Angelology(102)

lived in an era of conformity, and their actions would have been under constant scrutiny. As a result,

advances came slowly, without the great breakthroughs of modern angelology. Their studies brought

them laborious progress that, over the centuries, created the foundation for all I had learned. If they

had been discovered, they would have been declared heretics, excommunicated from the church,

perhaps imprisoned. I knew that persecution would not have stopped their mission—the founding

members of angelology had sacrificed much to further their cause—but it would have caused severe

setbacks. They believed that their orders came from a higher authority, just as I believed that I had

been called to my mission.

While Clematis’s expedition had faced the threat of theft and the ill will of villagers, our greatest

fear was that we would be intercepted by our enemies. After the occupation of Paris in June 1940, we

had been forced to go into hiding, a move that postponed the expedition. For years we’d prepared for

the journey in secret, collecting supplies and gathering information about the terrain, sealing

ourselves in a tight network of trusted scholars and council members, angelologists whose many years

of dedication and sacrifice assured loyalty. Security measures changed, however, when Dr. Raphael

found a patron—a wealthy American woman whose reverence for our work drove her to assist us.

Accepting the support of an outsider, we opened ourselves to detection. With our benefactress’s

money and influence, our plans moved forward even as our fears grew. We could never know for

certain if the Nephilim had detected our intentions. We could not know if they were in the mountains,

following us each step of the way.

I shivered inside the van, feeling ill from the violent lurching as we made our way over ice and

uneven roads. I was aware that I should have been frozen from the lack of heat, but my entire body

tingled with anticipation. The other members of our party—three well-seasoned angelologists—sat

nearby, speaking of the mission ahead with a confidence I could hardly believe. These men were

much older than I and had worked together for as long as I’d been alive, but it was I who had solved

the mystery of the location, and this gave me special status among them. Gabriella, who had once

been my only rival for this position, had left the school in 1940, disappearing without so much as

saying good-bye. She had simply taken her belongings from our apartment and vanished. At the time I

believed that she had been reprimanded in some fashion, perhaps even expelled, and that her silent

departure was one of shame. Whether she had gone into exile or gone underground, I did not know.

Although I understood that my efforts had earned me my place on the expedition, I was left with

doubts. Secretly I wondered if her absence was why I had been selected for the mission.

Dr. Seraphina and Vladimir analyzed the detail of our descent into the gorge. I did not join their

discussion however, so lost was I in my own nervous thoughts about our journey. I was acutely aware

that anything at all could happen. Suddenly every possibility arrayed itself before me. We might

complete our work in the gorge with ease, or we might never return to civilization. One thing was

certain. In the next hours, we would win everything or lose everything.

With the wind howling in the distance and the faint roar of an airplane droning overhead, I could

not help but think of the terrible end Clematis had met. I thought of the doubt that Brother Francis had

expressed. He had called the expedition party a “brotherhood of dreamers,” and I had to wonder, as

we emerged at last at the peak of the mountain, driving past a crag of ice-covered granite, if Francis’s

assessment did not hold for us so many centuries later. Were we chasing a phantom treasure? Would

we lose our lives to a fruitless fantasy? Our journey could be, as Dr. Seraphina believed, the

culmination of all that our scholars had striven for. Or it could be the very thing Brother Francis had

so feared: the delusion of a group of dreamers who had lost their way.

In their great passion to understand the details of the Venerable Clematis’s account, Dr. Raphael

and Dr. Seraphina had overlooked a most subtle fact: Brother Deopus was a Bulgarian monk of the

Thracian region who, although trained in the language of the church and fully capable of taking down

Clematis’s words in Latin, was also most certainly a native speaker of the local language, a variation

of early Bulgarian forged in the ancient Cyrillic of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in the ninth century.

The Venerable Clematis was also a native speaker of early Bulgarian, having been born and educated

in the Rhodope Mountains. As I read and reread Dr. Raphael’s translation that fateful night four years