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Chapter 5
 
 
 

Codex - REVIEW THIS STORY

Written by HF
Last updated: 09/18/2008 08:14:26 PM

Chapter 5

The rest of the day was spent in introductions, and it would have passed in a blur if Remy hadn’t committed himself fully to memorizing names and faces. He would have thought that the sheer variety of faces and body types would have provided some help, but the bewildering variation turned even people like Christof and Margarita into blurry, kaleidoscopic images, his unnatural height blending into her shortness, his pale austerity into her dark werewolfish face.

He met the four younger members who had gone out to get the stone for Mathilde (who had not been introduced to him, and seemed to be strangely absent, although no one commented on it.) Dominic and Valentino were brothers, Dominic being the elder by a year and a half, and both were overjoyed to have another of their age around. Catherine and Juliana stared at him for a moment, and whispered to each other in Italian, probably thinking that he either did not hear or would not understand them. They were wrong on both counts, and what he heard made him smirk privately to himself.

And there was Joyeuse again, hanging back shyly and pushing her dark hair over her shoulder. Next to her was Diego with his ’cousin’ Isidore, who did not look to be related at all, but perhaps their mutations were so wildly different that they masked any notion of kinship. Diego was squat and hunchbacked, somewhat like Quasimodo, but with powerful arms and hands that looked as if they could crush anything. Isidore was pale green, a photosynthesizer according to Marcus, and the young man billed himself wryly as ’the human plant.’ Remy met Svetlana and Lucine, the latter of whom was pale and ghostly luminescent, the former with skin striped like a tiger’s. There was a quiet, shy boy named Joshua who had wings in the place of arms and legs that terminated in birdlike claws instead of feet. There were others, but their names faded.

As it was, there was more than enough swirling around Remy’s head by the time he told Marcus he was ready to hit the hay again.

"I’ll walk you there," Marcus said, detaching himself from the deep easy chair that graced one corner by the fireplace of a large room that looked to have been a chapel once. The rest of the residents had either gone to bed or were sitting quietly, scattered about the room in singles or pairs, reading or whispering to each other in a hush of many languages. Svetlana’s deep voice was like a growl, her Polish inflected by a tiger’s snarl, harsh against Lucine’s French.

"So, what do you think?" the older man asked once they had made it out of the room, escaping a chorus of good-nights.

"I... I don’t know what to t’ink," Remy admitted. "De ole mind ain’t catchin’ up, if ya know what I mean."

Marcus, surprisingly, did seem to know. "You ain’t had a chance to take it in," he said softly. "When Robert found you, he didn’t know much for sure-he sorta had to piece it together, if you take my meaning, but he said you didn’t seem to be the kinda person who’d take to charity, or take to bein’ accepted into a group of people very well."

Remy had to admit, privately, that Father Clay was absolutely right on both counts. He never took charity from anyone, because ’charity’ in his book meant giving people favors they could call in anytime they wanted to. The last time he did that, dozens of innocent people died. Charity had given way to a ruthless business arrangement, almost before Remy knew what happened. "Non... dat be lyin’ to y’self, mon ami" he told himself bitterly. "You walked in, eyes wide open. You knew you couldn’ trust dat bastard." But as to the latter... that was true, too. His family had banished him. He knew why, intellectually, but his heart couldn’t accept it.

"We ain’t some kinda charity organization," Marcus continued. "We just look out for each other. Always have, ever since the place was founded."

"Does dat have anyt’in’ t’ do wit Saint Nathan?"

"So you did look!" Oddly, Marcus did not sound displeased; instead, he sounded vastly amused. "I told Robert that you would, y’ know, an’ laid him odds on it. That wasn’t a bet he took though. But you’re right, Remy-it does have something t’ do with Saint Nathan."

"And him bein’ a mutant?"

Marcus slanted a speculative, and somewhat respectful, look at him. "That’s one of our conclusions," he said at last. His footsteps sounded loudly in the stone hallway, and there was again that sense of being watched, overheard by anxiously listening walls. "We don’t know for sure whether he was or not, but we do know that ever since his consecration of the monastery, it’s been a shelter for outcast people. Used to be old women suspected of witchcraft, and Catholic priests who got on the wrong side of Henry the Eighth. Not even Henry tried to confiscate the monastery’s lands when he was on one of his little tears. Elizabeth more or less left the place alone... By that time there were rumors of bad luck, don’t you know-that messin’ with Saint Nathan’s would bring back the saint, who would strike down whoever was foolish enough to desecrate his monastery."

Remy nodded slowly, seeing the codex’s illuminations in his mind’s eye. He could believe the force of the belief behind what Marcus said, although he didn’t go for it himself. It was a nice story-it would make an even nicer reality, he thought with a brief spasm of wistfulness.

"The people in Haight’s Pond know that this is a retreat," Marcus said, "and those who have problems with it mostly keep their mumblin’ to themselves."

Both men walked in silence the rest of the way to Remy’s door, Marcus’s last words hanging between them. The younger man turned them over and over, trying to pick out... pick out what? A crack in Marcus’s calm serenity, the assurance with which he had spoken? A thousand years this place had endured, through storms of a history Remy could only very vaguely recall. But would it keep lasting? Henry VIII had been almost unstoppable in his determination to bring the Catholic church to heel in his dominions, possessed of a fury and animosity that now found its equal in the pocket groups of mutant-haters. Would this place last against *them*?

"Quit tryin’ t’ predict de future, LeBeau" he told himself sternly.

"Well," Marcus said into a silence that had dragged out uncomfortably, "I’ll be leavin’ ya to it, then, Remy. Sleep well, now."

"T’anks, Dr. Marcus."

"It’s Troy, Mr. LeBeau." A small light glinted in Marcus’s dark eyes and he smiled broadly, a smile that was tentatively returned before Remy turned and went into his room to go to sleep.

Remy found out who was Mathilde the next day, and in a way he did not fully expect. After joining a few of the residents for an early breakfast-Svetlana had offered to fight him for the last piece of sausage, but he had politely declined-he pulled on a borrowed jacket and scarf, and told Marcus he was off to pick up his car from where he had left it on the road, assuming it was still there. Marcus nodded benevolently and Remy was out of the warm interior of the monastery and into the bitter wind of a late Yorkshire winter morning.

The sky above him was clear and merciless, and the wind cut deeply and he shivered with the bitterness of it as its coldness seeped through his skin to mingle with that ever-present chill in his marrow. Automatically, his body responded to the drop in temperature, lightly charging the air molecules next to his skin to heat them up. It was not as effective a trick as it had been; to Sinister’s amusement, Remy had used to run a constant ’fever’ of 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and Remy remembered the evil man saying something about him "not even breaking a sweat." Not anymore, though-his temperature had stabilized at somewhere around 100-101, a low-grade fever by any standard. In this cold, he would have been glad for anything to be warmer, even that constant burning in the center of his body.

He trudged up the road, on the lookout for patches of ice and mud, felt his sneakers slipping a bit on the uncertain surface as he made his way uphill. As he moved further away from the warmth of Saint Nathan’s, the wind’s howling increased to a fever pitch and blistered through the jacket’s thick fleece as if Remy were simply going naked. The mental image made him snicker.

"Wouldn’ de girls like dat!"

At long last, he found his car, half-hidden behind some shrubbery and on the edge of going off the road and into a ditch. Carefully, he unlocked the door with cold-benumbed fingers and slipped into the driver’s seat, fingers clenched around the keys. The car sputtered to life, engine protesting against the temperature, and stumbled into gear. There was a painful grinding and the car lurched. Remy remembered the terrific jolt from last night, as the car had hit the bottom of the hill going full-tilt, and he thought dismally that the suspension was shot.

He forced the injured car to limp back to a small, cleared space that seemed to serve as a parking lot, parked it, and climbed out, nearly forgetting his duffel bag. As he doubled back to get it, he thought he saw a movement out of the corner of his eye, but dismissed it for the moment. Turning back around, duffel bag in tow this time, he began to walk swiftly back to the promising warmth of the monastery complex, and was so intent on getting inside that he almost missed the soft shuff-shuff’ing sound of something being dragged through grass.

Curious, heartbeat beginning to pick up a little with adrenaline, Remy moved in the direction of the sound. He could feel the slight, autonomic tingle of his power beginning somewhere deep inside his gut, trying to leech out into the promising rough canvas shoulder strap of the duffel bag. He forcefully throttled the power back, much easier now for him to do, and kept it in check. It coiled inside him, snaky and hot, waiting.

Remy stalked silently around the huge wall of the monastery, pausing at the formidably masoned corner. Back to the wall, he carefully peered around it.

And stared, and stared, and stared.

A huge boulder lay on the ground, about two feet from the side of the monastery, and as Remy watched, two arms extruded, amoeba-like, from the monastery wall, the same color as the black-gay stonework, long-fingered and reaching to wrap around the boulder. The impossibly long digits extended, engulfing the stone until nothing could be seen except a faintly writhing, pulsing network of snaky tendon-like fingers. He could hear a faint grinding sound, like bits of gravel being crushed together underfoot, and the arms shivered, extended, and seemed to swell.

The grinding went on a moment more, and then the long fingers began to unravel their knot. And when at last they fell away, Remy saw that, where there was once a rock that must have weighed five hundred pounds, there was nothing at all.

"It’s something, is it not?"

Remy had head footsteps coming up behind him, and turning, he saw that they belonged to Joyeuse, who watched him with her grave, dark eyes. She had her hands in the deep pockets of her coat, surprisingly casual, but the expression on her face was deeply serious. "That is Mathilde," she said as she stepped to Remy’s side, peering up at him with an unreadable expression. "You’ll have to forgive her for not noticing you-she generally doesn’t notice much these days."

It struck Remy as improbably cruel, what Joyeuse said, and the perfect disinterestedness in her tone only reinforced the impression. He said as much, but she met the mild rebuke with a soft twist of her lips and a philosophical, oddly American, shrug.

"Mathilde has been here longer than anyone can remember," she said. "She’s been here since the war, at least-I mean what you Americans would call the War for Independence. When I came here, I used to want to talk to her, but one of the others said that she never spoke much, unless it was to ask after what she needed to keep herself alive."

"Dat’s... dat’s bizarre," Remy said after a moment. "She’s in de building? An’ what d’ ya mean, ’alive’?"

"I mean ’alive,’" Joyeuse said impatiently, her accent sharp in her annoyance. "And yes, she is in the building. Dr. Marcus calls it a fuse-form mutation; Mathilde can bond to any material and take on its properties. She came here just after a fire had destroyed part of the building, and began to restore it herself. She’s been here ever since, keeping the place in repair."

"Bob Vila ain’t got nothin’ on dat girl."

"Who?"

"Never mind."

"You have seen mutants before," Joyeuse remarked. He glanced at her sharply, eyebrow raised in question. "Many of us had not seen... others of our kind, before we came here," she said. "Svetlana was an experience for me. So were Maria and Christof" Surprisingly, laughter tinged her voice, lending it an exotic lilt Remy found entrancing. "But it is difficult for some to adjust to seeing so many different people-many come from small villages where there is much intermixing of bloodlines, so people tend to look alike. You did not seem surprised by any of us last night, nor much by Mathilde today, which is why I say this."

"I worked wit’ some o’ dem," Remy said softly, privately adding that none of them were particularly savory or charitable types. He thought of Victor Creed and, as if in a wave, he could smell the huge creature’s foul, bloody breath streaming across his face. He thought of Vertigo’s bitter, sardonic face and long green hair, Scalphunter’s bitter, weary resignation.

"Ah." Joyeuse let the uneasy monosyllable hang for a moment.

"How long you been here?" Remy asked.

"Five years," Joyeuse said. A flash of pain twisted her face before it vanished. "Excuse me," she said hurriedly, "I have to help Mathilde." She brushed past Remy, who stepped aside as best he could, and made her way over to where a large pile of boulders rested. She stood frozen for a moment before a boulder trembled, tilted, and fell over, and began to scud along the flattened grass with the same shuff-shuff sound from earlier.

"Telekinetic" Remy thought uncomfortably. He had somehow dismissed the possible presence of psionics here and was briefly afraid-many times, telekinetics had some kind of small telepathic ability adjunct to the telekinesis itself. Cautiously, he tested his mental shields, reassuring himself that even with his guard relatively lax, he would have felt any unwanted intrusion and nipped it in the bud.

And wouldn’t *that* have caused some problems! Remy was deeply, profoundly familiar with secrecy. He shuddered, thinking about the rites that had made him a full-fledged Thieves Guild member, bound by blood to reveal nothing of his clan or affiliation. And a deeper shudder that made the ice in his bones grate together like glass, of what Sinister had done to him to ensure "complete security of information."

Sinister’s words, not his. Heard through a haze of pain, filtering through the grinding sound that must have been the plates in his skull shifting like an earthquake.

He mulled on that as he withdrew to the interior of the monastery, and the thought gnawed at him the rest of the day. Remy wasn’t used to doing nothing, and at the monastery, there was not much of anything to do-some simple chores, looking around the dusty catacombs that reminded him dimly of the old places back home, eating-and he, possessed of little patience, was chafing at the end of the first day. Marcus tried to assure him that, once the weather turned, there was much more to do, but any hope of springtime seemed dismally far away.

It was at dinner, eaten once more in the refectory, that Remy was struck by It.

The thought of how sudden this was. He had agreed not twenty-four hours ago to stay, never really giving the prospect much thought. More or less the answer had been startled out of him-sure, I’ll stay, why not? Remy winced at his nonchalance. He had agreed to stay *here*... Could he leave?

And why was he thinking of it already?

Svetlana sat next to him, chewing away lustily at a thick haunch of beef that looked to be almost uncooked, grunting with animalistic pleasure as she swallowed. Joyeuse sat a few seats away, nibbling delicately at some bread. The others laughed and talked amongst themselves, even Christof and Maria, who seemed to keep to each other’s company for the most part. Marcus sat at the head of the table, beaming at the room in general, like a benevolent, if skinny, grandfather. He could feel what he now knew to be Mathilde-that strange sense of unseen eyes-peering over the room, breathing down his neck.

Juliana, who made it a point of sitting next to him (much to Catherine’s annoyance), tried to engage him in conversation, giggling delightedly when he answered her in the lazier French he’d learned at home. Her green eyes glittered with an intensity that he found disturbing, and when he thought about it, the last time he had seen such fire was in Bella’s eyes, when she had looked at him That Way-and then all his wit fell away from him, and he lapsed into silence again. Confused, Juliana retreated and turned to chat up Dominic some more.

There was a camaraderie here, so close and desperate he felt his old psi-shell waver under the pressure of it. And he was frightened, too-frightened of the happiness of the place.

Left without appetite, Remy picked through the rest of his dinner, watching as the others began to finish and disperse. He waited for a while longer, until it seemed polite and not terribly reclusive of him to leave, then took his plates to the kitchen and stole soundlessly back to his room. Once there, he locked the door behind him, wincing at the loud grating of old metal over wood, and turned to stare at his surroundings.

Just a bed, a dresser with mirror, small closet for clothes, duffel bag on the floor where he had left it earlier. Crucifix above the bedstead, a little dusty from not being clean. Nothing of Mathilde’s presence, although the room was warm and close around him. Window on the far wall, small with its panes separated by heavy ironwork. Spartan, almost sterile but fairly reeking of age-Remy felt suddenly as if he were back in the old subterranean crypts of New Orleans, the kind that always stank of the swamp and decaying things, the dampness of the marsh working endlessly at brick and newer titanium-laced masonry. It was that kind of age, the kind he could feel in his bones-holy, almost, and solidly secure, but not comforting.

Shivering, fighting back the chill creeping through him, Remy undressed and pulled on a sweatshirt and pants, debated socks, then decided against them. He crawled into bed, for the thick blankets and soft sheets that greeted him, and his body was too used to any kind of sleeping surface to complain about the mattress. The warmth of his heavy clothing and blankets swept over him, making his head buzz pleasantly, and as he slipped off, he could feel the slight, gusty heat of Mathilde’s breath against his cheek.

tbc.

Note:

1.) Most of the residents of St. Nathan’s are named after various Catholic saints, some of whom were coincidentally martyrs. Actually, all of them were, I’m fairly certain of it. Christof is named after Saint Christopher, a saint who was said to have been a giant with the head of a dog who had converted to Christianity, and Margarita is a sort of descendent from Mary Magdalen, who was sometimes depicted as being covered with hair. Dominic, Valentino, Catherine, and Juliana were all martyred saints during the Roman persecutions; their stories survive in various collections of saint’s lives, although the ones I’m more familiar with--Catherine and Juliana--can be found in a couple of Old English texts.

Joyeuse is named, in case you were curious, after Charlemagne’s sword.

 

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