Alex Archer: Paradox

Annja reached up and grabbed his right boot to stabilize him. Whether the experience unnerved him or not, he didn’t continue the conversation. That suited Annja fine.

In the early afternoon the storm clouds returned with a suddenness that halfway tempted Annja to believe in Levi’s dueling mountain deities. At almost the same moment a soft cry came from above and Annja looked up to see Larry’s head silhouetted against the ominous boiling clouds. She could tell he was grinning.

Less than five minutes later Levi and Larry were helping her scramble onto the top of a gently sloping plain of ice, pierced by snow-mounded juts of rock. A mile and a half ahead of her rose the snow-covered peak of Ararat. And there, a quarter mile away to the south and west of them, the long, dark mound of the Ararat Anomaly seemed to hang over the edge of the abyss.

Rogue Angel ™

www.mirabooks.co.uk

…THE ENGLISH COMMANDER TOOK JOAN’S SWORD AND RAISED IT HIGH.

The broadsword, plain and unadorned, gleamed in the firelight. He put the tip against the ground and his foot at the center of the blade. The broadsword shattered, fragments falling into the mud. The crowd surged forward, peasant and soldier, and snatched the shards from the trampled mud. The commander tossed the hilt deep into the crowd.

Smoke almost obscured Joan, but she continued praying till the end, until finally the flames climbed her body and she sagged against the restraints.

Joan of Arc died that fateful day in France, but her legend and sword are reborn….

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

“Such exquisite form,” Roux said. He glided to a stop easily on the ice of the outdoor skating rink. “You make falling upon your wonderfully sculpted posterior a balletic act. Pure poetry.” He kissed his kid-gloved fingertips.

“How about a hand, here?” Annja Creed asked. She sat like an abandoned rag doll with her mittened hands on the ice and her legs stuck out in front of her.

She regretted the request at once. The slim old man with the bright blue eyes and the carefully trimmed white beard began to clap slowly.

Seeing her expression start to resemble gathering thunderheads he desisted and extended an arm. All around them cheerful skaters passed by emitting dragon puffs of condensed breath against a black night sky from which the bright multicolored rink lights banished stars. She fought the impression they were laughing at her.

With the help of Roux’s strength, surprising in a man his apparent age, she found herself back upright with her feet beneath her. Temporarily, anyway. She teetered, the blades of the rental skates strapped none too comfortably to her feet that slipped back and forth over the ice. Roux held her by the arm, steadying her.

“Where is your vaunted sense of balance, which you have supposedly gained through rigorous study of your black arts?” he asked.

“Martial arts,” she said. “ And the problem isn’t lack of balance. It’s lack of friction.”

“If you say so. Now, pay attention. The principle is simplicity itself. When you go with the direction of the blades, you move without effort. If you press at an angle to the blade, you push. You see?”

Annja did. She was starting to. Sort of. She made herself draw deep breaths to the diaphragm, calming, centering herself. You can keep your head while people are shooting at you, she reminded herself sternly. So you can keep your head while doing something little children do effortlessly.

The fact was, she was determined not to let this get the better of her. She wasn’t in the habit of backing away from challenges. It made her curse Roux all the more for talking her into this despite her reservations.

As she propelled herself forward a skinny septuagenarian a head shorter than Annja easily passed her by. Not a yard ahead of her a tiny girl, elfin face bracketed by enormous white puffy earmuffs, skated fearlessly backward.

Annja sighed. “I thought the Quays of the Old Port Skating Rink didn’t open until December.”

The outdoor rink was in the old St. Lawrence River dockside district appended to Montreal’s downtown. Like every other run-down waterfront in every other major North American city, it had been renovated and gentrified at enormous expense sometime in the last quarter-century. Now the skaters glided and chattered to saucy French techno-pop before the broad, benign domed edifice of the Marché Bonsecours, the old market that once housed City Hall.

“Customarily it does not open so early,” Roux said, tipping his hat to a passing pair of handsome middle-aged women. “But the winter has come early to Montreal, as you can see. This global warming, it fails again to materialize, it seems.”

He shook his head. “I do not understand you moderns and your superstitions. Even should the good Earth be warming, why is that bad? I lived through five centuries of what your scientists now call the Little Ice Age. Including times in which it lessened. In the times it grew cooler again, the people suffered, grew sicker and poorer. Crops failed. And whenever the weather grew warmer, prosperity and happiness returned.”

She said nothing. From her own detailed knowledge of history, especially European history, she knew her mentor was right about the previous effects of climate warming.

She also knew he wasn’t kidding about having experienced it for himself. What was worse, he wasn’t even delusional.

“All right,” she said to her companion as they picked up speed. She was finding a certain degree of control. She learned things quickly, physical or mental. “You’ve brought me here. You’ve established your dominance by ritually humiliating me. What’s so urgent that you had to see me?”

“What else but the offer of a job? At a fee most welcome, given the sadly depleted state of our exchequer,” Roux said.

Annja knew Roux was fabulously wealthy but he loved to cry poor. However, she also knew for a fact that their occasional joint covert enterprises, while tending to command high fees, were phenomenally expensive. For one thing she burned through all-but-bulletproof fake identities, with attendant documentation, the way some people smoked cigarettes. Even with volume discounts, the requisite quality was costly.

“Then give,” she said. The old man loved to hear himself speak and would ramble all night, or possibly for days, if she didn’t occasionally boot him back in the general direction of the subject at hand. The trouble was, he was highly entertaining to listen to. Being a raconteur was another skill he’d had a long, long time to develop.

He clucked and shook his head. “You moderns have no sensibility of the rhythms of life. Everything is always ‘hurry-hurry-hurry.’”

“You got that right, old man,” Annja said with a grin.

Roux sighed. “A consortium of wealthy American Protestant fundamentalists are organizing an expedition to examine the so-called Ararat Anomaly, believed by many to be Noah’s Ark. They wish you to come along and direct excavation and preservation.”