by D. J. Butler
The man sent inside returned, and he came accompanied. The second person was not in a soldier’s uniform, but wore a crisp coat, neck cloth and cravat, and had a thick gold chain on his chest. He was tall and bony, with a severe face that looked both French and Indian of some sort. He made a rolling motion with one hand and the portcullis was promptly drawn up.
“Father Angleton,” he said, bowing slightly to the Right Reverend Father. “The chevalier is pleased to receive your visit. He regrets he cannot receive you personally yet, but he is engaged in business matters. I am René du Plessis, Seneschal of the Palais du Chevalier.” This man was a servant like Obadiah, but a servant with standing, a man who could treat his master’s guests almost as equals.
“Many thanks to the chevalier, I am sure,” Captain Berkeley replied. “Mr. du Plessis, might you indicate to me some inn or hostel where I could quarter my men?”
“Certainly, Captain,” the seneschal replied. “You may install them in the City Building, which you see there behind you, across the street. The Gendarme Station in the building has extra bunks. They will need to circle around the building to get in; the entrance to the station is on the Perdido Street side.”
Obadiah experienced a tortured moment of indecision as Father Angleton and Captain Berkeley turned with the seneschal and entered the chevalier’s Palace, while the rest of the Blues peeled away and headed back the way they had come. He wanted to follow the Right Reverend Father, but Angleton didn’t look back, and as he receded across the wide courtyard, past a pair of waiting coaches and lines of footmen and guards, the lead rope of the mule string grew heavier and heavier in Obadiah’s hand. Finally, the rope grew so heavy that it pulled him back, and he turned away from the master who had turned away from him, drifted listlessly back across the street and followed the Blues to their quarters.
* * *
Bill woke to a pair of shoes in his view again. He counted them; two shoes; so the feet did not belong to Bayard. And they were buckled; Jacob Hop. He rolled over and looked up into the smiling, blond-framed face.
“Just when I thought I had lost hope,” he quipped, but didn’t bother sitting up. He felt drained, as if the act of forging a letter to the chevalier had consumed the last of his vitality, and now he could only lie spent. He saw chinks of light in the walls and frowned—he was used to seeing the Dutchman, at least in his talking persona, at night. “Is evening upon us, Jake?”
“Yes, another night is almost here,” Hop said.
Another night. And another, and another, and another. Bayard had not again whipped Bill, but neither had he again brought Bill liquor. Bill felt weak and tired.
“I hope you’ve brought me a pistol this time,” he said. “Or the keys.”
Hop handed Bill a bottle: rum. “The whisky is all gone.”
“It’s all the same, suh,” Bill lied, and took a slug of the rum. If he’d wanted a sailor’s drink, he’d have worn rope shoes and a ribbon in his hat. He didn’t know any sailors’ toasts.
“There are no guns on the ship,” Hop told Bill. “And the keys are locked up. What would you do with a pistol?”
“Shoot myself.” Silly Dutchman. If he had a pistol, he would kill Bayard Prideux, the next time he dared to show his face. “Keys seem like a surpassingly strange thing to keep locked up, don’t they?”
“You can’t shoot yourself now, Bill.” A mischievous smile crept across Hop’s face. “This is all just about to get interesting.”
“It’s unnatural and effeminate.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sarah followed Thalanes back under Andrew Jackson’s death-cage as the sun sank; Calvin followed her in turn. She felt like a banjo string wound to the point of snapping, and yet she knew that she would be wound tighter still before she could relax.
The Lazars were as much as a day behind her, though no more than two. It added to her tension that, away from the Mississippi and its gigantic ley, she could no longer see her walking-corpse pursuers.
Would a day be enough to find William Lee? New Orleans was a large city, one of the largest in the empire. Sarah stumbled through a vast carnival, and all the inhabitants were in costume and putting on a show.
She had tried, from the keelboat, to exercise her Second Sight to find Lee. After all, Thalanes didn’t really know her limitations, and she had been able to find the Lazars. She had seen endless swarms of people, but she had no idea how to distinguish William Lee.
If she had something that belonged to Lee, or, better still, a physical piece of him, it would be easy to devise a spell that would lead her to the man, or reveal him. That was Newton’s Law of Contagion. And if she had something that looked like him as well, or maybe something that looked like a finding device, then she’d get the benefit of the theoretical magician’s Law of Sympathy, too.
If.
But the beastfolk claimed they could lead her to someone who knew Lee. And failing that, Father Chigozie Ukwu had already promised to take her to his brother.
The monk slowed his pace to walk with Sarah. “Before we meet Grungle and Picaw again, I would like to tell you another story.”
“Can’t wait,” Cal said from behind.
“You’ll like it,” Thalanes told him over his shoulder. “It’s from the Poor Richard Sermons, and I remember the moral.”
“You know as I like a good moral.”
“Is there something in particular on your mind?” Sarah asked the monk.
He shrugged. “I want to impart a thought before we rejoin our beastkind friends, who wish to offer their help and who say they are emissaries of the Heron King.”
“You don’t believe ’em?” Cal asked.
“I believe them.” Thalanes cleared his throat and began. “The burgomaster and aldermen of a small town west of Chicago were meeting in council one day to discuss the draining of the local swamp, when a stranger appeared and offered to drain it for them. He was long of face and limb and would not identify himself, however he was pressed, other than to say that he was the Heron King, which the gentlemen found strange, as he was dressed in rags.”
“You sound like you’ve memorized this,” Sarah said.
“This one I know reasonably well.” Thalanes nodded. “‘What price will you ask of us for this feat of engineering?’ the burgomaster asked the Heron King.
“‘A very modest price, indeed,’ the Heron King replied. ‘I only ask your permission to dry out your land, and then I will do it, not for any reward from you, but for the amusement of seeing how you enjoy my gift. And I will accomplish no feat of engineering, for I am not an engineer, nor do I employ any. I shall dry out your land by magic.’”
“That’s a lot of gramarye,” Sarah noted.
Thalanes shook his head. “I don’t think it’s gramarye at all, not as you and I understand it. ‘Very well,’ laughed the burgomaster and all the aldermen. ‘You have our permission to dry out our land.’ The Heron King bowed and disappeared. The council then had a good laugh and they all went home and told their wives and children about the mad beggar who had promised to dry up their swamp. The wives and children all laughed, too, and then they all went to bed.
“In the morning they awoke to find that not only had their swamp been drained, but the moisture had been parched out of all the land for twenty miles around the town. The wells had dried up, the plants had died and the arable fields had been reduced to dust.
“The Heron King, still dressed in rags, stood in the square, and the town gathered around him. First the townspeople objected to what he had done, then they yelled in anger, and finally they pleaded, abasing themselves on the ground and weeping, for him to restore their land to what it had been.
“The Heron King listened to it all silently, a curious smile on his lips, and when every last person of the town had dried his throat begging and reddened his eyes with tears, and the whole crowd had fallen silent again, he finally spoke.
“‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for the amusement.’ And then he wa
s gone.”
“What’s the moral?” Sarah felt troubled.
“Poor Richard says: be very careful what you wish for, and beware consequences that you do not intend.”
“Jest ’cause it turns out that the Heron King is real don’t mean that every story e’er told about him is true,” Cal pointed out.
“The Heron King is real, all right,” Thalanes said. “The people of Cahokia have never been able to think any different, no matter how much he might sound like a figure of folklore elsewhere in the empire. And most stories, Calvin, have some basis in fact.”
“If you know so much about the Heron King,” Sarah said testily, “then who are Simon Sword and Peter Plowshare? What does it mean that Peter Plowshare is dead?”
Thalanes sighed. “I’m puzzled, myself. I had always understood that Peter Plowshare and Simon Sword were different titles of the same person, the Heron King. That’s how the names are used in Cahokia. I thought they all meant the same thing.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m not so sure.”
Grungle and Picaw loitered beyond the gates to the Place d’Armes. As she approached, they both bowed, which made her feel conspicuous, since everyone else on the street seemed determined to ignore her presence.
“Why are you concerned to hide your faces?” she asked them. “This city is so full of different kinds of folk, it’s hard to imagine anyone would care what you look like.”
“Yeah,” Cal added, “I saw a snout-faced feller jest over there who must a been a beastman. Didn’t nobody look at him cross-eyed.”
“Thou art almost certainly right, Your Majesty,” Grungle answered, “but we feel it is safer to stay concealed. Just in case.”
Sarah smiled. “I agree completely. Which is why you must not bow to me or address me as Your Majesty. At least, not in the open.” Had she gone too far? Could she give orders to the beastkind? Probably not. Thalanes had placed himself under her command, had told her she was his queen, but Picaw and Grungle served the Heron King.
But after a moment’s silence, both the beastfolk nodded their agreement.
“Please take us to the person you mentioned,” Sarah added. “I believe you called her Filmer.”
The Quarter was busier now. Sarah tried to take the additional traffic in stride, keeping the same casual distance between herself and Thalanes as she had before, but Calvin evidently had no concern to look nonchalant—he closed up the distance behind her until she could hear the faint puff of his breath and the padding sound of his moccasins.
God bless poor Calvin, he still thought he was in love with her.
The beastkind quickly led Sarah and her companions to a plasterwork-and-iron public house whose signboard identified it as Grissot’s.
A row of horses hitched to rings set in iron posts impeded access to the public house’s boardwalk, and as she struggled to squeeze between two of the animals behind the diminutive Father Thalanes, she heard the insistent bum-ditty, bum-ditty of banjo frailing.
The beastkind hesitated at the door, and Sarah waved to stand them down. “Filmer lives here?”
“Lives and works,” Picaw said.
“We’ll come find you afterward,” Sarah said to the beastfolk.
She almost asked them to wait outside, but in fact she didn’t want them to stick around. They felt strongly that she should accompany them to their mysterious and legendary and apparently very whimsical lord the Heron King. She had other things to do—family business to attend to—first, and in any case, having just found herself to be a queen, she was in no hurry to be anyone’s vassal.
All in all, she thought she’d be just as happy if the beastkind disappeared.
The inside of Grissot’s was all dark wood, dancing, smoke, and sweat. Sarah almost laughed to see how incongruous both Calvin and Thalanes looked in the drinking crowd, but she probably looked even stranger. Like a patient from some Harvites’ hospital, she thought, with her eye patch. Like a refugee from a war. Like a beggar.
Like the witch she really was.
The men dangled hesitantly just inside the door, so Sarah pushed past them, slipping around a paunchy, purple-robed Memphite who swayed in a close dance grip with a golden-skinned Creole girl. She stepped up to the bar beside a tall woman with long brown hair. The woman watched Sarah with cool blue eyes as she tried to get the hunchbacked bartender’s attention.
“Excuse me,” she said, and then again, louder, “excuse me!”
The barkeep shuffled over, a fumble-footed mushroom of flesh. “Aye, me lass, have ye got a thirst on ye? And what’ll it be, then?” You didn’t see many Irish in Nashville, but of course, this close to Texia, it stood to reason there’d be plenty. They let anyone at all into Texia. “The beer’s passable, but then, a lot of things go down all right, once you’re willing to drink vomit.”
“I’m looking for someone,” Sarah said, and the cool brown-haired woman returned her gaze to the dancers.
“Oh, aye?” the Irishman inquired blandly. “I can direct you to the nearest gendarme station, if you wish. Although if you’re thirsty and looking for someone, you’ve like enough come to the right place.”
Sarah didn’t know whether she was being taken advantage of, but she felt Thalanes and Calvin behind her now and their presence gave her confidence. “A beer, then.”
The hunchback uncovered a pitcher that stood cloth-shrouded in a row of its gape-mouthed brethren and poured beer into a pewter mug. “Who’re ye looking for, then, lass?” He squinted at Sarah out one eye. The gesture was likely accidental—especially, Sarah reminded herself, since her witchy eye was covered—but it still rubbed her the wrong way.
“Filmer.” Sarah quashed her irritation. “I’m looking for a woman named Filmer.” The tall woman raised her eyebrows slightly at the name. Sarah sipped the beer.
“Oh, aye?” The Irishman wore a curious look on his gargoyle face. “I’m not sure I know a Filmer. Why’re ye looking for her? She owe you money, does she?”
Sarah felt she was being played. “No. I don’t know Miss Filmer. I need her help finding a…a common acquaintance.”
“Who’s that, then?” the barkeep asked. “Is he the one owes you money? Maybe it’s someone I know. A lot of bad debts walk in here to wet their whistles, I can tell ye.”
Sarah looked briefly at Thalanes but got no indicators from the little monk. He seemed attentive. “I’m looking for a man named William Lee,” she said finally. “You might know him as Bad Bill.”
The elegant woman with long brown hair abruptly broke her cool silence. “Bill!”
“Are you Miss Filmer?” Sarah asked.
The tall woman flashed a wave of emotion and then visibly fought it down. “Mrs. Filmer. Who are you?”
“Sarah Carpenter,” Sarah slid smoothly into the practiced fib, and then she indicated her companions. “That’s my husband Calvin, and Father Thalanes.” She tried not to notice the look of delight on Calvin’s face. “I’m looking for William Lee, and I’ve been told you’re his friend.”
Mrs. Filmer’s façade of cool self-mastery had returned. “Are you a friend of William’s? I must tell you that he has never mentioned anyone named Sarah Carpenter. Your voice doesn’t sound Johnslander to me. Are you…” She hesitated. “Are you family?”
“Mrs. Filmer.” Thalanes stepped forward to the bar. “Is there somewhere more private we could speak?”
Calvin paid for the beer from the bishop’s funds and Mrs. Filmer led them upstairs into a parlor. There she took a thin vase of roses from a small table beside a door and brought it inside with them, shutting the door behind them and setting the vase on a windowsill.
“Please sit,” she said, gesturing to the room’s three upholstered sofas. “As long as we keep the flowers in here, no one will disturb us.” Sarah plunked herself down and Thalanes perched; Cal positioned himself standing in a corner, eyes wide open.
Cathy Filmer sat, composed and dignified. “Is Bill in trouble?”
Sarah’s heart sank. “You don’t know where he is, then, Mrs. Filmer?”
The taller woman shook her head. “Please call me Cathy. I used to see him…frequently.” Did she sound wistful? “He was taken about two weeks ago.”
Cal’s face was cool. “Do you mean he was your lover?”
“Who took him?” Thalanes interjected.
Cathy shook her head again. “It’s my regret that William and I have never been lovers,” she told Calvin gently. “As to the identity of his captors, he was taken by the chevalier’s men. The gendarmes.”
“Where did the gendarmes take him—do you know?” Sarah didn’t relish the thought of fighting the Chevalier of New Orleans to rescue William Lee.
“Can you tell us why he was taken?” Thalanes asked.
“I don’t know why he was taken.” Cathy’s voice cracked. As if to camouflage the slip in her self-control, she shifted her posture, crossing her ankles gracefully, folding her hands in her lap. “They don’t publish the banns when men are arrested. He was…is…a man who makes enemies. As far as what the gendarmes have done with him, the possibilities are all dire, and I fear for my friend Sir William. But you haven’t yet told me who you are, and why you seek him.”
“I’m an old friend of Sir William’s,” Thalanes said. “And he has a long acquaintance with Sarah’s family, is a friend of her parents. We’re here on family business.”
“We need to find him.” Sarah was a little annoyed that Thalanes kept cutting her off.
“Carpenter family business,” Cathy said, and she gave Sarah an appraising look. “Because Captain Sir William Johnston Lee, former commander of the Imperial House Light Dragoons, is a great friend to the Carpenter family. As are you, a Cetean monk.”
“Yes,” Cal blurted out.
“A servant of the emperor may know many families,” Thalanes said quietly.
“Yes, he may.” Cathy Filmer took a deep breath. “As I said, the possibilities are dire. The most common fate of anyone snatched by the gendarmes is a thorough beating. However, as I also said, I haven’t seen Bill in two weeks, which may be the longest I’ve gone without seeing him in nearly fifteen years. I doubt he was released.”