City of Swords by Alex Archer Read Free Book Online Page A

not far from the hotel. The Centre Historique.”
    “Our old hotel was closer.”
    “You’re going to complain about everything today, aren’t you, Rem?”
    He said yes one block later, when the gray afternoon sky opened up and drenched them.
    Their previous lodgings, the Avignon Grand Hotel, had been much closer, practically across the street from their meet at the Palais des Papes. But their stay there hadn’t sat well with Annja, after the beating she’d taken in the stairwell and the theft of her laptop from her room. She’d told Rembert about the theft, but didn’t mention the beating. After she’d come to at the bottom of the stairs, picked herself up and staggered back to her room, she’d discovered that all her things were just where she’d left them, but there were tiny differences that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. And there was the missing computer. So she’d relocated the crew to the Danieli and reported the theft to the police. Again, she didn’t report the beating. Annja healed quickly—a strange phenomenon somehow linked to the sword—and she didn’t want to explain that particular quirk to her photographer or the police.
    They were soaked by the time they reached the cluster of centuries-old buildings at the edge of the Rhône. It looked as if the walls of the medieval structures might tumble down the bank and spill into the river. The grandest, the Palais des Papes, was considered one of the most important Gothic buildings in Europe. Annja had been through it twice in the past.
    They shook themselves off just inside the entrance.
    “The palace of popes, eh?” Rembert mused. “And the place of dog-men. Hope our fellow has been nice and dry in here.”
    Annja cocked her head.
    “You never had a dog, did you?” he pressed.
    Annja had been raised in an orphanage in New Orleans. There was a resident cat, but she’d never caught more than a glimpse of it—the thing always fled from the children. Her life had been too crowded for pets, and now she traveled so much. She envied people who had such companionship. “No. No dogs.”
    “Well, they stink to high heaven when they get wet.”
    “I like you better when you smile.”
    “That doesn’t mean I think this interview is a good idea.” Rembert brushed the water drops off his camera, then dug a dry handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe it. “So, what’s with this place? Enlighten me a little. Only got an outside shot of it two days ago for color on the city.”
    “Gascon Bertrand de Goth—Pope Clement V—moved the papacy here after his election in 1305. This building went up after his death. Terribly expensive…”
    “You’d think religious people would spend the money on the poor. It’d be the religious thing to do, wouldn’t it?” Rembert panned the camera around the interior and then got a shot of Annja with her wet hair plastered against the sides of her face.
    “This was fortified to withstand attacks, expanded over the years, the wings flanked with high towers. Adjoining buildings were added to enclose the courtyard.”
    “Beautiful, but excessive,” Rembert said.
    Despite the archaeological significance of the place, Annja agreed with him. A dozen tourists wandered in the cloister, and they looked so tiny under the high, arched ceiling. Like ants. No doubt the rain was keeping the bulk of the tourists away. She tried to imagine what the place had looked like when the popes walked these chambers, before it had been seized and sacked. Before it became the setting for a massacre of revolutionaries in the late 1700s and was turned into a barracks and prison. Frescoes had been obliterated, the interior woodwork used to build stables. But in the early 1900s, when it became a museum, restoration began, and the renovation work still continued all these years later.
    The place carried the smell of old stone and cleaning products, and through the open front door came the smell of the wet city and the Rhône. Rembert