by D. J. Butler
Sarah mumbled something that included the word “serpentes” and flung her fingers at Cal where he wrestled on the floor. A black hairball landed on Calvin’s chest.
Cal, having regained his own features, was buried in a sudden avalanche of snakes. They were striped orange, white, and black, and they wound all about him about the hands and arms of those that fought him down.
“Serpientes!” a fat man shouted, and jumped away.
With many-pitched gasps and more than one shriek of surprise, the rest of the crowd dropped Calvin and took a startled step back.
“Emmenez-les!” shouted the chevalier. To hell with it, Bill thought, and he straightened his posture.
The cat was gone, and Obadiah held the bundle toward Bill, wrestling with his elbow against two bewigged Frenchmen in livery Bill didn’t recognize. It was a good thing the Englishman was burly.
Bill batted aside a bony man who tried to bite him and regretfully restrained a claw-flailing matron with his forearm on her chest, yanking both guns from Obadiah and spinning to meet the nearest gendarmes.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bill saw Cal standing up free of the tangle of snakes, tomahawk sweeping a wide space around him that the ballgoers hesitated to enter. Obadiah had a broadsword out, Cathy held two pistols, and Sarah gripped her staff like a club. They would not surrender without a fight, at least.
“Emmenez-les!” the chevalier yelled.
Bill clubbed down an overenthusiastic footman with the butt of one horse pistol. He was understanding more French, and felt a small surge of pride.
“Cet homme la, il a assassiné mon fils!” the chevalier cried.
Bill had been spotted. He tossed a short gendarme aside. At least the ambiguity of his employment situation had been resolved.
The dancers were flushing out of the way.
Half a dozen blue-and-gold uniforms advanced on Bill. Bill raised both pistols and pulled the hammers back.
“Arrêtez-vous!” shouted a voice Bill thought he recognized. He ignored it, bound and determined not to arrête anything until they pried his guns from his cold, dead fingers, but the gendarmes facing him stopped, looking startled and uncertain.
Bill risked a glance over his shoulder.
The chevalier stood in the center of a cleared piece of floor, even his seneschal having stepped away. Someone stood beside him in an elegant black suit, pressing a knife into the billowing cravat at the chevalier’s throat.
Someone Bill knew, though it took him a moment to realize it. An old man, with rouge on his cheeks, a thin mustache grease-penciled onto his upper lip, and a mad gleam in his eye.
Don Sandoval.
Hell’s Bells.
“Iffen anybody as ain’t William Lee or Obadiah Dogsbody sticks his head in, you knock it clean to Baton Rouge.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The crowd pressed itself against the walls of the ballroom, and Sarah drifted with them. The gendarmes shouldered past her to surround the old Spaniard with his knife to the chevalier’s neck; in the urgency of the sudden threat to their master’s life, they had forgotten entirely about Sarah’s party.
“Facies muto.” She willed herself and her companions to again resemble the Prince of Shreveport and his family.
Her own reservoir of magical energy was at a very low ebb, a sensation which felt a lot like exhaustion and fatigue and a little bit like being hungry and thirsty. She still had Thalanes’s moon-shaped brooch, pinned now to the white dress she had borrowed from one of the Machogu women. She hadn’t tapped any of its energy yet, out of a sense that the energy humming within the monk’s bauble was the last piece that remained of the man himself, his pneuma or his psyche, his spiritus or his anima, and once she used it up, he would be irrevocably gone.
Sir William was distracted by the spectacle in the center of the room. “Sir William,” she hissed at him, “let’s go!”
He didn’t seem to hear her.
“Non!” The chevalier raised an arm to direct his men, but his captor cut him off.
“Je le fis!” shouted the old man, and pressed his knife tighter into the chevalier’s cravat. He drew a thin trickle of blood, a shocking crimson flower in the bed of white. “Je suis moi qui l’assassinais!”
“Hell’s Bells,” Sir William muttered. “The old fool will kill himself.”
Sarah thought she saw the Spaniard wink at Sir William, and Sir William tip his head in a slight deferential bow, and then she pulled his elbow and drew him back with her into the hall. “We gotta leave while they’re distracted, out the front door.”
Sir William shook himself like a dog coming out of water and focused on the exit. Calvin, Cathy, and Obadiah fell in behind them. “You’re my queen, ma’am. I will only observe that the Blues and the Lazars remain outside, and if we’re detected we’re likely to face combat.”
“We’re between a rock and a hard place, Captain,” Sarah said. “It’s my choice, and I choose the rock.”
Sir William tucked his pistols into his belt, crooking an elbow toward Sarah. “In that case, Your Majesty, the Prince of Shreveport offers you his arm.”
Sarah took the proffered elbow and followed him out the door.
She and Sir William both inclined their heads to the footmen at the door, ignoring their sour looks in return, and passed into the cool evening air. Behind them she heard cries and blows.
Twenty-odd Blues, the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton, and several of the rot-coated Lazars stood mounted beyond the front gate. She ignored them and turned right along the face of the Palais, strolling at a casual pace past clumps of magnolia and cherub-festooned fountains toward the white and gold coach they’d left an hour earlier.
“Jerusalem,” Cal whispered. “I ain’t ne’er felt more nekkid in all my life.”
Could Sarah’s enemies see through her disguise? She resisted a strong desire to turn her head and look to see whether she was being watched, and instead focused on the coach. The smooth cobblestones before her stretched like an endless sea to the white and gold wheeled lighthouse on the distant shore, calling her on, guiding her through the shoals of footmen and fountains.
There was a commotion behind her, at the door of the Palais. Sarah willed herself to keep walking.
Closer.
Footmen bowed, and Sarah and Sir William nodded in return.
She heard shouting behind her in French.
Almost there. One of the two coachmen stepped down to hold the door open, while the other mounted the front of the coach to take the reins.
The shouting suddenly got louder. “Emmenez-les!”
“Sarah, they spotted us!” Cal cried.
Sir William dropped Sarah’s arm and pulled both pistols, leveling them at the two servants. “Get away from the carriage, gentlemen, or I shall release you from my service in a fashion you will find most abrupt.”
The coachmen stumbled away in terror and Obadiah climbed, quite spryly for his size, up to the coachman’s seat. “Get in, poppet.” He took the whip and reins. “I can ’andle this well enow.”
They jumped into the carriage and the party’s disguises dropped. Cal tossed the real prince and his family, still tied and squirming, to the ground. As he shut the door again, Sarah heard the clop of horses’ hooves and the coach rolled forward into action.
Sarah finally risked a glance out the window, and her heart sank. From the Palais swarmed gendarmes, armed and barking. The Blues beyond the gatehouse turned their horses to move in the same direction as Sarah’s carriage, following a course convergent with her own down the street, with Angleton and Hooke at their head, both staring at her.
She snapped her gaze away, remembering with an icicle through her heart the groping hands and endless amniotic sea of Robert Hooke’s spell; she could not afford to meet his eyes again, at least not until she was stronger. She looked ahead.
There was a second gatehouse at the end of the cobbled yard, and the carriages were organized to exit through it. The nig
ht still being young, there was no queue ahead of them, but a dozen gendarmes were forming themselves into a line across the gate, drawing pistols and yelling at Obadiah in French to stop.
“Froggez-vous!” Obadiah yelled gleefully back at them.
“Pardon me, Your Majesty,” Sir William said to Sarah, “but would you please keep your head inside the carriage? I believe we’re about to exchange pleasantries.”
“I see them,” she said.
To Cathy, who was loading the Lafitte pistols, the Cavalier added, “Save your powder, ma’am, until they try to board us.”
Then Sarah pulled herself inside and ducked, pressing her body against the heavy back of the coach, while Sir William leaned out the window in her place.
“The portcullis!” Obadiah shouted. “’It that fellow ere he brings the gate down on our ’eads, Bill!”
Bang!
“Drive!” Sir William shouted.
Then the gunfire began in earnest.
The glass windowpanes of the carriage shattered and the wood of its frame spat splinters as lead balls punched their way through. Sarah hunched low with Cathy and Calvin and hoped Sir William could avoid being shot, hanging as he was out the window.
The carriage rattled across the cobblestones. Sarah ventured a glance out the window and saw the Blues, galloping behind Angleton and Hooke; they were behind, but gaining, and Sarah racked her brain for a spell. She didn’t think she had the energy to turn the entire carriage and its teams of horses invisible, not for long enough to make a difference; she knew she hadn’t the strength to turn them into birds; disguises at this point would be useless.
Bang! Bang!
Wheels thundered across stone; bullets ripped the air to dangerous shreds. They must be almost to the gate now. Sarah peeked again across the tall iron fence—she could see Hooke’s pale face and white, worm-seething eyes framed by his flapping scarf, and she ducked.
“Here they come, Mrs. Filmer!” Sir William shouted, and fired.
There was a thud! of colliding bodies as gendarmes threw themselves against the front and side of the carriage. Sarah thought she heard a cry from the roof of the carriage, but gave it no thought in the general ruckus of shots, blades, and flailing limbs.
Bang!
Sir William dispatched a gendarme with an efficiently-aimed pistol ball to the sternum, then drew his sword and swung out the door of the coach to attack someone at the coachman’s seat.
Bang!
Cathy shot one assailant in the forehead, knocking him off the side of the vehicle, then calmly switched pistols and fired into another man’s shoulder. The second man cried out in surprise, and had no strength to resist when Cathy pistol-whipped him in the jaw, sending him tumbling to the ground. Acrid smoke from the pistols filled the coach.
The Imperials clattered through the gatehouse and into the street, and the coach swerved to put the dragoons directly behind them. Sarah still rummaged through her imagination for a good spell. She wanted the horses to go faster, and she remembered Thalanes’s morning coffee spell, and the little sack of beans nestled in the monk’s satchel. The Latin, though…it had been more complicated. What was it Thalanes had incanted? Pedes something, though of course pedes is feet, and horses don’t have feet.
But could she even cast a spell at all, through the silver filigree in the doors and windows of the coach?
Cal, meanwhile, needed help.
He had smashed one attacker away from the door with his tomahawk, but the blow left him open and another gendarme was dragging him slowly out the window by his long hair. Cal’s left hand fought for a grip strong enough to keep him from being tossed overboard, and he couldn’t bring the ax in his right hand to bear. One begrudged inch at a time, the young Calhoun slid closer to a hard fall.
Sarah drew the silver letter opener and moved toward the gendarme. His eyes widened, but he couldn’t free up a hand, either, and so he made no effective resistance when she stabbed him in his stomach. For good measure, Cathy punched him in the temple with the butt of a pistol. Crying out wordlessly, the gendarme let go and fell.
“Thanks,” Cal said to both of them.
Sarah regretted snapping at him in the china closet. Scuffling and thumping sounds continued on the roof, but there were no more gendarmes actually trying to climb inside the coach, so Sarah pulled out Thalanes’s sack of beans.
She poured a handful into her palm and looked at them, wondering how best to use them in an act of gramarye. She wanted to build a conduit for the transmission of power, because that made the transmission efficient, and it cost her less to cast a spell that way. Ideally, she’d like to boil a pot of coffee and give it to the horses, but in the circumstances that was impractical.
She’d use the least power if she could somehow get up onto the top of the carriage and get the beans into physical contact with the horses, but that seemed impossible. If she didn’t simply fall off from all the rattling, she’d get shot.
Looking at Cal, craning his neck to peer out the carriage window as he hefted his long-handled tomahawk, she had an idea.
“Calvin!” she called to him, and he immediately gave her his attention. “I need you to smash open a hole in the front of the coach here.” She had meant to request his help, but it came out sounding like an order.
She pointed at the front wall of the carriage, low and just above the front seat, and drew a little square in the air with her finger. She felt reasonably sure that would be well below where Obadiah sat, holding the reins.
“Big enough for what?” Cal didn’t quite meet her gaze. “You fixin’ to climb through?”
“No,” she told him. “I jest gotta be able to spit through it.”
He shot one last look out the window and then set to the work, hacking at the carriage wall and grunting. The workmanship was solid, but Cal’s axe was sharp and he was an old hand at chopping wood.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
But what was the Latin she needed?
Ungula, that was a hoof, she remembered. Were accelero and augeo the verbs Thalanes had used? Of course, really, she could use any words she wanted. Any that fit.
Calvin had chopped open the hole. It was square, splintered around the edges and about the size of Sarah’s face. The cloppety-cloppety-cloppety rattle of hooves on cobblestones filled the coach, and Sarah could see indistinct brushes of movement through the opening.
He stepped aside to show his handiwork, she nodded, and he went back to the window.
Bang! Bang!
Sarah heard shots from the top of the carriage, and then felt the coach jerk sideways as something hit it from behind. It must be one of the Blues, jumping aboard—they were overtaken.
She lost her hesitation and found her vocabulary.
“Ungulas accelero crures augeoque!” She touched the brooch at her chest and threw coffee beans into her mouth.
She bit into them hard as she willed vitality and speed out of Thalanes’s moon brooch and into the beans. She pressed her face to the hole and spat, spraying chewed coffee beans onto the hindmost pairs of hooves and the pole that ran up between them, and the soul energy of the monk Thalanes flowed through Sarah’s mouth, through her spittle and the ground coffee beans, and into the carriage horses of the Prince of Shreveport.
The coach leaped forward, throwing its three occupants to the floor.
A rooftop thump! made Sarah fear she might have dislodged Obadiah or Sir William, but it was followed close on by a snap! and then a cry of pain, and then Sir William poked his head in the window, his body apparently lying flat on the carriage roof.
“Heaven’s curtain, Your Majesty,” he drawled, the seneschal’s white powdered perruque dangling upside down off his bald skull and making him look completely ridiculous, “you’ve lit quite a fire under the horses’ hindquarters.”
Sarah nodded, feeling weak. “It won’t last, unfortunately. Please take us to the river, Sir William.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed. “Do we have a pl
an?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, but I hope to by the time we get there.” She needed to get to the river and its great ley line, where at least she could become magically effective again. Even if it killed her, she’d be able to cast some big spell of escape, or defense, or attack.
“Yes, ma’am,” Sir William acknowledged. “The Englishman has been hit, but I have some experience with carriages myself, and I believe we’ll have no difficulty making the Mississippi.” He pulled his head back in and disappeared.
All the power Sarah had collected at the death of Thalanes was gone.
He was gone, however many parts it was that really made him up.
“Good-bye,” she murmured.
Then she chuckled, softly. The little Cetean would probably have been amused to know that when he finally went, the last of him had gone in a spurt of coffee.
“I’m sorry, do you want me up top?” Calvin asked.
“No,” she said. “I’s jest…I wasn’t talking to you.”
“Shall I stay here, then, Your Majesty?” Cal’s eyes were downcast, and his miserable expression stabbed Sarah in the heart.
“Calvin Calhoun, you vex me,” she said. “One minute, I want to kiss you—” here his eyes lit up, “and the next I almost can’t help but whack you upside the head. First of all, you don’t call me Your Majesty, leastways not in private. Second, yes, stay here, iffen we get attacked again, I’ll want more’n this here toy pigsticker to ward off my uncle’s thugs.” She waved Chigozie Ukwu’s silver letter opener.
Cal nodded.
“Third, you and I got to have us a long talk about important things like feelin’s, only it ain’t gonna happen today, so I need you to hold your horses. For now, I reckon I ought to say that there ain’t any feller on earth I like more’n you. Any problems with that?”
Cal shook his head, looking almost hopeful. “No, Sarah, I ain’t got no problems with any of that.” He paused a moment, then continued slowly. “I don’t reckon you believe me yet, but I’m jest crazy about you. Even if I weren’t, though, you’re my friend and my granddaddy loves you like his own child. I promised the Elector I’d keep you safe, and Jerusalem iffen I don’t aim to do jest that.”