by D. J. Butler
However uncomfortable he felt with breaking into the dead priest’s home or witnessing black magic performed on his altar, Ezekiel found he just didn’t think the bishop’s death was his problem. Even if it had been Berkeley who had shot him.
The Lazars rode, too, on spare horses belonging to the Blues; their long-nailed bare feet looked strange in the stirrups, though they sat like practiced horsemen. The party rode west, then north, then circled east again, all in the wet, frothy tail end of the storm, Hooke ignoring repeated queries other than to say I follow where the evidence conducts us, priest. A man of reason cannot do otherwise. She is on the move. Be thou patient.
Hooke seemed to follow the Witchy Eye by sense of smell, sniffing at the hair in his hand and then at the air of New Orleans like a hound given the scent of a fox or a raccoon.
Ezekiel disliked riding with the dead, but between the thick weather and Robert Hooke’s scarf, he didn’t think anyone noticed the Lazar for what he was.
As afternoon turned into evening, the rain stopped, and Ezekiel found himself riding west again, with the Sorcerer Hooke and a morose Captain Berkeley, exposed at the head of a restless column of dragoons, hoping night came soon. They skirted the edge of the Quarter, headed back toward the Palais du Chevalier. They passed fine homes and streets lit by lantern poles.
Then they turned a corner and the Palais itself was in sight, hurling its shafts of light into all directions. A line of ornate coaches beetled its way one at a time through the gatehouse, each disgorging passengers at the front door and then trundling to a stop within the cobbled courtyard. A second gatehouse, further down the street, would permit exit later.
She must be inside. Hooke held the clotted ball of damp black hair in his hand, alternating sniffing it and nosing the air. She is near.
“I can get us in,” Ezekiel said.
Hooke wrapped his scarf more closely about his face and Tom Long-Knife followed suit. The burnt, one-eyed Lazar could do nothing about his appearance and simply fell back slightly, hovering between his fellow undead and the first of the dragoons. Berkeley and the other Imperial soldiers kept impassive faces, but the presence of the Lazars made all the horses skittish.
Ezekiel ignored glares and teeth-clenched curses from the drivers and guards on the foremost coaches and rode up to the gatehouse. After hours of riding around in the dark and wet, to feel the air only damp about his face and to stand in the blazing light of the thousand lamps and torches of the Palais’s exterior made him feel warm, dry, and exposed to view.
He hoped no one noticed the strangeness of his companions.
The gatehouse crawled with gendarmes; two stood in the gate itself, with a list-toting footman, in the act as Ezekiel approached of signing off a carriage and sending it on through to the front door. They glared at him.
“Good even,” Ezekiel called. “May we enter?” Out of the corner of his eye he watched the Lazars, who hung a little behind.
“You don’t look like invitees to ze ball,” the footman sniffed.
Tom Long-Knife reached for his weapon and Hooke held up a restraining hand.
“We’re not,” Ezekiel agreed. “I’m staying here as a guest of the chevalier.”
The footman shook his head. “Only invitees to ze ball are to be admitted at zis time.”
Now Robert Hooke hissed, his rancid exhalations drifting into Ezekiel’s nostrils like the stink of a dead skunk. Ezekiel shot him a pleading look.
“There must be a mistake,” he protested, “please contact the chevalier. Or perhaps his seneschal, Mr. du Plessis.”
The footman looked bored but he waved another gendarme to his side and sent the man into the house. Ezekiel and his company stepped back from the gate while the footman processed several more coaches. She is here, I am certain of it, Hooke whispered into Ezekiel’s mind. In this light, no scarf would hide the Lazar’s peculiarity, and Ezekiel imagined stares of disapproval and fear boring into his back from each passing coach.
Finally the chevalier came out the front doors of the Palais, accompanied by another half dozen of his men. They were prepared for combat, wearing blue-stained leathers and festooned with weapons, but he wore an elegant blue and gold coat, waistcoat, and breeches, cut tight to display his trim physique, and an enormous white cravat. He strode directly through the gate to Ezekiel, and his gendarmes drew up into a disciplined line behind him.
Elsewhere about the gatehouse and the courtyard, the chevalier’s presence made his men snap to even tighter focus, and Ezekiel felt watched by a thousand eyes.
“My Lord—” Ezekiel began, and the chevalier immediately cut him off with a wave.
“You gentlemen will have to bunk in the station with your men tonight,” he said, nodding to Berkeley and Ezekiel. “I appreciate your patience. Your things will be brought out to you.”
“But, My Lord…” Ezekiel began, but didn’t know how much to say. “There are other…”
“Yes,” the chevalier cut him off again. “I had suspected your pretender might have reason to try to enter my home. Your presence here with these—” he indicated the three Lazars with a twist of his wrist, “these things confirms my guess.”
“My Lord?” Ezekiel could think of no better answer.
A flicker of a smile crossed the chevalier’s lips. “How much do you think Thomas will be willing to pay me to keep her hidden? Annually, I mean.”
Tom Long-Knife and the burnt Lazar hissed and lunged forward at the same moment, pushing past Ezekiel but pulling up short of the chevalier as a bristling hedge of steel sprang into the fists of his men, forcing them back.
No, not steel, Ezekiel realized, recognizing the gleam of the weapons: silver.
The chevalier had armed all his men with long silver daggers. It was a shocking display of wealth.
Ezekiel and the Sorcerer Hooke shared a brief glance; the sorcerer’s cold face was unreadable, but Ezekiel knew he was broadcasting confusion and alarm from his own. He looked about the courtyard and the gatehouse and saw dozens of well-armed men, all now brandishing silver daggers. Bewigged heads stared shamelessly from the line of ornate coaches.
“We expected you might not wish to cooperate.” The chevalier turned his gaze to the Lazar. “Now the sorcerer will want to try some arcane attack, but I advise against it.”
Robert Hooke squinted, and Ezekiel involuntarily stepped back a pace. He worried Hooke was trying something, incanting in his silent mindspeech, and if his incantation exploded, Ezekiel didn’t want to be caught in it. There were no explosions, though, and then Hooke said-thought sardonically, I am not generally in the habit of taking advice from men in frippery. Still, tonight I shall heed the Lord Protector’s counsel and keep my powder dry.
The chevalier laughed. “The wisdom of the ancients. Good night, gentlemen.” Then he turned and walked back into his mansion, leaving his silver-armed men behind to reinforce the gate.
“The chevalier may be that wealthy, but he is not that generous.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The transition from the carriage into the Palais was tricky. Sarah stepped out first, mask held to her face, and as her foot touched the ground her thin, lanky, short black hair became thick, curled, and bound in wire, and her chalky white neck and shoulders assumed a dark, burnished hue. Bill came next, and then the others, and as each touched the ground he or she became a Bantu noble.
Obadiah Dogsbody came last, holding his mask and a bundle of their weapons. The others stood around the door at his exit to camouflage what he held in his arms, and as he touched the smooth stones of the ground, the bundle became a fat white cat.
“Miaow,” purred the weapons.
They left the paper blinds pulled down.
Bill led the way, ignoring the footmen other than to hand the real prince’s visiting card to a man at the door.
“His Serene Highness,” the man announced to a crowd of indifferent ball attendees, “Kimoni Machogu, Prince of Shreveport. Her Serene Highness, Pr
incess Jwahir Machogu…”
Bill kept moving.
A minute or two later, as the five of them drifted across a marble floor beneath a mural that ridiculously showed the Chevalier of New Orleans, Gaspard Le Moyne, defeating both Count Galvéz of New Spain and King Andy Jackson in a single battle, Bill became himself again.
He knew when it happened because his companions abruptly became themselves as well. He felt an itch to drag his hat out from where it was folded inside his waistcoat, but he knew it was too battered to make an appearance in this company, and with a twinge of misgiving he left it stowed away and kept the little mask over his face.
When the spell ended, Sarah’s shoulders slumped. How much spellcasting did she have left in her?
Bill’s pistols were inaccessible, wrapped in a bundle of his coat with the party’s other weapons. Obadiah carried the bundle, and as he noted the illusions on the party’s faces falling away, Bill turned to look at Obadiah, and was amused to see that he still appeared to be carrying a fat white cat. “Miaow,” said the bundle of pistols, tomahawk, lariat, and so on.
So that bit of gramarye, unfortunately, she would have to continue. And, for the moment, the hair-and-pearls lodestone spell.
At least Bill was wearing his own sword.
Bill looked for the seneschal. He knew René du Plessis by sight, though they had never met—he was always about town on his master’s business, public, private and, if any of the rumors was true, very private, indeed, for du Plessis was the most trusted servant of a man who kept many secrets.
Including, Bill hoped, a certain letter.
But in the thick crush of people in which Bill found himself now, he could see no faces. Once through the great front doors, Bill and the others had entered a swirling pool of New Orleans aristocracy. Most would be frenchies and Spaniards, though the scummy whirlpool of New Orleans threw up enough rough and tumble entrepreneurs, smugglers and gamblers and bawdy house owners and much, much worse, that there would be the occasional Anglo, Yonkerman, Memphite, Gullah, Texian, or whatnot.
Not that Bill could tell one from the other. They wouldn’t stop moving, and their faces hid behind demonic masks.
The light fell about him like blinding diamonds, the punch bowls squatted on their long tables calling Bill’s name, and the grotesque faces streamed tauntingly about him. Bill moved from one ballroom to the other following Cathy’s indications; she held the hairball guide discreetly in hands folded on her stomach.
How much time did they have before the Prince of Shreveport wiggled out of his bonds and escaped?
They needed to find du Plessis, get the letter, and leave. If they separated, they ran the risk of not being able to find each other again. Once they had found the letter, they had no escape plan. Bill hoped they could simply walk out, but it might not turn out to be that simple.
He looked closely at the hair and jawline of the woman walking next to him to be certain she was Catherine Filmer, and took her arm in his.
“I seen him,” Cal whispered. “Dark-skinned feller with a hard face, like you said, Bill, o’er there talkin’ to the banjer picker. That him?”
Bill looked, and there stood du Plessis, conveying instructions from a sheet of paper to a quartet of Igbo minstrels, who respectfully held their banjo, guitar, bass fiddle, and lapharp still while they listened.
“That’s him.” Bill released Cathy’s arm. “Follow me, and look natural.”
With his companions trailing behind, Bill glided across the floor, evading would-be dancers as gracefully as he could. As du Plessis turned to leave the room, Bill swooped upon him and caught his bicep. “Stay calm, suh, and you’ll not be hurt.” Du Plessis let himself be guided from the room.
“You’re making a serious mistake,” he told Bill, but his face was pleasant.
Outside the room, Bill found himself again in one of the wide halls that made up the skeleton of the building. Guests chattered away gaily, scintillating glasses of punch in their free hands. Punch probably spiked with rum, and somewhere in the palace there would be good whisky. Barrels of Elijah Pepper’s finest.
Bill forced his mind back to his task.
“Where’s a quiet place where we may speak undisturbed, suh?” he asked the seneschal.
“Upstairs,” du Plessis said immediately, and Bill turned to maneuver the smaller man toward a staircase—
but stopped.
Du Plessis wasn’t resisting at all, and Bill hadn’t so much as brandished a weapon.
“I’m hungry,” he growled. And thirsty. “Take me to the kitchens first.”
As the two of them walked, Bill forced du Plessis into a chat. Bill had no natural small talk to make, so he forced his face into a frivolous smile and asked du Plessis question after question about the endless parade of martyrs’ portraits that decorated all the walls; du Plessis obliged.
“And that one?”
“St. Edward the Martyr, stabbed in the back at the order of his stepmother.”
“And this gruesome fellow?”
“St. Bartholomew, skinned alive by the wild men of Armenia. That cloak is his own skin.”
“And her?”
“St. Anne Hutchinson, nailed to a cross by the Haudenosaunee for her preaching.”
As they walked, Bill noted a couple of grand staircases moving up, but once they had passed out of the front of the Palais with its complex of ballrooms and into servants’ territory, the halls and staircases (including a staircase that climbed up from right inside the main kitchen) became narrower. The saints disappeared, too, in favor of simple dark wood panelling.
“A quiet pantry,” Bill muttered, “and look cheerful.” A glance over his shoulder and a quick count told him that the right number of white-clad partygoers was following him.
He hoped all the right faces were lurking under the Venetian masks.
Du Plessis indicated a long hall off the main kitchen—servants rattled in and out and a master chef stood at the center of a storm of underlings, howling, tasting, and throwing rejected food, sparing only a glance for the outsiders passing through their midst—and at the end Bill found a small room full of linens and china.
“These are the second-best settings,” the Creole said. “They won’t be used tonight, so no one should have any business to bring them in here, unless some servant girl wants to get a footman alone for a few minutes.”
“I’ll take the risk.” Bill shepherded in his companions before grabbing a taper from a sconce in the hall and shutting the door. They all fit, but only standing. Instantly the cat illusion disappeared and Bill saw the butts of his pistols protruding from the folds of his red coat.
Sarah sucked in air, as if she’d been holding her breath.
“The rest of you, please stay here,” he directed, and then he set his own Venetian mask on a linen shelf, drawing one of his long pistols. “You, du Plessis, are going to help me.” Bill cocked his pistol and pressed it against the Creole’s cheek.
Du Plessis threw his hands up, palms forward, on either side of his head. He looked slightly comical. “O Lord,” he said, slowly, and almost as if it were a joke, “is there no help for the widow’s son?”
Bill frowned at the pantomime. “Hell’s Bells, man,” he said, “let us leave our mothers out of this affair.”
“That might have worked on me,” Sarah told the prisoner, “only you Freemasons don’t admit girls, do you?”
The Creole nodded. “Tell me what you want.”
“Years ago, a Frenchman named Bayard Prideux wrote the chevalier a letter. I want to see it.” As Bill made the demand, he realized it might be ridiculous. The chevalier must have voluminous correspondence, and the idea that this servant would know the location of one particular letter was absurd. “His private correspondence files.”
“I know the letter,” the Creole said modestly, “though I haven’t read it. It’s in the chevalier’s study, upstairs. I can take you all directly to it.”
This was all wrong. Du
Plessis was cooperating much too easily.
Hell if it wasn’t a trap. “How far away?”
The Creole shrugged. “Two minutes’ walk.”
“What we waitin’ for?” Cal asked. He had let his mask drop, showing a look of consternation on his face, like a man who felt intense belly-pain. Bill patted him on his shoulder.
Still, even a mousetrap was baited with real cheese.
Bill forced the engine of his brain to grind over the thought that just outside the door and down a short hall, underlings to the chevalier’s master chef were liberally pouring sherry into soups and sauces.
Bill could go alone.
“Your Majesty,” he asked, “I have another plan. Could you render me invisible again, for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and this fellow as well? I’ll need him as a guide, but I think the two of us alone can retrieve the letter as easily as all of us together, and at less risk. I fear trouble. I ask in the full awareness that we have already called upon your resources in a profligate manner today.”
She nodded, after a little hesitation.
“Do I ask too much, ma’am?”
“I reckon that ain’t a problem,” she said. “Only I have a different idea, something that’d be a little easier for me, and probably ought to do the trick.”
Bill nodded his acquiescence and shoved the Creole toward Obadiah and Cal. “Gag him and tie his wrists. I am in your hands, Your Majesty.”
“Forgive me.” Sarah plucked a long hair from Bill’s mustache and one from the Creole’s head and she picked up two soup spoons from one of the shelves.
Bill rubbed his face.
“Pewter,” she said, and she looked at her own reflection in the back of one spoon. “Good thing these’re the second-best settings.” Then she wrapped Bill’s plucked mustachio around one spoon and the Creole’s hair around the other.