can’t
Several of the men took Liam’s word for it, dropped their shields and swords and ran for the treeline either side of the track. But Eddie and four others remained, bunching up close together around Liam, presenting a shield wall to the figure.
‘Run, sire!’ shouted Eddie over his shoulder. ‘We’ll hold him!’
The hooded figure suddenly broke into a run and covered the last ten yards in a silent sprint. He collided with Eddie and his men, bowling them backwards. A roundhouse sweep of his broadsword lopped one of the men’s arms off at the elbow, sending it spinning into the air, hand still clasped round the sword-hilt.
One of the other men thrust his blade at the side of the Hooded Man. The black cloak collapsed inwards, and Liam heard a
The hooded figure reached with a gloved hand for the blade and snapped it with a sharp twist, tossing the broken metal off into the woods. It cocked its head for a moment, studying the man holding nothing but the broken hilt of his sword in his hands … and Liam would swear blind later that he saw the figure wag its finger at the man before picking him up by the throat and hurling him like nothing more than a bundle of twigs off into the trees.
Its head turned back and beneath the shadow of the hood Liam sensed its gaze was locked specifically on him.
Eddie’s remaining two men broke and ran, leaving him alone in the middle of the trail beside Liam. The hooded figure strode past Eddie as if he simply wasn’t there.
‘Sire!
Liam realized the thing had fixed on him for some reason. He did as Eddie said, dropped the shield and sword he’d picked up and backed quickly away towards the treeline. He saw Eddie lunge with his sword at the hooded figure’s back, ramming it hard into the space between its shoulder-blades.
The figure lurched in response — and Liam thought he heard some sort of wheezing whine come from beneath the hood. Eddie’s blade must have found some chink in the armour beneath. The figure spun round to face him, the blade of the handle protruding from its back.
The response was a savage thrust with the broadsword that punched a hole through the jagged and pockmarked remains of Eddie’s shield, the long blade continuing on into the man’s chest.
Liam watched Eddie gasp, then collapse slowly to his knees.
‘Stuff this!’ He then turned and ran off the track and into the woods, charging through low branches and brambles that whipped and stung his cheeks. His heavy leather boots stumbled over roots and hummocks in the ground; his rasping breath and the snap of twigs and branches beneath him seemed to fill the silent woods around him. He realized the racket he was making as he scrambled away from that thing was giving him away … but he couldn’t bring himself to slow down.
He ran for what he guessed was another minute before he finally stopped and turned to look behind him. He expected to see the wraithlike fluttering outline of black robes weaving past trees and through brambles hot on his heels; instead, the woods were still, empty.
Liam gasped air into his lungs, doubling over and dry-heaving from the sudden exertion, the burn of nerves. He spat phlegm on to the ground and straightened up on legs that felt like jelly.
All he had a chance to notice was the blur of something in motion towards him. Then he was seeing a world of speckled white.
CHAPTER 50
1194, Beaumont Palace, Oxford
Becks looked at the first grey light of dawn stealing in through the tall slitted windows. She calculated that she had another forty-seven minutes until the sun breached the horizon and the city of Oxford began to stir to life.
John, of course, was going to be asleep for another couple of hours at least. She’d worked out the average time that he emerged from his chambers and started bawling for breakfast. It was usually eleven minutes past nine. Although, last night, she’d made sure he’d consumed several flagons of wine which meant perhaps another hour before he stirred.
It would take her precisely twenty-seven minutes to make her way back out of the deserted halls and cloisters of Beaumont Palace, occupied by a skeleton crew of soldiers and servants, and jog the mile back to the walls of Oxford city.
The city’s walls were poorly maintained, and the missing blocks of masonry and cracks in the mortar made it possible to be scaled. She’d get back into the castle itself climbing the rear bailey wall.
Twenty-seven minutes from now she would be back in her chambers, pretending to be asleep.
She continued studying the wooden shelves of scrolls and leather-bound volumes of illuminated manuscripts in Beaumont’s royal library. She pulled them off the dusty shelves one at a time, scanning sample pages of each in an attempt to identify the correct document.
She’d examined seven hundred and twenty-six candidate documents over the last five hours of night. Her hard drive stored their digital images and her processor was working overtime to translate the elaborate swirls of handwriting into recognizable text characters. None of the texts she’d scanned and translated so far had produced anything useful. There’d been endless essays on royal protocol and volumes of romantic poetry but nothing she could classify as vaguely relevant. She had opted for a very simple search algorithm — any text that scored high on a hit-list of terms sorted into relevance by order:
Search Terms:
Treyarch (100 % relevance)
Pandora (100 % relevance)
Confession (83 % relevance)
Templar (79.4 % relevance)
Grail (79.3 % relevance)
Jerusalem (56.5 % relevance)
Code (23 % relevance)
So far twelve of the documents had contained three of the seven words. Thirty-two had contained two or more terms and a hundred and five had contained one or more. ‘Confession’ was the highest-scoring search term so far. It seemed a lot of people from this time felt the pressing need to confess something.
She continued robotically pulling out manuscripts amid showers of dust motes, opening them and grabbing snapshot images. But, somewhere inside her head, a part of her AI that wasn’t overloaded with running character- recognition software was wondering whether this approach was going to deliver any useful results.
She paused, a heavy leather-bound volume held in mid-air, dust cascading down in front of her. Her mind was making a quick assessment of the situation, of the amount of time she had left, and of the thousands of scrolls and volumes she’d
Her eyes followed a small tuft of fluff; the small downy feather of some bird that must have found its way in through one of the slit windows. She watched it gracefully seesaw down to the stone floor and then settle. She was about to resume scanning the leather-bound manuscript in her hand when the feather gently stirred. It spun on the spot for a moment before flitting lightly across the floor.
Curious at the sudden movement, she suspended the maths going on in her head and squatted down to look at the feather. She reached out, picked it up and put it back on the floor where it had settled a moment ago.
It was still for a moment, then it twitched, spun … then once again slid across the floor, in a short stop-start motion away from the wall beside her.
She looked at the wall. Like the rest of the walls in the library it was decorated with oakwood panels.
[Identify: Wall. Wood. Oak. Purpose: decorative]
She ran her fingers down the grained surface, all the way down to the floor, and there, from a gap between the panel and floor — no more than half an inch — she felt a cool draught on the tips of her fingers. She tapped the
