by Alex Archer
Out of the corner of her eye, Annja saw Archard open his mouth as if to say something. He drew his lips tight and his gaze drifted from the three girls to Annja. Odd, she thought, that he looked so unemotional. Interested and detached at the same time. Distant, yet observant. He reminded her of Mr. Spock in Star Trek.
“We left early,” Roux said.
“Wish John would leave early.” She twisted her curl tighter. “You a professor?”
Roux shook his head. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said softly to Annja.
She headed toward Archard, then pivoted on the ball of her foot and started down the long hallway to the parking lot. She heard Roux’s footfalls behind her.
“Would you like to see Durendal?”
Archard’s question stopped them in their tracks.
“Miss Creed?”
“Yes.” She turned, a second behind Roux.
“I will give you that courtesy. I think you appreciate fine swords.”
“It doesn’t belong to you,” Annja said.
“Ah, Miss Creed, it does. I was destined to have it, Roland reborn.”
This had to be a trap. But it was a tempting one.
“No,” Roux said.
“I didn’t ask you, old man.”
“Yes,” Annja said. “I would like to see Durendal.”
“Who’s Durendal?” the girl with red-blond hair asked. “Is he some celebrity?”
“A rocker?” the other two asked almost simultaneously.
Archard gave the girls a withering look—the first hint of real emotion he’d displayed. He looked at Annja. “In my car, in the faculty parking lot.” He took a step down the hall in the opposite direction, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “I’ll not repeat the invitation, Miss Creed.”
Annja brushed by Roux and hurried after Archard.
It was still raining. It had rained most of the time she’d spent in France, weather that matched her dark mood. The faculty parking lot was nested in the center of a U the building formed. A few lampposts illuminated about a dozen cars, with shadows from the brick walls around the lot making the place look desperate…like a scene in a noir film. The rain made the blacktop appear liquid.
“Won’t Dr. Lawton disapprove of this?” Annja paused just outside the back door. “You showing me this sword?”
Archard turned and looked at her, more emotion on his face. Was it anger? It melted back behind the stoic mask. “God-touched sword, Miss Creed. My mistake. I thought you’d truly want to see it, your connection to the divine and all.” He shrugged and shook some strands of hair out of his eyes. “I rescind my offer.”
“Dr. Lawton—”
“I do not always agree with him, Miss Creed. I believe in him, and I trust him completely. But I do not always agree.” He started to turn. “And the invitation was only for you, not your companion.”
Annja hadn’t heard Roux come out the back door, but she had picked up the scent of his cologne.
Archard waved. “Good night, Miss Creed.” He turned and threaded his way through the cars.
“Wait!” Annja called. “Stay here, Roux,” she added under her breath. “Keep an eye out. I don’t like this.”
“I don’t like it, either.”
She hurried after Archard, splashing through puddles. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
He raised a hand dismissively and kept walking.
She watched him, fit but not an athlete. He didn’t strike her as someone who would have been able to scale the wall and reach the sword in Rocamadour. Luc or his dead brother were athletic enough.
“Who got Durendal for you?” Annja was practically at his shoulder now. “In Rocamadour? Who stole it?”
She reached out and caught him by the arm. At the same time she felt for her sword, sensing it was poised, ready to appear. “Who stole it?”
He wrenched his arm free and glared at her. Once more the anger quickly disappeared behind the implacable mask. “The sword is mine by right. It’s not theft to retrieve something belonging to me.” He let out a sigh bordering on exasperation and raised his gaze skyward. Rain pattered against his face. “Your sword. Did you steal it?”
Annja didn’t bother to hide her surprise.
“Did you steal it? Or is it yours because of some divine right?” He lowered his head and blinked the water from his eyes. “What does it matter how we come by something that we are meant to have?”
He walked around a four-door navy Renault Koleos, a family man’s car. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key ring, pressing the button and popping the trunk. The trunk light was dim and revealed a piece of dark material. Archard leaned in and pulled the fabric back.
“Beautiful,” Annja said. She sought her sword in the otherwhere, grasping the hilt… Wait, she told herself.
“To call it beautiful is to insult it,” he replied. “Such a word isn’t adequate.”
The sword had been reforged, the broken point rejoined with the piece that had hung in the cloister in Rocamadour. It had been cleaned, too. The tempered steel blade gleamed, even in the feeble light. The pommel was leaf shaped, covered in gold and decorated with figures in relief. The quillons were lion heads, mouths opened and curved toward the blade.
“Beautiful” was inadequate.
“It once belonged to Hector of Troy.” Archard’s voice had changed, becoming reverent. “It came to Roland by Malagigi. Would you say Malagigi stole it? Did Roland steal it? Does it matter if I stole it? It was meant to be mine.”
Annja leaned closer to get a better look. Her breath fogged part of the blade.
“It’s not yours.”
“God-touched. Did you know that there is a tooth of Saint Peter in the hilt? A saint. God-touched. And though it has bloodied many men, it also has blood in it. Drops of Saint Basil’s blood are in the hilt and were put in the steel as it was forged. Blood of a saint. Doubly touched by God.”
“Archard—”
“The Blessed Virgin Mary herself, Mother of Christ. A piece of her raiment, her cloak, is in the pommel.” He extended his hand and let his fingers play across one of the lions’ heads. “Do you know The Song of Roland, Miss Creed?”
Annja didn’t answer.
“Lords my barons, whom send we, then
To Saragossa, the Saracen den?
‘I,’ said Roland, ‘will blithely go.’”
“And you are Dr. Lawton’s Roland?”
Archard continued to quote the poem, caressing the sword, his expression softening his features. Annja wrapped her jacket around her, very aware of her own sword.
“I got the impression you follow Dr. Lawton like a puppy. But who follows you, Archard Gihon?” She was trying to provoke him. She intended to take Durendal, call for Roux and get out of the rain. Brother Maynard would be pleased to get the sword back, though perhaps disappointed it had been reforged.
Archard persisted in reciting his poem.
“You’re nuts, too,” Annja said, so quietly she barely heard herself.
She reached for Durendal with her left hand. With her right she grasped her own sword.
At the same moment, Archard grabbed the trunk hood and slammed it down hard on Annja’s shoulder blades.
If it looks like a trap, she thought, a lance of misery pressing against her back….
“‘Distraught was Roland with wrath and pain,’” Archard recited.
Chapter 27
She felt like a mouse that had gone after a piece of cheese in a spring-loaded trap. She wasn’t broken by it, though, just hurt and upset with herself. She pushed the hood up, whirled, kicked out and connected with Archard to send him reeling. She called for her sword.
“Thief!” she spat. “Worse than a thief!”
He kept himself from falling, stepped back, hands raised defensively, his expression unreadable.
“Roux!” Annja shouted. “Trap!”
A car door opened and slammed, followed by a second and a third.
A
nnja pointed the sword at Archard’s belly. “We’re going back inside.” She held her blade with her right hand and with her left reached behind her to the trunk, feeling for Durendal. “And we’re calling the authorities. You might think you’ve got a right to this sword, but you’re not Roland.”
There was a spitting sound and a bullet whizzed by her head. She spun to put herself fully behind the trunk, using it as a shield and keeping an eye on Archard. A second shot spat by…from a gun with a silencer.
“Roux, look out! There are more of them!”
On her right she heard the sibilant hiss of a metal sword being drawn. A heartbeat later she heard it on her left.
“Put the gun away, Sarah!” someone called from a distance. “We don’t want her dead.”
“I would have gotten you out to the parking lot one way or another, Miss Creed,” Archard said. “But this way you got to see Durendal first. My gift to you.”
“Some gift.” She was angry at him—the blood-
boiling, furious sort of angry. But she was even more upset with herself for following him out here. He didn’t have a weapon, so she couldn’t use her sword against him, but…she lunged, bringing her foot up and sweeping his leg forward, catching him off balance. As he tried to recover, she raised her sword and brought the butt of it down hard on his shoulder. He dropped to his knees and she jumped out from behind the car. Luc Niveau advanced on her, a sword in each hand.
She hadn’t been able to beat him before, on the rooftops in Spain—though that was when he was with his twin. Could she now? There were two more figures behind him, each with a sword.
“This is great.” Annja ground her teeth. She looked toward the back of the building, where the light was brighter. Roux had been standing just outside the door, but he wasn’t there now. “Roux?” She crouched, avoiding Luc’s swinging blades, then jumped back up, slamming the trunk lid to keep Archard—at least temporarily—from getting Durendal. She spotted another man on the far side of the car.
Four swordsmen and Archard, who’d been reaching for Durendal to make it five swordsmen. Too bad he’d pulled his hands away before the hood came down. She might have broken all his fingers. She skittered back a few feet to put some distance between herself and Luc, and to find a car to set her back against.
Four swordsmen and Archard.
And a woman with a gun.
Tough odds…made worse because of Luc. She knew how very good he was. She hoped the others weren’t as skilled. They couldn’t be; if they were, she was toast. She wouldn’t let them completely surround her. At best they could only come at her from three sides.
Where the hell was Roux? He’d fought on her side before.
Luc was approaching from her left. The one on her right was stocky and had a barrel chest. He was maybe five feet tall, counting his shock of spiky hair. Looked like a dwarf. She couldn’t make out many other details in the poor light. If their intent was to rattle her, they were succeeding. Big-time.
Annja could see the weapons clearly enough. Luc was still wielding Honjo Masamune and a saber, the fellow on the right a massive two-handed blade that she knew must be cumbersome to hold. Despite the deepening shadows, she recognized it from the picture she’d seen as the missing Wallace Sword. Lawton’s “paladins.”
“Annja, take care!” At last she heard Roux, but she still couldn’t see him. He called to her again, and then she heard the unmistakable sound of ringing metal. Roux was engaged in a sword fight with a foe she hadn’t seen.
Roux was good, a paladin of Joan of Arc and a veteran of battles that stretched back through the centuries. With him on her side, somehow…somehow they just might get out of this.
She rocked back against the car, avoiding Luc’s next swing. He was using the flat of the blade against her.
She spotted Archard moving to his car again and popping the trunk.
Damn, she was going to have one more swordsman to fight. Five to one. She’d managed that before, she told herself, but not against trained warriors.
The two men closing in behind Luc wore tight-
fitting clothes that wouldn’t hamper their movements. Maybe students of Luc. The stocky man with the Wallace Sword swung the two-handed blade around his head, creating a dull whistling noise meant to impress and frighten her. If he connected, it would hurt.
In the next heartbeat, Annja decided to take the offensive. She sprinted at the stout man, ducking beneath his arms, elbowing him in the stomach and cursing when she didn’t budge him. It felt as if she’d slammed her arm against a brick wall. Spinning around behind him, she brought her sword about, not using the flat of the blade but the edge, slicing at his side and cutting through his heavy vest. She wasn’t sure if she’d reached the flesh beneath, but she swung a second time as he turned to face her, connecting for certain this time, rewarded with a spray of blood when her sword cut through his shirt.
“Brûle en enfer!” he screamed.
“I guess that hurt,” Annja said. She leaped, landing on the hood of a nearby car and jumping up to the roof. From here she could see Roux—he was engaged with three swordsmen—and she saw the woman leveling the gun at him, trying to draw a bead.
Go ahead and shoot him, Annja thought. You can’t kill him. But Annja could be killed.
Eight swordsmen. Where were the other four? she thought wryly. Charlemagne had had twelve peers. Was Lawton not able to get twelve misguided idiots to follow him? Or had she killed one of them when she’d pushed Gaetan off the roof in Spain?
“Come down, Miss Creed,” Archard called. The other swordsmen were deferring to him and hadn’t swung on her since he’d held up his free hand. “You can see that you’re outnumbered. You don’t need to suffer injury.”
A glance at the man with the Wallace Sword and the line of blood across his stomach told her she’d hurt him, but not badly. His face was twisted in fury.
There were a few lights on in the building overlooking the faculty parking lot. She hoped someone would glance out a window and call the police. Lawton’s lecture couldn’t go on too much longer. Some of the students would surely come out this back door, to their residences. If she could prolong this until somebody called the cops, she was confident her attackers would scatter at the first siren.
“But not all of you,” she whispered. “I don’t want all of you to run away.” Annja wanted to take some of them down, if for no other reason than to cut the number of Lawton’s peers.
At the far end of the lot, Roux was still fighting with the other three swordsmen. If the circumstances had been different, Annja would have enjoyed watching him. He was amazing, keeping the three from landing even a single blow. Medieval knights were trained to fight multiple adversaries. Annja had some of that training…and some tricks she’d picked up along the way from her opponents.
“Your poem ends badly,” she told Archard. “Roland dies.”
“Heroically, for God and for Charlemagne. I don’t consider that a bad ending.”
In front of the car, Luc tapped his twin swords on the hood. “Don’t make this easy,” he said.
“Never.” Annja leaped at him, clearing the hood, heel out, and catching the side of his head, bringing her sword down and sliding it along his. She jerked the blade, catching the crosspiece of his saber and sending it spinning out of his hand. She vaulted onto the trunk of the next car and skittered up to the roof. The impact dented it, and she hoped the owner’s insurance would cover the damage.
A quick look toward Roux told her only two men were fighting him now.
The five swordsmen surrounded the car she was perched on. This time Luc was the one to hang back, cupping his hand against his stomach before stooping to retrieve his saber. His eyes were bright and his expression mean, and he said something to Archard that Annja didn’t catch.
“Hey!” The shout came from above them, from someone finally looking out one of the windows. “Qu’est-ce qui se passe là-bas?”
“La police! Appellez la police!
” Annja hollered. Rarely did she need the cops, but the odds were bad.
And then two more men with swords ran into the parking lot, and the odds got worse.
That made ten, though one near Roux was down. Eleven with the woman, who’d started firing at Roux. She might have fired earlier and Annja just hadn’t heard because of the silencer. Were all of Lawton’s peers assembled?
“Truly, Miss Creed, let’s end this,” Archard pleaded. “No reason for anyone to die here.”
“Devons-nous garder en sécurité?” the one with the Wallace Sword asked. “Ne pouvons-nous tuer et de prendre l’épée de cette façon?”
“No, we are not to kill her,” Archard said.
“But I have no such constraints,” Annja returned. “I can kill you. Now…back off and let my companion and me out of here.”
“Get her!” Archard shouted.
“This is going to become bloody.” Annja slid down the windshield and landed on the hood, swung at a man who looked vaguely Asian, her blade biting into his neck.
His scream was short and terrible. Blood sprayed in a wide arc from the wound, showering her as she dashed forward, trying to take her fight closer to Roux.
“Crescendo!” Archard hollered.
“Crescendo’s down?” the woman with the gun shouted. “Not Crescendo!”
“Stop! Stop! J’ai appelé la police!” someone called from above.
“About time,” Annja muttered. “I hope they get here quickly.”
“Company!” yelled the woman near the back door. Sarah. Again she fired at Roux, and Annja wondered if her aim was good and Roux could ignore bullets, or if she was just a lousy shot.
Two down in any event, Annja thought, one each for her and Roux. That left eight. No sirens yet. But a handful of students spilled out the back of the building. A girl squealed. The rest grabbed for their cell phones, some making calls, some taking pictures. “La police!” one of them shouted.
“Miss Creed!”
Annja spun to see Archard on the car, drawing Durendal back and sweeping it at her. It caught the yellow light and looked for a heartbeat like liquid gold. Beautiful. The flat of the blade caught her in the midsection, just enough to put her off balance.