by D. J. Butler
Staggering from a wound to his shoulder, Gazelem Zomas got through the enemy line. He ran with long leaps, like a gazelle. At his approach, Chikaak raised his coyote head.
Gazelem ran the beastman through. The force of the Zoman’s charge shattered the crossbar that ordinarily would have stopped the spear’s forward motion, and sank the spear a further six feet into Chikaak’s chest. The spear tip finally struck the trunk of one of the goddess’s trees and stopped moving. The shock of impact threw Gazelem to the ground.
Cathy fell from the beastman’s grip, unmoving.
Bill fought to watch even as he parried horn attacks and lopped off an assailing claw. Chikaak writhed, mouth opening and closing, pinned to the tree like a butterfly on display. Gazelem had hurt himself; he rolled back and forth on the ground clutching an ankle, his face twisted.
And then Chikaak began to drag himself forward. One step at a time, red-black ichor spewing from his wound, the coyote-headed monster lurched toward Cathy again.
Bill roared. He meant to shout Cahokia and Elytharias, but what came out of his throat was considerably less articulate. Dropping a shoulder, he knocked aside the beastman attacking him and dodged past a second. His legs screamed at him.
“Noooo!” he roared.
Chikaak ripped himself free in a final spatter of gore.
Gazelem lunged and tried to grab the beastman’s hind leg, but missed.
Two beastkind grabbed Bill and threw him to the ground.
Chikaak leaped for Cathy, jaws open wide—
and a large, bald man tackled him.
And then a second large, bald man threw oil or liquor or something on Chikaak and applied a torch.
Over the top of the mound came more bald men, and with them Alzbieta Torias. The Podebradan Yedera danced and spun like a dervish at Torias’s side, her scimitar casting a web of protective steel around the priestess. The priestess and her former bearers, in turn, had fire and flammable liquid, and they crashed into a wave of undead just as it reached Cathy’s unconscious body. Bill saw Alzbieta standing over Cathy Filmer with a torch in hand, waving the flame in the faces of two dead men in long blue coats, and then he was dragged away.
* * *
Montse decapitated a charging beastman, slicing off its ape head with a single blow of her saber. Its forward motion continued, knocking her to the ground.
When her breath returned a minute later and she was able to roll the now-still corpse from atop her, she saw chaos. Living and dead in blue uniforms streamed across the top of Cahokia’s Great Mound. She grabbed her saber from the ground and looked for her friends.
Bill, kicking and roaring, was being dragged down one side of the mound.
A pile of wrestling and rending bodies struggled back and forth around the spot where Cathy, Alzbieta, and Yedera had been moments earlier. Whether either was still alive, Montse couldn’t tell. She saw no sign of Gazelem Zomas, either.
Nor of beautiful young Miquel.
Living men in blue uniforms charged toward the front entrance of the Temple of the Sun.
If Margarida were here, she would be Montse’s first priority.
In her absence, the best Montse could do was to defend the other children of Hannah Penn.
She snatched up a flaming torch from the dead hands of one of Alzbieta’s former palanquin bearers and attacked the men about to enter the temple from behind. She impaled one through the lower torso—when his comrade turned in surprise, she shoved the flame into his eyes. He dropped to the ground, shrieking.
“Cahokia and Elytharias!” she roared. Her own blade now stuck in a dead Imperial soldier, she stooped on the run to grab his weapon instead. Holding the man’s heavy Brown Bess under her arm, she fired it on the run, aiming at the center of mass of a third man.
Bang!
He dropped.
The fourth tried to pivot his bayonet into position and nearly succeeded. He cut a long gash alongside Montse’s arm—
and she ran her bayonet through his lung.
He fell sideways, dragging the Brown Bess down with him.
The remaining three men faced her, muskets aimed. And she was unarmed.
She inhaled and was about to spring to the attack one final time, with teeth and bare fists, when the men squeezed their triggers.
Click.
All three hammers fell. None of the weapons fired.
And then there was a man standing behind the soldiers. It was Luman Walters, the short, dark-haired, former Imperial, the hedge wizard. He clapped a small-caliber pistol to the temple of one of the soldiers.
“In the name of Her Majesty Queen Sarah of Cahokia, I demand your surrender.”
The soldier snorted his derision. “I know you. You used to dissect toads and make little wax models for Director Schmidt. You weren’t much good to her, and I don’t see as you’ve done any better by your new Wiggly friends. Look around you, Walters. Cahokia has fallen.”
Montse turned to look.
The top of the mound was the scene of Imperial victory, blue coats everywhere.
Only as she looked, a wave of fighters came over the top of the Great Mound. They weren’t soldiers, and their arms were irregular; mismatched old muskets, the occasional pistol, spears, farm implements, even clubs. They wore no uniform.
At their head raced Zadok Tarami. He swung a long staff and cracked an Imperial soldier in the head with it. Behind him, a woman in a nun’s habit carried a tall, thin cross, and sang a battle hymn.
Tarami’s mob—it was a mob, not a military unit—converged on the spot where Montse had last seen Alzbieta Torias.
“Too little, too late,” the Imperial soldier beside Luman sneered. He spun, trying to stab Luman with his bayonet.
Bang!
Luman shot the man through the temple, dropping him where he stood.
Then the hedge wizard flung himself on the second of the three men. He had a small, black-handled knife, and before the soldier could get his musket rotated into place, Luman had cut his throat. Blood spattered Luman’s face and glasses.
Montse tackled the third man, tearing his bayonet from his hands. When he tried to tear it back, she gutted him with it, like a fish.
Standing briefly in the eye of the storm, she met Luman Walters’s gaze.
“You stopped up their rifles,” she said.
“A cantrip.” He shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Is it over?” A bleak feeling gripped Montse’s heart. Maybe Margarida could escape, whatever happened here.
Maybe Montse could survive, find her way to Margarida, and continue in that way to keep her vow to Hannah Penn, even as Hannah’s other child was destroyed by the forces of Thomas Penn.
Montse sighed.
Luman grinned. Hair mussed, blood on his face, and his long coat missing, he looked wildly out of his element. “It is about to be over. But not in the way you think.”
From behind him, in the depths of the Temple of the Sun, burst a blaze of light. It struck Luman and Montse with a force that seemed physical, knocking them both to their knees.
The light rolled like the waves of an earthquake, outward in a concentric ring. As it passed each tree on the top of the Great Mound, the trees burst into flower. Snow melted as the light touched it. The golden ring crossed two shambling Imperial zaambis as they lurched toward Montse and Luman, and they both crumbled. Maggots surged from the earth in large numbers to consume their dead flesh. Living Imperial soldiers saw the light, looked up at the Temple of the Sun, and fled.
The stones of the temple began to glow.
Overhead and around the Great Mound, the black fire rolled back and shrank with the advancing of the light. Above the fire, the heavy gray clouds dissipated.
Montse thought she heard the singing of angels.
Suddenly released as his captors literally disappeared, William Lee dragged himself up again to the top of the Great Mound. Montse and Luman rushed to join him at the pile of bodies, to sort through the living and the dead.<
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Gazelem was alive and conscious, pinned beneath two dead palanquin bearers. Yedera was alive and apparently unharmed. She sprang to her feet snarling when the heap of dead Imperial soldiers trapping her had been pulled away.
All eight palanquin bearers were dead. The last they found was crouched over Alzbieta Torias, trying to shield her. But multiple bullets and bayonets had pierced both their bodies simultaneously, and the priestess was dead, as well.
Despite being curled into a ball and impaled, her face looked peaceful.
Zadok Tarami, showing surprising strength in his wiry frame, gathered the dead priestess in both arms. Tears streamed into his beard.
Cathy was unconscious, but alive.
Miquel had a leg that was badly mangled—beastkind had torn it with tooth and claw—but Zadok’s people were bandaging him, and he looked as though he would live.
Montse helped gather the wounded and the dead, dragging them away from the glowing edifice to the edge of the Great Mound. In Cahokia below, the light continued to set off explosions of blossom and fruit.
Maltres Korinn and a small knot of his wardens emerged from the Hall of Onandagos, alive and surprised.
Jaleta Zorales and many of her Pitchers lived.
Valia Sharelas was dead.
As the Imperials fled, stunned and fearful, no force rallied them.
“The Sorcerer?” Montse asked Luman Walters. “The Necromancer?”
“Gone.” He smiled. “For now, at least.”
No Cahokian defender pursued their former attackers, either.
“Father Tarami.” Bill groaned, dragging himself on two Brown Besses as if they were two crutches. “We will see to our dead in time. Would you please see to the wounded?”
As the expanding circle of golden light touched the upside-down crosses surrounding Cahokia, the crosses burst into flame. They burned quickly, disappearing entirely within minutes.
The Imperial gunners manning the Twelve Apostles abandoned the big guns. Just as Montse began to contemplate the thought of dragging the enormous cannons within the Treewall and finding a way to mount and use them defensively, she realized that the cannons were to have another fate.
Rapidly, as if decades were passing in minutes, a tree sprouted beneath each of the Twelve Apostles. Each gun rose slowly into the air, borne on a platform of leaf and branch, and then the trees grew around the cannons. The wood never swallowed the guns entirely, but when the trees stopped growing, the Twelve Apostles were thirty feet off the ground, perfectly preserved and also perfectly unusable.
From the moment of first contact with the light, the Treewall began to mend.
Montse gathered up Cathy Filmer and woke her. By the time the two women and Luman Walters had reached the bottom of the Great Mound, gathering up wounded and bringing them to the Hall of Onandagos or the Basilica for treatment, all the biggest holes had grown over, and the leaves and bark were beginning to return.
“Sarah?” Montse finally asked the magician. She’d been distracted by wonders, including the sight of children plucking fresh fruit from newly green trees in the city’s streets, but she hadn’t forgotten Hannah’s queer-eyed daughter.
Luman Walters puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. “I don’t really know.”
“Here I thought you would prefer to go in a fire.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Pick him up.”
Hands grabbed Etienne, awakening him with their vigor.
“No.” He waved away the hands, which belonged to Achebe, who had been trying to lift him.
Frogs croaked in the darkness. Monsieur Bondí pointed. The splash of yellow light on his face reminded Etienne that he was on Bishopsbridge, and that a large Spanish army was approaching from the west. “You really made them angry, Your Grace. They’re sending a whole brigade.”
Etienne stood. He sorrowed for the witch Sarah Penn, and his failure to help her. But then, with the best will in the world, how could she possibly have repaid him his favor? Even if she sent a mounted army, or an armed flotilla—and the Ohio was not famous for either cavalry or marines—they could not possibly arrive in time.
“If the Spanish are sending a brigade,” he said, “it’s not because they’re angry. It’s because they fear us.”
“You,” Achebe Chibundu said. “They fear you.” There was a note of curiosity in the wrestler’s voice.
“They are right to fear me,” Etienne said. “They are allied with the Chevalier of New Orleans, a man I have sworn to destroy. Let us try to count their fear.”
Torches approached the bridge. Fire in the west suggested that the Bishopric’s Westwego plantations were burning. With the lights came a bass chanting in a language Etienne couldn’t understand.
“Ordinarily, I do the mathematics, rather than the actual counting,” Bondí said. “The miracle of St. Bernardo is in the balance sheet and in the statement of earnings, rather than in the mere number of things. But, looking at those lights, I think there are perhaps two thousand men coming this way.”
“Five times that many are still in camp,” Achebe added. “Though I do not know who St. Bernardo is. Is he the one who trains dogs?”
“Ah, you Igbo.” Bondí clucked his tongue. “This is what you get for believing that every man has his own god inside him. No culture.”
“But having my own god who created me means that I don’t have to rely on a dog-trainer to teach me to count.” Achebe bowed his head to Etienne deferentially. “Your Grace, we should go. You are a mighty man, but you are not mightier than the thousands of New Spain.”
Etienne took his mother’s locket from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it sadly. He hadn’t failed her yet, could not fail her unless he died before he destroyed the chevalier, but he felt shame that he had not yet succeeded.
Stay, son.
“Boss?” Bondí prompted him.
Your help comes.
Etienne frowned, looking down at the locket. What help? What help could there possibly be? He looked back over his shoulder to New Orleans and was reminded that it, too, was in flames.
Could Eggbert Bailey spare him troops?
But if every single gendarme in the city joined Eggbert, they would not number enough to stand against the Spanish.
“Gunpowder,” he said. “Do we have gunpowder?”
“Enough to throw a few lead balls at the Spanish,” Bondí said. “Not nearly enough to destroy the bridge.”
“We can come back later,” Achebe offered. “With casks of gunpowder and a boat. They won’t expect us.”
He was brave. If it came to that, his plan, desperate as it sounded, might be the best there was.
Etienne looked at the locket.
Stay. The Serpent Queen sends aid.
He remembered his mother’s face—he had just seen it in vision, or trance, or ecstasy. He had seen Sarah in that same transport; Sarah had summoned him, had arranged for him to see his mother.
His mother had never lied to him.
“I am staying,” he told his companions. “I suggest you leave.”
“I shall stay as well.” Achebe Chibundu placed himself at Etienne’s left, planting his feet shoulder-width apart and facing the oncoming torches.
“I go with you, Etienne,” Bondí said. “But I’d feel much better if we were going somewhere else.”
“I’m staying.” Etienne softened his expression into a gentle smile. “It will be all right.”
Monsieur Bondí took a deep breath and settled himself on Etienne’s right.
The first of the Spanish troops reached the bridge. They were not the mounted lancers for which the Spanish themselves were famous, but a division of warriors from their southern lands. The torchlight added exaggerated shadows to an appearance that was already ferocious; they had skin the color of burnt umber, noses like birds of prey, and powerful shoulders. They wore kilts made of the skins of cats, and on their shoulders they rested heavy wooden clubs embedded with glittering black shards
of stone. Their cheeks bulged with something that they were chewing—when they spat on the stone, their spittle was dark red.
“Aztecs?” Achebe asked.
No one answered.
The chant came from these men. As they reached the far end of the bridge, it rose in volume and pitch—
and then they broke ranks and charged.
Bondí fired pistols into their attackers, injuring two but stopping neither of them.
“Papa Legba,” Etienne prayed, his eyes fixed on the charging, berserk mass. “Jesus. Mother. Now is the time.”
The chant disintegrated into an animal howl, reminiscent of panther cries. Etienne rubbed his mother’s locket with his thumb.
Has she misled me?
Achebe Chibundu settled into a wrestler’s stance, one foot back and both hands ready to grab. “Come feel the grip of Lusipher Charpile!” he bellowed.
One of the charging Aztecs raced out in front. Etienne saw the smears of paint on his face, the expression of animal rage, the torchlight glinting off the long shards of obsidian in his upraised club—
and then the man fell to the ground, screaming.
The man behind him dropped, too, slapping at his own flesh.
“Boss?” Monsieur Bondí said.
Farther back, where the stone of Bishopsbridge met the land, berserkers fell to the ground.
“Snakes!” Achebe hissed.
“No.” Etienne smiled grimly. “Basilisks. The flying snakes of the lower Mississippi.”
“We should run from the basilisks!” Bondí whispered urgently.
Flying serpents winged up from the river’s banks and plunged into the mass of Aztec warriors. They bit exposed necks and thighs. The men shrieked in pain or choked on their berserker-weed as they died.
Etienne shook his head. “They won’t harm us. They have come to our aid.”
A basilisk whipped up from beneath the bridge and hovered directly before Etienne’s face. Its wings were white and feathered. Etienne understood that there was another subspecies, with leathery wings like those of a bat. Scales shimmered with a rainbow of color as the serpent flitted back and forth before Etienne. It regarded him with dark reptile eyes that were anything but cool, and a thin tongue that flickered in and out of its mouth. Its tail coiled several times, running a loop along its own back, as if the creature were stroking itself.