by D. J. Butler
Sherem primed the weapon’s pan and took aim. He sighted along the barrel at the largest of Robert Hooke’s crosses.
“So long, Bob,” Sarah said.
Proud to assume that I would be here to face thee alone.
Bang! Sherem fired.
“Visionem—” Sarah began the spell she had intended to cut her connection with Robert Hooke, preparing to burn as she forced the ley energy of the Mississippi through herself to do so.
But the second dark aura, sending off wisps of death and evil like Hooke’s, reappeared. As if all things about her moved through honey or amber—or the deadly sea of Hooke’s evil spell—Sarah saw a person who looked like a child step forward from behind the large cross just as Sherem squeezed the trigger.
She saw this through Sherem’s eye.
Through her Eye of Eve, she saw the person’s hideous aura.
Through all three of her fields of vision at once, she saw the small person raise its arm—
and the enchanted bullet, hurtling through the air toward the cross and its diminutive defender like a bright blue meteorite, stopped.
Stopped, and hung in mid-air.
Sarah was so astonished, she nearly stopped fleeing. The groping hands of Hooke’s spell threatened to encircle her. She leaped back, but stared at the little figure as she did so.
The little figure had, she now saw, a death’s head for a face.
Was the wall of black flame higher than it had been? Sarah saw a flash of blue light rolling across the ground outside the Treewall. One of her people had died. A messenger, or someone on the wall. A defender.
The blue light struck the black flame and vanished.
And the flame rose slightly higher.
The deaths of Sarah’s people, the Firstborn, added to the strength of the noose around their own neck.
The small person raised an arm and reached toward the hovering bullet—
and the bullet drifted into its hand.
And now thou hast met my Lord Cromwell. Hooke laughed.
Sarah shuddered.
Cromwell, tiny and naked, was immediately the most menacing thing on the field of battle. He raised the bullet in both his hands and Sarah saw the blue light between his fingers swirl and grow cloudy as if with black silt. A terrible thought struck her heart.
“Break the connection!” she shrieked. “Sherem! Maltres!”
She couldn’t see any of them to know their reactions.
Oh, look thou at the squirming of Adam’s illicit get!
“You’re wrong!” she shouted, but stopped herself. Was she going to debate theology with Robert Hooke? Or less likely, tell him her revelatory experience on the Sunrise Mound?
She almost laughed, despite the danger to herself and her people. If she told Robert Hooke that Wisdom was the same person as Eve, only before Her fall, he would at best laugh.
Cromwell laid his right hand back alongside his ear and then hurled his hand forward. A ball of black light launched toward the Treewall.
Sarah turned to face the incoming missile. “Pallottolas—” she shouted, to begin a bullet-deflecting spell, but as she tried, hands grabbed her and she was forced again to divert her attention to Robert Hooke.
“Maltres!” she heard Sherem shouting. “I need silver, now!”
Where was Maltres Korinn going to get silver at this moment?
Sarah backed away from Robert Hooke. She needed a way to strike at Cromwell.
She needed more power.
And there was nowhere to get it. Already, the flow of energy moving through her soul threatened to burn her to cinder.
Through Sherem’s eye, she saw something unexpected. The Polite turned away from the field of battle and looked down within the Treewall. There, a man in a Cahokian warder’s uniform threw something at him. It wasn’t an attack, the toss was underhand.
Sherem caught the thrown object—
and it burned his hands.
Abruptly, Sarah’s link with Sherem snapped. She staggered away, physically. Arms gripped her, and she heard Maltres Korinn whisper in her ear. “Strength, Beloved.”
Her link with the Mississippi ley flickered and disappeared. Her flight from Robert Hooke slowed abruptly. Hands closed about her.
The black sphere hit Sherem and he staggered. Then it spun about him and struck the next person in line, one of Sarah’s wizards. He was tall and pot-bellied, and his face had the dignified expression of a thoughtful scholar.
The orb entered his body and paused, briefly. With a blood-curdling shriek, the man fell from the Treewall. His soul—or ka, or whatever it was—exploded from him in a blue ring.
Strengthening the black flame.
But Sarah dipped into the passing wave of energy as well, and the sudden burst of power pushed her beyond the grasping hands.
Was that Thalanes she saw, in the wall of numb faces?
And Grungle?
The black sphere leaped to the next wizard, a woman with short white hair and the tattoo of a raven on her neck. This time Sarah was ready. She reached forward with her own soul and dipped into the dying woman’s spirit.
It broke her heart. She was drinking the souls of her own people.
But the alternative was worse.
Sherem raced past, slapping the magicians as he went. He touched his hand to their bare skin: on their faces, or the backs of their hands.
Some of the woman’s energy escaped her, but most poured into Sarah. It felt like cool water after a dry walk under a hot sun. With the power she gleaned, Sarah pushed farther out of Hooke’s grasp.
Hooke laughed. Someone has taught thee Cromwell’s own magic, whelp!
Sarah wanted to vomit. She was pulled away from Hooke, but the black sphere was killing her wizards.
The third was a broad-shouldered woman with a lipless mouth. The sphere rested inside her chest for a second, and then she threw her arms over her head, shaped her mouth like an O, and collapsed where she stood.
Sarah grabbed her energy, sucking in as much as she could before Cromwell could take it.
Sherem was catching up to the sphere, but not nearly fast enough. At this rate, all her wizards might die. How did he know what to do, being a man with no spells?
Then Sarah realized what she had done. In her spell she had said coniungo, I share. As she had had Sherem’s vision, he had had hers. He had seen Cromwell’s aura, and the black sphere coming, and Maltres Korinn had somehow had a piece of silver for him.
With the link broken, he no longer saw what Sarah did, but he was racing from wizard to wizard, trying to get ahead of the death spell he knew was killing them.
Sarah could help him. She felt for the Mississippi through the Orb of Etyles and found it there again.
“Pedes accelero!” she shouted.
She had no coffee to throw or spit, but she hurled all the energy she could at Sherem’s feet. The silver in his hands felt like an enormous weight, and she pushed with all her might to speed Sherem up.
His pace redoubled. He fairly flew past two more mages, touching them a split second too late. An elderly man with a posture like a question mark toppled forward, and then a man so young Sarah wanted to call him a boy.
Sarah grabbed their energy and poured it into Sherem.
Then it happened. He clapped his hands, holding the bar of silver as they did, onto the next wizard. This was a heavy woman with curly brown hair and multiple iron rings piercing each ear. The sphere entered her body, and then Sherem slapped a hand onto her neck.
Light exploded from this woman too, but it wasn’t the blue light of her soul. It was the black light of Cromwell’s spell, and it broke in a ring. Sherem was thrown backward as if by an explosion and struck the Treewall’s parapet, crying out in pain and surprise. He dropped the silver, and Sarah saw bloody welts on both his hands.
Dead hands grabbed at Sarah and dragged her. Out of sheer inertia, she seized the ring of Cromwell’s energy as it passed her and consumed it.
Her lin
k with the Mississippi was suddenly cut off. She faltered. Her soul felt full of tar. Her spirit was drowning.
She tried to will energy into the Heronplow. She knew it was in her hands, but she couldn’t find it. She was utterly exhausted of power. She felt limp, body and spirit. She couldn’t find Thalanes’s brooch, couldn’t find the river’s ley, couldn’t find the orb.
Hands pulled her down and she heard the slow laughter of Robert Hooke.
She lost her view of the Treewall and the battle. She saw dead hands and dead faces, including the dead face of Robert Hooke.
Thou hast saved one or two worthless wizards, the Sorcerer said. And lost thyself. And in losing thyself, thou hast lost the city of the goddess, Her people, and all else. I shall not visit thee in hell, Ophidian.
He was right, and Sarah knew it. She’d lost half the beastkind and a quarter of the city’s magicians, and now she was dying. Who would defend her father’s land? Who would protect Nathaniel and Margaret? Who would stop Thomas Penn?
“Beloved!” The voice of Maltres Korinn sounded miles away.
A weight struck her, but she couldn’t see what it was.
She fell.
Was she falling into the vortex of dead hands? Fingers and paws brushed at her skin; dead eyes stared. Hooke drifted somewhere above them all. Behind him, Sarah thought she saw a naked youth with white eyes.
Then another blow shook her. Her skin was crisp as paper, and something scaly and rough rasped across her body. She screamed, though she couldn’t hear it.
The hands seized her.
“The blanket!” Maltres Korinn shouted. “The blanket, now!”
Fire swept across Sarah, body and soul. She arched her back and screamed again, but the hands and eyes surrounding her were swept away in the purifying flame. The amber sea boiled, and its final wave tossed Hooke and his master both aside.
Sarah struggled to breathe. Something suffocating pressed around her.
“Help!” she croaked.
Then she tumbled out of a blanket and a net in which she’d been tangled. Abruptly, the brilliance of the clear winter sky seared her eyes. She fell on snow, and the chill of it on her skin was a relief.
She was alive.
She had miscalculated. She’d lost soldiers, beastkind, and wizards.
Had she reckoned wrong, though? Was it possible that Oliver Cromwell could snatch a bullet from the air with no warning?
Or were we betrayed?
It seemed likely.
But she was alive.
And messengers were on their way.
“All New Orleans will see it, Eze-Nri.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Margarida lit her prison on fire by kicking its Franklin stove.
She didn’t know who they were, other than that they were Dutch. Smugglers or pirates, maybe: like her own people, the Catalans, the Igbo and the Dutch were merchants first, but frequently shaded from trading into smuggling when stamp duties became too onerous, and into piracy when customs officers became too well-armed.
Or were they her own people? The Chevalier of New Orleans had called her a princess. And Tia Montse had taken her over and over to Cega Sofía, until the chevalier’s men had killed the old woman. The chevalier, at least, seemed to believe that Margarida was someone or something other than a young pirate.
Unless the Quintana lands were considerably more extensive than Margarida had ever been told.
The chevalier had separated Margarida from her Tia Montse and put her in chains on a Dutch ship. She had tried to stay calm, as Montse had urged her to do all her life, but a week’s separation had proven too much for her. In rage, she had beaten to death the sailor who brought her food, and then wrecked the ship on which she’d been sailing by tearing the mast right out of the vessel.
Why none of the sailors had simply shot her at that point, she didn’t know.
She knew the vessel was Dutch because the men leaping off the ship had been shouting in Dutch. Tia Montse had been very careful to teach Margarida excellent English, somewhat against Margarida’s will, but Montse had insisted that this was the language of the empire and it would pay her well to know it. She had picked up French from her time spent in New Orleans and the bayous of Louisiana. She’d learned Igbo and Dutch from other smugglers.
Swimming ashore from the shipwreck, she’d met other Dutch people, from which she had guessed she must be near the Hudson River Republic. But at that point, her memory of events petered out quickly to nothing.
Until she had suddenly awakened in a cellar with a wizard wearing orange trying to keep her prisoner, and two ghosts apparently rescuing her.
She kicked the stove barefoot. She did it in anger, unthinking, and immediately expected a terrible burn to her foot. Perhaps because of the swiftness of the kick, she took no injury, and she put the stove right through the kitchen wall. In its flight, the stove scattered burning embers across upholstered chairs and wooden furniture.
Other Dutchmen attacked her. Again, they didn’t shoot her, and instead tried to capture her in nets or throw looped line about her or tackle her and drag her to the ground. She was too strong for all of them. She broke legs; she hurled men out windows into the winter’s cold. When one Dutchman shouted, “Pest!” and drew a knife, she grabbed him by the front of his filthy nightshirt and threw him straight up, right through the ceiling. His dangling legs twitched once and then were still.
As she slowly calmed, she regained some control.
She found square-toed shoes that fit her, as well as an orange flannel dress that mostly did, and climbed into them. She was still furious and took out some of her rage on the building. With a single kick, she put a crack in an exterior wall, floor to ceiling; then she marched through the crack, splitting it open and sending planks and splinters in all directions.
She intended to head for the nearest barn, because she remembered that her two rescuing ghosts had told her to do so. When she reached the front porch, though, they were there, waiting for her.
“Hello, Margaret,” one said. He was obviously Eldritch, pale-skinned and dark-haired. He wore his coat inside-out and his tricorn hat backward, and he carried a large, two-skinned drum over his shoulder. It looked like an Indian drum, though he was definitely not Indian.
He spoke English.
“Margarida,” she said.
The second ghost, a Dutchman, smiled. “We have many things to tell you. But you had better get a coat or something. It’s very cold out here, and we have hundreds of miles to go.”
“To New Orleans?” She wanted to go home to Tia Montse, and not wherever it was the chevalier had attempted to send her.
Rage still burned in her veins. When she was angry, she was very strong.
“To Cahokia.” The strangely dressed boy drummed fingers softly on the wooden cylinder of his instrument. “You don’t know me, but I’m your brother. We have a sister, too. I’ve never met her, but she’s Queen of Cahokia.”
“That would make me…”
“A princess.” The drummer smiled. “But quite a bit more than a princess, really. My name is Nathaniel.”
A princess.
“No,” Margarida said. “You’re wrong about me. I’m Catalan, and I have nothing to do with Cahokia.”
A shadow loomed up behind Nathaniel. It was a tall man, made taller by the peaked Covenant Tract-style hat he wore. The orange firelight shining on him gave him a terrifying cast: the skin of his cheeks and forehead was the color of pale ash, his nails and the skin around his eyes were black.
In his hand, he held a raised longsword.
“Look out!” Margarida shouted.
The attacker roared wordlessly and slashed down with his blade. Nathaniel turned and threw himself aside, but not quickly enough—the sword bit into his shoulder and he fell.
Anger surged through Margarida. While the Dutchman cursed and pulled a pistol, she seized a broken timber from the wall of the house and ripped it free. The far end burned like a brand and she
swung it at the attacker.
He roared like a beast again, with no words, and leaped back. In the firelight, she saw into his open mouth—not only did he have no tongue, but his mouth was full of dark rot, corrupted flesh, as if he were not a living man, but a corpse.
Serpentspawn! Margarida heard a Yankee voice whisper in her mind.
She swung the enormous timber back the other way and connected, striking the Yankee in the head. He fell to his knees in the snow, bellowing incoherently and raising his sword to parry another blow.
Margarida took a step back, tucked the timber under her arm like a lance, and charged. The blazing tip of the timber hit the tall man squarely in the center of his chest. She lifted him off his feet and carried him several yards before throwing the timber and man together into the night.
The tongueless Yankee hit the snow of the yard and rolled. When he stood, his rotting cloak had caught fire. He howled, more beast than man, and dropped to roll in the snow again.
Ophidian whelp!
The Dutchman knelt to look at Nathaniel.
Margarida ripped another plank from the side of the burning house and stomped toward the Yankee again. Seeing her approach, he yelped, staggered to his feet, and then loped away into the darkness.
“I can stanch the blood flow,” the Dutchman kneeling over Nathaniel said. “But I need to get him to a surgeon. Is there a doctor in the village?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“There are doctors in New Amsterdam,” the Dutchman said. “But that must be six miles away.”
Margarida looked at the wound; it bled, but the Dutchman had bandaged it tightly and that slowed the bleeding. She stooped, picked Nathaniel up, and turned to the Dutchman, who was her height. “Climb on my back.”
Promptly, the Dutchman did so. “My name is Jacob Hop. I like to be called Jake.”
With the anger and energy that still burned within her, Margarida ran. When she reached the wooden fence at the far end of the field, she took it in a single bound. A groaning shadow shifting in a ditch beside the road showed her where the Yankee was hiding, but if he reached out to grab her he was far too slow.