Gravel turned and shingle crunched beneath their feet as they made their way down the beach. At its southern extremity a boat lay beached on the shingle, heeled over onto its port side. Its bottom and screws had rusted red.

  "Athanasia," Aidan said, looking at the characters painted on the stern. "That's the boat we're looking for."

  "You know Greek?" Annja asked, a trifle suspicious, and ready to be more than a trifle put out if for some reason he had withheld knowledge and allowed them to struggle through the whole day trying subtly to interrogate people who spoke dribs and wisps of English if any at all.

  But he only laughed. "The dire consequences of a classical education," he said. "I speak a few words and understand next to nothing of the spoken tongue. But I read it fair enough. Well enough to transliterate, surely."

  He walked up to the boat and rapped on the hull. It did not ring so much but echo hollowly. "Besides, this is a big craft. Maybe thirty feet long. A substantial investment, especially on a poor island such as this one. Do you see any holes in her hull? I don't. So there must be some serious reason she's moldering here on the beach with nobody trying to take her to sea."

  "I guess you're right," she said. "She's a lot bigger than I thought she'd be."

  "She's not even being used to dry nets," Pascoe said. Several other craft, obviously also fishing boats, bobbed at anchor not far out from the little beach. Wet nets had been spread out over upturned dinghies and stretched out on the shingle and held down with large rocks. "People are afraid of her," he stated.

  Annja glanced toward the sun, which hung low and swollen above the steep green hills. "I guess we'd better take a look aboard while there's still some light," she said.

  Throughout the day they had not yet found it necessary to refer to the jar itself. This was good, Annja thought. Whoever or whatever had killed those men might still be in the area, or have spies on the ground. The guilty party or parties might or might not be fooled by touristy preoccupation with the macabre, or goofy genealogical enthusiasms. But the killer's putatively pointed ears would definitely prick up if somebody turned up asking about the priceless, supernaturally powerful relic the hapless crew had pulled from the sea in its nets. Provided, of course, the murders had actually been connected to Solomon's Jar, and not some semirandom element. Such as drug smuggling gone bad, as follow-up articles said the Greek police surmised. That was the catchall of bad, lazy, or simply stymied police investigations, Annja knew full well.

  Scrambling over the port rail was easy. Climbing uphill into the wheelhouse was something of a challenge, although nothing daunting to a pair as fit as Annja and her companion. Pulling herself through the open hatchway, though, she came up short.

  The stench struck her like an invisible barrier.

  "Ghastly," Aidan muttered. "I didn't imagine it would smell this foul after so much time."

  "Neither did I," Annja said. Her cheek rode up in response to the stink, squinting her amber-green eyes. "The humid climate must keep the smell active. I guess that's why we're archaeologists instead of medical examiners."

  "We're wimps," Aidan said, holding on to a stanchion right behind her. "I can live with that."

  By force of will she thrust herself into the reeking dimness. Flies swarmed up to meet her. Their bodies fuzzed the air like a living haze. The sunset light shone almost directly through the cracked front port, yet it made little impression on the gloom within.

  She could still see enough. More than enough.

  The first impression, which did not particularly surprise her, was that someone had tossed buckets of dark paint liberally around the compartment. Copious buckets. Her stomach began a slow roll.

  You've seen blood splatter like this before, she reminded herself sternly. You've even caused it. So you'd better learn to face up to the consequences of your actions, no matter how righteous.

  Lest they become too easy. The voices of Roux and Tsipporah sounded in her head.

  Beneath the irregular coating of dried blood the compartment was a shambles. Chair seats and backs had been ripped in parallel slashes and bled yellowed stuffing. An obvious radar screen and other navigation instruments were smashed. The chart table lay broken against the bulkhead below. Charts and logs had been torn to pieces and strewed around. The papers had mildewed and crumpled in the humidity, and some had begun to melt into the varnished wood and painted metal of the deck and bulkheads.

  The sound of the flies was like an idling engine's growl.

  "My God," Aidan said, coming in behind her. "A charnel house."

  "Literally," Annja whispered.

  He gestured around at the shambles. "Did vandals do some of this?"

  "I doubt it." She pointed to a volume lying open against the juncture of deck and bulkhead. A ragged streak of blood crossed it at a violent angle. "At least some of the destruction probably happened before the murders. Or during. Anyway, as you just pointed out, nobody's tried to reclaim this vessel, despite the fact it's still probably worth the life's savings of an entire fishing crew. Who'd dare to vandalize it?"

  "Not I," Pascoe said.

  Her foot began to slip on the canted deck. She reached out reflexively and grabbed the back of the pilot's chair, which was fixed on a pedestal.

  She felt a shock as her skin contacted the slashed leather. It was as if she had completed an electric circuit, though not unpleasant. Inside herself she seemed to perceive a hint of golden glow.

  She felt a chill as if the sun had gone out instead of set. She shuddered.

  "Annja!" Pascoe exclaimed, exquisitely sensitive. She felt the reassurance of his hand on her shoulder. The strength of his grip surprised her. "Are you all right?"

  She shook her head as if shedding water. "Yes," in a shaky voice.

  "What is it?"

  "It was here."

  "The jar?"

  She nodded.

  "That's what made you shudder like that? You looked as if you'd seen a ghost."

  "Not seen, Aidan. The jar was here. I'm sure of it. But it's long gone."

  He nodded. "We reckoned that."

  "It's not the only thing. There was something here. Something I've sensed before. At Ravenwood Manor and the Wailing Wall. And, oh, on Mark Stern's yacht, when Eliete von Hauptstark attacked me. I just realized what it is."

  "And that is...?"

  "Evil." The word had force precisely because she said it quietly, with utter lack of inflection.

  Pascoe looked around quickly. "Is it still here?" She could see from his frown that his trained skepticism was warring with his emotions. And losing.

  "No. All I'm feeling are the traces it left behind."

  "Months ago? It must have been a pretty potent evil."

  Wordlessly she waved her hand around the blood-splashed cabin.

  "Right," Aidan said. "Forgive my being a git."

  Pupils dilated more than the gloom justified, Pascoe's eyes scanned the interior, even the overhead, which was likewise liberally streaked with blood spray. "Do we need to search any further into the bloody boat?" His tone said that he fairly urgently didn't want to.

  "No point," she said. "We're not crime scene investigators, thank goodness. We know what we came to learn."

  Before she finished the last word he had slipped backward out the hatch. She joined him before saying, with a shaky smile, "I'm just as glad as you are."

  He stood with his feet at the joining of deck and gunwale, head down with chin on clavicle and moving side to side like a bull's, drawing deep, quavering gasps of air in through his open mouth. She recognized the signs of a desperate fight against nausea.

  The wind was blessedly coming in from the sea. The warm, humid air felt almost air-conditioned on Annja's face, which she realized was streaming sweat in a way the day's exertion in the sun had not been able to achieve. The moist sea breeze smelled sweet, like life itself.

  Aidan clambered over the rail and jumped down to the sand. Then he reached up a hand to help Annja. She hid a smile at that. Some women she knew might have angrily spurned the gesture as chauvinistic – and it was certainly unnecessary, given that she was as strong or stronger than he was. It struck her as archaic, gallant and altogether sweet. Just the sort of thing, she thought, a well-bred and very handsome young British archaeologist ought to do. She took his hand and jumped lightly down beside him.

  He withdrew it as if it were hot. "Sorry," he said, eyes down. "I think I've just been a right Charlie again."

  "Not at all," she said. "I thought it was sweet."

  "What now?" he asked awkwardly.

  She looked to the west. The sun was almost out of sight, just a blazing white arc backlighting a rounded peak. Around them she felt the velvet mauve darkness, the cooling of the heavy air.

  "Better see if we can find our friend Spyridon before he drinks himself to sleep," she said.

  He touched her arm, lightly and deliberately. "Don't move," he said softly. "We may have a spot of bother."

  She turned to look at him. Light and movement drew her focus beyond him, north up the beach, to where an irregular line of torches slowly approached.

  They were borne by half a dozen or more shabbily dressed men. They held knives and makeshift clubs in their other hands.

  Chapter 20

  "They've surrounded us," Aidan said through clenched teeth.

  She turned to look south. A similar group approached from down the beach. Their dark, bearded faces were grim in the wavering orange light of their driftwood torches.

  "Nice traditional touch, that. Torches," Pascoe said. "Pity it's not an agrarian enough setting for them to have pitchforks. Still one supposes it's the thought that counts."

  Annja felt a stab of admiration for his insouciance. She felt little herself.

  She recognized the approaching men weren't carrying torches to act out a classic monster-movie scene. Rather, it was because of the traditional role of fire in cleansing evil.

  "If we've trespassed, we apologize," she called out to the nearer group, the one coming from the south. "We mean no harm."

  Her eyes darted – her head unmoving so as not to reveal her desperation. The beach was isolated. A small scatter of shacks lay several hundred yards up the beach to the north. To the south a jutting headland walled it off. A few more little warped-plank buildings leaned in various directions across the road, a hundred yards or so inland. Help was far distant – if anyone in the vicinity would care to help them against their own neighbors.

  Pebbles crunched ominously beneath boots. The torch flames were gaudy in the heavy twilight.

  "You've done enough harm," called a voice. To Annja's shock it was familiar. The voice of Nomiki had coarsened to a raven's croak. "You devils killed our friends, our kin. Now the time has come for you to pay."

  With a scream of jet engines, an airplane lifted off from Corfu International Airport just across the narrow mouth of the inlet. It sounded to Annja like a lost soul fleeing.

  Someone cried out hoarsely. With a rush the fishermen were on them. Any doubts Annja entertained as to their seriousness were dispelled in a blink when one man took a horizontal swipe at her face with a torch. Its head blazed a meteor orange trail as she ducked back. A piece of her hair passed through the flame and she smelled the stench of it burning.

  She moved quickly, tweaking the torch from its wielder's grasp and throwing it end over end to fall with a hiss and a fizz into the foam of a retreating wave. It was a small gesture, and only momentarily satisfying as more angry men crowded around.

  She punched the man who had swung the torch in the face. He sat down hard with a crackle of shingle and an aggrieved outcry. "Stay behind me," she called to Pascoe without looking back.

  If the fishermen felt any Old World compunctions about attacking a woman they took care not to let them show. Annja pirouetted around a clumsy knife slash, smelling a waft of alcohol breath that accounted for much of the clumsiness. She dropped its originator sprawling and gasping with an elbow at the back of the neck. Somehow she sensed it as a club swung for the back of her head. She bent forward sharply at the waist. The club swished behind her skull. She mule-kicked straight back, caught an ample abdomen with hard muscle beneath and elicited a whoosh of forced-out air as its owner was launched back several feet.

  Another man rushed her, bellowing, club raised to crush her skull. She turned and charged past him, catching him with a forearm high on his chest that dumped him hard on his back and left him stunned and breathless. She stiff-armed a second attacker.

  Annja moved through the crowd of attackers in a controlled frenzy, allowing her training and reflexes free rein. Rather than block, she dodged, ducked and weaved. In preference to kicking and punching she grabbed and swung or simply pushed. She kept moving through her assailants, directing blows away from her, thrusting men into one another. Then she heard Aidan shouting angrily to the men to keep their hands off of him and she turned to glance back.

  The move undid her. Strong arms thrust beneath her armpits from behind. Huge hands clasped the nape of her neck. She was lifted kicking off the ground, knowing the bronze-bearded giant, Petros, had caught her.

  A man closed with her from the front, empty handed. She raised her knees and kicked him hard in the gut with both feet. He flew back, out of her sight beyond the ring of torches that had walled her in with barracuda suddenness. She became aware of various smells. Indifferently washed bodies, wool steeped in sweat, grease, sea salt and fish scales, garlic, decaying teeth, and resinous Greek wine and Albanian beer that smelled like formaldehyde, all mingled to cause a bit of sting for the eyes. She also sensed an edge of fear.

  Then Nomiki himself was before her, bandy-legged and mysterious as Pan in the shifting of dark and torchlight. A snarl of hatred bared his brown and jumbled teeth. A blade protruded from his hand, with torchlight sluicing along it like the premonition of blood.

  Annja kicked the knife from his hand.

  Nomiki fell back with a curse as she kicked him in the face. But then her leg was seized, followed by the other, and more men piled on than she could kick away with all her strength.

  She realized she had made a potentially fatal mistake. She'd been holding back when her opponents were not.

  Petros's monster hands thrust her head forward, intending to snap her neck. Her neck muscles strained, popped, seemed to groan aloud as she fought his strength. She would not give in. She couldn't win, but that meant nothing to her resolve....

  A voice cried, "Stop!"

  It called out in English. It was a male voice, high-pitched, harsh with an accent and something more. As it penetrated Annja's fog, in which she had been aware of almost no sound since the fight began, it must have penetrated the consciousnesses of the mob swarming over her. The men actually did stop and paused in their sinister intent.

  A man hobbled forward, using a broken oar as a sort of crutch. The men at the back of the mob surrounding her fell back with torches in hand like an inadvertent honor guard, producing an illuminated aisle for his approach.

  Nomiki stood before Annja rubbing his jaw. He spit what looked suspiciously like a fragment of brown tooth onto the slate shingle at his feet. "Spyros?" he croaked.

  At first glimpse Annja had thought the newcomer was an ancient, so hitched and painful were his movements. Now she realized the hair surrounding his head like a clumped and matted halo was dark. His naturally lean features were drawn further by pain as though stretched on a frame. His dark eyes were pits of sorrow, black in the torchlight.

  Someone barked at him in Greek. He replied in a low voice, more dead than deliberately soft, it seemed to Annja.

  "But Spyros," Nomiki said with a touch of whine in his voice. "They killed your mates."

  "No," the lame young man answered in English. "They did not. Now go."

  Petros protested. The young man's face twisted as if he had been struck. "Enough killing! Enough pain. Spare my soul more burden! Go!"

  He cried out again in Greek, his tone desperate, yet angry rather than pleading. Annja felt the self-righteous energy of the mob drain away. Where they had been a pack of raging predators half a minute before, now they were just normal men, rapidly feeling themselves overtaken by shame. Like a clot of muck being washed from a deck with a hose, the erstwhile lynch mob began to come apart, and then flowed away down the beach in separating streams, as if the men were too ashamed even for one another's continued company.

  Aidan knelt on the shingle by the Athanasia's red hull, fists down like a sprinter's on the line, breathing heavily through his mouth. Annja knelt beside him. "You're hurt," she said.

  "You oughta see the other guy," he joked through split and puffed lips. "Actually, the other guys look splendid, if you leave aside the effects of hard living and doubtful hygiene. I never laid a finger on them. Not for want of trying, though."

  Despite her protests he started to rise. When his determination became obvious she helped him stand and let him lean half surreptitiously against her. His body was warm, flushed perhaps by effort and fear, against hers.

  Aside from bruised cheeks and puffy eyes he didn't seem badly hurt. Apparently all that had struck him had been fists, not wood or steel. Not that fists alone couldn't do severe damage.

  "You're Spyridon, then?" Aidan said to the young man who stood before them, leaning on his crutch and panting from the effects of his own passionate outburst.

  "I am."

  The young Englishman forced himself by visibly painful degrees to stand fully upright. Not for the first time, Annja was surprised by his toughness. He looked so boyish and – tender, perhaps, not soft exactly, she thought. But he had steel in his spine.

  "We owe you our thanks," Pascoe said.

  "Thank you," Annja added.

  But the wild-haired head shook decisively. "You owe me nothing," Spyros said. "I do it for me. I am doomed. I hope to not be damned."

  He turned and stumped off. Bats swooped overhead, taking flittering tiny insects as they followed him up the darkened beach. A gibbous moon was rising across the waves. Pollution haze or something else stained it red around the rim, like dilute blood.