Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

whose seventeenth-century sermons the pastor borrowed heavily, understood him. Indeed, at the farmer’s wife’s request, the pastor had used a blessing from the old pre-1982 liturgy to ward off evil spirits from her house. It had worked. Colour had returned to the old lady’s cheeks and she had asked for some food, the first time she had done that for a week.
    The pastor had an air of authority in spiritual matters that gave people confidence. It also made them afraid.
    In years gone by, he used to perform an effective double act with his old friend Dr Ásgrímur, who had understood how important it was to give his patients the will to heal themselves. But the doctor had been dead nearly seventeen years. His replacement, a young woman who drove over from another village fifteen kilometres away, put all her faith in medicine and did her best to keep the pastor away from her patients.
    He missed Ásgrímur. The doctor had been the second-best chess player in the area, after the pastor himself, and the second most widely read. The pastor needed the stimulation of a fellow intellectual, especially during the long winter evenings. He didn’t miss his wife, who had walked out on him a few years after Ásgrímur’s death, unable to understand or sympathize with her husband’s increasing eccentricity.
    Thoughts of Ásgrímur reminded the pastor of the news he had read the previous day about the professor who had been found murdered in Lake Thingvellir. He frowned and turned towards his house.
    To work. The pastor was writing a major study of the medieval scholar Saemundur the Learned. He had already filled twenty-three exercise books with longhand writing: he had at least another twenty to go.
    He wondered whether his own reputation would ever match that of Saemundur’s, that a future pastor of Hruni would write about him . It seemed absurd. But perhaps one day he would be called upon to do something that the whole world would notice.
    One day.

CHAPTER NINE
    Á rni was having trouble locating Elvish speakers in Iceland, especially on a Saturday.
    The couple of professors at the university he called were dismissive of his request. Tolkien was not a subject of serious study, and the only person who had any interest in the British author had been Agnar himself, but his colleagues doubted that he spoke any Elvish. So Magnus suggested that Árni dive into the Internet and see what he came up with.
    Magnus himself decided to make use of the Internet to try to track down Isildur. Isildur was clearly the senior partner in the relationship with Steve Jubb and probably the one putting up the money. If Steve Jubb wouldn’t tell them anything about the deal he was discussing with Agnar, maybe Isildur would. If they could find him.
    The more Magnus thought about it, the less likely it seemed to him that Isildur would be a friend of Jubb’s from Yorkshire. That kind of nickname was more common in the online world than the physical one.
    But before he got to work, there was an e-mail waiting for him, forwarded by Agent Hendricks, who fortunately seemed to be working on a Saturday.
    It was from Colby.
    Magnus took a deep breath and opened it.
Magnus
The answer must be no. I can tell you don’t really mean it, so don’t pretend you do.
Don’t bother sending me any more e-mails, I won’t reply to them.
C.
    Magnus felt a rush of anger. She was right, of course, he didn’t really want to marry her, and there was no chance that he would be able to persuade her that he did. But he was worried about her safety. He typed rapidly.
Hi Colby ,
I am very worried about you. I need to get you to safety. Now. If you don’t want to come with me then I will try to arrange something else. So please get in touch with me, or if not me, with the FBI, or with Deputy Superintendent Williams at Schroeder Plaza. If you do contact him, speak to him directly and only him.
Please do this one thing for me ,
Love
Magnus
    It probably wouldn’t work, but it was worth a try.
    Magnus spent the rest of the afternoon in the murky waters of the Internet, feeling his way around forums and chat rooms. There were an awful lot of Lord of the Rings fans out there. They seemed to split into the amateurs and the obsessives. The amateurs were mostly thirteen-year-old boys who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought the Balrogs were really cool. Or they were thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought that Orlando Bloom