Siege of Stone Read Online Free

contact of the point with metal. Then he turned on his flashlight and dug with his small one-handed shovel.
    The moist ground was soft, and four inches down he uncovered a nail. It was worthless, but it was a carpenter's nail, not a horseshoe nail, and from its shape he knew that it was eighteenth-century or earlier. At least he seemed to be on the right track.
    In the next half hour, he found innumerable pieces of ironmongery, but also turned up three coins from the era of the Stuarts, and another example of Tudor coinage. He also found the heavy iron head of a blacksmith's hammer, and what he suspected were the surviving parts of a brace, the handle and bit having long vanished.
    It was nearly midnight when the tone in the earphones began again and continued to sound, even when he swung the detector in a foot-wide swath. There was something big here, larger than a coin or an ax head. And then the other sound crept through his earphones and into his head.
    It lasted for only a second, but Tom could have sworn that the steady beeping tone of the metal detector twisted into a human voice, a man's voice that screamed so loudly Tom staggered. He yanked off the earphones and shone his flashlight all around, certain that someone had just shouted nearby. But the only sound was the soft patter of raindrops on the earth, and not a soul was in sight.
    Ghosts? he thought. But then he shook his head. Ghosts were for gowks, and bogies were bull shite. It had been his imagination, that was all, or maybe the machine had malfunctioned. Tentatively he brought one of the earphones back to his right ear, swung the machine over the place that had sounded before, and listened.
    There now. Just a good, strong, steady tone, the way it should be. His imagination then, nothing more. Relieved, he set down the machine and knelt on the wet earth. No need to probe , he thought. He was bound to hit whatever was buried here.
    He dug, trying to be patient, not to go too fast or thrust the blade of the tool in too violently. Doing so could scratch soft metal like gold, or break whatever the metal that had sounded might be attached to.
    He was eight inches down now, and still there was nothing. But he kept digging. He wouldn't have gotten a strong sound like that for nothing.
    Finally, at a little more than a foot in depth, the blade scraped a rough surface. Tom shone his light down into the hole and began to clear the dirt away. His heart jumped in his chest when he saw what he had found.
    It was a box, nearly a foot long and nine inches wide. It was made of a dark wood, and brass fittings covered the four corners that Tom could see. He cleared the earth around it, and saw that a padlock was slipped through a brass hasp. There was no need for it. The nails that had held the hasp had loosened, and he easily pulled off the lock and hasp.
    Tom knew that he should wait, should get the entire box out of the ground before he opened it. But he couldn't. Here it was, begging to be opened, begging for hundreds of years. He wouldn't make it wait any longer.
    He held the flashlight with one hand, and brushed as much dirt away from the edges of the box as he could, so that it wouldn't fall in when he opened it. But when he tried to lift the lid, he discovered that it was somehow sealed around the edges with a soft gray substance.
    Lead.
    All right then. He'd dig it up and chisel it open.
    Getting the box onto the surface took another fifteen minutes of digging, as it proved to be nearly a foot high. But at last he lifted it from the hole, and was surprised and alarmed at the feel of it. It seemed heavy enough, but there was no mass to it, and the thought of it being filled with coins and jewels was fast vanishing. Still, there must be something of value inside. Why would anyone bury an empty box?
    The flashlight he had set on the ground illuminated the box as he scraped away the lead from around its edges, the bits falling off like strips of putty from weather-worn