The Seventh Sacrament by David Hewson Read Free Book Online

with the Praetorian Guard for the battle of the Milvian Bridge. The Praetorian backed Maxentius. The one who lost. Remember?”
    “I don’t waste time on old names,” Torchia murmured. He didn’t like being treated like a moron. “So you think he was here?”
    Abati shot a glance towards the anteroom, where the dead were.
    “Perhaps he still is,” he suggested. “Constantine wiped out the Praetorian Guard completely after he entered Rome. They’d backed the wrong side. He felt he couldn’t trust them. So he razed that headquarters of theirs…what was it?”
    “The Castra Praetoria,” Vignola answered.
    “Wiped it out completely. And here, too, I guess,” Abati added. “It’s creepy, really. Did anyone know about this place until Giorgio came along?”
    “Of course not!” Vignola squealed. “Don’t you think it would be in the books? This is the best mithraeum in Rome. Perhaps the best in the world.”
    Abati thought about this.
    “And Giorgio’s not sure whether he dare tell people? That’s nuts. He can’t keep it hidden forever.”
    Vignola shook his head, dragged himself off the floor, and rubbed the grime off his hands.
    “He can keep it hidden for as long as he likes. The department has charge of this entire excavation. Bramante can just carry on as he is now, working quietly with Judith Turnhouse and whoever else is in on the secret. Then someday, when the time’s right, he calls up the right people and says, ‘Look what we found.’ Behold, Giorgio the hero. The discoverer of unknown wonders. Schliemann, Howard Carter, all rolled into one. Wouldn’t he just love that?”
    “This is holy ground,” Torchia said abruptly, without thinking.
    “So what are we supposed to do, Ludo?” Abati demanded in that infuriating slow drawl of his. “Sing a few songs? Kill the rooster? Bow before the god, then go home and complete our assignments? You shouldn’t take this Mithras thing too seriously. It was all just a bunch of us messing round. Hey! Hey!”
    He was shouting now, suddenly animated and angry. He flew across the dimly lit room and seized Toni LaMarca, who was about to stumble down a small rectangular exit on the far side, behind the altar and its figures.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Abati yelled.
    “Looking…” LaMarca replied, his voice thick with dope.
    “Don’t…”
    “But…”
    Something in Abati’s face silenced him. Then the figure in the red caving suit, who looked so much at home here, picked up a rock from the ground and threw it into the black hole ahead of them, where LaMarca had been about to enter. There was no sound. Nothing at all. Until, eventually, a distant echo of a hard, lost object falling into water.
    Dino Abati gave each of them a filthy look in turn.
    “This is not a playground, children,” he said with venom. “There’s a reason you should be afraid of the dark.”
             

    T HE LIGHT WAS SO BRIGHT IT HURT. ALESSIO BRAMANTE looked at the switches on the wall and knew he’d have to do something about them, that he couldn’t sit on his own under this incandescent yellow sea much longer. It was like being beneath the eyes of some harsh, electric dragon. He was happy in the dark. Not the total darkness his father entered when he was working. Just the quiet, half light of dusk or early morning, an hour when there was room in the world for imagination. A time when Alessio could think about the day ahead, and that walk down to Piranesi’s piazza, the moment when he would peer through the keyhole, locate the distant shining dome, and say to his father, for both of them, “I see it. The world is still with us. Life can go on.”
    He couldn’t think straight now, not with the constant flood of illumination pouring down on him from the lines of bulbs above his head. And how long was he supposed to wait? He didn’t have a watch. His grandmother had given him one for the previous Christmas. It had a picture of Santa Claus on