by D. J. Butler
Sarah shook her head slowly. “In this place, I don’t think you can tell lies. He’s telling the truth. I have no right to enter.”
Simon Sword laughed, a sound like a waterfall.
And Sarah knew.
She turned her back on the Heron King and looked across the river. She took a deep breath. “I have no right to enter, because no mortal flesh has a right to enter.”
Behind her, Simon Sword laughed.
“But I have seen Eden,” Sarah said. “I have stood within the veil and seen my goddess face to face. I know I have no right to enter Her palace, but I have hope that She will let me enter, nonetheless. I will act on that hope. And if I am wrong, then I will lie on my belly outside Her palace and beg Her to help my people.”
Luman Walters looked abashed, but he nodded.
Sarah waded into the river.
In the ordinary mortal world, the act would have been suicide; the weight of her regalia alone would have pulled her to her death by drowning. Even here, in this strange place that was the threshold of Eden, she thought she might be making a grave mistake. She might be guessing wrong. Maybe Simon Sword did have a token to give her, and she hadn’t successfully cajoled it from him.
But she didn’t look back. She swam.
The current was fast and strong, but not as strong as it appeared from the bank. Sarah found that for much of the crossing, she was standing on the river’s solid bottom. Though the flow pressed her against rocks, it never did so hard enough to wound her.
The rocks, as she saw them from up close, reminded her of other stones. Where have I seen these before? Irra-Zostim, she realized.
Were these then Eve Stones? If Adam Stones marked the boundaries of the kingdoms of men, did Eve Stones mark the boundaries where the kingdoms of men met the kingdoms of the gods?
She climbed from the other side and found herself standing, queerly, at the foot of another gallows.
Or rather, the same gallows, with the same corpse hanging from it. Though she had definitely crossed the river, because on this side there was no forest, and a short distance away, a wall built of quartz rose from the black soil. Towers punctuated the wall periodically, and there was a single gate of black wood.
Light radiated through the quartz, or maybe from the quartz itself. If the wall was not the sun, it held the sun within it.
Luman climbed out of the river. His eyes were wide and he hummed a tune Sarah didn’t know, something that sounded vaguely hymnlike.
Sarah looked back across the river. On the far bank, she saw the clearing she had left behind and the tangled woods beyond. But there was no sign of Simon Sword, and no gallows.
She turned to look at the gallows on the near side of the river. It was gone.
In its place was a single tree, just beginning to bud.
Standing beside the tree was her father. He wore the noose around his neck, though the length of rope attached to the noose had disappeared. It was a masonic image, though Sarah had stopped paying much attention to the Freemasons when she learned they didn’t admit women, so she couldn’t say much about it.
Her father took the noose from his neck and laid it around Sarah’s. As he did, his face was replaced again with the face Sarah didn’t know.
“You are invited,” the Hanged Man said to her. “You must come properly dressed.”
He pressed a second coin into her hand.
“Are you my father?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said, but it didn’t seem to be a complete answer.
“Are you Onandagos?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Are you Adam?”
He smiled, then turned away.
“Am I?” she asked.
Without another word, the man walked down the dark soil of the river’s bank until he disappeared into the haze and the distance.
Luman Walters stared.
“Well, Luman,” Sarah said. “I’m inclined to go up to the door and knock. Maybe we ought to ask first: are there any more secrets waiting for us in the deck? Simon Sword was bad enough, but I’d hate to have, I don’t know, flesh and blood rampaging beastkind come out. Or Peter Plowshare. No guarantee he’s the grinnin’ Johnny everyone always wants to make him out to be.”
Luman laughed drily. “No more surprises in the deck, Jake swears.”
* * *
The ax was heavy in Margarida’s hand.
She was not afraid. Makwa the bear padded silently ahead of her, disappearing often in the darkness that covered the farm like a spiderweb shroud. Makwa was Nathaniel, she reminded herself.
Her brother.
It didn’t seem possible, on the one hand. How could she have a brother—and sister—she had never known, that her guardian had concealed from her? How could she be the secret child of the Empress herself, not to mention the half-wild, foreign King of Cahokia, whose name was still a byword for resolution and military cunning in the lands around Mobile?
Margarida had guessed instead that, whether Montserrat was really her aunt, or perhaps her mother, there was some shame connected with Margarida’s birth. She must be illegitimate, tainted, problematic.
But the bedtime stories and cançones de bressol that her Tia Montse had told and sung to her had often featured miraculous children: saints, witches, changelings. Margarida had believed of herself from an early age that she was different from her few playmates. That belief had been confirmed when her adolescence had brought more than ordinary moodiness, and when she had learned for the first time that she had extraordinary strength.
A young man named Arnau, a carter’s lad, had been trying to catch her attention for weeks. At the festival of Sant Jordi, he had dressed as a devil to play the correfoc, tossing fireworks into every open patch of street and playfully prodding the burghers in their bottoms with his nearly blunt pitchfork. He had tormented Tia Montse at particular length, winking at Margarida with good humor even when the smuggler lost her patience entirely and snatched the fork from him, shattering it over her knee.
Tia Montse had chased him away, but not before Arnau had given Margarida a time and a place—the carter’s shop, one hour after sunset, when the fireworks were in full flower—for an assignation.
When she had arrived, two young men she didn’t recognize were beating Arnau. “Robbers! Run!” he had shouted to her.
Instead of running, she had broken the legs of both boys, grabbing their thighs and snapping them with her bare hands. In her nearly blind rage, she might have broken more, but the sight of Arnau’s shocked face had caused her such sudden shame that she had turned and fled.
The next day, Arnau was gone.
Since then, Margarida had been prepared to learn mysterious things about her origin. The visits she and Tia Montse regularly made to the seeress Cega Sofía had come to make more sense. Though she teased her aunt that Montse should use the witch’s gifts to further her career, Margarida suspected she herself had a great past and perhaps, if she was lucky, a great destiny.
But she had expected that past and that destiny to revolve around New Orleans, around the Catalan villages of the Gulf, around the lower Mississippi and the Free Cities of the Igbo.
Not cold Pennsland.
Not queer Ohio.
But a boy who could leave his body to travel through dreams and contact dead spirits, a young man who could heal any wound and be in two places at once, a youth who had a second form as a bear made of darkness…that was a person Margarida could see as her brother.
And the witch-queen Sarah Calhoun, who sounded just as easily angered as Margarida herself, and who could see the very souls of men…such a woman could be Margarida’s kin, as well.
Which meant that Kyres Elytharias, who had driven off the Spanish when all hope was lost and all allies had failed with a ruse that, depending on whose version you believed, involved sending false messages from New Spain into the Spanish camp, or perhaps sailing the same five ships time and again past the Spanish on land, painting their side
s each time to make them appear to be a large fleet, or tricking a Spanish spy into believing that a single barrel of beans—the city’s remaining food supply—was an entire warehouse full, was her father. Such a man could be her kin.
Though it meant she was not herself a Catalan.
Was she even a child of Eve? She had to think about it. She was a daughter of Adam, but if her father was Serpentborn and her mother was a child of Eve, Margarida wasn’t quite sure where that left her.
Nor was she quite sure that it mattered.
But as she crept forth from the longhouse, fingers wrapped around the cold wood of the ax handle, she became more certain with every step that this was indeed her family. Why else would the Emperor Thomas send his creatures after her? Why else would Tia Montse, who always spoke so reverently of the Empress Hannah, go to such lengths to care for Margarida? Why else had Tia Montse taken her to sea, and kept her at sea, or in the bayous, hidden from prying eyes, since the day her hair had first risen of its own accord, filling her limbs with strength, and she had broken the two robbers’ legs?
With certainty came anger.
Thomas had stolen what was hers.
Thomas had killed her mother and her father.
Thomas had tried to kill her sister.
Her spine trembled as she felt the hair on her neck and scalp stand up.
Ani gibbor.
She heard the voice in her mind only, but she recognized it as the voice of the Yankee wiindigoo. Hearing a footfall, she spun and lashed out with the ax—
and the Yankee caught the weapon. The full force of her swing rocked him, but didn’t knock him down.
There was just enough light for Margarida to see the Yankee’s waxy dead skin and the dark hollows around his eyes. There was just enough light that when he flashed an open-mouthed, leering grin, she could see black gums and long, yellow teeth.
And she could see that he lacked a tongue.
Margarida. He sneered.
“Margaret,” she said.
Grabbing the Yankee by the front of his coat, she lifted him off his feet and ran.
“It is about to be over. But not in the way that you think.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sarah approached the black door. Steps climbed up to it in a straight ascent, carved of single slabs of the same shining white quartz of which the wall was built. As Sarah reached the bottom stair, she noticed a man standing beside the door. He wore a long robe that was white, but beside the quartz appeared gray. For a moment, Sarah felt she was seeing Thalanes, smiling and nodding, with his hands clasped in front of him.
The feeling took her breath away, and she stopped to get control of herself.
Behind her, Luman was murmuring. He stopped.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“What do the cards tell us?” she countered.
“There is a hill,” he said. “Then a ditch. Then a hand reaching out of a hollow tree. Then an embrace with an unseen person.”
Sarah tried to remember the suit of cups, and failed. “How do you paint a picture of a hug with an invisible person?”
“We see the whole traveler. But of the other person, we only see the arms.”
“The traveler.” Sarah liked that. She felt like a traveler. “And I reckon that there’s the Priest, ain’t it? He looks friendly. What are the other possible trumps we might meet?”
Luman conferred with his unseen partners. “The Revenant, the Lovers, the Widow, the Tree.”
“The Lovers sound nice,” Sarah said. “A Revenant—isn’t that some kind of Lazar?”
At that moment, the sky cracked. A fissure split the bright red sky directly over the gate and within moments stretched back to the horizon from which Sarah had come.
“I don’t see that in the cards,” Luman murmured.
“Keep lookin’.”
Capillary streaks of darkness shot out from the fissure, spreading across the sky like a net. From the smaller strands, a gray cloud spread, then darkened, shading into charcoal and then black.
Sarah could still see. There was light, but where it came from, she couldn’t have said. Within seconds, the entire sky was black.
Sarah gripped the Orb of Etyles in her shoulderbag. “I expect you’re going to tell me that the heavenly letter in this jacket only works once.”
“Unfortunately,” Luman said, “that has been my experience.”
Two figures descended from the spot where the sky had first cracked. One, Sarah recognized immediately as the Sorcerer Robert Hooke.
“There’s your Revenant,” she said. “I feel some exasperation at the fact that my personal enemies seem to be taking an outsized role in this ascent.”
“I’m not sure…I’m not sure that we are doing this strictly by the book,” Luman said.
The second figure was a young boy, and he was naked. The descending personages alighted beside the Priest, whose smile transformed instantly into a stern look of challenge.
“Who dares approach?” the Priest asked.
The naked boy spoke with a voice like Robert Hooke’s, sounding directly in Sarah’s mind, but had the tonal qualities of glass shattering and metal being snapped in two. I am Oliver Cromwell, and I am here to take possession of this city.
“Ignem mitto!” Sarah shouted. She reached down into the Orb, pulled out a stream of green fire, and launched it at the Sorcerer and the Necromancer.
Robert Hooke stepped in front of the boy-Cromwell and raised his hand. Sarah’s green lance struck his palm and entered his body. The Sorcerer’s china-white skin took on a faint greenish cast, then a brighter green, and his eyes began to glow.
Sarah’s body burned, and she had to drop the fire. She raised her staff defensively, expecting Hooke to throw the fire back at her…
But Hooke merely smiled.
“Sarah!” Luman Walters shouted.
Sarah whirled in time to see a wall of hands grab the hedge wizard and drag him out of her view. The air took on an amber cast, and hands grabbed at her body, as well.
“You’re not permitted here,” the Priest said to Cromwell. As he spoke, he looked at Sarah with an expression of concern.
“Ignem—” Sarah shouted, but hands tore the shoulderbag from her, more hands clamped over her mouth, and she lost the incantation.
I am permitted where I please. The boy-Cromwell plunged his hand into the Priest’s chest, passing through the white cassock without marking it with blood, and into the man’s flesh, if he had any.
The Priest stared at Cromwell, mouth gaping.
Cromwell ripped his hand back out and the Priest collapsed on the steps.
Darkness filled Sarah’s eyes.
* * *
“Luman,” Isaiah asked. “What’s happening?”
Luman Walters had slapped his arms and legs ferociously for several long seconds, then froze in place, staring at the wall. “Am I dead?” he asked.
Jacob Hop laughed. “Join the club, hey?”
That snapped Luman out of his frozen posture, drawing a dry chuckle from the hedge wizard. “Sarah?”
“Don’t tell me Sarah is dead.” Isaiah’s heart sank.
“I don’t know,” Luman said. “Robert Hooke, he…cast a spell. Sarah and I are lying in darkness. In a dark, cold place.”
“Nathaniel,” Jake said. “Can you find them?”
But Nathaniel now was fixed in his vision of some other place.
“Maybe you’re in a ditch,” Isaiah said. “Like on the card. Maybe this is supposed to happen. Maybe this is part of the ascent.”
“I hope so,” Luman said. “There seems to be a fine line between the ascent rite Sarah hoped to engineer and her actual conflict with her enemies.”
“That’s good,” Hop said. “She’s performing the ascent for real, it’s not just drama.”
“I would like to agree,” Luman said. “But I may be dead.”
“Just remember,” Isaiah told him, “death is not the end.”
Hop
looked through his suit of cups. “The token appears to be in the ditch. You are supposed to do something there. Be given a token by someone.”
“There’s no one here,” Luman shot back. “Well, there are hands trying to break in, I think. But they’re not friendly. And who would have given her a token, in any case? The Revenant—Cromwell? Hooke?”
“The priest,” Isaiah said. “You told us there was a Priest.”
Hop held up the Priest trump. A black-edged hole had been punched right through the card, as if a burning cigar had been pressed against the Priest’s chest.
“What happened?” Hop asked.
A brief silence. “Sarah says Cromwell killed him.”
“Dammit,” Wilkes and Hop cursed together.
“Wait,” Luman said. “Hand me that trump card. Sarah says she knows another priest.”
* * *
Etienne was staring at the lights when they began to move in his direction. Still some distance away, it would take them time to reach Bishopsbridge. He had nothing.
“Come on, boss,” Monsieur Bondí said.
Achebe agreed. “If we live, we can fight again.”
“There is no better barrier,” Etienne said. “If we fall back to the walls, then Eggbert Bailey’s men are outnumbered, ten to one at least. Probably more. Look at the size of that host.”
The Biblical word felt appropriate. If God fought with the host of heaven—the stars—at his side, then the chevalier had brought earthly constellations with him, the host of New Spain.
Etienne sighed. He had nothing.
As he exhaled, a tingle ran up his spine. He felt charged, alive, filled with energy. The Brides were speaking to him.
But there were no women. Or were there? Had the chevalier somehow brought an army of Spanish amazons to fight him?
Etienne laughed at the thought, but his breath came short. Waves of ecstasy rocked his limbs and he fell to his knees.
“Boss?” Bondí grabbed his shoulder.
Etienne fell over sideways.
* * *
Sarah could not even guess what strange space she was in now. She and Luman lay flat on their backs on cold earth, with a ceiling of earth just above their noses.
A ditch? A grave?