for that matter to kick any of the nasty little mushrooms that had taken up residence on the wood either. He proceeded cautiously and slowly towards what the books he’d read had described as the former reliquary. Tracey was being just as attentive as he was and he could feel the fallen angel straining to follow the flashlight through the gloom.
Finally they came to the door they’d been looking for, solid stone, seemingly impassable. Set into the stone, almost weathered away were the words.
nitimur in vetitum
To Rep it made sense. He backed up along the corridor, he could strive all right. Bracing himself and spreading his weight, he summoned Tracey and swung. The door held, he swung again, and again, until the roof was rent open to the torrential rain and his muscles sung with pain. Finally it gave, the door shunted open more and more with every blow rained upon it, shallow gouges in the stone from Tracey’s blade. When it was wide enough to accommodate him, he desummoned and carefully slithered inside.
The air was musty and old, and he breathed it resentfully with no other option available. If he got some horrible lung disease from it, he was going to be pissed as hell.
The darkness within felt absolute, the flashlight which had been so adequate in the hallway felt like a feeble dying gasp in the black and it was difficult to make out more than the circular shape of the room. The floors were stone rather than wooden and it felt like a prison cell, unwelcoming and solid. He moved closer to the centre of the room where a raised plinth stood out from the floor, engraved with more text.
He leaned in close and slowly to scan it and once again relied on Tracey to translate the Latin for him.
< It is not what we thought. Brings death to the flesh but does not die, fire burns it not. It calls dark to its side. The dark of our world twisted it. Take it from here. >
On top of the stone lay what looked like a perfectly sleek smooth shard of horn, fashioned to a small hilt, the overall effect was of a sacrificial or skinning dagger. But the shadows clung to it strangely and behaved in ways that flashlight shadows should not. It unnerved him but at the same time he felt undeniably that what he was looking at wasn’t some ridiculous scam but the real deal, an artifact.
Standing in the middle of the room he could finally cast light across the walls without the item distorting the beam and found himself looking at engravings that were less than heartening, men stuck with the strange dagger on the plinth, clearly dead or dying, many seemingly accidental in nature.
He examined the dagger further and found written upon the hilt. “I free the flesh that is steel” or at least that was Tracey’s best interpretation of it, there was a great deal of ambiguity in the phrase.
Anyone else faced with the same situation might well have called for backup, sought people who could handle the thing without danger, might have considered the murals a fair warning not to touch the object at all. Rep on the other hand was not a wise person, nor did he fear harm or danger. To him the dagger’s translation made perfect sense to him, these medieval twats had been sticking themselves with the thing when the instructions seemed to be to do something else entirely.
He summoned Tracey, a tight and awkward fit in the circular room, and laid him on the floor, red runes blazing their defiance against the twisted darkness – a creature of darkness himself, he felt no fear as Rep took the dagger in hand and eyed it thoughtfully.
<
He smirked and brought the dagger down on the steel of the axe, expecting it to glance off harmlessly; instead it stuck deep into the steel, shadow binding to shadow until he couldn’t pry the damn thing off. The room spun dizzily and Tracey hissed in perceived pain as he finally wrenched it free, though even as he did it was somehow differently shaped, erratic edges and shapes to the horn in an echo of Tracey’s own shape. He wasn’t sure what the ******** it meant. He felt good regardless. And he wasn't dead.
He desummoned the axe, glad he still even could and pocketed the artifact in his harness, still not sure what to make of it. The guys at the labs could probably help.
He didn’t feel bad about taking it, the plinth had said so, hadn’t it?
