Day of the Vikings. A Thriller. (ARKANE)

by J. F. Penn

  “Is it harder to believe that a Neo-Viking priestess caused long-dead bones to spin in the air, calling warriors from their Valhalla feast?”

  Morgan smiled. “Fair point. When I identified this staff as something to be looked into further, I had no idea that others would be seeking it, too. It seems this Valkyrie priestess could possibly wield its power, whereas I can only use it as a blunt club. We need to know more about it.”

  Blake’s heart thumped as he summoned the strength to speak of that which he kept secret. He rubbed his gloved hands together, the bumps of the scars familiar lines through the fabric. Part of him wanted to wait and see what Morgan would come up with, as he was sure she would get them out of here. But another part wanted to read the staff, a curiosity that made his hands tingle in anticipation.

  He pulled the gloves off, revealing his scarred hands, the cinnamon skin marred with criss-crossed ropes of ivory.

  “Oh Blake, I’m so sorry,” Morgan said, her eyes widening as she took in his extensive injuries.

  “My father tried to beat the gift out of me,” he said. “He tried to bleed it from my skin, but it always came back.”

  “What gift?” The violet slash in Morgan’s right eye seemed to darken to indigo as she focused on his words. Blake could see no judgment there, only sincere interest.

  “I can read objects,” he said, although it was hard to put into words the maelstrom of vision that consumed him when he read. “Some call it psychometry, or a form of clairvoyance. Whatever you want to call it, when I touch an object, I can enter into its emotional history. I can see the people and places it touched and feel the emotions that surrounded it. Sometimes it’s hazy, but the strongest emotions also bring the most powerful visions.”

  “So you see violence and murder more often than happiness?”

  Blake nodded. “Exactly.” That was the curse, along with the flashbacks he experienced of what he witnessed. He drowned his nightmares in tequila most nights, but Morgan didn’t need to know about his nocturnal vice. “I’ve helped the police on a couple of cases, not that they would admit that to anyone, but that has helped me reframe the gift as useful at least.” Blake thought of Detective Jamie Brooke and what he had seen of the murder at the Hunterian – the grotesque specimens in jars that revealed the heart of the crime. “Perhaps if I read the staff, we might find out something more about why the Neo-Vikings want it?”

  Morgan hesitated. Blake saw uncertainty in her eyes, but only for a second. She held out the staff.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Can you just put it down here on the floor?” Blake sat down cross-legged. Morgan put the staff in front of him, sitting down opposite him. Her proximity made him uneasy, aware that she would be watching him, assessing what he was doing. But apparently she had seen stranger things, and to be honest, he was interested to see what was so special about this staff.

  “So, how does this work?” Morgan asked. “Do you go into some kind of trance state?”

  “I guess you could say that, but if you remove my hands from the staff, I’ll come out of it. Sometimes I go pretty deep, and can have physical reactions to what I’m experiencing. If you’re worried, just pull the staff away.”

  Blake laid his hands on the iron rod and closed his eyes, sensing the waves of past experience waiting to wash over him. He dreaded this moment, but also craved it. For as much as he drank to oblivion to forget some of the things he had seen, he also experienced moments of beauty that stood out like diamond stars in the night sky, a precious glimpse into the lives of those long dead.

  The veil of consciousness shifted, and Blake reached back with his mind. There was a long period of dark, dormant power that throbbed and hummed, perhaps the time in the grave where the staff had been found. He heard his own pulse before it morphed into the beating of drums and his vision began to clear.

  ***

  They came from the sea in longboats filled with men in heat for battle, the staff of Skara Brae at their head, clutched in the hands of the only woman with them, the völva seeress. She wasn’t like the women they had left behind, those who served and bore children, subject to their menfolk. There was power in this one – a sense that she was at one with the ferocity of nature, and her will drove the men who followed her, even into death. The drums beat faster as the boats landed on the shore of an island. A priory loomed above them, carved into the rocks, its arches built to the glory of the God these monks served. The green hill slopes wound up to the priory, and the figures of people running could be seen, trying to escape the oncoming raiders.

  Blake sensed the excitement of the Viking horde, their blood calling for plunder and slaughter, but under it all a resonance of pure joy. It was the first time he had truly felt it when reading. These men knew happiness in these moments. Perhaps this is what men are truly made for, Blake thought, as the rumble of the drums filled him.

  “Fyllisk fjörvi feigra manna, rýðr ragna sjöt rauðum dreyra.”

  The men shouted Norse words as they spilled out of the boats, their voices a rough chant, evoking the frenzy and hunger of the god Odin as they charged. They called for the gods to feed on the flesh of the dead, and redden this land with gore.

  “Skeggjöld, skálmöld, vindöld, vargöld,” they chanted as they ran. “Axe-time, sword-time, wind-time, wolf-time.”

  Many were tattooed with the beasts that would stand with them in spirit during battle, and some wore wolf-skin pelts, the heads with teeth bared, adding to the ferocity of their appearance. With longswords and great axes held high, they ran in packs for the villages at the base of the priory, but Blake lost sight of them as he could only remain with the staff. He could hear the screams though, the wailing that soon filled the air, of women raped and men murdered, the village plundered as they died.

  The seeress made for the inner rooms of the priory, and her focus thrummed through Blake’s core. She wanted something from here, something very specific. He could sense her seeking it out. Two huge men flanked her, swords drawn. They pushed through the heavy wooden double doors into the sanctuary of the priory chapel, where a group of monks huddled near the altar, protecting the relics of the saint. One of them broke away carrying a heavy book, with two others flanking him. The Vikings ignored the group, for there was so much gold here, in the chalices and reliquaries, the wealth of a church that had not yet gone through the pains of the Reformation. The Viking guards stepped forward to begin piling it up for plunder.

  One reached for a candlestick topped with an ornate carved eagle as a monk rushed toward them, hands raised in supplication.

  “Stop,” he cried. “This is the Lord’s house.”

  The Viking backhanded him casually, swatting the man to the floor.

  “The punishment of God has come upon us,” the monk cried, rising to his knees, hands raised in worship. “Forgive …”

  His words were silenced by the thrust of a longsword, the tip of the blade emerging through his back, dripping with blood. The monk’s eyes reflected surprise as they glazed over, his mouth open in his last prayer. The Viking withdrew the sword and wiped it on the monk’s habit before sheathing it again, turning his attention back to the gold.

  “I want the bones of the saint and one of you for my sacrifice to Odin,” the seeress said, in the local tongue. “If you give me that now, along with gold for my men, the rest of you will live to rebuild your community. Otherwise, you all die.”

  Chapter 5

  BLAKE WATCHED AS THE monks stood in mute silence for a moment, and then one whispered. The others turned. There was a flurry of gesticulation and heated argument. The eldest monk finally stepped forward, his steps faltering, his blue eyes misty with age or the fear of what was to come.

  “Take me, but let my brothers leave. I will go soon to meet the Lord anyway.”

  The seeress nodded, and the other monks hurried away, only one looking back at the brother they had left behind, regret and shame on his face.

  “Make it
quick, I beg of you,” the old monk said, using one of the altar rails to lower himself down, beginning to pray.

  “I can’t give you that, old man, but perhaps your own god will hear your screams and your place in paradise will be assured.” She gestured to the two Viking guards. “Hold him.”

  The monk struggled as they forced him to bend forward, his back to the völva, his prayers spoken in halting Latin, interspersed with panicked breath.

  “Sed et si ambulavero in valle mortis non timebo …”

  One of the Vikings ripped the monk’s habit, pulling it down to reveal thin, sagging skin on old bones. Tucking the staff into her belt, the seeress withdrew a long knife, its blade wickedly sharp with serrated edges.

  “… malum quoniam tu mecum es virga tua … et baculus tuus ipsa consolabuntur me.”

  With surprising strength, she thrust the knife into the monk’s back and began to wrench it up and down. The man screamed and writhed, but the Vikings held him as the seeress continued cutting, sawing his ribs away from his spine. Blake felt the pulse of the monk’s blood, his agony like a wave. He recoiled from the scene, sinking toward darkness into the tunnel that led back to the present day. The vision of the monk faded and his screams became little more than a whisper. But Blake knew he needed to know more, he had to see what came next in order to understand why the staff was so important. He pushed back along the tug of the staff, and emerged again into the chapel.

  The stink of blood and feces filled the air, sweat and fear overlaying them. The monk’s body was laid on the floor by the altar now, his ribs splayed out from his spine revealing a bloody cavity where the seeress pulled his viscera out. Blood covered her hands, her fingers curled into talons with fingernails stained crimson.

  “Get me a bone from the relic of their saint,” she rasped, her voice almost bestial. One of the Vikings went to the altar and opened the reliquary of St Cuthbert, taking the small finger bones out.

  The seeress laid the bones on the floor, squatting next to them and crushing them with the blunt end of the staff. She scattered the powder and slivers of bone over the bloody corpse of the monk, muttering words as she waved the iron staff over it. On the final word, she thrust the staff into the raw cavity of the still-steaming body, coating the iron with gore and clots of blood. She stood again and lifted the dripping staff toward the heavens, calling in a language that resonated with power.

  “Great Odin, All-Father, give me your vision.”

  Her eyes rolled back in her head, showing the whites, and she began to convulse. The whole chapel began to shake. The Viking men held onto the walls as the vibrations grew stronger. A great crack filled the air and the flagstones ruptured beneath their feet, steam pouring out and engulfing the seeress in its hot breath. Blake felt the heat in her transmuted through the staff, but she screamed in ecstasy, not pain, as the visions filled her.

  “Alt veit ek, Óðinn! hvar þú auga falt: í inum mœra Mímis brunni,” she chanted, her eyes opening wider as she spoke, as if surprised by the words that came out of her mouth.

  Blake felt her exhilaration as her mind filled with the knowledge of the gods, but only a fraction of what was possible.

  “I know where Odin’s eye is hidden,” she called, “deep in the wide-famed well of Mimir.”

  Blake saw that the Eye of Odin would bring what she truly sought, knowledge and power that few could stand against. The monk’s broken body fell through the gap in the earth as the seeress stood astride it, head thrown back, shaking as she received the gift of prophecy from the other side of the veil.

  ***

  Blake’s visions tunneled and he gasped, his eyes flickering open to find Morgan shaking him.

  “Blake, are you OK?” she asked, her eyes concerned and questioning.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Just give me a minute.”

  It took a moment to reorientate himself after reading, like putting on a pair of glasses for the first time and finding the world sharpen in focus to detail never seen before. Every time he read, Blake wondered if this time he would find himself lost somewhere, his mind trapped in another realm, another time, even though his body remained in the modern world. He always set an alarm when he was on his own.

  His pulse calmed as he breathed in and out, consciously feeling his physical body on the floor of this room, where he had read so many times.

  “There was a Viking raid on a monastery, on an island, a long time ago.” He told Morgan of what he had seen, describing the ritual murder of the monk and the words of the seeress in her trance.

  “The Eye of Odin,” Morgan said, shaking her head. “I’ve read of this and the story gets stranger indeed. Odin always sought more knowledge, and the legend goes that he visited the Well of Mimir, the Rememberer, in the roots of the world tree, Yggdrasil. The waters revealed the wisdom of the cosmos, and when Odin asked for a drink, Mimir asked for his eye in return. Odin plucked one eye out – which one is unclear – and cast it into the well. In return, Odin drank from the waters. His eye still lies there.”

  Blake rubbed his temples, the pressure easing him back into his physicality.

  “The feeling I got from the seeress was that this Eye is an actual object that can channel prophetic visions from the gods.”

  Morgan nodded. “The words she spoke have been passed down in the Poetic Edda Völuspá, known as the Prophecy of the Seeress. If this Valkyrie wants the Eye too, then the staff can perhaps give her the same visions as the woman you saw.”

  Blake grimaced. “It seems a sacrifice is needed to activate the staff somehow before the visions come.” He described the injuries to the dead monk’s body.

  “It sounds like the Blood Eagle,” Morgan said. “A horrific method of torture and execution where the victim eventually died of blood loss and shock, or through suffocation when the lungs were pulled out through the back. The wings of the splayed ribs represent the eagle, the corpse-gulper, the war-bringer and the bird of Odin.”

  Blake paled again, knowing that the images would emerge in his nightmares. More bloody bodies to haunt his nights.

  “Could you tell where they were?” Morgan asked.

  Blake shook his head. “I looked east to the sea as the Vikings ran into the priory. It was certainly an island near the coast, because I could see the land.”

  “It sounds like Lindisfarne,” Morgan said, eyes narrowing as she tried to recall the details. “There were other monastery attacks, but the geographic features sound like the Holy Island. In 793 AD it was the site of the first Viking raid in Britain, a ferocious, surprise attack that left monks dead and much of the treasure from the monastery stolen. They repeated these raids at monasteries on other islands along the Scottish coast, because the sites were so rich.”

  “There was something else,” Blake said, frowning at the memory. “One monk scurried away carrying a heavy book, flanked by several of the others, so it must have been important. Maybe they wrote about the raid in that?”

  “The Lindisfarne Gospels are in the British Library,” Morgan said. “It’s an illuminated manuscript written in the century prior to the invasion. But I seem to remember that there’s a page of notes added at the end. It’s worth checking out when we get out of here.”

  An alarm bell rang out suddenly, and both covered their ears to shield them from the high-pitched shriek. When it stopped, an announcement came over the loudspeaker system in the voice of the Valkyrie.

  “Bring the staff to the Great Court in the next ten minutes, or I’ll start killing hostages.”

  Chapter 6

  THERE WAS NO HESITATION in the woman’s voice, no room for negotiation, and Morgan knew that their only choice was to go down to the Great Court. She couldn’t contact ARKANE – even if she did, a team of agents wouldn’t make it here in time to save anyone. She couldn’t be sure that the iron staff would even do anything, and besides, once the Valkyrie had it, there was no way for the Neo-Vikings to get out of the museum.

  Morgan wished she cou
ld go back to this morning, when she had left the ARKANE base under Trafalgar Square ready for a purely civilian research trip. She would have put better procedures in place, brought some kind of weapon with her, and she definitely would have brought backup. Her partner Jake was out on the firing range in the woods of Kent, finally recovered from his injuries, but she should have brought someone else. There was no point in regrets now, though. She could only go forward and take action. Morgan stood.

  “We need to go,” she said. “I’m not risking lives, and these Neo-Vikings are deadly serious.”

  Blake stood up, a little unsteady on his feet after the visions. His chiseled features looked pained and his caramel skin was still a shade lighter. Morgan wondered how he coped with the things he saw, how he reconciled it with the physical world of the here and now. She thought back to the demon creature in the bone crypt of Sedlec, how her own worlds had collided then, how her beliefs in what was truly real had been warped and twisted. They had something in common, for sure.

  Blake put his gloves back on, covering the ugly scars on his hands. Part of Morgan wanted to touch them, to stroke the lines of years of pain. But if she touched him, could he read her past? Could he see part of her shot to pieces with her husband Elian on the Golan Heights, or blown apart on the streets of Beersheba with her father? She wasn’t ready to let anyone come that close.

  “We can go through the Mesopotamian Gallery and out by the restaurant,” he said, brushing the dust from his jeans. “The stairs lead directly down into the Great Court, but we’ll be easily spotted soon enough.”

  Morgan nodded. “Good, I want them to see us coming. We can’t let them harm hostages. Are you OK now?”

  Blake rubbed his eyes, blinking. “Yes, sorry. It’s a bit of an adjustment coming back.” His eyes fell to the staff she held. “Are you sure we should give it to them?”