Moving Target Read Online Free Page B

across the flagstones, and half leaped, half flew up to the top of the high wall. There was a rustle, a flirt of black tail, and the chaparral cock vanished into a cascade of deep-pink bougainvillea.
    “So much for my coffee break,” Erik said to the empty yard.
    Nothing answered him, not even a stirring of shadows.
    He stood, stretched, and headed back for his workshop, which was in the tallest of the estate’s fanciful turrets. He had inherited the land and the Scottish stones that had been collected at an ancient ruin, shipped, and reassembled in the desert. It had been an expensive indulgence, but in those days there had been money—new money—from Erik’s great-grandfather, who had swashbuckled with Errol Flynn across a lot of movie screens. Like many other Hollywood denizens, Great-grandfather Perry had made enough to indulge himself in a Palm Springs fantasy getaway.
    A love of the medieval had always been part of the family. Erik’s paternal grandfather and his wife were both well-known medievalists when they met. His father had been a medieval scholar and children’s book writer. His mother’s drawings had been as enchanting as the stories they illustrated.
    Stretching one last time, Erik sat down on a tall, beautifully made cherry-wood stool that had once been his mother’s. He leaned over a steeply tilted drafting table of ancient design which had, like “North’s Castle,” undergone a few modern renovations.
    Even though it was ten o’clock and there were windows all across the north side of the big turret room—Perry had drawn the line at gloomy authenticity—there was barely enough daylight to meet the demands of Erik’s work.
    “I really am going to have to cut back that old bougainvillea,” he muttered.
    He needed good light, but he hated to curb the vine’s cataract of blazing pink blooms. Sooner or later a rare freeze would come to the desert and take care of the exuberant bougainvillea. Until then, he would enjoy the flowers.
    And squint.
    He tilted the table slightly to catch the north light better, then tilted a little more. There were two sheets of paper on the table. One was vellum, blank except for the carefully ruled lines waiting to be written upon. The other sheet was a photograph taken in ultraviolet light of a very faded old Celtic manuscript that dated back to twelfth-century Britain. In ultraviolet light, the original manuscript showed through, despite having been erased so that more spectacular—and far more modern—illumination could cover ancient vellum. It was a monk’s way of reusing expensive vellum, by replacing a secular text with the sacred word of God.
    It was also a forger’s trick to cover plain, pious text with something more flashy to catch a rich collector’s eye. A carpet page of bright colors and figures was a lot more saleable than sixteen or twenty lines of text in a language the buyer couldn’t read.
    As always, the voice of the man known as Erik the Learned seemed to vibrate in his modern namesake’s mind as he read the faded lines of the glossy photograph:
    I stood at the boundary today, the year-day of my “marriage.” Through the cursed mist I heard the bells of Silverfells ringing out the birth of a clan daughter, the first such birth in memory.
    And the mist held me back like chain mail.
    My horse refused the trail. My peregrine was blinded by sorcery’s light. My staghound’s nose was like unto stone. I was the most helpless of all. There was no means for me to pick a way through the mist, thus to get my hands on the source of my undoing.
    Cursed be all of Silverfells!
    I could taste the dark clan’s joy even as I raged against the foul sorceress who had charmed me into being her willing slave.
    Erik winced as he had the first time he translated the passage. His namesake had been well and truly pissed off, so enraged that it radiated up through time from the faded letters, so furious that he never even