“G’d rot it,” Ben cursed, but then caught himself. Though blackened and smoking, the envelope was not aflame. What’s more, with excruciating slowness, the Madman finally began to rise.
“Well done,” Charles shouted, barely audible over the roaring of guns.
“Aye, and thank you,” Ben replied. “And now all we have to do is find a wind to blow us to a Muscovite ship, invade her with our complement of eleven, and use her to blow the rest of these out of the sky.”
“No more than that,” Charles replied soberly.
Ben stared at the king, and it occurred to him that Charles of Sweden might be more insane than he was brave.
“Holy God,” Robert breathed, staring down. In rising they had just missed bumping into the descending Muscovite ship, and now it nearly eclipsed the Revenge. Even through the rainbow distortion of the aegis, they could see soldiers pouring over the rails. Above them and around them, the circle of flying ships closed like a noose around Venice.
Charles stood, despite the swinging of the boat.
“We are invisible to them?” he asked.
“Barely visible, I should say,” Ben replied.
Charles held a finger in the air, shook his head, and turned instead to watch the smoke below. “They sail against the wind and we with it,” he murmured. “And so we should meet one of them. A most happy circumstance indeed. Keep near the harpoons, men.”
Ben settled the drake firmly on the deck and turned to arm himself from the small arsenal on board, wondering what sort of circumstance Charles would not find “happy.” He supposed it would be one with no risk of painful death.
Red Shoes tightened his finger on the trigger at the same moment that Long Black Being flashed toward him, and for one instant feared he would not be quick enough. Perhaps he would not have been, save that something—a sort of silvery needle—appeared, impaling the monster, slowing it fractionally while he squeezed the trigger. The prime hissed in the pan and he understood that he had drawn his last breath. Then something slapped him—hard—the gun exploded, and for an instant he heard music before his head thudded against the wall.
At first, he thought his body was shuddering, the way he had seen a deer shudder when shot, but then he realized that someone was shaking him. His ghost vision faded, and he saw Tug’s ugly face an inch from his own. Something burned along the side of his head, before the dream drew him back to Nanih Waiyah, to the swamp.
The Long Black Being was gathering itself up to strike, but not at him. Rather, its target was an old man, all in black and white. He stood straight but noticeably shaking, a thin line of blood trickling down his face. He held something bright in his hand, like a star with long rays.
Cotton Mather. Red Shoes could hear him praying, both with his real ears and with those of his shadow.
“Deceiver!” the reverend shrieked, as the monster laughed at him and attacked; and again the strange turbulence of shadow combat. How had Mather, a white man, learned to do this thing, to impress his substance into the ghost realm? He remembered the preacher’s talk of witches and science, of the “invisible world” and its nature. Had Mather been shown the way here by his God or his Science? Or were they the same, after all? However he had gotten here, two things were clear: He had somehow harmed the Long Black Being—and he was losing the battle.
Red Shoes balled up what little strength remained in him, crushed it down, concentrated it with anger until it flamed, emptying more and more of himself, becoming a cave of flesh. All of his shadowchildren, Kwanakasha he had imprisoned so long ago—all gone, save one bright point of life, burning so fiercely now it could last only moments before his soul and shadow shook free. It was the worst and the best thing he had ever known, anguish and rapture bound so tightly he could not tell them apart. In that moment, he saw what he could do. As the Long Black Being fell again upon the faltering Mather, Red Shoes stepped up and swallowed it as it had swallowed Kwanakasha, filled himself with it, and then tightened, tightened, before it could understand what he had done.
When it understood, it was like a wildcat inside him, trying to chew out; but he constricted himself, his shadow swelling with stolen strength. He crushed the places where its awful dark thoughts crawled, until they went out, one by one, like the embers of a fire. Until its soul was dead and its shadow was his.
It seemed like years had passed, but Tug still had hold of him. He was crushed against the big man’s chest, and the pirate was weeping. “Tug …” he managed. “I can’t breathe.”
Tug thrust him back, his eyes widening. “Y’r alive!”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You shot yerself in the damned head, y’ idyot! If I hadn’t a’ slapped you, the ball would a gone straight into y’r teeny Indian brain ’stead o’ scootin’ along yer skull like so.” He tapped a scorch mark along Red Shoes’ scalp.
They were still in the place where he and Lenka had been held. Fernando stood by nervously, cutlass drawn. Two other men—Nairne and a young Janissary—stood over Mather’s body.
“How did you come here?”
“I heard that Boston boy talking to the cap’n. Told ’im you was held here. We followed Franklin as best we could, but he lost us in the canals till we heard the gunfire. We came around the corner an’ found some fellows in a boat. Killed all but one, but he told us what we wanted to know.”
“Thank you, Tug.”
The big man shifted, embarrassed. “Han’t like I don’t owe you a turn or two. Hell, all the boys feel that way.”
“Mather?”
“Damned if he didn’t insist on comin’. He kept jabbering about Satan an’ angels and whatnot.”
“Let me over to him.”
Mather’s eyes were open, but he didn’t seem to see much. When Red Shoes took his hand, he understood the touch and squeezed, hard.
“I defeated it?” he managed.
“Yes, Reverend.”
“I feel such despair.”
“It will pass. I did not know you had such power.”
“No one is pure, no one perfectly good.” Mather gasped. “Jesus Christ knows my sins. He knows I let myself be deceived. For all of my talk, it was my own desire …” His pupils were pinpricks. He turned his eyes upward to the dark ceiling, or perhaps the heaven he envisioned beyond.
“The invisible world has always been my armor against doubt,” he whispered. “It is the unseen that gives faith. If there are devils, there must be a God, and if there are evil angels, then good ones as well. So I thought, though my church does not preach it. But I could not believe, you see, that the angels of light had all left the Earth. I fasted, and I prayed, and the good angel came to me.”
His breath whistled harshly for several moments.
“Jesus,” breathed Tug.
“Yes, Jesus,” Mather whispered. “The angel said it had been sent by Jesus, to answer my questions, to defend me against the devils. They killed my child, the demons did—I proved it scientifically, you see, I knew they incited against me. I fasted, and I prayed.…”
“It was with you all along, hidden in you, hidden in your skin.” Red Shoes understood. As it was now hidden in his, albeit on different terms. The sheer power, to disguise itself in the very shadow of a man.
“It is gone now.”
“It told me.…” He blinked, slowly, like a tired lizard, his voice very queer, “Behold, he was a Cedar in Lebanon, with fair branches, and with a shadowing shroud, and his top among the thick bows.”
Red Shoes noticed the device curled in Mather’s hand. It was difficult to tell what it was, since black, cracked fingers stuck to it. “And this? In your hand?” he asked softly.
“God showed me the way,” Mather answered faintly. “Through science. In my experiments with the girls afflicted, I discovered that the evil spirits could be rendered scientifically sensible, and, moreover, affected through the medium of the philosopher’s mercury.” He gasped. “I think I will see my lord Jesus soon,” he finished,
and then, weeping, “but no, for I was deceived. I was taken in by a devil. Ah, God, forgive my pride.” He gurgled, and then, almost singing, he said, “The waters made him great, the Deep set him up on high with rivers running about his plants. His height—his height was—exalted—” His back suddenly arched high, and spittle flew from his mouth. “Oh, God, I see—I see—” He sounded terrified.
“If I were stronger—” Red Shoes began. In fact, he could feel a deep, hard power in him, but it was nothing he knew how to use. He could not help Mather as the old man’s face slackened and his eyes dulled. “Heaven?” he mumbled, and then a slurred mewling.
“What’s wrong with ’im?” Tug asked in hushed tones.
“He is dead,” Red Shoes answered.
“He still breathes!” Tug grunted.
Red Shoes shrugged. “He is dead, I promise you. The only mercy now is to free him from his body.”
Tug looked uneasy. “I don’t know …”
“Look away,” Red Shoes whispered, realizing that he was weeping. “I will do it, and I will make it quick.”
And so he did.
12.
The Tears of God
Ben fired the drake back up the envelope, cursing himself for not realizing that the little furnaces did not produce enough hot air for rapid rising. If he had thought of the drake earlier, it might have been mounted, sparing him singed eyebrows and all of them the danger of conflagration. He also wished there had been time enough to test the vehicle and practice in it; it was most difficult to gauge the effect of the drake-warmed air. Whereas he had meant to continue their ascent at a steady rate, his last firing of the flaming weapon had sent them bolting upward, making it clear that they would not pass close enough to their intended target, a rather small airship on their right.
“Never mind, anyway.” Charles grunted, waving at the higher sky. “I’ll wager that the loftiest is also the command ship. The tsar’s ship. Steer us there.”
“The problem, sir, is in the lack of steering,” Ben remarked. “We can climb—and fall as the air cools—but otherwise we suffer the vagaries of the wind.”
“We need only come near enough to sink in a harpoon,” Charles noted. “Some sixty yards. Can you manage that?”
Ben gauged the distance. If they rose just a tiny bit faster, it might be possible. He fired the drake again, trying not to think of what would happen should he be successful. “I’m sorry, Lenka,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I’ve taken you from one fire to the next.”
She shook her hair back. Her face was drawn and pale in the morning light, but her eyes held an unmistakable excitement. “Never mind, Benjamin, for I’m guessing that there is no safe place right now.” She smiled wryly.
“Just you keep your head low, Lenka, for I’ve no desire to have your being hurt on my conscience.”
“My, how my life has changed since meeting you,” she murmured.
“For better or for worse?”
She laughed and replied, “For richer and for poorer.”
Ben had an even wittier reply, but he lost it as the Russian ships suddenly filled the sky and the Madman rocked from the recoil of her three-harpoon-gun broadside.
“I keep losing it,” Adrienne complained.
“It distorts the aether,” Vasilisa said. “Doesn’t it?”
“Aether, light, gravity—all wrap around and vanish. My djinni cannot retain sight of it.”
“Sir Isaac had such a device,” Vasilisa said, “but I was never able to examine it. Do you even roughly know where it might be?”
“In the air,” Adrienne confirmed. “Whatever it is, in the air, I … Did you feel that?”
“Yes.” Crecy grunted. “Something struck our hull.”
The tsar began bellowing orders in Russian, and musketeers came along the rails. Adrienne was a bit taken aback at how few troops seemed actually to be on the flagship, but reflected that it did make a sort of sense. They expected to be safe, far above the action, while the bulk of the men were needed for the ground assault. But nothing seemed to have gone in accordance with the tsar’s plans, and she feared that this was no exception.
Something bounced violently from the deck next to her, a musket. She stared at it for an instant before looking up. She saw two ropes standing up from the side of the ship, fastened to thin air.
The soldiers around her made this out at more or less the same moment, and suddenly the muzzles of muskets, pistols, kraftpistoles, and murder guns all began to shout heavenward, and the sky cracked open.
* * *
The harpoons bit and the balloon continued to rise, swinging them over the prow and yanking the Madman so that her deck was halfway to vertical. Ben hung on and gaped; fifty feet below him lay the deck of the Russian ship, soldiers lining its rails. Quite near, strangely, were three women: a redhead and two brunettes. One of the brunettes seemed familiar.
Then someone—one of the Swedes—cursed, and a musket dropped for what seemed like a long time to the deck of the ship below.
“Ready?” Charles asked.
He was answered by Muscovite guns. The ship’s aegis held a few seconds, and then suddenly flashed white and was gone. Ben had the presence of mind to activate his own, hoping Robert had done the same as the balloon shredded apart above them, and they dropped laconically toward the deck.
He turned to Lenka, saw the blood, and realized that she, of course, had no aegis at all.
As they crashed into the Russian deck, Charles managed to fire the murder gun, and Ben saw perhaps ten of the green-uniformed men collapse in the mist of molten metal. He drew his own kraftpistole and began to fire, screaming.
Brick and tile fell like rain, the flesh and bone of Venice, chewed and spit up by Russian bombs. The air shuddered with what seemed a single explosion gone on and on. The airships had reached Venice at last, and they were making her pay for her resistance. Red Shoes hardly cared. Better that such a place never existed; better it return to the deeps.
The Venetians had a different opinion, that was clear. From every wall and rooftop, the Janissaries fired cannon, pistol, musket, murder gun, firedrake, kraftpistole, and even crossbow, to no obvious effect. The ships dropping the bombs came in high, though some could now be seen approaching at lower altitudes, presumably so that they could disgorge ground troops in the areas already bombed clear of resistance.
“God almighty,” Tug shouted, pointing across the water.
It was the Prophet. One of the airships sat practically on her mast, and her deck swarmed with green figures. Red Shoes made out Blackbeard, fighting on the forecastle, shrugging men off him right and left.
“Faster,” Tug urged. “We have to get there.”
Red Shoes wearily felt for the ax at his belt, wondering how long he would last. At least he would die in battle, and not as Mather had.
As they drew nearer, their hearts sank. The surviving crew of the Prophet and their Janissary allies—perhaps ten men—had drawn into a clump near Blackbeard. The pirate was streaked and spotted scarlet from head to toe, but there was no telling how much of it was his own blood. While they watched, the giant staggered as a pistol was fired into his chest, point-blank. His bellow was audible, even at that distance. Teach decapitated the offending attacker, and then, as if not content with the place he had chosen to die, suddenly began charging forward. Those with him fell in behind him, cheering, and for an instant they made headway, cutting a steady, bloody lane through the sea of attackers. But where were they going? To the side of the ship, to jump overboard?
Nairne understood first.
“The fervefactum!” he gasped.
“The what?” Red Shoes asked.
“It’s hanging beside the poopdeck there, you see? Covered with a cloth.”
Red Shoes wanted to ask what a fervefactum was; but at that moment, Nairne stood, aimed, and fired his pistol. Tug and Fernando followed his example.
“Go, Cap’n!” Tug shouted. “Go, ye great, bloody bull!”
/>
The fighting converged on the tarp-covered device, swirled in confusion for a moment, and then stopped, rather suddenly, when every man on the ship suddenly fell to the deck as if their legs had been cut from under them. A hundred inhumanly tortured cries rose up beneath the belly of the Russian ship.
“A siege weapon,” Nairne muttered, voice shaking, “It boils blood. We loaded her on board last night.”
“For what?” Red Shoes asked, staring at the shipful of dying men. “It kills all alike.”
“We had a different plan—Mother of God.”
A shuddering figure had arisen from the dead and dying, smoke from the matches in his hair and beard mingling with the steam rising from eyes and mouth. He swung his cutlass once, twice. Two of the cables holding the massive machine slackened, and for an instant it remained, slanting, on the persistent restraints. Then a third cable snapped, a fourth—the rest, and it plunged into the water.
“Oh, God, hold tight,” Nairne said.
And then the sea itself seemed to lift from her bed, throwing herself in a boiling column, up through the Revenge, up through the Russian ship. Red Shoes had time to see the airship spin and flip completely over before the bottom bloom of shock and steam struck the longboat back toward burning Venice like the fist of a thunder god.
“Tsar!” Charles shouted. “Tsar!” Lightning crackled from his unseen kraftpistole, igniting three green uniforms. Ben stood straddling Lenka’sbody. His own kraftpistole had given up the ghost after four shots, its supply of catalyst exhausted. Now he jabbed his sword viciously into the chest of an approaching Russian. The young man looked astonished and horrified, struck as he had been by an unseen ghost. Somehow angered by that pitiful expression, Ben ran him through the heart and watched him fall.
A Calculus of Angels Page 41