The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (5 page)

“At the moment I appear to be killing you,” he said, coming after me. “We must amuse the crowd, after all, or they grow restless.” He snapped out at me with one of the swords, and I threw myself to the side. But it was just a feint to set me up for the kick he delivered to my face, hard enough to somersault me backward. The wound to his foot didn’t seem to slow him down any.

“I meant what you’re doing playing at being the emperor,” I snarled. I got back on my knees and spat blood at him.

He chuckled as he circled me, forcing me to shuffle around to face him.

“My dear little monkey,” he hissed at me. “I’m not playing at anything. I
am
the emperor. Do you know how much work it took to become the leader of the most powerful empire in the world? How many years? The machinations and treachery are as divine as any court of gods. I have earned this.”

He suddenly lashed out at my face with a sword. I parried the blow, but couldn’t stop the strike with the other sword. He stabbed his blade through the back of my right leg and into the sand, pinning me now. I cried out in pain and the crowd cried out in delight.

“The gods be damned,” I said, turning my pain into a scream of rage. “Why are you doing this?” He was going to slay me again and I still didn’t know what was going on.

Judas moved behind me, and now I couldn’t see him.

“For the same reasons I killed you,” he said. “Or at least I thought I killed you.”

I reached back and tried to pull out the sword, but he smashed the other blade down onto my arm, breaking the bone. I made various unmanly noises at the pain and fell forward, into the sand. The crowd began to chant his name. Commodus. They’d always been a fickle lot.

“You’re going to destroy them,” I spat into the sand. “Just like you destroyed everything Christ could have given humanity.” He may have been the emperor, but he was still the same Judas underneath.

“They have tried to create a golden age,” he said, “but they cannot help their nature. They dress in the robes and fineries of upright citizens, but they are still beasts ready to turn upon each other.” He slammed his knee into my back and held me down against the earth. “Listen to them shriek at each other. They
want
the chaos of the arena. Did you hear them cheer when I came down here amid the blood and beasts? This is where they want to be. It is their nature.” He ground me deeper into the sand. “This empire will burn like all the others. I may be the flame, but they are the kindling.”

“You’re mad,” I gasped.

“Civilization is madness,” Judas said. “A delusion that you all share thinking it will hold off the night. I remind humanity of what you are. Monkeys killing each other in the dirt.
I’m
what you should be praying to because I’m the natural order.”

“That’s what this is all about?” I said. “You’re feeling left out because people have moved on to other gods?”

He put the blade of his sword against my throat. “You’d best pray to one of those other gods now,” he said. “For I won’t save you.”

“Answer me one thing before I die,” I said, gasping for my last breaths of air.

“Perhaps, if the question is interesting enough,” he said, pausing.

“Who am I?” I asked.

Judas chuckled. “You? You’re just another dead monkey,” he said. And he drew the blade across my throat and held my face into the sand until the blood drained out of me.

I died with the roar of the crowd in my ears.

And I awoke to the sound of my own screaming, alone under the earth.

I thrashed wildly, reaching out for Judas in the darkness, trying to find a weapon, trying to crawl away, all at once. But I was held by the grave. Dirt flowed into my mouth, choking off my screams, and I clawed my way blindly out, until I burst forth into the light.

I pulled myself halfway from the grave and spat the dirt out of my mouth before I threw up on the ground. I took deep, heaving breaths. More sobs than breaths, really. I looked around, expecting to find myself in Hades. Instead, I found myself in a shallow grave beside an olive orchard. A crow laughed at me from a tree, and I heard a donkey bray somewhere in the distance. Not exactly what I’d expected of the afterlife.

And that’s when I realized I couldn’t die. Not for good, anyway. Judas may have killed and buried me again, but my body wouldn’t let me stay dead. My body’s supernatural healing powers extended all the way to resurrection.

Since then I’ve learned the length of time I’m dead depends on how much grace I’ve got in my system. Sometimes it takes hours, sometimes years. But so far I’ve always come back to life, whether or not I’ve wanted to.

I brushed the earth from me and screamed some more. At what had happened to me. At what I had become. Then I threw a clod of dirt at the crow to shut it up and walked away from the grave to figure out where I was.

I was a day’s walk from Rome, but it seemed an entire age had passed by the time I returned to the city. I walked through the gates in search of Commodus or whoever Judas was now, but he was gone, and the city was torn apart. Armed militias clashed with each other, while soldiers got drunk in the public squares. Men and women fucked in the alleys. Villas burned here and there. And everywhere was graffiti announcing the death of the emperor. Some said he’d been killed by a slave he’d taken to his bed, while more creative pieces described in pictures how a group of his animal lovers had torn him apart and consumed him. The official notices posted in the squares said he’d been strangled in his bath by his wrestling partner, Narcissus. I didn’t know which of the stories were true.

Nobody recognized me. Nobody seemed to be in charge. I knew Judas had created this chaos somehow. The empire was falling into ruin, and nothing could save it now. And I also knew Judas wasn’t really dead, not any more than I was.

He was gone, but I understood now how to find him.

I left Rome and went out into the world, just another forgotten dead man. I went in search of more war and chaos, in search of Judas.

I went in search of myself.

And now here I was, centuries later, sitting on a dusty windowsill in a museum, with a few more memories and experiences but still no real idea of where I’d come from or even how I’d come to be. Or, more importantly, why I’d wound up in the body of Christ. It was the sort of thing that could get you down if you let it.

The window beside me turned dark and cool and a woman announced over the PA the museum was closing. I waited until the sounds of people in the hall faded away before I opened my eyes and looked around. It was just Victory and me.

Victory isn’t her real name, of course. And she isn’t just a statue. She’s a gorgon who was turned to stone through some misfortune she won’t discuss. All she’s ever told me is it wasn’t a mirror. Apparently that whole business about reflected gazes was a myth. You just can’t trust the people who make up the myths. Who knows—maybe her condition was caused by the gorgon equivalent of osteoporosis. At any rate, you’d be surprised how many statues and gargoyles are more than just statues and gargoyles.

I watched her and waited for the security guard to make his pass through the area. He patted her on the ass when he did so, and I had to smile and shake my head. If he only knew.

When the guard was gone, I hopped off the window ledge and went over to Victory. I summoned a bit of grace and blew it into the space where her head should have been. A face formed there, flickering, insubstantial, like a ghost. It writhed in and out of existence, so I could only catch glimpses of it. High cheekbones. Eyes and lips like a snake’s. Which matched the writhing hair you’d expect of a gorgon. I could have used extra grace to make her more substantial, but I’d learned over the years to conserve it. Angels were in short supply these days, and you never knew when you’d stumble across one again.

I didn’t bother averting my eyes. Victory’s gaze had never done me any harm, other than to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. Besides, she’d told me once the gorgons all had different powers and hers wasn’t her gaze. Of course, she wouldn’t reveal to me what it was. Women and their secrets.

“Hydra,” she greeted me. That was her pet name for me, because she found my inability to die amusing. “It has been a long time,” she said. I swear she looked like she stretched a little.

“It hasn’t been that long,” I said. It had only been a couple of decades since I’d gone to her for help with the Perseus affair. Perseus. Now there was a monster.

“Every second of time feels like an eternity to us,” she said.

Victory always used the plural when talking about herself and the other gorgons. She said they lived in each other. Like the Holy Trinity, she’d explained to me once, but I told her I didn’t know what that meant.

“Have you come to give us life and limb again at long last?” she asked me.

“I’m afraid not,” I told her. “I don’t think the world is ready for that.”

“It has never been ready,” she sighed, and I somehow felt her breath on my skin. The hair on my arms and neck stood up, and I had to restrain myself from stepping back. “But we are ready for it,” she went on, her voice rising. “The things we have dreamed of doing all these centuries—”

I motioned for her to keep it down and she frowned at me.

“When we were free of these earthly chains, we sang until the very sky was rent open,” she muttered, “and no one dared to silence us then.”

“Now they’d just put you in a crate with soundproof walls,” I told her. “Look, this isn’t a social call. I need your help.”

“Ah,” she said, and the snakes on her head hissed at me. “Men and their never-ending quests. Why is it that you all come to us with swords in your hands instead of flowers?”

“Rumour is you ate the one man who actually wanted to be your suitor,” I said.

“We were young and impetuous then,” she said. “And he was so very meaty. We are far more reserved these days, as befitting our ladylike status.”

“Give me what I need and I’ll bring you a cup of tea next time,” I said.

“Replace cup with flagon and tea with blood and we may be able to work something out,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not but what the hell. That’s why we have the Red Cross, right?

“Tell me what you know about the Mona Lisa,” I said.

“Go down the hall until you hit the washrooms,” she said. “Turn left and then—”

“Not that one,” I said. “The real Mona Lisa.”

She fell silent then as she considered me, which was a first. She’s usually a very talkative gorgon. I suppose being locked in stone for most of your existence makes you chatty in your few moments of reprieve. Even her snakes were quiet as they all watched me. I tried not to look at them and cast about the hall instead, checking for other security guards on their rounds. It would be only a matter of time.

“What is the nature of your quest?” Victory finally asked.

“A certain angel has taken an interest in the Mona Lisa,” I said. “If I can deliver it, he will give me something I really want.”

“The name of this angel,” she said.

“Cassiel,” I told her. “The watcher.”

Now she was silent for even longer, and her snakes coiled around each other.

“You know him,” I said. It was an observation, not a question.

“We know him,” Victory said.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet I was.

“We will help you,” Victory said before I could recover enough to ask the obvious follow-up question.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “
How
do you know Cassiel?” I wasn’t going to leave that one alone.

“You must earn your answers in the time-honoured manner,” she said. “With a quest.”

I sighed. There’s always a catch.

“Can I do the questing part later?” I asked. “After you give me the information and I get this other quest out of the way? I mean, it’s not like you’re going anywhere.”

“Find our head,” she said.

I paused. I wasn’t expecting that.

“You mean your missing head?” I asked. “The one all the archaeologists and scholars haven’t been able to find?”

“Find our head and we will reward you with the information you so desire,” she said.

“I can’t say I have any idea where to look for your head,” I said.

“This is why it is a quest and not a mere errand,” she said.

“What do you even want with it?” I asked.

Her hair hissed at me again. “We don’t ask you why you’re so attached to your head,” she said.

“What I mean is it won’t do you any good,” I said. “You’ll still be stone.” I paused again. “Won’t you?”

“We miss it,” she said simply, and I couldn’t take issue with that.

I thought things over, but I didn’t see as I had much of a choice.

“All right,” I said. “But you can’t keep it here. I don’t want the curators finding it and putting this place under constant surveillance.”

“Oh, you don’t need to bring it back to us,” she said. “Just destroy it once you’ve found it.”

“You want me to find your head and then destroy it?” I asked. “I’m having trouble following your logic.”

“We are trapped in separate pieces,” she said. “Our spirit torn asunder with our body. Perhaps if you destroy our head, you will free us and we can be one again.”

She didn’t need to say anything about her missing arms for me to imagine what might happen if I actually did manage to find her head. Every good quest comes in trilogy form, after all.

“And if it doesn’t free your spirit?” I ask. “What if destroying your head destroys what’s left of you?” I wasn’t just talking out loud here—I would actually miss Victory if she were gone. We had our differences, her being a gorgon and me being, well, whatever I was, but we went back a long way. There were a lot of memories.

“Then we will live on in our sisters,” she said. “Like Medusa.”

I took a step back involuntarily. “Medusa’s in there with you?” I asked.

“She is one of us,” Victory said. “She is all of us.”

“I wouldn’t want to be around when you all fight over the bathroom,” I said.

“My time here is fading,” she said. “Free us, hydra. Free us and you will be rewarded.”

And then she was gone and it was just me and the stone statue again. The sounds of someone whistling down the hall meant it was time to be going anyway. I patted Victory on the ass and got the hell out of there.

I left via an emergency exit that set alarms ringing—nothing wrong with giving the guards a little excitement to distract them from their cameras—and lost myself in the Tuileries gardens and the light rain outside. I ignored a handful of young men smoking a joint underneath some trees who mistook me for a lost tourist and yelled insults at me about—well, my contemporary French was a little shaky. I think they commented on the cut of my pants, but I wasn’t really certain. I’d long since given up getting in fights over such things. There were always young men ready with a quick insult somewhere. They were legion. And I’d learned very early in my life that it was best not to attract too much attention to myself by doing things like getting in brawls with strangers on city streets. Sometimes it attracted the attention of the authorities. And sometimes it attracted the attention of things far more dangerous.