City Of Swords

She eased that shut behind her, too, wincing at the grating sound it made, and jogged down from the eighth- to the seventh-floor landing, turned and headed toward the sixth. The air was fusty and stale.

The stairwell, dimly lit with energy-saving spiral fluorescent lights, probably wasn’t intended to be used by hotel guests. Emergencies and power outages, Annja figured, and for guests like herself who couldn’t sleep. The walls were painted a hospital-green, reminding her of avocado dip. They and the security doors were thick enough that she shouldn’t disturb anyone’s beauty sleep.

She laughed as her feet hit the fourth-floor landing and she picked up speed. She loved to run.

Annja felt the beginning of an exercise burn in her chest as she reached the first floor and wheeled around to start the jog back up. The smell of cleanser lingered like a thick fog. She thumbed the button on her iPod and then inserted the earbuds, not once missing a step or losing her cadence.

Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries played just loudly enough to muffle her breathing and her slapping shoes.

Kill da wabbit, kill da wabbit. As much as Annja loved Elmer Fudd, she flipped the button to bring up another piece. Balakirev’s Islamey. She set her feet in time to the beat and felt the piano riffs travel up and down her spine. The music swelled as she again neared the eighth-floor landing.

Up twelve more floors, to the top of the hotel, before returning to her room for a welcome shower and a few hours of good sleep. That was the plan. She felt wired, as if she’d just thrown back six cups of coffee. Maybe she’d do two circuits instead. That’d be enough. Yeah. Better than a sleeping pill.

As she hit the tenth floor, Balakirev reached a mancando section. Over the whisper of the piano, Annja heard the scrape of a door opening somewhere above her. A snippet of conversation drifted down, and then she heard the pounding of feet. Two more insomniacs.

Annja pressed herself against the wall of the eleventh-floor landing as they thundered toward her—two young women she’d seen in the restaurant during dinner. They sported hot-pink Wales Wrunners T-shirts. They smiled as they bounced by. She recalled reading about a marathon in town in another day or two. These were no doubt entrants.

At the sixteenth-floor landing, Annja nudged the button on the iPod again, wanting something a little livelier. Mikhail Glinka’s Kamarinskaya blared, and she ran faster.

The burn in her chest had spread to her neck. Her face was flushed from the mild exertion and her heart rate was up. The stale air reached deeper into her lungs, and she felt a sensation in her legs that wasn’t quite an ache, but was telling Annja that her muscles were stretching from the climb. It was a good feeling.

She turned her head and blew a hank of hair out of her eyes. She set her feet to the beat as she neared the uppermost landing. Annja brushed the door to the roof with her fingers, leaving four thin streaks of sweat, then spun on her heel and started back down.

She passed the Wales Wrunners again on the sixth-floor landing. They were coming up this time and pressed themselves against the wall to let her continue. Common runner courtesy. One of the girls said something, but Annja couldn’t hear her over the Glinka.

At the bottom the cleanser scent again assailed Annja—bleach or floor polish or both. She touched down on the landing, brushed her fingers against the first-floor door and then started up. She took fuller, even breaths now.

She spotted two more insomniacs when she turned on the seventh floor and started up the next flight. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the eighth-floor landing, blocking her path. Dressed in dark pants and jackets, they reminded her of the Blues Brothers. One was tall, the other shorter and stocky with a pockmarked face. The stocky one wore sunglasses, despite the stairwell’s dim lighting; that fact set her nerves tingling. Annja jogged in place on the stairs, halfway between landings, and plucked out her earbuds.

She waited for the men to move or to say something. Neither did.

“Excuse me,” she said as she reached the step just below them. They backed up, but not enough for her to reach the landing door. She didn’t like the looks of them, and hackles rose on her neck. “This is my floor,” she said, a little louder. She thought about reaching for the sword, but they hadn’t threatened her. Maybe they were with the Wales Wrunners.

The stocky one tilted his head to the side, as though he didn’t understand what Annja was saying, and so she repeated it in French. He nodded in comprehension and smiled, took a step back to accommodate her. Without warning, the tall one’s fist shot out like a piston, striking her on the shoulder. There was considerable force in the blow, and it caught her off guard.

Annja fell, arms flailing. Her legs struck the stairs and her back slammed down as she bumped and slid to the lower landing. Her head bounced hard against the tile and her vision swam. Her right ankle hurt like hell—definitely sprained, maybe broken—and she felt as if a truck had fallen on her.

She tried to get up, but her head was spinning, making the stairwell’s hospital-green paint a sickening swirl of color. As Annja retched, the tall man clomped down the steps and grabbed her by the waistband.

The sword! She felt for it with her mind, but everything was out of sync and she raced toward merciful unconsciousness.

“Where is it? In your room?” the stocky one asked in perfect English. He had the gravelly voice of a smoker. He’d taken off his sunglasses, revealing little black pig eyes. He heaved Annja around the corner to the next set of stairs and shoved. She was pitched down another flight and then another.

The tall one continued talking, but Annja was beyond making out the words. The sounds mingled with the crashing in her ears and the shock as her body hit each step. Blood filled her mouth. The sword hung beyond her reach in an otherworldly space her mind was too muddled to access.

Bending over her on the fifth-floor landing, the stocky one took Annja’s iPod and stuck it into his pocket, pausing only long enough to turn the device off. He found the hotel key card in her pants. “Let’s check her room.”

The tall man grunted in agreement as the blackness reached up to claim Annja.

Chapter 6

Archard placed the sword on the altar, first the large section and then the smaller one that Sarah had prized out of the cliff. In the gap between the two pieces, the black velvet looked like oil in the dim overhead light. A yard long, the section near the haft was jagged and reminded him of a bolt of lightning.

He bent over the blade, seeing his gray eyes reflected back at him, with faint lines visible at the corners. The years were starting to show.

“Durendal,” he said.

“Durendal,” one of two men behind him repeated in awe. “Durlindana. Durandarte. God-touched. Dr. Lawton will be pleased.”

“Indeed.” Archard pressed his fingertips to the pommel. “Most pleased.” But he couldn’t imagine that his employer’s pleasure would exceed his own. “The sword of Charlemagne’s paladin Roland.”

“Destined to be yours now,” the other man added. “You are the doctor’s lead knight.”

“I read about Roland,” Sarah said slowly. “In Dr. Lawton’s textbook. Some called him Orlando, and the sword—”

Annoyed glances from all three men made her stop.

Archard closed his eyes and prayed over the weapon. He heard the soft hiss of his own breath, faster than normal because of his excitement. The walls of this building were thick, but still the wail of a siren managed to find its way in, crescendoed. Another joined it, and then both faded to nothing. He continued to pray.

The other two tugged Sarah back to give him time alone with the sword.

“You endure,” Archard whispered, when he had finished his prayer. The name Durendal was believed to have come from the French word durer, meaning “to endure.” Despite Roland’s attempt to destroy it to keep it out of enemy hands, the blade had survived. Damaged, but it still endured....

In Italy it was called Durlindana, and in Spain, Durandarte. Just as Charlemagne had presented it to Roland, Dr. Lawton said it was to be Archard’s now. Once said to belong to the fabled Hector of Troy, it was supposed to have been forged by a mysterious Berkshire master blacksmith named Wayland. Its origin was murky, but according to the Song of Roland, somehow an angel had got hold of it and given it to Charlemagne. Did it truly have a tooth of Saint Peter inside its golden hilt? Roland touched the hilt again, holding his fingers against the warmth of the metal. A hair from Saint Denis, a piece of cloth from the Virgin Mary’s cloak and a drop of blood from Saint Basil—all those things were said to have gone into its making.

“God-touched,” Archard whispered.

And now it was his.

But was he worthy of it? And of being Dr. Lawton’s “Roland”?

Archard had memorized the Song of Roland, perhaps the oldest surviving French manuscript of any consequence. He’d been with Dr. Lawton for the past five years, coming to the scholar in much the same way Sarah had, through the university. He hadn’t been a student at first, but rather a teacher, one relatively fresh from his doctoral degree and entrenched in the religious studies department. Archard’s wife, in the history department, had suggested they attend one of Dr. Lawton’s lectures after dinner one night. He’d agreed to go because it would gain him “wife points,” which usually translated into out-of-the-ordinary sex.

The topic—religion’s influence on medieval European conflicts—held enough of an interest that Archard had stayed awake through the entire presentation. He was more fascinated by religion in its permutations in present-day society, but was nonetheless captivated by Lawton’s intensity and the way the man could hold a crowd on such an otherwise dry topic. Archard had recognized the charisma and power in Dr. Lawton, and had started attending more lectures, some with his wife, most without. Drawn like a moth.

Had he traded one addiction for another?

Archard smiled at that thought. If so, it had been a more than fair trade. A far better addiction, this.

His interest in religion had begun in high school, when his parents sent him to Avignon to seek penance for his obsession with girls. He’d gotten two pregnant before his sixteenth birthday—three, but one he’d managed to sweep under the carpet on his own. His father was well-off and paid for his indiscretions, after eliciting a promise from him to study with the order in Avignon. Archard spent the summer among the monks before deciding their lifestyle was a little too austere for his tastes. Especially since he couldn’t tamp down his interest in women.

And so come the fall he’d mixed his two fields at the university, delving into religious studies while pursuing as many girls as he could manage, given his academic work. Eventually he tried to settle down with a beautiful history major, who agreed to share a flat with him at the edge of campus. In time they married. He knew she was aware that he sometimes stepped out on her, but he wondered if she knew just how often.

And then Archard’s promiscuity became an issue with Dr. Lawton. The more time he spent with the professor, and the more he opened up about his life, the more Lawton beseeched him to change.

“Choose your penchant for flesh or choose salvation for your soul,” Archard recalled his mentor telling him after one lecture. “There isn’t room in my company for both.” Archard had attended it with a visiting student from Ireland who’d caught his fancy. Dr. Lawton said no more on the matter for several months.

The more lectures Archard attended, the more he fell under the professor’s spell. He even enrolled in some classes as a student himself, and the professor took him under his wing.

“You are my Roland,” Lawton told him on a weekend trip to the Imperial War Museum and the Tower of London in England. That night over dinner, the professor had outlined his plan, and Archard bought into it. But Dr. Lawton worried that “his Roland” could not wholly focus on their mission.

Women had always been the one chink in his armor, the one distraction that kept him from a perfect life. So Archard found a doctor in Paris who cured his sexual appetite with anti-androgen drugs. In some circles it was called chemical castration, though that was a misnomer, as he remained intact. It was a treatment the courts sometimes imposed on molesters or rapists. The drugs reduced his libido by suppressing his testosterone. Women no longer aroused him.

His wife left him...and left the university.

He’d chosen this chaste, important life over the bawdy, selfish one he’d left behind.

A good trade. A more than adequate trade.

“Much good will come of this,” Archard recited. In the Song of Roland, the paladin had used Durendal to hold a hundred thousand Muslims at bay until Charlemagne and his army could retreat into France. Archard turned and regarded the two men and Sarah. “Recovering this sword, embarking on Dr. Lawton’s quest. Nothing but good will come.”

The men nodded. Sarah wrung her hands together.

“So...who’s gonna fix the sword?” she asked. She shifted her weight back and forth on the balls of her feet and dropped her hands to her sides. “I mean, it’s not really much use with the end of it broken like that, is it?”

Archard growled softly in his throat. “Let Dr. Lawton know we’re ready, Sarah.”

She thrust out her chin at the order. A year ago he would have found her attractive and probably lured her into bed. Now she was only irritating. “Sarah...”

Chapter 7

The largest oil painting on the wall—lit museum-style in an ornate gold frame above the wainscoting—was a portrait of a well-dressed man with an abundance of black curls that fell past his shoulders. His face was all angles and planes, his eyes hooded and intense. There were other paintings, too, and all of them looked as if they’d been rendered by the Old Masters.

The room they were displayed in was opulent, the furnishings new, but not modern. Brocade cushions on white high-backed chairs. Settees, low tables, candelabras, a thick rug on the floor shot through with metallic threads. It all looked to be a carefully arranged tourist exhibit. There was even a velvet rope stretched across one section of wall to keep people from getting too close to the paintings. But this wasn’t a public exhibition. It was simply a favorite spot in Dr. Lawton’s warehouse in Paris.

He nudged back a heavy drape and peered out the window, looking down on the loading dock and at another warehouse across the street. The neighboring structures were busier—one supplied grocers, another automotive dealers. In reality the automotive supplier was a front for stolen cars coming into Europe from the United States. Dr. Lawton found the operation distasteful and intended to turn them in when he wrapped up his own business in this area.

His antiques storage warehouse was a front, as well. He cluttered the lower level with all manner of objects he purchased legally. Some of them were even rare finds. Although one object that had arrived a short time ago couldn’t fit into that category....

He heard a sound behind him.

“Dr. Lawton,” Sarah said, “we’re back.”

“I know. I saw the car and the van arrive.”

“It took longer than I thought it would, going to that dink-burg of a town, and—”

“And?” He didn’t bother to turn around.

“It’s downstairs. Archard has it. Do you want to—”

“Of course.”

“Should I have him bring—”

“No. I’ll come down.”

He stepped away from the window and let the drape fall back, paused and then turned to see the girl. Woman, he corrected himself. But just barely. She was young. Beautiful, though he had to really look to see it. She unwittingly dimmed her loveliness by wearing baggy shirts spouting slogans and pictures of whatever rock band she was into. This evening she sported a white skull and crossbones with bat wings and A7X in big block letters. Her makeup did nothing to improve her appearance. She wore thick eyeliner and layered on the mascara. Smudges of shimmering green and blue paste covered her lids and tapered to points. Her lipstick was dark. Unnatural. Never red.

“We got into Paris a few hours ago,” she said. “But I needed to clean up and change. My clothes got pretty well shredded.”

He raised an eyebrow, inviting her to explain.

“It was worse than those rock-climbing walls at the gym,” she began. “Not the big part of the sword. It was just hanging out there in the open...right where your research said it would be. But the tip of it...” She held out her hands so he could see all the cuts and broken fingernails. “It was exactly like the legend you taught in class. Roland had tried to throw the sword away, off the cliff, so the enemy wouldn’t get it. But the blade hit the stone, and a piece of it broke off and stayed there.”

“And the monks displayed the point that fell.”

“Yeah.” She paused. “They never bothered to go get the other piece. I had a hell of a time in the dark, finding the spot where that little shard was in the cliff. Then I had a hell of a time getting it—”

“God guided your hands,” Dr. Lawton said. “And brought the pieces together so that they could be reforged.”

“Uh, yeah.” She waited, fidgeting in the ensuing silence.

He watched her for several moments, knowing she couldn’t keep her tongue from wagging.

“So...who’s going to get this one? Archard? I figured it would be Archard because of Roland’s significance. He thinks it’s going to be his sword. He’s down there drooling over it. Are you—”

“Yes, Durendal is to be Archard’s sword.” A longer silence settled over them.

Finally she broke it, stuttering, “Am I going to... Are you going to—”

“If there are enough, Sarah. I do not intend to leave you out.”

He turned his back to her and faced the large portrait. “He died on the twenty-eighth of January. It was the seventh day since he’d taken to his bed and after his final Holy Communion. Did you know that?”

Sarah shook her mass of short blond curls. “I’m not much of an historical scholar,” she admitted. “I tried to be. Loved your courses. Maybe I shouldn’t have quit like I did, but—”

He gruffly cleared his throat. “He was seventy-two years old, forty-seven years into his reign. Twice my age when the pleurisy killed him.” Lawton slowly paced in front of the painting. “Buried the same day, in Aachen Cathedral. The rush wasn’t necessary—it had been so cold and the disease hadn’t touched his outward appearance. A count in Aachen claimed to have found and opened the tomb, finding the corpse inside sitting on a throne, decked out with a crown and scepter, the tight flesh over the bones incorrupt. God-touched.”

Sarah appeared to be in awe, but the professor suspected it was for his benefit.

“He died depressed. He hadn’t been afraid of death coming—that comes to all men. But he was afraid of being incomplete.”

She tipped her head in question.

“There were things left undone,” Lawton explained.

“But you will finish those things,” she said, squaring her shoulders.

“Together, we will finish those things.” He paused and turned to regard her again. “If your belief grows stronger. If I can sense in you an honest interest and desire. If you shed your youthful curiosity. If you follow me honestly.”

“I do. I—I will.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders. “If you are to be one of my twelve, you must convince me, Sarah.”

“Anything,” she said. “I’ll do anything.”

“Then prepare for another foray. Now, shall we...” He glided past her toward the stairs, inviting her to follow. “Shall we see Roland’s Durendal?”

The big staircase was a wrought-iron, circular one he’d imported from an ironworks in Scotland. It ended in the center of a massive room filled with crates and forklifts—the trappings of a warehouse. An illusion he found satisfactory.

Dr. Lawton approached Archard, who was kneeling in front of one of the smaller crates, now draped with a length of velvet. It was as close to an altar as could be arranged here. The lighting was poor, which helped hide the true nature of the building, but the makeshift altar was directly beneath one of the fixtures.

“Dr. Lawton,” Archard stated solemnly.

“Durendal,” Lawton said. “Our mission has begun in earnest.”

Chapter 8

“I thought it was a wrap, that we were done. You sent the rest of the crew home.” Rembert Hayes was Annja’s photographer for the dog-men segment in Avignon. He’d worked diligently with her on the project for the past three and a half days, and now he nudged his wheeled suitcase with his foot, jiggling it just enough to make a soft clacking sound against the marble floor of the Hotel Danieli lobby. He’d been her cameraman in the catacombs under Paris before that, never complaining, happy to get the work, in fact, as he was a hungry freelancer. But he’d just gotten a text from his daughter, who was on her way to the hospital to give birth. He was obviously going to miss the event, but he wanted to get back home to New York as soon as possible, and Annja sympathized. His daughter would be a first-time mom with single-parent responsibilities.

“I thought it was a wrap, too.”

“May I call a car to take you—” the bellman began, but Annja’s scowl cut him off.

“Rem, I’m very sorry, but—”

“Plenty of footage, Annja. We have some great color work.” He drummed his fingers on the concierge counter and jiggled the suitcase again. “I called. We can catch a flight in two hours at the Caumont Airport, just outside town. It’ll take us to Manchester, and we can connect to New York and—”

“Be home sometime tomorrow,” Annja finished. She studied him and offered a sad smile. “I thought your daughter wasn’t due for another two weeks.”

“The baby had other ideas, I guess.”

“Look, your wife’s with her, right?”

He nodded.

“Then she’ll get your daughter through this. We’ve got one more interview.” She waved a sheet of paper at him. She’d had the concierge print out an email off her phone. “Some tipster named Gaston claims to be one of the dog-men.”

“That’s...what Doug Morrell’s call was about?” Rembert sputtered. “One more interview? We don’t need it.”

“I might not have liked this whole assignment, Rem. But I’m not going to do a half-assed job when this could add something to an otherwise mediocre piece. And that’s what our dog-men story is right now...nothing special.”

“Damn, Annja.”

“I’m not going to argue with Doug about it. We’re doing this.”

“Doug doesn’t have a pregnant single daughter.”

“Doug’s twenty-two.”

“My point.” Rembert made a face. “All your beloved producer cares about are ratings.”

“Let’s go see this guy and get it over with. Then we’ll take the train back to Paris and get a direct flight. We might still make it home sometime tomorrow.” She told the bellman to store their suitcases.

“Damn, Annja.” He held the door for her. “A dog-man, eh?”

“A cynocephalus.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I know what he’s called. I just hope he’s had his rabies shot.”

Annja shot him a look. “We’ll walk. It’s not far from the hotel. The Centre Historique.”

“Our old hotel was closer.”

“You’re going to complain about everything today, aren’t you, Rem?”

He said yes one block later, when the gray afternoon sky opened up and drenched them.

Their previous lodgings, the Avignon Grand Hotel, had been much closer, practically across the street from their meet at the Palais des Papes. But their stay there hadn’t sat well with Annja, after the beating she’d taken in the stairwell and the theft of her laptop from her room. She’d told Rembert about the theft, but didn’t mention the beating. After she’d come to at the bottom of the stairs, picked herself up and staggered back to her room, she’d discovered that all her things were just where she’d left them, but there were tiny differences that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. And there was the missing computer. So she’d relocated the crew to the Danieli and reported the theft to the police. Again, she didn’t report the beating. Annja healed quickly—a strange phenomenon somehow linked to the sword—and she didn’t want to explain that particular quirk to her photographer or the police.