Read Online Corbenic by Catherine Fisher - Free Book Online

glad he had that much. The man gave him fifty pence change. Silent, Cal turned and stalked up the stairs. He didn’t draw a breath till he was out of the store, and then he marched down the steep street without turning or looking right or left, fury burning in him, and humiliation and dismay. Sixteen fifty! Why couldn’t he just have said he’d made a mistake, laughed it off! They couldn’t have arrested him. That was only when you left the store. Like the time his mother had . . . forgotten about the lager. His ears hot, he stopped and stared sightlessly in a window, taking a deep breath.
    The girl had been there. The Grail girl. She must have been.
    After a moment he took the plastic bag from his pocket and tipped the CD out, staring at it. It was called Parsifal , and it was all in German. And it looked like opera.
    Opera!

Chapter Seven
    Perceval goeth toward the Deep Forest, that is full broad and long and evil seeming.
    High History of the Holy Grail
    â€œI can give you a lift home if you hang on till about six.” Trevor had put his head around the office door.
    Cal looked up from the pink forms. “Oh,” he said. “Thanks.” Then, “What’s the earliest I can finish?”
    His uncle smiled wryly. “Five. Just because you’re the boss’s nephew . . .”
    â€œI’ll go then, if you don’t mind. I can walk.”
    Trevor shook his head. “Can’t stand the pace, eh? Have you had a good day?”
    â€œFine.” He didn’t know what else to say. When his uncle had gone and the door was safely shut, he tidied the mass of forms on the desk into neat piles and dropped the calculator into the drawer with a sigh. He’d guessed it might be boring. But this was mind-numbing.
    Opposite, Phyllis’s vacant computer station blinked strange images over its screen. Phyllis was his uncle’s PA, but she was well over fifty and as dry as a stick. She didn’t approve of him, he knew. Probably thought he was well-off and spoiled rotten, the boss’s nephew getting a job he wasn’t qualified for and couldn’t do. She certainly wasn’t making things easy.
    He looked up at the clock. Four-thirty. Thank God for that. It was his fourth day at work, and it had seemed endless. They’d been in the office at eight, because Trevor always liked to be first in, and by ten Cal had been bored rigid. They were giving him the dullest work—start with the basics, Trevor had said, learn the business from the bottom up. He was hardly doing that. Making tea. Opening the post. And they wouldn’t even give him a computer yet. All he had done this afternoon was check addresses, postcodes, and put incomprehensible numbers into boxes on pink forms. The trouble was, he knew absolutely nothing about accountancy, tax returns, VAT, all that. Maybe Phyllis was right. Maybe he shouldn’t have gotten the job.
    He stood up and stretched, yawning. Well, boring or not, it paid real money. And he’d get a day a week in college. He’d learn. Give him five years and he’d be a partner. Ten, and he’d have a chain of offices all of his own, and a flashy car and holidays abroad.
    Out of the window, just over the roofs of the next building, he could see a corner of the castle, a dark stone turret. It stopped his thoughts, made him restless, as it had all day, every time he had lifted his eyes from the papers. Probably because of the sword.
    Getting it here had been a real pain. He’d wrapped it in a spare T-shirt and then in a plastic bag, and had slipped it into the back of the car when Trevor was giving his impeccable suit a final brush. It would have been just too hard to explain.
    Yesterday, he’d found an antique dealer’s, in a small alley of tourist shops down by the castle. If he was quick, he could get down there before they closed and sell the thing and be rid of it for good.
    He bent and opened the bottom drawer