“What in God’s name?” Gunnar shouted crisply in his ears and Sam started from his vision. His eyes like saucers, he panted as the sweat rolled from his chest and face. Repeatedly, he pounded his fist on the floor, simulating precisely the sound of the hoof. Now he realized that Eldard had seized his wrist to make him stop.
“What did you see, Sam?” Gunnar asked, his face twisted in eager sincerity warped by the play of light from the window.
“We have to look for another horse, I think. A dead horse… pawing the ground with one hoof? And four huge… pots, I think?” Sam frowned. That was all he had. But as they had learned by now, once at the site, even the most absurd things had a way of making sense.
Chapter 35
“Tomorrow we must rise at dawn, whenever that is,” Lita sighed through her smoke screen. The odor of cigarillo smoke filled the room of the house where Lockhart and Slokin accompanied her. Now it was a hunting lodge for rent used by tourists and hunters. Lockhart had led them to the very same property where, as a child, he stayed when the killer collected him. A hundred nuances of emotion trekked through his soul at the first sight of the converted building where the hotel had stood during the Second World War.
It was the last place he had tea with his mother and the ache of reminiscence grated his heart until it felt raw, yet he could not show it. He could not venerate her one last time, here in the town he thought he would never see again. As if played by fate, Lockhart’s room was the very room he and his mother had parted in before she took the SS-officer out to the mounds that terrible day.
Inside the house, it was dank and smelled like old water caught in stone. For some reason, the stench comforted him, like the safe and eternal bed of a tomb. Lockhart did not want to die, yet he longed for the refuge of a sepulchre in the way of a cradle. Both served as a place of social absence, he thought, where no-one deemed one important enough to call upon. As infant or corpse, he would not have to be present, he would not have to make a living, he would not have to engage in company or be needed for tasks so that he was constantly hounded. Sometimes, he just wanted to stay in bed, or he wished he could just sit and think in the dusty darkness of his bedroom and not be called upon, not have to tread outside his own threshhold and enter the peril and betrayal of life.
“Slokin. Coffee,” Lita asked in her nicest tone. Her feet, now in white socks, lay one atop the other where she sat in the high back chair, watching the imp concoct her beverage without a word. Slokin kept casting glances at her, deliberately, to make her aware that he needed to speak to her outside of Lockhart’s presence. Lita blinked slowly, her equivalent of a nod.
“I suppose we must all get some rest, especially you, Master Lockhart,” she coaxed as she took her mug of hot coffee from Slokin. “I shall be waking you bright and early to take us to the site you saw in your dream. We have to see if it is the same one…”she hesitated, not wanting Slokin to know too much about Lockhart’s past, “…I read about in the file.”
“Quite correct, Madam,” Lockhart smiled at her as he rose from his chair with a groan of old age frailty. He was only too pleased that he could excuse himself from such vile company and find a few hours’ solace in a bed, alone.
When he was gone, Slokin threw his comical frame into a chair opposite Lita’s and latched his busy hands together like a housewife about to gossip. He whispered, “I have something to confess,” he started, “I think we are being played.”
“By whom?”she asked in her abrasive voice, putting out her tobacco stick and nursing the hideous scar left in her thigh by the rune blades of Erika the Dead.
“I could be mistaken, but I think Lockhart is faking the visions. When I exchanged the vial for the bratty academic, I could have sworn I saw Sam Cleave See-Walk for a moment,” he reported in a low voice. Lita looked shocked, then exasperated. With lightning speed she responded with a lunge toward him, violently pressing down on his skinny chest until he felt at one with his chair.
“You idiot!” she grunted, abandoning momentarily, her restraint of voice. A massive blow struck the side of his face as she dealt him a tremendous bitch slap. “All you had to do was to determine if the compound in the silver relic was real. I trusted you! Not only did you fail at recognizing the contents, but you saw Sam Cleave’s moment… and you gave him the little bitch anyway?” Now she was unbridled, her knee firmly between his thighs, pressing hard against his scrotum. Pitched high in hysterics, she squealed hoarsely, “I should kill you for this, you inept piece of shit!”
Slokin was disappointed in himself. While trying to implicate Lockhart as a traitor, he inadvertently exposed his own mistakes. He did not mind the devastating clout, but the knee in the balls was a buzzkill. Trying to get her attention with a raise of his index finger, he held his breath for the next shift in her weight that would no doubt have him clutching his nuts. Lita dismounted and paced furiously.
“It’s alright, though. I found something you are going to love!” he smiled like a Hollywood bullshitter. She ignored him, but he pulled a paper from his pocket and waved it about to draw her attention.
“What’s that?”she scowled, her eyes dark in the shadow of her eyebrows. Her dress moved on its own accord from the twitching tail she hid there. Under the fabric, she was lashing it with impatience.
“This, my dear Lita, is the key to Valhalla,” he smirked with dodgy eyes ablaze with iniquity.
Lita stopped pacing throwing out her hip in a stance of disbelief. She planted her hands on her waist and stared him down, “Oh, it is?”
“Yes, it is. I procured this from an archive in Tomar, Portugal, when I went to speak to that old fool from the Portuguese Black Sun affiliate about The Brotherhood,” he bragged.
“Carlos Oliveira?”
“Yes, him. I found this in the Castle of Tomar. It is from an old ledger, but it has more than financial records. Have a look and tell me I am redeemed,” he sneered. Lita scoffed at him. His pathetic attempt at charm was wanting.
Her heart jumped when she read through the scribbling in black, Indian ink on the back of the yellow rusted document. Recorded there in front of her eyes, was the half the number sequence needed to enter Valhalla, also naming the town where it was hidden. Supposedly, the other half of the number was inscribed in the skull bone of a child, Hermann Brozek, son of a Polish Brotherhood scribe. Lita looked up, her haunting eyes glistening with promise.
“Staraya Ladoga. That is near Novgorod in Russia! Tomorrow we will take Lockhart there… and he will… supply us with the other half of the number,” she smiled. “You are redeemed.”
In the dark of the staircase, the eavesdropping old man heard the toll of his gallows bell. He had to get the number, which he had memorised as a child already, to Nina’s friends before Lita and her demon ape killed him.
“Two days until St. Blod. We are cutting it close,” Slokin said. “I propose we kill him now. He is slowing us down anyway.”
The red haired bitch smiled, “Now. Tonight. Then we… pick his brain.” Lita giggled at her wordplay and lit another cigarillo. Rushing to his room, Hermann Brozek from Poland, now Herman Lockhart from Scotland, Chosen (Doomed) Secret Keeper of Valhalla, rummaged through his luggage. With a shivering sigh he closed his eyes and clutched the object he was looking for with great affection. Cell phone in hand, the old gentleman sat down on his bed and sent a text. He poured himself a stiff cognac and savored the smooth lick of alcohol infiltrating his body and senses.