Alexander C. Irvine

by A Scattering of Jades

  He was naked, too, he realized, becoming slowly aware of it as his bare thigh brushed against Kate’s ample rear. Too naked, in fact; the talisman was gone from around his neck.

  Archie sat up and stripped the quilt from the tick mattress, searching through the rumpled bedsheet. “Archie, sakes, it’s cold,” Kate grumbled, reaching across him to pull the quilt back over her.

  Ignoring her and the vertigo swirling through his head, Archie got to his feet and dug through the pile of his clothes. All of his money was still in his pockets, but no feather token.

  “Relax, love, it’s early. ‘Linda won’t need you for hours yet,” Kate murmured, turning her face into her pillow.

  “Kate, wake up.”

  “No. What?”

  He resisted a powerful urge to shake her. “Where’s the pendant I was wearing last night?”

  “Dunno, somewhere—” She waved an arm under the quilt.

  “Where?” Archie shouted. The effort dimmed his vision, and he felt his knees beginning to buckle.

  She sat up abruptly and reached down to the floor on her side of the bed. “Here,” she snapped, throwing the talisman at him. “Now stop your yelling and let me sleep.”

  Archie caught the talisman in both hands, feeling a clarity return as it touched his skin. The blinding pain behind his eyes eased, and the vertigo calmed into a simple hungover daze.

  I can think again, he thought, and memories of the night’s events flooded back into his mind along with the bludgeoning echo of the realization that Helen was dead and he was a drunk working for board in a sawdust-floored dive.

  He crawled onto the bed, struggling to separate the barrage of memories from his present, which seemed suddenly in danger of being swallowed up by his mind’s regurgitated past. Last night he had dreamed again, or suffered a nightmare was more like it. The mummy had … no, he had been the mummy, performing some gruesome ritual among torchlit stone walls with rivulets of mercury coursing down all around him, and watched over by that terrible statue with ringed eyes and some kind of bar splitting its upper lip … and Mike Dunn standing at his side, fresh mania burning bright in his eyes even as his lips formed the words No Archie… .

  And the victim of the sacrifice had been Jane.

  Kate elbowed him in the back. “Get out of here, Archie, I have to sleep.” She burrowed into the bedcovers, pushing him away with her knees.

  He stood, his mind full of the image of Jane grown into a beautiful girl, lying silently on the stained altar as he raised a chipped obsidian knife over the pale skin of her belly. No, Archie, Mike Dunn had said, his words sparking tiny flames along the scallops in the blade’s edge. And Jane had been happy and perfect, a dreamy smile on her face as she echoed the words spilling from Archie’s mouth. But Archie hadn’t been able to hear those words; they were lost amid the roar of the fire and the rumble of the statue as it said over and over again macehuales imacpal iyoloco.

  Archie blinked and tried to knot the leather thong where it had broken, but his hands were shaking too badly. The chacmool had said exactly those words when it stood over Archie with the watchman’s heart spurting in its clawed hands.

  “Kate,” he said softly.

  “Go away.”

  “Kate, please, I’m sorry I woke you. Please—what did I do last night?”

  “Ha,” she said from under the pillow. “You weren’t that drunk.”

  “Tell me,” he pleaded. “Then I’ll go away.”

  She rolled toward him onto her side and pulled the pillow away from her face. “You came in here in the middle of the night blubbering and babbling about some horrible dream, waking me out of a sound sleep. You ripped that trinket from your chest and threw it away, cursing about I don’t know what, and then you crawled in next to me.

  “That reminds me,” she said, fumbling around on the floor again. She came up with the gin bottle and drank off the inch or so left in the bottom, making a face at the taste.

  “Next best thing to savin for stopping a brat,” Kate said. “It’s near my time, and I shouldn’t even have let you in. Now go away.”

  She turned away from him again. “Go somewhere else the next time you’re drunk. My sheet stinks like gin.”

  He wondered what exactly he’d said to her, if perhaps he’d made some strange promise. But instead of asking, Archie dressed silently and went back downstairs.

  It was nearly eleven by the time he’d washed and come up for a quick drink at the bar before going off. Some of the resolution he’d felt the night before had stuck, and Archie was determined to see Bennett. The quickest way to anger Riley Steen, Archie had decided, was through the offices of the press, and to use them Archie needed his position back. Bennett hadn’t even consented to see him when Archie had gone to the Herald’s, offices three days after leaving the Brewery, and in retrospect Archie couldn’t blame him. His ghastly appearance aside, whatever story Archie came up with—and Mr. Bennett, have I got a headline—would have sounded to the publisher like an attempt to excuse three weeks’ delinquency with a lurid fantasy. He hoped that by this time Bennett had achieved a more magnanimous state of mind.

  Archie felt confident that he could pique Bennett’s curiosity even without mentioning Wilson or the exploding rabbit, and his appearance had improved these last weeks, although he was still deathly pale. He’d left Belinda’s Bright for only a few minutes at a time since she took him in, wanting instead to rest and also to hide from the Dead Rabbits, one of whom might recognize Archie and inform Steen that he was alive.

  He heard Belinda shifting things around in the storeroom. She had come down a few minutes before, assuring him that the price of the night’s wanderings would be exacted in labor. “I was about to start you on a small salary, Archie,” she said, shaking her head and polishing the bar’s surface with the hem of her dress. “But if that’s how you’ll spend it, it’s wasted. I don’t waste my money.”

  Archie knew better than to argue with her. It would be best to just accept whatever penalty she dealt out while he plotted revenge on Steen and Royce McDougall.

  He drained his glass of whiskey, feeling his mind clear a bit as the liquor cut through his hangover. “I’ll be out for the day, if that’s all right,” he called.

  “If you’re back by three, it’s all right,” Belinda replied, poking her head out into the barroom. Archie left before she could change her mind.

  Archie fell like a stranger walking down ro Franklin Square, seeing again its smashed teeming mass of dray horses, anxious merchants, sailors at liberty, and the ever-present pigs rutting around the roots of the half-dozen sickly trees some civic-minded individual had planted squarely in the middle of the intersection. His only excursions in the past weeks had been errands to Belinda’s brewery and dry-goods supplier. It seemed like ages since he’d walked with a purpose of his own among crowds of people, each with their own purpose and obstacles, running to markets or steering wagons through mad jumbles of people and animals. The city was alive around him, and Archie felt its pulse, felt his long absence.

  The day was clear and cold, the late-morning sun reflecting brightly from icicles hanging from eaves and balconies. Archie slowed his pace, enjoying the walk. Let others hurry to where they were going; he had the day, and among those three hundred thousand rushing strangers he was content to saunter past vegetable carts and laugh at frozen laundry strung across alleyways. Where this sudden good humor had come from Archie didn’t know, but he was glad to bask in it for now. Revenge could come tomorrow.

  He followed Pearl two blocks to Fulton, passing groceries and medical offices while he rehearsed the speech he would make to Bennett. Sir, my absence has not been without reward, he would say. You wanted a story on Barnum’s mummy, and I’ve got one. Of course the murder of the watchman had been no secret; Barnum had offered a cash reward and lifetime free admission to the American Museum to anyone identifying the killer. Archie’s angle for Bennett would be the involvement of Riley Steen, whose association w
ith the Dead Rabbits could only mean he had close ties to Tammany Hall. Bennett wouldn’t be able to resist that.

  Archie imagined the headline: TAMMANY BRAVE STALKS BARNUM’S MUSEUM. Or something like that. Both names would be in the headline in any case, and the lead article—next to a scathing Bennett editorial—would appear under Archie Prescort’s not-so-secret nom de plume. The Eye Peeled on Orange would have uncovered a real story.

  That was the crown jewel, the byline. Steen would tear out his hair trying to ascertain the reporter’s real identity, and being a meticulous man he would no doubt return to the Brewery to confirm Archie’s death. When that happened, any variety of ambush could be laid.

  If this is what it’s like to be dead to the world, Archie thought, I can accept it. This dead man would have a tale to tell, and Riley Steen would hear it.

  A block before the Herald building Archie stopped to brush off his clothes and comb his hair back with his fingers. He had a hat, but it was in such miserable condition that he almost thought it would be better to go bareheaded. Too much time would be wasted in buying a hat now, though; at that moment Bennett likely was lunching at his desk, sucking down oysters. Fifteen minutes from now he would be gone on business or sequestered for the composition of tomorrow’s editorial. Archie couldn’t chance missing him.

  He walked briskly the last block, full of determination and optimism, certain that his newfound vigor would persuade Bennett at least to hear him out. What evidence remained of his injuries would serve as testimony that at least part of his story must be true. One chance, Archie thought, his eyes on the imposing five-story granite facade of the Herald building as he approached the front doors. One chance.

  “I knew you’d come back, Da.”

  The voice froze Archie in his tracks. Across the city, church bells began to chime, marking the noon hour. The chimes echoed deep in Archie’s floundering mind, shaking him as if he’d been inside the carillon at St. Patrick’s itself. The bright sunlight cast strange shadows and the light itself seemed to grow heavy and viscous, as if the passing of noon had aged the sun. The false sun, Archie thought, not knowing where the thought came from. It hung in his mind with the weight of certain truth: In the false sun, men lose their faces and eyes see only lies.

  His eyes were closed, he realized, but he could still see. Faceless people thronged the streets, passing through the strange light as if blind. I’ve gone mad, he thought. The light stank like overripe fruit, like a winter afternoon, like quiet creeping age.

  I’ve been so happy because I’ve gone insane.

  Archie forced his eyes open and saw the ragged urchin squatting against the wall of the Herald building. She was scratching absently at the horrible webbing of scars on her face, and the false light clung like fungus to the marks left by her nails.

  “I knew you’d come back because of the dream,” she said, the words ringing in his head like bells, stirring up the dream until it boiled over into his vision and she was Jane, wearing a cloak of long green feathers and a mask of carved jade. He felt the weight of the knife in his palm, the muted life of her heartbeat beneath smooth skin.

  “Jane,” he said.

  She stopped scratching and looked at him dumbfounded, the false light dripping from her chin and pooling in the shadows under her eyes. “Oh, Da,” she said, standing, and she touched him gently on the arm.

  At her touch, the bells stopped and the air itself seemed to twist itself into shreds between them. The beautiful false light leaked away, and her face returned, bearing livid scars and a trembling expression of wonder. He cried out and jerked away from her, stumbling into someone behind him. “Nation sakes, look where you’re going,” a woman said, and shoved him.

  So this was madness.

  “It’s guilt, I know,” he said to her, his senses returning. “The guilt has turned my head. I’m sorry, but I’m as mad as you are.”

  “But you had the dream,” she insisted. “Da, you had the dream—” Her voice broke and Archie turned away, walking unsteadily in the clear light of afternoon.

  As the church bells struck noon, Riley Steen stood in front of his study window covering his right eye with a copy of Bernal Diaz. Behind him, ants crawled in the spaces on his bookshelves, looking for the source of the strange ripeness in the air.

  Steen saw the shadow of an eagle pass across the sun. The hour was right; Ometeotl was blinded by the false sun. He uncovered the Smoke Mirror, leaning the obsidian cover against his desk, where it would catch the sun. The mirror sat on a thick pedestal carved from a single piece of milky green jade, with ants covering each of the glyphs adorning the pedestal’s squared sides.

  Some of the ants left to swarm over the cover, creeping in formation along the scratched pattern of a crescent moon inside a blazing sun. Steen disrupted their patterns by plucking up four of them with tweezers and holding them in his closed fist. He ran his closed fist four times around the chipped rim of the bowl, watching his reflection in the still silver pool of mercury. Raising a spirit from Mictlan, the Place of the Fleshless, was a tricky business, but he could see no other way to gain the information he needed.

  “Lupita,” he said, and dropped an ant into the quicksilver. It sank without a ripple.

  He repeated the action three more times, saying as he dropped the fourth ant, “Lupita, I am who sent you to Mictlan, and I command your attention this hour.”

  The ant fell onto the mercury, sending a single ripple out the inside edge of the bowl. It stayed on the surface, crawling to the edge of the quicksilver pool and up to the scalloped rim of the bowl, where Steen crushed it under his thumb. As he did, a shadow grew in the pool as if rising from some impossible depth.

  “Wide Hat, why do you call me from my journey? The way back is long, across deserts and facing the Wind of Knives, and I have no dog to lead me across the river.” Lupita’s voice was soft, plaintive, nostalgic for the place she’d been torn from. The shadow of her filled the bowl now, spilling over the rim like smoke.

  “Why does Ometeotl watch me, Lupita? Caninmachiqualtlan nitlapachoa? Where have I offended him?”

  “God’s plans and men’s plans.” The shadow cackled softly. “He watches you because he will; the Fleshless Ones gossip.”

  “The chacmool has escaped me. With the Old God’s Eye so heavy, I dare not even search, lest he destroy it.”

  “Otima toyani, Wide Hat. You threw yourself into waters and only now see that the bottom avoids your feet.”

  “Parables are of no help now. Swimming lessons are.”

  “So.” Shadow-stuff had pooled at the base of the pedestal. It struggled to find form as Lupita spoke. “The Fleshless Ones laugh at you, Wide Hat, and rattle their bones because you do not think. But your life may yet escape the Old God’s anger. In tlautti mixpa nicmana: heed the light I set before you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Nanahuatzin’s father is the fulcrum. Your plans, and your life, tilt as he moves.”

  “Prescott?” Steen shook his head. “He’d dead, Lupita. His bones moulder in the Brewery.”

  “Iztlactli. You lie, although you do not know it; it is your plan which moulders in the Brewery. Prescott lives, and if you wish to live yourself you will not attempt to run him down.”

  Steen considered this odd admonition, forcing down his anger at Royce’s bungling. Consequences could be meted out later. He’d had an intuition that Prescott had somehow muddied his plans the night of the chacmool’s escape; it hardly seemed possible that Nanahuatzin’s father would accidentally stumble onto such proceedings.

  But if that were the case, logic dictated that he be eliminated, removing any potential for further disruption. Lupita was holding something back.

  He forced himself to speak humbly. “I don’t understand.”

  She cackled again. “So the Fleshless Ones say. Hear, then: Prescott wears the marks of both the huehueteotl and He Who Makes Things Grow. The gods watch him, save him for a role in their plans. Which of
them he serves will depend on your restraint, Wide Hat. You must abide, and know when to act, and only then act without hesitation.”

  A ripple passed across the Mirror’s face as a bird flew in front of the sun. “The chacmool has gone to ground,” Lupita continued, “but will soon begin the journey back to Chicomoztoc whether Nanahuatzin accompanies or not. If the Fifth Sun passes away without sacrifice of the yolteotl, it will sleep again and rise when the time is right. But Tlaloc’s marks are on Prescott, and he is not so patient. He has remembered he wants to live and will seek the chacmool to remove those marks. Nanahuatzin will follow him, Wide Hat, seeking her father as the river seeks the sea. If you would save your plan,” again she twisted the word scornfully, “you will not intervene until the journey has begun. If you remember nothing else, bear those words in your soul. They are all that stands between you and the Old God’s anger.”

  The shadows began to climb up the pedestal, receding into the depths of the mercury pool. “I tell you this because you command it, Steen,” Lupita hissed, her voice fading. “But I have not fotgotten what passed between us.”

  The shadow disappeared. One by one, the three ants rose to the surface of the pool and crawled away over the Smoke Mirror’s edge. Steen watched them drop to the carpeted floor and lose themselves in the heavy fibers, admonishing himself for his thickheadedness. Of course, he thought. He’d been stupid not to recognize it himself. Of course the girl would follow Prescott when he pursued the chacmool. He’d used the same reasoning when he predicted she would return to New York after escaping him in Richmond.

  Everything would work out perfectly. There came a point in the momentum of a man’s endeavors when obstacles began to fall away, when the weight of gathering history amassed itself and rolled like a juggernaut over all opposition. Those who marshaled only petty plans, who puttered about the margins of relevance, never experienced that sensation, and in their jealous ignorance they called such momentum luck. But there was no luck; Steen knew that as surely as he understood his destiny. What ineffectual men called luck was in fact history’s reward for well-planned audacity and ambitious scope.