Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  Thorssen shook his head, trying to understand how it was possible. He picked at another fragment, working his thumbnail beneath it, then held one end of the sword in both hands, studying it. If the sword truly was Nægling, this part must have broken off inside the body of the great beast—the dragon, he thought wildly. He tried to wrap his head around the possibility of the mythical creature and grinned—the part of the sword only recovered after the beast’s death. If this was the genuine article, not some elaborate fake, it would need to be confirmed before he could reveal it to the world.

  It would have been better with Mortensen’s stamp of authenticity on the find; the professor had a good reputation among the community and wasn’t prone to wild flights of fancy. But with his untimely death Thorssen would need to call in the B team. He’d established contact with various universities across Europe to provide independent analyses of the Skalunda finds; one had been so kind as to promise to validate whatever he needed, for a price. It was always comforting to know just how corruptable human beings were, even those who had dedicated their lives to the betterment of our cultural and historical understanding of these lost civilizations, even the ones with wonderful academic reputations. That was the power of the almighty dollar. There was no money in education. All he had to do was offer a sizable donation, perhaps a named wing at their university, and they were willing to declare him the savior of all things historical.

  It wasn’t as though they could just ask Creed if she knew what Mortensen had unearthed. She wasn’t an idiot, despite the best attempts of her copresenters to make her look like one by association. If she knew, it would tip their hand, and if she didn’t, it would only succeed in raising suspicions. It was a case of damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.

  “There is only one way we can be sure Creed won’t cause trouble,” Tostig said. He never threatened; he simply floated the idea, knowing Thorssen spoke the same language: the language of death. To be certain the woman didn’t say anything was to be certain she couldn’t say anything.

  It needed to be done quickly and with the minimum of fuss. Anything else would lead to more questions and the last thing they needed was some do-gooder cop digging around Mortensen’s accident.

  “Take care of her,” he said.

  He started to wrap the two parts of the sword again, carefully folding it within the sheets of plastic. It wasn’t exactly the most noble of ceremonies. Nægling deserved better, and in time would have it. But for now he merely wrapped it in the old garbage bag.

  He knew that he could leave Creed to Tostig. His man would take care of things as best he saw fit. Thorssen knew better than to try to tell him how to do his job. You didn’t stifle an artist, and that was what Tostig was—a death artist.

  Tostig nodded his head and left Thorssen alone in the hired apartment with the ancient sword.

  Thorssen watched him go. He barely heard Tostig’s footsteps on the old floorboards. He never ceased to be amazed at how quietly the assassin moved for such a big man.

  9

  More than a dozen cars and vans were parked on the grass when Annja and Johan arrived at the barrow.

  None of the vehicles were less than five years old. Most were closer to ten. These weren’t the cars of the well-off like most of the ones that had occupied the verge the day before. These belonged to students and lower-totem-pole staff from the university. It was still early for the volunteers to be rolling up.

  People were milling around aimlessly, looking for someone to give them direction. Without Lars Mortensen to tell them what to do they were lost.

  “Hey,” Annja said, raising a hand as she came forward to address the main group.

  She cast an eye across the cars in the vain hope she’d spot Lars’s battered Volvo among them. It wasn’t there. It was a smoldering wreck half an hour down the road, his body still sitting in the driver’s seat, burned beyond all recognition. She didn’t need the coroner’s report to confirm it. She knew it was true.

  One of the young women gave a tentative wave. She had that young, slightly grungy look that dogged students the world over. Annja thought she’d seen the girl at the ground breaking.

  Annja waved back.

  She caught Johan’s attention, pointing to where she was heading. He looked up from fiddling with his gear, getting it set up for recording, and nodded. She knew he had his rituals; most of these guys did. She just let him do his thing.

  “Hi,” she said to the girl. “No sign of Lars?”

  It was better not to tell them what she suspected; the police would work their way back to the site eventually, and people would remember if she acted weirdly.

  “Nope,” the girl answered, her shrug lost inside her baggy top. “He’d asked a couple of us to be in early so we could make a start getting stuff sorted for the volunteers.”

  “You work at the university?”

  She nodded. “Sorry,” she said, holding out a hand. “Inge Nordqvist. Research graduate. This is part of my project.”

  “Annja Creed,” Annja said, shaking her hand. She had the same rough calluses Lars had had. “Have you banged on his door?”

  “His car’s not here.” Inge waved at the bank of parked cars. “I’ve tried calling him, but his cell goes straight to voice mail. I guess it’s down to me until he gets back.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” Annja reassured her, remembering all too well what it felt like to be thrown in the deep end. It was all about keeping the volunteers busy—give them a bit of direction and let them look after themselves. “Need a hand?”

  “Always,” Inge said.

  Yesterday’s work was covered in a large green tarpaulin. They hadn’t removed it yet. The air still hung heavy with early-morning mist. As they walked toward the hill, the mist appeared like a carpet of white that clung to the grass. Closer to the tarp, Annja saw that it had been put in place clumsily, rather than being pegged down with precision. The plastic was heavy with dew. It took four volunteers to pull it away, revealing the deep trench, and in it a ragged opening.

  “It wasn’t like this when we left last night,” Inge said, confused. “The horticultural boys had cleared the turf and made a start on the trench, but no more than that.”

  Annja considered the dark sinkhole and the peculiar slate that seemed to ring it. “So Lars must have worked through the night, or we’ve got fairies.”

  Inge bent down and picked up one of the pieces of slate that had come free. She puzzled over it.

  “What’s that?” Annja moved in closer to take a look. Its edges were too even to be natural. Inge turned it over in her hands. It was dull on both sides, but there was a dark stain along one of the edges.

  “Hmm, curious.” She rubbed a finger over the stain, then lifted it to her lips.

  Annja expected her to say it was blood, but Inge didn’t offer any such explanation. Annja had seen enough bloodstains to know what she was looking at. She didn’t clarify it, though. There was no need to spook the girl. “And this wasn’t there last night?”

  Inge shook her head. “The trench, yes, but not the rest of it. But you can see he only went down a couple of inches before he reached this.” She held up the plate. “It’s hard to believe we were so close to the tomb so quickly. I need to get a lamp so we can take a look inside. Hold on.” Inge clambered out of the trench, setting the slate disc aside, and rushed away, clearly excited.

  Johan had to do a nifty little step aside to avoid being sent sprawling as the student sprinted toward the cars. Johan looked at Annja and shrugged. His camera rig had a front-facing light, which should be more than adequate to illuminate the shallow hole and record what was down there at the same time.

  “What’s all the excitement about?” he asked as he hoisted his camera onto his shoulder. He wasn’t looking at Annja; he had his eye to the viewfinder. Like most observers he came alive when the lens was between him and his subject.

  “You filming this?” she said, brushing her hair out of her eyes.<
br />
  “Yes.”

  Her appearance wasn’t something she worried about; she’d always been comfortable inside her own skin, and that made her attractive in ways that makeup couldn’t. She nodded, switching into professional mode immediately. She wanted to record her initial reaction to what was happening. That couldn’t be faked. Whatever she saw when they stuck the camera into the opening she wanted her face on film right there with it, those first thoughts upon seeing what waited down there captured forever. It might be nothing, or it might be the most incredible discovery since Carter broke into Tutankhamun’s tomb.

  She remembered what Mortensen had said on the phone.

  He’d found something.

  But before she could wonder at what, she saw the red light on the side of the camera and fell straight into her on-screen persona. “As you can see from the mist clinging to the field, it’s a bitingly fresh morning here at the Skalunda Barrow, though no one here’s feeling the cold because today we get the first look inside the excavation. Volunteers worked tirelessly yesterday, driven on by the belief that this truly is the last resting place of a legendary warrior king, and they are part of something special. We all feel it. There’s something about Skalunda Barrow. And, as you can see over my shoulder, they’ve got good reason to be excited. It appears that the entrance to the burial chamber was much closer to the surface than anyone could possibly have imagined.”

  She paused to give herself time to work out exactly what she was going to include in this brief piece to the camera—and more importantly what she was going to leave out. The pause would make the final edit easier. As with most things in life it was easier to just do it rather than leave it out and try and add it later.

  “It’s been a curious morning,” she said in the end. “We arrived a little while ago, only to find that the man in charge of the dig, Professor Lars Mortensen, wasn’t on-site, and by the looks of things work had obviously carried on through the night. When the protective tarp was removed to expose the primary trench just a few minutes ago we saw something stunning—an air pocket beneath the hill has been discovered and already broken into.”

  Johan knew that this was the moment to pan away from her and get a shot of the excavation.

  Annja didn’t move a muscle even though she was no longer in shot, careful not to cast a shadow across the trench while he zoomed in.

  He recorded for longer than they could possibly need, knowing that when it came to final edits the chances were Annja would change her mind and cut the talking head and go for the establishing shot of the barrow itself, running with her description of the morning as a voice-over. Even though they hadn’t worked together before it seemed that Johan could read her mind. He lowered the camera from his shoulder and crouched down over the lip of the trench.

  “Okay, let’s see if we can get a shot down there before Inge returns.”

  Johan looked across the fields at the girl heading back toward them. The return journey was considerably less energetic than the run to the car had been.

  Annja wasn’t worried about the other volunteers trying to stop them; they were too busy worrying about what they were supposed to be doing to pay any attention to what Annja and Johan shouldn’t be doing.

  By the time they’d dropped down into the trench Johan powered up the front-facing light and slung the camera back into position on his shoulder.

  He started his shot from a couple of strides away, approaching it from an angle so Annja had the opportunity to peer inside over his shoulder blocking his light.

  Excitement and anticipation gave way to disappointment, though, as the camera light filled the air pocket beneath the hill.

  She hadn’t expected a treasure hoard—that didn’t happen outside of action-adventure movies—but some kind of archaeological evidence that this was actually a burial site would have been nice. Gray slate plates tiled around the hollow inner dome wasn’t what she would call evidence. Though it was anomalous with everything she knew about burial sites in this part of the world. For a start they were highly uncommon as burial was a comparatively modern concept in the territory. Funereal pyres were much more in keeping with the death rites of the Vikings than any kind of interment, so that there was a burial site at all was surely proof that the dead man had been important. She examined the tiles lining the air pocket. Despite her initial disappointment, perhaps they were the archaeological proof she needed to show the site’s significance.

  “What’s down there? Can you see anything?” Inge Nordqvist asked, coming up behind them. Annja felt the pressure of the young woman’s hand on her back and shuffled aside to let her take a look for herself.

  “Incredible,” she said. “Just look at the construction of this thing. Look at how those pieces of slate overlap and support one another. It’s astonishing. I have never seen anything like it. We’re talking about a feat of structural engineering far ahead of its time.” And again that word, the only one that really seemed to encapsulate everything she wanted to say. “Incredible.”

  Annja felt an affinity with the girl; Doug might be looking for the spectacular find every time they did a segment, in search of something that would grab the viewers’ imaginations and leave them staring wide-eyed with wonder, but that wasn’t what drew Annja to the past. It was stuff like this. Simple truths. The barrow itself was an important find. It didn’t matter if there were no surviving relics inside it, the structure promised to reveal an entirely new level of understanding about the people who built it. That was important.

  But that wasn’t what had got Lars so excited.

  He said he’d found something—and he’d removed it from the site.

  So what was it, and more importantly, where was it?

  “You got what you need?” she asked Johan.

  He nodded.

  The other volunteers had all edged a little closer, waiting to get their own glimpse inside. A few had camera phones in their hands, hoping to get a shot of the open barrow as a memento, not that they’d get much beyond dark smears with those low-grade lenses.

  As far as Annja was concerned the whole thing raised more questions than it gave answers, which on another day would have made her exceedingly happy. But not today. Not when the man at the root of most of the questions had burned to death in a fireball en route to meet her. Annja didn’t believe in coincidences.

  “Hey, Inge, you don’t happen to have a spare key to Lars’s caravan, do you?” Annja asked, trying to make it sound like it wasn’t a big deal if she didn’t.

  The girl shook her head. “Sorry. You looking for something in particular?” Inge’s entire demeanor changed slightly, shifting into a more suspicious, defensive mode as her guard went up.

  “Nothing important,” Annja replied before the girl could get too suspicious. “He’d promised to dig out some stuff on the history of Skalunda for me. I just figured I’d do some reading while I waited for him to get back.”

  The lie came easy to her lips. She didn’t like lying—not like Roux, who could weave a tale so elaborate he’d convince the birds they swam and the fish they belonged up in the sky given half the chance. But sometimes lying was the only option. And it wasn’t as though Lars was going to come back and call her out on it, was it?

  “Ah, sure,” she said. “Of course. He’s got all sorts in there. The prof’s been obsessed with this place for the best part of twenty years. Have you seen inside his caravan? It’s crazy in there. He’s a compulsive hoarder. He writes down every thought he ever has, fills dozens of journals, thousands of scraps of paper, the backs of receipts, beer mats, you name it...crammed full of his tight scrawl. It’s a disease. Got to be. I have no idea how he can find anything in there, but you can bet there’s weeks’ worth of reading for you if the prof decided you needed a history lesson.”

  Annja couldn’t help but smile at the girl’s obvious affection for her very own nutty professor. The news, when it came, would hit her hard.

  Inge shrugged, and then said, “There’s
a rock near the door. The prof said he’d keep a spare key there in case we needed to go in while he wasn’t around. Between you and me—I’ve been on a couple of digs with him—it’s because he locks himself out and can’t find his key. I don’t think he even bothers locking the door most of the time now. Help yourself.”

  Inge turned her attention to the volunteers who were still waiting for permission to peer down into the darkness. One by one they lined up to take a look. There were oohs and aahs, but none of the same infectious excitement Inge herself had exhibited.

  And, more tellingly, no one mentioned the fact that the dirt floor in the hollow chamber had been disturbed. There were barely discernible signs of agitation in the dust, no doubt down to Lars’s brushwork during the extraction of the relic.

  She was gambling that Johan’s footage would reveal a little more when they went through it back at the hotel.

  Right now she wanted to take a look inside Lars Mortensen’s caravan before the police arrived. If he was as compulsive a note taker as Inge suggested, maybe, just maybe, he’d left some sort of clue as to what he’d found in the barrow.

  10

  The key was exactly where Inge had said it would be, but she didn’t need it because the door was already open. The girl had also been right about the contents of the caravan; there was little of value—certainly nothing worth stealing apart from a laptop, which lay on the counter, and even that was four years past its prime and outprocessored by Annja’s phone no less.

  There were editions of newspapers dating back weeks piled up side by side with obscure academic journals, stacks of handwritten notes, crushed receipts and who knew what else crammed into the tight space. Dishes were stacked in the small sink, half a dozen mugs ringed with coffee stains of varying permanence.

  An open newspaper lay beside the laptop.

  Annja scanned the page, looking for anything that might stand out—pictures, headlines—but it was harder in a foreign language even if a few words were almost recognizable. It offered no great insights. She moved the paper, angling it so she could check the date, but as she did she heard something slide across it.