The Seventh Sacrament Read Online Free PDF Page A

altar in St. Peter’s? These men were soldiers. If they wanted to fight, they would have made a stand outside. They came here…”
    He scanned the room.
    “…to worship one last time. This was a holy place. Not somewhere for human blood.”
    In his mind’s eye he could see them all now, not afraid, knowing the end was near, determined to complete one last obeisance to the god whose strength slaughtered the bull and gave life to the world.
    He bent down and turned the light onto the floor. There was a crude wooden cage there. Inside it were bones that must have been those of a chicken, now looking like the dusty remains of some miniature dinosaur, legs tucked beneath carcass, beaked head still recognisable. The temple followers never had time to finish their sacrifice before the Christian soldiers arrived, racing into the holiest chamber en masse, Constantine’s symbol, the chi-rho symbol, for christos, on their shields, screaming for more deaths on a day when the city must have run red with slaughter.
    “They came here to make a final sacrifice,” Ludo Torchia said. “Before the light went out on their god forever. And they weren’t even allowed to finish that.”
    He slung the rucksack off his shoulder onto the floor then unzipped it. Two sharp eyes gleamed back at him. The cockerel was shiny black with an erect, mobile red comb. It had cost him thirty lire early that morning in the busy local market in Testaccio, close by the Via Marmorata down the hill.
    The bird was still and silent as Torchia lifted the cage out of the bag.
    “Wow…” LaMarca whispered excitedly into the dark, turned on all of a sudden.
    Torchia had only ever killed one living thing before and that was a stray cat that kept annoying him, back when, as a young kid, he’d lost his key to the apartment, was waiting, bored and a little scared, for his mother to come home and bawl him out. But there was plenty of reference material in the standard Latin texts about how to offer a sacrifice correctly. It wasn’t hard. He could do it just the way an emperor used to.
    Something continued to bug him, though. Toni LaMarca was right. Seven was the magic number. And they were one short.
             

    T HE BIRTHDAY PARTY HAD TAKEN PLACE IN THEIR small garden, beneath the shade of the dusty vine trellises, on the terrace with its uninterrupted view down the Aventino towards the green open space of the Circus Maximus. There were nine classmates there, invited by his mother, not Alessio. Clio, the stupid blonde girl from one of the apartments near the school, had pointed at the remains of the stadium, to which emperors had once walked from their palaces on the Palatino behind, and complained, in her high-pitched, petulant voice, that it wasn’t a circus at all. There were no animals, no clowns, no cheap, noisy brass bands. At that moment Alessio, older, more conscious of those around him, realised Clio wasn’t actually a friend at all, that, from now on, he would prefer the company of others—children, adults, age didn’t matter. Or at least it shouldn’t. He simply wished to be with those like him, with open, curious minds and active imaginations. Like his father, extracting the secrets of the past from the cold, grubby earth. Or his mother, locked in her room, painting wild scenes on blank canvas.
    People with passions, because passions were important. Alessio possessed three: pictures, numbers, and words. Of the first, his favourite remained that image of St. Peter’s, seen through the keyhole of the mansion of the Knights of Malta. It was always present, part of the daily ritual, one that never failed him, except in poor weather, or when he tried to use those stupid glasses, proof again that childish things were no longer of any use.
    As far as numbers were concerned, only one mattered, and that wasn’t simply because it represented his age. Alessio’s father had taken him aside and talked of it a little, before the other children