by D. J. Butler
He strained again to look at his interlocutor and could not; after wrestling against the impossible for long seconds, he let his gaze fall back to the floor.
“Are you an angel?” he asked, drained and weak.
“God sends angels,” the voice answered, “but I am my own messenger, and the message is this: death is not necessary. It may be avoided, it may be ended, it is a curse that may be lifted. I have escaped death, Ezekiel Angleton, as may thou and, by the grace of God and through thine efforts, all the children of Eve.”
The ambition and arrogance in the voice—Ezekiel could not tell them apart—thrilled him. Death is unnecessary…could it possibly be true? He wanted to weep and he wanted to sing.
Wasn’t it blasphemy?
“Christ…” he struggled to regain control of himself. “Christ is the resurrection and the life.”
“Yes,” the speaker agreed. “God has wrought a salvation that is glorious. I am but the finisher, seeking to work a more glorious salvation still.”
More glorious? The finisher of God’s work? Who was this person, who spoke in riddles that were both blasphemous and divine?
“I do not require thee to love thy fellow servant Robert Hooke,” the voice shrilled, “but accept him, and thou shalt be rewarded.”
Hooke? Ezekiel felt his eye drawn up and he craned his neck to see again the stained glass windows from his dog-like posture. The windows now bore a different image, a vision of the corpse-like albino wizard Ezekiel had encountered at the cathedral doors, and who had been on Ezekiel’s heels in pursuing Witchy Eye up to the roof.
“Fellow servant?” Ezekiel croaked. “Is that why you give me these terrifying visions, sir? Would you have me for a servant? But I already serve the Order of St. Martin Luther, and His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn.”
The voice laughed, a harsh sound like bells being slammed against a stone wall. “Rest assured, Ezekiel Angleton, that a man may serve many masters. And thou, good fellow, hast long been in my service.”
Ezekiel struggled. “In your service?” He thought again of the horrific apparition that had greeted him at the cathedral door. The Sorcerer Robert Hooke. “How can you employ such fiends, when you say you serve Heaven’s ends?”
There was silence in response, and Ezekiel was left to answer his own question: death. Was not any means worth employing that would overthrow the grim specter of death hanging over every child of Adam from the moment of his or her birth? Was that not the great evil, to be defeated at all costs?
He nodded in submission.
“I do not claim to serve Heaven’s ends,” said the voice of Ezekiel’s teacher. “I serve the ends that Heaven should have served.”
“I…” Ezekiel felt slow of thought and of tongue, drained in his soul and shattered in his body. “I would serve those ends, too.”
The discordant voice spoke again. “Then look now, and behold thy master!”
Ezekiel tried to rise from his groveling posture but could not. He turned his head to see the person to whom he had been speaking, the source of his visions. He saw a rather ordinary-looking man with a high forehead, long hair, and a tuft of beard below his lower lip. He wore black plate armor from neck to toe, the monotony broken only by his riding boots and a white neckcloth.
As Ezekiel recognized the man, though, it seemed to him that he saw, glowing dimly through skin that seemed almost translucent, a death’s head in the speaker’s face.
The source of his vision—and, Ezekiel now understood, the source of all his visions—was Oliver Cromwell. The Regicide. The Lord Protector of the Eternal Commonwealth.
The Necromancer.
Ezekiel groveled. “But I don’t understand. How can you end death? And what do you want with the Witchy Eye?”
* * *
The Sorcerer Hooke dumped Thalanes’s corpse beside the bishop’s on the floor of the chancel, where Ezekiel sat in dumb contemplation. Berkeley and his men had secured all the cathedral’s doors, probably with the collusion of the chevalier’s Creole and his gendarmes.
Who had killed the bishop?
In the confusion, he must have been shot on accident, though Ezekiel didn’t remember seeing it happen. The little monk’s corpse and robe were soaked, and he fell into a sloshing puddle that reminded Ezekiel of his vision of the death of Adam and Eve. He winced.
“I know you now,” Ezekiel said to the Lazar. “You’re Robert Hooke, the Sorcerer.”
I am the disciple who did not wish to see death until his master came again. Hooke’s voice rattled in Ezekiel’s mind. The bullet hole in his chest was no longer bleeding, but the long black stain down the front of his moldering shirt gave him a gory, nauseating appearance. Thou hast spoken with our master, then?
“You serve Oliver Cromwell,” Ezekiel continued.
Yes, Hooke answered, thou and I both. Now, wilt thou join me in making inquiries of this Serpentborn monk?
Ezekiel looked at the body of Thalanes, wet and cold and pathetic. He had never liked the heretic, but it still seemed impious to manhandle his body about like a sack of grain.
As it seemed impious to be working with Lazars.
But if Cromwell really could eradicate death, what then? Was that not a fine end to serve, to restore God’s creation to what it had been before man’s great mistake? Was that, after all, what Cromwell had been after, with his Eternal Commonwealth and his wars against the Firstborn? If Cromwell had his way, then all men would live eternally from birth, as God had always intended.
All would be saved.
And Lucy…wouldn’t he see Lucy again?
But…the Necromancer? He had always been taught to loathe and fear Oliver Cromwell. And Ezekiel despised black magic.
And, despite Ezekiel’s questions, Cromwell had not explained himself or his plans.
Two other Lazars joined them, a silent man whose arms hung at his waist and a man whose white skin had been burnt a crisp black, like badly overdone roasted chicken; he stank of sizzled flesh and rot at the same time, and he lacked one eyeball. Hooke nodded to them, and the two Lazars with working arms hoisted Thalanes’s body up and shoved him against the bloodied altar, in a sitting position with his chin slumped onto his chest.
He did not need to serve the Necromancer.
At least, he didn’t need to make a decision one way or the other, not yet. He could work with Cromwell’s creatures to serve the ends of St. Martin and the Penn family. He could walk away from an alliance with the Necromancer whenever he wanted.
It is time, Hooke said. Come here and join us, or get thee hence.
Ezekiel steeled himself and stepped closer to the altar. He would be like Saul, consulting with the Witch of Endor when he could get no answer from the prophets, and speaking with the shade of the prophet Samuel. That biblical touchstone quelled the disquiet in his bowels, though the thought crept through his mind that the comparison was rather more flattering to Thalanes, in the shoes of the dead Samuel, than it was to him.
We need blood. Hooke turned abruptly to Ezekiel, holding out a knife and a gold chalice.
“I don’t have any blood,” Ezekiel demurred, feeling this was asking too much of him. He had thought to be only a witness.
The weak-armed Lazar looked at him skeptically, eyes squirming.
Dost thou not? Hooke again pressed the tools upon him.
It was only for the moment. He would work with Cromwell and his disconcerting agents for now, until he could recover the Witchy Eye. Recover or kill, if he had to. Then he would wash his hands of them and ride back to Philadelphia.
He took the knife and chalice.
“Where should I…?” He gestured vaguely at his body with the blade.
Thou mayest find it convenient to mark the palm of thy hand, though it makes no odds to me.
Trembling, Ezekiel cut a line into the flesh of his left palm, letting the thin trickle of blood well up and then drip modestly into the chalice. He stared at the red beads that slid down the inside of the gold
vessel, smearing it crimson and then pooling in the bottom. Had he gone too far already?
More. Hooke seized Ezekiel by the wrist and the burned Lazar grabbed his hand with surprising mobility and strength, squeezing the flesh of his palm and tearing it, bringing a torrent of bright red blood down into the cup. The red was shocking against the gold, an insult, a blasphemy, a wound.
Ezekiel gasped in pain and anger and tried to pull away; Hooke looked down into the cup with his dead white eyes.
That will do, he finally said, and the Lazars released Ezekiel.
Then the Sorcerer Hooke dipped his fingers into Ezekiel’s blood and daubed it on Thalanes’s face, anointing the corpse’s eyes, ears, and tongue, and smearing a great red line across his pale wet forehead. Ezekiel’s palm ached at the sight of his own blood being used this way.
Robert Hooke handed the chalice to Ezekiel. A small clot of drying blood remained in the bottom of the cup.
It will be safest for thee to destroy this, the Lazar said.
“Destroy it?” Obviously, if the Witchy Eye had Ezekiel’s blood, she could use it to ensorcel him.
It is safest of all to drink it.
Ezekiel imagined himself licking his own blood from the sacramental chalice and felt ill.
Then the Sorcerer was still a moment; he must be incanting a spell in his mind-speech, but one that Ezekiel couldn’t hear. Ezekiel felt even more vitality leach from him, and he nearly swooned.
Thalanes’s eyes opened and his chin snapped up off his chest.
For a moment, Ezekiel thought Hooke had made a mistake, that Thalanes was still alive, but then he saw the all-white eyes in the monk’s head and he knew he was in the presence of necromancy. He shuddered and took a step back, but not so far away that he couldn’t see and hear the interrogation.
Thalanes, Hooke intoned, crouching beside the corpse. Thou owest me three answers.
“I owe you nothing,” Thalanes replied. It was not in his natural, living voice, but in a basso mockery of it, a deep, rumbling grunt that seemed larger than the chest it came out of. “But I am compelled. Speak.”
Compelled to tell me the truth, mind thou. No tricks, Ophidian.
“Compelled to answer three questions only,” the dead monk countered. “Speak.”
Ezekiel had never seen such magic firsthand, and only read about it in Mather’s Denunciations. This was vile necromancy. Ezekiel clenched his wounded hand into a fist; he would cut ties with the Necromancer as soon as he’d found Witchy Eye.
Robert Hooke sneered. Where has Sarah Penn slept in the City of New Orleans?
Ezekiel thought he understood why Hooke had asked the odd question—this interrogation was a contest between the two dead men. The shade of Thalanes would answer three queries truthfully, but would not volunteer information or make up the weaknesses in defectively-phrased questions.
If the Sorcerer could find something of Witchy Eye’s, including, ideally, some small part of her body or her intimate toilette, he could use that to cast a spell to find her again. How had the Lazar followed the girl thus far? Ezekiel frowned.
Thalanes lay still for long seconds. “In the palace of the Bishop of New Orleans,” he finally groaned. A trickle of blood slipped from the bullet hole in his temple and onto his shoulder, as if from the mental effort.
Hooke grinned humorlessly at Ezekiel. Knowledge always begins with the asking of the correct question.
“Are you looking for material for a finding spell?” Ezekiel asked.
Hooke spat clotted black phlegm onto the floor. He turned his attention again to the interrogation. For what purpose didst thou bring Sarah Penn to New Orleans?
Thalanes was slow to answer again. “To find Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.”
“They found him,” Ezekiel confirmed. “He’s the big man in a red coat who was here in the cathedral today.”
What did Thalanes and Witchy Eye want with Lee? Lee was the former Captain of the Imperial House Light Dragoons, the one who had served under Kyres Elytharias. Could he have something of her father’s for the girl?
Or was the girl gathering her father’s retainers about her to aid her in a rush at the throne? Lee had almost said as much, standing beside the altar with guns in his hands and defying the emperor.
Hooke nodded and the weak-armed Lazar hissed, his breath a cloud of decay.
Hooke considered his third and last question at length. The last time thou hadst knowledge of her intentions, what did Sarah Penn plan to do when she left New Orleans?
Ezekiel nodded. Maybe they could get out ahead of the Witchy Eye, instead of always being a step behind. He leaned in closer to hear the answer; this information would justify the black magic taint.
“She intended to find her brother,” Thalanes said in his rumbling death rattle voice.
Ezekiel’s ears pricked up. “Her brother? Where’s the brother?”
The dead monk slumped, still and cold.
“Is that it? He must know more, make him tell us more!” Ezekiel demanded, almost yelling.
Robert Hooke shook his head. Thou art no necromancer, art thou, priest? We have finished here. Let us go see what we can find at the Bishop’s Palace.
Ezekiel looked down at the sacramental chalice in his hands, with the clotting lump of his blood in the bottom, and felt sick and foul.
* * *
It was cold inside the crypt. The heavy marble roof shielded them from the direct blows of the storm, but wind-flung spray still slicked and chilled their hands and faces.
At least, Bill thought with some wonder, they were mostly dry. After winging down to a landing among the glaring angels, sad-eyed gargoyles, off-centered stone memorials, and tall weeds that comprised the cemetery, they had shaken the water off. Pigeons must be water-resistant, being feathered and oily like ducks. And when he had suddenly found himself a man and clothed again, he had been a dry man in dry clothing.
Sarah and Cathy had tended to various injuries, Sarah with incantations and Cathy with bandages, and then they had begun to take counsel. Sarah told her story, and then Obadiah.
The storm-battered above-ground crypt had to be the strangest place Bill had ever held a council of war. The chiseled names of the dead to whom the crypt belonged stared at him from all sides, reminding him of his conversations earlier that morning with Jacob Hop.
Simon Sword. There is no such person as Jacob Hop, or if there is, he is a stranger to me.
Bill was chilled and wounded. He had betrayed his employer the chevalier, he’d been insulted by a former subordinate, and he’d watched two innocent men in a row killed, both of them priests, but Bill felt better than he had in years. He kept looking from Sarah to Cathy and back again, and trying to do more than just grin.
Bill did feel shock about Thalanes; after years of not seeing each other, he and his old friend, the little monk, had exchanged scarcely a handful of words, and now Thalanes was dead. The echo of the gunshot that killed the Cetean would be with him a long time.
It was Bill’s turn. He told his companions what he had to say, starting with the night the Lion of Missouri was murdered, fifteen years ago. He told about the storm at the junction of the great rivers, rain not unlike the rain from which they now huddled in shelter, about Kyres’s insistence on standing his turn at watch with Bayard Prideux, about Bayard’s foul murder and Bill’s subsequent pursuit into the rain, ending in Bayard’s escape.
He told of Kyres’s death under the oak tree, of the three bloodied acorns. He told of burying his master’s body in secret, as he had instructed them to do, along with Thalanes, then the Chaplain of the Blues, and of looking for, but not finding, the regalia of Cahokia—the sword, the crown, and the orb. He told of returning to Philadelphia to deliver the acorns, of the empress’s grief and terrible whispered suspicions, suspicions that were fully validated when Thomas had had his sister shut away, claiming she’d been driven mad.
“Thomas must have put Bayard up to the murder,” Bill concluded.
“Bayard said there was another man involved, too. ‘Ze ozer,’ he kept saying, frog that he was.”
“Who is this other man?” Sarah asked.
“He deserves death, whoever he is, Your Majesty,” Bill said.
“Revenge?” Calvin asked, looking dubious. “I ain’t sure how I feel about that. Turn the other cheek, Jesus said. Seven time seventy.”
“My conscience may be less metaphysical than yours, suh,” Bill shot back. “Revenge is what the other fellow is after; what I want is justice. Besides, Cal, I saw how you turned the other cheek to the Lazars back there. I’m not fooled.”
Cal’s face colored. “That wasn’t revenge, though. That was jest self-defense.”
“He does deserve death, and we’ll return to it.” Sarah said.
Bill bowed, deferring.
He told them of the three babies born and smuggled out of Hannah’s prison chambers in a warming pan. He told what he remembered of Sarah, which was mostly that she was a perfectly beautiful baby with a swollen red eye, but he had more to say about Nathaniel, the infant he had nurtured, concealed, carried, and delivered to—
“Don’t tell me!” Sarah interrupted him.
“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,” Bill said, “but I was under the impression that this was the information you came to New Orleans to seek.”
Sarah looked lost in a maze of thought, huddling into her purple shawl in the corner of the crypt. “It is. Only now I ain’t so certain my mind’s a safe place for the information, with that damned Sorcerer Hooke on the loose. Best you keep it to yourself for now.”
He resumed his story with circumlocutions to conceal the people and places. He told them he’d hidden the boy Nathaniel with a great man and friend of the empress, he told them of the great man’s son, who threatened to turn Bill and the child over to the emperor, of Bill’s duel with the young man that had led to his death, of the great man’s subsequent madness and Bill’s exile and flight.
He left out his tearful goodbyes with Sally, her grief and anger and suggestions that he was choosing his dead lord over his living children. He’d promised to write, and he had kept that promise for years, much as he disliked putting pen to paper. She had sworn never to write back, and she had kept her oath, too.