by D. J. Butler
The young red-haired Appalachee, Calvin, came sprinting after the Lazar, a coiled leather rope flapping in his fist.
The dead man ran surprisingly fast, given the long toenails that clicked on the stone floor as he moved.
Nails.
Bill looked down at the floor again at the scattered fingernails, and up at the running Lazar, seeing now that the inert arm was nailless. He must have cut them off with his sword, when he’d hit Tom Long-Knife in the hand.
He could cut the nails off the Lazar’s other hand, too.
He broke into a run.
* * *
Sarah charged the Lazar as if the Devil was on her heels.
Hooke saw her and raised his hand, pointing a gaunt finger at her. He hissed and Sarah tripped and fell, losing her grip on the knife and seeing it clatter away across the floor.
Curses and death magic, Thalanes had warned her. But the knife was silver; how had he been able to affect her with any spell?
She had been holding it by its wrapped hilt. She should have been holding it by the naked metal—it would have irritated her skin, but might have given her some degree of warding against Hooke’s hex.
Or maybe not. He’d hexed her feet, after all, not her hands. Besides, she’d tried to free Thalanes from the hex that trapped him with her silver knife, and to no avail. Maybe the Sorcerer’s spell was too powerful. Maybe she needed a bigger piece of the metal. Maybe the connection between Thalanes and Robert Hooke was localized somewhere in particular, and to terminate the gramarye she would need to identify a precise place on the monk’s body to touch with silver.
Sarah still had a lot to learn.
She scrambled to her feet, and then heard the running footsteps behind her. She turned, just in time to see the Lazar Tom Fairfax raise his knife hand over his head—
and Black Tom fell backward to the floor and skidded past. He was carried by his own forward momentum, but his body was no longer under his own control. She saw the lariat looped around the dead man’s neck, saw Calvin pulling on it, and realized he had again saved her life.
She scrambled after her knife, pushing a hand down under pews and feeling around on cold stone to try to find the weapon.
Black Tom groped after her with an empty hand, nails scratching on the floor and fetid air hissing through his lips. The nails scratched at her leg and Sarah pulled away.
A heavy boot came down on the Lazar’s wrist, putting a sudden end to the groping.
Sarah looked up and saw Sir William, saber raised above his head. “I wonder, suh,” the Cavalier said to the dead English rebel, “how you cared for your appearance in life.”
The Lazar twisted but the boot and the lariat held him firm.
“Did your mother not teach you that a gentleman trims his nails?”
The sword flashed as Sir William swung it, and brought up a stream of blue sparks as it crashed to the stone, not chopping off the Lazar’s hand, but slicing neatly through all his nails.
Tom Long-Knife hissed and tried again to roll away, but Sir William kept his weight on the dead man’s now-limp arm. Calvin tightened the slack in the lariat and pulled it in the opposite direction, and together the two men effectively anchored their foe.
“Now, Calvin,” Sir William said in his slow drawl, “I believe we may deal with this last piece of carrion at our leisure.”
Beyond them, at the front of the nave, Sarah saw the main doors to the cathedral abruptly swing open. To her dismay, Ezekiel Angleton stepped in, followed by a contingent of the Philadelphia Blues.
“Haven’t we all?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Obadiah was getting tired. The bare-knuckle boxing matches of his youth and the wrestling polls at county fairs he attended in the New World produced plenty of hard men to fight, but they were still men; if you broke a man’s nose, or his finger, he stopped the match and, like as not, you won the purse.
This walking corpse just kept coming.
Obadiah had early on ripped the knife from the corpse’s hand, but hadn’t counted on losing his own broadsword when the Lazar smashed his fingers against a fluted stone column. Since then it had been brutish, animal combat, no quarter given and no dirty trick omitted, while guns went off and swords flashed around them.
The Lazar had smashed out one of Obadiah’s teeth on the floor.
Obadiah had put a knee in the Lazar’s crotch with all his weight behind it.
The Lazar had pulled two of Obadiah’s fingers so far back they had broken.
Obadiah had gouged out one of the Lazar’s eyes with his thumb.
It was during this last operation that Obadiah realized he couldn’t win. Any Sunday Fair wrestler would have surrendered at the mere suggestion that a thumb was about to go into his eye, but the Lazar didn’t flinch. Lying prone with the dead man’s arms about his waist and squeezing, Obadiah dug one callused, horn-nailed thumb into the writhing mass of black worms at the corner of the Lazar’s eye, slid it under the blank, white, iris-less eyeball and popped the eye out. No fiber held the eye in place. It fell on the floor and splattered into a viscous gray puddle.
Still the Lazar squeezed.
“Wayland’s petticoats,” Obadiah grunted, “’ow in the ’Ell am I meant to put you down, you rottink bugger?”
The Lazar hissed, spraying the stench of death into Obadiah’s face.
Obadiah grabbed a spent pistol and bashed the Lazar repeatedly in the face with its butt, cursing all the while, until the Lazar released him to grab the gun.
Obadiah rolled away and climbed to his knees. Sarah was running from him now, toward the front of the church. The Appalachee redhead was in motion too, and the big gunfighter, but he had no time to try to see what the commotion was. He launched himself at his foe, knocking the other man forward and wrapping his arms around his neck and shoulders.
“Time to give over, you wee manky git!” Obadiah swung the Lazar’s forehead against the stone floor with all his weight and strength.
Smack!
The Lazar grunted and pulled his leg in, getting one knee on the ground under him. This feat would have caused any ordinary man serious pain from Obadiah’s hold, but the Lazar did it, snorting like a boar.
“I wot not what you be, mate,” Obadiah grunted, still casting about for some kind of effective weapon, “but I ’ope I never see your like again.”
His eye landed on one of the row of oil lanterns lighting the chancel from white-painted hooks set in the stone walls. Springing from his knees, Obadiah cracked the Lazar’s head against the stone floor again—smack!—and then jumped to his feet, leaping for the lantern.
The Lazar was up instantly after him, and yanked Obadiah back with hands at his shoulders and then a cold forearm about his throat. The Lazar had him by the windpipe and was cutting off his air.
Obadiah leaned forward, picking the Lazar off his feet and then running backward into a column, but to no effect.
His vision began to swim; Obadiah had only seconds left. Staggering forward, he grabbed a lantern off its hook.
The Lazar squeezed tighter, and Obadiah felt himself begin to slide into unconsciousness. He swung the lantern backward in a wide arc, smashing it toward his own back—
shattering the glass and spreading liquid fire on the Lazar.
Gwaaaraaaraaaraaaarghhh!
The ungodly howl pierced Obadiah’s skull. The Lazar released him.
He tripped. His vision went black but air rushed into his lungs again, and he crashed to the floor.
Obadiah floated with no sensation for some time, and then he felt a searing, stinging pain on his back.
Roll over.
A woman’s voice. Gentle.
Was it his angel, Sarah?
He rolled. As he did, the angel threw her wings about him like a great white shroud, and patted him with her hands, and he was comforted and floated, on the billowing clouds of heaven.
His eyes snapped into sudden focus with the realization that his back and should
ers and neck hurt. “Wayland’s bloody balls!”
He lay on his back, in pain. His body was swathed loosely in the white altar cloth, stained dark red with the bishop’s blood and now also splotched black here and there by the ichorous spray of the Lazars’ wounds. Smoke rose from the cloth, and the stench of scorched flesh filled his nostrils.
A woman knelt over him. “You lit yourself on fire to kill that thing.”
“Eh,” said Obadiah, unable to force any more complex thought through his lips. To his disappointment, the angel of his delirium was not Sarah, but the woman he’d captured her with, the tall brunette Cathy.
Graaaaaaraaaaaaaagh!
He could still hear the Lazar’s shriek, and light bounced off the chancel’s columns like the glow of a dozen dancing torches. He struggled to stand, wincing.
“I’ve loaded the pistols again,” she said, and he saw that she held one of the Lafitte guns in each hand. “But I don’t see any of them left to shoot.”
Had they won, then? Obadiah surveyed the cathedral.
The Lazar Obadiah had been wrestling was staggering away down the long nave of the cathedral, a twisting column of flame throwing great orange sheets of light against the walls. Sarah and the two men—the Appalachee and the Cavalier, he couldn’t remember their names—both ran back toward him. The front doors of the cathedral were open, and Obadiah saw a familiar party coming in. His heart sank.
Ezekiel Angleton stood in the doors, at the head of a squad of the Imperial House Light Dragoons.
“You’ll ’ave summat to shoot at soon enow, dearie,” he promised Cathy.
“Pardon me, Mr. Dogsbody?”
“You keep those pistols, love.” He threw off the shroud and collected his own weapons from the floor. “You’ll want ’em by an’ by.”
“Why, Mr. Dogsbody,” Cathy said, “you call me dearie and love. Are you playing the flirt with me?”
“Nay, ma’am,” he said, fighting back tears from the pain scoring his back, “I be just playink the Englishman.”
* * *
The sea above his head was infinite. The sea below his feet was infinite. All around him, infinite undulating sea of bile, and he died of drowning every second.
At least, Thalanes thought, I’m the one dying, and not Sarah.
Elsewhere, Thalanes felt other things. He felt a burning on his arm and he knew it was Sarah, trying to help him. He called to her and she couldn’t hear, not through all the hands.
Cold hands scrabbled at his throat. Cold hands groped at his heart. Cold hands clutched at his face, his limbs, his torso. Everywhere, cold dead hands. They were the hands, the spirit-hands, the mana-hands, of the dead man, the Sorcerer Robert Hooke.
The hands had once belonged to others, and Thalanes caught wisps that hinted at faces behind the hands. Their expressions were sorrowful and angry, bitter and surprised. They were the faces of stolen souls, lives damned and converted into power to be consumed by the Sorcerer. Many of those faces must belong to Firstborn, but he couldn’t tell those from the children of Eve. There were beastkind muzzles behind the hands, too, and those stood out, badger snouts and women with fox’s ears and things that had human faces but glittering black, impenetrable eyes, like animals.
You won’t have my life, he vowed, and he pushed back. His heart strained and he heaved with all his soul, and he threw the hands off, at least for a moment. In that moment, he looked into a thousand eyes and saw their deaths, the great gulfs that separated them from their loved ones, even from their beloved dead, saw their permanent sense of betrayal and their undying grudge.
He didn’t have a name for what he was seeing. Robert Hooke was some sort of soul-thief. This was damnable magic, malign craft worthy of the name sorcery, and the sort of engine in which Jock of Cripplegate must have ended.
If he succumbed to it, if he died this way, he would only add to the power of the Sorcerer and his master, the Necromancer, and put Sarah at even greater risk. It could be his face staring at her from the wall of lost souls, and his hands grabbing to pull her in and destroy her.
He must not succumb. He thrashed about, striking back with all his limbs and pushing with the energy of his heart, fighting to keep a small space about him free of the grabbing hands. He didn’t have the strength to resist, so he tried to be clever, ducking around the hands instead of wrestling with them.
But there were too many, and he had nowhere to run.
Yield thou, Serpentspawn, Hooke spoke into his mind, and there, through the writhing hedge of hands, Thalanes saw him. Robert Hooke floated in the amber-colored infinite sea, long, curling red hair drifting about his head like a halo and a devilish beatific smile on his pale face. Thou canst not win, Cahokian. Waste not the effort.
Behind Robert Hooke loomed another presence, darker than him, and larger, but something that seemed only half-formed. A stink of decay permeated the infinite sea.
You keep bad company, Hooke, Thalanes told him. I can win, and I will. Your master’s heart is rotten and evil, and I’ll see his schemes all spoiled.
He fought to move his lips, to speak. He had a very important message he had to give Sarah, the last he would ever give.
* * *
The nave of the St. Louis Cathedral was a warm respite from the storm. Ezekiel blinked while his eyes adjusted, and then he realized that he was seeing the backs of people.
There was the back of someone wearing a long brown coat that fell all the way to the floor and a broad hat.
There was the back of someone rising to his feet, arms queerly hanging at his sides, also in a brown coat.
Beyond them, running away and therefore also showing him their backs were three more people, and one of them was a young woman who might be Sarah Calhoun.
Ezekiel would have liked to investigate carefully, and to act with great discrimination shown as to the different fates of innocent and guilty parties. That would have been consistent with the Covenant Tract’s long history of careful and wise adjudication, and also with the dignity and legitimacy of the Penn family’s place on the Imperial throne. But he had been wrestling for weeks, with the Witchy Eye, with Obadiah, with Berkeley, with his dreams, with the chevalier, and with the bishop. He was tired.
“Shoot them all,” he said to Captain Berkeley.
Berkeley nodded. “Two rows!”
Waaaaraaararaaararghh!
A shrill howl erupted from the bowels of the church and an orange light flared. A flailing, running pillar of flame, a fire with a man inside it, rushed up the aisle of the nave in Ezekiel’s direction. The fleeing figures broke past it and disappeared behind the veil of its brilliance into the vault of the church.
The Blues didn’t hesitate. The eight dragoons at the front door (eight more had been sent to the apse and the remaining eight to one of the transepts, thus covering all three doors that the Imperial party had identified in its scouting) formed into two rows of four.
The front row took aim with their carbines and fired.
Bang!
The report boomed loud in Ezekiel’s ears and stung his eyes with its acrid smoke. The shooters repeated the process twice more, each with his two pistols, then they knelt to reload and the row behind them began to fire.
Bang! Bang!
Ezekiel looked out into the rain and saw twenty-four gendarmes, the chevalier’s men who had participated in the search for Witchy Eye. They had mustered in neat order and stood with the chevalier’s harsh-faced and laconic Creole du Plessis at their head, maintaining formation and watching.
Fine, let them watch. Let them learn to respect Imperial discipline and power. Maybe that would make the chevalier think twice about his blackmail scheme.
The Creole left his men and walked up to join Ezekiel, standing by the open cathedral door. He said nothing, and watched.
Ezekiel turned again and looked into the cathedral, and was stunned to see the brown-coated man walking purposefully through the bullet fire in his direction. The man’s appearance was s
hocking—he had pale skin, like an albino or even a corpse, his eyes were white and his fingernails were long and twisted. Under the rotting coat, his clothing looked a hundred years old, at least; he had a billowing cravat that had once been white, and was now a sort of putrid yellow, and a waistcoat and breeches that might have fit well into a country ball during the reign of King Charles Stuart.
He didn’t react as bullets plowed into his body, only occasionally stumbling from the impact. Ezekiel was looking death itself in the face, and he took a step back.
The apparition stopped a few feet from Ezekiel and met his gaze with strange eyes, white, black around the edges. The black writhed, like a mass of bees on their hive. Ezekiel shuddered.
He pictured the face of his youthful love, Lucy Winthrop, with this undead specter’s pallor upon it and such twitching orbs. He felt nauseated. This was foul magic indeed, and he despised Witchy Eye for having deployed such a fearsome agent.
“Ani gibbor,” he murmured, quickly deploying his favorite all-purpose magic for rough situations, a spell that enhanced his own speed, strength, and toughness. He couldn’t maintain it for long, but combat seemed imminent.
Ezekiel touched the hilt of his father’s sword to cast his spell, and he heard as if in an echo the marching songs of the Order of St. Martin.
Words entered his mind in a voice Ezekiel didn’t recognize, a voice like dry leaves rustling in the wind. My lord instructs me to give thee passage, the strange voice said, and Ezekiel knew somehow that it came from the corpselike man, though his pale lips were still. Be thou grateful, Roundhead; today I am not required to kill thee.
Did Ezekiel’s face show the horror and confusion he felt? Why would Witchy Eye instruct her creature to let him past?
Was it possible this apparition was not in the service of Witchy Eye? The phrase my lord didn’t seem to fit the Appalachee girl, even in the mouth of one of her creatures. Ezekiel shuddered.
I lose patience, priest, the mind-voice growled. Thou art a distraction. Move thou, before I break my oath and kill thee. Behind him came the man with arms hanging at his sides; he too was pale as a corpse, and had the same repulsive eyes.