GOD'S LIONS.

THE DARK RUIN.

John Lyman.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

First and foremost I want to thank my wonderful wife, Leigh Jane Lyman. Without her help you probably wouldn't be reading this right now. I also want to thank all of my test readers for their valuable feedback and support, especially Chuck Autrey here in the United States, and Shaneese Robinson, my test reader across the pond.

For my grandmother, Evelyn Kingery Wehling.

"A Beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it."

George MacDonald.

PREFACE.

Writing a sequel is always difficult. After I wrote "God's Lions-The Secret Chapel", it was evident from the amount of email I received that readers wanted more, thus the "God's Lions" series was born. Although I have endeavored to make each book a stand-alone novel, I wanted to provide an historical perspective relating to the Cathars who featured so prominently in the second novel in the series, "God's Lions-House of Acerbi". Therefore, I have decided to include a brief history of the Cathars to provide some background for readers who haven't read the first two books, and perhaps serve as a refresher for those who have.

The origin of the Cathars remains something of a mystery. They were a religious group that suddenly appeared in the Languedoc region of southern France in the 11th century long before the days of the Protestant Reformation that eventually changed the face of religion in the Christian world forever. The Cathars had been a separate religion from Catholicism-the word Cathar coming from the Greek Katharoi, meaning "pure ones". Unlike other medieval movements, they had formed their own system of religious beliefs centered on kindness to others, the rejection of material wealth, and the promise of universal redemption inspired by Christ and his disciples.

They alleged that the physical world was evil and created by the Satan-like god they called Rex Mundi. He was known as "the king of the world" who ruled over all that was physical, chaotic, and powerful. The other god, the one whom the Cathars worshipped, was a higher god-a god of love-a pure spirit that embraced his human followers. They believed that Jesus Christ was his messenger and referred to themselves as Christians, but the Catholic Church called them something else. To the medieval Catholic Church, the Cathars were heretics.

At the time, the Languedoc region of southern France that the Cathars lived in was not really considered a part of France. The culture of the area was still rooted in the feudal system, but the enlightened Cathars refused to swear an oath to any feudal lord. By the early 13th century, the tolerant and liberal beliefs of the Cathars had become the dominate religion in the area, much to the annoyance of the Catholic Church which was being held up to public ridicule when its bejeweled abbots and priests, dressed in their best finery, preached poverty and demanded tithes to be paid to them in the name of the Church. The Cathars referred to the Catholic Church as the Church of the Wolves, while the Catholics countered with accusations that the Cathars belonged to the Synagogue of Satan.

And so it went, back and forth, until finally, the Church had had enough. After the French King, Phillip Augustus, refused to intervene, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc and formed a Holy Army. The first military leader of this army was a Cistercian abbot by the name of Arnaud Amaury, a churchman with a sadistic penchant for terror and killing. He is best remembered for a command he shouted to his troops before they entered the town of Beziers in 1209. When asked by his soldiers how they could differentiate between the Catholics and Cathars, he said "Kill them all ... God will know his own!"

During this period of history, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population of the Languedoc by the Church. An estimated 500,000 Languedoc men, women, and children were massacred-Catholics as well as Cathars. During the attack on Beziers, the doors to the church of St. Mary Magdalene were broken down, and over 7000 men, women, and children were reportedly dragged out and slaughtered. Thousands of others in the same town were blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, burned at the stake, and used for target practice before the holy crusader army burned the city to the ground.

After the siege, Arnaud proudly wrote to Pope Innocent III, "Today, Your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex." Later, after the massacre at Beziers, Simon de Monfort, an especially dangerous and cruel baron who had successfully laid siege to the walled city of Carcassonne, was designated as the new leader of the Crusader army. The war against the Cathars continued on and off through the 14th century, setting the precedent for the various church-sponsored inquisitions that were to follow. In the end, an entire culture had almost been exterminated from the face of the Earth in what can only be described as church-sanctioned genocide. The crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc has been described by historians as one of the greatest human disasters in history on par with that of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II.

PROLOGUE.

THE FERTILE CRESCENT 10,000 B.C.

On the day the entity returned, a small gathering of primitive nomadic tribesmen were sitting on a crude stone floor, staring up at a massive limestone monolith that towered above their heads. The men were looking at the carved image of a snake, its forked tongue flicking outward, and in a bas-relief tableau that wrapped around all four sides of the gigantic block of stone, they could see other creatures, mostly predators, including leopards, wolves, and scorpions.

Encircled by twelve similar monoliths, a blackened area on the floor marked the spot where a fire had burned overnight, keeping the darkness at bay while the men moved the last stone giant into place. Now, with the sun peeking over the horizon, no one dared to speak, for even though they knew the thing was coming, they feared their words might anger the dark apparition that had haunted their dreams for so long.

For the past two years the men had toiled under a blazing sun to do what the entity had commanded of them. They had worked day in and day out, hacking gigantic blocks of stone from a nearby hillside to be used in the construction of something that was a total mystery to them, and already a dozen of their number had been killed-crushed to death before they had learned the finer points of moving heavy stone objects that weighed over sixteen tons.

In the years preceding the appearance of the entity, this tightly-knit band of hunter-gatherers had roamed the land at will, sleeping under the stars while maintaining a close bond with Mother Earth. They had moved from one place to another following the herds of animals that provided their food and clothing, and like their ancestors before them, they had drunk clear water from free-flowing rivers and wandered through vast green forests where the game was always plentiful and fresh.

Compared to their modern-day brethren, they had lived a relatively idyllic life, but on a warm spring day, as they camped on a grassy plain beneath a potbelly-shaped hill, something had happened-something that was so frightening to these people that they had suddenly ceased their wandering ways to begin construction of something that was completely useless to them.

Where before their life had been one of fluid motion and play, these nomadic tribesmen now toiled beneath an unyielding sun to build something that had never before been seen on the entire planet, and had it not been for the instructions given to them by the entity, they never would have considered building such a thing in the first place.

As far as they could tell, this circle of stone served no obvious purpose. It just sat there, a constant reminder of the seemingly endless days spent in back-breaking labor. A full seven millennia before the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza had even begun, these men had broken with thousands of years of tradition to build a complex stone structure by hand, all without the benefit of metal tools, wheels, or draft animals. The only question was-why?

It was a question that would cause archaeologists to scratch their heads in wonder when, in the 20th century, the Stonehenge-like circle of stone was finally unearthed in modern-day Turkey. But unbeknownst to these present-day finders of ancient artifacts, even the primitive men who had labored so long and hard to build it had no idea why they had done it other than the fact that they had been told to do so by something that terrified them.

Now, sitting on a crude stone floor, the men waited, and in the afternoon, as the sun began to beat down on the grassy slope with a fiery stillness, the sound of a dog barking in the distance heralded the arrival of dark clouds that began to flow in from the east. They were roiling black clouds; the kind that brought strong winds and blotted out the sun, and right on cue the winds began to blow.

Huddled inside the circle of stone, the men lifted their fur skins over their heads in an attempt to shield their eyes from the swirling dust, all the while hoping against hope that the structure they had been ordered to build would somehow appease the thing they knew was coming.

Without so much as a whisper, a dark shape began to materialize in the center of the ring. It wavered in and out of the earth plane like a fluctuating hologram from another dimension, until finally, as a hot, sulfur-infused wind continued to blow, a leathery-winged apparition stood before them, swinging it's monstrous head from side-to-side as its blood-red eyes fixed them with an otherworldly stare.

As the frightened men began to scuttle backward, the ground began to quiver, and as the shaking grew stronger the stone floor became transparent, revealing a black crystal abyss that fell away into the depths of the Earth beneath the feet of the terrified men.

Above their heads, a pillar of bluish light carrying two objects resembling large seeds suddenly descended from the base of the dark clouds, and as soon as they touched the transparent floor, the black surface seemed to liquefy, embracing the objects and pulling them into its depths. For a moment the ground seemed to quiver, as if Mother Earth had been struck by something she wanted to reject. Then all was quiet as the liquefied stone slowly returned to its original solid state.

Frozen in place by fear, the petrified men continued to shrink from the gaze of the hideous winged creature that towered above them, for their instinct for survival had kicked into overdrive, alerting them to avoid its demonic stare. Somehow they knew that if they gazed into the burning red orbs, it would only bring an end to lives that were already too short.

Please leave us! The terrified men covered their eyes and began to call out in an instinctive plea for deliverance, for even though they had no true concept of God, they had come to believe that if the dark apparition standing before them existed, then surely its opposite must also exist somewhere, and maybe it could help them. If there was a spirit of darkness, then there must also be a spirit of light-one that could intercede on their behalf and deliver them from this evil. Just like day and night, where the night was to be feared because it cloaked the predators that stalked them in darkness, the light was to be welcomed, for its brightness illuminated their path and revealed those creatures that lay in wait to rob them of their lives.

But there was also another thing these men had figured out. The apparition wavering before them had come from somewhere, but it was not of this earth, which meant that there was another realm out there-one that was invisible to them. If this monstrous thing had come from a world of darkness, which surely it did, then that meant there had to be a world of light-and therein lay their salvation. It had to be!

On the day the entity had first appeared to them standing inside a pillar of fire on the hillside above, the tribesmen had quickly agreed to do whatever it asked of them on the condition that it would spare their lives. They had kept their part of the bargain. They had built the structure it had commanded them to build ... now go! Leave us in peace!

Peering out from under his animal-skin hood, one of the men fell to his knees. The entity was gone! High overhead, the roiling black clouds were already disappearing over the horizon, while on the ground, the wind had descended to a gentle breeze, leaving the shaken men in a state of bewildered relief as the shrieking wind was replaced by the sound of dry leaves rolling across the still-warm stones of the temple floor.

In the days that followed, the men and their families decided to bury the temple as best they could and flee toward the coast, lest the entity return. In their exodus, these people and the generations that followed them began to spread out over the land, taking with them their newfound knowledge of the two opposing forces of darkness and light. It was a revelation within the human psyche that soon began to spread across an area of the ancient world that would one day come to be known as the Fertile Crescent-the very cradle of civilization.

Over the course of the next several millennia, thousands of temples dedicated to various gods representing both darkness and light would rise across the region in homage to the forces of both good and evil, until finally the world's three dominant monotheistic religions would spring forth, surpassing all others in the belief of a single god of light. It would be from this area of the world that a beacon would eventually shine over billions of people around the globe, giving mankind hope that the god of light would prevail and the thing of darkness would be held at bay-at least for awhile.

CHAPTER 1.

ISTANBUL - PRESENT DAY.

Enveloped by the sights and smells of the bustling Bazaar Quarter, the two dark-clothed men watched the maritime parade of boats flow from the Golden Horn into the Bosporus as they sat drinking strong Turkish coffee next to the steamy entrance of a sidewalk cafe. Technically it was springtime, but a slight chill blanketed the old section of the city with the last vestiges of a long winter that clung to the land in a feeble attempt to keep the warming rays of the sun from reaching down into narrow streets still cloaked in dewy, early morning shadows.

Cardinal Leopold Amodeo tapped his watch and held it to his ear. "What time do you have?"

"Seven-thirty," Bishop Anthony Morelli replied.

"He should have been here by now. Maybe you should call him again."

Morelli's brown eyes peered from beneath his black baseball cap. "He'll be here. I've worked with this man for years on other archaeological digs here in Turkey. He's never on time, but he always shows up ... and he's very discreet about my activities. We can't afford to bring anyone new onboard at this late stage."

The cardinal turned the collar up on his jacket and stared past his friend at the turbulent blue water lapping at a distant promontory point facing the Sea of Marmara. He was actually looking at another continent, for they were on the European side of a city that straddled the two continents of Europe and Asia, a geographical position that had made Istanbul a strategic focal point throughout history.

"Too bad Lev couldn't bring the Carmela into port here," Morelli huffed, watching cigarette smoke from a nearby table drift over their heads. "This is practically the yacht's second home, but her presence here now would have announced our arrival. I've been onboard twice when she was anchored off the coast of Turkey. The scenery was beautiful ... and the archaeology! There's no other place on Earth where the ancient world is so evident. It's all around us. We're sitting in the cradle of civilization. The Assyrians, the Hittites, the Greeks ... the Romans. They were all here."

"I know," Leo said, picking at his small breakfast baklava with a silver fork before downing the last of his coffee. "It wouldn't have surprised me if Lev had decided to build his villa here in Turkey instead of in Israel."

"He'll never leave the Holy Land, Leo, but he does love it here. There are more Roman ruins here than there are in Italy, and more Greek ruins here than in Greece. Even though Lev is surrounded by antiquity in Israel, this is where he discovered his love of archaeology. He brought Ariella here for her first dig when she was only ten years old. We all camped near the site of the ancient city of Troy, and that little girl wore everyone out tromping around looking for artifacts. We had to keep a constant eye on her because of snakes." Morelli shook his head as he gazed out over the jostling flow of humanity walking past their table. "People who don't enjoy learning about history ... I just don't get it."

By now Leo's gaze had shifted to nearby tables, looking for eyes that lingered just a little too long in their direction. Like everywhere else in the world, crime was also on the rise here in Turkey, but there was another, more tangible reason for Leo's growing caution.

Satisfied at last that they were not being watched, Leo looked at his watch again just as the loud screech of brakes on the street jerked his attention to a mud-splattered Chevy Suburban that had just pulled to the curb after cutting off a slower-moving car. Behind the wheel, peering from beneath a head of curly dark hair, the Chevy's grinning driver pulled his sunglasses down over his nose and winked in their direction.

"That's him," Morelli said, rising from his chair. "Let's go."

Hefting their backpacks over their shoulders, the two men quickly made their way through the jostling crowd before piling into the large four-wheel-drive vehicle. Glancing in his side-view mirror, the driver lurched the big Chevy out into thick traffic, joining the flow that crossed the famed Galata Bridge-a bridge that was named after the 6th century tower that overlooked the Golden Horn from the top of one of the seven hills that rose above the European section of the city.

Sitting in the front passenger seat, Morelli smoothed his thinning red hair under his cap before turning his heavy-set frame sideways so that he could peer into the back seat. "Leo, I'd like to introduce you to a close friend of mine. This is Abbas Sadik. Abbas is an archaeologist attached to the Turkish Ministry of Antiquities, and for the past twenty years he and I have made several important archaeological discoveries, both here and in other areas around the Mediterranean. Without his help here in Turkey I would have been totally lost on more than one occasion."

With his tanned forearms gripping the steering wheel, Abbas threw his head back in laughter. "Actually, Cardinal, your friend the bishop here is the one who keeps me from getting lost. He sent me a GPS for Christmas a few years ago after we accidently crossed over the border into Iraq. Luckily for us a group of U.S. Marines pointed out our mistake before we ran into any bad guys. Even though he knows I'm not a Christian, he keeps sending me Christmas presents every year just in case I suddenly convert without his knowledge."

Leo's stark green eyes narrowed as he smiled at the back of the man's head. "I've heard a lot about you, Abbas. Bishop Morelli tells me that you're a Muslim."

"That I am, Cardinal. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Sunni Muslim." Abbas grinned into the rear-view mirror. "Pay no attention to the bulges under my jacket ... they're just sandwiches."

It was quickly becoming obvious why Morelli had chosen this man to be their guide into the remote hinterlands of the Turkish countryside. Morelli enjoyed being around happy people with a good sense of humor, and this guy certainly fit the bill.

"Your people have a proud heritage, Abbas. Have you always lived in Turkey?"

"Yes, except for the time I spent at Cambridge. I was born in Meryemana. That's about 8 kilometers from the ruins of Ephesus, one of the greatest ancient cities in the western world. The proximity of my birth to such places is probably one of the main reasons I took up the study of ancient cultures. My friends and I used to play in the ruins when we were kids, and my parents still live in the area-a few blocks from the house where the Blessed Virgin Mary spent her last days."

"That's some neighborhood you grew up in," Leo said, impressed.

"It was the best. My father told me that, after Jesus asked Saint John the Evangelist to look after his mother, John brought Mary with him to Ephesus after the crucifixion. She lived there until the day she died, and her house still stands. It's a revered shrine to both Christians and Muslims alike."

"I'd love to visit there someday."

"You will, Cardinal," Abbas winked up into the mirror at Leo's blurred silhouette in the back seat. "I will see to it personally."

Speeding from the crowded Bazaar Quarter along the Ciragan Caddesi, the wide boulevard that parallels the Bosporus on the European side of the city, Leo watched the sprawling metropolis pass outside their windows in a blur of vibrant color and muted sound that reminded him of Rome. He was instantly struck by the similarity of the two ancient cities. Not only were they both dominated by seven hills, but Rome and Istanbul had once been major centers of the Roman Empire. In fact, after the Roman Emperor Constantine had made the city the new eastern capital of the Empire in 330 AD, it became widely known as the "City of Constantine" or Constantinople. Constantine himself wanted the city to be called Nea Roma, Latin for New Rome, but due to the confusion of having two cities with the same name, it never caught on. For almost 1600 years the city was called Constantinople, until the 1930's, when Turkish authorities formally announced that the city would be called by its Turkish name-Istanbul.

Curving up a wide ramp on the European side of the Bosporus Bridge, the big Chevy joined an endless parade of traffic moving from one continent to another across one of the busiest bridges in the world, and within minutes, they found themselves headed east through a warren of narrow streets in the Asian part of the city.

Digging through his backpack, Morelli retrieved a map and glanced over at Abbas. "Has there been any activity at the site since Eduardo left?"

"Nothing obvious, Bishop. I was out there last week, and except for a few graduate students and their professor, the place was practically deserted."

"You say, practically?" Leo asked, leaning forward.

"Yes, Cardinal. The usual sheep herders and farmers still wander by, but as far as I know nothing out of the ordinary has occurred since Eduardo and his team left. Their departure was just as sudden as their arrival the month before. A childhood friend of mine from a nearby village was hired to do some digging at the excavation site, and he said it sounded to him like they didn't find what they were looking for. He said Eduardo was becoming increasingly upset and threatened to fire everyone and hire another team of archaeologists. The next day, when my friend went to work, he and the other men were surprised to find that Eduardo and his people had packed up and left. They actually left the workmen's paychecks lying in envelopes under a rock."

"And the men doing the digging ... they weren't told what they were looking for?"

"Apparently not. Every time they uncovered anything that looked important, Eduardo would show it to his wife, but she would always just shake her head and walk away."

"What about the boy?"

"He stayed mostly to himself. Didn't speak much to anyone, but when he did speak he was very polite. I can tell you one thing though. According to my friend, his mother never let him out of her sight."

"Did your friend ever have a chance to speak with him?"

"Only once, Cardinal. The kid was sitting in the sun all alone on a hillside looking out at the horizon. My friend went over and offered him some bottled water. He said the boy looked up toward the top of the hill where his mother was standing before taking the water, and ...

"Please, Abbas ... any detail could be important."

"He said the boy seemed distant. There was something about him that made my friend feel uneasy whenever he was around."

"In what way?"

"Nothing he could pinpoint. I asked him the same question, and he said it was just a vague feeling of uneasiness ... like when a big dog is walking toward you and staring you down ... not growling but not wagging its tail either. A dog like that ... you never know what it's going to do."

"Interesting. I wish we could have come here sooner."

Abbas cleared his throat. "I don't think that would have been a good idea, Cardinal."

"Why's that?"

"The priest."

"The priest?"

"Sorry, Cardinal, I thought you knew. A Coptic priest arrived the day before they left and offered to bless the site. The security men hustled him away and ...

"And what?"

Abbas glanced up at the rear-view mirror and swallowed. "After his visit, the priest's body erupted in black boils. He died two days later."