Day of the Vikings. A Thriller. (ARKANE) Read Free

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.

Chapter 2

    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