Chapter 5

A New Hope Born

The rapid slap-slap of leather sandals on the ancient stone of the floor echoed off of the marble walls and raised heads from the desks stationed in two rows of six. A sturdy young man wearing the black habit of a Jesuit hurried to the solitary desk sitting next to the set of large double doors opposite the ones through which he just barged. The room had high ceilings, large windows, and walls lined with wooden filing cabinets. The people sitting at the desks in the room were all dressed in plain brown woolen monks' habits with varied color ropes that served as belts. In centuries past, their desks would have been covered with parchment, velum, leather, glue, quills, and ink for writing and binding as well as various hand-bound, illuminated books for reference. In this more modern century, all returned to typing away at the most modern electric typewriters with sleek black rotary telephones and stacks of manila file folders covering their desks. The older, bald monk at the desk by the far door looked up from his computer at the approach of the young, dusky-skinned Jesuit.

"Yes?" the bald monk said curtly, blanking the greenish screen covered in lines of code.

"Your pardon, sir, but I carry a message from Delphi," the young man said in a hushed, Lebanese-accented voice. He was dark featured and on the short side of six feet though in good shape, his musculature plain even under the concealing cassock. The clothes were travel-stained and he had bags under his eyes, evidence of a hasty trip here from Greece with no care for his own comfort. He straightened, putting a little more energy into his demeanor. "The Oracle charged me to deliver it to the Exarch himself."

The bald man gave the Jesuit a long look before picking up his phone and pressing a button on the cradle. "Yes, my Lord. There is an Arab Jesuit here with a message from Delphi for your ears only. Yes, my Lord. Yes, my Lord," he said in a low voice, well aware some, if not most, of the men at the desks could hear every word. He nodded to the door as he replaced the phone on the cradle. "The Exarch will see you."

The young man opened one of the worn, heavy wooden doors dark with age and entered. He was somewhat taken aback. As a messenger, he carried important missives to many important men, both in the Order and within the greater Church Alliance. As such, he had seen the offices of many great men and they usually were quite grand, both in scale and appointment. While the Exarch's office was certainly grand in scale, its appointment was plain to the point of being Spartan. Though the room had the same high ceiling and marble walls as the larger room full of clerical monks, the only furnishing was an aged hard wood desk, a large and detailed map of the world on the wall behind the desk, and a military camp cot nestled in the corner with rough woolen blankets folded atop it. The room, as the clerks' room, held a chill, musty stone air about it despite the Roman summer ablaze beyond the large windows high on the wall behind the desk that sent shafts of warm light streaking over the imposing shoulders of the desk's occupant seated in the last piece of furniture, a padded and comfortable-looking chair.

The occupant was Exarch Christopher VII, head of the Order and third only to the Pope and God in this world. He was an imposing man, despite still being seated. He had a grizzled, chiseled face made of sharp planes featuring more than one scar. The pale skin was olive-tinged, suggesting Italian or Eastern Mediterranean origins kept indoors by his position. Even sitting, his bulky, muscular build was evident through the plain brown monk's habit he wore with a scarlet and gold braided rope belt. His large, scarred hands were folded before him and his steel gray eyes and close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair gave him the look of a pagan war god awaiting the prayer of a supplicant.

This was his first time carrying a missive to the Exarch and the man's sheer presence must have had him gaping, because the Exarch's brow arched. "I believe my assistant said you have a message from Melanie for me?" he queried lightly, his voice a growling basso etched with a Greek accent.

"M-melanie, my Lord? N-no, I come with a message from the Oracle at Delphi, my Lord," he stammered, his dark eyes confused.

The Exarch sighed, rolling his eyes as an amused smile tugged at his lips. "I see she is still bedazzling the young ones with her mystic act," he growled, more to himself than in answer to the messenger's confusion. "Relax, boy! Melanie is the bloody Oracle! Is the message written or oral?"

"Oral, my Lord," he replied, his nervousness ratcheting up a notch. He hated oral messages. Delivering them made him feel like a zombie, despite the fact that he knew some things were too important not to safeguard as much as possible.

The Exarch's lips tightened, the only reaction to his answer. "How bad was her headache when you left Delphi?"

"She passed out with a scream after charging me with my task, my Lord," he replied hesitantly, not understanding the tangent on which the question seemed to take the conversion. "The Guardians of the Shrine assured me she would be fine but it would be a day or two."

Christopher VII nodded grimly and opened his desk drawer, extracting a dagger covered with runes. "Come here, boy." The young man eyed the blade wearily, though he obeyed. The Exarch grimaced as he touched the tip of the weapon to his right forefinger and drew it down to the first knuckle, a line of deep red, almost black blood welling up. "This is going to be slightly different from most oral messages you have delivered. You will not remember anything about ever being asked to deliver this. You will go into an ambulatory trance until you return to Delphi. I will have a couple of the brothers take you back home afterward. You came straight here, yes? Good. Close your eyes."

Christopher VII stood, suddenly towering over the fairly tall messenger. The young Jesuit realized the Exarch was nearly seven feet tall, looking like a small giant. The young man tremblingly closed his eyes. The Exarch raised his right hand to the messenger's forehead, dipping his thumb in the blood still welling from the cut to his index finger. The Jesuit only felt the first glyph the Exarch wrote on him. By the time Christopher VII finished, the Jesuit's face was covered in bloody glyphs which glowed slightly despite the brightly lit room.

"Reveal unto me that which was entrusted unto you," the Exarch intoned ritually as he pulled a handkerchief out of his sleeve and wrapped his finger in it. At the final syllable, the bloody glyphs flashed before slowly sinking into the Jesuit's skin.

"Chris, I hated to send this in such a manner," a female voice, sounding pained and still alluringly husky, said with the messenger's mouth, "but this one is a doozy that will have me laid up for three or four days at the least and you are going to have to start planning immediately. So here it is:"

The husky voice turned harsh, though obviously still the Oracle's.

"On the bicentennial day of birth,

Comes the one long awaited.

Born to one versed in the way of stealth

In the land divided by Darkness.

A Warrior of God

And Left Hand of the Lord,

Deadly peril shall she face

Long before her ripening.

Therefore, guard her well

Soldiers of Jehovah,

Or lose her to the Dark

And with her, the World!"

There was a slight gasp and a pause for breath. "Sorry that was so vague, but I think He wanted to make sure you knew the Warrior we have been awaiting for more than two centuries was on the way and that we better not lose her or the rest of humanity was going with her," the voice of the Oracle of Delphi said urgently, her voice back to its normal huskiness, her accent clearly American and excited. "This is not simple Knight, as the auguries have been suggesting was on the way. This is the real thing! The Left Hand of God!

"From the prophecy, she is going to be born on the 4^th of July, 1976 and I am guessing it is going to be somewhere in Germany. I am basing that last on the fact that I can tell you she will be American, born to an American Military Intelligence agent. Whatever you do, make sure to keep him in mind because he will not be one to trifle with. And he is going to pass that trait on to his daughter."

There was a long pause and then another sigh, this one slightly pained. "OK, that is all for now. I have to go, the headache is coming, but remember, you have three days before she is born and Germany is not the best place for her to show up. Get on it quickly or the Rudelles will get her first and then we are all toast-ahhh! Sorry, got to gooo-"

The messenger's shoulders slumped and his vacant eyes stared blankly at the Exarch as the man gaped at the young man with amazement. Shaking himself and reaching out a trembling hand to pick up his phone, he cleared his throat and pushed a button on the cradle. "Get in here, Gino, and bring three or four of the brothers with you."

The door opened a minute later and the bald assistant entered, four muscular monks in their mid-twenties to early-thirties trailing behind him. "You wished to see us, my Lord," the bald assistant inquired, his brown eyes flicking to the entranced Jesuit.

Christopher placed both fists on the desk and inhaled deeply. "Yes. You four, arrange a plane with diplomatic immunity under the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The Grand Master will be expecting your call momentarily. The young man is in a trance and will answer your questions and respond to you but he is not able to initiate action or conversation and won't be able to until you set down in Athens. Guard him well and get him back to the Delphi compound on Mt. Parnassos. I think he either drove here or came by boat, the Oracle would not have entrusted this to a commercial plane out of Athens. So ask him how he got here and where his belongings are and then go make your call to the Maltese."

"Yes, my Lord," they said in unison, two of them stepping forward to guide the Jesuit out.

As soon as they left, the Exarch turned his attention back to his assistant. "Gino, I need you to get the Pontiff on the phone and when I am finished talking with him, I am going to need to work my way through the archskopi, starting with Ulrich Wagner in Worms, West Germany," he said, his tone suddenly deadly calm and his face gravely somber as he sat down once more. He pulled a file from his desk, blowing some dust and cobwebs off of it. The folder it was bound in was leather, not the usual manila, and was tied with a faded red silk ribbon. The lettering on it was of the style used in the late sixteenth century and the language was Late Latin, a language dead for well over a millennium. The file was obviously one of the older files the Order possessed and had been recopied many times, though not in recent decades. "Between Paul VI and the archskopi, I need you to get Karl Waldensee in Bonn on the telephone. I have a job for him and his little group and I may need to get him some reinforcements so also have Hans Vandereyck in Amsterdam and Luc de Guerre in Strasbourg on the line with us."

Gino bowed and turned to begin his calls when Christopher VII said, "And Gino, begin typing up something announcing the coming of the Left Hand of God," in a shaking voice, his steel gray eyes blazing with fervor that was missing a moment ago. "I need to warn those who need to know that this could be the beginning of a long period of turmoil. The Almighty would not send us his greatest Warrior now, after two centuries, if we were not going to need her."

"Breathe, love! Breathe! In. Out. In. Out. I am going as fast as this road will let me without killing us all," a large, leanly muscular man in his early twenties said urgently to the beautiful young woman scarcely older than he was whose auburn hair was sweat-soaked and plastered to her forehead in the back of the gray Volvo barreling down the narrow and twisting back road somewhere in the wine country of Rheinland Pfalz. The young man was dressed in American Army fatigues and had his eyes searching the dark road ahead for signs of the Autobahn. "I knew this was going to happen! I told them we live too far out in the boonies for us to get to a hospital conveniently. Landstuhl is not an easy drive on days you aren't in labor!"

The heavy, pained breathing from the back was getting quicker. "I ... know, dear," the strained voice of the young woman large with the impending child she was birthing said. Her usually pale face was mottled red with the effort to deal with the pain and still focus on how her husband was driving. He was already a taut individual, but the added stress of the first child coming in the middle of the night miles from any doctors, never mind hospitals, was turning him into a hyper-focused bundle of nerves. She could hear the strain of his hands gripping the steering wheel and hoped he did not get them in a wreck. "Just relax and do your best, Sean. I know you can get us there safe."

"What do you mean they are not there?" Christopher said in a voice as close to panicked as Karl had ever heard him get. "The Oracle said it would be today! They have to be there if they are going to get to the hospital for the birth. Nobody would go gallivanting across the countryside this close to the birth of their first child!"

"I know, my Lord," the calmly professional voice on the other end of the phone said crisply, his voice barely tinted with German. "All I can tell you is that the men I sent to scout their apartment late last night entered the apartment this morning when they could not find the car and saw no movement at first light. They also had to deal with two packs of Ogres and a pair of Vampires that were lurking around the building before they could extricate themselves."

"Any casualties on our end of that?"

"No, my Lord," the man replied, relief plain in his voice. "A few scrapes and bruises are all. I have them converging with me on the hospital here in Landstuhl. That is what our information suggests would be their destination if they are already on the road. They are living out in the middle of nowhere, though. They could take any one of a dozen back roads to the Autobahn to get there so we have concentrated on the hospital."

Christopher VII sat back in his chair, scrubbing his face with his right hand while holding the phone with his left, wincing as the bristles of his unshaven face wormed their way through the bandage on his index finger. "I hear a little something you are leaving out of that, Karl."

A sigh drifted over the phone line. "You are as unwholesomely clever, as usual, my Lord," the man replied irritably. After a long pause, he answered the query with, "I am afraid there is going to be something of a pitched battle in the hospital. You might want to ready the closest clean-up teams and get them moving towards Landstuhl. I know it is going to be a mess to get something like this cleaned up in the middle of all of these American military personnel, but it is going to be unavoidable. We have already had to kill a pack of Hell Hounds and that was just in getting our people into position to protect the child and her parents. There are at least a half dozen Vampires and their minions, the Goblins, the Ogres, a Siren and her harem, a Hag and her harem, and what I think was a disguised Rakshasa and its slaves. We have lost three men in the skirmishes and this hasn't even really started yet. Whatever the Oracle saw must have been on a wide enough bandwidth for their Oracles to get it as well and prepare what is looking like the start of a serious campaign to kill the child before she is even born."

The Exarch grunted. "I wondered about that," he murmured, almost to himself. "I guess they figure that this is one they are better off just killing outright. Which, when I go over it in my head, doesn't make much sense. They gain more when they corrupt our Warriors and they were at least semi-successful in corrupting the last one. At least, we never got much use out of him and he didn't bother them nearly as much as he bothered us."

Karl snorted in disagreement. "My Lord, calling the fall of Isoroku Yamamoto a draw is being kind," he said scathingly."

"The man was honorable, to his own code, Karl," Christopher pointed out. "And he did warn the leadership not to attack the United States."

"But he also killed more of our people in the years he warred in the lands and seas we operated in than my beloved fatherland managed in thirty years of near continuous covert war between us and them," Karl rebutted angrily. "Given the choice between them managing to kill this newest Warrior and turning her into the 'neutral' you and others claim Yamamoto was, I would take them killing her."

Christopher VII sat up straight in his chair and gathered unto himself all of his power and authority, saying, "Let me make this very clear, Karl. I want that child saved! The Oracle at Delphi is still unconscious from her vision and she wanted it clearly understood we needed this little girl. The prophecy made it very clear that this world may very well rise or fall on the life of this one girl-child. Save her, Karl. That will be your only task from the moment she is born until you get too old to raise a sword or fire a gun."

Karl flinched away from the sound of the Exarch slamming the phone. He hung up the pay phone and looked around the area, trying to find any more monsters hiding in the scurrying of Americans around the largest military hospital in the country. He had known the man everyone called Exarch Christopher VII before he took his vows as Exarch and he couldn't recall the man ever sounding this intense about something. Given some of the hell holes they had fought in together, that was saying something.

He looked up at the beautiful, clear blue sky and took a deep breath of the cool summer breeze wafting the smell of flowers on the air and shook his head. This type of confrontation should take place on a lead gray day, a day threatening to deluge the world in darkness and misery, not this gorgeous early summer morning promising a day of picnics and soccer for those not working.

Karl looked around once more and decided there was nothing else to be done. The pieces were probably all in place, now all that remained was moving them into their final positions as the end game approached. To that end, he lifted the walkie-talkie to this mouth and pressed the button. "Move in! All groups move into your positions around the maternity ward. Make sure you don't spook the normals early by being out of character or flashing weapons other than the hand guns those of you in uniform are carrying. Exarch Christopher VII is going to send us all to Alaska to fight the Wendigos if we fail to save this child and her parents, so let's be aware and get this done!'

"Seaaaaan!" her breathing was too rapid and the contractions were coming one on top of the other. They still had not gotten to the Autobahn, but they were not far now. She wasn't going to make it, however. "Sean! I need you, damn it! Pull the fuck overrrrrr!"

The young man swore silently and pulled over to the honking of horns as those behind him swerved around him. He pulled well into the grass on the side of the road, one much more substantial than the one leading from their apartment but still not the wide, swift-moving Autobahn. He jumped out of the car and popped open the trunk, noticing the farm the road wound through for the first time. He had been a Boy Scout and old habits died hard. He knew they lived too far out for Anika to make it to the hospital in a hurry, so he packed an emergency birthing kit based on information he got from medics he knew. He opened the back door and put the kit on the foot well behind the driver's seat. He opened it and then popped his wife's seat belt. She was still breathing rapidly but now she was eyeing him in amazement.