The Lost Libraries Archive (The Erik Midgard Case Files Volume 2)

Chapter 12

XII

"Yes. All right," said Hades. "I've been selling them."

We were back on the moon in the main room. Baal was holding an icepack to the bruise around his left eye from when he'd foolishly tried to surprise me with the scissors as I was handcuffing him. I'd dragged both of them back here afterwards, leaving one of Hades's very shocked students in charge of the archaeological dig. Hades had insisted no one else was involved and - from the genuine shock on all their faces - I hadn't bothered to polygraph them.

"For the love of Darwin, Tony. Why?" said Zeus.

"For your department, I'd imagine," said Ra. He turned to me. "The directors have been discussing closing the school of archaeology for years. They don't get as many students as they used to and that isn't likely to change. They've already slashed the budget three years running."

"It's not just for the department," said Hades. "It was for my field."

"You did it for archaeology?" said Mirabi. We'd heard all sorts of excuses for crime over the years, but this was a new one.

"Yes," said Hades. He looked her in the eye and I was surprised by the honesty in his face. "It's my life. It's my subject. It's my work. It's everything. And despite what all you historians secretly think, it still has value."

"Hey! We don't..." said Zeus.

"Anthony, I have never...," said Baldr.

"Oh, please. History - your entire discipline," said Hades, "amounts to nothing more than reading and then rewriting what other people have already written about the past. Archaeology is about actually handling it. We do things historians can't. You can learn stuff about a culture from its materials that would never have been written down. But yes. It is dying. Time travel's seeing to that, even though you can never backstep for long enough to really study a culture. Is it a crime for me to try to save it?"

"By stealing artefacts to sell on the black market to top-up your budget? Yes," said Mirabi.

"Yes," said Zeus. "And I don't just rewrite. I make documentaries. I bring history back to life for the public. And when I said why, I meant why were you stealing from the past? You could easily use the stuff you dig up."

"Most temporal artefact collectors want items that are new," said Hades. "Not something that's been buried in the ground for hundreds of years."

"We've never managed to sell anything broken or damaged," said Bernard Baal. "It's all from the past, but they want things that looks like they backstepped and picked them up yesterday. I've got a whole box of stuff under my bed we were never able to sell and some of it was really difficult to collect."

"By which you mean difficult to steal?" said Mirabi.

"Well... Yes," said Baal.

"Why were you helping with this?" I said.

"I've got tuition fees to pay," said Baal. "And Doctor Hades offered me a doctoral place with archaeology if I didn't get the project's one."

"You're certainly not getting either of them now," said Baldr. "This is utterly outrageous. You are both a disgrace to the university."

"All right. First things first," I said. "Polygraph is on. Did either of you smuggle the dagger back?"

"No, I have genuinely never seen it before," said Hades.

"Ah. Yes. About that," said Baal.

Hades - and the rest of us - looked at him.

"I didn't get a chance to show it to you, Doctor," said Baal. "It was from the main temple in Tutal Xiu. I swiped it when the high priest's back was turned. But I didn't stab the professor with it. I just put it in one of the crates I was going to send down this morning. Someone else must have found it and done it. It really wasn't me."