by D. J. Butler
She tried to be pure of heart and single and selfless of purpose.
Curiously, she found herself trying to feel in her heart as she imagined Calvin must feel. Not innocent, but trusting, good, and open. Honest with himself and with the world.
“Mother Wisdom,” she said. “Forgive Thou my missteps and my arrogance in approaching Thee. And if Thou strike me down, may it be as an atoning sacrifice to cleanse the past misdeeds Thy children have sinned against Thee. I wish to cleanse Thy footstool, that I may save Thy city.”
Halfway through, what she had intended as a statement of her intentions had become a prayer. Not the Latin prayer-incantation she had used to activate the Heronplow, but a simpler prayer of the heart.
Also unintentionally, she had fallen into the cadences of Court Speech.
Thank you, Calvin.
Rising, she began to pour the oil. Despite her words, she really didn’t want the goddess to strike her down, atoning sacrifice or not. She took measured steps, as if approaching a dangerous predator—a panther or a wolf—and deliberately trying not to startle it. She stepped with flat feet, except when she had to rise onto the balls of her feet to pour oil into the higher bowls.
The goddess didn’t strike her down.
Sarah abased herself to the floor again. “Thank you, Mother Wisdom. Mother Eve. Mother of All Living.” She wished she’d grown up a little less New Light, so she had more sense of ritual.
Still kneeling, she raised her hands before her, palms up, and repeated a tiny spell she had once used, perfectly timed, to drive away an attacking slaver on the Natchez Trace.
“Ignem mitto.”
The spark she sent lit the lowest of the seven bowls. She repeated the spell six more times, each time lighting only one lamp.
When they all burned, the light sprang from the gold-covered Throne, rebounded off the gold-plated walls, and nearly blinded her.
Sarah pressed herself to the floor again.
Then she took the oil and retreated to meet Alzbieta Torias. She knelt beside the priestess and they gazed upon the Serpent Throne together.
“What do you see?” Alzbieta whispered.
Sarah touched a finger to the oil very slightly, anointing her eye and then Alzbieta’s, and then she took her cousin’s hand. “Visionem condivido,” she murmured, and willed their visions to fuse.
The fog still shrouded the Serpent Throne, but in its seven burning lamps now danced seven flaming salamanders.
Alzbieta gasped.
Questions flooded Sarah’s mind, and she bit back her tongue. She would let the goddess reveal what She willed.
At least until Sarah felt she wasn’t getting the information she wanted.
The salamanders wiggled together and then spoke. Their voice was a chorus of feminine bass tones woven together in a close harmony. “Thou seekest a vision.”
Sarah bowed, pressing her forehead to the cold tile of the floor. Alzbieta imitated her immediately. “I am trapped.” Her voice boomed very loud in the long hall.
The salamanders danced and the black smoke seemed to part. Still through a haze, but more solidly now, Sarah again saw the Woman sitting on the Throne. She was tall and beautiful and the sun shone from Her face, which seemed to shift between a woman’s and a lion’s and a gazelle’s.
Suddenly, men were in the vision. Men climbed the throne, wrapped ropes about it and tried to drag it, struck it with picks. A priestess in white linen tried to stop them and was run through with a spear, her body thrown onto the seat and left. The Woman sitting on the throne cupped Her face in Her hands and wept, and her weeping was the sound of rain. When the desecrators found they couldn’t damage the throne, they defiled it by voiding their bladders and their bowels upon it. The Woman stood and retreated to the space behind the Serpent Throne, still weeping. As a final insult, a man rode a horse up the steps and into the apse. There he circled the throne three times before finally dropping the rotting corpse of a dog onto the throne’s seat.
The sound of weeping came from two directions. Sarah looked at the priestess beside her and saw that Alzbieta wept, too.
“And my father?” Sarah asked. “Did my father not cleanse the temple?”
The vision continued. Sarah saw a man with her own face—not her own face, because it was lightly bearded, but obviously the face of someone who was Sarah’s kin—climb the Serpent Throne and sit on it. But the stains left by the dog and woman and the attacking men were all still there, the black smoke didn’t dissipate, the Woman stood behind the bearded man at arm’s length.
“Thy father sat upon the throne,” the salamanders hummed. “He was the Beloved of the goddess, and She permitted it. But he was not king.”
“What?” Sarah and Alzbieta spoke together. Alzbieta looked as surprised as Sarah felt.
“I saw his coronation in the Basilica,” Alzbieta said. “The Metropolitan crowned him. And I know he sat on the throne in the Temple of the Sun. I saw him sit there. I assumed…I mean…”
“He never shut the veil,” Sarah said, thinking out loud, “because he never performed the temple enthronement rite. The people made him king, but the goddess didn’t. He was Her Beloved son, but he was never King of Cahokia in Her eyes.”
Was that what her father was doing at the Serpent Mound when he died? Lacking the Heronplow, he had not been able to meet the goddess on the Sunrise Mound. Instead, he had gone to find Her elsewhere. Was it to be crowned king? Was it to learn how to be crowned king?
The vision continued. Sarah saw the Woman watching and weeping behind the Throne as claimants to the Throne stood in the nave before Her and asked to be chosen. She chose none of them.
She saw the Throne glow with golden light as Maltres Korinn placed her shoulderbag containing the regalia on it. She saw Calvin Calhoun kill Eërthes the poet, and black smoke rose again from the Throne, obscuring her view.
“I would ascend the Throne. Will you teach me?” Sarah asked.
The salamanders were silent.
“Could I use the Heronplow?” Sarah asked, but in her heart she knew the answer: no. The plow might be an important part of consecrating the Temple of the Sun, or re-consecrating it, but there was a pollution to remove first. And mere consecration wouldn’t open the way to enthronement.
She needed a rite. A rite she had assumed Alzbieta would be able to help her discover or recreate, but that assumption had been mistaken.
The salamanders said nothing.
“And to cleanse the temple?” she called. She tried to remember her Bible on this point. “Twenty thousand oxen and a hundred thousand sheep, something like that?”
She doubted Cahokia had that large a herd in the entire kingdom. Certainly, such herds and flocks were not within the Treewall.
The salamanders trembled and were silent.
Alzbieta took a breath as if to speak, but then only whispered to Sarah. “Why not the Sunrise Mound? The goddess chose you there. Can She not crown you there as well?”
Sarah hesitated, but it wasn’t a bad question. “Would the goddess seat a king on the Sunrise Mound?”
This time, the salamanders spoke. “Would you take the Serpent Throne to the Sunrise Mound and place it before the eyes of all the world, including heretics and Imperial spies? And having done that, how would you then cleanse the pollution you had brought with the Throne?”
Sarah bowed in acknowledgement of the answer.
“I think my father knew more than I do,” she said slowly. “I think I’m going to have to visit him and ask what he can teach me about the enthronement rite.”
“If he knew it, why wouldn’t he have used it?”
“Maybe he couldn’t use it because he needed the Heronplow to rededicate the temple,” Sarah guessed. “Maybe he couldn’t use it because he didn’t know how to cleanse the temple. Maybe he only knew part of the rite. In any case, I’m pretty certain he knew more than I do.” She laughed softly. “Mostly because I know nothing. If I can learn what my father knew, that’
ll be two big steps forward.”
Alzbieta lowered her voice, as if not to be heard by the salamanders. “What…necromancy…are you planning?”
“No necromancy,” Sarah said. “Anyway, not as you think of it. No Cromwellian nonsense about death winds or Lazars. But I think I can speak with my father at the Serpent Mound.”
“You’ll leave the city.” Alzbieta’s face showed uncertainty.
Sarah laughed. “Once, you would have welcomed my disappearance.”
“Those days are long past, Beloved. What will we do without you?”
“Fight until I get back, I expect,” Sarah said. “Only I really hope you’re fighting against the Imperials, and not with each other.”
“When will you leave?”
“As soon as I can figure out how. Only we have some burials to attend to first.”
* * *
Jake awoke with a splitting headache and a powerful feeling of shame. Lotte and Ambroos both stood over his bedside with worried looks on their faces.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “I wasn’t myself.”
“I could see that,” Lotte snapped, but then her face softened. “I am pleased you’re feeling better now.”
“Whatever was wrong with you,” Ambroos said, “it’s still wrong.”
“You think I’m possessed, hey?”
“No.” Ambroos shook his head. “I’ve seen enough possessions to see that your case is…something different. For one thing, if you were possessed by a devil, the exorcism should have worked. You would have screamed and resisted, and the devil might have tried to enter into one of us, but we would have forced it into the writ of divorce, and then burned the writ.”
“Easy as pie,” Jake said.
“No, very difficult. But something we know how to do, something we’ve done before. Instead, you went berserk.”
“Maybe it’s because I don’t have the devil in me,” Jake suggested.
“You mean the Reigerkoning?” Ambroos smiled. “Okay. But you wrote his name down on the writ too, and it’s not like any herons flew in the window and asked to participate in the rite.”
“That’s not what he looks like,” Jake said. “He’s a giant, and…” His voice faltered as a vision of a plain strewed with dead and dying warriors, tall and red-haired and wearing copper breastplates, filled his vision.
Ambroos waved his hand. “I think you’re mad, Jacob.”
“You don’t plan to send me to Roosevelt Island?”
Ambroos looked his cousin in the eye and thought for a moment. “No. But I can’t have you do that again. Not around my family, Jacob.”
“I’ll leave. Is Nathaniel conscious?”
“Not yet.”
“Will you watch him for me? I have something I must do in New Amsterdam, but it doesn’t require either of the children to come with me. I’d feel safe if I could leave them here.” Jake saw looks of apprehension on both their faces. “And I don’t even have to come back. I could stay in a hotel. Or in a shed. Or a haystack.”
The last image did it; Ambroos laughed. “No, you can come back. But, Jacob…if you do that again, I will have to shoot you.”
Jake nodded. “Ja, that sounds like a fair deal to me.”
Lotte and Ambroos left him, and Jake got up and dressed. He found Margaret standing in the hall.
“I’m coming,” she said.
“It’s not safe.”
“Nothing is safe. And if I stay here, maybe I can protect my brother. But if I come along, maybe I can protect you. And since you’re leaving the building, with its light and people and guns, I think maybe you’re the one most likely to need protection.”
Jake stopped arguing. “I think your sister would say similar things. On the other hand, if you come with me and get hurt, your sister might kill me. But really, at the end of the day, how could I possibly stop you?”
Margaret crossed her arms and smiled.
“Would you be willing to wear a disguise? Just a hat and a coat, breeches, so you look like a Dutch boy instead of like the girl with strange hair and an orange dress who escaped yesterday?”
Margaret nodded.
They both dressed in borrowed clothes—long coats, scarves, and tall hats—so they looked like a couple of short Yonkermen bundling against the cold.
Lacking any better means of finding his quarry, Jake took a blank card from Ambroos, on which he wrote the words I HAVE SOMETHING FOR YOU AND I AM WAITING IN THE LOBBY before tucking it into an envelope. On the outside of the envelope he wrote MR. TEMPLE FRANKLIN.
At the first book-cadger’s they passed, Jake stopped to buy a copy of the Tarock. The act of thumbing through the cards brought him a sense of calm; when he drew three cards, they were the City, the Drunkard, and the Emperor.
The familiar riddle, menacing though it was, brought a smile to his face.
When they reached New Amsterdam proper, Jake took them to a street of elegant hotels with marble facades and three or more stories of rooms. Starting at one end of the row, they walked into the hotel doors and told the desk clerks they had a message for Mr. Temple Franklin.
The fourth clerk, at a hotel called De Republikein, took the envelope.
Jake debated between asking Margaret to hide and asking her to stick close to him. He settled on the latter, and the two of them sat on a red-upholstered sofa with a view of the stairs as well as the front door.
“We might have to wait hours,” Jake said to Margaret. “Stay awake.”
They only had to wait minutes. Temple Franklin descended the stairs in waistcoat and slippers, the card in his hand and a curious frown on his face. Jake stood and waved to the emperor’s confidant. They met in the center of the room.
Franklin looked Jake and Margaret both carefully in the face with a keenness of eye that made Jake regret he’d come. “You sent this message up to me?”
“Are you Franklin?”
“Yes, as you and the staff of the Republikein well know.”
“Are you…the only Franklin?”
Temple Franklin’s eyes narrowed. “To my knowledge, I’m my father’s only child, as he was his father’s. We both had births that were…less than fully conventional, so I can’t guarantee I don’t have a sibling somewhere. Why the genealogical inquisition? Who are you, and what do you want? Is this some kind of back channel attempt from Stuyvesant?”
Jake nodded. “In October, I witnessed the death of a man name René du Plessis.”
Temple frowned. “That is not an especially uncommon name, if you were in, say, Acadia.”
“Du Plessis was the intendant of the Chevalier of New Orleans. The seneschal.”
Franklin nodded slowly. “I know the man you speak of.”
Jake decided to omit mention of his mistress, though du Plessis’s actual dying exhortation had begun tell the Witchy Eye that she must. “In his moment of death, he told me to give this to you.” Reaching inside his coat, he took out the bronze medallion carved with the Franklin Shield.
Franklin raised his eyebrows. “A cheap trinket, sold all over Philadelphia for pennies. Is this all there is to the joke?”
“No joke, Mr. Franklin,” Jake said. Was this the right Franklin? But who else could it be, if he was the only descendant of the Lightning Bishop? “And he said, ‘tell Franklin that the sword has gone back.’”
“The sword? Did he say which sword?” Franklin smiled warmly.
“From the context, I think he must have meant the Heronblade. The sword that was once carried by the King of Cahokia, as part of his regalia.”
Franklin’s eyes narrowed. “And now the sword has gone back to whom?”
Jake hesitated. “To Simon Sword, Mr. Franklin. To the Heron King.”
Franklin nodded slowly. “Stay here one moment, would you?” He walked to the front desk.
This was the moment of truth. Despite being an envoy of the emperor, Franklin might also be a leader in the so-called Conventicle, if it existed. He might be an ally for Sarah; ma
ybe his position close to the emperor could be turned to Sarah’s advantage.
When he returned, one of the doormen was with him. The doorman held a cocked pistol in each hand and scowled.
“Where did the other fellow go?” Franklin asked. “The one who looked like a wiggly?”
Jake looked about—Margaret had disappeared. “What other fellow?” he asked. “I came to see you alone.”
Franklin shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Such a liar.”
Margaret reappeared, stepping from behind a column, out of sight of both Franklin and the doorman. In a single fluid movement, she gripped the doorman by his belt—
Jake ducked—
bang! bang! the doorman’s pistols both went off—
and tossed him across the lobby.
Franklin spun around in time for the girl to yank the medallion from his hands and knock him to the ground with a tap to the chest that looked gentle.
“Laten we vertrekken!” she bellowed. Without waiting, she marched out of the hotel.
Jake followed. No one tried to stop them.
“Stick to talk of anointings and burials,
and say nothing about who should rule.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A bonfire burned in a plaza just inside Cahokia’s southern gate. The sun had gone down hours earlier. Luman Walters stood in the cold at the edge of the fire’s reach, standing beside two gray-caped Cahokian wardens who had just finished twelve hours of standing on the ramparts.
They ignored Luman.
Within the fire’s warmth, living beastkind, Sarah Elytharias’s bodyguard corps, sat on the frozen ground. The more man-shaped among them sat cross-legged, but some lay like cattle on their flanks. Collectively, they emitted a low-pitched rumbling sound.
Luman shrugged deep into his wizard’s coat. He resented not being invited to stand with the Firstborn wizards on the wall, but not because it suggested that Sarah doubted where his loyalties lay. That was a reasonable response, despite whatever it was she saw in her magical eye. Luman hadn’t been an employee of the Imperial Ohio Company long, but that was how Sarah had first met him.
He resented his lack of invitation because it meant they saw him as their magical inferior.