Unnatural Issue

by Mercedes Lackey

  Dumbarton shrugged again. “Right, then. Do we report the tragic fire as folks who came to visit and found the place deserted, or do we slip away and let the locals discover it?”

  Peter felt sick at the idea of having to deal with strangers who were frantic about the loss of their relatives here. There had been at least two young girls there, who presumably had families. “Call me a coward, but—”

  “No, I agree,” Maya put in unexpectedly. “We can do nothing to help the relatives, we have done our best by the victims, and we certainly cannot afford to be pent up here when we are sorely needed in London.” She looked earnestly at all of them and got nods—mostly relieved—from her fellow Huntsmen. “If we report it, there will be many questions—why we were coming, when Whitestone is a known recluse who never sees anyone, for instance. But other than the fire—and these people know nothing of magic—there is nothing to show that we have been here. No one in the village knew where we were going. Let us get in the carriages and move on to the next village, where there is a telegraph. We can arrange to rendezvous with the private car from there, and send Alderscroft a brief missive. Once on the car, you gents with the salamanders can contact Alderscroft for a more detailed explanation.”

  Peter gave her an appreciative look. “You have a knack for sifting through chaff, Doctor,” he told her.

  She shrugged. “When one works at a charity clinic, one becomes accustomed to knowing when one should confront the unpleasant and deal with it directly, and when avoidance is the best course of action. Shall we?”

  The drive to the next village was conducted in silence and gloom.

  Peter hated losing. And this was losing.

  The next village was in the middle of its Market Day, which was a very good thing, as their carriage did not draw nearly as much notice as it would have otherwise. Peter was able to get off the telegraph with no trouble, told the postmaster that if there was any answer where he would be, and joined the others at the village inn rather than the pub. None of them were in much of a mood to eat, but the inn had a private parlor, and while Maya comforted her stomach with tea, the rest of them opted for something a bit stronger.

  “He’ll have a bolt-hole somewhere on the moors,” Dumbarton said gloomily. “Probably several. Shielded, of course.”

  “Or if he is really clever, he has an entirely harmless second identity somewhere,” Peter Scott pointed out. “That would be what I would do. Pass myself off as an invalid in the country for my health. Nerves. Anything can be attributed to nerves. Good excuse for not seeing anyone.”

  Anything else that might have been said at that point was summarily interrupted by a knock on the door of their private parlor heralding the arrival of the boy from the Post Office with a yellow telegraph envelope in his hand.

  He handed the envelope over to Peter without a word. Peter tipped him absently and tore it open.

  But the contents were nothing like what he had expected, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop thirty degrees.

  Germany declares war on France. Stop. Return at once you are all needed. Stop. Alderscroft.

  16

  SUSANNE felt distinctly odd, and distinctly uncomfortable, sitting in a Roman Catholic church. The High Altar, with all of its furniture, was entirely foreign to someone familiar with the plain Table. And to have all those statues peering down at one, not only from the area of the altar, but from other niches built into the walls—it was a little unnerving. Not that she believed all that nonsense that some spouted about Catholics being wicked; they weren’t any more wicked than anyone else. But . . . Papists . . . the cruel Papists who had conspired to kill Queen Elizabeth, the Papists who had turned English seamen into galley slaves, the Catholic Conspiracies, real and imagined, over the last several centuries . . . there was a long heritage of rhetoric and preaching designed to make anyone raised in England very wary of Roman Catholics.

  Don’t be ridiculous, she scolded herself. Nobody wants to burn anybody at the stake, or otherwise. There is no Inquisition anymore. Sir Thomas Moore is not going to rise from behind the altar and point accusatory fingers at the heretic in the sanctuary.

  It was otherwise a very pleasant building to be in. Her Earth-senses approved of the light stone and white plaster of the walls and the clear windows instead of stained glass. Small and narrow, it nevertheless managed to accommodate what must have been almost two hundred people. The parish priest and the—well, she supposed he was the equivalent of the mayor of the village—had tried to bring in just about everyone in the neighborhood, and it looked as though they had succeeded. The sanctuary was packed solid.

  The Germans had already come over the Belgian border and were besieging Liège. Young men were streaming toward Paris to join the army, for it was no secret that the Germans were crossing Belgium to outflank the French. But already there was a trickle of people coming the other way, fleeing, with everything they could pack piled precariously on their farm carts. And that was just here, in France. In Belgium, where the fighting was, the roads must be clogged with desperate folk trying to escape.

  The Belgians were disputing every inch, now . . . but how long could tiny Belgium hold back the great Germanic tide?

  Here in France there was a great deal of rhetoric and some inspiring speeches in the papers. The Army could not process their recruits as fast as they signed up. The general public had been fired with patriotic enthusiasm. The prevailing sentiment was that even if Belgium could not hold out, France would crush the enemy, and it would all be over by Christmas.,

  The Elementals, however, were terrified.

  The local Earth Elementals were handicapped by her unfamiliarity with them, but they conveyed as best they could that something horrifying was coming along with the German advance. It was not, as nearly as the three magicians could make out, that the Germans themselves were using the nastier forms of magic. In fact, they didn’t seem to be using any magic at all, at least with the Army. The horrors that they were bringing were entirely man-made and solidly physical.

  “The boche have never been good magicians,” Uncle Paul murmured to her, as if reading her thoughts. “They’ve never cared for magic. Not scientific enough. And they have not imagination enough.”

  Susanne only shrugged; she didn’t know any Germans, so how would she know? From what Père François was saying, however, she didn’t want to know any Germans!

  The stories the priest had collected, and now recited, were appalling, and so utterly at odds with the tranquility and peace that these walls should have held. At least some of the tales had been passed along from priests and nuns who had either witnessed these things or been told them by the survivors. Entire villages set afire because of resistance in the neighborhood. Aged and infirm priests shoved to the ground and beaten and kicked unconscious. Unarmed and unresisting young men—boys, really—shot dead in front of their mothers. Fathers killed before their children, who were then, in turn fired upon and killed or wounded. Girls and the elderly tied to the doorposts of their cottages and burned to death as their homes burned down. Men going into a cottage, devouring the dinner that had been prepared, then, for sport, burning down the cottage and shooting indiscriminately at the family, killing a baby in his mother’s arms, two of the daughters, and leaving the rest wounded and bleeding on the ground.

  There were more such stories coming with those refugees, and they were so very terrible as to seem incredible, like the barbarities of the Thirty Years’ War. Surely no modern soldier would inflict these atrocities on civilians!

  “Clausewitz,” Uncle Paul murmured, shaking his head sadly. But he didn’t explain what he meant by the name.

  Susanne shivered with a sudden chill, and the light in the little church seemed to dim. Mary looked ill. Uncle Paul patted her on the shoulder. “You should pack up and go home while you still can, chérie,” he told her. “Your nation has declared war as well. This will be no place for an English, when the boche come.” She nodded, then hesitated. P
ère François had finished his stories; the mayor was trying to make himself heard over people erupting into little knots of talk, furious or fearful.

  “What about you?” she asked.

  Uncle Paul sighed. “I will sell my cattle and horses to the army at a bargain. For one, I am a patriot, for another, it is better to sell now than wait and see them taken. That is the first thing. But the second, now—”

  He turned troubled eyes on Susanne. “I promised to protect you. You dare not return to England, but there is no safety here for you, either. I would say to take shelter in a convent, but from these terrible tales, the boche will not respect convents, either—”

  He pondered this a moment. “Well, then. I have my savings, and I will have the money from the sale of my cattle. I know the region about Mons; we will go there and find a cottage to lease. Perhaps the boche will not come so far. Even if they do, perhaps by that time we will be able to find a safe place for you to go.” He raised his head a little as the buzz of conversation changed in tenor from fearful to defiant. “They cannot prevail, the boche. No matter what they bring with them. They have sealed their defeat with their atrocities.”

  Susanne could only hope he was right—but the Puck’s warning, back in the spring, made her terribly afraid that he was wrong.

  It was trivially easy to practice the darker side of magic in London undetected—so long as Richard Whitestone kept things relatively small.

  “Relative,” of course, to all the grime and poison and misery of most of London. He sent his goblins to steal, his trolls to rob, and he no longer needed to visit a bank. He had a small flat in the East End; he needed only one room, really, but the last thing he wanted was a nosy landlord investigating “smells” or “noises.” His flat, most conveniently for conjurations, was in the basement.

  Two of the walking dead served as his servants. He didn’t need a cook as there were dozens of cookshops within walking distance. Eventually these two would get too noisome to keep around; he’d dissolve their soul-binding and have the trolls bring him two new replacements. For now they would do, and the amusing thing was, they were probably behaving with more intelligence than they had when gin-soaked and prowling the gutters.

  And as for information? He was living in the greatest city on the planet. London boasted dozens of papers, and a good percentage of them were under the impression that anything a member of the peerage did was noteworthy and should be reported.

  Pathetic, it was. But even more useful to him than Elemental spies.

  Unfortunately, Susanne was not a member of the peerage, so he had no idea what had become of her. She wasn’t in Britain; that much he was certain of. All of his Elemental creatures had her scent now, and none of them could find her. It was long odds in favor of them sending her away somewhere. If it was across water, he could never find her, and since they would have identified him by now, sending her across the water was a logical maneuver.

  The paper he was reading shook with his fury. Charles Kerridge—that was who was to blame!

  He was going to get revenge on Kerridge, but first, he was going to get his hands on the man, then he was going to find out exactly where Susanne had been sent. And then he was going to make Kerridge pay. It would be particularly pleasant to have his enemy resurrected as one of his servants.

  Richard’s sojourn in London was made even easier by the chaos that erupted within the city when Germany marched into Belgium. Oh, not that most ordinary folk really understood what it meant, and as for the slum dwellers, they didn’t even notice. But Alderscroft’s wretched Lodge—now, they boiled about like a kicked-over hive. He went from being vitally important to find and dispose of to being the last thing anyone was thinking about.

  Marvelous, that.

  He bought and read six papers a day; he wasn’t altogether certain what the Kerridges were going to do about the war situation, but he knew they would react to it somehow, and when they did, it would create a window of opportunity for him.

  But it was purely by accident—more because he was reading anything that had to do with the movements and plans of their set than because he actually had expected it—that he found, halfway down a list of members of the peerage who had volunteered to serve in the newly formed British Expeditionary Force, Charles Kerridge’s name.

  He had to read it three times to be sure. And when he understood that, yes, Charles Kerridge was going to France, and, yes, he was going to be in the army, on the battlefield, effectively putting him in ideal circumstances for Richard to enact his revenge—

  He very nearly overset his tea in his glee. Kerridge would be fighting for his life, because everything pointed to a very messy engagement at the least. The Germans were superb soldiers, well trained and well equipped, utterly ruthless and armed with weapons the British had not dreamed of. The British were overconfident. This was going to be a bloodbath.

  And in such a monumental mess as a war of the sort the British were not prepared for, Charles Kerridge would forget all about Richard Whitestone.

  And that was when Richard would strike.

  But first, he had to get to France, and now would be the time, before all civilian travel was forbidden.

  He rolled back the carpet and exposed the diagram he had painted on the floor. He was going to need a great deal of ready money.

  And there was nothing like a troll for “finding” money.

  “Incroyable,” Uncle Paul kept muttering as he leafed through the paper. They sat side by side on a bench in front of the tiny cottage they had leased, a flood of golden sunshine pouring over them and a breeze heavy with the scent of drying hay moving over the fields.

  The bucolic scene was rather spoiled by the columns of uniformed men marching up the road to the border.

  Susanne didn’t blame Uncle Paul for his reaction. The headlines seemed a bad joke. The Belgians had not stopped the Germans, even a little. Oh, Antwerp was holding out under a heavy siege, but it could not do so for much longer, and the Germans had just swept around them anyway. The Germans were approaching the French border.

  You could not get passage across the Channel now for any amount of money. Their last three letters and a precious telegram to Peter had gone unanswered.

  The press of heavily armed men had made calling on the Earth Elementals absolutely impossible. All that iron and steel repelled them as effectively as a fence. Neither Susanne nor Paul had been able to call in so much as a brownie since the troops started moving through here.

  The last of the men in this column marched past, leaving behind an enormous dust-cloud hanging in the air over the road.

  At least Susanne had managed to get a magically assisted course in French from one of the little house spirits when they first took over the cottage. She could understand most of what was being said around her now, even if she couldn’t read anything. Unfortunately, the house spirits were illiterate.

  Just as unfortunately, that had been the last she had seen of any Elemental at all.

  “Do you think we should try calling them again, Uncle Paul?” she asked dubiously, as the clatter of hooves in the distance, and an even larger dust-cloud, heralded the arrival of a troupe of cavalry.

  “No,” Uncle Paul replied. “They are frightened. Such will only frighten them more.” He put the paper aside and stared morosely down at his feet.

  It all was so hideously wrong. It was a wonderful summer day with scarcely a cloud in the sky. When the sounds of nature weren’t totally drowned out by the advancing army, birds sang softly in the eaves of the cottage.

  There was nothing to indicate the slaughter going on to the north and west.

  Finally Uncle Paul sighed. “It is of no use. We are trapped here, chérie. And I do not know what to do.”

  Susanne smiled wanly. “In that case, Uncle Paul, we will do what we can. And I will try to find a little creature that is braver than the rest.”

  The elegant little room with its spindly Baroque furniture looked far too dainty for
the man sitting at the writing desk. To be fair, Peter’s commanding officer really would not look at home anywhere but a campaign tent or the Exeter Club.

  “Permission to hunt for my relatives, General,” Peter Almsley said, with a crisp salute for General Smythe-Hastings. He and four other Elemental Masters under the general comprised a very special force indeed, and one whose existence was extremely hush-hush, for all sorts of reasons. Most people—well, those that were even aware of them at all—were convinced they were assigned to MI1 or SIS and supposed they were some sort of code-breaking wizards, and not of the magical bent.

  In fact, they were their own arm of Military Intelligence, the never-mentioned MI13, the department that officially did not exist. They were, in fact a sort of scaled-down version of Alderscroft’s Hunting Lodge, and right now Peter desperately wished he had some of the folks from that larger organization right here. From all that he and the others could tell, the Germans and Austrians were not using magic in combat. He wasn’t sure why, nor was he sure if this meant because they were using it for espionage.

  That was probably the Old Lion’s thinking as well. When Peter had last spoken to him, he was actively recruiting. People who would never have been considered for the Lodge were getting invitations. Alderscroft’s plan was to cover all of the British Isles with members or allies of the London Lodge so if the Germans did get up to any chicanery, it could be detected and snuffed out quickly. There was also some thought of trying to get the selkies to guard the coastline . . . if they could be persuaded. That, Peter wished to stay out of. It would take a much better diplomat than he.

  And would require your definition of “diplomat” to be “Someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a manner that you look forward to the trip.”

  The British Expeditionary Force had arrived in France three days ago, and MI13 with them. France had officially declared war on Austria-Hungary today, and Britain would probably do so in the next couple of days just as a kind of ironic final flourish to the mess. Both, of course, had already declared war on Germany. The Germans had declared war on just about everyone but Austria-Hungary and were making hash of Belgium, and there hadn’t been any time at all for Peter to look for Susanne and his great-uncle. Affairs were rapidly avalanching out of control.