by D. J. Butler
“Jerusalem.” Cal peered through the hole he had smashed. “Iffen we had wings, I’d be havin’ a much better day.”
Sarah began to weep.
Clang! Clang!
She heard the clash of steel on steel and looked back along the path down which they’d come. She saw Sir William’s red-coated back as he retreated slowly in her direction, sword flashing before him as he fended off some foe.
“They be on this side over ’ere, too,” Obadiah called from where he stood looking up the far side of the nave’s rooftop. He drew his sword and Calvin crossed the little courtyard to join him, war axe in his hand.
Sarah armed herself with the little silver knife and looked at the monk, shivering beneath her. The cross of leadership had fallen on her. She wanted to be the person who had the stomach, who was decisive enough to do this horrible, necessary thing, but she cringed from the task.
She wanted Sir William to take away the burden, but he was busy. So were Calvin and Obadiah.
Would it matter, anyway?
Would it make a difference if she did what he asked? However Thalanes died, he would be dead, and without him, Sarah didn’t see how they could escape. Thalanes had always been clever, and he would know some spell that would get them off this rain-blasted rooftop, but Sarah was out of ideas, and she had no strength left for magic, in any case.
But by killing him, she might save his soul. She remembered the short moments she had had under the influence of the Sorcerer Hooke’s baleful magic, the hands grasping her, the infinite uncrossable space around her, and the sense that she was in damnation’s own clutches. She tightened her grip on the knife.
“I’ll do it.” She thought he smiled. She held the blade up to his exposed throat…
And still she couldn’t bring herself to kill him.
The clashing steel and stomping boot sounds of Sir William retreating before the onslaught were close now, and Sarah trembled. On the other side of the rooftop, Calvin and Obadiah scuffled with someone she couldn’t see. She heard all the noises, the yelling, but could make out no words. She floated in a tiny bubble that contained just her, the dying monk, and the silver knife.
She couldn’t do it, it was just too brutal.
They would all die, and Thalanes would lose his soul to the Sorcerer Hooke.
Poor Thalanes. He had served her parents and saved her life, time and again from the moment of her birth until now, and she didn’t have the strength to do this tiny thing that would save his soul.
“It is not too late,” Simon Sword said in his strangely accented English. She turned to look at him, sitting calmly on the stone parapet, water running out of his hair in rivers. “I can save him, too. I can save you all. I will turn your enemies to dust and take you all from here. Only say that you will marry me.”
He looked calm and human, almost handsome, and Sarah was sorely tempted. He could save them. She valued her freedom, she valued her independence, but did she value them more than she did Thalanes’s life?
She hesitated, the knife trembling, and the sounds of combat closed in on both sides of her.
Why had she resisted Simon’s offer in the first place? She didn’t remember now. It must have been her own vile selfishness. Her personal freedom was not worth the death of any of her friends.
Fffffft.
Sarah heard the sound of tearing cloth.
But there was something else, she remembered. Something…something about Simon.
Something about the way he looked.
She pushed the eye patch out of the way and looked at the Dutchman, and the shreds of fog and fear bedeviling her mind fell away. Through her witchy eye she saw him loom tall, green, and dangerous over the imprisoned white soul of the little Dutchman. His heron-crested head leered down at her through piercing eyes, waiting for her answer, expecting a yes. Behind those eyes, though, was no human compassion, no human mind or heart. She couldn’t trust Simon Sword; she feared him immensely.
“No,” she whispered.
“Try this.” The woman’s voice seemed wildly out of place, until Sarah realized that she was still on the church rooftop, and Cathy Filmer, tall and glowing white in her Second Sight, was talking to her.
Talking to her and holding out to her a loaded pistol, covered in a strip of torn white cloth. One of the Lafitte pistols.
She took the gun and the little cloth that shielded it from the rain.
“It’s loaded with silver,” Cathy said.
Sir William backed into view, ducking a swing of his opponent’s sword, and Sarah saw that he dueled Father Angleton. The priest moved fiendishly quickly, and where his long iron sword crashed into the walkway’s balustrade or the wall of the nave it threw up stone chips. The Cavalier resisted his opponent with economy of movement, slipping back only as much as he had to, deflecting rather than catching blows with his saber. Sarah could see Angleton had been cut deeply several times and bled great red gushes, but still he came on in unstoppable rage. Sir William might be the better fighter, but he was injured too, bleeding from his side and his leg, and his breath came hard and fast.
Beyond the dancing white glows of Lee and Angleton she saw the dull dead aura of the Sorcerer Hooke. He showed concentration in his face, and he walked slowly, and she knew he was sucking the life out of her friend.
On the other side of the nave, Cal and Obadiah skidded back, forced onto their heels by several dragoons that crashed out onto the little courtyard, sabers weaving.
Thalanes jerked, his body quivering down its entire length, and she looked at him through her witchy eye. He was blue and, as she had told him, looked younger and more handsome to Second Sight than he did to her normal vision. Now, though, he lay wrapped in a cloud of black, a sinuous, serpentine coil of darkness that nearly enveloped him—only the lower half of his face was free of it. Within the coil, Sarah saw a multitude of crawling, pricking, stroking movements.
It had been Thalanes who had intervened, had saved her from the Sorcerer Hooke. Both times. She owed him this.
“Goodbye,” she said, and then her voice caught in her throat. “I love you.”
She snatched his satchel with its precious little sack of roasted coffee beans, slinging it over her own shoulder. Then Sarah Elytharias Penn pressed the muzzle of the pistol against Thalanes’s temple.
“It ain’t over,” she said.
And pulled the trigger.
“My conscience may be less metaphysical than yours, suh.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The black coils looped around Thalanes’s soul vanished, dissolving in the rain. He kicked once, with both feet, and he was still. Just for a moment, Sarah thought she saw a smile on the handsome blue face of the aural Thalanes.
He smiled, and he exploded.
She knew the explosion would come and at the last moment she had the presence of mind to open herself up. A blue ring of mana-fire rolled out from his body and most of it flowed directly into Sarah. The experience was like drawing energy from the ley lines, only mixed in with the tingling power was something that felt like love.
She was an empty cistern, and the heavens suddenly opened and dropped a flood upon the land. The flood filled her, warmed her, made her skin dance. She channeled energy into Thalanes’s moon-brooch as well, filling it. Still the flood came on, and she sucked it in. She felt like a waterskin pumped too full. Her hair stood on end, her skin prickled, her Second Sight focused into crisp clarity.
She dropped the pistol.
Angleton hesitated, perhaps feeling Thalanes’s death, and Sir William beat him back a pace or two.
Robert Hooke stood behind Angleton; he raised his hands and closed his eyes. The blue light of Thalanes’s aura blackened as it touched Hooke, swirling tightly around the Sorcerer.
“Hooke,” Sarah gasped, “stop him.” She was trying to call to Sir William, but her voice was drowned out by the constant hammering of the rain. William didn’t hear her.
But Cathy did.
&n
bsp; The tall woman strode over behind Sir William, unheeding of the blades that flashed near her and the ringing of steel on steel across the roof. Just as the Sorcerer Hooke raised his hands to shape his spell, Cathy pulled the trigger of the second Lafitte pistol—
bang!—
and Hooke went stumbling back down the walkway, black blood spraying from his chest. Sarah saw the murk that had been his building spell wink out like a snuffed candle.
Cathy stooped beside Sarah to pick up the second Lafitte pistol. “Waste not, want not.”
The wave of energy exploding from Thalanes’s death was gone, and Sarah felt the crackle of surplus power within her. Her limbs twitched like autumn leaves in the wind. She needed something to do with it, before it hurt her. She looked at Angleton; could she get rid of her persistent pursuer? She saw Hooke, climbing to his feet, and several of the Blues behind.
She should get herself and her friends off the roof.
Sarah scraped up a handful of pigeon feathers in a wet plaster of gray excrement from the stones beside Thalanes and she spun in a circle, hurling them at her friends.
“In aves mutamur!” She willed together all the excess power playing on her skin and through her hair and lurking in the rain about her, channeling it through the pigeon mess and her words and into her companions.
With a cooing and a fluttering of wings, Sarah sprang up from the rooftop.
She was disoriented by the change, and the struggle in her brain translated into the frantic flapping of wings. The flapping pulled her away from the sea of slick gray stone, and the raging men.
Other pigeons rose with her. What would happen if the pigeons separated? What would happen to poor Calvin if the spell ended and he was two hundred feet off the ground above the Place d’Armes?
But the other pigeons followed Sarah.
Sarah’s wings weren’t the same as arms, but if she concentrated and focused on controlling her movements, she could fly. Her flock struggled as she did, and they collided more than once in mid-air, but none of them fell.
They left behind the still, cold, smiling body of the Cetean monk.
They also left the blond Dutchman, but Sarah watched with a round, sharp eye as she beat away into the rain, and she saw the little man shimmer and disappear. A great crested heron rose in his place, lifting itself from the roof of the cathedral and swooping south over the Place d’Armes, heading for the Mississippi River.
Behind it, the heron left a sword clattering on the stones of the rooftop.
Shots were fired by the shrinking men on the cathedral, but they hit nothing.
And then the soldiers and the Lazars were gone, whipped away as Sarah and the other pigeons slipped into the gray cloak of the storm.
* * *
Ezekiel stumbled back down the steps. He was soaked and bleeding, but the injuries were minor. His combat magic had given him strength, speed, and resistance to bullet and blade, but the exertion left him so tired that now, with the fight over, he could barely walk.
He had lost the girl.
Who had transformed her and her companions into birds? Thalanes might have done it, the Cetean heretic had always been a better wizard than Ezekiel, but Thalanes was dead. He was fairly sure that Thalanes died before the flock of pigeons appeared and took flight. The girl herself had shot the monk, for reasons Ezekiel did not understand.
The girl must have done it. She must be a more powerful thaumaturge than he had realized.
Had Thalanes taught her?
And what about the blond man in knickerbockers who had gone off alone afterward, in bird shape—who was he, and what power did he serve?
Obadiah Dogsbody was now fighting for the little witch. Obadiah, with whose lack of faith and many mistakes he had been so patient, and on whom he had showered so much beneficence, had shown himself to be an ingrate.
Well, for every Judas there was a potter’s field.
Ezekiel stopped in the chancel. He leaned to rest against the shattered remains of the rood screen—he expected to be forgiven for that damage, as he’d only done it in pursuit of the Witchy Eye. The light was diffuse and tinted, coming through large and elaborate panels of stained glass.
Ezekiel preferred the more austere Roundhead churches of his native Boston. Not that his people eschewed images, but they were more restrained, and a cathedral this size was likely to contain only some central image of the Savior, and maybe a painting or a statue of a single patron saint, like St. John Wycliffe of the Book or St. Cotton Mather, the great Matthean of the northeast.
But he had to admit that the images carved, painted, or glazed into church architecture served a useful teaching function.
Ezekiel looked up, and his breath was taken away.
It was as if he was instantly transported into the first chapters of Genesis and the glories of God’s creation. From where Ezekiel stood he could see and interpret the whole story in the stained glass.
Here in the windows, for those who couldn’t read or wouldn’t listen to a homily, was painted a sermon about God’s creation of the world, the wreckage that sinful Adam had made of it, and the central and eternal salvage work of the great Second Adam, the Messiah. Imagery from Job, Isaiah, and the Psalms had been worked in, so that on the First Day, Jehovah on his great white-winged charger smote the dragon Rahab in the watery abyss. Allegorical, of course, but it was in the Bible. And when God divided the waters from the land, Ezekiel saw the great four-legged Behemoth grazing beneath snow-capped mountains while its aquatic counterpart, nine-headed Leviathan, dove beneath frothy waves.
Thinking of Adam, he turned in the chancel to regard the stained glass depiction of the Fall. Adam and Eve were both portrayed as young people, which was right and proper—an older Adam might remind viewers of the wife of his youth, whom God disfavored. Eve had eaten her bite of the apple and looked mournful; Adam was reaching out, his white teeth showing in a smile, unaware of the sorrow that was about to be his. It was a good picture because it was a true picture.
Without warning, Ezekiel’s vision spun out of control and he fell to his knees.
Was this fatigue?
But Ezekiel felt as if he were being called.
“Yaas?” He swallowed as much cold air as he could, but the world refused to stop turning. With an effort, he reached out to the naked altar, meaning to climb it like a ladder, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate.
Then, suddenly, someone was there in the chancel with him.
Ezekiel found he could not look above the knees of the personage. Feet paced up to Ezekiel and stopped, feet clad in tall black riding boots. Ezekiel saw the boots and the mail above them, but couldn’t lift his eyes any higher.
“Ezekiel Angleton,” said the personage. The voice was sharp and unmusical and impossible not to hear, and it rang with authority. “Ezekiel Angleton, behold thou the Fall of Man.”
Ezekiel looked to the windows, and again saw Adam reaching for the apple that had already slain Eve. Eve and Adam looked different, though, subtly. He thought he saw in the tall, long-haired Adam a reflection of himself.
And Eve was absolutely the perfect image of his lost Lucy Winthrop. Ezekiel choked back a sob.
Then he blinked, for the image was changing. Adam bit into the apple before Ezekiel’s eyes, and then dropped it, and Ezekiel saw the head of a worm protrude from the fallen fruit. Now Adam had a saddened mien, and Ezekiel, astonished, wondered what would happen next.
And who was this giving him this vision? Was it the same source that had given him the dreams that had led him to New Orleans?
The worm succumbed first, shriveling and fallen from the apple to be lost on the garden floor. As the worm died, the apple was already rotting, and Ezekiel thought he could actually smell the pungent cidery tang of the withering fruit. That odor thickened and darkened, until Ezekiel was assailed all about by the cloying stench of decay. The green leaves of the trees in the Garden turned red, yellow, and brown, and the whole scene was suddenly autumnal and tin
ged blue with a chilly wind, harbinger of a bad winter.
“Stop this,” Ezekiel muttered.
There was no answer.
“Please,” he begged. “I know what happens.”
Eve-Lucy and Adam-Ezekiel went together. His nose and ears grew longer in a bearded face, his chest sank and became hollow, his belly bulged out and fell, the fine muscles of his arms and legs died to nothing. Her breasts withered and drooped, the flesh around her eyes collapsed and became dark; Ezekiel whimpered. Both lost their teeth and their hair and the gleam in their eyes.
“Stop this, I implore you,” Ezekiel said, louder this time. His own years weighed on him and he felt death approaching inexorably on the road, a dark presence growing closer by the moment. Lucy’s loss rose above and behind him black and furious, an implacable angel of pain. He tried to turn his head to look at his merciless instructor, to learn who would want to pierce his soul with such withering knowledge and memories, but he could not move.
Green returned to the leaves in the Garden, and then autumn again, and then spring, and Adam-Ezekiel and Eve-Lucy still aged. Eve-Lucy succumbed first, but only by a hair’s breadth, and both the first parents of mankind died in the same horrible way under Ezekiel’s flinching gaze; they shrank and shriveled and the flesh fell from their bones until they collapsed, dead puddles of bone and corruption in a grove that flashed repeatedly from green to orange and back again.
“Stop!” Ezekiel saw in his mind’s eye his own form, already beginning to lengthen in tooth and lose muscle, rotting into the ground like Adam’s. He was horrified, though he knew he had no right to be.
Death was merely death; it was the common lot of mankind, and it was acceptable to grieve for the Fall, but nothing could be done about it, so one grieved while one was young and then learned to accept the world as it was.
Still, there it was, in his heart: fear.
As if responding to his secret thoughts, the sharp voice spoke to him. “Man dies by Adam’s fall,” it said, “but it was not ever thus, and it need not be.”
Ezekiel felt cold.