Moving Target Read Online Free PDF Page A

wrote the name of the sorceress; at least, he hadn’t in any of the seven pages Erik had managed to find over the years.
    “Poor son of a bitch,” Erik muttered. “She really stuck it to you, didn’t she. Or maybe you stuck it to her. A birthing bell, hmmm? Well, unless they conceived babies differently in twelfth-century Britain, I suspect you were willing enough in the saddle. Wonder what went wrong . . .” His mouth turned down. “The usual, I suppose. She wanted more than you could give her and still call yourself a man.”
    It had happened that way to Erik North. His fiancée had wanted his undivided attention. She hadn’t wanted to be “stepmother” to two teenage girls who happened to be his younger sisters. There were plenty of second or third cousins, weren’t there? Let them raise the girls.
    End of engagement.
    Beginning of single parenting.
    Carefully Erik put away the tools he had used to mark lines on the vellum. Because this particular client was exceptionally fussy—to put it politely—he had used a bone stylus with an embedded metal tip for marking on the vellum, just as had been done for more than a thousand years. Now the lines were waiting to be filled with calligraphy. All he had to do was see the ancient text well enough to copy from it.
    It would have helped if he could have worked with the original vellum longer, but the owner was understandably possessive of his treasure. Works by the Spanish Forger were in high demand in the twenty-first century. Erik had been lucky to get permission to put the leaf under UV and photograph it, thus reclaiming the original text.
    Slowly he tilted the wooden drafting table until what had been merely a hint of thin shadows just beneath the surface of the original vellum condensed into a photograph of elegant yet spare calligraphic lines. He made a deep, rough sound of approval that was rather like a growl. The sound went quite well with his tawny blond hair and predatory golden eyes.
    “Gotcha!”
    Humming a chant passed down from medieval times through generations of men, he fixed the table at the proper angle. Only then did he select a quill from a rack bolted to the edge of the drafting table. As he was left-handed, the quills he preferred using came from the right wing of the bird—usually a turkey, sometimes a goose when he was copying a page down to the last finicky historical detail.
    Today he was using goose quills. His client was himself; when it came to the Book of the Learned, he was the fussiest client on earth. If a total re-creation of the original meant finding goose quills in Palm Springs, then by God he found goose quills.
    The ancient monks and scribes had no problem getting good feathers. Old World medieval monasteries had never heard of New World turkeys, but the monks had kept flocks of geese to supply their pantry and their calligraphers.
    Erik hadn’t been driven to that extreme yet. He had chatted up some organic turkey farmers and a woman who raised European graylag geese for restaurants specializing in unusual foods. Once he had worked past the farmers’ disbelief, they were glad to give him the pick of the feathers.
    As expected, Thanksgiving was best for getting bushels of turkey feathers. Christmas was best for geese. Just a few weeks ago he had prepared hundreds upon hundreds of goose quills, plunging each shaft into hot sand to “cure” the quill, then peeling away the frail, slippery skin, and finally scraping out the soft core. After that a few practiced strokes of his penknife transformed a feather into a writing instrument.
    It had taken incense to chase the smell of processed feathers from the old castle he had inherited from his grandfather. In fact, Erik suspected that monks had used incense for the same reason. Wet, scorched feathers had a smell that ranked right down there with skunk.
    Automatically he held the quill up against the daylight and inspected the tip. Perfect. It wouldn’t last long, but that was