Chapter XXXV: The House of the Rose
October 15, 1582
The sign of the Rose was etched with such prevalence into the parchment and onto the wooden furniture around the room that it became a motif as disturbing as if Antonio had a thousand eyes peering at him through the circles of that symbol. To add to the eeriness, the room itself presented something of an unremarkable fixture of Chinese possessions slowly growing in age and dust. There were also artifacts of Portuguese origin strewn here and there: western tables, western swords, etc. It was in these Spartan surroundings that the lady tightly held by ebony straps of leather fawned over her new prisoner.
He was certainly a handsome little specimen, Nia thought to herself. Allowing her eyes to follow the stately curves of Antonio’s jawline, she bent a grin on her face before standing up straight to examine her bound prisoner on the bed from a God’s eye view.
“I hope you make yourself comfortable,” she teased the man. Her eyes wandered a little towards the more uncovered portions of Antonio’s body. This nakedness was necessary, she thought to herself, to keep him cleaned.
As for Antonio himself, the presence of the lidless gaze of the room only added to the nausea and vertigo which he now experienced. It must still be the lingering effects of the various poisons, he thought to himself as he attempted to close his eyes to steady his head. In a temporary form of paralysis, he was only able to breathe heavily as the collective dizziness of the entire room seemed to mount onto his brain like a rush of blood.
Before he could ask any more of his warden, she already slipped past the ornate entrance way. When Antonio attempted to open his eyes again, the apparition of the beautiful lady was gone. Forcing himself to breathe through his teeth, he kept his consciousness about as best he could in order to study his surroundings. Although he had the utmost faith in the rescue from his friends, he was not about to let himself be idle. As if to counter his determination, his fractured arm communicated a sting of pain as he attempted to test his restraints.
“Don’t do that!” someone suddenly called from the doorway in a heavily accented Spanish, “or the bone won’t set properly!”
Antonio’s dizzied expression met a simple young woman holding a jug in her one hand and a bowl in another. Although she wore a tight black cloth binding—not dissimilar to what Sweet wore when Antonio first met him—her face and hair expressed no strangeness or aloof eccentricity usually associated with these members of the House of the Rose.
Oh yes, Antonio’s thoughts simultaneously reminded him, the House of the Rose which was better known in its westernized pragmatic name of the Beijing Espionage Team was a directory arm of those shadows who possess the Imperial Palace with their minds of intrigue and war. Acknowledging the importance of information with a far greater alacrity than their western counterparts, this particular group was well known throughout Asia. Not just mere spies or assassins these highly educated and deadly foes were a combination of western forked tongued diplomats and the ruthless and stealthy Hashshashins of the Muslim world. Even the Shinobi of Japan understood the excellent scholarship and discipline of these mainland warrior-shadows.
But that doorway exacted a different image. Perhaps she was just a stable girl or servant, but she still bore the distinctive privilege to tend to prisoners—which the House, as Antonio was told, holds to high regard. It was not merely that to be trusted with a prisoner means that one does not betray any information, but that through simple deception more can be gained from the enemy than the enemy from them.
“I’ve come to bring you some water,” the girl at the doorway announced as she rushed with small steps to the side table. Antonio nonetheless tested his straps despite the warning and moaned softly in between the lightness of his head and the pain from his arm.
With no luck, Antonio settled against the rather comfortable cushions provided for him and trained his blurring eyes towards the young lady now to his left. Through his strained vision he could barely see her features but nonetheless could see an object being brought towards his face. His instincts depressed his head further into the pillow to avoid the coming hand but as the girl insisted on pressing the object against his bottom lip, the cool softening touch of water entering his mouth forced him to nearly swallow the vessel it was brought in whole.
Barely remembering to breathe as he gulped down bowlful after bowlful, Antonio’s parched eagerness elicited a faint chuckle from his caretaker. When the ferry of water to his lips ceased, he let out a heaving pant before settling back into the cushion. With his head better off from the introduction of the liquid, his vision similarly attained some clarity. Looking upon the girl, she seemed just as ordinary as he had associated with her clothes and she might have been five or six years younger than he. Muttering a “thank you” softly, Antonio kept his eyes on the girl as she cleaned put the bowl and jug to the side of the room.
“You can thank me by not moving that arm,” the girl responded with a grunt as she heaved the heavy water container to its proper place. “Otherwise, Lady Nia would kill me for having you be irreparably harmed.”
Antonio narrowed his eyes inquisitively at those words.
“Lady Nia?” he asked, “is she your master?”
As the young lady finally placed the object, she turned to face the prisoner and dusted herself off comfortably. “Of course,” she replied with a grin that almost ridiculed the question, “she is the Head of our House and thus the head of all the Jinyi Wei”
“But I had spoken with the leader of the Jinyi Wei before… he was no wom—”
“Oh that was our previous leader,” the girl pre-empted Antonio with a motion of the hand that waved the statement away. She found her way back to the side table and impishly leaned over to hover her perpetually smiling head above Antonio’s. “In fact,” she added in a hushed voice, “It was your little invasion that got his head chopped off.”
Antonio took a moment to direct his eyes straightly towards the girl’s. “And Nia took command?” he asked as his dark hues watched the movement of her features carefully hoping they would betray some information.
“Yep, she was our training instructor so it was only natural that she took over,” the girl replied straightening herself up again.
Pondering the words in his head, Antonio stretched parts of his lethargic body careful to avoid moving his left arm. Closing his eyes and letting out a soft moan he could feel the silk sheets atop his body caressing his naked frame in mock decadence. When he opened his eyes from the exercise, he found the girl again but she had a strange blush dominating her pale cheeks. Antonio was caught off guard by it and merely blinked at her.
“I… I will be back later with some food,” the girl stammered before quickly turning and shuffling out of the room. Antonio could barely take in a breath before she was gone only forcing him to slink back into his cushions with a sigh. The headache began to overtake him again.
As the young girl slipped past the portal and into the hall, her arm was suddenly accosted by slender fingers. She let out a small gasp before following the forceful grip into the shadow of the corridor’s bend.
“Does he have it?” was the curious voice from the dark.
“I… I’m afraid I didn’t get a good look, Lady Nia…” the young girl replied with obvious anxiety.
“Try again when you bring his food,” was the calculated order before the grip on her arm was released.
Slightly shaken, the young woman hugged herself against the wall of that shaded hall as her mistress stepped away. She could not tell her lady, she thought to herself. For the House to survive, their leader must not have any distractions. She must never know who it is she will eventually have to part with forever.
---
The pressure around Cardinal DeWitt’s neck permitted no air to pass except the faintest of gasps. Grappling feverishly with his hands clawing his neck, he tore some of his skin as he attempted to find whatever object it was that held him in place suspended a foot off the ground. But it was in this oxygen deprived manner that the familiarity of the pain sparked in his mind. He had felt this before.
In his memory, it seemed only yesterday when he had a noose tied around his neck. One could barely believe it was nearly a quarter of a century since that time. Dragged downward step by step in front of his parish church, the Cardinal had been garroted by a common rope and forced to bang his chest and knees against the stone entranceway to his small chapel in the east of the Holy Roman Empire.
“Burn the heretic!” he remembered the crowd crying out as his enraged captors tugged violently on the cord. He had let out a desperate cry as his bloodied knees once again rapped against stairs.
At that time, his vestments did not shine with the nobility of the blood of martyrdom. Instead, his clothing was a simple black and white—the colours of a local priest.
“Burn him!” the crowd formed in a semi circle at the entrance of the chapel called out once more.
With knee and elbows bleeding from underneath his clothes, the young Father James DeWitt held onto his noose with tired hands attempting to dislodge himself. It was to no avail. Another pull and his face now found itself sloshed in the mud of the well trodden dirt in front of his small chapel.
A triumphant cry emanated from the crowd and many pitchforks and torches were raised high in glory.
“What do you have to say for yourself?!” One of the strong men pulling on the rope called out to him.
As the young priest spat out mud and blood, his upper body weakly forced itself upward and he gave no response except small almost unintelligible gasping.
“Ave María, grátia plena…”
Another terrorizing tug on the rope and Father DeWitt’s face hit the mud once again.
“Your Lady won’t save you now, priest!” one of the men jeered as the crowd erupted in another jubilant cry.
Though tears and pain wracked his faced, the young priest continued his prayer as he brought himself up again despite the jeering of those around him. As his muddied face held bitterly to the cold of the dirt, he was suddenly met with a wandering warmth.
Quickly opening his eyes, he saw a fire erupt in front of him. The image ahead of him rushed immediate tears from his eyes as the very image of Christ burned in a pile. The cross which had but so recently adorned the top of the Sanctuary of his little chapel was now charring away a few paces from him.
“You will burn along with your idols!” one of the other men holding his rope roared at him.
For Father DeWitt, his heart receded until its very beat seemed to dampen against the bottom of his spine. His eyes would have single handedly washed away all the mud from his face with all the tears it was pushing forth when something golden caught his attention from the corner of his vision. He saw two men carrying an object and immediately recognized what it was they were doing.
“NO!” he cried out as he lunged towards the men on his right as they descended the steps. These men were now bringing the Tabernacle towards the flames.
“Take me!” Father DeWitt cried out as the men held him back half choking him as he pumped legs against loose mud. “Please take me instead!!” he cried out with outstretched arms towards the Tabernacle as it was carried towards the flames.
“Look at him worship his idol!” the men yelled out to the crowd again as they held back the young priest as that golden container was now dropped into the pyre.
In the laughter, the men let the rope go and his forward force immediately brought the young priest to the muddy ground again eliciting a greater show of amusement from the audience. Half crying and half beaten to exhaustion, the young DeWitt clawed the ground and found his way to the fire. Reaching into the flames, he held the heated metal of the tabernacle and let out such a cry that the crowd even dampened their glorious uproar for a moment to watch as that young man burned the skin on his hands to pull out the golden vessel.
As the Tabernacle swung in an arc away from the fire and the young priest DeWitt fell on his back against the mud, the doorway opened and the Eucharist flooded outwardly in a white rainbow before precipitating onto the dirt. The spectacle drew a second array of laughter.
Heaving with strained and course breath, Father DeWitt followed the trail on his hands and knees and with great reverence and crossing himself each time, took each muddied Sacred Host and placed it into his mouth.
“Look! Now he’s eating dirt with his bread!” the men called out again.
As the crowd erupted in laughter once more, the young priest swallowed each piece despite coughing up blood on several occasions. The people around him no longer existed. He had already reconciled that today he would be dead. Unlike many of the Catholic residents of his city that had fled when the new Protestant governor came to power, Father DeWitt stayed. He knew it was only a matter of time before the townsfolk would come to his chapel—they would come for him and for the five or so remaining Catholics of the city who he said mass for every morning. This would be his last act as a priest and as a servant of God. All he needed was enough time to consume the Sacred Body so that it might not be blasphemed. He prayed fervently to God to give him that time so that his life might end for the sake of his Lord Jesus Christ.
“Eternal Father,” he prayed in his mind as he consumed the Body with trembling hands—dirt and all. “I offer you this pain and suffering; this humiliation and death, so that I will be ‘filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church, of which I am a minister…’ May my suffering be penance for all the abuses done by priest and clergy—”
Once again, a swift pull on the rope and the side of his body crashed against the mud. He had finished bringing the Body of Christ into himself. He was now resigned to his death. With weary eyes he looked around at the bodies illuminated by their sacrilegious fire. As his final thought, he attempted to look at each and every face willing himself to forgive them all.
It was these thoughts that wandered through the eternity of those seconds in between breathlessness and consciousness. Although he was eventually rescued by the liberating Austrian forces a few weeks later, the Cardinal now found himself once more choked. But… he would not die this way, he screamed in his mind. He would not allow it to happen so easily—especially not when it was simple and unabashed trickery.
Trickery indeed, for even in the dim light and veiled windows he could see the black-painted metal wires emanating from Zio’s gauntlets, twining around his neck, and continuing to shaded corners of the room. Zio’s trickery might have worked on less intelligent individuals, but Cardinal DeWitt, one might say, developed skepticism to magic early on.
His scarred hands from all those years back now grabbed onto the metal threads both in front and behind him and gripped tightly. With a singular feat of upper body muscle, both ends were now contracted towards his neck. Zio held fast but could not help but be dragged across the floor an arm’s length as the three black cloaked individuals along the top corners of the room were now pulled away from their high positions atop reliefed windows and came crashing to the floor.
As the Cardinal whipped the wire away from his now reddened and bleeding neck, he roared in Zio’s direction. The Lion of Meissen will not die until his Heavenly Father says so.
After the morning prayer in the staff meeting room, General Mikhaylo Novaposhyn crossed himself up, down, right, and left while most of his staff crossed themselves up, down, left, and right. Although the scourge of Mohammadism and Communism eradicated millions of Eastern Christians like General Mikhaylo, the beginnings of the End of the Great Schism nearly a century and a half ago secured him a viable and peaceful way of life in the Spanish world.
Naturally it was not until John Paul the Great a few years back and now Pope Benedict’s historic visit to Constantinople that sealed the deal nearly one thousand years waiting, but his family had been quite excited to not only repair the age old division, but also because the recent Popes have been adamant and encouraging about keeping the regional customs of their exarchs and metropolitans. The synthesis of Western concern on rationality and the Eastern concern on mystery complemented each other far more than they ever contradicted each other. It was in this same way that his Eastern heritage was welcomed and made at home among his Latin Rite brethren—even to the point of rising in the ranks of the usually Latin-Rite Lions of Meissen. He was proud to be an Eastern Catholic.
“General, we’ve fulfilled Duke Jimenes’s orders as you requested, the city will be secure,” one of the lieutenants said.
As General Mikhaylo reviewed the report just given to him, he blocked out the din of telephones and the tapping of computer keyboards that dominated that headquarters.
“And what do the supercomputers say?” the General asked curiously.
Nearly a mile underneath the metropolis of Tokyo, deep in an underground bunker, not only did the Lions sponsor and maintain a large military installation, but directed Pacific Rim activity for the entire Asian coast. Feeding weather patterns, troop movements, and other data into the facility also meant passing it through Japan’s best supercomputers. The installation felt like something out of that Matthew Broderick movie about the Great War that he saw growing up—at least the General thought so.
“That whopper of a computer down there did detect a radiation spike in the vicinity,” replied his lieutenant, “and recommends we go to Defcon 3.”
With a nod, the General of the Pacific Rim gave his authorization. The command center he presided over was like a glorified mechanized court room. Where he sat was like the raised dais of a sitting tribunal. Flanking him on his right and left were the various operators working the supercomputers, and where the audience would be were various screens and map layouts that showed the state of that side of the world.
In a large screen illuminating a good portion of his field of vision, the General could now see His Imperial Majesty Emperor Otto addressing the Empire. As the General watched the old monarch give words of solidarity now that his Lord Chancellor informed the nation that no such nuclear device has been unaccounted for, he sighed wearily and looked down towards the red phone once again that flashed a signal that it was calling someone. Ten times now and Duke Jimenes had not picked up. He had just spoken to him a few moments ago, he thought. Where had he gone off to?
---
“What else do we know about this Zio persona?” Rodrigo asked as he anxiously awaited Carlos’s analysis. They both were crowded around Rodrigo’s Macintosh in his hotel room.
Carlos scrambled with the Lions server systems. In the meanwhile, Lara and Tom were glued to the television watching the Emperor’s statements on the top right corner of the screen as images of panic in the streets of Beijing followed by the paratroopers and tanks getting into position filled the rest of Noticias Zorro’s live coverage. The Lord Chancellor had explained just a few minutes earlier that the troops were there simply to find the terrorist, they had claimed.
“Nothing else seems to be available on him except the notes given by the Cardinals’ aides,” Carlos explained.
Rodrigo looked carefully at the screen.
“What does this mean?” Rodrigo asked pointing towards a portion of the text.
“Well, one of the reasons why the Cardinal never found the other councilmen or why this Zio was never apprehended was because of that.”
Rodrigo read it over in his mind, “Cardinal DeWitt, Missing 1582.”
Chapter XXXVI: The Missing (coming soon)
It was quite fun, actually. Not that it's a difficult cipher. And the words jogged my memory -- I knew I'd heard it before, so I googled it. So here we are.
