Guardians of Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Llywelyn grunted. “You haven’t looked closely enough yet, but they’re there. This world does love a straight line, though, I’ll grant you that.”

  “Anna has told me that centuries-old buildings are prized here for being—what was the word?—rustic,” Math said. “They value what is old.”

  “That’s something in their favor, then,” Llywelyn said.

  “Why would they value what is old when they can make this?” Math gestured to the solid walls and doors surrounding him. “I could hold off an army from this building, and yet it sits in an entirely indefensible location with no guards, no people. It’s empty at night.”

  They’d reached the main corridor. When they’d followed Rachel’s father into the building earlier, the front doors had locked behind them. Self-locking doors meant Math didn’t have to worry about anyone sneaking inside except on the coattails of someone who had a key. Then again, it meant he and Llywelyn couldn’t get back in if they went out either.

  “They build everything this way. And since their country is at peace, they never think about being attacked,” Llywelyn said. “It takes some getting used to.”

  “They have more money than-than—” Math struggled to think of a way to convey his thoughts.

  “Than sense.” Llywelyn smirked. “What we could do with what they have and think nothing of.”

  Math was finally starting to understand the quiet desperation he felt in Dafydd when he talked about what Avalon could offer the Middle Ages. “Things, as Anna has said many times.”

  “Things,” Llywelyn agreed.

  “I would like to see one of these bathrooms Anna goes on about,” Math said.

  “I thought I saw a sign—” Llywelyn broke off as lights flashed across the doorway, and the sound of a motor indicated someone had entered the parking lot.

  Llywelyn signaled with his hand, indicating they should both move back around the corner of the corridor. Math heard the clunking sound of a closing car door and feet crunching the snow.

  He and Llywelyn crouched on opposite sides of the corridor, which formed a ‘T’ with the one that led to the front doors. As the footsteps came closer, Math peered around the corner. A light shone directly in his eyes, and he pulled back his head, blinking away the glare.

  He waited a moment, watching the light dance against the walls, and when it disappeared, he carefully looked towards the doors again. A man in a trench coat, a nearly exact replica of the one worn by Callum, shone a light—a flashlight to Anna and a torch to Callum—all around the doorframe. Beyond him, snow continued to fall, and flakes coated his head and shoulders, just from the brief walk from his car to the sheltered doorway.

  “Who could that be?” Math half-moaned, half-whispered the question. “Why can’t these people leave us alone?”

  “The authorities must have thought better of the policemen’s departure and sent this new man to ask more questions,” Llywelyn said.

  “We’re not going to answer any,” Math said, a little grimly.

  “There you are!”

  Both men turned at Anna’s voice. She’d come down the same stairwell they had.

  Math put a finger to his lips. “Shh.”

  “What is it?” Anna crouched against the wall beside Math, speaking now in a whisper. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you, even the men’s bathroom in case you were discovering the wonders of a flush toilet.”

  Math jerked his head in the direction of the front doors. “A man is outside. He is dressed like Callum.”

  “Oh no,” Anna said. “What’s he doing?”

  “Nothing yet,” Math said.

  “We don’t think he knows we’re here, though Dr. Wolff’s vehicle is still parked out front.” Llywelyn was standing, but he had hadn’t crossed the gap between them because it would expose him to the view of the man outside.

  Anna’s face fell. “If he’s MI-5, he can run the license plate and discover in two seconds who owns it.” She leaned past Math, seemingly to look around the corner, but Math caught her arm to stop her.

  “He’s just looking right now. The bus is gone, so there’s nothing to see.”

  “Those policemen must have called their superiors immediately,” Anna said. “I would have thought they would have been intimidated enough by Callum to do as he said, since he’s MI-5 too.”

  “Sadly, it doesn’t appear so,” Math said. “Maybe they found courage in a cup of mead.”

  “I don’t think anyone drinks mead here anymore,” Anna said.

  Of all the changes that could have occurred in seven hundred years, that surprised Math the most. “What do they drink then?”

  “Um—” Anna was distracted by the light bobbing around the hall, directed into the building by the man at the door. “Beer, I think.”

  “That’s an English drink,” Math said.

  Anna gave him a dark look. “You remember the English won, right?”

  “Do you have news of Meg, Anna?” Llywelyn said.

  Anna looked past Math to her father. “Actually, yes. That’s what I came to tell you. Mom’s had the mammogram. It’s amazing how quickly things can go when you don’t have to wait for anyone else to go first. There’s a lump there—kind of a big one, actually. Dr. Wolff is doing an ultrasound right now. The next step would be a biopsy.”

  “And then we’ll know if it’s cancer?” Math said because Llywelyn looked so stricken he had to have been afraid to ask.

  “The cells have to be sent to a lab—or should be—but both he and Rachel said they’d look at them with the equipment they have here, and they’ll be able to give at least a tentative answer.”

  Math knew what a lab was because Rachel had one in Llangollen, and he was opening his mouth to ask what equipment said lab might have that Rachel’s father didn’t when the front door rattled and banged.

  “Open the door. I know you’re in there!”

  The three of them looked wide-eyed at each other. Math put a hand on Anna’s arm. “Don’t move.”

  Crouching, he peered around the corner again. The man now stood facing the parking lot, his hands on his hips, clearly frustrated.

  Llywelyn took the man’s moment of inattention to dash across the corridor to reach Math and Anna. “Can he get inside?” he asked when he reached them.

  “I don’t know English law, but in America, police need a search warrant because this is private property. They can’t just go barging in.” She shrugged. “But again, that comes from American television police procedurals, not any real knowledge on my part.”

  “We’ve been here only a few hours, and already I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Llywelyn said, though he squeezed Anna’s shoulder as he spoke to take the sting out of his words.

  “The answer to your question is, I don’t know,” Anna said. “I’m just sorry someone was paying attention on Christmas Eve after all. Or was lucky enough to find out about the Cardiff bus so quickly. Maybe that agent lives in Gwynedd.”

  “I don’t like it when my enemy gets lucky,” Llywelyn said. “It makes me wonder what other mistakes I might have made.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” Math said. “We can’t allow him to arrest us.”

  Anna pulled out her phone. “It’s time to call Callum, don’t you think?”

  Math grimaced. “I hate to disturb him. He and Dafydd are doing important work.”

  “What about Abraham?” Llywelyn said. “It’s his clinic. He could send the man on his way.”

  “We can’t expose him to MI-5!” Anna said. “If the police had returned, I’d ask him to come down here in a heartbeat, but what if the man takes him away?”

  Math found a growl forming in his throat. “Your father and I could take him easily.”

  Anna shook her head. “I know you can, and it might be easier just to let you. We could lock him in a closet until Mom’s done, but that would only cause trouble for Abraham down the road. Callum knows how these people think. He can tell us what to do.”
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  Math’s discontentment rose further. He had his sword, but no authority. At home, he would have walked right up to the doors and sent the man on his way. Llywelyn, as King of Wales, could have done the same—as could Anna for that matter. But this world was too big and, while the modern Prince of Wales might have had that kind of authority, among those of them here, it was only Callum who could tell a fellow agent what to do. It was the lesson in powerlessness that Dafydd had been trying to teach. Math hadn’t understood what he meant until now.

  “What if we ask Callum and Dafydd to return, and they are thrown in irons instead of us?” Math said. “This could be a trap for Dafydd.”

  “I can’t talk to these people, Math. Nor can you. Even Anna is an outsider as an American,” Llywelyn said. “I know my son, and you know your brother-in-law. He would want Anna to call.”

  Nodding, Anna pressed the screen on her phone.

  Callum answered almost immediately. “Is everything okay?”

  “There’s a man in a suit and trench coat like you wear outside the door,” Anna said.

  “Damn,” Callum said. “We’re in the middle of something here—”

  “The door!” Llywelyn dashed away.

  A gust of cold air wafted down the corridor, and Anna passed Math the phone at the same time that she called out to the agent, who had pushed the door open. “Hi! We were just coming to talk to you.”

  “What’s happening?” Callum said into Math’s ear.

  “He opened the door,” he said.

  “Keep me on the line,” Callum said.

  Anna caught the edge of the door and stood directly in the doorway so the man would have to push past her in order to enter the building. “May I help you?”

  “What can you tell me about the bus that was here?” the man said.

  Anna frowned and didn’t bother to pretend she had no idea what he was talking about. It wasn’t snowing so hard that the great ruts weren’t clearly visible in the snow, though they were starting to be filled in by new flakes. “Nothing.”

  “But you saw it?”

  Anna shrugged. “It came. It went.”

  Although Math was pleased to discover that he understood the English the man was speaking, thanks to being married to Anna for most of the last decade, he wasn’t in a position to involve himself in the conversation in a way that would make sense, so he didn’t try. His eyes went instead to the vehicle beyond the sidewalk, parked such that Dr. Wolff’s little car wouldn’t be able to leave.

  “Did you notice that it was a Cardiff bus, not one from Bangor?” the stranger said.

  Anna put on a puzzled expression. “Why would a Cardiff bus be in Bangor?”

  “That’s what I wanted to ask you,” the man said. “You’re saying you have no idea where it went.”

  Anna raised her shoulders in an elaborate shrug. “I didn’t see anything. My mother has a lump in her breast, and the doctor is doing a biopsy of it right now.”

  The agent frowned and shifted from one foot to the other. “Er—”

  Math was quietly pleased to discover that men in Avalon weren’t any happier than medieval men to hear about the private doings of women. He had to stare at a point three feet above the man’s head to keep his expression blank. It really wasn’t fair of Anna to pretend she knew nothing about the bus, but if it made this agent leave without any more questions or Math having to resort to violence, he could accept it.

  “Was there anything else you needed?” Anna said brightly. “I really would like to get back upstairs to my mother.”

  She started to back away, but that was a mistake because the man in the suit pushed between the door and the frame, his eyes now on Math. “Is that a sword you’re wearing?”

  Math looked down at his sword, and then up again at the stranger. He should have left his sword on the bus, but he hated not having its comforting weight at his side.

  “Oh, that?” Anna said. “We’ve come from a medieval feast to celebrate Christmas Eve. My husband wanted to dress the part.”

  Math was astounded that Anna had come up with an exact description of where they’d been and why he was wearing a sword that wasn’t even a lie.

  The man in the suit continued to edge sideways, trying to get all the way inside. Math stepped forward and put an arm out to prevent him from doing so. The man retreated slightly. There must have been something to Anna’s idea that the law didn’t allow an officer to enter a private building without cause or unless he was invited. Math still had the phone in his other hand, though he’d put it surreptitiously down by his side so the agent wouldn’t realize Callum was listening.

  “And you decided to stop on the way home for your mother to have a biopsy?” the agent said.

  Anna shrugged. “It was when the doctor could see her.”

  Llywelyn then came into the light and said in his heavily accented English, “Excuse me, could you tell me your name?”

  The man reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a wallet not unlike the one Callum and the other MI-5 agents carried, and held it up. Anna looked closer, and Math peered over her shoulder. A piece of paper said his name was Rupert Jones, and he was associated with something called The Guardian.

  Anna blinked. “You’re a reporter?”

  Math studied the man. A reporter. He’d heard of such an occupation. Darren, in particular, had made several sneering comments about the press in Math’s hearing. Dafydd had brought the printing press to the Middle Ages, and books and broadsheets were becoming more common. Wales and England had the beginnings of what Math understood had become a huge industry in Avalon.

  Math stepped back and put the phone to his ear, turning sideways so he could still pay attention to the stranger but could also talk without being overheard. “He isn’t MI-5. He’s a reporter named Rupert Jones.”

  “Ask him how he tracked the bus to the clinic,” Callum said.

  Math put down the phone and repeated the question to Rupert.

  Rupert gestured to the parking lot. “I have a police radio, which also confirmed that the bus is definitely the one that disappeared a year ago in the bombing at Cardiff city hall.”

  Anna frowned. “Maybe you’re looking at an alien abduction.”

  Math didn’t know what that was and, apparently, Rupert didn’t either because he ignored the comment. “One of my contacts was on the motorway earlier and saw it appear out of nowhere with her own eyes.”

  If that was true, Rupert’s friend had truly been in the right place at the right time and, depending upon how close she was when the bus appeared, she was lucky to be alive. It also meant, now that Math thought about it, that Rupert might have a bigger role to play in what was happening here than it first appeared and wasn’t merely an obstruction to what they were trying to do.

  “Tell me your name again?” Rupert had his phone in his hand and looked like he was prepared to write something into it.

  “Anna and Math Rhys,” Anna said before Math could stop her. He heard a tsk coming from the phone, which meant Callum would have preferred she’d made up a name too. “We’re just visiting.”

  “Did she tell him what I thought she just told him?” Callum said.

  Math put the phone back up to his ear in order to answer. “She did.”

  “Get rid of him!” Callum said, and then added somewhat under his breath, “A reporter. Jesus Christ.”

  Math grimaced, but Callum was right that it was time the conversation ended. He put his hand on Anna’s shoulder and spoke in Welsh. “Go. Let me deal with this.”

  Anna looked at him warily, but with a tug on her elbow from Llywelyn, they got her moving away, back down the corridor.

  Rupert’s attention became fixed on Math. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “I assure you, I was born in Wales and have lived here my whole life. Now—” Math studied Rupert, who didn’t exactly wilt under his gaze, but some of his aggression seemed to leave him. He might have thought he could bully Anna,
a woman, into giving him the information he wanted, but Math was a different story. “I know that you have no cause to enter here, and my wife and I have far more pressing issues than answering questions about things we have no answers to.”

  Rupert glared at him, frustration rolling off him in waves. Math started to close the door, but Rupert jammed his foot into the gap before Math could close it all the way. “All of you know more than you’re saying. I was hoping, sir, that you could explain the flare-out.”

  “The … what?” Math said. The corridor was freezing now, and snow had blown in such that it had accumulated in the doorway to an inch in the time they’d spent talking.

  “The bus vanished from the middle of downtown Cardiff on a Saturday morning over a year ago. The flare-out was caught on video. Research shows that a change occurred in that location at the subatomic level.” Rupert was still wedged into the doorway so Math couldn’t close the door. “Do you have anything to say besides alien abduction?”

  Math’s eyes narrowed; this wasn’t making Rupert go away. If anything, he seemed more interested than before. “No.”

  Rupert grunted and then reached into a side pocket of his jacket to pull out a small rectangle of paper, which he handed to Math. “Ring me if you have any information that might help track down the bus.”

  Math took the paper automatically, with no real idea how it would help them contact Rupert, but he slipped it into his pocket anyway. “Of course.”

  He paused as it struck him that Rupert’s tone had changed completely. He was giving way—except Math didn’t believe for a moment that Rupert was giving up. More likely, he was trying to appease him, and when Dafydd and the others returned, he would be right behind them, following them to wherever they went next. Callum wouldn’t thank him for allowing that.

  “You might consider a trip to Caernarfon. That’s where the real action is tonight.”

  “Caernarfon.” Rupert sneered. “Right.”

  He didn’t believe Math, of course. It had been a faint hope that he could divert Rupert, even if telling him that answers lay in Caernarfon had been the truest thing Math had said so far.