The Russians had discovered his kites.
* * *
Adrienne saw the flash of light for what it was.
“That was a kraftpistole,” she said. “I’ve seen them fired before; this is the same.”
“Impossible,” Peter snarled. “No kraftpistole has that range.”
“That one did, Captain,” Adrienne said quietly. “And that,” as another flash erupted. She wished she could see the actual stream of the bolt—something seemed strange about it. Another lit, and another.
“Damn!” the tsar stormed. “It’s like a wall.” His face worked furiously. “I’ve been too hasty,” he muttered. “Give the order to fall back!” he shouted over his shoulder. “We’ve let them guide us into their traps—No more. Night is doing them more a service than us. We’ll rise high and finish this in the dawn. The hell with Venice. I’ve given them their chance.”
His face wrenched itself grotesquely as lightning struck again, again, again.
10.
Canals
The gondola rippled through the still water as if through some stygian pool, some dark and narrow place beneath the earth. The sphere of lanthorn light was bounded by walls and darkness, the glittering red eyes of rats, larger movements that might be merely shadows and might be something more sinister. Ben reminded himself of Lenka—kidnapped, hidden away, possibly tortured or already dead. He needed that thought, that frustration and anger, to inspire his body when exhaustion, the leaking wound in his chest, the battering he had taken at the Divan, and three days without sleep all conspired to drag him to defeat.
“How the lightning?” Hassim asked.
“What?”
“I know about balloons—float up, explode like mines on the ocean. But lightning?”
“Oh.” Ben grunted. “Kites. Kites can fly very high, and the people of Venice make good kites.”
“Yes. You should see festival—many kites, and very beautiful. I saw the men go with kites in their gondolas.”
Ben nodded, remembering the sight. Hundreds of the slender craft, dispersing across the dusky lagoon, kites rising in the sea breeze.
“The string we treated with a kind of iron,” Ben continued. “Tie the point of a kraftpistole to the string and fire it, and then—um, lightning—runs up the string to the ships. You see?” The problem had been getting enough kraftpistoles. Only seventy had been found—or rather, relinquished. These had been given to the fastest gondoliers, that they might take them where needed.
A fragile plan—all of it improvised, contingent on the cooperation of too many people. And yet, it had borne fruit, the more so because the Russians had attacked at night. It had been Charles who had guessed that would happen. He understood the tactical mind of the tsar and his generals better than any man alive—any enemy, that is.
Ben realized that it had been some time since he had heard the crack or boom of combat, and wondered what that meant. Retreat? Victory? How soon before Venice began to shatter around him?
He hoped the Russians meant to spare the city. What use a city in ruins? But the tsar was undoubtedly angry by now, and his anger was legendary.
“Here,” Hassim murmured, as they came around a corner.
Even by lanthorn light, he recognized the yellow sign of the bee, and that renewed his conviction.
Now what? He closed his eyes, remembering. Water, suffocating him, a rope. Ben’s eyes flew wide as it came back with sudden force. He felt his lungs squeezing smaller and smaller, panic rising.…
“No!” he muttered angrily. He was not afraid of swimming, below the water or upon it. Even as a boy, he had been the strongest swimmer he knew; and in Prague, he had taught lessons in swimming. Why these feelings?
But he knew the answer. They were not his feelings at all, but those of whatever malakus had assaulted him. Of course, that meant that he might be walking—or, it seemed, swimming—into a trap.
It didn’t matter. Too many people had suffered or died in his wake: his brother, parents, John Collins, Sarah Chant, the archduchess. At seventeen, the list was already too long. At that rate even the high worth he placed on his own skin would require outside moneys to justify.
He stripped off his coat, waistcoat, shirt; unbuckled his shoes and lay them in the bottom of the boat; and then shucked his stockings. “If I do not return soon, Hassim, go tell the others where I went.”
“Where did you went?” Hassim asked, clearly puzzled.
Ben pointed at the water.
“Ah. Hassim go with you.”
It came to him that he had not been thinking of Hassim as a person, but as a sort of thing—a Turk he could talk to. Hassim’s limited fluency in English helped that impression, filtering out many of the nuances that made a person unique. Now Ben suddenly saw the great hope, fear, need of the boy; and it came as a shock.
An epiphany he did not need right now.
“Do you know the way underwater?”
“No,” Hassim admitted.
“Then I would rather you stayed here, to bring word should I be killed or captured.”
“Hassim cannot be Janissary like his father,” the boy said, trying to sound fierce, “but he can help!”
“You have helped me, and will help more if you wait.”
Hassim looked uncertain, but Ben had no more time. He had done what he could. If the boy followed him now and got himself killed, it was no longer Ben’s fault. He eased himself into the canal. The water was cold and dirty, repellent; but he took the lanthorn, a deep breath, and kicked downward, letting the “memory” guide him.
The first two dives he found nothing, but on the third, he located a cracked and crumbled place in the building, well below the waterline. The lanthorn light did not carry very far into the breach, but it appeared to be a low-roofed room, full of water. Perhaps it had once been a cellar. Had the sea risen or the building sunk? He went back up, gasped deeply for air, and then dove again, kicking in through the hole, hoping he chose the right direction—that there was a right direction.
Adrienne rocked Nico, awaiting the dawn, trying not to wonder which of the ships Hercule had been on. He had taken most of the men from Lorraine, leaving her a guard of five. She remembered giving them her blessing, remembered the ridiculous trust they placed in her; and her heart felt cold.
In the hours since falling back, they had discovered that six ships had either been destroyed or damaged so badly by fire and blast as to be useless. Losses had been great, especially on the packed infantry carriers. That left sixteen ships in the windborne fleet; and so, despite everything, the tsar was still confident of victory. Victory would mean little to Hercule if he were on one of the lost ships.
It would mean even less if something happened to Nico, but in the small hours of the morning, she had turned her thoughts to providing for that. “Here, little darling,” she whispered to her son. “I want you to do something for me.”
He looked guilelessly up at her, seeming attentive. She took him over to a large wicker hamper—one of the smaller ones used to pull food and supplies up from the ground. She had modified it a bit: four iron wires wove through it like lines of longitude on a globe, forming a sort of dome above. “I need you to stay in this basket, Nico. Can you do that? I will be near, and Crecy, and your nurse. But you must stay in the basket.”
He blinked at her and smiled, which she decided would do for a yes, but resolved to have Crecy keep an eye on him.
“Some protection for Nico?” Crecy asked, emerging from the shadows aft.
“Yes. I’ve set four djinn about it—I’ve shown them the iron and they can see that. They will deflect bullet and flame, lightning—anything else I could think of. Should the ship fall, they will bear him down gently to the earth.” She pursed her lips. “It is not good, but it’s the best I can think of.”
Crecy mussed the boy’s hair. “You’ve your own airship, now, Nico! What do you think?”
“La loon,” the boy replied, quite seriously.
&nbs
p; “I should hope it won’t fly that high,” Crecy answered fondly. “Now, be a good fellow, and soon enough we’ll be living as dukes and duchesses in the Muscovy land.”
“Yes indeed,” Adrienne answered. “You shall have a room of your own, and toys, and when you’re old enough, a pony.…” He looked so fragile, sitting there in that basket, and for an instant she felt a surge of panic. Trying to push it down, she turned to Crecy. “I’ve solved the mystery of the lightning bolts,” she said.
“Oh?”
“The conducting strands are borne aloft by kites. Like the balloons, they write no unusual sign in the aether for me or Karevna to read.”
“You have to admire them,” Crecy said. “Who would have thought of such things?”
Adrienne crooked a little smile. “I like to think I would have. What I wonder is why Vasilisa and the other philosophers gave no thought to such countermeasures.”
“They have not encountered them before. As I say, who would think a balloon or a kite might be a weapon?”
“Anyone thinking clearly, knowing an attack was coming from the sky.”
Crecy shook her head. “No. Men have been thinking on how to wage war by land and sea for many thousands of years, and that many years of contemplation wears deep ruts. Look, even, at this amazing fleet. With ships that can move at will through the very air, why would the tsar sweep in from the most obvious direction? Why in a single front? The maneuvers are still naval maneuvers, though there are a thousand better uses for a fleet like this. Why attack at night, when balloons and kites could go unseen?” She shook her head. “No, the sort of ingenuity we see below us is rare.”
Adrienne shrugged. “I prefer to think you exaggerate. At any rate, I’m sure the tsar will shift tactics now.”
“It’s still misty below?”
“Yes. I believe that small boats are constantly renewing the mist.”
Nico pointed at something in the darkness and laughed.
“I hope I’m doing the right thing,” Adrienne said softly, studying her son’s face.
“I can think of no better plan,” Crecy said.
“Nor I. But thus far I have failed.”
“Ah, but you have done more than Karevna. The balloons and kites, at least, are no longer a threat—thanks to you, not to her. The tsar will remember.”
Adrienne shrugged. “My concern now is with the survival of my son and friends, not with the tsar’s grace.”
The east was graying, and the highest clouds powdering themselves pink. The battle would begin again, soon, and because of her, men would die. Listening to Nico’s soft cooing, she found that she could accept that, so long as the right people lived.
Ben tunneled through the murk, feeling more like a mole than a fish, the lanthorn grasped in his teeth. Finding his way was easier than he thought; the rope in his vision was not there, but the marks where it had lain in the muck were clear. At the end of that wormy trail he would find Lenka, he was certain.
By the time he reached the end of the marks, he still had breath to spare, if not much. The problem was that the track led to what looked like a cellar door.
A closed cellar door.
For an instant he hesitated; he might just barely be able to make it back to the canal. What if the door were locked from the other side?
He pushed on it, gently, but it stayed firm. He shoved harder. Now his lungs were starting to hurt, and he knew he had forfeited his chance to go back. Fighting panic—both his own and that which he had been poisoned with—he let drop the lanthorn, braced his back beneath the slanted doorway, steadied his feet on the step below him, and pushed with all his might. Black spots appeared in his eyes, and now his panic became all his, running out from his aching lungs, strengthening him as he strained once more.
More than a little rotten, the wood tore, and he burst up through it and another foot of water and was breathing again. The air was sweet, but not so sweet that he did not notice a man, some thirty feet away, pop-eyed and gaping in the flickering light, raising a pistol.
Snarling, Ben drew his sword and threw it, following it as fast as he could, water sucking at his legs. The man—seated on a small stool—cursed and scrambled away from flying steel, lost his balance and fell to one knee. The smallsword spanged against the wall behind him, and though he kept his pistol, he did not manage to get it back around in time to meet Ben’s charge. Ben crashed into him, and the two of them smacked into the wall, the guard getting the worst of it. Ben got a brief impression of a roundish face and the stink of wine, felt the stranger’s hard muscles writhe beneath him before the gun clubbed against the side of his head. Yowling, he jerked back, and a hand fastened onto the front of his face, clawing at his eyes. He punched weakly at his opponent’s gut, and then, as nails dug around his eye sockets, drove a right fist into the fellow’s throat. The claw on his face slackened, and Ben hit him again so hard that it felt as if his hand were broken. The man let go completely then, and Ben scrambled up. Seeing his opponent still trying to rise, Ben kicked him hard, once in the side of the head and once in the ribs.
The guard stopped moving, though he continued to breathe, and Ben spun wildly around, feeling a hundred other pistols aimed at him. But there were no other guards, and no place for them to hide either, and so he relaxed and finally let himself glance at the two figures chained to the far wall, a man and a woman.
“Lenka?” he said. “Lenka?” She was manacled with hands behind her back, blindfolded. The Indian was next to her, contorting, trying to get his feet up and through his arms so that his hands would be in front of him.
“Benjamin? Benjamin, is that you?”
He rushed over and nearly collapsed next to her, tugging the cloth from her eyes, stroking her hair. “Are you hurt? Lenka, did they hurt you?”
Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair bedraggled, her face smudged with dirt. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “No,” she said. “No, Benjamin, I’m well. We have to hurry. There are more of these men.”
“Lenka, I—I’m very glad to see you.”
“And I you. But quickly!”
Ben nodded, a little chagrined, wondering where that perfect thing to say had gone. He returned to the guard and searched him, discovering a ring of keys in his coat pocket. He hurried back and tried them in Lenka’s manacles until one fit and reluctantly turned. She shook her hands free, groaning.
“Thank you,” she managed.
“Lenka—”
“Red Shoes,” she muttered, crawling toward the Indian. She removed his blindfold, revealing haggard, dark eyes.
“Merci,” he mumbled, and then to Ben, “Many thanks. You are a brave man.”
“I told you we would be freed,” Lenka said, squeezing the Indian’s hand.
Ben snapped out of his paralysis and unshackled Red Shoes.
“I am sorry for any discomfort I may have caused you,” the Indian said, stretching his arms and trying to rise.
Ben stared at him without comprehension for a second, and then gaped. “You! You sent me the vision.”
“Yes. I hoped you would understand.”
“But how— ”
“Please,” Lenka said. “Please, talk later.”
“Aye,” Ben said. “Lenka, can you swim?”
“She is weak,” Red Shoes said. “You must help her.”
“And you?” But the vision surged through Ben again, and he knew that the Indian could not swim.
“I will follow you.”
“But you can’t—”
“I will follow you,” Red Shoes insisted, his black eyes sparkling. “The rope is still there?”
“Yes.”
“Take her, then.”
Ben nodded. “I can come back and help you, too.”
“No need.”
Ben nodded and hurried to retrieve his sword. He eyed the gun, but saw no point in carrying it with him through the water. Besides, he had a pistol in the boat.
“Come on, then,” he
said to Lenka. “Hold around my neck.”
She nodded, and they entered the water again. His fight with the guard had given him a febrile new strength, but it was now flagging, and he found even Lenka’s slight form a burden, though one he bore gladly.
They came up, gasping, in the dark of the canal.
“Hassim!” he hissed.
“Here,” came the answer, and a slender hand closed on his own. Treading water, he helped Hassim draw Lenka into the boat and then painfully dragged himself in, too, nearly upsetting the gondola. For a long moment, he could only lie back and draw labored breath.
“We go now?” Hassim asked.
“No,” Ben managed, “one more coming.”
“Yes, and someone there, too,” Hassim said, gesturing. Down where another canal connected with the one they were in, the corner of a building was visible, illumined by an approaching light.
“Shh,” Ben hissed, feeling around for his pistol. He found it, wishing he had enough light to check the prime, and cocked back the hammer. A moment later, two gondolas came around the corner, lanthorns dangling from their jutting, ornamental prows. For an instant, his heart seized as it had when the Golem touched it, for beneath their black tricorns, the faces of the passengers were bone white with almost no features.
“That’s them,” Lenka gasped, even as the masked men began shouting. Ben did not know Italian, but he knew a curse when he heard one, and now he heard a string of them. He also noted them reaching into their dark cloaks.
“Hold!” Ben shouted, standing in the rocking craft, pistol pointed at the closest man, a fellow with a red plume in his hat that Ben guessed to be some mark of distinction. “Hassim, translate!”
“No translation is necessary,” one of the masked men said.
“Well enough. Let me tell you who I am. I am Benjamin Franklin from Boston, the apprentice of Sir Isaac Newton, and I am the one with gun already drawn. You, sir—” he said, waving at a fellow in the back, shadowed, who seemed to be moving stealthily, “if you please, do not move, or I shall be forced to kill you.”
A Calculus of Angels Page 39