Книга - Celtic Fire

Celtic Fire
Alex Archer


A sword, a stone and a deadly legacy…The theft of a whetstone from a Welsh museum and the murder of a curate during a grave robbery seem, at first, like random crimes. But the troubling deeds are linked by a precarious thread. An unusual collection of rare and scattered British antiquities has become a target-and the relics' value lies in something much more dangerous than money… . Annja Creed, archaeologist and host of television's Chasing History's Monsters, is in the U.K. when her mentor, Roux, interrupts her sojourn with news of the thefts. He's certain that the thirteen Treasures of Britain are wanted for their rumored power. Roux tasks Annja with locating and protecting the treasures before the wrong person finds them, meaning she must stand against a woman fueled by madness and the fires of her ancient Celt blood-and a sword as powerful and otherworldly as Annja's own.







A sword, a stone and a deadly legacy…

The theft of a whetstone from a Welsh museum and the murder of a curate during a grave robbery seem, at first, like random crimes. But the troubling deeds are linked by a precarious thread. An unusual collection of rare and scattered British antiquities has become a target—and the relics’ value lies in something much more dangerous than money….

Annja Creed, archaeologist and host of television’s Chasing History’s Monsters, is in the U.K. when her mentor, Roux, interrupts her sojourn with news of the thefts. He’s certain that the thirteen Treasures of Britain are wanted for their rumored power. Roux tasks Annja with locating and protecting the treasures before the wrong person finds them, meaning she must stand against a woman fueled by madness and the fires of her ancient Celt blood—and a sword as powerful and otherworldly as Annja’s own.


“There’s already been enough death. So just put the sword down…”

But Awena wasn’t prepared to give up on her vengeance. She wanted Annja to pay, and lunged at her, slashing wildly. She had no skill with the weapon, but pure rage still made her more than dangerous.

Annja parried blow after blow, fending off the attacks, knowing that like any fire, Awena would burn herself out. She didn’t have the stamina to match Annja, even if the blade somehow imbued her with unholy strength.

Again Awena swung, coming at her, but the intensity of the attacks lessened as she tired. Annja felt the strain, too. The muscles in her sword arm burned where it had been touched by the blue flame.

Annja blocked each parry, swords ringing out as they clashed.

Tears streamed down Awena’s face. She seemed to shrink in on herself, drawing a shallow breath before launching the next blow.

Annja knew that this was the moment to strike.

One chance. One opening. That was all she needed.

She had to end this now….




Celtic Fire

Alex Archer














Contents

Cover (#u7232be13-d20a-52d1-aed7-6442fb2f08ed)

Back Cover Text (#u9d8b2e55-aacb-5737-bffc-408e5eb74182)

Introduction (#ua13c2215-0af0-58ef-a28e-57e22632a523)

Title Page (#ue379bcea-d9cb-5831-bef8-6be846deb188)

The Legend (#u9caa59aa-8841-5601-9a23-fa84123188ad)

Chapter 1 (#u53642148-9811-532a-ac10-c12724c143ee)

Chapter 2 (#ue5707fb1-ef41-5377-98a3-906080d452f4)

Chapter 3 (#u84b18ead-d531-5f25-8f7b-d6ad78fd3816)

Chapter 4 (#ua77a58ef-3b63-58f6-88b8-91671360bc18)

Chapter 5 (#u02796c6c-bd8d-5f08-9128-26d139eff46e)

Chapter 6 (#u9d07499c-66bf-59e6-b191-2eb9feec9416)

Chapter 7 (#u46220641-8f65-52eb-b677-b93d3853594b)

Chapter 8 (#ue656f58f-9940-55a8-b75d-fe602a403d0c)

Chapter 9 (#u6b94e227-cfe8-5d8d-acc9-fef58584906f)

Chapter 10 (#u9554fc60-fa98-5cf7-9872-ea7c1a2c94c3)

Chapter 11 (#u34159a5b-5a15-5386-9e81-d54893c9001b)

Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)


Chapter 1 (#ulink_9b62d9e3-5b19-5836-af75-b1578e3caa55)

Clouds covered the moon. The garden was in near-perfect darkness but for the ambient orange glow of the streetlights pushing at the edges of the shrubbery. Deep among the medicinal herbs there was nothing but shadow. A short distance away two cats fought, hissing and squealing as they duked it out over territorial rights for a scrap of land not worth the urine it took to mark it. And among those deep shadows in the darkest part of the garden, the woman in black let out an almost-silent breath she’d held a second longer than was comfortable.

Awena had walked the narrow paths between the flower beds every day that week, admiring them, passing comment to the gardeners and tourists as she went, making sure that she knew every inch of them. There was no way she was going to stumble into a replica urn or turn her ankle on a shallow border or do anything else to cause undue commotion. A certain amount of noise would get put down to badgers and foxes and other nocturnal scavengers, but a woman crying out—no matter how strangled her cry—only ever sounded like a woman crying out. It was the kind of sound hardwired deep into the human psyche to draw the attention of heroes, especially after the sun went down.

The last thing she needed was any heroes.

The garden was only a brisk five-minute walk from the police station, though through a geographical and town planning quirk it was longer if a car was sent thanks to the twisting one-way streets.

She was playing the law of averages. First responders would instinctively check the front of the building before making sure the perimeter was secure, then eventually make their way over the wall she had climbed and into the garden at the rear. Each action bought her a few precious extra seconds to do what she’d broken into the garden to do.

Lights still burned at the front of the museum, small halogen spotlights meant to entice casual passersby visiting the town in the evening, their glow saying Stop, look around, marvel at the glass display of the frontage and the great pillars of the portico, imagine what it’s like inside. A notice promised free entry, with opening times from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, Monday to Saturday, and from two on Sunday afternoons. It was an imposing building, even in the dark. More so in the dark. It was a mixture of classical Roman and modern architecture. At the rear of the main building stood the Roman garden and a smaller entrance that was invisible to casual prying eyes.

She moved silently, feet ghosting across the ground with the lightest of steps, her black trainers, black jeans and sweatshirt making her almost invisible in the darkness. A navy blue woolen hat kept her hair tucked out of sight and gloves ensured that there would be no fingerprints to give her away. It was all in the planning. Be methodical. Take no unnecessary risks. Idiots took risks. Idiots thought it was cool to make stuff up on the fly and improvise. Awena was not an idiot. The lock wasn’t going to be a challenge. As far as the world was concerned there was nothing in there worth stealing. She knew different.

It was a calculated risk: trying to avoid setting off the alarm would only slow her. It would also make the job exponentially more difficult. She knew exactly how long she had from the moment she deliberately tripped the alarm to the second she disappeared into the night, knew exactly what she was looking for, where it would be and how to get out of there before the first responders were even in their cars.

She broke it down into segments.

Ninety seconds to break the lock—it was fractionally longer than it had taken for her to crack an identical one at home, but then that hadn’t been in the dark. Pressure situations added a few seconds. The risk came as those seconds added up.

One hundred and twenty seconds from opening the door to be in and out before anyone came running. Another sixty seconds to get her treasure to the car—which was parked on the other side of the wall—and a final seventy-five seconds to move the car to a carefully chosen parking bay where no one would notice it.

Two hundred and fifty-five seconds.

There were few houses close by. None overlooked the garden. It was unlikely that even the nosiest of parkers would be out of their beds and twitching their curtains because of the commotion, but even if they did all they’d see would be a car driving away. In the middle of the night a car was a car was a car, almost impossible to differentiate a Volvo from a Ford from a Volkswagen. That was what she was banking on.

Awena took a deep breath and opened the door, starting the stopwatch on her wrist, and stepped inside.

Immediately inside she heard the high-pitched whine indicating the alarm had been triggered.

These systems were set up with a sixty-second grace period for people to enter the code into the alarm box. That meant she only risked one hundred and ninety-five seconds with the escalating shriek of the alarm. One hundred and ninety-five seconds was a lifetime in the silence of a little town in the middle of the night but there was nothing she could do about that. She didn’t have the code. Once the tone changed that signified an alert had been sent to a private alarm company, the alarm company would try to ascertain if it was a genuine alarm call or a mistake, which would eat up a few more precious seconds before they contacted the police. There could be delays at any link along the chain, but she couldn’t rely on that. One hundred and ninety-five seconds, in and out. That was all she had.

Awena moved quickly, making her way into the main exhibits room. The faint glow of the streetlight outside leached through the window, bathing everything inside in its curiously otherworldly orange glow. She pulled the jeweler’s hammer from where she’d carried it tucked into her jeans. As the tone of the alarm changed to an escalating shriek, she delivered a single swing of the hammer, shattering the display case’s glass top into a million orange-filled fragments.

She ignored the cache of denarii in the broken pot and reached inside for her prize.

It was the only thing in the whole museum that held any value as far as Awena was concerned.

She lifted it out of the case.

It was heavier than she’d expected, needing two hands to carry.

When the two-minute timer she’d set on her stopwatch beeped before she was halfway across the floor she realized she wouldn’t be able to get out in time and felt a rising panic as each step seemed to take a little longer than the last. She’d planned this meticulously, down to the second, but the reality of the break-in defied all of her best-laid plans. She was going to need whichever god or devil looked down on thieves to do her a favor if she was going to get out before the police showed up. And even then she had to move quickly. But like it or not, the weight slowed her down. She hadn’t bargained on that. But then, how could she have known how heavy it would actually be?

She pushed the back door open again, leaning into it, and hitched her burden a little higher, trying to run across the gravel until the fire in her legs became too much to bear. The alarm grew progressively louder. Every dog in the neighborhood tried to compete with it. She couldn’t hear anyone shouting to silence them. She couldn’t hear any footsteps or wailing sirens of police cars.

Perhaps someone was looking out for her, after all.

Awena staggered the last few strides to the wall, and as much as she wanted to drop her burden, at least for a moment to catch her breath, she knew if she did there was no way she’d get it up and over the wall. Momentum was vital. All she could do was grit her teeth against the rising tide of agony and push on until she’d strained every single muscle in her body to lever the treasure up and onto the top of it.

She braced herself against the wall, balancing the treasure while she struggled to catch her breath, then hauled herself up and rolled off the wall onto the roof of her Land Rover. She’d parked it right up against the rear wall. It meant leaving tire tracks, but she’d switched the wheels out that evening, using a set of radials meant for a much smaller vehicle. She’d switch them back tomorrow. Awena lay on her back looking up at the moon as clouds drifted across it, then pulled the weight after her, putting it onto the roof beside her, then slid down the side of the car. She’d lost track of time. She couldn’t waste so much as a single second checking her watch.

She managed to get her prize into the Land Rover—hiding it on the floor behind the driver’s seat—just as she heard the sound of a siren in the distance.

Even with the weird night acoustics of the town, she could tell the patrol car was still making its way through the one-way streets. Close but no cigar, she thought, grinning for the first time that night.

She fired the engine up and threw the car into first, pulling away from the grass verge without turning on her lights.

The police siren was closing in, but instead of turning right and following the road out of town, she drove straight across into Broadway, a narrow lane that led only to the Roman amphitheater and the rugby field. There, without so much as a streetlight to guide the way, she had no choice but to turn on the lights so she could navigate what amounted to a dirt track.

It was a calculated chance. She knew how the police thought. They’d expect her to run. Hiding in plain sight wasn’t in their playbook. Hiding out in the parking lot outside the old Roman amphitheater was not logical, so it was her best shot at getting away with the robbery. She’d watched the parking lot over the past week, making sure that it wasn’t unusual for cars to be left overnight. Every night there’d been a handful of motors in there, left by people who’d spent the evening in the rugby club and decided to return to collect their car in the morning.

She pulled into a space beyond the last vehicle and turned off the engine.

She sank back into the soft leather bucket seat and closed her eyes, tension flooding from her body.

She’d done it.

She gave herself a minute to savor the fact, then climbed onto the backseat and settled herself beneath a picnic blanket to wait for morning.


Chapter 2 (#ulink_61ae40ef-e261-5ba3-92de-0a15c5ebb201)

Daybreak began somewhere over the horizon.

The faint glow in the sky signaled the start of the day.

For the curate, there was more than enough time before the 8:00 a.m. service to unlock the doors of the cathedral and make the preparations for Communion.

He hurried along the path in the slowly brightening gloom, enjoying this time of the morning as he always did, when God’s glory was there for all to wonder at. He was a simple man who enjoyed simple pleasures. Anyone who had ever heard him in the pulpit knew that. The curate crossed the old wooden footbridge spanning the brackish water of the narrow River Alyn before it moved out to the sea. The man in the shadows knew that it wouldn’t be long before he arrived—the curate was a creature of habit—and like it or not he was going to have to give up his search for now if he wanted to slip away unnoticed.

He had already spent a couple of days checking the grounds, examining individual gravestones, crossing them off on the rough map he had sketched out to be sure he didn’t return to overlapping areas of the bone garden.

But he still hadn’t found what he was looking for.

More than once he had been approached by staff and clergy of the cathedral asking if he was all right, or if he needed any help looking for a particular grave. Each time he smiled politely, said thanks but no, and they left him to wander the huge grounds. It was more attention than he wanted to draw to himself, but it was of the natural sort, in keeping with what the staff saw every day. That was the trick, to remain inside the ordinary, not to do something outside of it that would be remembered. There were tourists doing wax rubbings of some of the older gravestones, school groups being given a guided tour of the noteworthy dead and told the stories of the old town in hushed voices.

The curate’s shuffling figure drew closer, the man looking like something out of a cartoon as he held up a hand, conducting the nature around him in time with the music he was humming, and the man knew he’d have to stay where he was now until the holy man had gone inside. He was a genuinely happy man. There were so few of those in the world. He almost skipped as he came through the lych-gate, his footing sure on the cracked and broken cobblestones that lead up to the main cathedral doors. A huge weeping willow overhung the path. Its long thin dagger-leaves rustled in the breeze. To hide from the curate, the man had taken to the deep shadows the willow cast rather helpfully.

He was silent, still, allowing the shadows to shroud him. That meant he was as good as invisible to the curate.

As the curate neared he took a single slow step back, allowing the tree trunk to come between them.

When his heel came down it was on something harder than grass, but as he placed his weight on it a sound cried out.

A strange noise...

A voice calling?

The curate stopped in his tracks, his head cocked on one side as he looked directly at the man even though he couldn’t see him for the protection of the shadows.

“Hello?” The curate waited for a response, his eyes scanning the shadows for any sign of movement, which proved he couldn’t see the man hiding there. The man didn’t answer. “Who’s there?”

The man held his breath, readying himself in case the clergyman moved closer.

He would hate to have to kill him.

Mercifully he stood still, too.

He had no idea what had caused the “voice”—the sound of stone grinding against stone. Some sort of echo effect caused by being so close to the great cathedral?

“If you need food or shelter you are welcome,” the curate called. “I can get you a hot drink as soon as I have done my duties inside. Would you like that? Tea? Coffee?”

The man tried hard not to laugh.

There was something about do-gooders that brought out the worst in him. Put them in the robes of the church—which they stupidly believed gave them a cloak of invulnerability—and they were insufferable. He decided to have some fun. “I could murder a cup of tea,” he replied in a voice more gruff and deeper than his usual tone. It masked his accent. “Thank you.”

The cleric waved in his direction, the smile on his face broader than the simple act of boiling water warranted, and made for the main door of the cathedral with his keys jangling in his hand. The curate was clearly a trusting soul. But then why would he imagine the man would need anything more than that? Why would he conjure imaginary thieves intent on mugging him? Why indeed.

No doubt there were processes and procedures in place to protect the relics—triggers that would dispatch a silent alarm to the police if anyone tried to force their way inside. That didn’t concern him. He had no interest in what was inside. None of the ritualistic paraphernalia held any fascination for him. It wasn’t about value. While there was a chance that what he was searching for lay inside the building, it was a slim one because by rights it would have been discovered long ago if that was the case. No. The only thing that interested him about this particular patch of hallowed ground was a long-lost burial plot he knew must lie somewhere within the property.

And what was buried there along with the old bones was worth more to him than anything the church in Wales held precious: it was the final resting place of Giraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales.

Once he was sure that the curate was inside he waited another moment, then heard other voices carrying in the air as the holy man was greeted by his brethren. The man then ran as quickly and as lightly as he could to reach the car he had parked in a pay-and-display lot tucked at the bottom of an overgrown country lane a couple of hundred yards beyond the towering spires of the cathedral.

He was intrigued by the “voice” and the curious stone that seemed to have triggered it, but it wasn’t worth the risk of returning in daylight. At least not today. A few days, maybe, to allow the curate to forget about the poor soul who was too timid to come in to claim his cup of tea.

He started the car and drove carefully through the narrow lanes and one-way system until he found himself on the road to Haverfordwest. Once he reached Solva he pulled off the road to take advantage of the unobstructed—and spectacular—view over the bay, then settled back to catch a couple of hours’ sleep.


Chapter 3 (#ulink_66d0cd43-95ca-5cdd-9aa1-5a26062a5709)

Another day, another flight, another country.

World traveler or not, Annja had flown enough long-haul flights to know she’d want nothing more than sleep when she reached her final destination, but more likely than not the room wouldn’t be made up. That was the problem with an evening departure from New York. It was great in theory, if you could sleep on the plane, but she couldn’t so she’d effectively been up all night without the joys of dancing and pounding nightclub bass to keep her going. That’d slow the whole body clock adjustment thing along with her screwed-up circadian rhythms. One thing she’d noticed was the older she got, the more difficult the adjustment was. A few years ago jet lag barely touched her.

Through the window to her left she saw nothing but cloud below her, thick, white and impenetrable.

She checked her watch. There was still about an hour until landing, which meant somewhere below her lay the endless deeps of the Atlantic Ocean. Soon enough they’d hit the change of air as they traversed Ireland. That was always an invitation to turbulence, like Greenland. It was something about the warm air and cold air colliding.

Annja had been looking forward to this trip for a while.

She’d already earmarked a bunch of places she wanted to visit to research possible segment ideas for Chasing History’s Monsters, not that she’d shared them with Doug Morrell, her producer on the show. As much as she loved Doug, there was a limit to how many times she could stomach her ideas being energetically talked over in favor of zombies and werewolves as seemed to be his usual habit.

She’d made sure there was time for pleasure included in her schedule.

There were places she wanted to revisit while she was here, places that she’d visited when she had researched the show on the legendary King Arthur, and even though she’d thought she had left little unsaid at the time there was something absolutely fascinating—and undying—about the Grail King. She wanted to revisit Glastonbury first, and climb to the top of the tor on a sunny day. She wanted to look down from the summit and imagine what it might have been like if the land around it had been flooded.

Could the tor really have been the mythical island of Avalon?

Anything was possible, of course, but she was experienced enough to put flights of fantasy out of her head. One thing Annja Creed prided herself on was that she dealt in facts. What the rest of the world didn’t know was that there were some facts that it was best they never learned.

“Orange juice?” the flight attendant asked, disturbing her thoughts.

Annja smiled and nodded, then happily let her imagination run away with her while she waited for the captain to turn on the fasten seat belts sign, indicating their descent had begun. She knew that she could spend a month over here and not see a fraction of the places she wanted to visit; the British Isles were a wealth of ruins and history waiting to be explored, of cultures to be rediscovered and ingenuity unparalleled. Her first stop on the itinerary was a place in Wales that had been getting some press on the archaeology discussion boards on the internet.

She’d first heard about the Roman ruins in the small town of Caerleon many years before, but had never had the opportunity to visit. This time she was determined to put that right. Then it was only maybe twenty or thirty miles to Caerphilly, where a wonderfully preserved medieval castle still watched over the town and a number of faithfully re-created siege engines were on display and demonstrated regularly for the benefit of tourists.

What was doubly interesting about Caerleon, though, was that it was also one of the possible sites of Camelot, the fabled court of King Arthur, according to the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century. There was also a reference to Arthur fighting a battle against the Romans in the “City of the Legion” according to Nennius in his Historia Brittonum; this could easily have been Caerleon, home of the Second Augustan legion. This was why she loved archaeology; it was more than just digging things out of the ground. It was all about sifting through the clues buried in early writings and using them to locate important lost sites. It was more than just history. It was akin to lore and legend in the absolute nerdiest sense.

Annja hadn’t even realized her breakfast had been placed in front of her as she had been so caught up in her thoughts. She wouldn’t reach the small Welsh town until tomorrow, but she had given herself a few days to stay. She wanted to make sure she saw everything there was to see in case the chance to return didn’t come around again.

She picked at the food without any real appetite and drained the orange juice. There would be plenty of time to grab something else to eat later; she’d promised herself a traditional English breakfast of sausage, bacon, eggs, potatoes, beans and fried tomatoes. She knew a great little greasy spoon just around the corner from the station. The locals called the specialty “the heart attack on a plate,” but it was nothing compared to some of the stuff they served back home.

She looked through her papers one last time before packing them away for landing, studying the photographs and maps of the area around Caerleon. She skipped past the pages on Caerphilly, slipping those back into her folder. There were another half a dozen folios like this in her case—the other places she planned on visiting on her trip—but they could wait.

When the plane finally touched down she was ready for the shuffle-race to the exit with everyone standing up and crowding the aisles long before the cabin doors were open.

By the time she’d collected her luggage from the baggage carousel, and gotten through customs and passport control, the clouds had begun to break up. It wasn’t exactly glorious out, but it was a good morning and it looked like it was going to be a better day, which meant the drive into Wales should be easy, as long as tiredness didn’t mean sleeping in a lay-by somewhere near the River Severn.

Annja claimed a hire car from the desk, then went on an expedition to find it. She scoured parking bays that went on forever in a recursive loop of identical hire cars until a click of the key fob resulted in a flicker of lights identifying her ride.

She sat inside the car for a few minutes, trying to familiarize herself with the right-hand-drive position before pulling away. She repeated, “They drive on the left” like a holy mantra as if she really needed any reminding from the minute she hit the open road of the M25.

It felt good to be driving once she got to the motorway rather than crawling through the airport’s one-way system. She rolled one shoulder after the other to free it from the kinks that still lay in her muscles from the flight.

The sun was behind her and the steady flow of traffic away from London moved at an even pace with vehicles peeling off and others joining at every junction.

In an ideal world she would have made the journey a little more slowly, but her speed was dictated by the cars and lorries around her. Annja was caught in a stream where each vehicle moved at the same speed as the one in front so she cranked the radio up, choosing volume over taste, and wound the window down. It was summer, after all.

Eventually the discomfort of sitting still for so long after the flight left her with no choice but to pull off at a motorway services area and go in search of coffee and the chance to stretch her legs. The decor was bad, the coffee was worse. She wound up getting back in the car and heading toward the motorway less than fifteen minutes after she’d pulled into the rest stop. The next signpost promised that Cardiff was less than fifty miles away. The turnoff for Caerleon would come some time before that.


Chapter 4 (#ulink_318da2fc-e2db-52ad-aa68-bd459cfd8661)

An engine fired up beside her, gunned quickly into life and was followed by the crunch of tires on gravel as the car pulled away. Awena knew that it was safe to move at last. She’d lain still and silent, listening to the wail of the museum alarm as it carried on into the night air, and then drifted off after it fell silent, one hand on the stone artifact she had liberated from the glass case. She liked to think that she’d saved it from being transferred to some dusty old vault somewhere where it would have been hidden away until doomsday, completely forgotten about. That would have been a bigger crime than anything she’d done.

She hadn’t realized what she’d been looking at the first time she’d laid eyes on the exhibit—why would she have?—but there was something about it that had brought her back to it again and again, until she was finally convinced that it was mislabeled. The card had described it as a quern—a hand-grinding stone for grain—but it clearly wasn’t; it was too large and too heavy to be one of those. Once upon a time she might have pointed the mistake out to one of the staff to let them know how clever she was and basically how stupid they were for screwing it up. She’d grown up a lot since the days wasted in museums with her easily embarrassed twin, Geraint, who frequently turned a darker shade of red than their flame-red hair while he tried to pretend he had no idea who she was. It never worked. Now, thankfully, she was comfortable with the idea that she was the sharpest person in any given room she walked into. It wasn’t arrogance; it was just a fact. It didn’t matter who else was there, Awena was ferociously intelligent.

Once the sounds of the car had faded into the distance she eased herself up a little to scope out the lane. A glance through the rear window revealed a blanket of mist across the rugby field, shrouding it with a soft white in the early-morning sun. There was no sign of anyone else around. She’d reached the point of no return. If she waited too much longer to make her move, traffic to the heritage site would increase and it’d be difficult to slip out of the car to stretch the kinks out before getting back into the driver’s seat without anyone noticing.

She opened the door.

The air was colder than she’d expected. She used the discarded blanket to cover the stone. A dog came bounding toward her along the lane, its owner calling after it, but it wasn’t slowing down. It raced with its tongue lolling between open jaws, full of excitement. Awena wasn’t afraid of dogs, but it was the kind of encounter the mutt’s owner would remember, and the last thing she wanted was to be memorable. With the dog still thirty feet away, she slipped back behind the wheel and slammed the door. The confused animal stopped dead in its tracks and stared at her for a moment, wounded, like it couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to stop and play with it, then looked back in the direction it had come from before it took off into the mist-shrouded field.

Awena waited a moment before starting the car, watching the dog’s owner shrug helplessly and follow after it into the field, then pulled away.

The streets were dead. She reached the end of the lane, putting on the blinkers to indicate she was turning right. She couldn’t see any policemen outside the museum, though she had half expected a guard to have been posted.

Alongside the building where her Land Rover had parked she saw a white van.

She pulled out into the road, driving slowly and straining to catch a glimpse of the writing on the side of the van: a twenty-four-hour locksmith. She smiled. Typical—shut the stable door after the horse has well and truly bolted.

She followed the road as it arced right, curving around a big old Gothic school building, and took her beyond the police station. There was no sign of anyone coming or going. Any panic or rush of excitement at the break-in and the resultant flurry of activity had died down and life had settled back into the normality of its daily routine.

Awena turned left at the end of the street and followed the road through a series of villages that fed one into the next. Eventually, she picked up a faster road and was able to put her foot down on the gas.

She allowed herself to laugh as she felt the rush of speed and the excitement of her plan falling into place. She’d done it. Simple as that. She’d won. She couldn’t wait to show Geraint her trophy, even if he still had doubts about what it was that she had stolen. She’d just have to convince him. Awena desperately wanted to call her brother, even though the digits on the dashboard reminded her that it was barely 7:00 a.m. He wasn’t an early riser.

She’d almost forgotten that he’d stayed the night in London.

She was going to enjoy the look on his face when he laid his eyes on the treasure.

Like the old commercial said...priceless.


Chapter 5 (#ulink_248d74a8-55c5-5612-9bc9-789d35052a45)

The Welsh seemed intent on charging Annja to enter their country—or was it the English charging her for the luxury of leaving theirs? She wasn’t entirely sure, but it was the first time she could remember being charged to cross a border. Signs at the side of the sweeping bridge that carried traffic over the River Severn warned that tollbooths lay ahead, clearly marked with the cost for each type of vehicle. It’s highway robbery, she thought, and grinned at her own dumb joke.

Brake lights glowed in the distance; there was a long queue to the control booths taking the money.

Annja reached for her purse as she joined the back of one of several snakes of cars that had formed and pulled out a crisp ten-pound note fresh from the currency exchange office.

A quick glance to the left confirmed she was already on the far side of the river. To her right she could see the supports of a second, older-looking bridge.

Cars edged forward slowly, and as was the way with queues, some moved faster than others—which really meant all of them seemed to be moving faster than hers. As she neared the front, she realized that some of the booths were actually automated, self-service barriers while the queue that she was in relied on someone giving change.

The guy in the next car flashed a smile across the lanes to her, but Annja was more interested in the car ahead. It wasn’t that she didn’t like drawing grins from strangers; just like everyone else she found them flattering, and his smile did draw a smile from her, but she didn’t want him to see it and think he’d somehow made her day. She was contrary like that. Plus, his queue was moving faster than hers. He’d have another driver to flirt with in a moment.

Eventually her turn came. She smiled to the tired-looking teller, trading money for less money, and he raised the barrier with a snatch of something she didn’t understand but assumed was the Welsh equivalent of Have a nice day or Drive safe.

She pulled away as cars raced into the bottleneck of decreasing lanes, each driver looking to secure one of the three lanes ahead of them before it became a mad scramble. The merging was surprisingly smooth, all things considered, with cars filtering in and drivers allowing one another enough space for safety. It wouldn’t have been like that back home, she thought, letting a black Jaguar XJS slip into the lane ahead of her. It was only when the traffic had eased to a steady fifty-five pushing sixty that she realized how tightly she’d been gripping the wheel. Annja relaxed her grip and eased back on the accelerator, signaling to move into the slower traffic of the left-hand lane.

She glanced across to see that the car beside her was the same guy who had flashed her a smile in the queue at the tollbooth. He slowed down and gave her room to pull across in front of him. This time she smiled back.

The off ramp she needed came upon her sooner than she’d anticipated, and almost disappeared into the rearview mirror before she’d seen it. It took a bit of emergency maneuvering, but she managed to cut across the chevrons painted across the road and up onto the ramp before she ran out of room, half expecting the driver behind to hit his horn in protest. But she saw the smiler was still behind her, still smiling.

It was just her luck he was turning off the motorway, too.

Annja followed the brown signs with the outline of a Roman helmet, indicating a tourist attraction, as the road took her through the outskirts of the city of Newport with its run-down houses and seen-better-days factories, before steering the car out into the countryside proper. The short journey from the motorway to the outskirts of Caerleon only took ten minutes or so, but the change of pace with the speed limit dropping by thirty miles per hour made it feel like so much longer.

The approach offered a spectacular view of the town and castle. An old stone bridge too narrow for two cars to pass side by side spanned the River Usk before the road swept right to a wonderful holly-and-ivy country pub. The place had a thatched roof that made it look like something that had slipped through a crack in time from the 1800s. It stood invitingly on the river’s bank, promising refreshment and a nice warm hearth. Just the sight of it brought on a sudden thirst and gnawing hunger so Annja decided to take care of both, even though she was only a short distance from her hotel.

The gently swaying sign had the gold-painted words Miller’s Arms and a crest. A smaller blue plate on the wall explained that the building was originally a sixteenth century coaching inn and lots of the oldest features seemed to have survived into its new life. It took Annja a few minutes to get used to the landlord’s accent as he offered her his very proud spiel, but after a while she found her mind singing along with the rise and fall of his speech.

“You from America, are you, then, me love?” he asked, pulling a bottle of water from one of the fridges behind the bar. She’d never heard anyone call her “me love” before; “my love” was more northern, but the “me” seemed slightly tortured. She smiled as he offered ice by holding a scoop over a plastic ice bucket but she declined.

“For my sins,” she said, taking a sip of the water, realizing just how thirsty she really was. The label on the bottle was in Welsh and seemingly unpronounceable, which she thought was cute. “Hope you won’t hold it against me.”

“We get quite a few of your sort through here over the summer, people coming to take a look at the ruins and stuff. That why you’re here?”

“That’s me.” She laughed. “Just another tourist.”

He reached to a dispenser on the side of the bar that was stuffed full of slightly faded leaflets about the various attractions and places of interest in the area and plucked a few of them out for her. “Then you might find these useful,” he said.

“You on a commission?” she joked as she glanced through them.

“Well, the museum is free, and so is the amphitheater, so it’s not going to make me rich. There’s a charge to go and look around the old Roman baths, but hard as I’ve tried to convince them, no backhanders have come my way.” He smiled again, showing he was joking, even if it wasn’t a very good one. “There should be one of their leaflets over there.” He pointed to another, larger rack that was perched on a low windowsill on the other side of the room.

Annja picked through the stack of leaflets he’d selected for her.

One was for the local museum, which was at the top of her list of places to visit, another about the work of Cadw, the body that looked after ancient monuments in Wales, and the third was a street map of the town. It was a decent selection; she’d already decided to examine them a little more closely while she sat with her drink.

Annja glanced down the small laminated menu on the bar, thought about asking what was good, then remembered something Roux had said about British cuisine—anything was good as long as it was brown. The Brits seemed to have a penchant for brown food, but she didn’t fancy a pie or battered fish or anything heavy, so she took a chance on a green salad.

“There’s a few tables free down by the river if you’d like to sit outside,” the landlord said as he wrote her order on a tiny pad of paper and tore the top sheet off. “I’ll bring your food out to you.”

“Sounds good,” she said, paying for the food and another bottle of water, then heading out into the sunshine. A haphazard arrangement of picnic tables and benches were set out on the grassy bank. There were a dozen large umbrellas fixed through the centers to provide shelter from the sun. Half of them were occupied; some with couples who were oblivious to anything but each other, others with couples who had clearly been together so long that they had little left to say to each other and others with men intent on filling every inch of space with empty beer glasses.

A mother fussed at a wasp that was buzzing around a small child in a buggy beside her. Annja thought that there was something about the scene that was so English but then corrected herself, remembering that Wales was very definitely not England and saying it was tantamount to a hate crime in some minds.

The water in the river seemed low, with steep mud banks on either side. She was staring at some kind of mud-wallowing bird she couldn’t name when the landlord appeared with her lunch. “Low tide,” he said as if reading her mind. “At high tide the flow slows down and the water level rises as it’s being held back.”

She’d forgotten how close they were to the sea and yet she knew that the Romans had brought boats up here from somewhere beyond the horizon. It was funny how the journey across the country could disorientate you. The landlord had moved on before she could reply. She saw him work with one swift movement, pulling a glass towel from where it had been tucked into the top of his trousers and flicking the troublesome wasp away from the child, earning a grateful smile from the mother in return. He stacked the unwanted glasses from the crowded table into a precarious tower and headed inside with them.

Annja marveled at him, not for his dexterity, but the way he seemed to be aware of all these different things going on around him and just dealt with them with as little fuss as possible. It was a skill. But then to do a job like this you had to be a master of dealing with the mundane as well as the surprises that might turn up.

From where she was sitting she could see the narrow stone bridge that had brought her over the Usk. Cars came and went, though the sound of the small amount of traffic didn’t disturb the tranquility of the pub garden or drown out the burbling of the river. A bird swooped and touched the surface of the water, snatching something up in its beak and taking to the air again. There was something beautiful about the motion. There was no violence, no brutality in the action; it had more in common with plucking fruit from a tree.

The garden was a little slice of paradise.

Annja spread out the street map that the landlord had given her on the table in front of her. The lightest of breezes tugged at the corners so she weighted the farthest one from her down with the water bottle and the half-empty glass. Back in the car she had a number of printouts she’d pulled off the internet when she’d been prepping for the trip, but here, now, this was so much more real.

She saw the river marked on the map in blue and the bridge that crossed it. The Miller’s Arms was also clearly marked on the map. She traced a finger along the road that continued past the pub, picking out the museum, the amphitheater and the Priory Hotel, where she’d booked herself in for a few days. Despite the relatively small scale of the map, she could count the number of buildings between the pub and the hotel on two hands, proving just how close everything was. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes’ walk.

She’d been eating without realizing or tasting what she’d been putting into her mouth and now her plate was empty.

Annja pushed it to one side, poured the last of the water into her glass before she folded the map back into its original shape.

A quick glance around her proved that life did indeed go on without one; the young mother with her wasp-fearing child had left, but at least the middle-aged couple still weren’t talking to each other. The group of men were working on another empty glass mountain. Time seemed to be passing at a different pace. She could easily have sat there for the rest of the afternoon and just let the world pass her by. After all, it wasn’t often life afforded Annja Creed the luxury of just sitting and thinking about nothing in particular other than enjoying what was around her for what it was.

She drained the last of the water from her glass, running her fingers on the outside to wipe the condensation away.

Another wasp fussed around her empty plate. But rather than dive-bomb her, it skirted the edge of her plate, obviously feasting on the sweet tang of leftover dressing, so she let it alone.

A wave of tiredness hit her from nowhere.

She caught her head lolling and realized she’d pretty much blanked out while staring at the wasp. So much for soaking up the warmth of the sun. She should probably check into the hotel and grab a few hours’ shut-eye, but if she slept it was unlikely she’d wake up again until the next morning, wasting the rest of the day.

She hated wasting time.


Chapter 6 (#ulink_92815fde-a6e8-5fe1-9218-4836c8ca476f)

The house was silent.

It felt strange to be coming home to an empty house. She was so used to Geraint being there. So used to him just being part of her world it felt peculiar that he’d stay in London even an hour longer than necessary. But he had.

Awena couldn’t wait to show him the fruits of her labors and, rather like the eager child she used to be, felt acutely disappointed she couldn’t do it straightaway.

They had shared the large house halfway up the mountain—looking down on every other house in the valley—since they’d been children, usually in the care of a housekeeper-cum-nanny while their father came and went.

That she could no longer remember what her mother looked like without looking at the few photographs they still had of her was a constant source of pain for her, but memories were like that. So much so she couldn’t be sure if the few she had of the woman were actually true or created from the stories she’d been told by her father. He’d even made her promise not to forget. Could she really remember the trip to St. Davids in Pembrokeshire on the west coast of Wales, when she’d barely been two years of age? It seemed unlikely, but the memory was in her head whenever she reached for it. The place was no more than a village, but somehow had been designated a city simply because some religious soul a few hundred years back decided to build his cathedral there. She’d been there many times since that first visit, of course, but it was the first visit she impossibly remembered. It didn’t matter, really, even if it was an imagined memory. So were the occasional flashes she got of her mother smiling down at her. Sometimes the mind was just being kind.

It had been a few years since the old housekeeper had lived with them. She’d been replaced by an occasional cleaner who ran the vacuum and a duster over the place a couple of times a week. And if necessary she could double as a cook if they wanted something beyond Awena’s culinary expertise—but those occasions were few and far between, with her father rarely coming home these days.

In the evenings it was almost always just the two of them, comfortable with no other company and never needing anyone else. It was how they had been for most of their lives. It was how she wanted it to stay for the rest of their days. Her greatest fear was that there would come a time when one or the other of them would feel the need for more, for that something their twin couldn’t give.

She wrapped the stone in the blanket that had kept her warm through the night and carried it into the house from the car.

It felt even heavier now than it had when she had stolen it from the museum, but then she had been fueled by adrenaline and urged on by the fear of discovery. Now there was no strength brought on by the risk of failure, and she was still stiff and tired after trying to sleep in the back of the Land Rover. She wasn’t good when it came to sleeping away from her own bed. She was a homebody. Besides being cramped, the back of the car had been stuffy and her sleep had been restless at best.

She felt an overwhelming sense of relief when she placed her burden down carefully on the scrubbed pine kitchen table.

She was hungry and thirsty and in desperate need of a hot shower and fresh clothes. But she was happy and that was the most important thing.

She tackled her needs one at a time: first, she spooned coffee into the filter machine, filled the reservoir with water and switched it on, then she headed upstairs for a shower. She knew that she would feel better after that, more alert and ready to face the day. Geraint was unlikely to be back from his trip until at least lunchtime. Like their dad he was always disappearing somewhere, but that was the nature of his job; people needed him to fight their technological fires. It didn’t matter if it was their websites, their databases, their security protocols or whatever else he did; if it was to do with computers he was every bit as much a wizard as Myrddin Wyllt. That thought led her to stretching out on her bed without even getting undressed, and pretty soon she’d drifted into sleep, all thoughts of showers and coffee gone.

When she woke it was well past eleven o’clock and the sun was glaring in through her window.

The heat from the shower quickly steamed up the small room. She stripped, shedding her clothes like a snake sloughing its skin, and stepped behind the curtain.

Needles of hot water stung where they struck, turning her skin red and raw, but the warmth made her feel alive.

She lathered up, luxuriating in the little agonies of the hot water, suds sluicing off her back to gurgle down the drain, and long after she’d finished washing she stayed beneath the spray, head down, her long red hair sodden and hanging over her face.

Finally, after more than half an hour under the flow with the water finally beginning to turn cold, she switched off the shower and stepped out.

She felt the sudden blast of cold air from the open window, but didn’t move for the towel. Instead, she let the air dry her body, then dressed in fresh clothes, her damp hair sticking to the clean T-shirt as she went downstairs.

The hot-plate of the coffee machine hissed as she entered the kitchen, the pot dripping condensation down the outside of the bell jar. She’d put enough water in the pot so that it hadn’t dried up yet, but there was only enough for one treacle-thick cup, so she poured it and focused her attention to the bundle on the table.

She didn’t unwrap it straightaway. She stared at it, like she half expected there to be nothing inside the blanket. Then slowly she eased back first one corner and then the next.

It wasn’t much to look at—a simple piece of stone with a hole in the middle.

It wasn’t the kind of treasure that made it on to TV shows. It wasn’t sexy enough for any of those. Looking at it, it was easy to see why it had been mistaken for a quern. Although a decent archaeologist ought to have been asking where the second offset hole was. Otherwise, how could they have inserted the stick to rotate the stone and grind grain between this stone and the second lying beneath it?

But it could have been the bottom of the pair, she thought suddenly, angry that she hadn’t considered it earlier. Her heart raced a little faster at the mere thought of it. She scrambled to get her fingers underneath and lever it up on its edge. Her fingertip snagged at the rough stone until she realized that she could use the blanket as a cradle to tilt it upward until it stood on its round edge.

With one hand on either side she ran her fingertips over either side, comparing them for differences in texture.

If this had been used for grinding corn, then one face ought to have been worn smooth as it rubbed against its mate. Both were rough. She couldn’t find anything resembling wear or weathering that she would have expected on a millstone.

Her hands were trembling as she moved them out toward the very edge of the stone, knowing that this was where she’d find the proof she needed to confirm that the stone had been used the way she suspected.

She moved gingerly at first, with the lightest of touches, then started laughing as she rubbed her hand across the smoothest of surfaces.

This was no quern; it had been used for sharpening blades, not grinding down grain. She knew that she was right. The only question that remained was whether this was the stone she was looking for, or whether it was just any old mislabeled whetstone, and she couldn’t work that out by touch alone. It would have to wait. Today was about showing her doubting twin precisely what she was capable of.

It had taken a while to convince him that she was right about the stone, and even then there was that gleam in his eye he got when he was humoring her. Thirteen minutes older than her, he liked to think that he was the dynamic force in their little family of two, but she was no slouch. And this would prove it.

She held the cup of coffee a few inches from her mouth, feeling the heat and breathing in the aroma, savoring every second of it.

* * *

BEFORE AWENA WAS able to brew another pot of coffee, she heard the sound of a car approaching.

Geraint coming home.

She wanted to rush to the door and hurry him inside, eager to show what she’d found. It was funny how life didn’t change—once upon a time it would have been showing him the new eggs in the birds’ nests or foxes in the woods behind the house. Now it was just a different sort of treasure. He’d always humored her then, always followed out to let Awena show him what she’d found and pretended it was the most interesting thing in the world, even if he’d already seen it. He was the perfect big brother like that. Or he had been. He wasn’t quite so generous now, a little less tolerant of her whims now they were older and supposed to be beyond flights of fancy. He wouldn’t chase her down to the bottom of the garden to hunt fairies anymore, but that didn’t stop her wanting to share her tumbling train of thought with him every bit as much as she always had.

“Awena,” he called, opening the door.

So many great things in life began with something simple like a door opening, she thought, metaphorical or literal.

“Kitchen,” she replied, grinning like an idiot despite wanting to come across as nonchalant, confident, grown up. She wanted him to walk into the room on his own and see the stone on the table for himself, let him join the pieces together and work it out without her having to spell it out for him.

But he ruined it, walking in blindly and sitting down without even noticing it. He was obviously preoccupied with something he was as every bit as desperate to tell her as she was to tell him. So Awena said nothing, giving him a chance to say his piece, but then he saw the huge stone and whatever he’d been about to tell her was shunted out of his mind.

“What the hell is that?”

It wasn’t quite the response she had been hoping for, but it had certainly got his attention.

It was painfully obvious he was unhappy she’d gone ahead and done everything without him, but she didn’t care. She’d pulled it off. She’d proved what she was capable of. She’d done it. Not them. Not him. She had.

She twisted her lips into a half smile and shook her head, knowing that her eyes were still smiling.

“Don’t play games, Awena. There was no need to take stupid risks. We should have planned this out together. There were other ways.”

“Were there, now? Like what exactly? Walking up to the museum with a blank check and saying name your price? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But I could have paid someone else to do it.” He thumped the table in frustration, but the stone didn’t even move so much as a millimeter. “There was no need to put yourself in danger. What would I do without you? Did you even think about me when you were playing cat burglar?”

“There were no risks,” she lied smoothly. It helped that she almost believed that herself. “It was a good plan. Besides, I wanted to do this on my own. I wanted to make you proud of me. I wanted to make him proud.” She wasn’t sure why she said that. She hadn’t thought of their father for days, for weeks even. But that was her dad; he was like a specter that loomed over the pair of them, ever present even when he wasn’t there. She saw the way that Geraint looked at her when she mentioned him, but let it pass.

“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear about it.” He raised both palms in surrender, then walked past the table to join her, seemingly more interested in the coffeepot than her prize. It hurt that he showed no interest in it, but she knew he was just trying to punish her.

Awena was pissed with him. She’d been so excited to share her success with him, but now all she felt like doing was giving him the silent treatment. He always made out that he was the strong one, the rock, but she’d seen how he could be when he thought she wasn’t looking. He might not like what she had done, but he wouldn’t stay angry with her for long.

She’d give him an hour.

Maybe less.

Then he’d be all over the stone, talking about it, and wanting to hear every audacious word of her heist like it was some grand story.... Still, he’d already ruined it for her.

“So, how was your trip?” she asked, turning the focus back on him. She knew he was dying to tell her now he was over the shock of what she’d done. He shrugged. “Stop sulking,” she said. “You know you want to tell me.”

“Fine,” was all he managed, but nothing more. He still couldn’t take his eyes from the stone. She continued to sip her coffee in silence and waited as he started to circle it until finally he crouched down to look at it more closely.

She smiled as he ran his fingertips over the surface just as she had done.

He was hooked.


Chapter 7 (#ulink_cf4ade52-b81a-5017-ae7f-87d07482acd3)

The museum was closed.

Annja had moved her car from the pub to the hotel, checked in, dropped off her bags and, despite the lure of the big comfortable bed, turned around and headed straight back out again. She’d hoped to get a quick look around the museum before it closed for the afternoon, but when she got there she saw a makeshift sign on the door that said it was closed for the day, so it’d have to wait until tomorrow.

She peered through the long window, pressing her face up to the glass. There were lights on inside, and she could just about make out the shadow-shapes of a handful of people milling around. She tried to shield more of the window from the sun, cupping her hands around her brow as though peering through binoculars. She saw a woman talking to a policeman. There was another man—dressed in overalls measuring up the size of one of the display cabinets. The woman saw her face pressed up against the window and mouthed the words Closed and Sorry, shaking her head before she returned her attention to the policeman with his notebook poised.

It wasn’t exactly difficult to put the pieces together: a man measuring up a display case, a policeman taking a statement; there’d obviously been a robbery. It was surprising that a local museum would have any particularly valuable exhibits, though. Normally these rural sites just offered a few fairly interesting treasures dug up from the site, a few battered coins and rings, with the most precious golden torcs and such being spirited away to London for the British Museum’s collections.

The brochure the landlord had given her mentioned a cache of small Roman coins, which would be both difficult to sell and unlikely to fetch a great deal of money—certainly not enough to make the effort worthwhile—so the theft was more likely to be a case of petty vandalism, probably bored kids looking for a thrill than any international criminal masterminds at work. Kids would have no idea as to the value of anything inside the collection and probably thought it was all priceless.

Hopefully no one had been hurt.

Annja turned her back on the museum and crossed the quiet road.

A handful of cars had driven by while she stood there. Was the place always this quiet? A woman passed her with a buggy. It took Annja a second to realize it was the same woman she had seen in the beer garden earlier, proving just how small a town it really was. The woman smiled at her, clearly enjoying the momentary respite her sleeping baby offered.

Annja proceeded along the road. An old lady weighted down by straining bags overfilled with shopping nodded at her as she shuffled off toward her home, stockings rolled down around swollen ankles. It was like something out of an L. S. Lowry painting, only she wasn’t a matchstick. This was a sleepy little town where strangers smiled at one another in the street. She was from a neighborhood where the guy in the apartment across the landing didn’t say hello, never mind a complete stranger. Her commute involved people crowded in on the subway too scared to make eye contact because they never quite knew what was going on in the heads of their fellow passengers. It was a different world. As much as she enjoyed the hustle and bustle of big cities and the anonymity that came with them, there was something special about quiet places like this. She couldn’t live here, she’d go out of her mind after a week, but for a couple of days it was a great place to recharge.

A signpost shaped like a finger pointed down a narrow lane, promising her that it led to the amphitheater. She’d followed the same lane to move her car from the pub to the rear of the hotel.

Time to go exploring.

Annja walked past the cluster of cottages on the left and realized that it was in the garden of one that the most recent discoveries had been made. She tried to recall what she’d read. There was some kind of preservation order on the buildings that was supposed to prevent people from digging too deep. But the urgent removal of a tree teetering due to severe storms had exposed earth that had never been excavated and led to all sorts of wonderful finds. Sometimes life was funny like that, in order to preserve one way of life another had been kept hidden for over a century and it had taken a brutal act of nature herself to change that. Annja skirted the gardens, following the lane down toward the ruin.

It wasn’t the first time she’d seen an amphitheater, but there was something incredible about seeing it here, right out at the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire.

Beyond the houses the lane opened up, providing more room for school buses to negotiate the track down to the ruin. The camber was quite severe, allowing the rainwater to sluice away without eroding too much of the track. She saw a row of buses parked on the right with a cluster of teenagers milling around them, waiting to board. The kids were full of noise. A few others made their way to cars parked on the other side, no doubt to drive home with parents who’d chaperoned the visit.

Annja kept close to the fence, looking for a gate into the site. What she found looked like a rusty old turnstile from a ballpark. She slipped through, keen to be away from the critical mass of teenagers.

She stepped into a huge open field, its grass clipped as short as a playing field, which maintained the illusion of having entered the ghost of the old stadium. In the center, instead of a diamond, she spotted an information board. She walked over to it.

As she approached the board, the excavated amphitheater was revealed by the subtle change in elevation. It was easy to imagine how the remains had been hidden beneath earth and grass not so long ago. She walked in the footsteps of history, following a line of Romans and Britons before her to the excavation, eventually reaching the center. At this point, she imagined the wooden structure that had once stood above these stone foundations and how it must have towered above anyone down in the arena.

The acoustics were interesting; the stone sides cut out the external noise. Despite the fact they were no more than a couple of hundred meters away, she couldn’t hear the kids who had still seemed so loud before she’d gone down into the heart of the monument. It was a curiously intimate moment of tranquility.

Not that it lasted.

Her cell phone’s ringtone ended the peace.

She glanced at the display before answering.

“Garin,” she said. He only ever seemed to call when it was bad news. That had become the nature of their relationship. Save a girl once, she’d joked, and you think it gives you the right to ruin her life. “What can I do for you?”

“Ah, Annja, sweetheart, how I’ve missed your dulcet tones,” he said, making no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Not missing me too much, I hope?”

“I’ve not even been here a day—besides, it’s hard to miss you.” She checked her watch and tried to work out what the time was where he was, but then realized that she had no idea where he was in the world.

“Well, according to this little gadget I’m looking at you’re in Wales of all places.”

“Spying on me?”

“Hardly. It’s just this new box of tricks we’re trying out that tracks back signals when they bounce off satellites. It’s a refinement on the old caller ID. You never know when it might come in handy.”

“I’m not sure I want to think about why you’d need to know exactly where someone’s calling from—mainly because every reason I imagine will probably be suspicious if not illegal.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.”

“So what can I do for you? Got some relatives you want me to visit?” She looked across the fields at a flock of sheep nuzzling along the barbed wire of the perimeter fence, and pushed a toe against a pile of rotting cigarette butts. She could never understand why people would litter in a place like this.

“Ask not what you can do for me, ask only what I can do for you.”

“What on earth are you babbling about?”

“I’m nearby, someplace they call London. Ha! I figured if you were at a loose end I could nip over and entertain you.”

“Entertain me?.”

“I’m a lover of beautiful women, Annja, you know me. I don’t discriminate—black, white, in color—doesn’t matter, beauty is beauty. And I like to collect beautiful things.”

“And vacuous ones.”

“Oh, you wound me...though I will admit to a weakness for the odd dumb blonde. I can’t help myself. That isn’t a crime. So, let me entertain you.”

On a bucket list of wants and desires, that was right down there on the bottom of Annja’s bucket along with the dregs. But for all his lecherous ways, Garin was charming, and good company, hence the ease with which he took to womanizing. “I’ll give the offer its due consideration, but right now I’m hoping for a couple of days of me time.”

“Well, if you change your mind...”

“You’ll be the first to know,” she replied.

“Excellent,” he said. “Have fun and try not to miss me too much.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said, but he’d already killed the call.

A boy peered over the edge of the grassy bank, looking down at her, Roman emperor to her gladiator waiting in the pit. He disappeared back behind the edge without giving her the thumbs-up.

Annja left the amphitheater, climbing the hillside that would have been banked seating back in the day. She then spotted her Roman emperor; he’d moved on to the shelter of a hedge at the end of the field with a couple of his friends. They were huddled together. She saw the spark of a lighter, which therefore explained the cigarette butts.

Behind the boys she could see a lonely spire.

She left them to smoke their coffin nails and went to check it out.


Chapter 8 (#ulink_8da79d3a-10e1-5e23-b187-e6c87ed6036d)

“I don’t mean to be difficult—” which of course was exactly what he meant to be “—but what exactly are you are planning to do with this thing now?” Geraint tilted his head slightly, making a show of thinking about it. “I suppose it could make an interesting flowerpot. Maybe you could turn it into a water feature?”

“Or I could hit you over the head with it,” Awena said. Her twin was proving more obstinate and much less enthusiastic than she had hoped he’d be, but then it hadn’t been his idea to steal the stone in the first place, so perhaps it was all just a case of sour grapes. The important thing was that he agreed with her—the stone wasn’t what the museum curator had thought it was. Unfortunately, he didn’t agree that it made it any more important than a well-preserved whetstone. That it had been used to hone blades rather than crush grain made no difference to him.

She took a deep breath, refusing to let him wind her up.

“Do I really have to spell it out to you?” She shook her head.

“Spell away, dear sister. I’m clueless.”

And he really was. He couldn’t see why she’d been compelled to steal it before it was consigned to some dank storage area in the bowels of the museum, never to be seen again.

She wanted him to be as wrapped up with possibilities as she was, not just humoring her. It might have been her idea, but he was her other half and she didn’t just want him to be in this with her; she needed him to be part of it.

“Don’t laugh, but I’m ninety-nine percent certain what you are looking at is the Whetstone of Tudwal Tudglyd.” She let that sink in. The whetstone was one of their father’s obsessions. He’d spent most of his life chasing around the country in search of it.

Geraint stood in silence, running a finger over the stone. “Could it be?” What he really meant was: What makes you so sure that it’s one of the things Father wasted his life on?

And it had been a waste.

They’d grown up with the stories and knew all about the thirteen Treasures of Britain and their supposed properties. She’d grown up with the myths even if she hadn’t grown up with a father, as he’d spent most of their childhood and adolescence chasing shadows.

“Don’t do this, Awena,” he said finally, not unkindly. “Once you start on this trail it’s going to be impossible to stop. You know that, don’t you? Don’t let it steal your life like it stole his.”

“It won’t.”

“I’m serious. He can’t think about anything else. He’s obsessed. It’s like madness that’s worried away at him over the years, removing all trace of his personality. Now all that’s left is this compulsive need to prove he’s right. Take a good look at this thing, see it for what it really is.”

“And what’s that?” she asked guardedly.

“A lump of stone.”

“Of course it isn’t just a lump of stone. We’ve both read Dad’s notes. Look at it. Think about what he worked out.... This has to be the whetstone. It was found in the same area where Tudwal Tudglyd’s whetstone was last known to have been, and there’s no denying it was found with other relics from the same era. It can’t be a coincidence.”

“Can’t it? Or is that just what you want to believe? Dad spent his entire life looking for this. Do you really think he’d have missed it if it was simply sitting in a display case in a local museum? He isn’t an idiot, Awena.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. He doubted her. “Certainly it’s the real thing,” she snapped.

“Is it? Can you prove it? Is it supposed to have some kind of property that no other stone has?”

“If it’s used to sharpen a blade and a brave man uses the weapon, then it is guaranteed to draw blood. But if the blade belongs to a coward it won’t even sharpen.”

“But how do you prove that? Or do you have a convenient coward in mind? And who uses swords nowadays. It’s not exactly the weapon of choice, is it?”

“Blade. Not sword. There’s no shortage of knife crime in the city, is there?” She shook her head, refusing to be drawn into it. “It’s not about proving it and you know it. I believe that it’s the genuine article and for the moment that’s all that matters.” She prepared herself for a patronizing response, but surprisingly none came. It had been a while since their father had returned to the cottage, so by rights he ought to be home soon. He’d know just by looking at it and that was all the proof she would need. It was all the proof she had ever needed.

“The question remains—what are you going to do with it?” He still hadn’t conceded that it could be the real thing, never mind that it was. Awena hadn’t really thought much beyond liberating the whetstone.

“I’ll keep it safe until Dad comes home.”

“If he comes home, you mean.”

“He’ll be back,” she said. “He always comes back.” Which was true, but there was no way of knowing when. She was planning on accelerating the process by sending a photo of the whetstone to his cell phone. With luck it would be enough to bring him running.

Geraint covered the stone with the blanket. It was as though he didn’t want to have to look at it.

Awena decided that it might be for the best if she adhered to the old adage of out of sight, out of mind. If he didn’t keep being reminded of it, maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about it until they knew for sure she was right.

She tried hard to hide her disappointment by asking, “How was your trip?”

“Not bad,” he replied, nothing more.

When he’d come bursting into the house he’d been so full of life, desperate to tell her all about his trip; now it was just “not bad,” as though what had happened was suddenly unimportant. The theft had sucked all the joy out of his life. She hadn’t for a minute considered the prospect that he’d see it not as the beginning of some grand adventure they could go on together, but rather her catching their father’s particular madness.

The sooner the stone was out of sight, the better—that much was clear.

The best place for it was in their father’s study.

Geraint never went in there.

He wasn’t interested in reading the volumes and volumes of notes that made up Dad’s journals, the vast quantities of used and battered books he used as his points of reference for the great hunt, or the huge chart hanging proudly on the wall, tracing back their family tree to the last of the true princes of Wales.

The room contained a lifetime’s work, a lifetime’s obsession.

Geraint was right, though; she was in danger of following in his footsteps. She really was her father’s daughter. She was more than capable of becoming obsessed with the search, even though she knew most of them would never be found. There were worse things that might consume her life, especially now that she’d found one of the lost treasures. And didn’t finding one prove the existence of all of the others? In all the years her father had been hunting, he’d never laid his hands on a single one of them. And yet that only fueled his obsession. How would he react now, to actually hold one of them in his hands? To know he’d been right all this time. How would he take that vindication?

What he’d never said on those rare occasions when they’d talked about the quest was what he would do if he ever found one of them. What they did talk about was the history of oppression that was the foundation of Wales, how the English had beaten them down into submission and how these lost relics really were the inheritance of her people. They may have been called the Treasures of Britain, but they belonged to the Celts, not the invaders who came later. These treasures had nothing to do with the Romans, the Danes or the French who invaded their shores. Some of the treasures had their histories in Scotland, but the only documents which recorded their existence were in the Welsh Triads.

They were the Treasures of Wales.

Something to be treasured by all pure-blooded Celts like her family.


Chapter 9 (#ulink_7c25b2cb-b74c-5cca-93cf-3579f82105b1)

He had tried several times to get a better look at the peculiar pieces of stone during the daylight, but every time he did his presence drew curious looks from visitors and cathedral staff. He tried standing on it again to see if he could replicate that weird voice, but the stone remained silent.

He hadn’t noticed the priest he had seen that morning walking across the grounds toward him.

“Can I help you at all?” the cleric asked, a gentle smile on his weathered old face. The heavy crags only served to make him appear closer to God in a literal sense.

The man wrestled down the sudden surge of panic he felt at the curate’s approach and plastered a smile on his own face. It was highly unlikely—if not impossible—that the man recognized him from their previous encounter, but if he did, what of it? He wasn’t duty bound to accept an offer of tea just to salve the curate’s conscience, and walking away was hardly a crime.

“I’m good, thanks,” he said, hoping to keep the man at a distance. “Just taking a few minutes to myself. Soaking in the ambience of the cathedral. It really is an incredible building. Inspiring.”

“That it is,” the cleric agreed, accepting his lie at face value. The curate left him to his contemplation, and as soon as the man was out of sight he crouched down again to take a closer look at the stone he’d been standing on. It was rectangular in shape and stretched almost eight feet in length, but was less than three feet wide, like a grave marker but not. It almost abutted the cathedral wall, stone hugging stone. He ran his fingers across it, sensing there was something strange about the piece of rock, even if he didn’t know what. The fact that it was so large and in a single piece was noteworthy, especially in this region, but what really interested him was why it had been placed so close to the wall. That led to a second question he hoped to answer: What was its purpose?

He ran his fingers across the surface, feeling for any irregularities in the sheet of rock, but as far as he could tell it was perfectly smooth. How long had the stone lain in place? Maybe not time immemorial, but it had certainly been there more than a few centuries. Hence the surface was so smooth, as if it had been worn down by the endless shuffle of penitents’ and pilgrims’ feet. Though given its relative position to the cathedral that was impossible, surely? He lived for a good mystery. They made life interesting.

With one fingertip he found the slightest of indentations. It was so small he almost missed it, but then he found another and knew he was onto something; something had been scratched into the rock once upon a time so long ago that the weather had worn it down to almost nothing.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic water bottle. It was barely half-full, but that should be more than enough for what he intended. He unscrewed the top and searched with his fingers again, locating the slight indent of the markings, and tipped the contents of the bottle over it.

The water splashed and ran across the surface of the stone; some of it found its way into the shallow indentations. It wasn’t about washing them away; the water turned the dirt and grime caught in the cracks a darker shade in contrast to the stone it was ground into. Even without scraping the dirt away he could read the two words that were revealed as if by magic....

Two words that meant he’d found what he had been looking for.

Giraldus Cambrensis.

* * *

IT WAS NIGHT when he returned.

It had been so hard to resist the lure of the stone, but he couldn’t risk drawing more attention; the curate noticing two men loitering around the stone in one day was coincidence enough, a third time was just downright careless. And carelessness led to questions. And questions increased the risk of discovery.

He’d done his best to scatter earth across the surface, masking the newly revealed writing long enough for the soil to dry out and leave the surface seemingly bare again. The risk was that the curate returned to take a closer look before it had dried out. But even so, in this day and age of heathens who’d forgotten their own history, would the man even know who Giraldus Cambrensis had been? It was a risk he’d rather not run, if he could help it. It was always better to go undetected than trust to blind luck and the failings of the school system.

He had brought a crowbar with him, intending to try to prize the stone out of its position and reveal what lay beneath, and with luck turning himself into a grave robber in the process. That brought a wry smile to his lips. He was still struggling to believe that after all this time he’d done it...and by chance. Years and years of focused and very deliberate study, years and years of systematic searching, and he’d almost literally stumbled upon Giraldus Cambrensis’s final resting place.

He moved slowly around the side of the cathedral, keeping to the shadows as best he could. Nosy neighbors might be a cliché, but it was a cliché born in truth as far as he was concerned.

The section of wall closest to the funereal slab was out of sight of most of the street, but working by flashlight was asking for trouble. Someone would see the beam and, even if they didn’t know what it meant, would remember they’d seen it. He needed to operate fast, and as “blind” as possible.

He found the edge of the slab by feel and, on his knees, teased the metal bar down along the edge, pushing at it to feel for its thickness before applying any weight to lever it up. Not that it was going to be easy. The slab had been in place for who knew how long. It was part of the land. It wasn’t just going to pop open. He pushed down with all of his weight and the stone shifted slightly. He pushed again, but it didn’t budge more than that first inch.

He adjusted his position, trying to get more leverage—it was basic physics. A longer bar would have helped. He slid the tip of the crowbar farther in, forcing it into the dirt and underneath the great stone slab to increase his purchase. Then he leaned into it, putting all of his weight and strength into a single huge push to try to shift it.

For a moment he didn’t think it was going to move, then he felt it tear free of the ground, opening a crack no more than six inches wide—but that was all the gap he needed to wedge a piece of wood in place.

His back and shoulders burned from the effort. He could feel the strain in all the muscles around his upper arms and his ribs.

He reached for the flashlight, but didn’t hurry. He took the time to recover his breath and give his heart the chance to slow down. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He had brought his car jack with him, despite the difficulties of concealing it beneath his coat along with the crowbar and the piece of wood he had liberated from a nearby skip. Now he slipped it into the gap beside the wood and worked the jack’s handle until it rose enough to take the weight from the wood, increasing the gap without adding to the strain in his old bones.

He cranked it up another six inches, the jack’s feet being pushed down into the ground by the incredible weight of the slab combined with their small surface area.

He wasn’t sure how much higher he could risk working it.

The street was still silent. There was no sign of anyone approaching either across the footbridge or from within the cathedral.

He risked turning on the flashlight and angling the beam into the wide crack to try and get a first look at his find.

Beetles scurried for darkness, fleeing the too-bright beam as it shone inside. Other, slower-moving creatures slithered for safety.

It took him a moment to process what the contours of the darkness and the shades of dirt meant, but soon he realized he was watching something slide through the gaping eye socket of a skull.

There was no doubt in his mind he’d struck metaphorical gold. The only question was whether the stories were true, and if they were, that what he sought was still inside with the remains just waiting for him to find.

They were more “ifs” than he would have liked, but in the grand scheme of things he was closer now than he had ever been, and that was something.

The flashlight’s beam caught the glint of something impossibly bright lying on the desiccated remains and his heart raced as everything he’d ever dreamed of became so much more real. It was there. He’d found it. He hadn’t expected it to have retained its luster after all this time, but there was nothing else it could be. There just wasn’t. Not buried with him. It had to be...had to be...

He’d read the letter a thousand times even though it was supposed to be secret, and in it he’d learned the truth about the bones of Gerald of Wales and what they had been buried with. There were countless legends of powerful weapons, great swords, shields, armor, mantles, cups imbued with magic—as many stories as there were weapons to be talked of. Gerald, the letter claimed, had been interred with a weapon of great power, both to keep him safe in the afterlife and to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

As with all treasure hunts there were hundreds of dots that needed to be connected, but this was it, the final dot. With the artifact in his hand he would finally know if it truly possessed the properties legend promised.

And if it did...

He slid his left hand into the narrow slit held open by the jack, and eased his arm all the way inside up to the shoulder, imagining the weight of the slab coming down on top of him. His fingers scrabbled against bone and tiny skittering creatures that crawled over the remains, until he found a hand closed around metal.

He intended to ease it free of the bony grasp, but it refused to move, almost as if the dead man was still intent on keeping the weapon safe as he had done for so long.

He took a tighter grip on the weapon, and even as he tried to pull, the inside of the tomb filled with bright blinding light. In panic he tried to wrench it free, but his panic caused the jack to twist and the stone slab to slip. He would have lost his arm but for the fact he hadn’t removed the block of wood. Even so, it was trapped, and try though he might, he couldn’t pull it or the weapon clear.

He shifted his position, wanting to work the fingers of his free hand under the edge of the stone to ease the pressure on his shoulder, but all he succeeded in doing was contorting his body and dislodging the wood in the process.

He couldn’t keep the scream from his lips as the only thing stopping the grave from slamming shut was a corner of the wooden block and his skin and bone.

“Are you all right over there?” came a voice. The damned curate.

He knew any amount of serious struggling risked sending the wood and jack tumbling into the tomb, then there’d be nothing to save his arm. He needed help if he was going to get out of this. “Please,” he said. “Help me.”

The curate came hurrying toward him, then understanding the heinous crime being perpetrated on his sanctified ground, crouched down beside the grave robber to help him. He asked no questions. He didn’t need to. He took hold of the edge of the slab and strained with all his might, slowly shifting it first an inch, then another, gradually releasing the pressure on his trapped arm. The sudden rush of blood through his system and alleviation of pain filled the grave robber with a wave of euphoria.

He drew his arm out of the tomb, bringing the sword out with it.

Its blade still cast a glorious radiance all of its own.

It wasn’t enough to prove it was the weapon he sought—Giraldus Cambrensis’s legendary sword—but he had joined together all of the dots, and they had led him to this marked tomb....

The curate lowered the slab, pulling his fingers free at the last moment as the wooden block and metal jack tumbled into the grave.

“What is that thing?” the curate asked, unable to take his eyes from the shining blade as he sank to the ground. The grave robber could see the rising tide of panic there behind the man’s eyes as he struggled to hold it in check. He gasped for breath, but it was impossible to tell if it was the exertion or the fear that caused it. “What were you doing?”

The grave robber scrambled to his feet, ignoring the searing ache in his arm.

He tried to flex his fingers as though that was all it would take to restore the circulation. It would take more than that.

He held the sword out in front of him, marveling at the flames dancing along its edge and the pale yellow glow it cast on the prostrate clergyman.

He hadn’t wanted this to happen; he’d never intended for anyone to know he’d been there, that the grave had been disturbed, or more importantly that something had been taken from it. But he’d met the curate for a third time. He had no choice. There was no time for regret, even if this morning the curate had proven his kindness by offering a vagrant a cup of tea.

It only took one swing of the burning blade, then it was all over.


Chapter 10 (#ulink_4d6aadf2-7c3b-5e8b-bfca-3b04f4100eee)

Annja hit the sack early.

The jet lag had finally gotten to her.

She’d ordered something from room service having learned from bitter experience that while she could have slept through the apocalypse she couldn’t sleep through the midnight munchies. She unpacked the few things she needed for the night, her room still light with the hazy glow of the evening sun, and drew the curtains. They didn’t quite meet in the middle, leaving a crack of white light in the darkness that she’d just have to live with.

Given the sleepy nature of the village beyond the glass there was nothing else that would keep her awake. Even though it wasn’t quite six she was absolutely exhausted. There was no point fighting it, and honestly, it was a fight worth losing, Annja thought as she climbed under the covers and closed her eyes.

When she woke, the crack in the middle of the curtains was still white—or white again; it was impossible to tell. Her first thought was that she’d been woken by something because her head was still foggy and lethargic and her entire body ached. The clock beside the bed said six. That didn’t help; she’d either slept about six minutes or twelve hours...but judging by the fact her mouth was sandpaper raw and her eyelids scraped against dry eyes as she blinked, twelve hours felt more likely. She needed a drink, and despite her room service feast, she realized she was starving.

Breakfast came and went. By the time she’d finished, Annja felt decidedly more awake. Jet lag be damned, at least for a few hours until it caught up with her again and sleep came crashing down around her. That was the usual chain of events when she came off a long flight. It would take two or three days to get used to being on the other side of the world. All she could do was roll with it, which meant getting out of the hotel and taking a look at the museum, assuming it reopened today. Not that it would be open for a few hours yet.

But that didn’t mean she was going to sit around twiddling her thumbs; that wasn’t Annja Creed’s style.

She hit the books first, going through all of her papers that covered the village and surrounding countryside, highlighting things of potential interest, then cross-referenced them with the brochures the pub landlord had given her. The lobby carried the same range of brochures. There were enough things to keep her occupied for a few days at least without giving her time to develop itchy feet.

She thought about checking in with Doug, but a quick calculation was enough to know that even a workaholic like him would still be fast asleep.

She thought about reading a novel, but of the dozen they had on the wire carousel in what passed for the hotel’s guest shop only one of them caught her eye. The story featured a young aspirant seeking to prove himself by finding the unholy grail. She bought the book, then took a seat in the lobby and started to read. Annja had read three-quarters of the book, drunk three cups of coffee and was on first-name terms with the girl manning the lobby area by the time the museum opened for the day.

The museum was quiet. She couldn’t tell if it was closed or not as she walked up the road toward it.

Annja pushed the door tentatively, not expecting it to open.

It did. A small bell rang above the door, announcing what was almost certainly the first visitor this morning. She expected the staff to pounce, only too eager to explain the exhibits in an effort to stave off boredom. She’d visited enough of these places over the years to know there were two poles they veered between; there were those where the staff were just a little too keen, and others where surly staff viewed visitors as an intrusion sent to ruin their shift. There didn’t seem to be anything in between.

She saw a youngish girl behind the desk in the main room, probably a volunteer from the nearest university looking to add some summer credits. Behind her there was a display of books with faded jackets, and souvenir racks filled with postcards and faux-Roman trinkets. She smiled and the girl said, “Hello,” but that was all.

Another woman polished the glass of the new display case, Annja realized as she circulated around the room.

She came up beside the woman and said, “What happened?” looking down at the obvious emptiness where something had been on display up until yesterday.

“Oh, hello,” the woman said, almost dropping her duster in surprise. She seemed to recognize Annja. “Sorry we couldn’t let you in yesterday. We had a little trouble, I’m afraid.”

“Nothing serious, I hope.”

“Anything that keeps us closed for a day is serious for us. We might not charge an entrance fee, but the money we take in for books and stuff makes all the difference in the world when it comes to what we are able to do. School parties, all of that, it keeps us afloat. That someone stole from us hurts because we’re all part of the same small community, but it’s these other losses that really hurt.”

Annja looked into the case and saw that there was a stash of small coins nestling in a terra-cotta pot. “What did they take?”

“Well, between you and me, that’s the strange thing. They left all these coins—not that they’re worth much, really—and took a grindstone.”

“A grindstone?”

The woman shrugged as if to say, Who knows? “I know. What on earth would a thief want with an old Roman grindstone? It’s essentially worthless outside the educational value, even to a collector. Next to the grindstone those coins are worth a king’s ransom.”

“Kids? Maybe the whole thing was about breaking in rather than taking any particular relic?”

“Maybe. The ridiculous thing is we were about to put it in storage, anyway. We’ve got limited space and much more interesting exhibits to take its place, but that’s life.”

Annja couldn’t understand why anyone looking for the thrill would steal something as heavy as a grindstone. It didn’t make sense when there were so many other more portable—and resalable—things close to hand, including the slew of coins in the same case, the collection of pins and brooches in the case beside it, even the “cool factor” of the old sword in the display case in the center of the room. It really didn’t compute at all, even if it was about the thrill. Maybe it was a dare? Break-in and escape with one of the heaviest treasures to prove their manliness or something? And yet one of the memorial stones or the stone sarcophagus would have been more difficult to remove....

There were plenty of items of interest—some large, some small—but what Annja loved about places like this was that each and every one of them had a story to tell. It was even more special when one considered they’d all been found locally, either in the town or nearby in Usk. Together they offered a fascinating insight into the people who’d lived and died in this area. She could almost hear the ghosts of the Roman legion marching down the street toward the amphitheater, a few good men so far from their own homeland. That was why she loved what she did.

The sound of her cell phone broke the silence of the room.

Both members of staff turned toward her, both smiling as she shrugged sorry.

The screen displayed Garin’s name. She hit the refuse button to end the call before it began. He could leave a message and she’d return his call—assuming it was anything worth returning—when she was done.

No sooner had the phone fallen silent than he called again.

She killed it on the first ring only for him to call back again.

“Someone really wants to talk to you,” the woman said.

Annja answered. “Persistent, aren’t you?” she whispered, heading back outside. “Twice in two days? Should I be worried or flattered?”

“You should be moving. Fast.”

“Should I now? Why might that be? Thinking of paying a visit, after all?”

“It’s Roux. He needs us.”

That changed things.

“What’s wrong?”

“We’ve got to get to a place called St. Davids yesterday. I’m picking the old man up. We’ll be there by lunchtime.” His voice sounded strange and there was a noise in the background she knew should have been familiar.

“What’s going on?” She still found it slightly ironic that a man who was more than five hundred years old could call anyone else an old man.

“No idea, but something has really upset him. And you know what he’s like. He doesn’t upset easy. See you soon.” The call ended, leaving Annja with a growing sense of unease. Garin was right; Roux wasn’t rattled easily, so if something had got to him it had to be serious. It was equally unnerving that he’d used Garin as a messenger boy. What kind of trouble was Roux in?


Chapter 11 (#ulink_bd17bef0-d952-59ba-a16f-35aaecf906c8)

Annja was on the road again.

So much for being on holiday.

But weirdly, though, the thought of saying no never occurred to her; that was just the way it was. Garin said Roux was in trouble, what else was she going to do? She owed the pair of them more than she’d ever admit, technically everything her life had become. That the older man had recovered every shard of Joan of Arc’s shattered sword was down to Roux, and that she’d ever walked away from la Bête du Gévaudan was down to Garin’s timely arrival. The man sure knew how to make an entrance.

The manager of the hotel hadn’t batted an eye when she asked to extend her stay a week and paid for the room up front. Although he had cocked a curious eyebrow at her bags, she’d explained how she was making an unplanned detour and expected to be back in a day or two tops.

The landscape changed as she traveled. Mile by mile it became more mountainous and increasingly spectacular. She caught the occasional glimpse of the huge white turbines of wind farms as the road curved and coiled toward the urban sprawls of Newport, Cardiff and Bridgend before she reached the industrial landscape of Port Talbot. There she was greeted by a huge gout of flame blazing brightly from one of the chimneys of the steelworks. It was a different world.

Eventually the motorway came to an end and the road narrowed considerably. The cars around her slowed without any warning signs, their drivers used to the slower pace of life and the end of the motorway regardless of the speed limit. She followed the road from village to village rather than town to town; houses were dotted across the hillsides, a few huddled together in small clusters. She had to pull over to the side of the road more than once to double-check the map to be sure she was still on the right road as every few miles it became less and less convincing. The landscape, though, was breathtaking and more than made up for the permanent feeling of being lost. Lots of signposts she saw were in duel languages—English and Welsh—though the Welsh seemed to lack a lot of vowels. At last she skirted the fringes of Haverfordwest and picked up another winding road that would take her to St. Davids.

Her cell phone rang again: Garin.

She pulled over to the side of the road to take the call.

“If you take the second exit at the next island you’ll see a small private airfield on your right. If you pull in you can give us a ride.”

“That really is creepy, you know.”





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