The Avalon Chanter Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
mainland and the much larger towers of Bamburgh. Tara crossed her
arms and looked down at her boots. Crawford didn’t look at anything
at all, but stood at parade rest, waiting.
    Alasdair inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, and when
no one else did, spoke. “I’m hearing things did not exactly go to
plan the day.”
    “ Not half. The reporters are no doubt
savaging me in their respective media. I’m an easy
target.”
    “ I’ve been there myself, sort of,” Jean
said, partly trying to establish a sisterhood, partly distancing
herself from her ink-stained brethren.
    If Maggie heard her, she didn’t reply.
Groaning audibly, she stood up, squared her shoulders, and raised
her chin, leading Jean’s eye upward, but then, most other women,
let alone men, were taller than she was. Ready, aim . . . “When the balloon goes up,”
Maggie stated, “anything the media’s said today will be
insignificant. They’ll run mad.”
    After a long moment, Alasdair asked,
“Aye?”
    “ This morning I had a quick peek into
the tomb, the better to stage the reveal, sort out the lighting and
such. I don’t like surprises. I’ve never been proved more justified
in that sentiment.”
    A bagpipe lament, borne on a gust of wind,
swelled, faded, and left a lingering resonance among the broken
arches. Several black birds, crows or ravens, stirred uneasily atop
the walls. One of Gallowglass’s greatest hits, Jean remembered, was
“The Ravens of Avalon.”
    “ Well, there’s nothing for it. Come
along.” Maggie strode toward a round-headed door tucked into the
inside corner of the church and disappeared through it. Glancing
almost belligerently over her shoulder at the others, Tara
followed. Crawford paced along a step behind.
    Alasdair gestured Jean on ahead. She took one
step out of the wind into the shadowed stillness of the chapel and
stopped dead. She’d expected it to be dank and cold. But the air of
the tiny room, no larger than her and Alasdair’s living room in
Edinburgh, froze her bones. It was so thick with the scents of mud
and decay that she gagged. In that moment she felt not a pricking
of her thumbs, but a prickle of the back of her neck. Her ghostly
early-warning system. Her paranormal detector.
    From behind, Alasdair’s hands grasped
her upper arms. He felt it, too. Steady
on.
    Then the spine-tingle evaporated. The
atmosphere in the room lightened to merely chill with an elusive
hint of damp rot. Jean patted Alasdair’s hand— I’m okay —and he released her. His voice murmured
so quietly in her ear she had to cock her head back and up to hear
it. “What, or rather who, was that?”
    “ We’ll be finding out in due course,”
she whispered back.
    “ Yes, dear.”
    The others were picking their way around two
fresh test trenches, black gashes cut through uneven flagstones,
toward the largest window in the room. The bits of broken tracery
lining the opening looked like thorns against the darkening eastern
sky. Jean and Alasdair took up their places beside Crawford even as
Tara hung back.
    Maggie lifted an industrial-sized flashlight,
large as a policeman’s truncheon, and trained its beam of light
toward a flat box of excavation tools and a rectangular pit at the
front of a low dais—access to a small vault. The last resting place
of the person to whom the chapel had presumably been dedicated, set
into the floor before the now-vanished altar. The pieces of the
slab that had once covered the tomb now leaned against the wall
behind Tara. Surely Maggie hadn’t broken it—that would have been
archaeological heresy.
    Maggie knelt at the edge of the hole as
though in prayer. Her light illuminated a bright blue plastic
tarpaulin about eight inches down. Grasping one corner, she jerked
it up and back.
    The body was almost a skeleton, but not
quite.
    In the slightly shaky beam of light—Maggie’s
hand must be trembling—bone, cloth, skin, strands of hair, all were
a dismal brackish brown. The corpse looked more like a