Sunstone

by RW Krpoun

  “Nuthin’ much,” he shrugged. “Worse was running out of ammunition. Turns out there were more guards than we knew.”

  “So Tobias said.”

  “The little rascal was damned useful, I have to say.”

  “Tell it to Brother Andrew; as it is he’ll be digging ditches until the week after his honeymoon. How’re you, Mac?”

  “All right. You gave me quite a start when I looked and you had quit following me.”

  “Yeah, that didn’t work out anything like I intended. Did you see Green Coat?”

  “No, did you get a shot?”

  “Yeah, but it was rushed, I think I hit him in the left hand or wrist.”

  “You ever notice how a lot of men get shot in the lower arms?” Captain said. “Its because holding a gun puts the lower arm between the chest and the enemy.”

  “Well, he was pointing a stone at me, but it’s the same principle.”

  “One of those black statues?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why the crazies went quiet-I bet you broke his hold over them.”

  “Might could.” I leaned back against a mesquite, my left arm around Nhi.

  “That sunstone was…strange,” Mac muttered. “I think Brother Paul was right about all of this.”

  “Well, did we stop it? Did you contaminate the stone?” Captain asked.

  The big man shrugged.

  We dozed amongst the mesquites until dawn. Nhi was completely out of ammunition, and had thrown one of her hatchets, but she still had her sword and one hatchet; Mac had a few rounds, and since Captain had hung onto the Colt he had brought as a backup I gave him four rounds, which was exactly half of what I had left. I gave Nhi my derringer, but she gave it back, and I didn’t argue-that sword wasn’t too bad against the crazies, at least one-on-one.

  We eased west, staying low, but by the time we were within sight of the presido the only trace of the necromancer and his army was a trail of dust rising over his carriage and the two crazy-drawn sledges. There were a few riders escorting the little caravan, one leading a fair-sized string of extra mounts.

  From the presidio came the sounds of shots, single reports over measured intervals. “Sounds like they’re mopping up the leftover crazies,” Captain observed. “Let’s go get some breakfast and give them a hand.”

  We stayed on until the twenty-ninth in case the necromancer figured out how to restore the mystic-whatever to his materials and came back for another go, but he didn’t. We spent the time burying the dead in long trenches and repairing the damage to the walls. Tobias was on the digging detail every single day.

  Sibley was laid to rest with the other fallen defenders, each in their own grave, and Brother Andrew promised to erect a carved wooden marker once the orphanage was fully put to rights.

  The Judge left on the twenty-fifth, having business of his own going unattended further north; by then Brother Paul was confident the danger had passed. I shook his hand outside the presidio’s gates. “I can’t thank you enough, Judge.”

  He grinned. “I’ll have nightmares as long as I live, I expect.” He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, though. You think you’ve done something in your life, and then a thing like this comes around…well, you know how it is. Good luck and safe travels, Seth.”

  “Vaya con Dios, mi amigo.”

  He swung himself up into his saddle, tossed me a casual salute, and turned his horse north. I watched until he and his men were out of sight.

  When it was our turn the entire orphanage saw us out the gate. Brother Andrew walked a short distance from the battered walls with us. “The Lord be with you, my children. I hope you understand this is something that should not be casually discussed.”

  “We already sent a report to our agency,” I pointed out. “They’ll have questions.”

  “That is understandable. But otherwise I would keep it a secret.”

  “Why?” Captain asked. “If more people knew, they would drag all this old stuff out and smash it to gravel.”

  “Quite a few items have been smashed to gravel, or burned,” the monk nodded. “Most of it, in fact. The danger is the human nature towards curiosity. Clever, idle men would dig into places they would not if it were only legend. Clever men who might find modern ways to accomplish ancient horrors.”

  “History is more dangerous than magic,” I grinned.

  “Indeed; history is simply legend confirmed as fact. What was done here will not be forgotten, but it need not be widely known.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  My caretaker these days is a crusty Norwegian woman who had nursed at the State Hospital in her younger days. When my visitors left I had her help me out onto the porch so I could watch the sun set, and she insisted on bundling me up first like a little kid.

  When we got back to Austin the District Chief called us liars to our faces when we turned in our final report, but later someone from the top office communicated with him and shut him up for good. We took some time off to rest, and went on to union-busting. I personally never set foot in Mexico again, and I’m fairly certain neither Mac nor Captain did either.

  Nhi came north with us, and we married in 1913, which on the face of it was not an auspicious year, but looking back at it now I see that it was a sort of Indian Summer before the century really got down to brass tacks. Only death did us part-she passed two years ago, in June of 1953, and I expect I’ll be joining her soon. She never saw her French colony again-on a couple occasions we made plans to visit, but politics and turmoil always got into the way.

  My baby brother died in the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1919, he and his young wife both, so Nhi and I took in his two young sons and raised them as our own, and two less equipped parents never shouldered such a load. I left the Pinkertons in 1920 and hired on as a Deputy City Marshall for Austin, Texas in order to be at home for the boys. Despite Nhi’s and my best efforts they turned out to be pretty solid young chaps; the older is now a banker in Fort Worth, and the younger worked for a publishing house in New York City for a while before he joined the Army and died in1944, flying one of those damned air machines.

  My brother died before Henry Ford proved just how right he was: those stocks he bought me turned out to be worth more than gold, and Nhi and I never wanted for much because of it. I visit his grave when I can and tell him he was right, but its not the same.

  I tried to keep track of Brother Andrew and the orphans, but the turmoil in Mexico didn’t abate for nearly a decade, and before it was over it took the lives of Brothers Andrew, Lars, and Paul, although I never got the details. Of the orphans I was not able to find any trace, despite spending some serious money trying. I kept an eye out in case Tobias showed up with my letter looking for a Pinkerton job, but he never did. I really hope they came through the maelstrom of the revolution and made it to more peaceful times. Despite all the killing and destruction Mexico didn’t seem any better off after the revolution than it had been before, but it has been my observation that revolutions seldom improve anything.

  I spent some time trying to track down Sibley’s family in order to tell them how he died and where he was buried, but none remained alive that I could find. After the Revolution ended I sent a marker down there in the care of a reliable man, but the presidio was abandoned and the graveyard was so overgrown that he just erected the simple stone near its gate. It was about all I could do for him, and I felt better for having done it. He wasn’t what you would call a good man in general, but he cashed in his chips defending children from an atrocity, and to my way of thinking that has to count for something.

  Captain passed in his sleep in 1943; he had returned to law enforcement in 1923 and was a County Sheriff for five terms or so, dying in office. We stayed in touch, and he must have bragged on his predicting the Great War a hundred times.

  Mac went to ranching about the same time the Captain first took office and turned out to be a terrible rancher but a lucky land-owner: they found o
il on his property, and he did all right. I know he spent some of his money looking for the children, same as I had. He lives with his daughter in Dallas these days, more hale than I am, which isn’t saying much.

  I never saw the Judge again, although I’ve thought of him often. I hope he finished out his days in peace in his Mexican hideaway.

  Wurfel got wrapped up with the Nazis in the 30s, helping hunt for ancient signs of Nordic history and all that. I understand he died in 1942. He was easy to follow on account of being an academic, and I kept tabs on him because I never trusted him, was never completely sure whose side he had been on. It chilled me when I found out he was part of a government program to explore the past, especially a government such as Hitler was setting up. It made me think of another research job Wurfel had had.

  Looking back, I think it was lucky that Billy died when he did. I don’t think he could have handled seeing how the 20th Century turned out: the Great War, the Russian Civil War, all that endless fighting in China, the banana wars in South America, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the civil war in Greece, the British fighting all over their Empire, Palestine when they created Israel, the war in Korea, the French in Indochina…it has been one long bloodbath, and the common people have done nearly all the suffering.

  My curse never came back after Mexico-oh, I had some bad nights here and there, but not many, and nothing like the crawling dreads and attacks of panic that I had had before. Whatever it had been, it stayed down in Mexico. Personally I think Nhi had a lot to do with it; my life was never the same after we met. In the middle of death and violence I found something, was given something to be more accurate, that made it all worthwhile.

  Those October days have never left me. Some men might walk away from what we saw-Mac and Captain never seemed to dwell on it once the Pinkertons accepted the report, but it never left my mind. More so even than Captain I became a reader of newspapers, and became inclined to ponder the wording and descriptions of events, particularly those of war and devastation.

  Because the necromancer got away, him and Cabral in his damned green coat, and the troubles in the world never seem to end. It was too easy to envision those two lurking around the killing fields of Flanders, the slaughtered villages in Russia, the bloody plains of Spain, the camps in Poland where ash belched into the sky night and day.

  Nor was it just my fancy. In 1919 a couple lads from the Department of War stopped by to quiz me about the incident, armed with a copy of my report to the Pinkertons. They obviously thought the entire business was a matter of too much sun and tequila and did not waste too much of their time. A few years later a Federal man and a Marine officer with haunted eyes came by and asked a lot of questions which did not make a great deal of sense to me-they harped on the exact image on the black stonework of the controlling statues, amongst other things. They didn’t seem satisfied when they left, but they were dead serious throughout, and I wondered what the Marine had seen that put that mark in his eyes, sure as a Moro blade had left its mark on me.

  In 1939 two men from the State Department and a quiet olive-skinned priest set up a meeting, and I had to walk them through the entire business again. I wasn’t any spring chicken by then-I was fifty-seven, and they damn near gave me a seizure when they fished out a drawing and showed it to me. The artist had done a good job-the coat was a different cut, but the color was the exact same shade of green. Cabral was missing his left hand at the wrist, a souvenir of our brief meeting that desperate night in 1912, but otherwise he didn’t look a lot different. I pestered them something awful about him, but they were there to ask questions, not answer them.

  As they walked out afterwards the priest lagged behind a step; looking back he caught my eye and drew a finger across his collar, a neat, concise gesture. I hope Green Coat did met his maker in Spain during those bloody years, and while it is not a righteous thought to have, I hope he saw it coming.

  Two tanned and fit young fellows from the OSS came by in 1943 to repeat the same old questions from the same old report, and get the same old replies. They took it seriously, and this time they asked about the orphans, the monks, and the nuns. I showed them what I had managed to scrape up years before, and they copied all of it down and asked even more questions.

  This morning two fellows from the new bunch, the CIA, came by and we ran through it all again. I gave it my all because I expect I won’t be talking to any more government boys, and I didn’t want anything to be lost when they nail the lid shut on me. I pestered them with questions in return, but if they had answers they did not share them.

  Sitting on the porch of the house that my baby brother’s belief in Henry Ford had built with a blanket over my legs and a thick sweater draped across my shoulders, I wondered at who the necromancer was and whether he still lived. Green Coat had likely died in Spain while doing the devil’s work in that awful civil war, but his master might yet be drawing breath. When you have seen the dead walk the idea of a lifespan being extended far past the norm is no great stretch to envision. When you have lived from a time of horseback to that of jet air machines anything seems possible.

  It was not a new topic-I had wondered if the unknown man behind the horrors in Mexico would want revenge on those who had foiled him, and both Nhi and I had been very alert for such things for years. Eventually it had dawned on us that such a man would be more focused on his grand ambition than the ordinary people whose paths he had crossed, no matter what those people had done, a point borne out by the abruptness with which he had quit the field in 1912. And despite our victory he still had his items and implements when he left, useless at the time but undoubtedly repairable.

  That bothers me. Who knows what bits of buried lore still sleep in the sod? What ancient remnants of earlier practices escaped from museums and private collections during the decades of war, turmoil, and social collapse that made up this century? Was he still out there, patiently assembling the bits and pieces, the followers and the foot soldiers, preparing for another effort to call forth his elder beings?

  I hope those young men in their sober suits listened carefully because when the Lord sets pieces onto the board to oppose that sort of plan again, it will be their turn. I can’t help them any more than I already have. It will be their turn in the barrel.

  Closing my eyes, I sank deeper into my chair. Then I am there again, in the October warmth of the Mexican sun, a revolver on my hip, the Model 1911 tight against my lower chest, standing on the wall of the orphanage, Captain squatting nearby studying the Chuj as they keep watch on us. To my right Brother Andrew smokes a cheroot, looking out at the world with eyes harder than a monk’s should be, Brother Lars a man-mountain at his side. Brother Paul is a bit further away, frowning over papers, while Tobias, resplendent in his officer’s tunic and cavalry kepi, looks over the monk’s shoulder.

  I didn’t have to look to know Nhi was at my left; I slid my arm around her shoulders and swallowed a painful lump as the scent of her hair reached my nose.

  “How long until they attack?” I asked when my chest and arm stopped hurting.

  “No attack, my friend,” Brother Andrew flicked away ash. “We did what we could. Now we wait to learn what the fruits of our labor shall bear. Every action, every word must be accounted for.”

  “How long will we wait?”

  The monk smiled. “Not long. None of us have been waiting long, and neither will you. It is a privilege, to wait upon the trumpet call with old friends.”

  “I tried to find you, afterwards. But things in Mexico were such a mess.”

  “Indeed they were. But you have found me now, and that is all that matters. I am very glad to see you again.”

  “Captain, how long have you been waiting?”

  “Me?” He turned to look at me. “I got here a few minutes ago, just before Nhi. I expect Mac will be along shortly.”

  “I expect he will, too.” I held Nhi a little closer.

  It was a privilege to wait with old friends, in a
place where we had done good work.

  It is the sort of thing that could give a man hope.

  About the Author

  Born and raised in the icy wastelands of North Dakota, RW Krpoun joined the US Army, serving two enlistments before being honorably discharged at Fort Hood, Texas. Delighted to discover a land where snow was a novelty, he settled in Texas and took up a career in law enforcement, serving twenty-five years to date and counting. His service includes a Sheriff's Office and two Municipal police agencies, as well as two enlistments in the Texas National Guard as a Criminal Investigator.

  RW lives on lakeside acreage with his lovely and amazingly tolerant wife Ann, and a band of ill-mannered animals who are all highly photogenic. His hobbies include reading, history, various forms of shooting, collecting battle-ready examples of medieval weaponry, and learning to use such weapons.

  Sunstone is his twelfth published work.

  RW’s work includes alternate history, fantasy, science fiction, and zombie novels. You can view his author’s page here.