Rogue Angel 50: Celtic Fire by Alex Archer Page B

as it was intended to be,” Roux said. “There’s a certain irony in burying a vain man in a simple grave, don’t you think?”
    Annja knelt to closely examine the edge of the stone. It was easier to make out the scratches where a crowbar had been used. Even though the grave robber had obviously gone to pains to clean up his mess, he couldn’t hide the fact that blades of grass had been trapped when the stone had fallen back into place, nor could he entirely mask where the earth had been disturbed by the crowbar, faint though the indications were now as the ground sought to return to its natural state. There was no sign of any blood on the unmarked grave, but she only needed to turn her head to see the telltale dark stains where a few spatters had hit the nearest headstone. Not much, admittedly, to confirm that the blade had been used to kill the man, but enough.
    “We should tell the police,” Annja said, standing up at last.
    “What good would that do?” Roux asked. “They have a body, and there’s not enough evidence here to help them solve the murder. Isn’t it better they think of this as a simple mugging gone wrong, not a grave robbing?”
    “What the old man’s delicately trying to say is, he doesn’t want the idiots holding us up if he can help it.”
    Annja wasn’t convinced, but this was Roux’s show, not hers.
    “What’s obvious is our grave robber didn’t stumble on the sword by accident,” Roux said. “So what led him here? Work that out and maybe we can work our way backward to him.”
    Annja thought about it for a moment. “If we discount coincidence, that means we’re looking for a seeker, right? So he knew what he was looking for. He followed some sort of clue that led him here, which means someone else knew you’d put the sword in this grave.”
    “Gerald’s book,” Roux stated. “There are only a handful of copies still known to be in existence. That’s the only thing that even hints at the fact he would be buried with the Sword of Rhydderch Hael.”
    “Then I’d say that narrows down the number of possibilities and gives us a starting point,” Annja said.
    “What’s to say the killer wasn’t paid to look for the sword?” Garin asked.
    “Doesn’t matter. Roux said this is all about finding the sword, not getting revenge.”
    “It’s always about revenge with the old man, so don’t let him fool you,” Garin told her.
    Roux was already walking away, lost in his own thoughts, so he couldn’t refute his ex-apprentice’s claim.
    Not that he would have.

Chapter 13
    Annja ate alone in her room.
    Roux had claimed not to be hungry. Garin had said that he needed to make a couple of calls and wanted to do a little digging. She could imagine him huddled over his laptop with his cell phone wedged against his ear, the very model of a modern-day treasure hunter backed by technology and big bucks. The days of getting his hands dirty were very much a thing of the past, but that was what happened when you lived for five hundred years. Everything was pretty much a thing of the past.
    She’d had to pry the book from Roux’s hands—the one that had been inside the leather bag he had been clutching for the duration of their journey—and even then he really hadn’t wanted to let it out of his sight. She offered to wear a pair of pristine white cotton gloves when she handled it. She had no problem with that; she was an archaeologist.
    She’d given the words of Giraldus Cambrensis a cursory glance before ordering room service, knowing she’d need to dedicate more than a few minutes to study the text. It was essentially a foreign language, after all, one lost to antiquity at that. Finished with the food, she began a more careful study of the writings, letting her mind wander. It was easy to imagine Roux reading the text while she stumbled over the Latin.
    It had taken her more than an hour to find the first reference to the sword, but with it came another clue that might help them