Then, finally, the surge had passed. Yorick took the first of the stack of bins, handed it to Ella, and took one for himself as the rest of the crew swam over. Yorick put his urn into the bin as he dragged it over to the bulging seine and filled it with a cascade of gold and silver coins. With the bin in place, he swam back to the center of the beach, knowing the focus of the time machine would be on him as soon as he activated the call signal. Pressing against the middle of the net, he pressed the button—and the center of the net disappeared. Gold and gems hurtled down in an avalanche—but instead of dropping to the bottom, the cascade disappeared even as it fell.
The agents pulled the seine loose from the bottom as it emptied and swam back toward mid-Wash, funneling the treasure into the time machine's vortex. When the last of it was gone, they folded the seine around the few pieces left and swam into the vortex themselves. Yorick was the last to enter; the time-gate closed, and the tide rolled on as it always had.
John sat in the litter, his head in his hands, and Hugo could almost have felt sorry for him if he hadn't remembered the list of John's cruelties. The water was still so loud, though, that he certainly couldn't hear what Sir Gorier said as he rode up beside John's palanquin, pointing toward the waves. John only shook his head in despair, and Hugo breathed a sigh of relief; it would have been very embarrassing for local divers to have encountered frog-men. There would certainly be peasants enough diving for leftover silver pennies in the next few days, but if the chronicle was accurate, they would find very few.
In the time lab, Yorick landed belly-down on a heap of gold, feeling for a moment like a medieval dragon guarding a hoard. He pushed himself to his feet and went stepping and sliding down the ramp of treasure that spilled down out of the time machine to fill the lab. Walking across a beach of gold coins, he pulled out his mouthpiece and came up to Angus grinning. "Mission accomplished."
"I'll say it is!" Angus stared down at the piles of treasure in disbelief. "Uh—you don't suppose this is stealing, do you?"
"Stealing?" Yorick stared at him in amazement, then grinned. "No way, Ang! It's salvage, that's all. Check your history books—none of this was ever found."
"Yeah, and now we know why."
"Come off it." Yorick kept his grin. "You didn't see the way that tide was racing, Angus. It would have spread this loot all along that beach, and it was stirring up so much silt that most of it would have been buried that very day. The rest would have been silted over the day after that, and by the end of the week, it would have been buried deep. No wonder nobody ever found it."
"If you say so." Puzzled, Angus asked, "Why do you suppose a king would take his wagons across the shallows instead of building a proper bridge?"
"Too expensive," Yorick said immediately. "King John was a miser, Angus—didn't want to spend a penny more than he had to. Probably figured shallow water was all he could afford."
Angus still looked dubious, but said, "It's ours, then?"
"Hey, we worked for it." Yorick pulled a coin-filled golden vessel out of a bin and presented it to him. "A penny seined is a penny urned, Ang. Don't worry about the details."
"I suppose." Angus looked around him and finally grinned. "We have definitely increased GRIPE's liquid assets." Then he looked up with a frown. "You don't suppose this counts as money laundering, do you?"
"Well, Yorick said, "we really cleaned up—and according to history, it all came out in the Wash."
THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Stasheff spent his early childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, but spent the rest of his formative years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has always had difficulty distinguishing fantasy from reality and has tried to compensate by teaching college. When teaching proved too real, he gave it up in favor of writing full time. He tried to pre-script his life, but couldn't understand why other people never get their lines right. This caused a fair amount of misunderstanding with his wife and four children. He wrote novels because it was the only way he could be the director, the designer, and all the actors too.
More Kobo eBooks by Christopher Stasheff...
Escape Velocity
The Warlock's Grandfather
The Warlock in Spite of Himself
King Kobold Revived
The Warlock Unlocked
The Warlock Enraged
The Warlock Wandering
The Warlock Is Missing
The Warlock Heretical
The Warlock's Companion
The Warlock Insane
The Warlock Rock
Warlock and Son
A Wizard in Absentia
M'Lady Witch
Here Be Monsters
A Wizard in Absentia
A Wizard in Mind
A Wizard in Bedlam
A Wizard in War
A Wizard in Peace
A Wizard in Chaos
A Wizard in Midgard
A Wizard and a Warlord
A Wizard in the Way
A Wizard in a Feud
Her Majesty's Wizard
The Oathbound Wizard
The Witch Doctor
The Secular Wizard
My Son, the Wizard
The Haunted Wizard
The Crusading Wizard
The Feline Wizard
Saint Vidicon to the Rescue
Mind Out of Time
The Crafters (volume 1)
The Crafters (volume 2)