A Calculus of Angels

by J. Gregory Keyes

  “What does that have to do with my ships?” Blackbeard grunted.

  Ben smiled. “Drop the device in the sea, and what do you suppose will happen?”

  “Pardieu,” Bienville muttered.

  “An eruption,” Mather breathed. “Steam.”

  “Indeed,” Ben replied. “A column of steam that will rise high and continue to rise—a miniature storm, if you will, that can be used to disrupt the movements of the airships and perhaps overturn some. If we carry one suspended on a ship, we can position it to its best advantage.”

  “I like this thinking,” Charles murmured.

  “It’s nothing,” Blackbeard snarled. “A minor trick. But then my ships are vulnerable to every sort of attack. And what can I do in response? How will my guns reach these flying ships? What will repel the mines they drop upon me?”

  Ben rubbed his hands together. “I have answers to all those questions, Captain Teach, gentlemen. The fervefactum is the most minor part of my plan.”

  “What other things do you need to know?”

  “Venice is famed for her stores of silk, true?”

  “Only China has more silk,” Riva said.

  Ben’s grin broadened even more. “In that case,” he said, “we shall have a good defense indeed.”

  9.

  Three Magi

  Adrienne first saw Venice as a fey glimmering beneath the roots of black cloud mountains. As they drifted, the numinous range shattered, and the sky opened to receive the faint iodine breath of waters far below. The city was glowworms nested on a sea of ink.

  Between her and that suggestion of sea and city, she saw sailing a squadron of what resembled red fireflies marking the rest of the Muscovite fleet, lowering themselves for nocturnal invasion. It was such a wonder, all of it, that Adrienne could scarcely believe it a prelude to violence.

  “How low are the lowest ships?” she wondered aloud, her eyes still fastened on the marvels below. Her voice broke the momentary silence that had transfixed them all when Venice first came into view. Even the tsar, conferring with his officers a few yards away, had fallen silent. Now he cleared his throat.

  “You worry about d’Argenson, Mademoiselle?”

  “And the men with him,” she said. “I thought this was to be an assault from on high.”

  “Look there,” the tsar said, indicating the glowing islands of the Venetian lagoon. “Have you ever been to Venice?”

  “I have not.”

  “Nor have I, and I would despise to see her only in ruins. I would take her without raining flame.”

  “Even at the cost of your soldiers’ lives?”

  “If I expected a high cost in lives, I would not pursue this particular course,” he explained. “When morning comes, they will see our troops already occupying key points of the city, our ships poised to strike decisive blows. They will see how little they stand to gain by resistance. Our design is to take the city with no bloodshed at all.”

  “Do you truly believe it will happen?”

  The tsar sighed. “Charles is an intractable foe, Mademoiselle, and perhaps mad. I do not expect him to go quietly. But I dislike the idea of pulverizing a city like Venice merely to dispense with a troublesome Swede. The Venetians deserve their chance.”

  “How can I help?” Adrienne asked quietly.

  The tsar beamed at her. “Help Mademoiselle Karevna locate scientifical defenses. Fervefactum, firedrakes, airy shields such as protected Prague. We will then know where to station our ships.”

  “Anything that looks strange in the aether,” Karevna put in. “All which the malakim recognize as unusual.”

  “Very well.” She flexed her manus oculatus, beckoned her minions, and told them what to do. As they dispersed, their eyes became hers, and she sorted through their perceptions as she might a book of diagrams.

  In djinn eyes, the water was a vast canvas; land, smudges of paint. The lights of Venice were smoldering embers, the drifting smoke of shattered ferments—alchemical lanthorns. She found the faint, slow-throbbing energies of a fervefactum and several cannon with unusual properties she could not identify. One of the tsar’s engineers worked quickly with surveying tools to map their locations as Adrienne pointed them out.

  More worrisome was a general and almost undetectable wavering in the aether, a sort of glimmering here and there, mostly on the water.

  “I didn’t notice that,” Vasilisa admitted, when Adrienne mentioned it.

  “Might it be some natural effect?” the tsar wondered.

  “So far as I can tell, Captain, my djinni do not note processes we consider natural—evaporation, heating, cooling, the slow vegetation of metals. They help me see and understand these things if I direct them, but natural processes do not catch their attention. Only direct manipulation of the aether does that.”

  “You think it a danger?”

  “I will study it more, Captain.”

  “Do so.” He sighed. “This disconcerts me. Surely they cannot be considering an actual defense of the city, given what they face.”

  Adrienne gave little of her attention to the conversation, for as she had promised, she was concentrating on the strangeness below. It was subtle, merely a hastening of natural sublimation. It was no wonder that Vasilisa had missed it. “I think,” she said softly, “that they are raising a mist—a forced sublimation, perhaps by some powdered catalyst. To the eye it looks natural.” Indeed, the lights of Venice were beginning to blur.

  “Ah. One wonders what they hope to accomplish,” Vasilisa murmured.

  “We cannot bombard what we cannot see,” the tsar growled.

  “Yes, Captain,” Vasilisa went on, “but Adrienne and I can peer through that mist. If they prepare an alchemical weapon, we will know of it.”

  “But they do not know this,” the tsar said. “They could not, and so foolishly prepare to fight.”

  “That is their mistake,” Vasilisa said grimly.

  “Unless—” Crecy muttered, a faraway look in her eyes.

  But she was interrupted by a flash of light, a billowing globe that limned one of the ships below—the Bogatyr—in a shroud of flame. An instant later, the sound and the shock wave hit them, buckling the deck beneath their feet. Panicked shrieks and commands suddenly filled the air.

  “Unless the weapons aren’t philosophical,” Crecy shouted over the noise. “Where is Nico?”

  “He is with a nurse, below deck.” She hesitated an instant. “Crecy, go get him.”

  “Is he not safer there?”

  “Not if that happens to us!” Adrienne shouted, pointing. The Bogatyr, flaming, wrenched in half, each side still supported by its ifrit. In the light of the flames, she saw men spilling from the ship as if from the belly of an eviscerated whale.

  Farther away, a second new star lit the night.

  A thunder of cheers erupted on deck of the Carolina Prophet—Blackbeard’s new flagship—when the first explosion broke the night stillness, a firework visible even through the creeping fog. Despite his exhaustion—he had spent the last three days working nonstop, pausing only for the briefest naps—Ben shouted as loudly as any of them, and at least ten Janissaries slapped him on the back in congratulation. He nearly wept with fierce pride. His plan was working! He had claimed it would, convinced it would—and yet, deep down, perhaps never believed it himself.

  Now if it would only continue to work.

  He knew that they needed the fog—made by the same agent as that he had given the little archduchess Maria Theresa—but he wished it weren’t there. Likewise he wished it were not nighttime, though it was absolutely to their advantage. But he longed to see what he saw only in his mind’s eye: the sky filled with the myriad forms of hastily sewn silk balloons, filled with hot air from a thousand fires, bearing their deadly, explosive burdens to the Muscovite ships.

  Another explosion, and another, though it was difficult to see what effect the bombs were having. The effect should be good; the Venetian magazine contained helios,
one of the newest and most powerful alchemical explosives, and it was with this that the balloons were armed.

  “Congratulations, Mr. Franklin,” Charles said, shaking his hand. “You have given us a good start. Striking the first blow is always important. I hope your other ideas work as well.”

  “Believe me, sir, so do I. Perhaps the Muscovites will even retreat.”

  Charles shook his head skeptically. “That I doubt, I’m afraid. We’ve shaken them, but for every one of those balloons that does some damage, thirty float away.”

  Robert grunted, pushing his hat back on his head and folding his arms. “I should say someone downwind’ll receive an unpleasant surprise.”

  “Oh, God,” Ben said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Charles shrugged. “Most will land in the sea.”

  “Most,” Ben replied, thinking that it seemed to him that the wind was blowing toward the mainland. But the balloons would drop quickly as the air in them cooled.

  Charles rested his hand nervously on the pommel of his sword. “When will the Madman be ready?”

  “Another thirty minutes, I should think,” Ben replied.

  “Why so slowly?”

  “It’s a larger envelope and takes longer to fill. And rifts were found in it when they began the inflation.”

  “It must be ready while mist and night still hold. I don’t trust your airy shield.”

  Privately, Ben didn’t either. He had cobbled the aegis together awfully fast, and was far from certain how effective it would prove.

  The sky blazed twice more, and then suddenly the sea and shore erupted as the Russians counterattacked. The string of concussions slapped across the water, somehow out of keeping with the unbelievable size of the explosions; and Ben’s triumph turned to a sudden, suffocating fear. When those ships stood over Venice, they were doomed. Of course, that’s why the command had been placed on the Prophet, but in some ways that made them all the more vulnerable.

  “We need to get more balloons under them,” he muttered. By necessity, the balloons had been strung out in a perimeter around the city—on the other American ships in the deep channels, on flatboats and skiffs in the shallows, as well as on the islands that dotted the lagoon. When word came from the watchers on land, the ships rushed to release the balloons where they could be most effective. Ben had seen at least one of those ships—he could not be sure which—struck by the Muscovite counterattack. The others were rushing to interpose themselves between the attackers and Venice itself. The Prophet, on the other hand, was hiding, motionless, some four hundred yards from the city, directing the defense and readying its own slender hope of attack. But if even a single Russian ship came on, Venice would be rubble.

  Lenka was in Venice, so he could not let that happen.

  A runner shouted something in Charles’ ear.

  “The kites have gone up,” Charles said.

  “I hope there is enough wind.”

  Ben turned to stare at the map, where Charles and his tacticians were scribbling furiously as reports came in. The Russian ships were approaching in an arc from land—though it seemed certain that some had been sent to surprise them from the sea. This is insane, Ben thought. What did I ever think I was doing?

  But another explosion, high in the air, reminded him; and at the same moment, a weird sensation shuddered through his body, one he well recognized. It was the touch of a malakus upon his soul. He closed his eyes, swaying with sudden nausea, his mind screaming, Go away. But it would not stop. In the babble and confusion, no one saw him slowly drop to his knees.

  “What is this?” Tsar Peter roared hoarsely. “What attacks us?”

  “I do not know, Your Majesty,” Vasilisa replied coolly. “We are trying to discern that now.”

  Adrienne stepped grimly to the rail and set the air alight in a sheet that rolled, waving and down, stairs worn smooth by the feet of the gods. In it, they saw the rising forms of what might be jellyfish, if the air were ocean.

  “Balloons,” she said. “That’s why we didn’t see them. They are not scientific weapons at all.”

  “Balloons? Not scientific?”

  “They make no unnatural mark on the aether for the djinni to scent,” she explained.

  “Stop them.”

  “I’ve already begun,” Adrienne replied quietly.

  “It would seem that the Venetians had more fight in them than I thought,” the tsar admitted.

  “Yes,” Crecy agreed. “It would seem so.”

  “Your Majesty, we must fly higher,” Adrienne said.

  “Why?”

  “My science will work better from a height.” It was a lie, of course, but she was thinking of her son. What other nasty surprises did the Venetians have awaiting them?

  Meanwhile, her djinni, obedient as ever, followed her commands. Now that she knew what to look for, the balloons were clear enough: air ferments more agitated than the rest. Hot. It needed only to cool them a bit, and they would sink instead of rise.

  Red Shoes felt rather than heard the dull crump of distant explosions, but by then he already knew the attack had begun. The air was shrill with the noise of spirits—one-eyes, Lowaks, Shimoha—and somewhere, lurking, the thing that stalked him. For two days in darkness he had labored to make himself invisible, to stop the creatures from underneath from finding him. Now with so many shouting voices in the spirit world, it was easier.

  “Did you hear that?” Lenka asked.

  “I heard.”

  “What was it, you think?”

  “A bomb—maybe a cannon.”

  “Then attack is beginning.”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw them attack Prague—or part of it, after Sir Isaac let me out of the boat’s compartment. They to drop bombs from air, big bombs. I don’t think we safe.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he agreed. It was time to do something. In the first day, he had tried to melt his chains where they joined the wall, but the metal proved too conductive of heat. He might be able to stand the pain of red-hot irons on his hands and feet, but he would be in no shape to escape afterward—or even to free Lenka. He had been working at weakening the stone, but that had borne little fruit, especially as he had to be wary, recall his shadowchild each time he felt his enemy near.

  He had gradually—and reluctantly—formed a plan, but now it was probably too late to put into effect. He supposed he must try, however, or be here, helpless, when the sky began to rain thunder and fire and that horde of spirits he sensed no longer had anything to do save search for him. Further, he had taken a liking to Lenka, and wished her to live. He could not delay his own confrontation forever.

  And so he cut another shred of his shadow from himself and hesitated a moment, wondering who to make it for. Nairne? Tug? But they might be at sea, or otherwise unable to help. No, he knew who he would make it for, though he barely knew the man.

  But Lenka knew him well. And so he took the little taste of breath he had captured, the breath of Benjamin Franklin, wrapped it about a dream, and sent it away to find him. Gritting his teeth against the vacuum within, he tried to staunch the wound, bleed as little shadow as possible; and he waited for his enemy to come to the scent.

  Ben shuddered as the images poured through him, sickened, knowing they made no sense. He was pulled through a tunnel beneath the water, had a glimpse of a man’s face, of a canal and an alleyway, pain, remorse—Lenka’s voice. Speaking a language he did not know, but her voice. And somehow, in all that, the Indian who had vanished three days ago.

  He thought his head would split—worse than the worst hangover he had ever had—but he staggered to his feet to find Hassim. Mercifully, he found him quickly, gawking at the flames across the water.

  “Hassim,” he yelled. “Quickly! An alley, with a yellow sign. A yellow sign with a bee on it. Do you know where this is?”

  “Yes. Hassim believe he knows.”

  “Good. Take me there.”

  Where was Robert? He cast
about for his friend, but he was no longer near. And Ben didn’t have time to find him.

  A number of craft—small boats and gondolas—were moored about the ship. Ben gestured for Hassim to start down, and made to follow himself. A small sound warned him to turn.

  Blackbeard stood less than a yard away, pistol aimed between Ben’s eyes. “I missed y’ once.” He grinned. “But at this range I think there’s no question.”

  “Then shoot and be done with it,” Ben gritted. “For I’ve business to be about.”

  “Still the same stupid-tongued boy. And your smart trick with the longboat—that was nearly the end of me.”

  “You tried to kill me, remember? Did you think I would just let you row away?”

  Blackbeard chuckled. “I suppose I did. But I was a pirate then, and I’m a right legitimate captain now. So you tell me, why are you desertin’ my ship? So I’ll know what I’m killin’ you for.”

  Ben stared at the barrel an instant longer, and then very deliberately started for the rope ladder. “A friend of mine—and the Indian fellow that came with you—they’re being held hostage.”

  “I know. We got a letter about him.”

  “I know where they are.”

  “And y’r going to the rescue, all of your lonesome?”

  “Aye.” He was now four rungs down the ladder, and Blackbeard hadn’t fired. He looked up. “Captain Teach, if you don’t think you and I are even by now, that’s fine with me. But be man enough to let it go until I’ve done this.”

  Blackbeard made no other comment, but when Ben reached the boat and looked back up, Teach no longer stood at the rail.

  As Ben began to row, another ball of flame appeared in the sky, north. It looked as if the Russian ships had slowed, if not stopped. That was both good and bad; they had learned respect, but with it, caution. He only hoped this new caution would give him enough time to reach Venice, rescue Lenka, and return.

  A white ribbon of light as straight as a geometry lesson cracked against the black sky, wreathed a sky ship in an argent umbra. For an instant all Ben could think of was the old tale about Jack who went up a beanstalk.