The third book in the Mistress of the Art of Death series, 2009

Aka Relics of the Dead

“And God was angry with His people of Somerset so that, in the year of Our Lord 1154, on the day after the feast of Saint Stephen, He caused an earthquake that it might punish them for their sins…”

Thus wrote Brother Caradoc in Saint Michael’s chapel on top of Glastonbury Tor, to which he’d scrambled, gasping and sobbing, so as to escape the devastation that God with His earthquake had wrought on everything below it. For two days he and his fellow monks had been up there, not daring to descend because they could still hear aftershocks making their abbey tremble and look down, appalled, at more giant waves submerging the little island villages in the Avalon marshes beyond it.

Two days, and Caradoc was still wet and had a pain in his poor old chest. When the earthquake struck and his fellow monks had scampered from the shivering abbey, making for the Tor that was always their refuge in times of danger, he’d run with them, hearing Saint Dunstan, strictest of saints though dead these one hundred sixty-six years, telling him to rescue the Book of Glastonbury first. “Caradoc, Caradoc, do your duty though the sky falls.”

But it was bits of masonry that had been falling, and Caradoc had not dared to run into the abbey library and fetch the great jewel-studded book-it would have been too heavy for him to carry up the hill anyway.

The slate book that was always attached to the rope girdle round his waist had been weighty enough, almost too much for an old man laboring up a five-hundred-foot steeply conical hill. His nephew Rhys had helped him, pushing, dragging, shouting at him to go faster, but it had been a terrible climb, terrible.