by D. J. Butler
Chigozie flinched instinctively, but Stoach put a hand on his shoulder. “Steady, Shepherd,” the outrider said. “Ya’alu’s art comes from Peter Plowshare himself, and will hold.”
The words gave Chigozie little comfort.
“I wish I could hear,” he said.
“Ya’alu would have amplified the words for us.” Stoach turned to Marie and glared at her with disdain. “What say you, witch? Will you ask your Africk spirits to wing your husband’s words to us?”
Marie spat.
Good God of Heaven, her belly was definitely swollen.
Stoach shrugged. “It matters not. He asks the general where we are. Since the general doesn’t know, he will either bluff or tell the god of the Missouri and the Ohio Rivers to go bugger himself.”
Chigozie stared. Simon Sword prowled about the pinioned general like a large cat stalking a small and helpless animal. The general stared dully ahead.
Simon Sword circled the general twice, his gestures becoming larger and more energetic. Beastkind dragged Zomans into the square and killed them in front of the general, disemboweling them, tearing off their heads, and rending their flesh with beastlike teeth.
The general sagged, defeated.
Simon Sword circled a third time, and then abruptly wheeled on the general. With a single downward swing of his golden sword, he split the Firstborn commander in half.
Lightning flashed and the earth shuddered. Moments later, the sky groaned.
A knot of beastkind pounced, devouring the remains of General Varem. Chigozie looked away.
“You are next,” the mambo Marie muttered.
“Your loving bridegroom is unable to find us,” Naares Stoach said. “Peter Plowshare makes the bounds, and by ancient covenant with Zomas and Etzanoa of the White Towers, he taught us the arts to enforce them.”
Marie’s laugh was hollow and sounded more like choking. “Fools. Peter Plowshare makes the bounds, yes. And Simon Sword breaks them. For all his father does, in all his decades of work, Simon Sword breaks them. He breaks them all.”
Naares Stoach growled. “You carry a monster in your womb and you rejoice in it?”
She gazed at him coolly. “Père Loko and Mère Ayizan permit it. And I do it because this is how I will have my revenge.”
“On Zomas?” Stoach howled. His voice was so loud, Chigozie turned and looked toward Etzanoa, half-expecting the Heron King to come charging their direction.
“On mankind,” Marie said. “On men. On the chevalier, who imprisoned me. On his mamelukes, who dragged me to the Heron King’s bed. And yes on Zomas, and on Memphis, and on every other power that has enslaved my people!”
“I will kill the child in your womb.” Stoach drew a pistol from his belt, checking the firing pan. “I was sent to bring that child back to Zomas, to be held as a bargaining chip against the Heron King, but Zomas has fallen. I will shoot you in the belly and destroy you and your madness now.”
Thunder rolled and the earth shook again.
“I will die.” Marie sneered. “And my newborn son will kill you where you stand.”
“We shall see.” Stoach raised his pistol and pulled back the hammer.
“Stop!” Kort bellowed.
Chigozie flinched again, uncertain where to turn. A glance at the funeral pyre of Zomas reassured him that the Heron King still hadn’t noticed him, but a look at Kort’s face gave no reassurance whatsoever. Why was the beastman interfering?
Had his conversion and faith fallen away? Had it been feigned? Was he now intervening to save the child of his true god, the Heron King?
Kort moved between Stoach and Marie, towering over them both.
“She speaks the truth,” Ferpa said softly. “She doesn’t speak it kindly, but she speaks the truth.”
“As she knows it.” Naares Stoach ground his words out through clenched teeth, but he lowered his pistol.
“There is a balm in Gilead,” Kort said slowly. The big beastman turned and looked at Chigozie. “I have learned this from the Shepherd of Still Waters.”
“No,” Stoach said.
“If there is a balm that can heal my wounds, then it can heal the wounds of this witch, and of her child,” Kort said.
Marie laughed. “But I am a good Christian already! And more than that, I am mambo asogwe of la Société la Belle Aphrodite of the Faubourg Marigny!”
Stoach shook his head, but his words were words of surrender. “I have nowhere else to go. It’s worth a try.”
Kort looked at Chigozie. Chigozie took a deep breath and nodded.
Marie continued to rave. “And I am the bride of a god, the great mystère of this continent, the Heron King! You cannot give me more religion, beastman!”
“No,” Kort said. “But I can give you mercy.”
Marie shut her mouth, but still showed her teeth in a snarl.
Chigozie turned away from the burning city and looked northward. “Let’s go. We will lead these lost souls, too, beside the still waters.”
“Lead me where you will,” Marie murmured. “Simon Sword will find me.”
Kort picked the mambo up, and they walked northward. The earth continued to shake and the sky to rumble, as if the world itself were protesting.
* * *
Sören and Sigrid continued to sleep soundly as Nathaniel collapsed into a trance. As he had predicted, a shadow rose from the furs about his sleeping form and took the shape of a bear.
“Makwa,” Margarida said in friendly greeting, and fell asleep.
She dreamed of golden light on the waters of Pensacola Bay, the ancestral lands of Montserrat Ferrer i Quintana, which she had once believed were her family demesne. In the dream, she still believed, but a lawyer in a three-cocked hat followed her about, trying to persuade her otherwise. He presented a birth certificate, written in blood on a plank of oak, that showed her to be a child of the Penn family. He tried to press into her hands affidavits of witnesses to her birth, though they were all in the form of transcriptions of torture sessions. Each statement verified that she was Margaret Elytharias Penn, daughter of the Empress Hannah Penn and her husband Kyres Elytharias, and was accompanied by a notation as to the sort of torture that had produced the statement. “Spoken through the slot of the iron maiden,” one said. “Given upon the rack,” said another.
Each time the lawyer approached with such a document, Margarida fled, first down to the beach, and then out onto a long dock that trembled at every step. Finally she leaped into a waiting boat and rowed herself out into the water.
The last time the lawyer appeared, he emerged directly from the waters of the bay. Salt water sluiced off his hat, which, for the first time, he was wearing backward on his head.
As the lawyer climbed out of the water on the invisible rungs of a ladder, Margarida saw his faded purplish coat, which was worn inside out, and recognized his face as the face of her brother, Nathaniel Elytharias Penn.
Nathaniel shook himself like a wet dog, throwing off water, and stepped into the boat. “You need to wake up. You’re about to be attacked.”
“But Makwa,” she said.
“Makwa will fight.” Nathaniel frowned, looking very serious. “I don’t know if Makwa alone is strong enough to defend us.”
“Who is it?” Margarida asked. “The Emperor’s man, Franklin?”
Nathaniel shook his head. “Cromwell’s man. Ezekiel Angleton, the Martinite. The wiindigoo.”
“How am I going to stop him?” The sunlight was gone, the waters of the bay scowling the gray reflection of a cloud-filled sky that now seemed to threaten rain.
“Seize the initiative,” Nathaniel said. “Take the fight to him. Surprise him if you can. I’ll do everything I can to help. But I’m needed here.”
“Where is here?” she asked him. “Where are you?”
Nathaniel hesitated, then frowned. “Here seems to be many places at once, and some of them may not even fit the ordinary definition of a place. Here is a thing that is happening, and I h
ave to be part of it because I am holding some of the pieces together. We’re helping our sister Sarah. But I think I can be with you, too.”
“You can be in two places at once?”
“At least two,” Nathaniel said. “I am Makwa, for instance, as much as I am the boy sleeping beneath.”
“You’re the bear?” But he had already told her that he was.
“Wake up now. Take a weapon, and I will come with you. Let’s find the wiindigoo. And maybe you could get a little angry. Not all the way, not so you lose complete control, but enough so that you can rip the masts out of ships.”
Margarida woke up.
Makwa stood on the packed earth floor of the longhouse, nodding at her. Margarida shrugged back into her wool coat. The hair on the top of her head began to rise and her scalp tingled as she lifted Sören’s ax from the pegs where it rested and crept to the door.
She listened at the planks and heard nothing. Lifting the leather-thong latch, she slipped out into the winter night.
Makwa followed her.
What stars and moon there might be were obscured by thick clouds. Margaret crouched beside the longhouse, wishing suddenly that instead of her own gift she had the gifts of her sister and brother. Where she saw a dark thicket of leafless trees, rolling fields under snow, and ditches thick with impenetrable shadow, Sarah might see the Yankee necromancer, plain as day.
And Nathaniel might hear him.
As if prodded by her thought of Nathaniel, the shadow-bear Makwa nudged Margaret’s side. It felt warm and substantial, despite its appearance. It turned and slunk past the outhouse behind the longhouse, heading for a line of fenceposts and a creek bed beyond.
Ax gripped tightly in both hands, Margarida followed.
“I’d wet my breeks at the sight of you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
They were losing.
Bill saw Maltres Korinn fall back from the wall with a shrinking knot of Cahokian wardens and the Podebradan Yedera. They retreated to the Hall of Onandagos through bloody streets as a hundred-foot length of the Treewall crumbled. South of the Duke of Na’avu, Joleta Zorales and Valia Sharelas beat a similar retreat, abandoning their guns on the walls and falling back to one of the city’s larger private homes.
Here and there, other homes made defensive stands. Maltres had requisitioned all of Cahokia’s bodyguards, retinues, and family troops. The women and men standing atop wooden walls and firing down at the Imperial soldiers wore no uniforms and carried irregular and uneven weapons.
The blue soldiers streaming in through the gaps flooded across the plain below him.
Shuffling dead flooded up the Great Mound. Some were men in ragged blue Imperial colors, but more daunting than those were the dead beastkind, Sarah’s own former troops. More daunting, larger, and in front.
Bill needed a barrier.
He needed fire.
“Sergeant,” Bill growled, “we need to send soldiers into the temple and requisition wood and oil. Anything we can get that will burn.”
Chikaak didn’t answer; he had disappeared.
“Sergeant!” Bill bellowed, but there was no answer.
He dragged himself, wincing, to his knees, and turned just in time to see the coyote-headed beastman come over the lip of the mound. With him came two of Sarah’s larger beastman warriors, grunting and roaring. Between them, they dragged a cart.
The cart was piled high with wounded warriors. Those lively enough to do so loaded and fired weapons down the slope of the mound behind them. Montse’s young pirate protégé was among them, shouting and singing as he fired.
Cathy Filmer, Montserrat Ferrer i Quintana, and Gazelem Zomas staggered up in the cart’s wake.
His heart nearly exploded in relief, but Bill had no time.
“Sergeant!” he shouted to Chikaak. “Well done! Now take those men into the temple and get me all the flammable material you find. Furniture, oil, sheets—anything you can get!”
Cathy and Gazelem both looked as if Bill had struck them. Chikaak nodded and barked to the two beastmen at the cart. The three of them charged toward the temple door—
and froze, just as they reached the opening.
“They can’t do it.” Gazelem Zomas’s voice was filled with awe. “They can’t go in.”
Hell’s Bells. We are caught between the hammer and the anvil, and the anvil is Sarah’s own goddess. “Unload the men from that cart!” Bill shouted. “Get every man who can fire a gun into position. Get ready to light that cart on fire and send it down the hill!”
Chikaak raced to obey Bill’s orders. Cathy worked with the wounded men, helping them down off the groaning wagon. Montse and Gazelem returned with Bill to the edge of the mound. All three of them crouched to present small targets to the Imperial soldiers below.
The dead warriors ascending the hill were slow but tireless, and they had nearly arrived.
“I can see their eyes!” Bill barked. He took the Heron King’s horn in his hand and blew the signal for fire.
The volley crashed through the lumbering beastmen. Two fell, knocked down by the impetus of the bullets, but the others moaned and wailed and kept running.
“Load silver shot, if you have it!” Bill bellowed.
He noticed the black fire surrounding the city; after the first few days, it had become such a normal sight, it escaped his notice.
He saw it now because it had doubled in height, and it was drawing nearer.
It had crossed the Treewall.
“I’ll ignite the wagon.” Gazelem slipped away.
“What I wouldn’t give for a few of those big guns and the Pitchers to work them,” Montse murmured. She loaded a brace of pistols with silver bullets.
“The small guns do virtually nothing,” Bill grunted. He blew one signal advising his warriors to arm themselves with bayonets, and a second, summoning them to form up beside him. “We will have to break this charge with a counter-charge. Hell’s Bells, I need barrels of black powder. Or a few hundred more soldiers.”
Beastkind warriors rejoined Bill from the other corners of the mound. They were pitifully few in numbers, but their eyes were fierce.
The last of them came with Gazelem Zomas, dragging the hospital cart. Somehow, he’d managed to ignite it. Flames licked up the cart’s walls.
“Before the wheels burn,” Gazelem advised with a resolute nod.
“Great God of Heaven,” Bill said, grinning at his men. Not all of them could understand his words, but the peeled-back lips, bared fangs, and joyous panting he got in return told him they could understand his smile. “If I were one of Thomas’s wage-boys, I’d wet my breeks at the sight of you.”
Chikaak saluted, straightening his spine and snapping one furry hand to his coyote brow. Following his example, the other beastmen all saluted in turn.
General William Lee saluted back.
He lacked an appropriate horn signal. “Chikaak, the Imperial soldiers approaching the top of the mound must surely be fatigued. Let us send them an appropriate conveyance.”
“Perhaps a wagon?” Gazelem Zomas suggested.
“I believe it would be the very thing, suh.”
Chikaak and three of the other beastkind stepped forward and hurled the cart down the steps of the mound. The dead beastkind warriors, formerly their fellows, were within moments of the peak, and the flaming cart caught them by surprise. Several were trampled and lay still. Others were knocked down. Some were caught up and rode hissing and shrieking down the mound, igniting with the wood.
The Imperial charge was broken.
Form up, Bill blew, then fire, and then charge.
A mixed volley of lead and silver slammed into the undead creeping up the mound. Many of them dropped, and some of them stopped moving entirely. Then Sarah’s beastkind warriors thundered down Cahokia’s great mound, roaring as they went.
“Cahokia and Elytharias!” Bill shouted. It was an improvisation, but Gazelem and Montse took it up immediately.
&nb
sp; “Cahokia and Elytharias!”
Bill couldn’t run, but he fired his pistols over the heads of his men into the oncoming mass of Imperials.
The beastmen collided fifty feet below the top of the mound. The Imperials were fatigueless dead, but the living flesh and bone of Bill’s warriors was driven by courage, devotion, and gravity, and it followed a racing fenceline of bayonets.
The beastmen rolled over their former fellows and the shambling dead men who climbed in their wake. Beyond that was a gap, caused by the weariness of the living leg muscles of the Imperial soldiers following. As his men entered the gap, Bill blew retreat to summon them back to the height of the mound.
“Give them covering fire!” he shouted.
Cathy was there, and Montse and Gazelem and half a dozen wounded Firstborn soldiers. They fired and reloaded over the heads of the beastmen.
From below, the Imperial soldiers also fired and reloaded into the mass of living beastmen.
Sarah’s beastkind soldiers struggled back up the hill. Tired from battle, weak from rationing, and wounded, they didn’t make it. Chikaak fell ten feet from the top of the mound, dropping first to his knees as bullets struck him in the back, and then falling away to one side.
His dying face wore the grin of a faithful dog.
One of the Firstborn, a man Bill had seen in drill but whose name he didn’t know, rose to his knees to try to retrieve Chikaak. A bullet passed through his throat, killing the Cahokian instantly.
As the man dropped, Bill had the distinct impression of seeing his soul leave his eyes, not fading into nowhere, as he had seen so many times on the battlefield, but sucked away into the atmosphere—
and into the wall of black fire.
Was it a trick of his mind that made the ring of fire seem to constrict slightly more around the dying city?
And was that ring centered on this very mound?
With a twist of pain like a stab wound in the pit of his stomach, Bill knew that every death of his own men strengthened the enemy’s sorcery.
Two figures ascended the mound. They did not walk on it, but floated above it, as if they were birds wearing the shape of men.