The Shadows of God

by J. Gregory Keyes

  Nairne was there, along with a French lieutenant, one Regis Du Roullet.

  “What's the noise?” Franklin asked.

  Nairne was grimacing at one of the three opticons Franklin had built the previous week.

  “Four airships have just come up to the northwestern perimeter,” he said. “The debt for the time we borrowed is come due.”

  Franklin felt his heart go chunk-a-chunk, like the water-filled drums some of the Indians used. “Did the depneumifier prove effective?”

  “I don't know. The ships stopped short and infantry debarked. Then the ships flew off, still out of range.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was afraid of this,” Nairne went on. “They used the same trick against us in Carolina. They can't use the airships direct, for our devil guns, but the ships are still terrible weapons. Moving troops without having to march them is an incredible advantage.”

  “They're hastening the war,” Franklin noticed. “Even with their ships—and I'm told they have only a few—they can move only small numbers of their total host. Why rush them in here in numbers we might be able to account for, rather than waiting for their mass to settle on our frontier?”

  “To give us less time to prepare, naturally,” Nairne replied.

  “How many men did they land?”

  “We don't know yet,” Du Roullet said. “We also have some intelligence that the underwater boats are putting troops ashore about thirty miles up the coast.” He smiled grimly. “One of our Taensas scouts reported a great deal of bubbles boiling up somewhat closer. They must have found our mines too impeding.”

  Nairne rubbed his eyes. “Two fronts,” he murmured. “With the permission of you gentlemen, I should like to take command of the northwestern line. That will be where the hardest and most immediate fighting will be. They may have made a mistake, coming at us in pieces, like this. We might manage to swallow a number of small bites as we could not the whole meal.”

  “True,” Du Roullet mused. “Which makes me wonder, with Mr. Franklin, why? Do they so fear what we might do in just a few days?”

  They might, Franklin thought, if they got wind of what Vasilisa and I are working on.

  He didn't say anything, though. If there was a traitor, best not to let him know his existence was suspected. “Have you sent for the tsar?” Franklin asked. “He might have some insight into this strategy.”

  “A runner just went for him.”

  Franklin nodded. “I had hoped we had a few more days.”

  Nairne shrugged. “We got more than we did at Venice, and that turned out well enough. I have faith in you, Mr. Franklin.”

  It struck him, then, that they did have faith in him, and it went cold into his bones.

  “I will meet with you gentlemen later,” he said. “I need to talk to someone.”

  Euler stirred awake almost instantly. It was disconcerting, the way he went from sound sleep to complete attentiveness. Franklin didn't like it.

  “Mr. Franklin. Back out of my box?”

  Franklin took a deep breath before beginning. “Mr. Euler,” he said, “it may be that I have treated you shabbily. I see no sense in apologizing for it. Trusting you comes hard, and I think you understand that. But you've done us more good than the people I trust. You warned us of the ships in Charles Town harbor and you told me how to provoke Sterne into revealing himself. I need you again.”

  Euler looked frankly at him. “I am your prisoner,” he said.

  “No. I've already given the order—you are no longer confined to the palace. You can leave without listening to another word from me. If I were you, I probably would. But I'll be plain. I need you.”

  “Of course you do,” Euler snapped, his brow wrinkling. “You needed me weeks ago.”

  “I know, but it's too late for that. Will you help me now?”

  “Help you how?”

  “Two things. First, the answer to a question, if you know it.”

  “Ask it.”

  “The army from the west hastens to attack us. But I have seen Swedenborg's designs for the engines.”

  “From Mrs. Karevna?”

  “You know her?”

  “Of course. Go on.”

  “It's a tidy question. They can be used at great distances. Why haven't they used them?”

  “I thought I explained that. They won't use them until it's clear their military assault is a failure. Once they commit, the war in heaven will break full gale, and it will be a terrible one. Why risk that, when it seems clear that their forces can dispatch you—us, I should say—with relative ease?”

  “You mean if we contrived to lose, the engines will never be used?”

  “Never is a long time, Mr. Franklin. But possibly. Make no mistake—humanity will still perish—slowly. Or, if luck is with us, the Liberal faction will return to power in time to save a few of us, though our great cities and all our learning will be stripped from us by then.”

  “But our race might live.”

  “Might.”

  Franklin sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “They attacked earlier than we thought, using the most mobile elements of their forces rather than waiting until they have the whole bear trap about us. Why? That only increases the likelihood, however small, that they will lose and have to use their engines.”

  “They must suspect you are near a countermeasure. Or else …” He trailed off, then flicked his sharp gaze up at Franklin. “There is something else, something they fear themselves. I think they worry that if they unleash the engines, they might somehow turn on them. I don't know how—it's mostly intuition, gleaned from a word here and there, nothing I can put my finger on.” He considered another few seconds. “Does Swedenborg say how the engines are made?”

  “I think they aren't machines that empower malakim—I think they are a new sort of creature, created from malakim. I'm not sure.”

  “Think. Think what else you might do, if you had that sort of power. Wonder what might also be created, what the malakim might fear enough to make them hesitate.” “Nothing comes immediately to mind.” “Not to mine, either.” “But will you be willing to help me? In the laboratory? So that when the time does come, we will have countermeasures?” Euler smiled faintly. “Mr. Franklin, I thought you would never ask.”

  Adrienne rode sidesaddle on a muddy road, surrounded by brambled fields that rolled gently to the horizon. The air was perfumed with the acrid scent of gunpowder and horse dung. Behind her she heard the creak of wagons, the chattering of the sutlers and the whores, drums beating.

  Nicolas d'Artagnan rode beside her, his rangy body swaying comfortably in rhythm with his horse, colichemarde slapping gently in time against his leg.

  “How is it with you, beloved?” he asked.

  She didn't know the answer. She couldn't remember. She closed her eyes and saw only colored clouds, shifting and breaking.

  “Where are we, Nicolas?” she asked.

  “Where are we?” He repeated her statement, frowning a little. “We are together, I think.”

  “I l—” Her tongue clove thickly to her lips for a moment. “I love you,” she managed to finish.

  “I know.”

  “I have a son.”

  “I know that, too. You named him for me. But he isn't mine.”

  “I wanted to give you sons. If children could be born of hearts instead of bodies, he would be yours. I have never loved anyone as I loved you.”

  He smiled gently, as if to himself. “One of the great benefits of dying in the first days of love, I think.”

  “Please don't say that.”

  “I always spoke what I felt with you, when I had the courage. Now courage and cowardice are equally absurd.” His saddle squeaked as he shifted to face her. “You are thinking of killing him, this child of our hearts.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. As you killed me.”

  “Nicolas, no.”

  “As you killed Hercule.”

  “No,” she whi
spered, collecting herself. She looked at Nicolas again. He was a boy, a child. What did he know? “You killed yourself,” she accused. “You could have lived.”

  “We could have gone away together, you and I,” Nicolas said. “I planned it. I offered it to you.”

  Adrienne shook her head. “But I had to— You're trying to confuse me. Are you one of my enemies?”

  “You're starting to remember.”

  “Yes. Are you Nicolas? Or are you the one who came be fore? Lilith? Sophia?”

  Nicolas smiled, that infrequent, cryptic, annoying smile of his. “Maybe I'm your son. Maybe I'm Hercule. Who else shall we add?”

  “What do you want? Have you just come to torment me? To remind me that everyone I love dies? My skin is thickened to that.”

  “Thick enough to kill your own son?”

  “I do not know him. He does not know me except to hate me. How is he my son?”

  Nicolas just chuckled at that.

  “What do you want of me?” she demanded again.

  “‘And God so loved the world …’ ” Nicolas began. He turned his byzantine eyes fully on her then. “God does love the world, Adrienne.”

  “Last time we spoke, you said you were not sure God existed.”

  He frowned almost imperceptibly. “Perhaps that was another, or perhaps my faith has returned. Or perhaps I love the world, and that is enough.”

  “Real or not, God does not love me.”

  “Maybe not, not as you mean. When you loved Nicolas, did you love each atom that composed him? Did you mourn each breath that was in him when he exhaled, cherish the new air as it entered his lungs? Did you weep when he lost a fingernail, grieve when his hair was cut? God's is a different sort of love, Adrienne. A more profound sort. It is a terrible sort of love, the love of the world. It is a love that requires, at times, bitter things.”

  “What sort of bitter things?”

  “You,” he whispered. “You.”

  Her hand glowed, and she held it up in front of her.

  “I have no power left,” she said. “My djinni have all died or deserted me.”

  And Nicolas began to laugh. Not his usual chopping, reserved, good-natured chuckling, but a full roar from the belly. She could only watch him in astonishment.

  “My predicament amuses you?”

  “You would use a sword to trim fingernails. You would use a cannon to snuff a candle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Instead of answering her, he leaned suddenly and kissed her. It was as if some potent distillation had been poured between her lips, a tonic of every sort of love. He tasted like Nicolas, Hercule, Crecy, her son.

  And he was gone.

  “Uriel?” she asked the gray sky. “God?”

  But no answer came.

  She awoke in a cathedral, the largest she had ever seen, whose columns supported a roof so vast she had difficulty making it out. She heard priests chanting the Te Deum, smelled the incense.

  Another dream?

  But no —the columns were the boles of pine trees so enormous in girth that four men could not link hands around them. The Te Deum was in a language she did not recognize, and the incense was tobacco and the scent of popping, hissing pine resin in the fire nearby.

  The chant broke off. “She wakes,” someone said in French.

  Her eyes, stung to tears by the smoke, cleared again, and she saw an Indian sitting near her. He was handsome, in an alien sort of way.

  “Adrienne?” That French was better.

  “Veronique?”

  “It is me. How do you feel?”

  “How long have I slept?”

  “You have been in and out of a fever for almost two weeks. You nearly died. I nearly lost you.”

  She wanted to ask where she was, but she feared another conversation like she'd had with “Nicolas.” Instead, she touched her throat. “I'm thirsty.”

  “I'll get water.”

  A second later, lukewarm water splashed in her mouth. It tasted good. Crecy touched her forehead.

  “Your fever seems to be gone at last,” she said cautiously.

  Adrienne surveyed her body. Her left leg was in splints, and her ribs ached as she drew breath. She wondered how she had been traveling. “What of the others?” she asked.

  “Hercule is dead.”

  “I remember.” Words clotted on her tongue for a moment, then she went on. “The others?”

  “More than half the crew, actually. Your students all survived—Elizavet included—and Father Castillion. Some of your guard was killed, fighting these Indians.”

  “They are our enemies, then?” She glanced up at the Indian.

  “They fired on my people,” the Indian said. “My people killed them. If their guns had stayed silent, they would still be alive.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I hesitate to give a name to someone as powerful as you. Suffice to say I am a sorcerer, something like you. We fought the Sun Boy together, though I was confused about the matter at the time. He survived, by the way. His army follows us, by perhaps two days, perhaps three. I am still too weak to tell.”

  “Follows us to where?”

  “To your kinfolk. To New Paris.”

  She fumbled in her memory for such a place, came up with nothing.

  He saw her confusion. “It was once named Mobile,” he offered. “The chief city of Louisiana.”

  “Ah. Why do we go there?”

  “Because we have matters to attend there, you and I,” he answered, and with that he stood and strode away.

  “They have treated us well, but we are captives,” Crecy explained. “What he says about the soldiers might be true. It might have been a misunderstanding.”

  “Most of my guard gone, no djinni left to serve me. It's as it was in the beginning, Crecy.”

  “No. You have me. You have Linné and Breteuil and Lomonosov. They want to see you, but I have kept them away.”

  “But I have no way to protect them. The Queen of Angels is dead.”

  “Good. Then perhaps Adrienne can live again,” Crecy said.

  “I'm not sure I—” But Crecy wouldn't want to hear that. “How badly am I hurt?”

  “A broken leg, cracked ribs. You lost a lot of blood, and then the fever set in. It seems now that the fever is gone—you will be well soon.”

  “Well? What does that matter? Unless you defeated Oliv—” She broke off. The Indian was back.

  He rubbed his chin. “The Sun Boy defeated both of us, and his army is a few days behind our heels. But I think there is still a way to win. Here.” And he pointed at her hand.

  “Not anymore,” she said. But she remembered the creature in her dream and what it had said.

  “I think you are mistaken,” Red Shoes said.

  “You are the one mistaken, if you think you can talk to her like that,” Crecy snapped.

  A faint frown creased his brow, and he looked away, almost as if he hadn't heard her. Then he sighed. “My apologies. You have just awakened. We do not have much time, but it can wait until we reach New Paris. If we reach New Paris.”

  “I thought we were ahead of the army. What would prevent us?”

  “We are ahead of part of the army. Several airships flew over and let troops off between us and our destination.

  “Must we go around them?” Crecy asked.

  The Indian smiled disconcertingly. “I thought we would go through,” he said.

  “This gets worse and worse,” Thomas Nairne muttered, peering through the spyglass. Below them, the frigate Dauphin rocked gently. They had come out here to check the mines and nets, and to sound for Russian underwater craft. They were not far from land—in fact, they were well under Fort Condé's guns—but it was still dangerous. Franklin was nearly certain his modified aether compass would warn them of the underwater boats as it warned of aircraft and warlocks, but he could not be entirely certain. Nor could he be sure that the stuff he had invented to make them rise like corks in the wat
er hadn't been proofed against by the Russian philosophers.

  But what they hadn't expected was this—sails and puffs of steam on the horizon.

  Franklin peered through his own spyglass to confirm it. “A small fleet,” he said. “Men-of-war under steam. But no airships.” Franklin grunted. “Let's hope our minefield will trip them up, and the nets ought to get any of the amphibians.”

  “It will for a time, but most mines are sunk deep, to trip up their devilish underwater boats. We've had no report of sailing ships.”

  “We'll have to reinforce the fort,” Nairne said grimly. “All the commanders we have worth anything are out at the redoubts, awaiting the inland attack. Damn.”

  Franklin's heart sank. He needed more time, just a little more, but the malakim weren't going to give it to him. The troops on the northern frontier hadn't moved yet, and Nairne was reluctant to attack them first, using the interval for more defensive works instead. And now they had three fronts—two armies and a fleet—poised to crack New Paris open like a nut.

  “Well, we must do our best,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” Nairne said, his voice rising. “And, by heavens, our best may be better than we thought.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They've run up colors!” Nairne exclaimed. “The lion of King Charles of Sweden, the winged lion and crescent moon of the Janissaries and Venice—and, by all that's holy, our own Commonwealth flag! Oglethorpe managed it, by God! He warned the Venetian fleet!”

  Franklin felt a surge of joyous hope but kept caution wound as tightly as he could. “Could it be a trick? If the Russians killed Charles and took his ships, they might try sneaking in under false colors. We've heard nothing from them.”

  “We shall see, soon,” Nairne commented. “They've sent out a longboat. Shall we send our own to guide them in?”

  Franklin hesitated only a moment. “Yes.”

  “Margrave Oglethorpe, you are a sight for sore eyes,” Franklin said, smiling.

  Oglethorpe, despite himself, shared a reluctant grin. “It was more touch than go, but here we are, with allies.”