Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Huginn’s Eye had only existed for three generations, and someone in one of those previous generations seemed to me to have possessed a sense of irony: all that Norse ritual grandeur a few hundred meters away and here the fluorescent lights, server racks, and ergonomic chairs that no self-respecting Son of Odin would ever admit to finding comfortable.
I found them extremely comfortable. I supposed I thought of that as my private shame.
The sensor array woke up during the second hour of my three-hour shift.
The alert came in the same way alerts always appeared, from the older systems, with a sound like an ancient, metallic statue clearing its throat, a brittle kind of buzz that I had never actually heard with my own ears in the two years I had rotated through control room duty, but recognized immediately from Sven’s description of the noise. Even he, the chief of the Sons of Odin, had only heard it once, he had told me.
I set down my coffee and leaned forward, my eyes moving over the six different candidates for the sound’s provenance, each of them a dusty box with a pair of lights on the front. Five boxes showed only their green light, while one showed both green and red.
The Sicily array. I had to look twice at the designation, because I had assumed, as we all had, that the Sicily array was essentially decorative at this point—a legacy system installed by an earlier generation of Viking brothers and maintained through distant hands, thanks to inertia and the organization’s deep institutional unwillingness to decommission anything. The sanctuary at Capo Zafferano had been dormant for decades. The array monitored a pair of sensors buried in the floor of the cavern; one just inside the entrance, the other in the passage leading to the bridal chambers. It had not registered anything more significant than a stray seabird since before I was born.
Now it had registered a human being, if I read the scant series of digits under the lights correctly; a moving weight on the order of sixty kilograms, corresponding fairly exactly to the step of a small person. The sensors transmitted only once every three hours, so whoever it was could still be there or could have come and gone.
I moved to the main monitor and looked for the interface Sven had shown me a single time, when I had started taking my shift in the control room, the one innovation to the old monitoring systems made since their installation in the 1970s. The clever application took the bare bones provided by the sensors’ data and extrapolated it into a rudimentary telemetry, based on the relationship between timing and force detected.
At 18:47 local time, someone weighing about sixty kilos had found the fissure in the rock and entered the ship sanctuary. They had stayed there for thirty-two minutes before they had entered the passage to the bridal chambers.
Someone had gone all the way in. They had stayed in that vicinity for a further forty-six minutes, then triggered the two sensors in reverse order, moving very fast… almost as if they were fleeing something.
I picked up my phone and called Sven.
* * *
Ilsa
The next morning, a Saturday, I told myself, when I woke up from a dreamless sleep, that I had definitely calmed down. Also that I had obviously had some sort of minor psychosexual freakout, but that I just needed to figure out what I would do about what I had found. I knew the mosaic and the cavern had been real, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about the ship, the carvings, and… and…
I blushed down at my espresso as I sat in the morning sun at my favorite café.
The other thing. The thing in the chamber. And what I had—or hopefully hadn’t—done on top of it.
The espresso, as always, tasted very good, just on the far edge of bitter, exactly where I liked it. I concentrated on that. The espresso was perfect and the morning light on the Palermo streets was beautiful. I, a doctoral candidate in archaeology, had made an extraordinary discovery, and I was not going to think about the bride saddle, or especially what I had (or hadn’t?) done on its warm leather surface.
I wrapped both hands around the small cup and looked at the pigeons investigating the cobblestones near my feet. I told myself, very firmly, that the rational explanation represented the only possible correct one. I had been alone and overstimulated and the combination of physical exhaustion and academic excitement had produced a kind of waking dream.
The warmth of the wood had been the warmth of my own body’s heat, reflected back. The voice had been my own subconscious, stocked with Old Norse vocabulary from my coursework and apparently harboring opinions about Viking masculinity that I had not previously been aware of.