by D. J. Butler
This might be a problem for her.
“There is a second sorcerer,” she told her fellow magicians on the wall. “He lurks near the cross.”
Hooke’s presence alone made her nervous; she had struggled enough to defeat him the last time, and had done so by ambushing him. The presence of a second sorcerer like Hooke ratcheted that nervousness into pure fear.
The wall was their target. Sarah believed that if she punched a hole—or at least, a big enough hole—in the wall of fire, the whole thing would collapse. She also hoped that the attack would shake her besiegers loose enough to allow some messengers through.
It had been a hard decision, whether to launch the attack at night—when the Imperial militia would have a harder time shooting at messengers—or by day—when the walking dead seemed generally to stay in their ditches. Sarah had chosen the latter.
No one had gainsaid her.
Sarah’s cannons were prepared to fire to give support to the messengers. Sir William also had escorts of beastkind warriors ready to race ahead of the messengers. He suggested the beastkind for the mission because they were faster on foot than any of the children of Adam in the city, which made tactical sense to Sarah.
She didn’t ask whether he regarded them as more expendable, or in some sense desirable to take as casualties early on, before their oath to Sarah could really be tested.
They had to make the attempt today. The Imperial forces were larger each successive dawn.
“Please, Maltres,” she said. “For the last time, I beg you. If you stand here, you may be hurt.”
“Beloved, I will refuse you very few things in this life.” Maltres Korinn smiled, the unexpected curve to the lips breaking the harsh, pitted look of his face. “Today I do not leave your side.”
“Nor I,” Yedera said, standing to her other side. The Podebradan had become a more constant presence in Sarah’s life as Sarah had spent more and more time with Alzbieta Torias, until one day she found that when Alzbieta left, Yedera stayed with Sarah.
“Very well, then,” she said, and she nodded down the line at her magical corps. “Begin.”
Sherem had gathered every magician in the city he’d mentioned to Sarah and discovered a few more, to boot. He stood at the end of the line to Sarah’s right, still unable to cast a spell, but unwilling to leave, as was Alzbieta Torias, who stood at the left of the line.
All three of her witnesses, then. So be it.
Sherem had also agreed to act as Sarah’s eye. Sarah had taken a tiny amount of consecrated lamp oil from the temple’s stores—the oil that illuminated the lamps in the complex beneath the temple, and that would, with additional sanctification, be used in the right circumstances to light the lamps on the Serpent Throne—and anointed both their eyes.
“Visionem coniungo.”
Her vision was a complex overlay of three plates. She had grown accustomed to seeing through her natural eye and her Eye of Eve simultaneously, but now a third layer was what she saw out of Sherem’s eye. It was slightly different from the view through her natural eye, being placed a hundred feet to the side.
Sherem leaned on a musket. A horn of powder hung at his side.
Stretching to either side of Sarah were the wizards: priests and priestesses, retainers of wealthy families, and scholars. Every wizard Sherem could find in Cahokia except Luman Walters.
The Imperial magician had volunteered, and Sarah had turned him down. He looked honest, but she didn’t know whether he was dependable. And moreover, he’d called himself a hedge wizard. What would he really contribute to her plan?
The plan was three-part. Too many parts, Sir William warned her, would doom a plan to failure, but these three seemed necessary.
Her part came first. To employ a chess metaphor, she must tempt her opponent by exposing her queen.
Which was to say, herself.
Exposing, not sacrificing.
“Robert Hooke!” she cried. “I have had enough of your wall! Come out and do battle!” She willed a little energy into her voice and amplified it, shouting audibly across the entire Imperial camp.
Curiously, she felt energy flow into her from her right and left.
From her witnesses, it seemed. So perhaps their presence would be useful, after all.
Another Beloved, centuries earlier, had challenged the Philistines’ best man to single combat. David had won, but God had been with him, or at least that’s the way Samuel told it. And if not God, then serious luck.
Was God with Sarah? Or the goddess?
Or luck?
The Imperials heard her. She saw faces turning in her direction, eyes rising to stare.
“Come on, Hooke!” she shouted. “Arrogant bastard like you, you must be sore after I caught you out for a gump and shipped you off downriver! Let’s settle this! Come on out, and I’ll stuff you down your own lizard hole with that ugly hat pulled down around your uglier face!”
She could see him clearly by his aura, watching her from behind the flap of a large tent. After a moment’s hesitation he stalked forward, crossing through the black flame to stand on bare snowy ground, just behind the Imperial trenches.
I hear thy mewling hiccup, serpentspawn! Hooke roared into her mind. And then the full weight of his amber sea of death fell upon her.
* * *
“Fire!” Jaleta Zorales shouted.
BOOM!
Cannons all along the wall went off. They had been modestly reinforced by the big guns from the west side of the Treewall, which had been dragged around under cover of darkness. Maltres forced out of his mind the possibility that the beastkind prowling the Mississippi might seize this opportunity to attack, or might simply be provoked to frenzy by the violence of the guns. It was a calculated risk.
The guns all lay aimed at the thickest knots of besiegers, nearest the roads. Korinn watched cannonballs plow into the dirt, bounce, and slam into the Imperial ranks. He saw a squad of militiamen behind a wooden barricade torn apart as two balls flew through their ranks. The men themselves exploded. Bits of bone and shattered rifle flew in all directions, inflicting further damage.
He didn’t feel the slightest compassion for the dead men. They had brought this on themselves with their unlawful marauding and their wickedness.
This was not to be a sustained cannonade. Cahokia didn’t have the powder and shot for that. It needed to conserve resources against the possibility of further battles. Three shots, that was the plan.
Behind the Imperial lines, Notwithstanding Schmidt rode back and forth, shouting commands. Perhaps Jaleta should have laid at least one gun pointing at the director’s tent?
Crisply following Zorales’s shouted commands, echoed by subordinates directing the fire on the south and north walls, the former Pitchers—now the Cahokia Cannon Corps—reloaded.
Maltres signaled to his two servants below. He’d explained the plan to the Podebradan, and they now locked eyes.
Thirty feet below, Maltres’s men—a valet and a butler, two thirds of the total household staff he lived with here in the city, since most of his people were at home in Na’avu, where he would rather be as well—brought forward a net. It was the same net he’d used to arrest Uris, Alzbieta’s counselor who planned her political position and managed her household while she thought of priestly matters.
Uris was dead, in part due to Maltres’s miscalculations and mistakes.
Four wardens met Maltres’s two servants and the six of them held the net ready. A seventh man stood by with a blanket that had been sewn to Korinn’s very particular instructions.
Yedera nodded.
“Fire!” BOOM!
The three gates of the Treewall dropped.
A horn blew from the Great Mound. Alzbieta had objected to the impiety of directing an assault from the goddess’s temple mount, saying it was a violation of ancient law. Maltres had joined Sir William in pointing out that the peak of the mound was the single best vantage point in Cahokia for seeing all three sallies, more
or less from the same spot, arguing that the law might in this case be stretched. Atop the roof of the Temple of the Sun would have been even better, slightly, but even Maltres balked at that thought.
So had Sir William. Captain—no, General Lee—had suggested the rooftop himself, but then withdrawn the idea, saying, “But perhaps, Your Majesty…that’s just a little bit more than the law will allow.”
Alzbieta had looked prepared to dispute the point further, but Sarah had intervened at that point, directing Sir William to use the mound. She had a strange knack for impieties, the Beloved. It set her apart, although Maltres Korinn was hard pressed to articulate exactly why. Perhaps her will to trample sacred traditions and her ability to get away with it marked her as favored of the goddess? Perhaps her success in trampling the rules showed that she had a strong grasp of what was truly impious and what was merely conventional?
Perhaps Maltres simply wanted to believe that Sarah was doing right. Perhaps he wanted someone else to take on all the burdens of administration and leadership, so he could go home.
Sarah’s beastkind warriors charged out all three gates. Immediately, a thicket of guns rose before each gate, and a tight volley exploded into the beastkind. Sarah’s warriors were fearsome and huge, but they began to fall.
Had the Imperials been waiting for such a sortie?
Had they been warned?
Responding to the same signal horn, riflemen along the walls leaned forward into position. At that moment, the rest of the Imperials returned fire. Farther down the line, Maltres saw first one warden, and then a second, take a musketball and fall wounded.
None of the magicians were shot. All of them had closed eyes and chanted Latin together except Sarah, who was feverishly mumbling incoherent syllables, locked in her own invisible battle, and two wizards from one of the kingdom’s noble houses who waved their hands in front of each other repeatedly and shouted.
They were protecting the magicians.
Behind the beastkind came the riders. For the moment, they ran alongside their horses, staying low to minimize the chances that an Imperial musketball might abruptly end their commission.
Beastkind dropped here and there, too, shot by besieging rifles. As the beastkind reached the Imperial lines, the riflemen on the walls fired their first round. They, too, were restricted to three shots each. To ensure compliance, they had only been issued three paper cartridges.
The riflemen fired at the defenders on the roads. Three seconds later, the charging beastkind hit.
Maltres looked to the top of the Great Mound. Sir William leaned on his crutches and pressed a telescope to his eye, looking southward and eastward. One of his beastkind, a warrior with the head of an eagle, stood on the north side of the mound and waved a feathered arm to General Lee.
Sir William blew his horn again, a different collection of tones.
Sarah’s mumbling grew more feverish.
The wedge of beastkind forcing itself past the trenches and over the barricades to the east of the city shifted position. Each warrior turned to face laterally and took a step forward. Shambling dead dragged at their feet and bayonet-wielding irregulars stabbed at their faces; beastmen and beastwives fell, but the carnage on the besieging side was even greater.
And the wedge opened through its center and created a passageway.
The messengers leaped onto their horses—shots stopped some in their tracks—and raced through the passageway. Looking southward and northward, Maltres saw the same maneuver in execution. To the north, though, something had gone wrong. The beastkind wedge hadn’t opened. Instead, the beastkind warriors were piling up in heaps of dead and wounded. The messengers mounted, but found their way blocked and themselves targets for musket fire.
Two, he thought, managed to jump their mounts over the Imperial trenches and continue. Otherwise, the north side of the city was a failure.
South and east, the messengers galloped through.
And then their horses screamed and fell. Maltres could see no cause for their collapse, but the beasts dropped to the road and thrashed in the mud and snow, great gouts of blood staining the land.
Caltrops? Or some other unseen trap.
They had failed to take the Imperials by surprise.
There was a traitor. Someone had warned the Imperials.
The riders of the fallen horses were bayoneted to death by men in blue, or torn limb from limb by the shambling horrors from the trenches.
But not every rider had fallen. A few, seeing the fate of their comrades, had veered off the road. They rode through the Imperial camp itself, jumping cookfires and trampling tents in their mad dash to get to open space beyond.
Cahokia’s riflemen took their second shot, aiming to clear as much road as possible before every messenger. The task was complicated by the fact that the messengers were no longer on the roads, but here and there within the Imperial camp, soldiers fell to Cahokian fire.
The riders galloped on.
Gunshots took down more of them, but the first of the heralds was entirely through the Imperial camp now. South and east, messengers streamed away from Cahokia with a cry for help.
Too few, dammit.
Sir William blew his horn a third time.
The beastkind began to retreat. Imperial irregulars followed them out of the trenches, and so did the dead. Maltres saw not only whole corpses, but detached limbs dragging themselves after the beastkind to give chase.
“Fire!” BOOM!
Zorales’s third round of cannonfire cut through the larger knots of attackers, south and east. As the beastkind shook off the Imperial fighting them, their retreat gained speed. The third round of musket fire from the walls shook off some of the more persistent pursuit, and then the beastkind raced into a sprint.
More of them were picked off by shots from the trenches.
North, none of the beastkind were returning.
Half, Maltres Korinn thought bleakly. Half of Sarah’s beastkind had fallen.
And most of the heralds.
The surviving beastmen came back through the gates, and then the gates were drawn shut.
* * *
Sarah had no intention of ever getting snared within Robert Hooke’s death-vortex spell, and if she did get caught, she planned to break out immediately. She squeezed the Heronplow until her knuckles turned white. She siphoned energy through the orb.
She stepped out of her shoes.
“Fugio!”
She saw a wall of reaching hands rising up from the east as the sky darkened from winter blue to pus-amber. She shuffled her feet and willed her mind backward and out of reach of the spell.
The hands pursued, but they didn’t close.
Robert Hooke rose into the air, arms spread wide and coat spreading behind him like wings. He laughed, a sound like rattling bones.
Sarah heard the guns begin to fire. Through Sherem’s eye she saw plumes of smoke fired from the mouths of the cannons and rifles of her soldiers.
She ignored the sight.
Lost thy nerve, helldropping?
She backpedaled, careful to keep her physical feet rising and falling rather than actually moving back. Death by falling wouldn’t serve her cause.
“Thinking you ain’t worth my time, Rot-Face.”
She saw her beastkind warriors race from the eastern gate in Sherem’s gaze. Then the spell-less Polite looked up to the line of Cahokian magicians on the wall. They began to recite the spell they had concocted and rehearsed with Sarah.
“Cruces perdimus.” She heard the words with her own natural hearing; they were the ones she had devised, in Latin because her Ophidian was still rudimentary. The Firstborn wizards crossed their hands like the upside-down crucifixes of Hooke’s barrier. “Murus cadit.”
As they chanted, they passed a lead musketball from hand to hand. The ball started with Alzbieta and with each repetition of the words of the spell it shifted one person down the line. Yedera and Maltres stepped back to let the mana-gathering b
all pass without their touch.
Sarah would have liked to contribute power to the spell herself, but she repeatedly saw the face of Thalanes stiffening into a death mask on the rain-battered rooftop of the St. Louis cathedral of New Orleans. She poured the energy into her own spell of flight, instead.
Thou thinkest to outwit me. Hooke laughed, floating in the air above Sarah. Thou thinkest to distract me so thy messengers may escape.
Through Sherem’s eyes, Sarah saw the first messengers breaking through the Imperial lines at that moment.
Then Sherem poured powder into his musket.
“Looks like it worked to me,” she said.
I care not for thy messengers. No help can come to thee in time.
The musketball reached the end of the line of wizards. There Sherem took and dropped the ball into his weapon, tamping it down firmly. Sarah saw the work of loading the musket from close up, as if she were doing it herself.
Sherem had begged for this assignment, along with that of being Sarah’s eye.
He wanted to be part of the magic. Sarah couldn’t find it in her heart to refuse him. Maltres Korinn, hearing her plan, had suggested a marksman. She had told her Vizier she didn’t think accuracy mattered.
Really, Sherem should only have to hit the wall of black fire, and maybe not even that. Maybe a bullet crossing the line of the fire would be enough.
“Well, I guess that’s checkmate for you, then, Bob,” Sarah said. “Can’t fault me for trying.”
On the contrary. I find great fault in thee. I find the fault of pride, more than any other.
“Yeah, well, you ain’t the first preacher to tell me so.” Through Sherem’s sight, Sarah watched the Polite rest the musket barrel on the Treewall.
Pride in placing thyself above the good of the Empire. Pride in placing thyself above the good of all the children of Adam. Thou thinkest to stand in the service of life, but it is only mankind’s universal death that is preserved by thine actions.
“Hell.” Hooke’s wall moved closer. Sarah forced more energy into her retreat. “I sound like a real bad seed.”
Wouldst thou not see death undone? Eternal life for all mankind? Thou art proud to resist God’s appointed redemption. Proud to believe thyself to be a match for the Lord Protector.