Rogue Angel 50: Celtic Fire (6 page)

Chapter 11

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.”

“What is?”

“Spying on me.”

“Annja, it’s because I care.”

She heard the low drone of an aircraft overhead and, leaning up against her window, could see it coming in to land. It had the name of one of Garin’s companies on the side of it, or one of the shell companies his companies pretended to be. She could never really work out what he owned and what he didn’t, only that after five hundred years he’d amassed a stupid amount of money. And where Roux was content with his château and pretending it was pre–French Revolution most days, Garin wanted it all—bigger, brighter, shiner, sexier and most definitely more expensive. There was no point berating him; he was just testing another one of his new toys out. Next week it would be some other invasion of her privacy that was merely part of his dubious charm.

They really were the odd couple, Garin and Roux—apprentice and master long gone beyond the original scope of their relationship. She knew how much Garin struggled with the new dynamic and wanting to be seen as more than Roux’s former pupil.

She ended the call and followed his directions.

The plane still trundled down the short runway as she pulled the hire car to a halt on the fringe of the strip’s hardtop. There’d been next to no security in place, a barrier with an old guard who had been drawing his pension for the past few years. He waved her through without asking for any identification so she assumed Garin had phoned ahead to log her license plate with him. In these days of increased security alerts and color-coded terror threats, this little backwoods airstrip felt incredibly
quaint.

The facilities were limited to say the least, but given the location it served a purpose. It was unlikely there was another airfield within fifty miles of the place, and even the daredevil in Garin’s soul wouldn’t have fancied bringing the plane down in a field unless there was no other choice.

Of course, if Roux was in trouble he’d have landed in the middle of Broadway if he had to. But he’d never tell Roux that. Likewise Roux would have done anything in his power to help Garin if he was up to his neck in it, and he’d be every bit as grudging in admitting that Garin was the yang to his yin.

She stayed behind the wheel, waiting for Garin to debark the Gulfstream.

After a moment the seal around the airtight door popped and the door came down, the built-in ladder descending until it reached the ground. Garin emerged a moment later, dressed in a ridiculously expensive suit, jacket slung over his shoulder, aviator sunglasses in place.

Roux came a moment later, gray and grizzled and most of all tired. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.

He saw her car parked up on the asphalt and descended the steps, waving a hand toward her as he approached. He had an overnight case in one hand and a smaller leather grip bag clutched in his other. Garin carried one in his free hand. They were clearly prepared for this—whatever
this
was—to take more than a day to resolve. She’d expected nothing less, really. Roux wasn’t keen on forgoing his creature comforts if it could be helped, so whatever had happened was important enough to keep him away from the poker tables
and
the château. Add to the fact he’d called in both of them, and that spelled trouble with a capital
T.
But at least he was in one piece. She realized she’d been holding her breath, half expecting the worst; hell, if Roux could do one thing well it was get into trouble.

“Annja, you’re a sight for sore eyes, girl. Good to see you. Thanks for agreeing to come,” Roux said as she got out of the car to embrace him. Annja decided not to tell him she hadn’t agreed to anything, as much fun as being pedantic could be. He knew he’d not given her an actual choice.

“Not a problem,” she said, smiling as if butter wouldn’t melt as she popped open the trunk. They slung their luggage inside. Roux kept ahold of the leather bag.

Garin smirked. It was the kind of smirk that he thought made him look raffish and debonair but really only made him look like a smug fool. At least he didn’t hold out his hands for the keys. She had no intention of letting him drive. He slid onto the passenger’s seat without a word. Annja hoped that he was going to stay that way. Every now and then silence really was golden.

She gave it a few minutes, pulling out of the airfield and out onto the main road, before she asked, “Want to tell me what this is all about?”

She watched the older man through the rearview mirror. He stared straight ahead, clutching that leather bag to his chest.

He didn’t speak, but neither did he relax his grip on the bag.

Annja couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him like this—half there, half somewhere else. Probably back when he’d been so manfully convincing her to surrender the fragment of Joan’s sword, back when Garin would have happily killed her to make sure her reconstituting the sword wouldn’t jinx whatever weird curse was supposedly keeping the pair of them alive. The worst of it, she realized, was how frail Roux looked.

She knew him well enough to know he’d talk when he was ready and not before.

“Sorry I had to drag you from your vacation,” he said at last. “I know you’d been looking forward to it, but needs must when the devil drives.” The road swung away from the last of the shoulder-to-shoulder houses and out into the country again.

“Garin said you were in trouble,” Annja replied.

She glanced at him but his eyes were still firmly set on the road ahead.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“And what manner would that be?” Annja asked.

“The pretty damn blunt manner,” Garin said. “Tell her, old man. No need to dress it up all pretty, she’s a big girl.”

Roux took a deep breath, like he was preparing to off-load some huge confession. “I shouldn’t have involved you...not yet. Not until I was sure.” This didn’t sound like him; this sounded like a man who had been broken by events.

Annja watched him steadily through the backward land of the mirror, trying to judge just how bad things really were.

She resisted the temptation to press. “Okay, so where am I going?”

“Follow the signs for St. Davids town center,” Garin said. “We’re going to a cemetery.”

“You take a girl to all the most romantic places,” she said.

Garin grinned.

“Someone interesting buried in the cathedral?” she asked. She’d read up on some of the tourist literature about the town that was at least a city in name thanks to its cathedral.

“Someone and something, I suspect,” Roux offered. “But I won’t bore you with that.”

“Let’s try again—why the sudden rush to get the gang together and visit the boneyard?” Roux may well have been trying to duck the question, but he also had an annoying habit of specificity, so she’d learned to tailor her questions to meet his frustrating personality as best she could. “Something special?”

“Ah, well, there are three things that make this place special to
me,
” he began, and she realized she’d unlocked at least one layer of security around the puzzle. She caught sight of Garin leaning back in his seat and she smiled, realizing he knew no more about the motivation for the trip than she did. Roux wasn’t one for confiding in people if he didn’t have to, which of course was one of the other things that frustrated not only her, but Garin, too; he really hated being treated like an errand boy after five centuries.

“For one, this is the last resting place of Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales to you and me. Gerald was a chronicler of his age. A lot of what we know about Wales from that time comes from his writings, and it really was a different world. But more importantly, just as we know and have seen things that most of our world remains oblivious to, he saw things and knew things in his own time. Only a fraction of the events he witnessed still fall under the gaze of the world, but believe me, there was much more that remains hidden, secrets lost to all but a few....” It sounded like the beginning of a fable, the older man spinning a story for them, but she’d seen enough and lived through enough to know better.

“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.”

* * *

T
HEY
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 figurative 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.