by D. J. Butler
Bill favored his lady with a gentle smile. “Some of my riders did get past the trenches,” he agreed. “For all we know, they were shot down a mile further on. Still, of course, you’re right. And the moment any relief force arrives, I will offer up every sheep and goat I can find in thanks to that force’s guiding totem. Cuius auxilium, eius deus, as you might say.”
He laughed out loud at his own bon mot. In Latin, no less!
“Also,” Alzbieta Torias said, “Sarah may yet return. Her Majesty has proved to be a resourceful magician.”
“And yet, we must prepare as if those things will not happen.” Maltres Korinn’s voice was gloomy.
“Build the boats,” Bill said. “We will send as many baby Moseses into the water as we can, and hopefully none into the bellies of the angry beastkind that prowl there.”
Maltres nodded and climbed down off the wall.
The Podebradan Yedera stared at the cannons.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her. Her presence with the city’s leadership on the wall was not strictly regular, but no one criticized or defended it. She simply was, and seemed to stand at all times outside the rules.
“A small force,” she said. “Highly protected and fast.”
“Magic could be worked that would provide protection at least until such a force reached the black flame,” Sherem said thoughtfully. “It would require a large amount of power, but it could be done.”
Yedera looked at the Polite and something unspoken seemed to pass between them. Yedera nodded.
“Perhaps the queen’s beastkind,” Bill suggested. “They are terrifying and fast, and make for excellent shock troops.”
“I had in mind another force,” Yedera said. “I had been thinking that such a force might target the Necromancer himself, but I think our more urgent need is to eliminate the guns.”
“Such a force would suffer serious casualties,” Bill said. He had the uneasy feeling that Yedera wasn’t going to ask his permission. At least he could offer advice. “But if it could spike those guns, it would buy us time.”
Yedera frowned. “I don’t know guns. Do you mean stop up their mouths?”
Jaleta Zorales stepped in; this was her métier. “The charge in the gun is ignited by combustion that passes through a touch hole. That’s a small hole at the base of the cannon, at the opposite end from its mouth.”
Yedera nodded. “I think I understand.”
“I’ll show you,” Zorales said. “If you jam a spike through that touch hole, the Imperials might take hours, even days, to get the spike out. In the meantime, the cannon is useless.”
“If you have the spike forged with barbs,” Bill added, “it becomes even harder to remove.”
“Do we have such barbs?” Yedera asked.
Jaleta Zorales nodded. “We have a few ready made at all times. In case of retreat, we spike our own guns so they can’t be turned against us.”
“I’ll have more made,” Bill said. “I’ll have sixty by sundown. I assume you are proposing to command this verloren hoop? That’s what the Dutch would call such an expedition.”
“It sounds like forlorn hope,” Alzbieta said.
“It’s worse than that,” Bill said. “It means ‘lost troop.’” He looked gravely at Yedera. “Shall I task the beastkind?”
“No,” Yedera said. “I have my companions already. Give me the spikes by sundown.”
“I’ll be ready,” Sherem said.
Was the wizard going to run out with the Podebradan to spike the Twelve Apostles? That didn’t seem quite right to Bill, but having lost his magic, perhaps the man was anxious to make his mark some other way.
“Tell me what else you will require,” Bill said.
Yedera shook her head. “Nothing, General. I have sworn my oaths, and I will do my duty.”
BOOM! The first of the Twelve Apostles began to fire on the eastern wall.
“It seems that there’s a fine line
between the living and the dead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dockery had been whistling incessantly. He and Kinta Jane Embry stood in a slanted crack between two walls of gray striated rock. Ahead of them lay the entrance down which they had come, the entrance Isaiah Wilkes had taught her. Behind them lay a pool of crystal clear water.
In the light that shone when Kinta Jane cracked open her darklantern, she saw white, eyeless things wriggling in the pool. Some of them looked like fish. She hoped they weren’t venomous; she and Dockery might have to flee in that direction. She hadn’t crossed the pool, but Wilkes had said there was a back way out. That had to be it.
On a warm night in May
All the girls came out to play
And dance, as far I could see
I said to myself
She’s an angel, or an elf
You’d put on your red dress for me
Who would answer their signal? After much debate, she and Dockery had written a news-paper story together. Cracking the lantern a little wider, she unfolded the sheet of paper and read it again.
ONAS AT THE SIGN OF THE CENTAUR
At the Centaur tavern this week, famed Pennslander storyteller BROTHER ONAS performed his much-loved tale, “The Three Brothers and the Landlord Gone Mad.” Brother Onas can be reached evenings at the Centaur all this week and next, warming himself by the chimney, should there be any audience desirous of a second performance.
It had the advantage of being slightly less obvious than Brother Onas wants to meet, while at the same time being short. Montreal news-papers, it turned out, charged by the word, and when individual words became too long, the editors sometimes counted them double. They had paid to run the English-language version of the message in The Tattler and The Herald. They had also prepared a French version for Le Courier and Le Mercure. Kinta Jane had paid for the ads by selling rings she had taken off the fingers of an Imperial thug named Joss. Joss had assaulted Kinta Jane in the Ohio, and she’d killed him for it; it pleased her to think that her assailant’s wealth now aided her in her mission.
Is my message too obvious?
Too clumsy an approach might not attract the people Kinta Jane wanted, or might draw the attention of enemies.
There was no Centaur beside a chimney by which they could warm themselves. Indeed, the chimney in the article was a sly hint, referring to the chimney of rock in which they stood, the appointed meeting place Isaiah Wilkes had known.
They had found the rock formation eventually, riding past it twice before passing it at exactly the right angle to be able to see the centaur within. The chimney and cave, which took only an hour of climbing to find, had confirmed that they were in the right spot.
Each night for a week and a half following publication of their notice, Dockery and Kinta Jane had come down into the chimney. By day they slept in a rat-infested boarding house called Le Baiser du Roi, eating what food they could gather in the late afternoon and buying lantern oil to get them through another night.
Not a month had gone by
With a tear in my eye
I came on bended knee
I could see you were touched
I said, I can’t promise much
Would you put on your white dress for me?
The words disappeared into the echo, which lingered long, drifting back down the stone chimney in reflected, lugubrious snatches.
Kinta Jane shivered. “This is the last night.”
“That’s it, then?” Dockery spat. The corner of the cave where his brown saliva and soaked tobacco plugs had accumulated over the week they’d spent underground reeked, but at least he had the decency to keep using the same corner. “We’re just finished? The Conventicle failed?”
“I don’t know,” Kinta Jane said. “I don’t know what else the Conventicle is trying to accomplish. But I came here to meet Brother Odishkwa, and Brother Odishkwa never showed up.”
“You and I failed, then.” Dockery’s voice was bitter.
First the first
time in weeks, Kinta Jane Embry couldn’t find her tongue.
As they had for ten days, they climbed back out the stone crack at dawn and loped back toward the boarding house. Cold gnawed at Kinta Jane’s fingers and toes, burrowing through her flesh to pinch her bones.
Montreal was a city of a handful of stone buildings within a stone wall encircling a three-peaked hill on an island. The sun cracking over the eastern horizon lit those structures and tinted them pink, as if they had come directly from a fairy story. The southern hills through which Kinta Jane and Dockery had come by canoe were blue-gray at their base and wrapped in white around their upper two-thirds.
The morning light revealed the bulletins and broadsheets that covered every empty brick and protruded from beneath snow and mud. Montreal was a city of competing missives, especially now—some sort of public debate was taking place, over the replacement of a dead elector. La Fayette soutient l’évêque, began one broadsheet, while another countered, Le sieur de Champlain témoigne de la valeur de l’abbé, and a third forcefully argued for a kind of compromise: L’heure est venue pour un chaman haudenosaunee. None of the pamphlets were in English, but some were in a mixed patois with a few words that looked to be of French origin: Michif, Kinta Jane thought. In Acadia, they called Creoles Métis, and Michif was their own language.
Maybe she should take up praying to St. Jean Nicollet and ask for the gift of tongues.
Champlain and La Fayette were to choose an ecclesiastical elector between them, and they could not agree.
Kinta Jane sucked cold air into her lungs and exhaled a small cloud of steam. The carts of the morning’s pedlars and shopkeepers, trundling off to set up their work, raised a comfortable din around her. Coureurs du bois, trappers and traders who dressed and held themselves like Dockery did, moved to and from the river with a purposefulness that suggested they wouldn’t stay long in the city if they could help it.
“We could go find Brother Anak,” she suggested experimentally.
“Yes.” Dockery nodded. “Where would we do that?”
“North,” she said. “Somewhere.”
“As far as I know, everything north of here is wild Algonk land. If you go far enough, you get to places so cold, nobody owns ’em and their bears are white.”
“That sounds like a fable.”
“No, I’ve seen one myself. You want to see Anakim in any kind of numbers, you gotta go west. But I think maybe we ought to try to talk to Champlain or La Fayette. I don’t expect they’re Brother Odishkwa, but maybe they’re in on the secret.”
Kinta Jane hesitated. “They seem a little busy right now.”
“Man like that is always busy. But they won’t make time unless we ask them to.”
“Do you know either one of them?”
“Did Isaiah Wilkes know Thomas Penn?”
“He rescued Thomas from a fire. He himself set the fire, I believe.”
Dockery laughed. “There you are, then. One thing you know I can do well, rain or shine, is start a fire.”
Kinta Jane looked at the stone walls of the city’s center and shook her head.
“You don’t look like Brother Onas. Neither of you does.”
The words were spoken by a new voice, which came from behind Kinta Jane. She jerked in surprise, then tried to keep her knees from wobbling as she turned to look at the speaker—
and found herself staring into his sternum.
“Hellfire,” Dockery muttered. He spat tobacco juice into the snow.
“In the woodcuts and the puppet shows,” the stranger continued, “Brother Onas always has one of those broad hats they like in Pennsylvania. And long, curly hair. Mind you, I think they’re just trying to portray William Penn.”
The speaker was a giant, literally. At first guess, Kinta Jane would have said half again the height of a normal man, though after a few exchanges of dialog, she’d have brought her estimate down to eight feet. Give or take a few inches. He had a broad face with wide nose and cheeks, a chin so small she might have called it recessive, and deep-set dark eyes that twinkled beneath a rocky outcrop of forehead. His eyebrows were large enough for a small bird to nest in, and a thatch of red hair hung down around his neck.
He wore layers of fur and wool draped over his enormous body, with broad leather belts buckled around his chest and shoulders to hold them in place. Above his shoulder she saw a crude, leather-wrapped hilt that suggested a sword hanging on the man’s back. A quiver of arrows too long and too big around to be useful to a man of normal size was strapped to one thigh, and he carried cradled in his arms a long staff that tapered and was notched at both ends.
A long bow, Kinta Jane realized.
Of enormous size.
“Mind you,” the giant said, “I speak only out of my own knowledge, which is miserably inadequate. Persons of your culture and sophistication are likely well-advised to ignore me entirely.”
“You’re Misaabe,” Dockery said.
The giant nodded. “That’s what our Chippewa neighbors would call me. But old Will Penn spoke the language of the Bible.” The giant cracked a grin that seemed to split his entire head in half, revealing yellowed teeth the size of eyeballs. “Maybe that’s why he went to heaven, like the song says.”
“You ain’t in the empire,” Dockery said. “You know the Elector Songs?”
“We ain’t.” The giant shook his head. “But I’ve traveled, and the songs that stick in your head aren’t necessarily the best ones. Sometimes they’re the catchiest, or the shortest, or just the ones you hear most often. I know about the three from Philadelphi-oo, although I don’t really know what they’re for. But because he was a Bible man, Penn called us the Anakim. The sons of Anak. Anyway, that’s what I’ve been told, but I’m too unlettered to have confirmed it for myself.”
“Or Brother Anak,” Kinta Jane said.
“In the woodcuts, Brother Anak is usually twice the size of Brother Onas and Brother Odishkwa.” The giant smiled again. He seemed unable to grin with closed lips, so every smile cracked his maw wide open and sent his eyebrows into a merry dance. “You will have noticed that that’s an exaggeration.”
“Would you say you’re…large for your kind?” Dockery asked.
“No,” the giant answered. “Nor am I small.”
“A more important question,” Kinta Jane said, “is why are you talking to us?”
The laughter that exploded out of the Misaabe startled a passing horse, causing it to throw its rider into the snow. The man rolled to his feet cursing and shaking snow from his three-cocked hat, but when he saw the giant, he spun on his heels, grabbed the animal’s bridle, and ran.
“Really?” the giant countered.
Kinta Jane crossed her arms.
The giant dug beneath a thick fur on his chest and found a piece of paper. It was a page from Le Mercure. “My French wouldn’t stand the scrutiny of a deaf man, miserable untutored pig that I am, but I know pretty well what Frère Onas means. I’ve been watching you.”
“How long?” Dockery looked surprised.
“Since the day this was published.” The giant leaned down to look more closely at the scrap. “A week.”
“I never saw you,” Dockery said.
“Either you’re calling me a liar, or you’re expressing admiration for my woodcraft.” The giant grinned, and Kinta Jane stepped back in surprise at the sudden flashing of teeth. “Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of chance to see me in action. I expect you’ll find me terribly inadequate. Head like an oak trunk, that’s me. No boring through it, no climbing over, you just have to go around. Obviously, I have to take you back to my people.” He smiled again. “Put your witness to the test.”
“I saw no tracks in the cave other than our own,” Dockery said. “You might be quick and quiet, but a fellow your size leaves a mark in the dirt.”
“I came in the other entrance,” the giant said. “I watched you both. And listened.”
Dockery looked mortified. “Listened?”
The giant sang:
Now, if the sergeant is right
We won’t last the night
And the river is as deep as the sea
So pray one more time
Kiss the children good-bye
And put on your black dress for me.
“I think I’ve heard it before,” he said when he’d finished. “It’s about your Spanish War, isn’t it?”
“I guess no one invited the Misaabe to that one.” Dockery looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“We’re on the far side of your Empire. I think mostly you were grateful we didn’t take the opportunity to cause trouble.”
“You look like you could cause a lot of trouble, if you wanted,” Kinta Jane said.
The giant snorted. “No, we’re peaceful people. The great advantage to being bigger than everyone else is you’re never forced to fight, because others leave you alone. That lets you cultivate a mentality of harmony. It’s little people who are aggressive.”
Dockery opened his mouth and shut it again.
“You were waiting here,” Kinta Jane said.
“We’ve been watching for years,” the giant answered. “We lost contact with Brother Onas when the Empire was formed. Brother Odishkwa stopped talking to us ten years ago. We’ve been watching for signs of either ever since.”
“We’ll go with you,” Kinta Jane said. “Only I suppose you’d better tell us your name.”
“Chu-Roto-Sha-Meshu, son of Shoru-Me-Racha,” the giant said.
“My name is Kinta Jane.”
“Dockery. That’s a long name you’ve got.”
“And I do not deserve it.” The giant showed all his teeth in his still-terrifying grin. “Call me Mesh.”
* * *
“Shall I bind you?” General Varem asked. He had a receding jaw and a receding hairline, and two glittering eyes set close in beside a pointed nose. His black wooden armor showed several long cracks and his red cloak was filthy.