Cline glanced over his shoulder toward the throng of passengers milling about, cussing and complaining about the cold. He spotted Maude standing in the cluster of Negro and Chinese passengers. She had removed Jed’s coat and wrapped it around the two shivering Chinese kids. Somehow, she had managed to replace her skirt with an undamaged one, and she looked like she was shivering, just like the other passengers, but Cline noted no line of visible breath trailing from her lips. Maude’s eyes found Cline’s, and she nodded to him. He nodded back, and that hint of a smile returned to her face. Cline looked back to the engineer and conductor.
“Not even a notion, I’m afraid, gentlemen,” Cline said. “I suppose I’ll chalk it up to another mystery of the West.”
“At least you’ll get a hell of a story out of it,” the conductor said. Cline looked back toward Maude. She had vanished.
“Yes,” Cline said, “that I shall.”
3
The High Priestess
London, England
December 21, 1870
Amadia Ibori moved through the tangled evening street traffic as silently as the falling snow. She loved snow, and London was in the grip of a major storm. Even with the weather, people hurried by her, balancing stacks of Christmas parcels tied with string. A cluster of children laughed and hurled snowballs at one another as their mother called for them to come along. A large man in a bloody butcher’s apron carried a Christmas goose, wrapped in paper, on his shoulder for an elderly man with a walking stick. Amadia smelled the roasted chestnuts two blocks away before she heard the vendor hocking the treats. If anything, the storm was putting the city in even more of a Christmas mood.
If any of the people on the street were to focus on Amadia, they would be startled at her appearance; she was African—slender and tall. Her black hair was shaved close to her skull, with sideburns that ended in points. Tonight, she was wearing a man’s overcoat, unbuttoned in spite of the storm. Under it was a man’s white-collared shirt, open at her throat, a buttoned brown vest and men’s pinstriped trousers with a pair of ankle boots. Her boots left no mark in the thick white powder, and she seemed impervious to the cold.
None of the hundreds of pedestrians she passed as she advanced up Duke Street glanced at her for more than a second. They saw her skin color, looked away and hurried on. She was a lone black face in a sea of white as she headed south toward Grosvenor Square. While there were parts of London where she would blend in, this was not one of them. She had the ability to be unseen, to move and leave no trace of her passing in the physical world or in the minds of men, but she didn’t need any of her abilities in this place—her skin was enough.
Amadia took another puff on the cigar she had purchased from the tobacconist on St. James. She knew it was a dreadful habit. Even as efficiently as her lungs cleaned themselves, she could feel the damage it did, but it was a vice that she afforded herself whenever she traveled away from home. She knew her iya would chide her when she returned home, smelling the sweet tobacco on her no matter how hard she tried to hide its presence. As powerful as Amadia’s senses were, Iya’s were far more acute.
She paused when she felt the child’s notice—a little girl about six years old with brown curls and brilliant blue eyes. The parents were busy taking in a window display. Amadia nodded to the girl and smiled. “Very good,” Amadia whispered. She directed the sound waves from her throat so that only the child heard her. Her English was as fluent as a native’s—better than many natives’, in fact, and she spoke with a slight British accent. “Aren’t you a perceptive little one?”
The girl walked up to her, smiling. “Are you a lady?” the child asked, her voice soft and unafraid. “What happened to your hair, and why are you dressed like a man?”
Amadia laughed.
“I am a woman,” Amadia said, now for all to hear. She knelt to look eye-to-eye with the child. “I don’t like the word ‘lady.’ It’s a word used to control what you should do and not do, or be, and I don’t like being controlled. You don’t either, do you?” The little girl laughed and shook her head.
“Good, don’t change,” Amadia said with a wink, the cigar clenched at the corner of her mouth.
“Sally!” It was the child’s father, the parents rushing to the girl’s side. The father grabbed Sally by the arm and jerked her violently away from Amadia. Sally squeaked in pain and was suddenly clutched tight in her father’s arms. Both parents were red-faced.
“How dare you approach my child,” the mother said. “You … teapot!”
Amadia rose, her face placid, as if she hadn’t heard the racial slur. “I’m sorry, I was just saying hello to your daughter. You are very fortunate. She is a very intelligent, independent and precocious child. You should not grab her in such a forceful manner, sir.”
“You presume to tell me how to treat my child?” the father said, his face flushed. “I shall handle my daughter in any way I see fit!”
“Come away, Sally,” the mother said, her eyes narrowing at Amadia. The family turned and began to walk briskly in the direction they had come from. “Bloody fuzzies!” the father bellowed. “Allowed to walk the streets with decent people! What’s this country coming to!” Sally peeked over her father’s shoulder and waved good-bye to Amadia, who waved back and continued on her way, puffing on her cigar.
The townhouse at the corner of Duke and Brooks was a three-story fortress of thick stone walls and high iron fences. It had no house number. It was the most secure and impregnable structure in London, but only a handful of souls knew that.
Amadia walked through the gate, crushing out her cigar on the gatepost, and climbed the stairs to the stoop. She clutched the doorknob of the steel-reinforced front door. To open, the knob required the person using it to simultaneously apply precise, and differing, amounts of pressure to each of a hundred small points hidden across the circumference of the seemingly normal-looking knob. Amadia turned it effortlessly with a click and entered.
The house was quiet except for the muted hiss of the gas lamps that lit the foyer. She shook the snow off her coat and hung it on the wooden and brass coat stand in the corner behind the front door. She took the grand staircase to the parlor on the second floor, and found the others assembled there.
“Ah, Amadia, dear,” Alexandria Poole said. Amadia noted that Alexandria said her name as if she had conjured Amadia into being, a typical British attitude. The world and all its people were just sitting around waiting for the white folk to find them and “help” them. Alexandria was tall, almost as tall as Amadia’s own six feet. Her features were regal, pale and perfect, like a porcelain doll. Her eyes were blue, her long blond hair straight and she appeared to be in her late twenties.
Alexandria’s appearance always created faint repulsion in Amadia. She knew the secret of what hid behind the mask of that innocent young face. It was the same reason Alexandria and generations of her family hated Amadia and her iya.
The crackling fire in the parlor’s fireplace chased away the chill of the storm. The floor was covered by a Tabriz rug, and the walls were adorned with paintings—Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio. An ancient, crumbling stone tablet with an ankh featured prominently on its face rested in a wooden cradle, under glass, on a display table near a bookcase. There were also numerous medieval woodcuts on display, depicting the Lady of the Lake giving Arthur and Merlin Excalibur. Other cuts depicted Percival returning the blade to the woman of the waters. A large, round table of dark cherrywood sat at the center of room, and Alexandria and the others sat about it.
To Alexandria’s left was Inna Barkov. Amadia had met Inna several times over the years, and she liked the Russian a great deal. Inna was a muscular woman with a great lion’s mane of hair so blond as to appear white. She dressed like a peasant from her native land—a simple tunic, loose comfortable pants and fur-trimmed boots—even though back home Inna had been granted titles by the czar and riches beyond imagining for her service in defense of her homeland. Inna offered Amadia the empt
y chair to her left.
“Where’s your daughter?” Amadia said in Russian as she sat. Her Russian was not as good as her English, but it was serviceable.
“At our estate outside London,” Inna replied in her native tongue. “I saw no reason to bring her into this until I know what this is all about.”
Amadia knew Inna and her daughter, Lesya, from several encounters they had shared over the years. Inna was as passionate in life as she was fierce in battle, and Amadia and the Russian had struck up a fast friendship that they maintained through correspondence. Lesya should be a teenager now, and far along in her training under her mother.
On Alexandria’s right was Leng Ya. Ya’s black hair was tied back into a ponytail away from her narrow face. She wore a simple and loosely fitting blouse and pants of black cotton. Her blouse had beautifully embroidered braided buttons of white. It was hard to determine Ya’s age by her appearance, but a best guess would put her between forty and sixty years. Ya made no gestures of greeting to Amadia. Not a single muscle in her face reacted in the slightest to her arrival or joining them at the table. Amadia, for her part, gave her the curtest of bows, one that she knew would most likely be taken as an insult, before taking her seat.
On Ya’s left was the final member of the circle present, Itzel. Itzel, seeming no more than a child in her teens, with her long, straight black hair falling past her shoulders and bangs that hooded her large, observant brown eyes. She was native to the Spanish colony of Guatemala, and was dressed like she was about to attend her first day of parochial school. Itzel wore a modest buttoned blouse of white and a conservative black skirt that ended just below her ankles, revealing only her plain, sensible work shoes. The only things about Itzel that broke the illusion of the pious schoolgirl were the jagged shards of obsidian jewelry she wore on her neck and wrist and the jar filled with beautiful blue-winged, fluttering butterflies that sat on the table before her.
Amadia had not met Itzel before, and knew her only by reputation. Itzel nodded as a greeting, and Amadia returned the nod.
“Good. Now that we’re all here,” Alexandria continued, “we can—”
“All here?” Amadia interrupted. “Where’s Kavita? Where’s the American woman and her daughter?”
“Kavita is dead,” Alexandria said bluntly, obviously annoyed at being interrupted. “She was attacked in Kolkata by the Sons. They killed her whole family and left her dead on a rooftop.”
“The Sons?” Amadia said. “The Sons, after all this time? You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Alexandria said. “My family and I possess information sources throughout the empire and the world. I’m quite sure. If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t have called out to all of you. They’ve been active for several months now; all the old nests have been reactivating. They are recruiting again, everywhere, aggressively. We all know what their renewed activity most likely means. We must prepare for war, sisters.”
“The American and her daughter?” Itzel asked. “Did the Sons get them as well?”
“Ah, the American,” Alexandria said the word as if it were infectious. “She is the cause of this problem, her and her child. We’ve all had the dreams, yes? The mine, the chamber with a silver floor that crawls with alien script, the American spilling the last of the Mother’s blood from the Grail to save her child and quiet the beast curled at the heart of the world. The American has become our undoing. Her child will be the last of the Daughters.”
“No!” Inna exclaimed, rising from her chair. “My Lesya is ready! She has endured years of training, overcome every challenge. She is ready to be initiated, to drink the Mother’s blood!”
Alexandria’s eyes lit up at the Russian’s agitation. “I’m sure she is. However, thanks to the Americans, the flasks have all run dry.”
The women reached for chains about their necks, and all of them withdrew the small flasks that hung from the chains. The flasks were of ancient iron, flecked with the green oxidized stains of time. Each flask was wrapped in a fine filigree of silver mesh. The cap of each flask was tipped with a small gemstone, each woman’s flask having a different capstone—alexandrite for Inna’s, jade for Ya’s, onyx for Itzel’s; Amadia’s flask was capped with an amethyst. Alexandria had no flask.
“We who sit at this table are the last,” Alexandria said, looking from face to face, “the last of the Daughters of Lilith to exist.”
“How can that be?” Itzel said softly, placing her hand on the jar of swarming butterflies. The creatures stilled and came to rest on the leafy twig that was propped within the jar. “Ix Chel, the Mother, her blood is eternal. It has resisted the ravages of time for eons within the Grail. How did this American, Stapleton, deplete what is supposed to be infinite?”
“For that matter, how did this woman we know so little about come into the possession of the Grail at all?” Ya asked.
“Apparently, the pirate queen had one final student, Maude Stapleton,” Alexandria said. “Her mind must have been more addled than we already knew it to be. She entrusted the Grail to this … washer woman. If the Grail had remained in the possession of my family,” Alexandria looked across the table to Amadia, “this would not have happened.”
“Raashida took the Grail from your family for good reason,” Amadia said. “Your family was … abusing its gifts and power.”
“And the former Oya’s choice of caretaker has led us here,” Alexandria said. “Led us to the edge of oblivion, to the destruction of all mankind. Do you honestly think there is any other power in this world that can stop the Sons, and their father?”
“I think you … exaggerate,” Amadia said. “The dreams have been upsetting, but I see no reason to—”
“It’s prophecy,” Alexandria said, interrupting. “Written upon the tablet. ‘When the blood fails, the Father of Monsters rises again to devour all.’ I’ve read it myself. We are facing fate, sisters.”
“You’ll forgive me if I give pause to your interpretation of fate,” Amadia said. “You visited the bone city once, over sixty years ago, and whatever you encountered there, you have been … reluctant to return to it. You, Lady Alexandria, are the only one to have read this ‘prophecy,’ and as I have said you have a penchant for … exaggeration.”
Alexandria managed to control the physical signs of her anger; however, Amadia noted a slight contraction of the pupils in the blue eyes that were now becoming storm gray. “Are you accusing me of lying?” Alexandria said.
“No,” Amadia said. “I’m accusing you of cowardice and lying.”
“What would I possibly gain by lying about this?” Alexandria asked.
“What you and your family have always wanted,” Amadia said. “Power, control.”
Alexandria smiled, and Amadia suddenly had the feeling that she had somehow fallen into a trap. “Of course I seek those things, Amadia,” Alexandria said. “While your iya, your mother, sits in her hut in the middle of the wilds of Africa, as she has for uncounted centuries, the world has moved on. There are channels, conduits of power, here, in England, Europe, even in the wilderness that is America. Commerce, war, politics. We are to act as guardians, as counsel, to humanity. We are architects of the future. We can no longer sit passively by and attempt to change the world a single person at a time.
“The blood of the Mother no longer flows and the Sons are on the move against us once again, which can only mean their father has returned. These are facts, Amadia. If we are to stop our enemies, we must use all the weapons at our disposal. Power is not to be feared or eschewed. If there is anyone on the planet capable of using it wisely, it is us.”
The others agreed. Amadia steepled her hands in front of her but said nothing.
“Alexandria is correct,” Ya said in English. “Our ancient enemy has already slain one of our number, and without the Blood of Lilith from the Grail, we cannot continue our line.”
“My Lesya is ready to take Kavita’s place,” Inna said. “We cannot allow the Daughters to die. We are all that stands b
etween the Sons and humanity.”
“If we are to survive this, we must act quickly,” Alexandria said. “The prophecy offers us a means of salvation for the Daughters of Lilith, but it will require great will and great sacrifice.”
“What must we do?” Itzel asked.
“First,” Alexandria said, “we must find the American’s daughter, Constance Stapleton, and bring her here.”
“The American will not willingly give up her daughter,” Inna said. “I wouldn’t.”
“No,” Alexandria said, “she will not. As I said, great sacrifices will be required.”
4
The Three of Cups
Charleston, South Carolina
December 24, 1870
There was no snow to greet Maude at the train depot on Line Street, only fog, thick, milky and swirling, clinging to everything. Over the hiss of the locomotive, she heard the church bells and imagined Constance and her grandfather riding in his fine carriage to Christmas Eve service at St. John’s, just as they had done so many times when Maude was a child. Maude considered for a moment confronting him there, at the church, getting her daughter back tonight. The heat of the thought was cooled, stilled and put away. She would stick to her plan.
The air was cold and damp. Passengers streamed past her, greeted by family and friends on the platform. She thought about the port here in Charleston for an instant, imagined all the sailors from across the world huddled in taverns tonight, celebrating the holiday with drink and song. She wondered how many were alone, peering through the fog, trying to see their families, their faraway homes.
“Shall I fetch someone to get that for you, miss?” the porter asked as the baggage was unloaded. Maude shook her head.
“No thank you,” she said. “I’ll manage.”
Maude picked up her single bag and walked through the crowd. She had managed to avoid Alter Cline and his attempts to locate her during the rest of the journey. He was persistent and quite skilled, she had to admit. He had the instincts of a natural-born hunter. It had given her abilities a thorough testing to misdirect him, but the game had made the trip seem shorter. Mr. Cline was very determined to continue their conversation, and that was something Maude didn’t need.
The Queen of Swords Page 4