“I have the greatest difficulty accepting that God actually likes mankind, let alone gives a tinker’s cuss about us. So, what would you do with the weapon, should you ever come across it?” he asked, with his eyes narrowing. Tamsyn felt that this man was so dangerous, but said nothing.
Gwen, sensing her friend’s disquiet, laughed and waved her hand.
“This is getting so serious about something that actually I know very little about. I imagine that if the sword was ever found, it should be placed into a collection in a museum so everyone could appreciate it. However, I am a realist, and to expect a fifteen hundred year old sword to still be in a reasonable enough condition to be an attraction would be expecting a little too much, don’t you think?”
“Well, some artefacts of that antiquity have been found in perfect condition. I have a few, as you have seen in my collection.”
“It’s a wonderful collection, but to have such a sword would be the icing on the cake. I’m sure that if ever you possessed it, you’d want to share it with as many people as you could?”
“Indeed, madam, very likely. However, the laws of the land are such that I very much doubt that something that rare or valuable would be allowed to remain in private hands for long.”
The audience was over, as Gwen had overstretched her welcome. Matthew realised that the women had been quite interesting, and now he had what he wanted, he sought to terminate the visit as soon as he could.
He remained pleasant, showing them a few more lovely but innocuous items from his collection. Then, he escorted them to the front door. As the door closed, Gwen turned to Tamsyn.
“What did I say?”
“I have no idea, but he has the sword.”
“How silly, of course he doesn’t. He would have shown it to us if he had.”
“He saw us as silly women who are ignorant of men’s ways,” said Tamsyn, getting into the car. “He wouldn’t suspect we’d know the sword if he beat us over the head with it. He didn’t like you saying that he had no right to the sword.”
“I never said that!”
“Not in as many words, but you implied that wherever it was, it was not in the right place.”
Gwen started the car and began to drive away.
“Are you sure that’s it?”
“Absolutely. I felt it.”
Gwen glanced at her friend.
“You felt it?”
“I knew it was the sword as soon as we went in there. I could have transcribed the inscription with my eyes closed.”
“How?”
Tamsyn shrugged.
“Something inside me remembered.”
“So, it definitely was the sword?” Gwen persisted.
The girl nodded.
“I will tell you when I have the sword. While we don’t have it, that knowledge is dangerous.”
“You’re talking in riddles. We can’t get the sword if he has it locked away.”
Tamsyn turned to her.
For the first time, Gwen looked into her dark eyes and felt a chill of fear.
“That is my sword, and no Saxon dog is going to keep it from me!”
Gwen looked back to the road, realising that the girl spoke not in English, or Cornish, but pure Old Celt.
“What can we do?” she asked.
“You, nothing, but I know a man who can. They usually have computers at libraries, don’t they?”
“Tamsyn, it’s Sunday,” Gwen reminded her.
“How can I get online?”
“My tablet is in my bag. What do you want to find out?”
“I need to find Grif.”
“What’s a Grif?”
She might well have not bothered, for Tamsyn was logging into the tablet and entering strings of numbers. She was at it for quite a while, so Gwen simply headed south on the M1.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding an IP address and then, doing some back-tracking. Ah, got him!”
There was a pause.
“Where the heck is Eastcote?”
“West London, I think.”
“How far is that?”
“From here, roughly an hour.”
Tamsyn was entering more digits and letters.
“Now what are you doing?”
“Going into the server for the game looking for contact emails.”
“Can you do that?”
“Not officially, but I know some back doors to these programs.”
“You do?”
Tamsyn looked up for a moment.
“It’s what Allun did for a living. I still have all his memories and skills, remember?”
Chapter Ten
Matthew watched the car drive away, grateful that they had gone, and yet uneasy as to why he felt such relief. Neither woman was a threat, he told himself. The older woman was well versed in her knowledge of Cornish and Celtic lore, but pretty stupid when it came to the realities of life. To think that the old Celtic Gods were unhappy was just a pathetic notion.
Of the girl, Jane, he had no second thoughts. She was undoubtedly a very bright kid, with exceptional language skills. However, as a girl, she was of little interest to him.
Once the car had gone, he relaxed and returned to the office. He opened the safe and removed the sword.
He adored holding it, as he could almost feel the surge of power that he imagined used to emanate from it. The steel was cold to the touch, and for some reason, it felt heavier than it had on the previous occasion he had held it. It was almost as if it didn’t want him to hold it.
He regarded it for a moment, trying to imagine those who had held it before, and under what circumstances. There were marks on it that signified that it had been used in battle, and he was positive that the dark stains were of human blood.
He tried to see any sign that it was anything more than a beautifully ugly weapon: beautiful in the design and construction, but ugly as to its main purpose.
He stood, hefting it in arcs before him, as if fighting an imaginary foe. Once more, his imagination took him to places of old, amongst sweaty, well-muscled men fighting for their lives. His heightened sexual awareness grew as his imagination took him to those dark places, as he maimed, killed and then sexually subdued the vanquished.
He stopped, not because he was tired, but he was suddenly haunted by the eyes of the girl – Jane. Try as he could, he could not seem to forget the way they bored into the depths of his soul, so nothing was hidden from her.
He put the sword carefully away, locking the special safe.
How could he have missed her? He had ignored her because she was young and female, and yet she said little apart from what the inscription on the blades said. She just watched, and as he recalled, he knew she missed nothing. The older woman did most of the talking. Some of it was vacuous, and yet so much was good sense.
How was it that, now, he felt that the main purpose for their coming was not for Gwen to get information, but for the younger woman, but why?
What was she after?
He glanced at where the sword was locked away.
Could Jane have actually read and understood the inscriptions accurately?
No, it wasn’t likely, he thought. She probably guessed. He had no way of knowing, but she brought up names of deities that he had never heard of before.
Why then, did he feel uneasy?
He logged onto his computer and idly drifted from emails, to the RPG game. Still the Tamsyn character had not logged in, so, as Brutus, he asked what had happened to her.
None of the other game players responded, except one.
Grif was a petty thief in the game. The character was a lithe young male, in his mid to late teens, capable of squeezing through small gaps and adept at locks. As a character, he was relatively weak and powerless, but his skills in stealing useful items seemed to be rated very high, so the others used him to do jobs for them in exchange for money, gifts and magical tokens that gave him temporary powers. He was, therefore, everyone’s friend, and potentially, everyone’s enemy at the same time.