Celtic Fire

by Alex Archer

  “You have access to his writings?”

  “Some,” Roux admitted. “A few translations and a single original illuminated manuscript in my private library back at the château you are free to study when we’re through here. That obviously means coming to France, but that’s no great hardship, I’m sure.”

  “I’d like that,” Annja said, taking the left-hand turn away from the line of windswept cliffs toward the town proper.

  “Gerald was interested in artifacts known as the Matter of Britain, or the Treasures. Even in his day they had attained something approaching legendary status among scholars and knights alike.”

  “Are we chasing another myth?” Garin said.

  “Aren’t we always? Given that a myth is just the truth that no one really believes any longer,” Roux said quite matter-of-factly. “You could argue that everything we do is rooted in myth, but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

  He had said it in that calm, reassuring manner he had, but Annja knew him well enough by now to recognize that just beneath the surface Roux was seething and it took every bit of self-control he had not to lash out at Garin. That more than anything piqued her interest in the mess she knew she was about to get into. Anything that rattled Roux was going to be interesting and, more likely than not, lethal.

  Garin mumbled something she didn’t catch over the sound of the motor running.

  She glanced and saw that he now seemed fascinated by something he’d spotted through the window. “Okay, that’s one. You said three reasons?” Annja asked. She knew a little about these Treasures of Britain, enough to keep up her end in a spirited conversation about them. What she didn’t know was what was drawing them to this isolated place, but Roux did.

  “Quite right. Well, the second reason is that one of these treasures is buried with Gerald’s remains in St. Davids. Believe me, this is not something we want falling into the wrong hands.”

  Annja nodded, taking his warning at face value. The older man knew things, but coupled with that he wasn’t prone to dire prognostications for the fun of it. If he was worried, then they should all be worried. “How do you know that it’s there?” she asked, turning to face him and taking her gaze from the road ahead for the first time.

  “I know, because I put it there.”

  Chapter 12

  The old curate looked peaceful.

  His skin had turned a pallid, bloodless gray. His hair and beard looked as if it had been combed more in death than it ever had in life.

  Annja had no idea how Roux had been able to pull the strings to get them into the mortuary to see the man on the slab. Garin had stayed outside in the car.

  “He was a friend,” Roux said at last. That changed everything. Roux almost never displayed emotion. It wasn’t that he was hard so much as inured to death of all of his friends by the sheer longevity of his own life. The morgue attendant left them alone. Roux didn’t need to say any more than those four words for her to understand. In fact, it made perfect sense. It explained why he had been prepared to leave his home, why he’d summoned her, knowing she’d drop everything to be with him, and why he looked like death warmed over.

  “How long have you known him?”

  “Past tense, dear. Past tense. We’d been friends for forty years, give or take. Long enough for him to decide that I’d stashed Dorian Gray’s portrait in the attic, at any rate. He’d worked himself up through the church over the last twenty or so of them, and was a curate at the cathedral here, but my first thought now that he’s gone is that I never really paid enough attention to him. I used to come here and see him once a year, but I guess that’s what happens in life—you start to take the good things, the good people, for granted.”

  “He must have been a good friend for you to come to see him every year.”

  “Good? Yes, but more than that he was a reliable friend. He even helped me secure one of the fragments of Joan’s sword. He knew of my obsession, and now it may well be my fault that he is dead.”

  “Your fault? How could it be your fault?”

  “He was doing a job for me. I’d asked him to keep watch over the tomb of Gerald of Wales, make sure it remained undisturbed. I should have known we couldn’t keep it a secret forever. I should have done more...I should have taken it away from here and put it in a safer place. The police might have this chalked up as a mugging, but he wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was exactly where he was supposed to be, watching over the sword of Giraldus Cambrensis. The police are simply looking for an easy explanation.”

  “But what about the tramp hanging around the cathedral? Do you think there’s something in that?” Annja asked. On the way in, they’d talked to the mortuary assistant, who had told them the little gossip he’d picked up during the autopsy. That a suspicious vagrant had been seen several times over the past week in the cemetery grounds around the cathedral. It was a straw, but was it one worth clutching at?

  She watched Roux tenderly pull back the sheet to reveal the Y-shaped incision that had been stitched postautopsy. “You see those?” He pointed out several burns that had gouged deep into the dead man’s flesh and the mess of melted subcutaneous fat. She did, and in truth she’d never seen anything quite like them.

  “Those are all the evidence we need to know he wasn’t killed by some hungry vagrant,” Roux said, then covered his friend up again. Annja couldn’t really argue with that. “And there is only one thing I know of that could have inflicted that wound. It is all the proof I needed that the burial place has been disturbed and the weapon I had thought safely out of reach has been found. That is why we are here, not to mourn an old friend—there’s time for that later. We have to recover Gerald’s sword and quickly, before whoever has it causes damage that cannot be repaired.” He returned his gaze to the dead man before adding, “Now, I’d like to spend a few minutes alone with him, if I may.”

  * * *

  THEY WAITED OUTSIDE beside the car.

  The afternoon wore on. Annja was grateful for the fresh air, not least because it purged the scent of disinfectant from her lungs. It also served to keep her awake and alert and jet lag free. The parking lot had a distinctly clinical feel to it, but at least it avoided feeling exactly like what it was, a morgue. It could have been any sort of municipal building. But then, they all shared the same atmosphere of hopelessness, didn’t they?

  “You think he’s gonna snap out of it?” Garin asked, full of sympathy as always.

  Annja shrugged. “This is Roux. He’s never down—angry, sure, bitter, much, but focused and insanely driven. I’m not used to him like this.” She realized that this was the first time they’d been alone since he’d called; could she share the full extent of her anxiety and just how worried she was about Roux?

  No, but not for want of trying.

  Roux emerged from the building and started walking toward them.

  He looked like a shadow of the man he used to be, which was unsurprising, she figured, given the self-imposed weight of the world he was carrying on his shoulders.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Roux said when he reached them. He tugged at the door and got straight into the car.

  Annja clambered in behind the wheel and fired up the engine. The car didn’t purr so much as growl as it came to life. The sound was in keeping with her mood.

  Garin made a call to one of his people. It lasted less than a minute, and when he pocketed his cell phone he said, “That’s the accommodation sorted.” Annja used the blinkers to indicate right, and pulled out of the car park. “We’re a couple of streets from the cathedral, but the same could be said of everything in St. Davids, including the sea.”

  Annja concentrated on the road ahead—which really wasn’t developed enough to deserve the name—until they reached the outskirts of St. Davids, which was small enough to fit on the head of a fi
gurative pin. It wasn’t difficult to find the cathedral; the spire dominated the sleepy little town. Garin gave directions from the screen on his cell until Annja finally pulled into the parking lot of a guesthouse. It only had space for three cars and made the hotel she’d stayed in back in Caerleon look like a palace.

  It had been a long day already, but it was still less than eight hours since she’d received the summons.

  Roux was first out of the car, before she’d even switched off the engine. Head down, he walked along the tight steps flanked with faux-Grecian urns overflowing with near-dead plants that led from the lot down to the main street. They made a particularly sad-looking set of sentinels. Annja and Garin trailed in his wake as he hurried to the cathedral.

  He stopped in front of it, keeping his head bowed, as he observed a moment’s silence.

  “So this tomb...?” Garin said, breaking the stillness.

  Annja wanted to ask the same question. She’d not read anything about Gerald of Wales’s final resting place in the various pamphlets she’d managed to accumulate, bar the fact he was supposed to be interred somewhere in the vicinity of St. Davids Cathedral. There was nothing more specific about his grave. Meaning it was highly unlikely he was inside the building, and despite their obvious age, none of the gravestones in the shadow of the cathedral looked anywhere near old enough to house him.

  As though reading her mind, Roux said, “It’s an unmarked grave. Even if you knew it was there it’s still unlikely you’d actually realize it was a burial plot. But it doesn’t matter. Not anymore. His bones, God rest his soul, were never as important as the sword that lay with them.”

  “Okay, old man, how about you tell us why this sword is so important. Forewarned is forearmed and all that. I’ve got a nasty feeling we’re about to walk into a boatload of trouble, and you’re cryptic crossword stuff isn’t helping my mood,” Garin said.

  Roux scratched at his white beard, then inclined his head slightly, offering a particularly Gallic shrug that seemed to say, What can it hurt now?

  “As I told you, this pivots around a fulcrum of the Treasures of Britain, supposedly magical artifacts that possess great power and could be used to cause a great deal of harm in the wrong hands, particularly if someone came into possession of more than one of them. And before you say there’s no such thing as magic swords, let me remind you that there are more definitions of the paranormal than there are sticks to shake at them. To paraphrase, any culture sufficiently developed may seem to be in possession of magic. These treasures are from a time of superstition where anything not understood was immediately classified as magical.”

  Annja nodded.

  “I had hidden one of the most potent of these objects here, making sure there was always someone to watch over it. The Sword of Rhydderch Hael.”

  “Roderick Hail?” Garin mangled the Welsh pronunciation.

  “Rhydderch Hael,” Annja said, her Welsh pitch-perfect. “His blade was called Dyrnwyn.”

  “It means nothing to me,” Garin said.

  “Dyrnwyn had a special blade,” she said. “Wielded in battle, it transformed into fire.”

  “Sweet,” Garin said, letting out a low, slow whistle between his teeth.

  Even as she said the words she understood why the sight of the corpse had been enough to rattle Roux and serve as proof that the sword had been discovered. That deep wound could quite easily have been caused by something matching the description of Dyrnwyn biting deep into flesh but cauterizing the cut in an instant.

  “And very dangerous,” Roux said. “Don’t think about the Matter of Britain in the abstract, consider it in the collective sense. Imagine what powers might be at play if Dyrnwyn was brought into contact with another of the treasures. Alone, they are strong, but together...together they are unstoppable.” He let that sink in. “But all of that pales beside the one unassailable fact we know to be true—a man is dead because I left him to a task I should never have asked him to do. I should have found a safer resting place for the sword a long time ago. This is my fault. The burden of his death falls on my shoulders.”

  “So, you want us to find whoever killed your friend? I can make a few calls. A guy with a flaming sword isn’t going to get far,” Garin said.

  Roux shook his head. “This isn’t about vengeance. Two wrongs do not make one right. No. We need to find the sword, neutralize the threat it poses—that is the only revenge I need.”

  “So where do you suggest we start?”

  “Right here,” Roux said, looking at an innocuous patch of ground beneath the shade of a weeping tree.

  Annja didn’t see it at first; there were no ribbons of police tape to keep people away from the crime scene. Then she remembered what the coroner’s assistant had said about the body being found beneath a bridge, which meant it had been moved for some reason. Perhaps that reason had been to keep the grave secret?

  They almost missed the simple stone slab; the summer grass had grown across it, though there were fresh signs of disturbance around it where it had been levered up. If she hadn’t known what had happened here she never would have guessed from the scene.

  “This is it?” Garin asked, his question loaded with incredulity. “It doesn’t look much like a grave. Certainly not for someone who was supposed to have been pretty famous in his day.”

  “And that was exactly as it was intended to be,” Roux said. “There’s a certain irony in burying a vain man in a simple grave, don’t you think?”

  Annja knelt to closely examine the edge of the stone. It was easier to make out the scratches where a crowbar had been used. Even though the grave robber had obviously gone to pains to clean up his mess, he couldn’t hide the fact that blades of grass had been trapped when the stone had fallen back into place, nor could he entirely mask where the earth had been disturbed by the crowbar, faint though the indications were now as the ground sought to return to its natural state. There was no sign of any blood on the unmarked grave, but she only needed to turn her head to see the telltale dark stains where a few spatters had hit the nearest headstone. Not much, admittedly, to confirm that the blade had been used to kill the man, but enough.

  “We should tell the police,” Annja said, standing up at last.

  “What good would that do?” Roux asked. “They have a body, and there’s not enough evidence here to help them solve the murder. Isn’t it better they think of this as a simple mugging gone wrong, not a grave robbing?”

  “What the old man’s delicately trying to say is, he doesn’t want the idiots holding us up if he can help it.”

  Annja wasn’t convinced, but this was Roux’s show, not hers.

  “What’s obvious is our grave robber didn’t stumble on the sword by accident,” Roux said. “So what led him here? Work that out and maybe we can work our way backward to him.”

  Annja thought about it for a moment. “If we discount coincidence, that means we’re looking for a seeker, right? So he knew what he was looking for. He followed some sort of clue that led him here, which means someone else knew you’d put the sword in this grave.”

  “Gerald’s book,” Roux stated. “There are only a handful of copies still known to be in existence. That’s the only thing that even hints at the fact he would be buried with the Sword of Rhydderch Hael.”

  “Then I’d say that narrows down the number of possibilities and gives us a starting point,” Annja said.

  “What’s to say the killer wasn’t paid to look for the sword?” Garin asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. Roux said this is all about finding the sword, not getting revenge.”

  “It’s always about revenge with the old man, so don’t let him fool you,” Garin told her.

  Roux was already walking away, lost in his own thoughts, so he couldn’t refute his ex-apprentice’s claim.

  Not that he would
have.

  Chapter 13

  Annja ate alone in her room.

  Roux had claimed not to be hungry. Garin had said that he needed to make a couple of calls and wanted to do a little digging. She could imagine him huddled over his laptop with his cell phone wedged against his ear, the very model of a modern-day treasure hunter backed by technology and big bucks. The days of getting his hands dirty were very much a thing of the past, but that was what happened when you lived for five hundred years. Everything was pretty much a thing of the past.

  She’d had to pry the book from Roux’s hands—the one that had been inside the leather bag he had been clutching for the duration of their journey—and even then he really hadn’t wanted to let it out of his sight. She offered to wear a pair of pristine white cotton gloves when she handled it. She had no problem with that; she was an archaeologist.

  She’d given the words of Giraldus Cambrensis a cursory glance before ordering room service, knowing she’d need to dedicate more than a few minutes to study the text. It was essentially a foreign language, after all, one lost to antiquity at that. Finished with the food, she began a more careful study of the writings, letting her mind wander. It was easy to imagine Roux reading the text while she stumbled over the Latin.

  It had taken her more than an hour to find the first reference to the sword, but with it came another clue that might help them in their quest to identify the man who’d taken the weapon from the grave.

  The man who had killed Roux’s friend.

  She checked her watch; it was late and likely Roux would be sleeping. She had no great desire to share her discovery with Garin, at least not until she was sure of it.

  She read through the book a second time, cover to cover, taking three hours to slowly pore over the subtleties of the translation. Then she set it aside, carefully returning the ancient volume to its protective bag, and tucked the gloves away with it.