Celtic Fire

by Alex Archer

  Great, she thought bitterly, working her way slowly higher. Her arm gave her problems. The muscle beneath the burn couldn’t take her weight as well as her other arm, meaning she favored it as she climbed. That presented an entirely new set of problems for the ascent.

  Garin waited at the bottom.

  Roux was somewhere in the shadows, with a vantage point that included the street and the castle gates.

  She had only seen one soldier on patrol, his silhouette moving along the battlements. The rest were no doubt inside watching the football now the gates were secured. After all, they wouldn’t expect any sort of insurgency or break-in. This wasn’t Egypt on the brink of civil war; this was a sleepy little town in North Wales. Not exactly a hotbed of revolution since the days of Owain Glyndŵr.

  The blocks of stone were large, meaning that she had to stretch for each toehold and push herself up for every fingerhold. It wasn’t good. It was exactly how accidents happened, but Annja was in the zone. She moved instinctively, choosing the holds without looking at them, without looking down at the drop, and when the slick surface threatened to betray her, she trusted her shoes to keep her on the rock.

  Eventually her hand reached out, flexing and stretching, seeking the next handhold, and found a flat surface for her fingers to curl over. She was at the top.

  There was no flooding sense of relief; this was the most dangerous part of the climb.

  A fall from here would be fatal.

  Garin might have bought shoes, but he’d skipped handy safety stuff like a helmet—not that a helmet would have made a lot of difference from a fall like this. The damage caused to bones and internal organs would be too much to survive.

  It was hard not to think of Awena and her own fall, though from a substantially lower elevation. She had walked away. A single slip now and Annja wouldn’t be so lucky.

  Muscles and sinews strained and ached as she reached over the parapet, the rough edge of stone block digging into her flesh through the thin material she was wearing. An extra layer of clothing would have provided more warmth and protected her against this, but would also have made her more bulky and less agile, and right now agility was key.

  At last she was over, aching and exhausted with the effort.

  She lay on the stone floor on the other side of the parapet, struggling to catch her breath and trying to will the pain away. She could hear Garin down below, hissing like a cat. It wasn’t exactly subtle. She rolled over onto her stomach and rose.

  The moonlight had been no help when she’d been climbing, but here, on one of the highest parts of the castle, there was nothing to cast shadows. So she stood in a pool of clear moonlight for all the world to see—all they had to do was look her way.

  There was no obvious mooring point for the rope, so she wrapped a length of it around one of the merlons, the solid parts of the defensive wall around the tower. Between the crenels she secured the rope with a knot she would be able to release once they’d both climbed back down. She checked the knot a couple of times before giving Garin the signal to climb.

  He scrambled up the wall quickly, with the rope threaded around his leg and trapped in his feet to serve as a makeshift harness.

  She watched as he climbed, then used her vantage point to see if she could see Roux, but he was well and truly hidden.

  She glanced over the other side of the parapet down into a courtyard.

  There was no sign of anyone patrolling. Again, she reasoned, why should they be? The guards might be there to ensure that no one had planted a bomb inside one of the main buildings ahead of the royal visit, but that didn’t mean they had to maintain a state of heightened vigilance. There was no reason to assume they’d come under attack. It was very much business as usual.

  She checked back, surprised that Garin was almost at the top.

  She braced herself and offered an arm to help haul him over the battlement.

  It took a couple of minutes to wind the rope up, carefully making sure that it wouldn’t snag on itself when lowered down again. Care was everything. They worked in silence.

  Done, they crouched down. “Time to check in,” Annja said.

  Garin pressed a button on the Bluetooth earpiece he was wearing and then said, “We’re in.”

  Annja pressed a finger to her lips as the sound of heavy footsteps echoed on the inside of the castle walls. Someone was crossing the courtyard. It might not be a regular patrol checking for intruders, but that didn’t mean that the man would not be keeping his eyes and ears open.

  She held her finger there until the last echo of the footsteps died away.

  It sounded as though the footsteps had been moving toward the tower, but she could not be sure. The acoustics were tricky. She didn’t like the added risk that came with working blind.

  Garin nodded.

  He scrambled away from her, moving like a crab, running his hands over the stone floor of the parapet, until, in the corner farthest from them, he located a dark opening. No doubt the stairwell down the inside of the tower, which would lead either down to the courtyard, the walkway along the inside of the defensive wall or possibly both.

  “Found it,” he whispered. “Okay.” A beat. “Okay.” And to Annja, he said, “This might take a few minutes.”

  He pulled a small Swiss Army knife from his pocket and opened it up. He ran the blade between the stone blocks to clear out the grit and dirt that had gathered and been ground in over the generations. Annja watched him work. It was plainly obvious the stone hadn’t been disturbed recently.

  If the mantle was gone it had been taken years ago.

  He slowly opened the gap around the stone with his knife until the blade slid easily into the dirt. “This is the one.”

  Annja unhooked a tool that Roux had given to her, a strange piece that turned at right angles. Garin nodded and she worked the hook’s bill into the slot he’d levered up. She slowly turned the tool ninety degrees, teasing and twisting it until she could feel the hook grind into position under the slab.

  Together, they tugged on the handle, and stone ground against stone as the slab shifted a fraction.

  They looked at each other and nodded, timing the moment of pressure, and the stone shifted again, slowly at first. Then the fragments of grit and grime that his knife hadn’t been able to shift exploded in a shower of dust. Garin shifted his position and slipped the fingers of one hand into the gap they had created to gain a secure grip.

  As the stone slab was lifted, it became obvious that its edge had been cut to create an overlap that sat on a matching shoulder in the stones surrounding it, fashioning a hollow beneath it. Once Garin had lifted the slab sufficiently, Annja could get her hand inside. She expected to find the Mantle of King Arthur, but her fingers closed on nothing.

  She felt about frantically, but it wasn’t there.

  “It’s gone,” she said.

  “It’s got to be there.”

  “It’s gone. As in, it’s not there.”

  “Oh, man, Roux’s going to lose it. He already thinks this is all his fault. I’m not going to be the one to tell him. He loves you. You get to break the bad news. If he hears it from me—”

  “Shh,” Annja hissed as she worked her fingertips into the deepest corner of the secret space. She felt them brush over something, something with a different texture. Something that didn’t belong in there. She found an edge and pinched it between a finger and thumb and pulled it out. It was a muslin bag and it had obviously deteriorated over time.

  Annja sank back against the wall, oblivious to the fact that Garin was beginning to struggle with the slab.

  She nodded and he dropped it back into place. He brushed dirt into the grooves, rubbing as much of it in as he could to mask the fact the hiding place had been discovered. Not that they were worried about any would-be treasure hunt
er, but rather because they didn’t want some soldier to come along in the morning and discover that the tower had been breached.

  “I take it that’s it?” he asked, indicating the muslin sack, but Annja didn’t get the chance to respond. They heard the sound of heavy boots on stone steps in the stillness.

  “Move!”

  Garin didn’t need to be told twice.

  In an instant he snatched up the rope and threw it over the parapet wall. The rope made enough noise to carry to the courtyard and market square in the quiet night, but the sound of the footsteps didn’t quicken. Garin went first, and as he went over the top she pressed the muslin sack into his hand before he rappelled down the side. Annja followed him, wrapping her wrist and waist around the rope, ready to step out into nothing as she heard a voice calling out.

  “Who’s there?”

  The beam of a flashlight shone upward from the stairwell.

  In a moment it would be too late. She had to go over the top now even though Garin wasn’t on the ground. The guard was seconds from emerging onto the platform and seeing her. It was now or never. She stepped off the wall into thin air, bouncing hard, once, twice, three times, the rope burning as it slid through her hand. She needed to get to the bottom and release the rope before the guard saw it and raised the alarm.

  Still thirty feet shy of the ground, she found a hand jam and pulled the quick release on the knot, sending the rope snaking to the ground.

  Annja held her position, listening, and willing the guard to move on without investigating any further.

  “Must have been the wind, or birds,” a voice called back down the stairwell. She willed him to go away. “Nothing up here.”

  Annja let out a deep breath as the flashlight beam turned around the perimeter wall above her, casting weird shadows through the crenellations, but the guard’s face never appeared over the edge.

  Hanging there, Annja felt the muscles in her injured arm slowly burn, cramping until her fingers felt like they had to let go to ease the ever-increasing fire she felt inside the wound. All she could think was that there was no way she could make the climb back down again—her muscles and sinews had frozen—but she had no choice. It was that or fall. And she didn’t like the odds of survival if she simply let go.

  She shifted her balance, taking all of her weight on her toes to relieve the strain on her injured arm. Sweat gathered at the nape of her neck and trickled slowly down her spine. It broke out on her brow, rolling down her temples, and threatened to sting her eyes. The fact she couldn’t just wipe it away made the sensation excruciating. She breathed hard, blinking furiously to clear her vision, and then moved her hands one line of bricks lower, taking her weight on the fingers of her good hand, and was moving again with painstaking care. It was considerably more taxing than the climb had been. She could feel Garin willing her on, but wasn’t about to risk a misstep.

  No looking down. Cheek pressed tight to the stone so she could feel the roughness against her skin as she descended, until at last she felt the lightest of touches of his hands on her ankles. His voice was reassuring and she allowed his shoulders to take her weight before she dropped the last few feet.

  He nodded toward the opened muslin bag, its contents spilled on the ground. There was a small chamois leather wrap, which he’d unfolded to reveal a small envelope with Roux’s name in careful faded script. What there wasn’t, was any sort of cloak or mantle.

  “I know it’s supposed to be invisible, but...”

  Not good. Not good at all, Annja thought, trying to process it all. The hiding place had been compromised, the treasure long gone. All that was left in its place was some sort of letter to taunt Roux, and now they were going to have to tell him they’d failed. Again. Today wasn’t a good day.

  “Where’s Roux,” she asked.

  “Not here.”

  Chapter 35

  Awena Llewellyn watched the Creed woman. Everywhere she turned, she seemed to be waiting. It was as if she were haunting her, or taunting her. One or the other. This time she was with two men.

  Awena stood in the doorway of a café, masked by shadows as she looked out across the market square toward the high walls of the castle. There was no obvious route inside that didn’t involve scaling the walls—walls that had been built with the express purpose of stopping precisely that kind of attack. The market square was derelict, the stalls stripped down to their skeletal remains, the cobbles sluiced down and rotten vegetables swept up.

  She had the sword at her side, the blade wrapped in a piece of sacking and clutched tight in her hand. She wore a single leather driving glove and didn’t dare touch the hilt for fear the sword would burst into flame regardless of the glove and betray her hiding place.

  She had not expected to see anyone moving around at this time of night, let alone the Creed woman. Not here. Not so much farther along the quest than she’d imagined possible. There could only be one explanation, and it confirmed Awena’s worst fears. Annja Creed was on a quest for the Treasures of Britain and that was why she had murdered her father.

  She shivered despite the lack of cold.

  The sky was clear. The moon lit up the square more effectively than the dull amber glow of the five working streetlights along it. The one bright light to match the moon was the castle itself, lit up like a comet on reentry, burning bright. It was both breathtaking and humbling. This was the heritage her father had always promised her, the history that flowed through her veins.

  Not that she could claim it today or tomorrow or any day soon with the royal entourage well and truly ensconced. But that didn’t detract from the fact she was here, at journey’s end. This was the resting place of the greatest treasure of them all.

  She watched the three of them separate, one moving off into the shadows to take up a position as watchman, the others appearing to ready themselves to scale the castle wall.

  Her father’s notebook had been vague, but the sight of them removed every last lingering doubt; the Mantle of King Arthur was hidden in the tower waiting to be claimed. She hadn’t understood the sketch of a chessboard with an X in one of the squares when she’d found it. But looking at the cobbles beneath her feet it made perfect sense; he’d quite literally drawn an “X marks the spot” treasure map, no doubt counting out the exact dimensions of the tower and drawing in brick by brick on the grid. But that didn’t guarantee that it would be there. Far from it; there had been countless false trails and dead ends over the years. She knew better than to get her hopes up, even at the sight of Annja Creed scaling the wall. All it meant was she’d come across the same line of clues and believed them worth investigating.

  But the opportunity for revenge made her pulse quicken.

  She wanted to move into a better vantage point that offered an unobstructed view of what they were doing, but that meant crossing the square, which was out of the question. Instead, she waited.

  She saw the man move into his own private spot from where he could see the market square and the roads leading to and from the castle.

  Creed was already at the top of the tower and the second man was about to follow her up the rope she was lowering for him.

  As she turned, Awena saw the watcher seemingly stare straight at her hiding place; her heart hammered against her breastbone as she willed her body not to move, not to breathe.

  He stepped from his hiding place and she was sure he was about to stride toward her and unmask her, but he turned his back on her and watched the progress of the other two, until the man was hauled up over the parapet. That meant they were close to finding the mantle. In a moment her chance would be gone forever, and so would her revenge.

  It was now or never.

  She moved quickly, feet almost dancing across the cobbled square as she made her way back to her previous position. She couldn’t worry about the two that had finis
hed their ascent into the tower, not yet. She could deal with them when they came down, but she could deal with their lookout, evening the odds and maybe even gaining some leverage.

  She remembered a game she had played with Geraint as a child, a game played outside in the dark with only the moon to provide their light. One of them commanded the flagpole at the far end of the garden where the Welsh flag always fluttered proudly, while the other would attempt to reach the pole unseen. The person would move stealthlike from bush to bush, shadow to shadow. She played the game again, only this time it was more than just a game, mattered more than family bragging rights.

  It was only as she drew a little closer, while the man was distracted by his team up on the tower, that she realized just how old he was. This was going to be much easier than she’d thought. Smiling now, she slipped the sword free of the sacking. Stepping right up behind him she pressed the sharp edge of the blade against his flesh and clamped a hand over the old man’s mouth.

  “Make a noise and it will be your last,” Awena Llewellyn promised.

  She let go of the blade and took hold of the sword at the hilt. The blade came to life despite the leather glove, its bright blue blush of flame lighting up the old man’s face. The sight of it was enough to stop his struggles. He knew what was going on. He knew how much trouble he was in. He knew...

  “This way,” Awena rasped, steering him from the market square and the castle toward an alleyway between buildings. He didn’t fight her. There was no one around to see them. Most would have been tucked up in their beds long ago. No one was going to hear them, not even the pair climbing the tower.

  She released her hold on his mouth.

  “Don’t bother trying to run. It won’t end well.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you want, but please...” He fumbled at his wrist to take off his watch and offered it to her.