by D. J. Butler
Ya’alu took the lead, climbing the steps up the front of the pyramid. Near the top was a square opening. As Ya’alu reached the last of the steps, two beastmen emerged. One had the head of a mantis. The other looked like a man, but with tusks like a wild boar’s.
“The king sent us,” she said.
Chigozie realized with some part of his mind that what he was hearing was not in fact French, but a beastkind mode of communication. Still, it sounded like French to him.
He looked to Naares Stoach to comment on his surprise, and saw Stoach calmly pluck the skull from the Caddo boy’s chest. “Son of Adam!” Naares roared.
“Son of Adam!” roared the two guards at the top of the pyramid.
A look of intense fear and sudden comprehension broke into the boy’s face, and he ran.
Kort bellowed, a sound of distress. Did the bison-headed Merciful wish to rush and save the boy?
Chigozie put an arm on Kort’s shoulder. He couldn’t restrain the giant, but his touch reminded Kort of Chigozie’s presence, and maybe also of what was at stake—the survival of all the Merciful at the Still Waters.
Kort flinched.
The pyramid guards bounded down the stone steps. As they raced past Kort, the beastman lurched forward, as if he, too, were bounding after the Caddo guide…
only he leaped into the path of the guards.
The three of them tumbled to the ground. The other two dragged Kort to his feet, snorting and pawing the earth. Kort shrank back, head and shoulders dropping. It was a strange and unnatural motion when performed by such a ferocious and formidable person, and it worked—the guards threw him to the ground and raced after the Caddo boy.
“I am humbled,” Chigozie whispered to Kort. “Your courage humbles me.”
“No, Shepherd,” Kort said. “I am not braver than you are. I am only larger.”
Ya’alu waved from the top of the pyramid and they climbed the steps to join her. “We don’t have long,” she warned.
Within the pyramid, the stone glowed green, a soft light emanating from the floor, walls, and ceiling. The drumming and chanting sound faded, muffled by the stone walls. The structure contained only three chambers—a room with rough pallets that smelled of beastkind near the entrance, and then, down a flight of stairs, a bedroom and a chamber with a pool of warm water. Green light reflected from its surface and dappled the ceiling.
On the bed lay a woman.
She wore green and gold over skin the color of cinnamon. She was young, she was beautiful, and she was very pregnant. When Chigozie and Kort followed the Zoman magician into the room, she sat up on the edge of the bed.
On the floor beside the bed, Chigozie saw a wicker basket torn to shreds and a wooden broom whose handle was snapped in two.
“I will be missed immediately,” the young woman said.
“You will be missed,” Ya’alu agreed. “But not in time. Show me your knees.”
The young woman hiked up her skirt to show her knees. Removing the cap from the stone jar, Ya’alu anointed her kneecaps.
“For stamina?” the young woman asked.
“You are a witch?” Ya’alu countered.
“Who else?” the girl said. “Whose art should a woman trust to hex her womb, if not her own, and the strength of her loa?”
She had the strong French-Creole accent of someone who had lived in New Orleans, probably the Vieux Carré or the Faubourg Marigny.
Ya’alu reached inside the girl’s dress with two fingers of ointment to anoint her belly.
“You’re a mambo,” Chigozie said.
She looked at him with narrowed eyes. “I know you.”
“I am no one special, that you should know me.” Chigozie shrugged. “But I assisted my father when he was Bishop of New Orleans.”
The mambo’s eyes opened wide and she laughed, her voice becoming suddenly musical. “I don’t know you,” she said. “I didn’t know your father. But I know your brother, Etienne Ukwu.”
“My name is Chigozie.”
“I’m Marie.”
Chigozie wanted to sit down. “Dare I ask in what capacity you know my brother?” Etienne himself was a houngan, an initiated Vodun priest. Did the girl know him from some dark cavorting in the name of Papa Legba?
“He’s the bishop now.”
Chigozie felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. He wanted to throw up, and he also wanted to weep. “Yes, I knew that.”
“Did you know that the chevalier destroyed the cathedral?”
Chigozie felt lightheaded. “No.” He thought of his brother’s wicked, and maybe blasphemous, preparations to curse the chevalier. “Does Chevalier Le Moyne still live?”
“They both live, as far as I know. They attack each other in turn, destroying allies, wealth, health.”
Chigozie longed for a chair to sit down in. He leaned against the wall and inhaled deeply as his vision blurred. “But Etienne lives.”
“Yes.”
“The chevalier sent you here. What for?”
“We have no time for this now. Get up!” Ya’alu pulled Marie to her feet and handed her to Chigozie.
“I can walk,” Marie said.
“I believe you.” He took her arm anyway.
“Do not let go of her.” Ya’alu took another dab of the ointment from the stone jar and rubbed it on the knees and belly of the brown doll. She chanted, and Chigozie blinked. The Zoman magician had been transformed into…himself. And the doll on her arm had become the mambo Marie.
“Where did you learn these magics?” Chigozie asked, feeling a little envious despite his general mistrust of wizardry.
“From my master, an old man who was half-Sioux. But he told me that originally they came from Peter Plowshare. Once the Heron King taught us what we would need to know when the day arrived that we would have occasion to enter his kingdom unawares.”
“I thought Zomas and Peter Plowshare were enemies,” Chigozie said.
“Every border has tense moments,” Ya’alu said. “And we have had our share of ours with the Heron King. And yet Peter Plowshare gave us this gift.”
Naares Stoach entered the room. “Where is the witch?”
Ya’alu pointed at Chigozie. Naares peered, and after a moment saw Chigozie. “Very good. We go now. Stay close.”
They exited to the renewed booming of drums and screeching of alien voices.
They fled the pyramid at a speed that was nearly running. Chigozie was shocked at himself, dragging along a pregnant woman as he was doing, but Marie didn’t complain. They didn’t retrace their steps, but followed another path, one that seemed to be dictated by things Ya’alu said after placing her stone to Marie’s belly and listening through it.
But that was the illusion. The magician must be consulting her map, as she had before.
Chigozie had more questions for Marie, but their speed took his breath away. He took Ya’alu’s instruction to mean that he should be quiet and focus on holding the witch, that if he did, they would remain unseen.
They arrived at the pyramid gate abruptly, a screen of trees giving way to a steep stone wall. Naares—who looked like one of two beastkind with a lizard’s body—raced up a crumbing stone slope to the shelf above. Chigozie dragged Marie as close behind as he could. The Merciful followed, then Ya’alu.
How was she so slow now? She had been faster than Chigozie until the mambo’s pyramid, and now she lagged.
Chigozie shot a glance at the Zoman magician and found her farther behind still, looking up and behind her.
The drumming suddenly stopped, and there was a moment of silence—Chigozie heard birds in the unreal forest, and the whistling of a soft breeze.
He was higher on the large pyramid now than he had been earlier, so he took the opportunity to look eastward. There he saw not the river, but another pyramid. One face of the pyramid had been scalloped away and carved into the shape of an immense throne. Sitting on that throne and facing south was a giant, covered with white feathers, w
hose head bore the crest of an enormous bird.
Stairs winding up the other three sides of the pyramid crawled with beastkind in gray robes. They moved between enormous flaming salamanders whose flickering tongues of fire mostly passed between the robed figures, but occasionally scorched and killed them. A hum emanated from the reptiles. It rose in volume with the emergence of jetting tongues; the tone was bass, but feminine. The beastkind in robes passed bundles up the steps from hand to hand. Chigozie had to squint, but after a moment, he realized what the bundles were.
Bound children of Adam.
At the peak of the pyramid, above the head of the seated giant, was a U-shaped stone bar or table. As Chigozie watched, straining to see detail with the distance, the gray-robed beastkind at the top of the pyramid laid children of Adam across the stone…and killed them.
Chigozie didn’t quite see how they died, but he guessed it must have been by a blade, because red began to stream down the stone and onto the bird-headed giant’s white feathers. Or were the feathers colored like the rainbow, and iridescent?
From this distance, Chigozie couldn’t tell.
The small amount of blood that poured onto the giant was barely an anointing, enough to speckle his head and shoulders. But then the beastkind in gray killed another three, and then another, and another, and the speckles became a coat.
The beastkind threw the corpses down the altar. Where they struck Simon Sword, or landed within his reach, the giant seized the bodies of men, women, and children, and tore their limbs from their dead bodies with his enormous beak.
Chigozie vomited, but managed not to let go of the witch.
“There!”
He heard the word in French, but the sort of French that sounded like it was a translation of beastkind speech. Straightening up and wiping vomit from his mouth, he saw the two pyramid guards emerge from the trees and charge.
Not toward Chigozie, who was above them on the large pyramid, but toward the false-Chigozie, Ya’alu and her doll, who were on ground level and had drifted somewhat into the forest.
Ya’alu turned and ran away from the pyramid.
Chigozie froze, watching. The Zoman magician ran and the beastkind chased her. Within moments the trees began to obscure that contest. Chigozie was unable to tear away his eyes, until Naares grabbed him and the mambo Marie both by the napes of their necks and propelled them up the pyramid again, toward an open passage.
Chigozie kept looking over his own shoulder. He saw an image of himself running through the woods. The image hid briefly behind a tree trunk bigger around than the pillars of the St. Louis Cathedral.
The former St. Louis Cathedral.
He saw the image of himself and the mambo Marie running across a clearing toward a silver ribbon of flowing water.
He saw himself torn to pieces and the witch snatched from his bloody corpse in triumph.
Then Ferpa and Naares dragged him into the tunnel.
“Don’t dishonor her sacrifice,” Naares said. “She gave her life to save your people.”
“You are the ones threatening my people.” Chigozie’s eyes stung. “She gave her life to save her own kind. I am not so stupid that I don’t see the difference.”
* * *
Achebe woke Etienne from a deep sleep. Etienne opened his eyes with the awareness that he had spent the night with the Brides—drained, exhilarated, slightly disoriented.
“The city is attacked, Your Grace,” Achebe said.
Etienne rose immediately. “Get Bondí.”
“I’m here, boss.” Monsieur Bondí stood in the corner of the room, unnoticed because of the darkness. One of the shutters of Etienne’s bedroom was open the slightest crack, and a very faint light crept in from the street outside.
“The money?” Etienne asked.
“What little we have in cash.” Bondí patted a leather satchel. “It’s here.”
The rest of Etienne’s wealth—dwindling and under attack, as the chevalier directed his gendarmes to persecute Etienne, Onyinye Diokpo, and the Kennedies, rather than enforce good law and order in the city—continued with the businesses themselves, hidden behind proxy names and joint-stock companies hard to trace to Etienne, or had been banked under assumed names, with Monsieur Bondí designated to the banks as the accountholder’s proxy.
“Who attacks?” Etienne asked.
“I don’t know, but the city burns.”
Etienne considered. Could it be Eggbert Bailey’s revolt?
He needed a vantage point from which to observe the city, but there was none.
“To the Victoire, gentlemen. Bring pistols.”
They were staying at Don Sandoval’s opera-house apartment, which was in a tall building on a fashionable street. Behind the apartment building stretched a wide stable, and there Etienne kept a number of horses.
These were under Achebe’s name.
Don Sandoval himself was away, having left for New Spain. By the time Etienne and his aides were saddling their sleepy beasts, he no longer longed for a vantage point. The opera house was on fire. Dark shapes raced through the red-carpeted lobby, shattering glass and tearing furniture to pieces. Their silhouettes were swollen, misshapen, grotesque.
“Beastkind,” Etienne said grimly. “The Heron King has come to New Orleans.”
August Planchet’s ship La Bonne Chance—its hull repainted to christen it La Victoire—rested at anchor at the docks nearest the Vieux Carré. On an ordinary night, the ride to the docks would have been a cool, fifteen-minute saunter through quiet streets. Looking over the iron, plaster, and wisteria that made up the New Orleans maze between himself and the river, Etienne now saw mostly fire.
“This way!” Etienne called.
Bondí was a clever investigator, but he was a man of books and didn’t know the city the way Bishop de Bienville’s former leg-breaker did. Achebe wasn’t from New Orleans at all. After several weeks, he still looked around with the wide eyes of surprise wherever he went. Both men followed Etienne without hesitation and without question, and he led them by the route that looked to be the least on fire.
He skirted the northern edge of the Vieux Carré, crossed the Esplanade, and entered the Faubourg Marigny. He heard shooting in the Vieux Carré—not the infrequent shots of looters, robbers, or shopkeepers defending their investments, but the sustained shooting of battle.
The chevalier’s men defending the city? The chevalier’s men and Eggbert Bailey, battling?
He didn’t dare ride closer to see.
They were shot at while crossing the Esplanade, which forced them off Etienne’s planned route, but the Faubourg was intact. Its inhabitants swarmed like ants under boiling water, fleeing the fires, running toward them, or hiding behind barricades to prepare for whatever was attacking the city. Etienne tried to cut back through the Vieux Carré toward the docks and saw gendarmes crouching behind barricades.
He’d go farther around.
The Franklin Gate was abandoned and dark, the gate itself open, the guards gone.
Strange voices called from the Spanish moss-draped oaks outside.
“If we ride out that way, boss,” Bondí said, “we’re not taking the Victoire.”
“We could ride to Mobile,” Achebe said.
“Yes,” Etienne agreed. “But that’s longer than I want to go in the saddle.” He was no horseman, and already his legs were sore. “We abandon the horses here.”
“Pity,” Achebe said, “I had come to enjoy owning such fine beasts.”
They turned the animals loose and sent them out of the city, Etienne guessing that was the beasts’ best chance for survival. Then they climbed within the guard tower of the Franklin Gate and stepped onto the wall.
Now Etienne had his vantage point.
Two thirds of the city burned. Etienne kept an eye on New Orleans as he crossed back toward the docks high on the stone wall; he saw marching and shooting gendarmes in blue uniforms, but nowhere did he see gendarmes fighting gendarmes.
; Had Bailey’s revolt failed?
There were no guards over the Mississippi Gate, either. Before going into the gatehouse, he looked for the Palais du Chevalier. The windows of the great palace were dark, though fire burned in its gardens.
Where was the chevalier?
“I’ve found the mechanism for lowering the gate,” Bondí said.
“No,” Etienne said.
“No…what?” Bondí stood inside the gatehouse and examined a pair of long levers. “Do you want to just jump down, instead? Whoever is lighting fires, they haven’t done it on the docks. I can see the Victoire from here.”
“No, we’re not leaving,” Etienne said.
“Shall we retrace our steps?” Achebe asked. “Take shelter in Don Sandoval’s apartment?”
Etienne shook his head slowly. “We don’t need to take shelter. We need to give shelter.”
Immediately, he felt the desire of the Brides well up within him.
“Like a king,” Achebe said.
Bondí looked up. “But you are a king without a palace, boss.”
“Not sure where to sleep, eh? Not to worry. New Orleans has a palace for the taking.”
What did it mean? Why would the Chevalier of New Orleans abandon the city that made him wealthy and powerful, an Elector and a force to be reckoned with? Had he simply tired of the battle?
Etienne himself had withdrawn from his cathedral and from his gaming establishment, and not because he wished to surrender or had lost the will to fight. He had been forced to change strategy, and he had adapted. Perhaps the chevalier was dodging Etienne’s attack, preparing a counterstrike.
Where was the chevalier, and what was he doing?
Etienne sang as they walked:
Il se cachera de jour
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine
Il se cachera de jour
De nuit il va voler
De nuit il va voler
They descended within the gate complex itself, then crossed through the corner of the Place d’Armes. There, Etienne saw four men in gendarme uniforms dragging an old man from a burning storefront.