“I had all the equipment we were going to need in my car,” Denison sighed. “But the survey shows several spots where the tunnels are very close to the surface. If we choose the right spot, we should be able to break through in short order.”
“Break through? With our bare hands? In the middle of the night? Tony, is any of this even legal?”
There was a long pause and in the dim glow cast by the dashboard lights, Frost could see the conflict in Denison’s expression. To his surprise however, it was Lili that answered. “Have you understood nothing? It is urgent that we find the Crocea Mors. Our enemies have already found us. We cannot delay. Not even an hour.”
Denison slowly exhaled then spoke with a more subdued tone. “Although he cannot officially sanction our search, my patron has given us tacit permission to do whatever we must, but it is critical that we act as quickly as possible. The surveyors will soon make their findings public and once that happens, our adversaries will be able to hide the sword away for good. They won’t be put off by questions of legality; they make the laws, after all. However, once we find the sword and put it in the right hands, the question of whether we’ve committed a misdemeanour or two will be moot. We’re not looking to steal the sword and sell it on the black market. We only want to put it in the hands of its rightful owner. Trust me, Ronan, you’re on the side of the angels.”
Frost sighed, gripping the leather contours of the steering wheel, and wondered again what had he gotten himself into?
A buried treasure—a magic sword, no less—hidden in a secret passage under an old church; it sounded ridiculous.
Tony and Lili could worry about breaking the secret codes and solving the riddles; his job was just to keep them alive.
6 Tomb
Saint Albans—2104 UTC
The Cathedral of Saint Albans and the orchard green below didn’t look like the sort of place you’d go digging for a two thousand year old relic.
Frost said as much as he gazed up at the dimly lit structure atop Holywell Hill.
“Most of what you can see from the outside was built or renovated from the nineteenth century on,” Lili explained patiently. She’d lied, she was obviously prepared to speak to him like he was an idiot. “But even the earliest Christian buildings antedate the battle between Caesar and Nennius by more than six hundred years, so don’t expect to find clues in the architecture.”
That wasn’t really what Frost had meant.
He’d not visited Saint Albans before, but he had grown up in the shadow of Saint Columb’s Cathedral in Derry, and that had coloured his expectations.
Though he hadn’t been back home in ages, he vividly recalled the severe spire of Saint Col’s stabbing into the heavens; it could be seen from almost anywhere in the county. Saint Albans was a little more subdued.
Although it did have the distinction of being the longest cathedral in England, its elegance and grandeur were a little more down to earth.
And unlike the dark Gothic austerity of St. Col’s, the long but relatively low nave of St. Albans was formed of light-coloured stone and ringed in Romanesque flying buttresses that appeared to serve an ornamental rather than structural purpose.
Somehow, it just didn’t look mysterious enough to hide a treasure out of legend.
They’d parked the car just off Abbey Mill Lane, near England’s oldest surviving public house: Ye Olde Fighting Cocks. It would be a good place to fall back to, Frost decided, once the night’s adventure was done. Even treasure hunters needed to sleep. Either they could celebrate the successful recovery of the Crocea Mors or they could drown their sorrows in a pint of bitter.
Denison produced a sheaf of papers from a coat pocket and began studying them in the glow of a small keychain-sized LED torch.
After a few seconds, he looked up to orient himself with the geophys map and then gestured to a stand of trees on the south-eastern boundary of the orchard green. “That’s our best bet,” he announced. “The tunnel is about less than a meter below the surface, and we can use the trees for cover.”
Frost let out a sigh. “Forgive me for belabouring this point, but we still don’t have anything to dig with.”
“A tyre iron ought to do the trick. There should be one in the boot.”
Frost tossed the keys to Denison. “Be my guest. I’ll go see if I can’t scrounge up something better.”
He turned and headed up the hill, setting a brisk pace. He really didn’t want to talk anymore. He wasn’t sure how much more bullshit he could swallow.
Denison’s presence felt like a black hole, sucking common sense out of the air. Now he had finally broken free, or at least, put some distance between himself and the man, he felt normal. But the only way to truly break free would be to tell his old mate to piss off—and that wasn’t on the cards. Not while people were still shooting at him. No matter how stupid the reason felt. That didn’t mean he had to buy into Denison’s crazy quest.
Rock, welcome to the hard place, he thought.
What he really needed was a different perspective; an outsider’s opinion.
He slipped his Bluetooth earbud in again and double-tapped for Lethe back at Nonesuch. Instead of the expected electronic trill, he heard three distinct and familiar tones, followed by a recorded operator’s voice informing him that his call could not be completed.
The earbud was satellite uplink, it wasn’t reliant on the mobile network. It didn’t go out of range or drop out just because he’d wandered off the beaten track.
He double-tapped again.
“Your call cannot be completed at this time.”
He didn’t like it.
He didn’t like it at all.
He left the earbud in as he climbed the hill.
The cathedral grounds were empty, but Frost stayed in the shadows as much as possible. He skirted the exterior of the vast structure, and on the north side, tucked into the shadows cast where the nave met the transept. He found what he was looking for; a shed filled with grounds keeping equipment.
There was a padlock on the door latch, but it wasn’t really designed to keep anyone out. Inside, amidst a variety of electrical and petrol-fired mowers, hedge-clippers and chainsaws, Frost found two spades and a mattock which he hefted onto one shoulder. He also acquired a folded tarpaulin and a beat-up old handheld torch that he carried in his free hand.
He returned to find Denison and Lili crouched over a patch of grass.
Denison was using the end of the tyre iron to outline a rough square where he intended to begin his excavation.
Frost handed one of the spades to him, and without comment, commenced carefully scraping up the turf. He rolled it back in a single unbroken section like a surgeon peeling away skin to expose what lay beneath.
The first half-metre of dirt yielded quickly to their shovels and they piled it on the tarpaulin, but beneath that they hit a layer of hard clay that wasn’t so easy. Several blows from the pick end of the mattock cracked the clay and loosened the earth, but digging down through it left both men filthy, blistered and exhausted.
Denison grinned triumphantly as the head of the mattock sank deep into the ground.
“I think we’ve found it,” he announced.
With caution tempering his growing enthusiasm, Denison worked the spot for several minutes until he’d opened a hole through which loosened soil began to disappear like water down a drain. Denison shone his light into the opening. “We’re close,” he said, directing his words to Lili, who despite her earlier dour manner, now seemed to be holding her breath, caught up in the madness of the moment.
Frost cautiously moved to the edge of the waist deep pit and began chipping at the thin layer of limestone to widen the opening.
Denison dropped to a prone position beside the hole and shone the beam of his small torch into the darkness.
Frost couldn’t tell if he saw anything, but when the breach was large enough, his old friend turned and began lowering himself into it. A few moments later, he wa
s peering up from inside the void.
“This is it,” he declared. “There’s evidence of digging and old wooden support beams.”
Without waiting for an invitation, Lili clambered into the hole as well.
Left with no choice, Frost followed suit.
He switched on the torch he’d liberated from the groundskeeper’s shed, but even in concert with Denison’s keychain light, the darkness was overpowering.
An intaglio of reddish-black chisel marks marred the white chalk walls, and in the dim light, they looked to Frost like a malevolent curse inscribed in runes. He played the light back and forth trying to establish a mental map of the passage, and found the rough-hewn wooden struts Denison had described. The old timber crumbled to dust when he probed it with a fingertip.
“Ah, Tony, I’m not so sure this is such a good idea. The whole thing could come down with a sneeze. It’s only held together by a wing and a prayer.” When his friend did not answer, Frost directed his light ahead and found that he’d been left behind. “Bollocks.”
They had entered in the middle of a tunnel that sloped up to the right and down to the left. He followed the glimmer of Denison’s light as it reflected off the roof of the passage to the right and caught up to the others just as they paused to inspect a two metre-deep niche in the left hand wall. Over the dark curve of Lili’s shoulder, he saw an amorphous mound that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a human skeleton.
When it had been interred, the remains had probably been adorned in armour of wood, leather and iron, but time had left little intact. Yet, there was no denying that this was a purposeful burial, and the discovery of it, right where Denison had said it would be, was at least one point in Denison’s favour.
“It isn’t Nennius,” Lili declared.
Frost was surprised by just how swiftly she’d reached her conclusion. “How can you tell? Is there a headstone or memorial I’m not seeing?”
She shook her head. “The Catuvellauni had no written language. And even if they did, they would not have recorded the names of the dead.”
“Okay, then how are we supposed to know the right pile of bones when we find it?”
“Do you see this sword?” She helped herself to Frost’s torch and played the beam along the resting figure’s torso. Frost didn’t see anything that he would have identified as a sword, but there was a long rust encrusted smear that appeared to have fused with the skeletal fingers holding it. “It has a leaf-shaped iron blade,” she explained. “The hilt is decorated with carved pieces of bone. Nennius was buried with the Crocea Mors, which is almost certainly a Noric steel gladius. Very distinctive. Shorter than this Celtic sword, with no cross-guard.”
“That should narrow it down,” Frost muttered, not caring if she caught his sarcasm. He backed away as she came out of the niche.
They resumed their exploration of the main passage.
The funerary niche proved to be the first of several that lined both sides of the tunnel.
By some unspoken mutual agreement, Denison began searching the tombs on the right side, while Lili took the left. Frost dedicated his efforts to making sure no one came up on them unannounced.
He was surprised at the amount of effort the ancient Catuvellauni tribe had put into shoring up the necropolis. When Denison had described a network of tunnels underneath Holywell Hill, he’d imagined natural caverns created by water eroding random fissures in the limestone. The ancient Britons hadn’t been content to simply stuff their dead into whatever cracks they could find, though. They had excavated the tunnels to an almost uniform height, just under two metres, and laid down oak planks to form a continuous floor. They’d braced the ceiling every few metres with upright support pillars. It was obviously a proper work of engineering, even if the wood had long since rotted away. Frost had no difficulty imagining the barrow as it had been two thousand years earlier, with a procession of mourners carrying a fallen king to his final resting place.
The barrow was humbling.
He shone his light into one of the recesses and illuminated the skeleton therein. As before, the grave goods had succumbed to rot and corrosion. Perhaps Lili had the expertise to identify the artefacts, but Frost saw nothing remotely recognisable as, well, anything. He moved on, inspecting two more tombs that were, while not exactly identical to the first, uniformly nondescript. Then, in the fourth niche, his torchlight fell on something that stopped him in his tracks.
“I think I’ve found something,” he called. His voice echoed much more loudly than he’d intended. When Lili arrived at his side a few seconds later, he pointed his light at the object that had caught his eye. “That’s Roman, isn’t it?”
Lili was silent for a moment, but Frost saw that she was shaking her head slowly. “No,” she whispered. “No, no... This is wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“This shouldn’t be here,” she said.
Denison crowded in behind them and added his torchlight to the tableau while Lili’s hoarse denials continued. Frost looked again, wondering what he’d gotten wrong.
The niche contained a posed human skeleton, adorned with the same shapeless mass of decomposed clothing and armour that had fused to the other bones, but with a significant addition: directly in front of the bier, affixed to the end of a spear that protruded from the tunnel floor, was a human skull, still wearing a half-dome shaped cap of metal. At the base of the shaft, scattered among a pile of disconnected bones, was a jumble of metal plates.
He was no expert, but he’d seen enough pictures of Roman soldiers at school to recognise pieces of lorica hamata armour. The armour was standard issue for a Roman soldier of the first century BCE. Unlike the iron weapons and armour of the Britons, the bronze and steel used by the Roman legion was in markedly better condition.
So why was Lili on the verge of tears?
“They would not have done this,” she said, still shaking her head in disbelief. “They would not have defiled the sacred place of their ancestors with the remains of an enemy.”
Frost was beginning to understand: it was about honour.
Soldiers hadn’t changed that much in two thousand years, it seemed.
Denison placed a hand on Frost’s shoulder and spoke in a low voice. “The ancient Celtic tribes believed that the burial was a gateway to the afterlife. A rite of passage. Burying an enemy in the same tomb as your king would be tantamount to sending that enemy to join him in heaven.”
“It makes no sense,” Lili said.
Frost stared at the deliberately placed puzzle of bones. “They ripped him limb from limb and put his head on a pike. You don’t have to be an expert to read that message.”
Lili looked up sharply. “Really? And what do you read here, then? Tell me.”
“‘Keep out.’” Frost said. “My guess, they caught this guy trying to break into the tomb and decided to make an example of him.”
Even in the dim light, Frost could not help but notice the abrupt change that came over Lili’s face. “My God...”
She stared at the skull for a moment, and then dropped to her knees and began rifling through the heap of bones and metal.
Frost glanced at Denison, but his old friend appeared equally confused by her actions. “Lili?”
She didn’t look up. “He tried to rob the tomb, but was caught and killed. His body left as a warning. It’s the only thing that makes sense. And who do we know that wanted something from Nennius’ tomb?”
There was silence for a moment, then Denison said: “Labienus?”
“The answer was right there in the palimpsest. Labienus was asking for permission to go and retrieve the sword.” She shook her head disparagingly. “We were foolish to assume that was the end of it.”
“And this is Labienus?” Frost asked, pointing at the skull. “Or what’s left of him?”
“Or one of his cohort...” Lili’s voice trailed off as she found something in the pile of bones. When she withdrew her hand, she was delicately hol
ding a long tube that might have been made of bronze or leather—it was so decayed Frost couldn’t tell which. With painstaking care she began picking at it with a fingernail. Despite her cautious touch, huge sections of the tube broke away as soon as she touched them.
“Shouldn’t you be doing that in a laboratory?” Frost asked.
“There’s no time.” Lili’s voice was whisper quiet, urgent, as if she was afraid a single breath might cause her discovery to disintegrate completely in her hands. “There is a scroll in here. A message from two thousand years ago. It may tell us where the Romans were taking the sword.”
There was an eager gleam in Denison’s eyes, and for a moment, Frost felt it too; the discovery wasn’t just a clue that would bring them one step closer to goal, it was proof that they were on the right track. It was proof of a legend even he’d grown up with. He understood now how a normally rational and cautious man could be completely seduced by the lure of buried treasure.
And then Frost saw something that made him forget all about dead legionaries and magic swords.
It was subtle—a faint change in the level of ambient light and a gentle shift in the angle of shadows cast on the wall of the main passage—and anywhere else he would have dismissed it or missed it entirely.
Several metres underground however, when the only sources of light were a nearly spent torch, a keychain light and the screen of Frost’s mobile phone, all three focused into the burial niche, it meant one thing and one thing only: “Someone’s coming,” he said, keeping his voice low.
Lili did not look up from her labours, but Denison did. He turned to gaze down the tunnel. “They’ve found us!” He said, louder than Frost would have liked.
Frost had a pet theory: the denial response was an evolutionary trait. It was the result of many generations of hominids playing dead to avoid being eaten by stalking lions on the African savannah. And despite years of training and experience, which had honed both his reflexes and his instincts, his first impulse was still go for the obvious denial—there were any number of possible explanations that didn’t involve secret societies and conspiracies. They’d dug a hole in a relatively public place, and there was no telling who might have stumbled across it: a curious local out for his evening constitutional; a drunk on his way home from the pub; the cathedral groundskeeper looking for his stolen tools; even one of the local plod following up on a call about people digging on the green. Maybe this once it didn’t have to be the worst case scenario? That inner voice that had kept him alive for so long laughed at him. A cold tingle of adrenaline pulsed through him and without consciously thinking about it, he drew the Browning.
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