Day of the Vikings. A Thriller. (ARKANE) (2 page)

Morgan nodded, pleased to find someone so well-versed in the lore. “Of course, Britain has experienced record flooding this year and the aurora was seen in the most southerly parts of the country. Very unusual. As I delved further into the prophecy, I discovered the staff of Skara Brae which has an unusual rune. I wanted to see it for myself, rather than just in photographs, and this seemed like a good chance to examine it.”

Blake pulled open a double door, waving his hand to indicate she should enter first.
 

“This is the back door to the exhibition, as I presume you want to skip the preliminaries. The coins, gold and jewelry are nothing to what’s in the main hall, and I’ve put the staff in a side room so we won’t be disturbed when the exhibition opens up to the public.” He checked his watch. “We’d better get moving actually, as the first visitors will be in soon. The Vikings seem to be quite the popular thing these days. We’re sold out daily.”

The main exhibition hall was huge, dominated by the remains of a Viking longship found in Roskilde, Denmark. Ancient spars formed part of the vessel, held in shape by a metal frame with open ribs to see inside. Even with its skeletal appearance, the sheer magnitude of the ship was impressive. Glass cases and information boards surrounded the central focus on all sides, but the boat was clearly the highlight of the exhibition.

“I think more people are coming to see this than your staff,” Blake said. “Although we do have some rather good swords, as well.” He gestured to a glass case containing longswords and metal axe heads. The clinical display didn’t do much for the imagination, but Morgan knew the damage a blade could do on a human body. Her scar throbbed at the memory. “We even have a Neo-Viking group coming today,” Blake continued.

“Neo-Viking?” Morgan asked, turning away from the sword case.
 

“Yes, apparently it’s all the rage at the moment. Something to do with the popularity of
Game of Thrones
and how much it’s influenced by Norse mythology. Of course, we Brits have always liked dressing up and doing pitched battles for tourists at castles.” Blake grinned. “This is just another iteration on the theme. The group will be in later, so we might catch a glimpse of them. The curator is excited by their enthusiasm – there are some impressive beards, according to their website.”
 

Blake raised an eyebrow, and Morgan couldn’t help but smile at the thought of what a band of Neo-Vikings might look like. She turned to look into another display case. At sight of what it contained, the smile died on her lips. A metal conical helmet sat above a Viking jawbone, the teeth still intact in a macabre grimace. These men were not to be ridiculed.
 

“They filed their teeth,” Blake said. “And colored the grooves between them, as well as tattooing their skin to intimidate those they set to plunder.”

Morgan imagined a longboat the size of this hall filled with warriors of this ferocity, and her hands itched for a weapon. She had once vowed to leave physical violence aside, after the death of her husband Elian in a hail of bullets on the Golan Heights. She left the Israeli Defense Force for academia, but ARKANE had thrown her back into the fray. These days she understood that the adrenalin rush of the fight was just as much a part of her as her intellectual curiosity, and she was slowly beginning to accept her shadow self.
 

Blake pushed open a door at the back of the exhibition hall and led Morgan into a small room.

“Here it is: the staff of Skara Brae. There are two other staffs, as well, which we’ve left in the case out in the main exhibition hall.”

The staff lay on a white table with a pair of white gloves next to it for careful handling. Not that she’d be able to do any damage to it, Morgan thought, for the staff was iron and well made. The top was thicker than the rest, designed with a woven pattern, representing the threads of fate that could be controlled through spinning or entwining, or cutting and burning.
 

“You can see the inscription here,” Morgan said, pointing at the rune carved in the middle of the staff. It was a geometric pattern of lines and curves and cross-hatches. “It’s called
ægishjálmr,
the helm of awe, which Vikings believed had the power to invoke illusions and fear through incantation and inscription. This staff is the only example of its kind found in the world with this rune. The
völva,
or seeress,
who held this would have been considered powerful enough to span the nine worlds of the Viking Yggdrasil.”

The word
völva
meant ‘staff bearer,’ and they practiced
seidh
, a sorcery that bound the natural world to that of the gods. These women were powerful, with the ability to read and write runes, casting their will upon the world. Morgan had discovered that most of the staffs and swords found in graves had been bent or rolled, ritually ‘killed’ when the owner died. It was said that this made the powers disappear, that they were lost into the earth. But this staff hadn’t been bent, or rolled. It was pristine. Did that mean it could still be wielded by those who knew the rites? Once, Morgan would have laughed at the idea, but the things she had seen in the fires of Pentecost, the bone church of Sedlec and the Egyptian temple of Abu Simbel had opened her eyes. This physical world was not all there was, and only those with eyes that could see beyond knew the truth.
 

Morgan put on the gloves and picked up the staff, its iron weight heavy in her hands. It had the heft of a poker kept by an open fire to prod the coals, a practical object, not something ethereal like an imagined fantasy wand. In her years of practicing Krav Maga, the Israeli martial art, Morgan had used pieces of metal like this as weapons many times. Used as a club, this could surely kill, but was it more than a lump of metal? Were its properties even something that could be empirically studied in the ARKANE labs? She laid the staff down again and bent closer to examine the rune.

BLAKE WATCHED AS MORGAN leaned closer to the staff, brushing a long dark curl from around her face. Her eyes were cobalt blue with a
slash of violet in the right eye that made Blake want to learn what else was unusual about Dr. Sierra. He had read up on the official side of ARKANE, but Morgan was not what he had expected from a purely academic research institute, and he had his suspicions about what else they might be involved in. Morgan was toned muscle under her slight curves, and she moved with the grace of someone acutely aware of her surroundings – the type of vigilance he would expect of someone in the military. There was some kind of accent in her words, a hint of Israeli perhaps, and she looked to be Mediterranean in origin. With a name like Sierra, Spain would be the obvious choice.
 

His own mixed heritage made the cultural guessing game a regular pastime for Blake. His blue eyes were from his Swedish father, and his darker skin tone from his Nigerian mother. He would have an Afro if he let his hair grow any longer, but he preferred the razor buzz cut. London was the perfect place to people watch and guess where they had traveled from, or perhaps where their great grandparents had originated. This was a true multicultural city, and one that embraced the stranger, since all were outsiders in some form. This was the Britain he loved and belonged to, the endless meshing of culture in the river of city life.

“Do you have any more information on the grave it came from?” Morgan asked, standing up straight. “Or if other grave objects were found with it?”

Blake shook his head. “The curator said that little is known about the staff, which is why he was happy for me to show it to you. Believe me, if he had known anymore, he would have scheduled several hours to talk to you himself.”
 

A flicker of dangerous thought surfaced in Blake’s mind as he spoke. He usually preferred to keep quiet about it, but he had an unusual gift that could perhaps help Morgan in her quest for knowledge. Some called it clairvoyance, others psychometry. In his darkest moments, Blake knew it for the curse that it was.
Whatever its name, Blake could read objects through their emotional resonance. The gloves he wore protected him from accidental contact, but they also covered a patchwork of ivory scars, where his religious father had tried to beat the visions from him.

A babble of voices came from the main exhibition room, breaking their quiet study. Blake could hear the curator speaking loudly, his excitement at sharing his work causing his words to run into one another.
 

“The ship was built after 1025 AD and from stem to stern it’s thirty-six meters, which makes it the longest Viking ship ever discovered. We have calculated that there would have been thirty-nine pairs of oars, with seventy-eight rowers to serve them.”
 

Blake couldn’t help smiling at how bored the group must be with all the facts and figures, but it wasn’t often that the curator got to hold forth to so many. Most people just wanted to see the longswords, and the bones of the decapitated Vikings held in the central exhibit, clearly the result of a massacre. British pride perhaps, fighting back against the widely held belief that Vikings raped and plundered with no defiance from the local population.

Morgan was still examining the iron staff, so Blake pulled open the side door a crack, trying to catch a glimpse of the Neo-Viking group that the curator was escorting. There were several groups of other tourists in the exhibition hall, but the Neo-Vikings weren’t hard to spot. There were five men wearing rough-spun tunics over long trousers, wrapped round the middle with leather belts. They had fur skins over their shoulders, real ones by the look of them. Their faces were expressionless, even as they were shown the case of the Norse helmet and jawbone. One of the men wore a close-fitting tunic that revealed muscular arms, his left bicep tattooed with a raven in flight, its feathers entwined with rune letters. The man’s eyes darted around the room, taking in everyone’s position. He seemed strangely dissociated with what they were supposedly here to view.

The group shifted as they moved to the next case, revealing a woman in their midst. She could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy, her features wrinkled but her skin glowing with an inner radiance. Her dark eyes were sharply focused on the curator, as if sucking his words into a bottomless pool. Her long gray hair was wound into a plait that hung down her back, with one blue streak that ran through it like the lapis lazuli jewelry held in the Egyptian rooms next door.
 

“The Neo-Vikings are here,” Blake said, turning back to Morgan with a smile. “They look pretty convincing, actually.”

She looked up at him just as an explosion shook the building and the high-pitched shriek of the emergency alarms filled the air.
 

THE EXPLOSION WAS COMPLETELY unexpected in this hall of ancient knowledge, but Morgan’s military training kicked in and she pulled Blake to the floor, under the protection of the broad table while the alarm shrieked around them. In these old buildings, the threat of falling plaster and stone could be worse than any initial damage. Part of her expected more explosions.
 

“I’ve got to go and help with the evacuation,” Blake shouted above the wail of the alarm and the screaming voices from the exhibition hall. “We’ve got to get everyone out of here.”

He tried to get up, but Morgan pulled him back down.
 

“Wait,” she said. “In Israel, this kind of thing is part of our daily drill. You don’t run yet, because you could be running into something worse.”

Her mind flashed to her days in the IDF: the bomb attacks she had experienced, the soldiers she had treated for PTSD … her father’s body blown apart by a suicide bomber, a sack of oranges spilled on the road amongst severed limbs.
 

There was something very wrong here. She checked her phone – no reception. Then she heard it. In between the rhythmic siren noise, it was quiet. The screams had been silenced.
 

“Listen,” she whispered. “Next door.”

Blake cocked his head sideways. “Maybe the people have been evacuated?”

“Stay there. I’m going to have a look.”

Morgan scooted out from under the table and went to the door, pulling it open a tiny crack as Blake had done minutes before.
 

People lay on the floor, hands on their heads, while around the room, the Neo-Vikings stood with handguns drawn. The alarm suddenly stopped and the sound of smashing glass filled the room. There was a gasp from the floor.
 

“You can’t!”
 

A cry of pain followed as one of the men kicked the curator into silence.
 

Across the room, Morgan saw an older woman reach into a glass case. She lifted out one of the iron staffs and examined the surface before flinging it to the floor. The crash brought another collective gasp from the hostages. The woman took out the second staff, examining it with jerky movements, like an addict desperate for a fix.

“Where is it?” she said, quietly at first, her voice a Scottish lilt. “Where is the real staff?”

The woman spun around and Morgan saw burning fury in her eyes, her hands clenched into claws.
 

“Bring the curator here.”

As two of the big men dragged the curator from the floor, Morgan knew she only had seconds to make a decision. The woman wanted the staff of Skara Brae, but once she had it, what would she be able to do with it? Not so long ago, Morgan would have given up the lump of iron with no question. She would save these people from harm and the witch would leave with her staff. But Morgan’s perception of the world had changed after what she had seen with ARKANE. Sometimes darker things were at stake.

The men pushed the curator to his knees before the woman.