Shadows and Anguish (A Cat Among Dragons Book 8)

by Alma Boykin

  Rachel squelched back to the road, scraped her boots as best she could, then limped back to the gathered military vehicles. She retrieved her walking cane from the APC, then took a deep breath and crossed the small village market square to the command vehicle. General McKendrick stood outside glaring at the damp cobbles. Then he saw her. “Yes?”

  “There is something here, sir, something odd. Before I say much more, I need to look at the parish records, or the village chronicle if there is one.”

  “Oh?” Before he could say much more, Knox swooped between them. “Oh.” He glared at the bird.

  “Yes, sir, but not entirely that. There may be an imported item included, which is why I’d like to look for something similar: more lights, odd noises, that sort of thing.” She scuffed her boots as she spoke, trying to shed more of the mud.

  “Very well. Does it pose an immediate threat?”

  “No, sir, I don’t believe so at present. It has been here, and by here I mean in its current location, for several thousand years.”

  The stocky Scottish general blinked at her, red eyebrows rising until they almost touched the brim of his hat. “Thousand years? Without anyone noticing?”

  Rachel shrugged a little, catching herself as she started to make an Azdhag forefoot gesture. “Not exactly. I suspect it has been noticed, but ignored or explained away.”

  The parish record had almost nothing. “You see, there was a fire in the parish hall in 1871,” the parish warden said. He shrugged broad shoulders. “Someone use it as an excuse to clear out a number of old, badly foxed books. Some had been the parish records from 1654 on.”

  “I see, Mr. Pryde. Thank you.” Rachel shrugged to herself: what’s done is done. “Thank you for letting me see these.”

  “You’re welcome, Commander Na Gael.” He rubbed a thick finger under his very large, flat, red nose. “Ah, what precisely are you looking for?”

  “Accounts of odd goings on, like what Constable Smith reported. Strange sounds, lights where there shouldn’t be any, perhaps animals acting odd or not acting odd when they should have been, those sorts of things.”

  “Oh, you need the town record and Mrs. Whitacre. If it happened and was funny, she’s heard the story.”

  Rachel smiled. “Yes, that is exactly what sort of thing I need, Mr. Pryde. Where can I find Mrs. Whitacre?”

  “Green Brush tea shop, the table in the corner under the shelf with the tatting and the china cat toby mug.” His recitation brought a little grin to Sergeant O’Malley’s face before he caught himself.

  Rachel risked a sending. «Sound familiar, Manx Two?»

  «Just like me Gran’Pa, ma’am. Third stool from the end, Black Ox pub, four to six every afternoon but Sundays for thirty years or so.»

  And probably had solved all the world’s problems four times over in that time, Rachel thought to herself. “Green Bush, under the cat and tatting, thank you Mr. Pryde. I’ll just go have a word with her then.” McKendrick is going to fuss.

  Rachel took a back way from the parish hall around a row of houses and gardens before doubling back up the high street to the Green Brush. Before she went in, however, she poked her head into the town museum. “I’m sorry, Miss Na Gael,” the wispy woman at the desk said, looking very apologetic. “All our old records are at the archival conservation center at Lincoln. We hope to have them back in a month or so. Would you like their number?”

  “No, thank you, I have it. Thank you.”

  Once back in the street, O’Malley asked, “Ma’am, do you really think Mrs. Whitacre can answer your questions?”

  Rachel let out a long puff of breath and turned to face him. “I suspect the problem will be getting her to stop telling me, Sergeant. After all, I’ve not heard her stories before, assuming she’s the talking type.”

  An hour later, Rachel wondered if she’d still be there at sunset. Mrs. Whitacre was that rarest of English creatures, a talkative soul. “Oh, aye, I know stories about that sort of thing. My grandmother saw lights too, back before the Great War and the drought of ’96, and before that she told me about her father seeing the leaves around the fountain dance. You see, he was out late one night comin’ back from the cattle fair in . . .” and the tale commenced. Rachel took notes and after forty-five minutes thought she had a pattern.

  Two pots of tea, some sandwiches, scones with clotted cream, and another hour later, Mrs. Whitacre finally wound down. By then Sergeant Lee had relieved Sergeant O’Malley outside the tea shop, and Rachel desperately needed to visit the WC. But she had more than she had hoped for. “And you say your great uncle’s teacher said he’d seen something about it in a book in the Bodleian?”

  “Oh yes.” The old lady leaned forward, light brown eyes intent. “You see, the Romans wrote about the wall around the hill and commented about the fountain in it. A church book from the Saxons had the story, and someone else copied it down in a new book a little while later.” A little while meaning less than five hundred years, Rachel decided. “But getting it listed as an antiquity is such a fuss, and since there’s nothing in the hill, no one’s ever bothered. The field belongs to the parish, you know, and trying to get the entire parish to agree on something.” She gave Rachel a significant look and finished the last of her tea, setting the dainty chintz-pattern cup down with the faintest clink.

  “Indeed, Mrs. Whitacre, indeed.” Rachel put her PDA and stylus away and began gathering her things. “I apologize for bothering you, Mrs. Whitacre,” she began.

  “Oh, it was no bother Miss Na Gael. No one wants to listen to me these days. It’s all on paper, you see so this,” she tapped her white curls, “doesn’t matter. You say you are doing a local history article?”

  Oops. I think I am now. “Yes, Mrs. Whitacre, I am. I can’t promise that it will be accepted, but I will let you know as soon as I have word from the editor.” After a few more polite words, Rachel managed to escape. She found the loo and made grateful use of it, then went out to find Sergeant Lee trying to look inconspicuous with as much luck as a giraffe would have in a petting zoo. “I got what we needed, Boer Two,” she said.

  “Very good, ma’am.” She sensed him stopping his next comment and wondered what it would have been. Probably something about having her ears talked off, Rachel decided, which was almost funny. In a few more years it might be truly funny.

  “Well?” General McKendrick demanded.

  “Actually sir, that’s entirely correct.” Before he could explode, Rachel said, “The power source is a well, what has been occasionally considered to be a holy well, simply because of the very high water quality.”

  Captain Moshe ben David, standing behind McKendrick, made an interested noise. “Is it the water from the face in the wall, Manx One?”

  “Affirmative Hunter One.”

  McKendrick looked from his officer to his xenologist. “And you say that that is the source of the power surges and that it is . . . imported?”

  “Yes, sir, and yes. I’d like to go back and make a closer examination of the item, but based on what I’ve heard and observed thus far, I recommend improving the insulation on the telephone lines, or burying them, and leaving the object where it is.”

  She’d never made that recommendation before, and McKendrick and ben David both stared at her. “We never leave imports out in the open,” Moshe protested. “That’s not policy.”

  “Hunter One, this one has been here for so long that, eh, come see for yourself,” Rachel sighed, rubbing her forehead.

  Five days later, Colonel Tadeus Przilas rubbed his forehead as he studied the picture and the energy releases on the graphic below. “Sir, I’m sorry, but why did we leave it in place? If it’s transmitting that much power, it could pose a real problem. And what’s fueling it?”

  McKendrick pointed down the table in the staff briefing room to Rachel.

  She explained. “We left it in place because it’s been there for tens of thousands of years, sir. It’s been there so long it is literally part
of the landscape. And it serves to vent excess power from something that’s also been here for tens of thousands of years. That energy is then drained off into natural channels,” tapped by Logres actually, but you don’t need to know that, she thought. “No chronicle or evidence suggests that the discharge is harmful, so we’re better off leaving it where it is. If we start digging, or just prize it out and replace it with a replica, one, the energy build-up could cause problems of some kind and two, the water will back up and probably flood the parish hall basement and the church’s crypt. The church is a historic property of national interest.”

  “Oh.” The American executive officer leaned back in his chair. “No, I do not want to face angry church ladies or architectural preservation officers.”

  Captain Maria de Alba turned back around from studying the projected chart. “Commander, how long has that pattern repeated?”

  “Well, based on Mrs. Whiteacre’s stories, confirmed in part by what records have been released by the preservation team, every fifty years, three months, and six days. It starts as infrared, then visible light, then jumps through ultraviolet to alpha radiation, I’d guess over the course of two weeks. Then it goes quiet again, except for a very, very low baseline release, barely enough to register. That is what’s absorbed into the environment, which explains in part why the parish has been so determined to keep that field. Apparently it produces magnificent crops, especially root veggies and clover.” Rachel caught Captain O’Neil making a face. “Yes, turnips, Swedes, potatoes, beets, the usual, sir.”

  “The stone cries from the wall,” RSM Sheldon Smith said.

  Rachel blinked. “Say over?”

  “It’s written on a slab in a churchyard in Wales, one of the odd places. The slab reads in Welsh and Latin ‘The stone cries from the wall.’” Smith nodded at the officers’ blank looks. “Archaeology instructor I had used it as an example of inscriptions that will never be understood.” He raised one dark brown eyebrow and looked at Rachel.

  All of Wales is an odd place, based on my experience. She tiled her hands and turned them out, palms up, in a sort of shrug. “Probably no connection, RSM, but, well, people do odd things and perhaps someone remembered the face in the wall. The wall was built around the hill at the same time the fountain went in, and there’s nothing inside the hill that showed up on test excavations or on a LiDAR re-survey.”

  McKendrick frowned. “Nothing at all?”

  Captain ben David spoke up. “No, sir, nothing. Which also suggests that pulling the stone out of the wall might not end the energy discharge.”

  “Could you determine why it does that, Commander?” Tadeus asked.

  She opened her mouth and closed it again. “If you mean am I capable of doing it, I probably have access to the necessary tools, but would need Captain Ahkai to back me up. If you mean did I try in the field, no, sir, beyond what we’ve already discussed here. It’s part of the landscape and the village, sir, so why dig too hard?”

  “A twenty thousand year old fountain and you don’t want to see why it still works?”

  Rachel and McKendrick both shook their heads. “It does what it’s supposed to,” Rachel said.

  “And it’s part of the village, has been for, as you put it, twenty thousand years,” McKendrick said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to find people in the area whose families have been living there for that long.” He sorted his papers and looked around the room at the gathered staff officers and senior NCO. “Is there any further need for discussion?”

  A chorus of “no, sirs” rose from the seats.

  “You are dismissed.” He waited until everyone but Rachel had logged out before ending his own session on the GDF intranet. “Americans have no sense of time, do they?”

  She smiled a little as she finished collecting her stick, satchel, and notes. “Not for truly old things, no sir. Leastwise not the way the Isles do.”

  He led the way out into the hall. “By the way, I understand you have applied for publishing permission?”

  “Yes, sir.” She squirmed a little. “I was not entirely honest with Mrs. Whitacre about why I wanted to know about the parish’s history and the fountain. So I have written up a little bit about holy well customs in parish tradition for the folklore journal.”

  “What did she say about the soldiers outside the tea shop window, pray tell?” He folded his arms and looked down at her.

  Rachel gave that crooked grin that always made him concerned. “She thinks Sergeant O’Malley has a nice rump and that someone needs to feed Sergeant Lee more because otherwise people will think his mother doesn’t love him.”

  McKendrick didn’t know if he should laugh or sigh. “You are dismissed,” he said instead.

  “Caw!”

  “You too.” Knox followed Rachel down the corridor, giving her a piece of his mind, apparently. McKendrick watched the show and smiled a little. Better her than him for once.

  April, 2013. I should have known that things were too quiet, Rachel moaned as she sat down at the table across from Rahoul Khan and General Eszterházy. Nothing had moved in Britain since the discovery of the stone in the wall. And then Joschka’s world had shattered in an instant with the sound of breaking glass and crumpling metal. She’d called him as soon as she heard, and he’d given her an order, the one order she could never obey. I should have lied to him, then lied again. But I didn’t and now he hates me. She’d been impressed that he recalled all those words in Trader and other non-Terran languages. Then he’d hurt her, his words ripping into her and leaving her with flashbacks and night terrors for half a week. Rachel had shunted the pain aside and pretended she’d not spoken to him. It had almost worked, at least until General Eszterházy had dragged her to the funeral. As soon as the mass ended, Joschka’s grandson Leopold had ordered her out of the church.

  Another three weeks passed. Then Eszterházy called her back to Vienna. They needed Joschka on duty. They thought she could help him. Rachel was not certain they should, but kept her thoughts to herself as Helmut briefed her. He finished and she took a deep mental breath, wondering if she’d go mad before they got through to Joschka.

  “You are correct, sir—I fear I am now the only one who knows what is required.” And I know it too damn well. You have no idea what he’s capable of, no idea at all.

  “Rachel, you know that he hasn’t forgiven you?” Colonel Rahoul Khan cautioned his friend and former advisor as Major General Helmut Eszterházy nodded.

  “Yes, sir. And I’m afraid that the only way to break his depression is to force him to confront matters. I don’t like it.” She absently rubbed her temple as she thought back three and a half centuries to when the man then called Yori dar Orkhan had hurt her in a moment of rage—a rage she’d deliberately goaded him into. “I’m open to any other possible suggestion.”

  The two humans exchanged a glance and both shook their heads. In four weeks they’d not been able to come up with any, nor had the man’s priest and confessor. General Joschka von Hohen-Drachenburg’s depression had grown blacker and deeper, until his family had asked for the GDF to try to help him before someone was hurt. The few administrative staff and military personnel involved assumed that the family meant Joschka killing himself. Eszterházy, Khan, and Na Gael knew differently, especially Commander Na Gael.

  “When are you going to start?” the Hungarian wanted to know.

  Rachel studied the ceiling for a moment. “Next week. Colonel Khan and General McKendrick need to work out a timetable so I can be at British H.Q. most of the day and get night coverage. Then I will come here and see what I can manage. It will probably take at least a week before he even lets me near him,” she warned.

  “Better to take three weeks and get him back than push the situation and lose him—and at least one other person,” Eszterházy decided. His subordinates didn’t look as satisfied, but could offer no better option. There had been brief talk about drugging the general and taking him to medical care, but Eszterházy and the secreta
ry had vetoed that idea. While no one denied or confirmed that Rachel was an extraterrestrial, only four people outside of Hohen-Drachenburg’s immediate family were aware that the Graf-General wasn’t completely human. Thus, normal medical treatment was not an option even within the GDF. Rachel flatly refused to try and use her skills to force him to get well. “Can’t work without his cooperation and I won’t do it even if you order me to.” Hell, he’d kill me if I tried, and he’d be justified doing it.

  Eszterházy left his chief of staff and the British Branch’s xenology specialist to work through the details. Once the schedule complications had been ironed out, Rahoul leaned across the table to his advisor and friend. “Rachel, is there anything more I can do?”

  “Pray for me and for Joschka. You’ve never seen him truly angry, Rahoul, but I have. And I’m scared about his mental state at the moment.” She leaned back and said more loudly, “And see if you can get any invaders to reschedule until after this little headache gets sorted out. I do so hate having to interrupt an appointment for a battle.”

  Once again, Rahoul Khan wondered what horrible thing he had done to deserve having to work with a cocky wiseass like Rachel. And what he’d do if said cocky wiseass wasn’t around to shoulder so much of the load.