Apostolic Journey

[Patricus I]

Moscow was upside down. The Kremlin hung above him like a ceiling, its towers descending from a black sky while beneath his feet stretched another landscape entirely. It was older than the one buried beneath the snow, older perhaps than Moscow itself, a succession of corridors and chambers falling away into darkness. Some were brick, some stone, some nothing more than raw cuts through earth. Doors lined the passages in numbers that made no architectural sense.

Snow covered everything above. Below, the earth was warm under foot. Philip walked a steady pace. He wore his white tracksuit. It stood out against the shadowy ground almost as if the snowy globe overhead had fallen in soft petals into the very fabric of his clothes as some sort of beacon.

Someone was calling for help behind one of the doors. He opened it.

A woman stood on the other side with blood beneath her fingernails, weeping as though she had been knocking for days. Philip reached for her, but before he could touch her another voice called from farther down the corridor. Then another. The doors were everywhere.

Some concealed frightened people. Some opened onto empty rooms. Behind one he found rows of candles burning before an altar whose saints had no faces. Behind another lay a chamber filled with water so black that the surface reflected nothing at all. He shivered wondering what was waiting in its depths, and hurried on.

Philip kept opening them because people were calling. Every time he did, another door somewhere deeper underground opened by itself. He noticed eventually. One latch lifted in the darkness below. Then another and another.

Philip stopped, frozen by the endless doors and the voices within them that continued pleading. That was when he heard a different type of voice. Its cadence was softer, its tone high. A child. His heart lurched and he brought himself to open one last door.

Somewhere far beneath him, he heard something inhale. The sound traveled upward through the buried city. It wasn’t the growl of an animal, nor even the intake of a human gasping for air. It was like a breath was drawn into lungs that suddenly opened after an eternity collapsed shut.

A chill ran down his spine, but Philip turned toward the darkness anyway. In There was something standing very far below him. He could not see its face nor could he tell if it even had one.  Between them stretched hundreds of doors, and one by one their locks began turning. Then a line of brilliant white burst through the earth above.

Snow erupted like an upside down volcano. A tunnel bored downward from buried Moscow and struck the uppermost passage of the city beneath it. The instant the two touched, every door below Philip opened at once.

He woke with his hand clenched around his pectoral cross. Sweat grazed his entire body wet that the chill seeped into his bones.  For several seconds he did not move.

The room he rested in was dark except for the weak light leaking beneath the door. His heart beat hard enough to irritate him, which Philip considered an unreasonable response from an organ that had contributed nothing useful to the experience.

He stared at the ceiling. Twenty meters of impossible snow had buried Moscow for days and God had apparently seen no reason to mention it beforehand. Someone proposed opening a door underground, however, and suddenly Heaven became conversational.

“Wonderful,” Philip muttered. He sat up, shaking off the last dredges of the dream.

Sleep had been an inconsistent visitor since the summit. The Kremlin had become less a palace than an organism swollen beyond capacity, full of government ministers, security personnel, displaced families, emergency workers, clerics, foreign staff, and people who had once occupied offices sufficiently important that they were astonished to discover catastrophe did not recognize rank. Buried in the mess of it all was the Pope and his gentlemen, but Philip had found uses for himself.

He had celebrated Mass twice, once with proper vestments and once without because everything required to make the occasion suitably beautiful had been somewhere inaccessible beneath several buildings and a ridiculous quantity of snow. He had prayed with Catholics who had lost homes, sat beside people waiting for confirmation that relatives were alive, and given absolution to a man who had asked for it before going back into the tunnels.

He had blessed the dead as well, a necessary evil. More of them on the second day. Philip had maintained intermittent contact with Rome, listened to reports from the Secretariat, dictated statements he later rewrote because everyone else seemed determined to make him sound either terrified or inspirational, neither of which he found acceptable, and spent an unexpectedly interesting period of time in conversation with a gentleman named Lucien, the Brotherhood's librarian and archivist.

Philip had told no one what they discussed. He intended to keep it that way.

His enforced residency within the Kremlin had also provided far too much opportunity to observe Nikolai Brandon up close. That had not improved Philip's disposition in the least.

Brandon was everything Philip distrusted concentrated into one inconveniently competent man: political authority on a scale no mortal ought to possess, supernatural power beyond anything governments had previously been forced to contemplate, and now the rapidly accumulating devotion of people who had begun speaking of him with the language men historically reserved for saints, kings and gods. Worse, Brandon insisted on behaving semi-admirably. It would have been much easier if the man were merely vain. Oh he was vain enough to rival Philip himself, but paired with competence and demonstrations of selflessness made him wholly virtuous to the masses.

He went into the storm himself. He slept on floors. He prioritized civilians over government buildings. He worked beside rescue crews until exhaustion finally accomplished what persuasion apparently could not. The Brotherhood hardly needed to manufacture miracles. Moscow was doing it for them.

Philip had watched the stories spread with depressing speed. A woman who forced Ascendancy to drink tea. A child sleeping beneath one of the lights he had made. Rescue workers describing impossible tunnels bored beneath the snow. Each account was perfectly ordinary when taken alone. Together they were becoming scripture. Those stories frightened Philip more than Theron Finnegan's ridiculous Codex ever could.

As he pushed himself up the dream returned to him with the clarity of a blade. Doors opening. The snow tunnel touching the buried city. Something breathing below. Philip hurriedly swung his feet to the floor.

He did not waste time wondering whether the dream meant anything. Experience had cured him of that particular arrogance. He had once dreamed of a flood before a tsunami. Other visions had led him through symbols he understood only afterward. Dreams did not arrive because Philip invited them, nor did they concern themselves with providing useful explanations.

He dressed quickly and left the room. The corridors were busier than the hour deserved. Kremlin staff had stopped observing anything resembling a normal schedule two days ago. Philip's own people had adapted less gracefully. Two of the Gentlemen of His Holiness were already nearby, one rising from a chair when Philip appeared and the other exchanging quiet words with a member of the Kremlin staff assigned to the papal delegation. A priest from his household stood farther down the corridor with a cup of coffee gone cold in his hand. None of them seemed surprised to see the Pope awake at an unreasonable hour anymore.

One of the Gentlemen stepped forward automatically. Philip waved him off without slowing. Annoyingly, he still did not see his cherry Coke Zero he required yesterday.

Whatever expression the man made behind him, Philip did not turn around to see it. His entourage followed at a discreet distance anyway, practiced enough to understand that dismissal did not necessarily mean abandonment. Their presence trailed him through the Kremlin as reliably as the white cassock itself, familiar figures amid the constantly changing collection of people filling the complex.

Philip found an aide near the staging room and began asking questions.

“What has changed underground?”

The aide blinked. “Your Holiness?”

“Today. Since yesterday. Tunnels, excavations, anything beneath Moscow that someone has recently decided to disturb.”

The man's expression changed slightly. Philip’s frown deepened..

He learned the essential facts within minutes. Someone had proposed linking the newly excavated snow tunnels with portions of Moscow's existing Undercity. Emergency command had identified a known entrance that might provide a faster route toward a hospital requiring fuel.

“You have to stop them.”

The aide hesitated. “Your Holiness, the operation is already underway.”

“I understood the tense of the sentence. Stop it.”

Calls were made. Philip waited with rapidly diminishing patience. The answer returned exactly as he expected and still managed to infuriate him.

Those ridiculous channeler children were already en route to the entrance. Emergency command would relay Philip's concern but would not countermand an operational decision on the Pope's authority.

Philip stared at the aide.

“How comforting that catastrophe remains so respectful of jurisdiction.”

The aide scoffed, clearly too dull to sense the insult.

He asked for Ascendancy. The aide's hesitation returned.

“His Excellency is asleep.”

Philip closed his eyes. His excellency now? Of course he was.

He knew the man probably needed the sleep. Everyone in the Kremlin knew it by now. The man had driven himself so far into exhaustion that even Philip, who possessed little inclination toward sympathy where Ascendancy was concerned, had been relieved when someone finally removed him from circulation. Driving a power hungry tyrant to sleep-deprived madness was not a good idea.

“How long until he’s awake?”

“A few hours.”

Not soon enough. Philip looked toward the corridor that led deeper into the secure section of the Kremlin.

He saw the doors from his dream again. All of them opening.

“Where is he?” The aide's face suggested that answering might constitute something approximating getting fired over at best and treason at worst. Philip smiled pleasantly. The man answered.

The first Barrier Praetor intercepted him before he reached the door.

“Your Holiness.”

Philip continued walking. The man tensed and moved into his path.

“Sir, you must understand that Ascendancy is not to be disturbed.”

“Yes, several people have told me that. The Kremlin’s internal memo consistency is admirable.”

Philip stepped to the side to go around.

The Barrier matched him. In true secret service fashion, another agent suddenly appeared next to the first.

Philip stopped, folded his hands against the cassock, patiently posed.

He looked from one man to the other, then toward the staff and emergency personnel occupying the corridor farther back. Several were openly watching the confrontation.

“You may physically prevent me from passing if you wish.” Philip’s voice was terse but steady. “I recommend deciding how much you would enjoy explaining why Ascendancy's security tackled the Pope during a humanitarian disaster.”

He stepped forward. The first Barrier put out an arm but stopped short of actually touching him. Philip passed beneath it. Both agents immediately moved with him, one ahead and the other close enough that Philip could practically feel disapproval radiating from the man's suit.

The room was dim and warmer than the corridor. Brandon lay beneath the blankets in a black long-sleeved shirt, stripped of jacket, shoes, insignia and everything else that usually made him look like a state unto himself. One sleeve had been pushed above the elbow for an IV. The line ran from a hanging bag to Brandon's arm, though whether the infusion remained active Philip neither knew nor cared.

He was asleep deeply enough that three armed men and one increasingly furious pontiff entering the room did not immediately wake him. For one strange moment Philip simply looked at him.

Without the tailored suits, cameras, titles and relentless movement, Brandon appeared almost offensively human.

Philip found that irritating too.

“Ascendancy.” He spoke clearly, but nothing.

One Barrier shifted, but Philip raised his voice.

“Ascendancy.”

Brandon moved. Philip gave up on courtesy.

“Wake up.” He woke hard. His eyes opened with none of the gradual confusion Philip expected from someone dragged out of profound exhaustion. One second he was asleep; the next he was staring directly at Philip while his security detail redistributed itself around the bed. The anger arrived shortly afterward. His gaze moved first to the Barrier Praetor who to his credit was not white as a sheet, but definitely appeared afraid.

Philip almost admired the efficiency of the accusation.

“Why am I awake?”

One of the agents answered carefully. “His Holiness insisted.”

“Insistence is charitable.”

Ascendancy looked at him. Philip had been glared at by presidents, monarchs, cardinals and one exceptionally angry patriarch in Constantinople. Brandon was better at it. It was almost admirable.

“This had better be important.”

“Your people are opening passages into the city beneath Moscow.  They are attempting to link your rescue tunnels to the Undercity to reach a hospital. You must stop them.”

Ascendancy pushed himself higher against the pillows, the irritation on his face giving way to concentration. “Why?”

Philip opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Fuck.

The part he had avoided thinking about while bullying his way through security.

Why?

Because Philip Patrick Sullivan sometimes dreamed about things that had not happened yet.

Because symbolic nightmares occasionally crawled out of his sleeping mind and became reality, and he had spent years recording them privately because there were some forms of power even the Pope did not advertise. Especially this one.

The Church could survive a pope who claimed divine authority.The Church had survived mystics before. What Philip had no intention of creating was a mystic on the Throne of Peter whom half the world would immediately begin mistaking for an oracle. Never mind the bureaucratic nightmare that such a revelation might unleash in the Vatican.

And Brandon was the last man Philip wanted possessing that information. Philip imagined the information filed somewhere beneath the Kremlin. Patricus I, predictive dreaming.  The thought made his stomach turn.

“Why!” Ascendancy demanded, his voice gravely with exhaustion.

Philip looked at the Barrier Praetor.

“Leave us.” Nobody moved.

Philip's eyes returned to Brandon. “If you want the answer, I will give it to you alone.”

One of the Barrier agents immediately shook his head. “Your Excellency I highly advise against—”

Brandon raised a single finger to silence them. The room fell quiet as he studied Philip for several seconds. Philip had the unpleasant sensation of standing at the edge of something and being given one final opportunity not to jump.

He should have taken it. Instead, some pressure he could neither identify nor resist seemed to draw the decision out of him. Not coercion. Nothing so obvious. Merely the overwhelming conviction that this particular truth, concealed from everyone else in his life, had somehow arrived at the exact moment when keeping it secret would be worse than surrendering it.
He loathed this feeling.

“Outside.”

The Barrier Praetor did not like it, but they obeyed anyway.  One agent checked the room before leaving. Another gave Philip a look that promised immediate consequences if the Holy Father attempted regicide. Then the door closed, leaving them just beyond it.

Philip and Ascendancy were alone. Philip did not know how to begin. For once in his life, words seemed inadequate.

“I have dreams.” Ascendancy's expression did not change.

“For fuck’s sake. They’re not ordinary dreams.” Still nothing. “Do try to look appropriately astonished.” This was humiliating enough as it was.

A faint narrowing of Brandon's eyes was the only concession. Philip exhaled through his nose. Philip went on. “I see things before they happen sometimes.” Brandon shifted, pushed the blankets aside, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat there for a moment with one hand braced against the mattress, as if testing whether his body intended to cooperate. Dark drawstring trousers replaced the tailored clothes Philip was accustomed to seeing him in, and for a moment the effect was disconcertingly humanizing.

“You see the future?”

“No. I see nonsense that occasionally has the discourtesy to become the future afterward.”

Philip continued before courage could reconsider. He shared some small-scale examples. Not every dream. Certainly not Nimeda. Not the Pillar. Not the things Philip still could not interpret himself. He gave Brandon only enough to establish that this was not intuition masquerading as mysticism.

Then he described Moscow, and how he saw the city inverted. The doors and the people trapped behind them. How every act of rescue caused something below to open.

“When the tunnel touched the Undercity, every door below me opened.” Brandon's face had changed. It wasn’t relief, but he had that unmistakable focus of pure attention. It made Philip ponder why he was so accepting of the situation.

“What was behind the doors?”

“I don't know.”

“People?”

“Some were people, but something else too.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t see it. I could not see its face, if it had one. But the dream was not ambiguous about the sequence. Your people reached the Undercity, the doors opened, and something that had been shut away wakes. I heard it breathe. Not like an animal. Like something taking its first breath after a very long confinement. If your people make that connection, I believe they will release it. Stop them before they do.”

Philip became acutely aware of how absurd this entire situation was. “I am telling you that I have had dreams before events that later happened. Sometimes I know exactly what it means and sometimes I don’t. Tonight I dreamed specifically of opening the city beneath Moscow, and I woke to discover your people are doing precisely that.”
Brandon looked toward the door. There was calculation on his face. “I know exactly what this means. You have to stop them.”

“There are twelve million people buried under this storm.”

Philip's temper flashed. “And apparently something else that Heaven considers more noteworthy.”

He wanted to shake the man.  “I did not dream about the snow at all!” Where the fuck was that cherry Coke Zero? “Do you understand what I am telling you? Moscow disappears beneath enough snow to bury buildings and I get nothing. No warning. No image. Not so much as a cryptic puddle.” He pointed toward the floor between them, toward all the unseen levels beneath the Kremlin. “But this? This I dream about.”

Brandon said nothing. He sat on the edge of the bed with his forearms resting loosely against his thighs, listening with an attentiveness Philip found difficult to interpret. The anger from being awakened had receded. In its place was something quieter. Calculation, perhaps.

“I don't know whether there is a creature down there,” he said. “I don't know whether there is anything down there in the way either of us would define a thing. It could be a collapse. A fire. A chain reaction. Some damned human being with access to something he should never have found.”

He heard himself becoming more agitated and resented Brandon for making restraint feel childish. “What I know is that the dream had an order to it. Your tunnel connected to the city below. The doors opened. Then something changed.”

Brandon's eyes narrowed slightly. “Changed how?”

Philip hesitated because the problem was that dreams didn’t arrive with instructions. He had to spell it out. “As though something that had been contained was no longer contained.”

Brandon pushed himself to his feet. The movement was controlled until it wasn't. For half a second his balance shifted and one hand found the mattress behind him. He waited there, still, until whatever unsteady moment had caught him passed.

He didn’t comment on it. Instead, Brandon reached for the shirt folded over the nearby chair and pulled it on. “Which part of the city are they heading toward?” Philip told him only as much as he knew.

Brandon crossed to the small table where his communication device had been left charging. He picked it up, but rather than calling anyone immediately, he stared at the dark screen.

“How far along are they?”

“Far enough that I woke you.”

He powered up the device and within a few commands, a whole map system was illuminated. Philip felt tension ease from his shoulders.

The request went through to someone outside the room. Brandon listened to the response, asked two short questions Philip could not quite hear, then ended the connection. He inquired about the location of his channeler team and their leader. Karim, Philip thought he heard him say. Just before ending the call, he nodded to whatever the voice on the other side said, and Brandon answered with:  “I'll deal with Karim.”

Philip studied him. Brandon had gotten out of bed. He was pulling up maps.  He was asking where the team was. All reasonable signs that a man intended to stop something. Philip chose to accept them as such. Perhaps faith was merely exhaustion with better tailoring. A few more commands punched into the device brought up the room’s lights to full illumination.

Dismissed then. Philip rolled his eyes.

The Barrier Praetor were waiting immediately outside. One looked past him toward Ascendancy before apparently deciding the world had not ended during the five minutes they had been excluded.

Philip ignored them. He had done what he came to do. At considerable personal cost, if anyone bothered asking. He had told Nikolai Brandon something Philip had spent a lifetime ensuring no one knew. He had handed a man with armies, intelligence services and an unhealthy amount of personal power the knowledge that the Pope occasionally dreamed about events before they happened.

Philip walked back toward the staging area with two of the Gentlemen of His Holiness falling naturally into place behind him. The adrenaline was wearing off now, leaving irritation in its wake. He wanted sugar. Caffeine. Something cold enough to hurt his teeth. And a damned cigarette to go with it.

One of the Gentlemen approached from the opposite direction carrying a bottle. Philip's eyes fixed on it. Hallelujah. It was a cherry coke zero. He stopped walking. The Gentleman held it out without comment.
Philip accepted it with both hands. It wasn’t a can, but better than nothing.

“You may have just justified the entire institution.”

The Gentleman smiled faintly. “The papacy?”
Philip twisted the cap.

“Don't be absurd. The household.”

The first swallow was aggressively cold and tasted entirely artificial. It was the glorious nectar of mankind.