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a particularly brave man, nor a lettered one, but he had found strength in his conviction that the holy writings should not be destroyed. He could not watch the words of Mary Magdalene and Thomas and Peter and Judas burning. Arinius still remembered the crack of the flames licking the air, red and white and gold, as the precious writings were consigned to the pyre. Papyrus and vellum, the quires and scrolls, the blister of Greek and Hebrew and Coptic turned to black ash. The smell of reed and water and glue and wax filling the stone courtyard of the community in the capital of Gaul that had been his home.
    The papyrus shifted beneath his tunic, like a second skin. Arinius did not understand the text; he could not read the Coptic script, and besides, the letters were smudged, cracked. All he understood was that it was said the power contained within the seven verses of this, the shortest of the Codices, was absolute. As great as anything in the ancient writings of Exodus or Enoch, of Daniel or Ezekiel. More significant than all the knowledge contained within the walls of the great libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum.
    Arinius had heard some of the lines spoken aloud by a fellow brother, and never forgotten them. An incantation, wonderful words sent free within the cool cloisters of the community in Lugdunum. It was an act that had precipitated the Abbot’s rage. Considering this Codex to be the most dangerous of all those proscribed books held in the library, he decreed it to be magic, a sorcery, and those who defended it were denounced as heretics. Enemies of the true faith. The novitiate was punished.
    But Arinius believed he was carrying the sacred words of God. That his destiny, perhaps his entire purpose on God’s earth, was to ensure that the truth contained within the papyrus was not lost. Nothing else mattered.
    Now, floating across the still waters to where he stood on the banks of the river Atax, the toll of a bell for lauds. A simple song calling him home. Arinius raised his eyes to the city on the hill and prayed he would find a welcome there. Then he grasped his staff in his right hand, stepped out on to the wooden bridge and walked towards Carcaso.
    ‡

Chapter 1
    CARCASSONNE
    JULY 1942
    S andrine jolted awake. Bolt upright, her eyes wide open, her right hand stretched out as if she was trying to grasp something. For a moment she was neither asleep nor awake, as if some part of her had been left behind in the dream. Floating, looking down at herself from a great height, like the stone gargoyles that grimaced at passers-by from the cathédrale Saint-Michel.
    A sensation of slipping out of time, falling from one dimension into another through white, endless space. Then running and running, escaping the figures hunting her down. Indistinct outlines of white and red and black, pale green, their faces hidden beneath hoods and shadow and flame. Always the sharp glint of metal where should have been skin. Sandrine couldn’t remember who the soldiers were or what they wanted, if indeed she’d ever known, and already the dream was fading. Only the sense of threat, of betrayal, remained. And those emotions, too, were slipping away.
    Little by little, the room came back into focus. She was safe in her own bed in the house in the rue du Palais. As her eyes became accustomed to the dark, she could pick out the bureau of bleached mahogany against the wall between the two windows. To the right of her bed, the high-backed couch covered with washed-green Chinese silk and the bamboo plant stand. Opposite, beside the door, the low bookcase, its shelves filled to bursting.
    Sandrine wrapped her bare arms around her knees, shivering in the chill of the early morning. She reached for her eiderdown, as if by touching something real she would feel less insubstantial, less transparent, but her fingers found only the cotton of her crumpled sheet. The eiderdown, kicked off in the night, lay on the floor beside the bed.
    She couldn’t