by Alex Archer
The priest stopped at the lectern and placed a tight grip on it before he took a deep breath. Wood grated on stone as the structure began to move, slowly, inch by inch, until it was freed from whatever held it in place and then slid smoothly until the floor beneath it was completely exposed.
Roux watched as the younger man knelt and used a key to scrape away the accumulated grime from the joins in the stone; again, not rushing, carrying out the act with a significant amount of reverence. Like those before him, he had never considered the possibility that the box might leave his care.
Eventually a catch was revealed.
The man looked up at Roux.
“Would you like me to open it?”
Roux nodded.
He had waited a long time for this moment, and had thought to wait a lot longer, so he could wait a few seconds more.
A sudden fear rose in his chest: all it took was for one of the priests down the long line to have failed him and everything he was trying to do here was undone. What if someone opened the box only to find it empty? What then? What could he do to help Annja? How could he buy her life? Or would he be forced to walk away and leave her to her own fate? He’d told himself a thousand times over the past twenty-four hours she was big enough to take care of herself. But…
Stone ground against stone as a piece of the newly exposed floor began to shift from its resting place. Considering how many years it had set in place, it was a miracle of fishes and bread proportions that the ancient mechanism still worked, Roux thought irreverently.
The priest managed to get a grip under the exposed edge of stone and slowly a slab began to rise, even if just a couple of inches.
Dust trickled and fell into the space below, landing on the dark hidden shape.
And then it was free.
The priest lifted the slab and moved it to rest against the lectern.
He stood back, allowing Roux the opportunity to retrieve the box himself.
He had always remembered it being a little larger than it was. Funny how the memory played tricks on you, he thought. The box was less than two feet wide, only a little longer than that and less than a foot deep.
Roux peeled away the cloth that protected it while it was in its resting place, a piece of sacking that had at some point replaced the material he had carefully wrapped it in the first time it had been hidden away.
The box itself barely looked older than the day he had buried it. He had seen chests that had been buried for far less time and suffered far more from the effects of damp, mold and insect attack, but not this one. If there had been an escutcheon protecting the simple keyhole, that would have pitted and decayed, regardless, but the chest lacked protection or ornamentation.
Roux reached into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys he always carried with him.
Sometimes he thought that keeping things hidden would not be a bad thing. Too many of those items could prove dangerous in the wrong hands.
The breastplate itself wasn’t something that was a danger to the world at large, a rallying point for fundamentalists looking to start another Holy Crusade, but in this case it could prove fatal for Annja if Cauchon didn’t keep his word. Or if he did, and tried the rituals Manchon and Gui extolled. The box, like Pandora’s, could never be closed once he’d let its secrets out. Was he really prepared to do that? Even for Annja?
“Do you want me to leave you?” the priest asked. “If you need some privacy…”
“It’s fine,” Roux said. “It’s only fair that you should see what you have spent your life protecting, even if I can’t tell you what it truly represents. With luck, it may yet be returned for your safekeeping.”
The man nodded, but showed no sign of moving any closer.
Roux felt for the right key, knowing its shape within the bunch without needing to see it; some things were burned onto his soul.
He paused as he slipped the key into place in the ancient lock, and felt the tension as it engaged, hoping that the mechanism itself hadn’t corroded or fused together. It wasn’t a sophisticated lock; the lock had never been meant to protect it. That was why he had gone to such lengths to hide it.
The key moved smoothly, needing only the slightest amount of force to turn.
Roux held his breath as he lifted the lid, his heart skipping a beat as he saw the piece of red silk he had used to cover the armor, still undamaged, as pristine as if it had been placed there yesterday.
He folded back the edge of cloth, so fine in texture compared to the sacking that had provided the first layer of protection, to reveal the breastplate.
The metal beneath possessed a strange glow in the candlelight, as if there was a sheen to it that might not be seen in normal light, making it seem almost magical. It still bore the scars of battle, and the leather straps that had once held it to the young woman’s body were all but dust. They were of no consequence. Beneath it lay the other smaller object, essential if he were to make his trap work. He closed his hand on it and palmed it away into his pocket without drawing any attention to it.
“It looks very precious,” the priest said, his voice reverent.
A sudden breeze entered the church, threatening to extinguish the candles.
Roux had been concentrating so much on the box and its contents that he’d almost forgotten that he wasn’t alone, taken aback by the simplicity of the statement.
“It is,” said a voice from the doorway.
42
Annja felt the life returning to her muscles.
She closed her hand around the nail scissors, prepared to use them. Something so sharp, punched in hard, could do serious damage, even if she didn’t take the woman unawares. She didn’t need her sword to take care of a threat like Monique. Annja had dedicated a lot of her life to physical training, sparring, learning the fighting techniques of martial artists, hand-to-hand as well as with weapons. She was more than a match for anything the woman could throw at her. And on top of that she had the sword.
She worked her joints again, keeping the muscles supple.
In the distance, she heard the sound of a car engine starting.
She couldn’t tell if it was the truck she’d arrived in or the car she’d seen in the open garage. It didn’t matter. It had tilted the odds very much in her favor.
Everything in those notes and papers, a mixture of ancient ideas and a twisted imagination, had obviously convinced Cauchon to believe he could separate her from the spirit of Saint Joan that somehow possessed her. Yes, there was a bond between them. Roux had explained his belief after she’d grasped the shattered sword and made it whole again, but even then she had never quite swallowed all of the more mystical aspects of Roux’s beliefs. Some things she knew were undeniably true. The sword for instance was proof of that. But there were still gaps that she constantly tried to bridge with concrete understanding without seeing the big picture because she was in the thick of things.
In Cauchon’s mind, she was sure, there was no happy ending for her.
Annja rubbed her shoulder one last time before reaching out for the familiar grip. She drew it gently and smoothly from the otherwhere, the blade crystalizing into existence before her eyes. One moment there was nothing, a ghost of a sword, and then the weight solidified, taking on substance and form, its molecular structure attuned to hers, the vibrating in time with her flesh on a quantum level. She was the sword. The sword was Annja. Smiling, she let it return to its resting place.
She climbed the ramp to examine the door.
It was considerably sturdier than she had hoped; this was no re-formed fiber door that one good kick could break down. This was a solid, thick century-old cured timber that was intended to keep fire at bay. It was fitted with a heavy mortise lock. It was old—if not as old as the door itself, still not something that had been fitted purely because they intended on holding her hostage down here. Cauchon valued his privacy. It was as simple as that. Even in a place as remote as the farmhouse, he did not want to risk being dist
urbed by anyone while he devoted himself to his obsession. But then, who in their right mind would try to break into a house out here in the middle of nowhere?
How had her captor made the connection between Roux and Joan of Arc? How had he made the further connection to her and the sword? She had a lot of questions and very few answers. The only thing she knew for sure was that he had made the connections and he’d brought Garin into this, too. He was pulling their strings, all three of them, manipulating them. And that sounded like a very dangerous situation.
She had nothing with which to pick the lock, and nothing to get at the screws that held the hinges in place. It was as secure a prison as any that could be improvised.
She imagined being trapped down here with a raging fire. It wasn’t something she really wanted to contemplate, but there was a smoke alarm and the sprinkler system set into the ceiling. Could she use them to her advantage? Even if she could scavenge everything she needed to start a fire, would anyone come if the alarm went off, or would she be left to burn?
There was no sign of matches or a cigarette lighter, nothing she could easily start a fire with, but there was plenty of material that would work as tinder, including the wadding of the comforter and mattress on the bed, which she could cut open with the nail scissors. There was nothing that would make a spark.
Frustrated, she stared at the paperweight on the desk and an idea began to take shape in her mind.
Annja made a nest out of a bundle of towels scavenged from the bathroom along with a mixture of fibers and paper gathered from around the basement. Her thought process was simple. Lots of different materials, all dry, all flammable. All she needed was one of them to hold the flame if she got something to ignite. Logically, the comforter stuffing and the mattress fibers were probably flame retardant, but she wasn’t going to discount them because of logic. If there was a chance, even a slim one, that they might burn, she was happy to risk it.
It was all going to come down to the spark.
The exercise had done her good.
Her shoulders were moving with something approaching freedom, even if she could still feel a lingering tightness. She reached out, the sword singing in her hand as she brought it back again. She rested the point in the nest of tinder and held the blade upright before striking it with the paperweight.
Nothing.
She tried again.
This time a spark flew when the two materials collided.
It wasn’t enough to start anything smoldering.
She hit harder and the blade vibrated with the impact, sending something akin to an electric shock surging up the length of her arm. She felt it sear the already strained and tender shoulder joint.
Again.
This time a shower of sparks ran down the blade into the wadding, paper and feathers and the first wisp of smoke began to rise.
Annja removed the sword from the bed where the embryonic fire was just beginning to take hold. She leaned it against the ramp before going down on her knees and lowering her face to the wisps of black smoke curling up from the towels.
She blew softly across the surface, drawing the fire to life as it finally caught hold.
All she could do now was pray that she set the alarm off without the whole place being engulfed in flame.
Because if there was one thing in her life that gave her nightmares, it was fire.
43
“Garin.”
“Disappointed?”
Garin closed the heavy church door behind him.
The air had been enveloped in a draft that felt so much colder than when Roux had come inside only a short while before.
“What are you doing here?”
“Helping.”
“When did you become so altruistic? Or,” Roux said, drawing out the insult, “did you come here to steal this artifact for yourself? Maybe you have a buyer lined up?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“Absurd? You can just walk away from all of this. What does it matter to you what happens to Annja?”
“Now you’re just being insulting, Roux, but I’ll forgive you this once because you are upset.”
The priest gave Roux the briefest of glances, obviously made uncomfortable by the exchange. Roux placed a hand on his shoulder.
“There is nothing to be concerned about. This is Garin,” and a second later, deliberately insulting, he added, “My apprentice.”
“Once upon a time, maybe. Look, Roux, we both know just how stubborn you can be,” Garin said, walking toward the front of the church.
Roux replaced the silk over the breastplate and closed the lid of the box before Garin could catch a glimpse of what was inside. He would recognize it, and that would just lead to questions Roux had no intention of answering. Instead, he asked one of his own. “How did you know where I was?”
“I didn’t know. I just tracked your phone. You should be used to the modern world by now, sir. It isn’t the way it was even a couple of years ago. And I know, old dog, new tricks, but you really ought to embrace the future instead of burying your head in the past. For a while I thought you were on a suicide mission actually, heading straight to Cauchon to fulfill some romantic idea of a showdown. I figured he’d told you where to come and you thought you were being all noble. This is a nice surprise.”
“Disappointed?” Roux asked, throwing Garin’s word back at him.
“Well, let’s just say I didn’t like the idea of not getting to put things right between us and leave it at that.”
“So you just hopped in a car and came after me.”
“So I just hopped in a car and came after you. Seemed like a smart idea, and now it looks like I got here just in time. Believe me, there’s no way we’re getting back down the mountains in this weather.” He shook his head. “Not tonight.”
Roux didn’t need to check outside to know he was right; the snowfall had been intensifying during the journey here, and the roads were barely passable before he’d pulled over to walk the remainder of the distance. Even the 4x4 would struggle, and in the dark, it’d be flirting with the reaper if not outright suicide.
“But lucky for you, I came prepared. Snow chains for the wheels.”
“Sounds like you’ve thought of everything.”
“Not everything,” Garin said. “But hopefully you’ve got the rest of that covered, boss.”
Roux saw that his gaze was resting on the box that he had been in the process of wrapping.
“The longer we stay in here, the less chance we’ve got of getting out of the village, with or without snow chains,” Roux said. He thanked the priest and told him that he would return, but knew in his heart of hearts this was no longer a safe hiding place, not now that Garin knew about it. He wouldn’t be coming back here in this lifetime, no matter how many years remained in it.
“Give me your keys,” he said, holding out his hand to Garin.
He turned to the priest and passed the keys to him. “We’ll pick this up when we return. Feel free to use it in the meantime.”
“Roux! It’s a Porsche! You can’t just go giving away a luxury car!”
“I’m not, you are. Now be gracious.”
“But I was just getting to like her.”
“You’ll like another one tomorrow,” Roux assured him. “Something bigger, flashier and more expensive.”
Garin nodded. “And with more under the hood.” He grinned, and for a moment it would have been easy to think he was talking about a woman, not a lump of metal.
The priest was lost for words.
It was unlikely the poorly paid priest would be able to afford to run a car like that in a place like this. He told the man, “Feel free to sell it. I won’t be offended. Use the money for something good.”
“I will,” the man promised. “I will. Absolutely. Yes.”
His thanks were still ringing in Roux’s ears when they stepped outside, leaving him to clear up.
“Where are we heading?” Garin asked.
�
�No idea,” Roux said. “But I assume you are about to tell me. After all, you didn’t follow me here only to drive all the way back to Carcassonne. That means you’ve worked it out. So, where is he hiding?”
“You’re getting better at this, old man,” Garin said.
“So?”
“Cauchon made his first mistake. He tried to call his thugs in Carcassonne just after you left. The phone wasn’t connected to the network for long, obviously, with them being tied up with the local law. He didn’t leave a message. The good news is that it was long enough to narrow his position down to within a five-mile radius.”
“Is he still here in the Pyrenees?”
“He sure is. We get ourselves into that circle and wait for him to contact us. With a little luck he’ll still think that we are miles away, up at the chateau even. That should give us time to hit him where it hurts.”
It sounded like the closest thing they’d had to a plan in a while.
Roux wanted to get to Annja without handing over the box. Nothing good could come of losing possession of Joan’s breastplate to the man, even if Roux didn’t believe in hoodoo or witchcraft or any other nonsense. Playing his game, going along with his delusion, was dangerous.
The wind dropped.
The snow still fell in an impenetrable sheet. There was no visibility. Roux walked on memory, edging a few steps at a time, looking down at his feet, clutching the box and its sackcloth to his chest like a shield. Garin’s footsteps were still visible in the thick blanket of snow, but they were fading fast, being filled in like those left by Roux and the priest only half an hour earlier, long gone now.
Somehow he managed to lead them to the 4x4, opening the backseat for the box, while Garin brushed away the fresh accumulation of snow on the windshield before he climbed in.