Free The Bone Conjurer by Alex Archer Page B

the chunks of colored sugar and fortified whole grain, plucked a spoon from a pile of scattered flatware and padded into the living room to sit before her now-clean desk and looked at her laptop.
    “And to think I was complaining about how messy this desk was. Guy did me a favor. Too bad he doesn’t dust.”
    The cereal was a rough go at first. Her aching jaw reminded her she’d taken a few more punches than she’d delivered.
    Pressing the spoon over the cereal so it sank deeper into the milk and would become soggy and easier to chew, she moused her way to the archaeological site and found a few replies to her post.
     

    BestMan573 wrote, You’ve seen one skull, you’ve seen them all. Though it does resemble that of a newborn. Where’d you say you found this? By the way, love the online pic!
     

    “Must not be an anthropologist,” she commented on his blasé dismissal of skulls. “And no, I’m not going to tell anyone I found this in some dead man’s backpack. Online pic? Must have seen my bio at the Chasing site.”
    In that picture, taken on a lavender-streaked Scottish moor, she wore a boonie hat, cargo shorts and hiking boots. Not at all sexy. But indicative of her true self.
    PinkRibbonGirl started by saying she was only in the seventh grade. Annja worked the numbers and figured she must be about twelve years old.
     

    Hi! I’m so excited to be talking to you. I think you have the Skull of Sidon. I just found out about it a week ago, and thought it would be an awesome idea for my history report. I handed the outline in to my teacher and she nixed the idea. Said I couldn’t write about necrophilia in middle school. It wasn’t very becoming of a young girl. I didn’t even know what necrophilia was until I looked it up. Eww!
     

    “What comes out of kids’ mouths today,” Annja said. “The poor teachers. If it isn’t bad enough they have to deal with gangs and cell phones and ADHD, there’s the class brain in the front row writing about necrophilia.”
    She chuckled and clicked on the next e-mail.
    NewBattleRider commented on the various skulls in history.
     

    There are many black magic rituals involving skulls. Blood is drunk from the cranium to gain immortality. In medieval Cathay, rituals to honor gods involved skull bowls lined with brass or copper that blood was drank out of. The Knights Templar used to worship heads, which could be construed as a skull. That would jive with the cross pattée on the gold.
     

    None of them felt right. The cross pattée felt like a red herring. A common marking. Could have been a goldsmith’s mark or some kind of freemasonry symbol, Annja thought.
    She reconsidered the Knights Templar. Head worshipping?
    Annja had cursory knowledge of the monks who had taken vows of chastity and promised to protect helpless peasants who traveled the highroads from thieves. Didn’t ring any bells to her, though, regarding skulls. The Templars were a few centuries earlier than her favorite research period.
    She reread NewBattleRider’s e-mail.
    “I don’t know. Worth a look,” she said.
    She moused to Google and typed in head worshippers. The search brought up references to trepanning, which was carving a hole in the skull to give a swollen brain room or air. The ancient Greeks had used trepanning frequently. Macabre circular hand-cranked drills had been used to cut through the patient’s bone. Anesthesia was little more than some crushed herbs in those days.
    The whole thing gave Annja a headache.
    She typed in ancient skulls, which brought up more entries than her tired brain could manage. If she wasn’t careful she’d need trepanning to give her gray matter room for expansion.
    “All right, so I won’t rule out the Knights Templar.”
    She couldn’t get behind the idea. There were so many grail myths, she didn’t want to get drawn into that muck of rumor, legend and hearsay.
    Worship of gods made more sense to her. And her skull did have decorative metal.
    Going