by D. J. Butler
“Let’s go, Captain,” Ezekiel said to Berkeley, and the albino and the numb-armed man both stepped aside to let the Imperials advance.
The third creature, the column of flame, thrashed limply about on the ground in a corner, the fire slowly dying.
The Creole and the chevalier’s men stayed behind.
As he and Berkeley rushed down the aisle, Ezekiel felt the power of his spell course through him, and he longed for battle. Urgently. “Where are they? I saw them, but I was distracted. Where did the Witchy Eye go?”
Ahead, other contingents of dragoons entered by the side and from behind the chancel.
“This is a cathedral, Parson,” Berkeley drawled, “so the only two likely possibilities are that they went down into the crypt or that they went up onto the roof.”
* * *
Suddenly, Robert Hooke was gone, and so was the presence behind him.
The hands hesitated, and Thalanes took his chance. He pressed against a wall of inert fingers, cold and deathly, wiggled, and, having made a hole, he swam through it. Above him he saw light, a shimmering ball like the sun on the surface of the water—the infinite sea was abruptly finite above him.
He scissor-kicked his way toward the light—
and felt hands grab at his ankles.
* * *
Bill sent the ladies up first.
He didn’t think there would be anything on the roof of the cathedral to attack them, and if there were, Cathy at least had the two Lafitte pistols, primed and loaded with silver shot. Even a gargoyle would have to beware the lady from Virginia.
Then Cal backed up the stairs, hunching his lanky frame over but never enough to avoid banging his head against the stone ceiling of the narrow staircase. He shuffled backward, kicking each foot heel-first up over the next high stone step, because he had his arms under Thalanes’s shoulders to carry him, the monk’s head slumped to one side in semi-consciousness, lips moving but no sound audible.
The burly Englishman came next, carrying the Cetean’s feet, and he mumbled curses involving the anatomy of Wayland Smith, Herne the Hunter, and other members of the English pantheon too obscure for Bill to recognize them. As his ankles disappeared up the stairs, Bill saw that his neck and the back of his skull were burnt from ear to ear, and his coat was charred.
Bill respected the toughness of the man.
After the Englishman, Jacob Hop marched up the stairs without a comment and without an invitation. He smiled at Bill, and Bill glared back; Hop wasn’t a Dutchman, Bill reminded himself, or maybe he wasn’t only a Dutchman, he was also the Heron King.
Hell’s Bells, Bill was living in a fairy tale.
It wouldn’t have mattered who Hop was if Bill had remained alone. But Bill had responsibilities once more, he had a mistress and a position, and it mattered very much that Hop couldn’t be relied upon and might betray them.
Though Hop wasn’t helping their enemies and he wasn’t interfering. He was deliberately refraining from doing anything at all.
Bill scowled.
And Bill’s position wasn’t Captain of the Blues. On the contrary, the Blues were marching in his direction with hostility, coming at him from three sides.
Bill would go last. He wasn’t idling as the others went up, he was reloading and priming the four pistols now in his possession, his two long horse pistols and the hidalgo’s brace of large bore mankillers, as fast as he possibly could. Which was very, very fast.
He couldn’t defeat all twenty-four of the Philadelphia Blues, but he could put a little fear of God in them. Fear of God, and fear of Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.
Looking down at his feet, he saw drops of his own blood on the white stone floor, and he remembered the wounds Tom Long-Knife had inflicted on him. The pain in his ribs and his thigh flared sharply, and he felt old.
Eight Blues marched down the nave toward the altar in the wake of Daniel Berkeley. Bill’s old lieutenant walked beside a tall man in a Martinite tabard and a black Yankee hat with a naked sword in his hand.
More dragoons came in through the transept door, and more still picked their way through the devotional chapel in the apse. Bill stood out of sight near the altar, at the tight spiral staircase that descended into the crypt and climbed toward the ceiling, his guns all ready. He squinted at the Blues in the nave and recognized a few faces, men he had known as young, idealistic soldiers, and who were now grizzled veterans.
They might similarly recognize him.
He stepped out beside the altar and into sight, a pistol in each long pocket of his coat and another in each hand. The carved wood of the rood screen still separated him from Berkeley and his party, but it didn’t impede visibility and he doubted it would give him adequate protection from flying pistol balls, either.
Bill wished, not for the first time that day, that he had a bottle of whisky.
“Atten-shun!” he bellowed in his best parade ground voice. Despite themselves, several of the Blues straightened, and they all stopped.
“What are you doing here?” the Martinite demanded in a shrill Yankee whine.
Berkeley looked wary. “Get out of the way, Will. This affair needn’t concern you.”
“Oh, but it does, suh.” Bill wondered how much the man knew. And the Martinite—times had changed, indeed, for the Imperial House Light Dragoons to have a devotee of St. Martin Luther for a chaplain. “This affair and I have a long history together.”
“Do you understand that I am on the emperor’s errand?” Berkeley demanded. “Do you remember, Captain, what it was like to serve the empire? I will not be deterred or further delayed! Stand aside!”
“I think I know what it must be like to hold up the skirts of little Tommy Penn,” Bill granted. “Do you know whom you are pursuing?”
“Kill him,” snarled the priest, but none of the dragoons raised a weapon.
The Martinite resumed walking forward, though none of the other Imperials followed his lead.
“Yes,” Berkeley said. “Do you? Do you know she is a pretender, that the emperor wants her apprehended so she can’t raise a rebel flag against him?”
“She has a valid claim to the Penn land, suh,” Bill said, “and if there is a Penn usurper, it isn’t she.” His eyes searched the Blues, trying to discern how much of this information was new to them. They were an elite unit, but they were soldiers, and he guessed they had no idea whom they were hunting.
“That’s a lie, Lee!” Berkeley shouted.
“I’m no liar, Dan. She’s the Empress Hannah’s daughter.” The dragoons were too disciplined to gasp or cry out, but Bill saw looks of astonishment on several of their faces, and not just the old men who had served Kyres. “I stood outside the door at her birth with pistols in my hands to protect her and her mother. I’d have killed any man who dared attack her then, and I’ll do the same today.”
“Mad Hannah’s daughter by whom?” The Martinite sneered.
Bill remembered the rain, fifteen years earlier, a storm much like the one that now dumped water on New Orleans. He remembered the three acorns lying in Thalanes’s palm, then the chaplain of the Blues and soon to become Hannah’s confessor in her confinement. He remembered the blood on them, Kyres’s blood, which Kyres himself had smeared on the acorns with his dying breath.
He remembered Hannah’s secret pregnancy, possible to keep secret because virtually no one was allowed to see her, shut out of the Palace as she was and hidden away in the old Slate Roof House above the Delaware River. He remembered three disfigured babies, smuggled out of her apartments in a warming pan. He thought of young Nathaniel, the boy with the puckered red ear folded to the side of his head, whom Bill had taken to hide, and Margaret, with the grotesque scabs on her scalp.
He’d ridden, alone and hard, to Johnsland, to deliver little Nathaniel to the earl because the earl was the empress’s friend and at the time had not been fallen into madness. Bill remembered feeding the boy with the oozing milky rag that Thalanes had enchanted, singing
soldiers’ songs and campfire ballads to him on the road. He had only seen the other two children once, briefly, and Thalanes had taken the one with the disfigured eye to hide her.
That child was Sarah.
“By her husband, King Kyres Elytharias, suh,” Bill said firmly. “Which makes her also the rightful Queen of Cahokia. If there is a God in Heaven, I’ll see her restored to her family lands and the upstart Thomas Penn kicked to the gutters of Philadelphia to shake a begging bowl.”
“Silence!”
The Martinite roared and jumped, and Bill was astonished to see him fly into the air and crash through the rood screen. He plummeted earthward again with sword raised, exploding toward Bill in a cloud of flying splinters.
Bill was surprised, but not taken flat-flooted. As the Martinite rushed through the air, Bill raised both the hidalgo’s pistols and squeezed their triggers.
BANG!
Both shots blasted the flying priest in the chest. The simultaneous explosions shivered Bill’s arms; the priest landed off-balance, and slipped.
Bill didn’t wait to see what happened next. Spinning on the balls of his feet, he sprinted for the door of the staircase.
“Fire!” Berkeley yelled. A ragged volley of bullets plowed into the stone wall about the doorway, several pinging through the open door and ricocheting briefly inside the staircase.
Bill was already on the stairs, and though lead whizzed around him through the air, none of the balls hit him, and then he slammed the door shut behind him. He wished he had something to bar the door with.
Tucking one pistol into his belt and reloading the other, Bill began his slow backward climb up the stairs. The years of experience it took to reload a pistol under these circumstances, measuring quantities by feel alone, tamping in patch and ball without needing to look at them, were unbearable to think about. Bill felt ancient. The tightness of the passage made it easy for him to stay upright, and he had one of the pistols reloaded by the time the door below—now barely in Bill’s sight around the curve of the spiral—opened.
Bang!
Bill shot at the head that peered through, hoping it was the Martinite, or one of the Blues he didn’t know. The shot resounded gigantically inside the stairwell, and Bill didn’t stick around to see who owned the head and whether he’d hit it—shoving the empty gun into his belt alongside its mate, he turned and charged up the stairs.
At any moment the door below would be thrown open, and guns would be fired after him up the stairs. In this spiral tube, even bullets that missed would ricochet and continue to be deadly, though with each impact with the wall, a bullet would lose some of its force; he needed to get far enough around the stairs that the coming fusillade would not tear him to pieces.
He’d gone three or four times around, these calculations pounding through his brain as his feet pounded on the white stone steps, each worn down into a deep rut in the center, when the attack came.
B-B-BANG!!!
The guns’ explosion resolved into a single crashing boom that left Bill’s ears. He felt the ricochet; bullets struck him in the back of the neck, and the calf, and the buttock, each feeling like a sharp stinging punch rather than a bite that tore flesh.
Bill stumbled, but didn’t fall.
The stairs were built with sconces for candles to light them, but the sconces were empty, and the little light by which Bill made his way came filtering from above or streamed through slits in the wall that periodically opened into the main vault of the cathedral. Bill heard booted feet on the steps below him, but risked stopping a moment to peer through one narrow window.
Below, a group of the Blues crowded the chancel around the dead body of the bishop and pushed one at a time into the staircase. Other Blues jogged for the exits; they would be looking for a way up the outside of the church, or blocking off escape routes.
He turned and kept running.
Bang! Bang!
The occasional bullet sped past him or pounded into his back as he ran, and Bill was grateful for the slimming effect his stay in the Incroyable had had—two weeks earlier, he would not have been able to run up the steps. As it was, he reached the top bruised in the head (from the low ceiling), back (from the occasional flying bullet), and toes (from the stone steps) and very happy to see daylight, even if it was the gray light of a rainstorm.
He exploded onto the roof of the cathedral, rain blown sideways cooling the flushed skin of his face. The others must have reached the rooftop only moments before him; the Appalachee and the Englishman were laying Thalanes down under eaves, while the two ladies ran to the edge and looked down. Cathy held her skirt hitched up as if it were wrapped about something to protect it from the elements.
Bill stood in a small courtyard that covered the roof of one transept, ending in two steep shingled towers with slat-barred windows at the far corners. Stone-flagged paths led up around the edge of the roof of the nave, and down similarly around the edge of the apse.
“Find a way down!” Bill barked to Calvin, and was pleased to see that his command was unnecessary—the young man was already sprinting for the edge.
The Englishman joined Bill in the opening of the doorway where, sheltering from the wet, they both reloaded pistols. The sound of boots pounding on stone echoed up the staircase to Bill’s still-ringing ears.
“My name be Obadiah Dogsbody,” the Englishman said. “I should tell you I ’ave been a very bad man.”
“I’m Bill, suh,” Bill offered in exchange. “Haven’t we all?”
The first face to charge up the stairwell belonged to a young dragoon Bill didn’t know, and he and Obadiah fired at the same time, sending the soldier falling back into his comrades. Then they both stepped aside to avoid the inevitable response of a burst of whizzing lead.
Another dragoon, two more shots, and then Calvin was at Bill’s shoulder, reporting that he didn’t see a way down. “Lessen you’re a pigeon,” he grimaced, holding up a handful of gray feathers.
“What about that rope you carry on your belt?” Bill asked.
Cal shook his head. “It ain’t long enough, not by half.”
“Get down to the front of the nave, gentlemen,” Bill told the other men, reloading. “Find some defensible spot, and find a way down, even if it means jumping or climbing down St. Louis’s face. I’ll hold them here as long as I can.”
Cal and Obadiah ran to pick up Thalanes. “And wake the monk up!” Bill yelled after them.
Thalanes was their best hope. Without him, they couldn’t hold out for long.
Another volley rocketed out of the stairwell and then, to Bill’s surprise, the Martinite came scrambling up the stairs, sword in hand. He didn’t know how the man was still moving, having taken two bullets to the chest. Maybe he was wearing armor under that tabard, or maybe he’d protected himself somehow with magic—his jump through the rood screen stank of combat wizardry.
Bill raised the hidalgo’s loaded pistol and pulled the trigger.
Click! The gun misfired.
Behind the Martinite he saw the Lazar sorcerer.
“Hell’s Bells,” Bill muttered, hurling the pistol at his attacker and ripping his sword from its scabbard.
* * *
Thalanes was trying to say something.
Cold rain poured into his face as Cal and Obadiah slung him along the roof of the cathedral nave between them. Sarah didn’t know if the motion had pricked Thalanes from his stupor, but he was formulating words.
Her heart pounded with panic, but she was still able to feel concern for the monk. He’d been a sort of father to her, at least for a little while. Besides, she didn’t see how they could possibly escape the trap they were in without him.
Simon Sword seated himself on the cathedral rooftop’s southern parapet, overlooking the Place d’Armes. Through Sarah’s mundane eye, he looked like a wet, unassuming little Dutchman in brown knickerbockers and buckled shoes, incongruous sword on his back.
Should she have accepted his offer?
“Talk to me,” she said. They reached the front of the nave and the walkway became another small courtyard between the higher nave, with narrow iron-latticed windows, and a shingled steeple tower rising at the very front of the church. The men set Thalanes down against the nave and Sarah took his hand.
His skin was cold.
“Kill me,” Thalanes said, and her heart froze. He was delirious. His eyes were shut, he might be sleeping.
He couldn’t mean what he said.
“I hate to do this,” she heard Cal say, and she turned in time to see him bring his tomahawk down hard into the wooden slats covering the tower’s windows. Pigeons exploded out from under the blow with a squeak.
“Listen,” the monk murmured, his eyes fluttering faintly. “I’m a dead man. You can’t let Robert Hooke take my soul.”
Tears welled into Sarah’s eyes. She remembered her vision of Hooke at the prow of the little ship sailing down the Mississippi, the hands that clutched at her, and her distinct sense that her soul had been in peril.
“I’ll free you,” she insisted.
Calvin smashed the slats again with a loud crunch!
Thalanes shook his head feebly. His body twitched and shivered on its bed of pigeon droppings and feathers. “Your father left you many gifts. You have his courage and his charisma and his gift for gramarye.” He squeezed her hand as he said gramarye, and Sarah thought of the acorn she carried hidden on her person.
“It ain’t over,” she objected.
“You aren’t strong enough to save me, Sarah,” the monk mumbled. “I’m not strong enough to save myself. You must…you must kill me. For your sake, and for mine.”
“I’ll jest kill Hooke.”
“No time.” His voice sounded distant, and receding further away every moment.
“I don’t think I can do it,” Sarah said.
“Now, while he’s distracted. Use…the silver…knife...” The Monk’s lips stilled. He was white as chalk. White as a Lazar.