“Your father gave powerful gifts.”
Chapter Six
Thomas carried the dead child in his own arms.
Temple had brought him into see the boy shortly after dawn. The other Parlett quintuplet was alive, though unconscious and whimpering through some sort of nightmare. Gottlieb, whose duty it had been to watch the children through the night for any incoming messages, lay senseless on the floor, bleeding through his nostrils.
Thomas took the Parlett boy to Shackamaxon Hall. He wasn’t traumatized by the child’s death any more than he was shaken by the deaths of any of his dragoons or company factors or spies. People died for empire: men, women, and children. Thomas could not begin to hold himself responsible for each of them.
If the Parlett boys had come to him from their families rather than from the Imperial College, he might have sent their parents money, perhaps even arranged an annuity. He might very well have put all five Parletts on the honors list, once their work was done.
But he wouldn’t shed a tear.
Once the other Parlett was conscious, Thomas would inquire whether Director Schmidt had any explanation. First, he would see what he could learn from his guiding ancestral genius.
The hall was cold. Since Thomas was the only person who used the hall, and that only infrequently, there was no point heating it. The vents that would have brought coal-heated air into the large room were shut, and the stones felt like slabs of ice under his knees.
He laid the boy on the floor.
“Grandfather,” he said. “What happened?”
There was no answer.
“Grandfather,” Thomas tried again. “This boy died under my roof tonight. He died for his empire and there’s no shame in that, but there is something of a mystery. His brother lives, but raves, and the name that falls from his lips over and over again is Oliver Cromwell.”
Nothing.
“The Lord Protector could not be allied with the Cahokian witch.” Thomas pressed his forehead to the stone. “Please. I am trying to understand.”
The Presence filled the hall.
Thomas’s heart beat faster.
“My son,” the apparition said in his voice of cutting wire and shattered glass. “You are troubled by death.”
“The boy is nothing,” Thomas said. “There are four others to replace him. But he died in my hall. Was it an attack? Did the boy take a blow that was aimed at me? Why does he repeat the Lord Protector’s name, over and over?”
“Are you troubled by the name of Cromwell?”
Thomas considered. Was he? “No. The Lord Protector deeded Pennsland to my family. I owe him my wealth. And if perhaps he went astray later in his life, he did it for his land. He took power to benefit the people of his England.”
The Presence took two steps forward, plate armor gleaming dully in the morning light. Thomas’s heart beat faster; his grandfather was walking toward him. “He took power to benefit all the children of Eve, my son.”
“But is it the Lord Protector who now attacks me?”
“The Lord Protector has no desire to bring down the House of Penn. On the contrary, together we shall work a mighty work. The Eternal Commonwealth that fell in England under the hammer of John Churchill may rise in Pennsland, protected by the sword of Thomas Penn.”
Visions of an eternal Philadelphia filled Thomas’s mind, a Philadelphia in which every building glowed with the warmth and light of permanent power, and not just the Lightning Cathedral. A Philadelphia in which Thomas had no need of the protection of his Town Coat, in which he didn’t need to cadge shillings to fund the grinding pseudo-war of the Pacification, and in which the most noble and wealthy princesses of Europe came to seek his affection.
He shook his head. “Grandfather, strengthen my faith. You speak of glorious things, and I find that I am a bricklayer whose task it is to capture the continent’s overflow of liquid feces.”
Moments of terrible and majestic silence passed.
“I give you a sign, my son. Rise.”
Thomas lifted his eyes, surprised that the Presence would command him to stand.
Then he realized that the order wasn’t directed at him.
Lying naked on his back, the Parlett boy opened his eyes. A split second later, he gasped, sucking air into his narrow chest with a high-pitched whistle.
“God be praised,” Thomas murmured.
“Life,” the Presence said. “So fragile in the individual. So indomitable in its collective flow. Nowhere to be found when needed, and impossible to eradicate when it is not desired.”
Thomas nodded.
Parlett sat up. The pallor fled from his cheeks and he shivered.
“The gift of God poured out uselessly on the undisciplined poor, and grudgingly withheld from the mighty.”
The Parlett child climbed to his feet, swaying unsteadily.
“Even John Churchill doubted at the end,” the Presence said. “Even the Hammer of Woden wondered whether he had sided with the powers of death, to the detriment of his beloved land.”
Odd to hear his grandfather talk of Lucky John so, though of course they had been contemporaries. “I would bless my land.”
“I know you would, my son. And yet you have no children to follow you. If you die today, who rules Pennsland? Whom do the Electors choose for the throne?”
Thomas sighed. “I know I fail you in this, grandfather. I am trying. I do not wish Hannah’s rebel get to spoil what you built. What I have built. And I have years yet to take a bride.”
Parlett tottered toward the door. Thomas turned his neck slightly to keep an eye on the boy.
“You may have more years than you think,” the Presence said. “I preserve you with my power, my son. You will be vigorous and strong into an unusually old age, as you are faithful.”
“I am faithful,” Thomas said.
“And yet, I cannot extend your life forever,” the Presence said. “My power is limited as of yet.”
Parlett abruptly fell. As if he were a marionette and his puppeteer had cut the strings, the boy collapsed in a tangle of bare knees and elbows and lay still.
Should he rush to the youth’s aid? But if his grandfather’s power, sufficient to raise the boy earlier, could do nothing now, then surely Thomas was ineffective.
“What would you have me do?” he asked.
The Presence strode closer. His armored feet made no sound on the stone, and he cast no shadow. “When the Lord Protector granted the forests of the new world to William Penn, he installed Penn not merely as landowner, but as king.”
“Yes.” This felt right. This was what Thomas had always known in his heart.
“The ceremony took place on board Penn’s ship The Fox. Penn eschewed a literal crown, but he knelt in a box of soil brought from the banks of the Susquehanna River and the Lord Protector anointed and blessed him.”
Thomas shivered. His own accessions to power had been more prosaic: a legal document, drawn up after the fact, sequestering Hannah for madness; a deed transferring the family lands and properties; a grudging consent from the Electors to his regency, and another to his taking the throne. He had come to power with the blessing of lawyers. He envied his grandfather’s more beautiful ascent.
“Yes,” he said.
“This is no secret.” The Presence gestured at the painting of the Fox Anointing on the wall. “It is as public as the history of the Walking Purchase, your grandfather’s alliance with the peoples of the forest. But here are aspects of that history that are less well known.”
“Yes.” Curious that his grandfather spoke of himself so consistently in the third person.
“I will tell them to you now.”
Thomas found he was holding his breath. He forced himself to exhale steadily and nod.
“In the anointing, Oliver Cromwell passed more to William Penn than just land. He placed himself into the landowner and traveled to the new world in Penn’s breast.”
“Do you mean a copy?” Thomas was confused. He had listened to lectures on the theory of gramarye at Harvard, but Ezekiel Angleton had sat all those exams for him. “A doppelgänger, or a simulacrum?”
“The copy stayed behind. John Churchill was rising, and the Lord Protector saw that his reign would be ended in England. He had to leave a shade, a mirror image of himself to act and rule in England, and that cost him much of his power. But his true self traveled to the new world with William Penn.”
Thomas shook his head, not meaning to. Could this be true? “A sizar at Harvard reported such a rumor to me,” Thomas said. “I had to pay a pretty purse to the Yankee he served after I killed the fellow in a duel.”
“The rumors have at least a kernel of truth within them. Your family, my son, has prospered with the blessing of the Lord Protector. The blessing, and often the counsel as well.”
Counsel? “What do you mean?”
The Presence stepped forward again and reached down to graze Thomas’s shoulder with a mailed hand. “I am your ancestor William Penn. I am also Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, great benefactor of your family. The loss of my other half John Churchill was a crushing blow, and I have been regaining power slowly for decades. I guided you to the throne because it was imperative to keep the Firstborn from seizing its power. I will guide you now to take even greater power.”
Thomas swallowed. His throat was so dry, the action hurt. “My sister…what did she know?”
“Nothing,” the Presence said. “My power descends through the male line alone. She was the first landowner not to bear me in her breast, the first not to hear my wisdom in her ear.”
“And my father? Did he see you?”
The Presence squeezed Thomas’s shoulder, a sensation like a gentle breeze. “The men of the House of Penn have heard my voice in their hearts from William Penn through to you. They have taken me to be the Holy Ghost, or their own intuition, or the phantoms of dream.
“You are the first to see me.”
“You appeared to me here.” Thomas could never forget the moment he knew his grandfather had chosen him. His grandfather, who was also Oliver Cromwell. The shade had appeared to him in the empty field that would one day become the site of Horse Hall, the night before Hannah’s installation as Empress. Thomas had seen the Presence sitting in a ghostly image of the Shackamaxon Throne, surrounded by a phantasmagorical Shackamaxon Hall.
That first conversation had started Thomas on the path that had brought him here.
“You will be the greatest Penn ever to sit the Imperial throne, my son. My power is recovered. The pieces are moving into position. The time is right.”
“The stars favor us.”
“You will unite your lands. Not as a loose coterie of squabbling fiefdoms, but as the true and eternal Empire of Pennsylvania, as it was always intended to be.”
“Yes.”
“You will crush your rebel niece and all her allies, grinding them beneath your heel and adding their lives to your honor and the glory of your house.”
“I will.”
“You will open up the shell of the Moundbuilders, and you and I shall drink their life. You will live forever, and all mankind will know you as their benefactor and great leader. Your name will be whispered with the names Moses, David, Cromwell, and Christ.”
Thomas trembled.
“You will end death.”
Thomas fell forward onto the stone. He pressed himself flat to the slab, arms extended before him.
“It is time I again took a body,” Cromwell said. “Or rather, bodies.”
Thomas turned his head slightly to watch. The Lord Protector—did Thomas think of Cromwell as the Necromancer, or was that the invidious slander of his enemies?—stepped slowly to the body of the Parlett boy.
“Turn him for me,” Cromwell said. “Lay him on his back.”
Thomas made slow, small, solemn motions. He rose to his knees, approached Parlett slowly, and then rolled the corpse onto its back. He arranged the arms by the boy’s sides, straightened out his legs, as if he were preparing the boy for burial.
Then he moved back and knelt.
Cromwell in turn descended to his knees. He then lay on the boy’s body, stretching himself out to full length and intoning heavy syllables Thomas didn’t understand.
Then Cromwell sank into the boy’s body and disappeared.
Thomas gasped, despite himself.
The boy opened his eyes again, but they had changed—they were entirely white. As the boy stood, a dark gel began to form in the corner of his eyes.
The boy turned to Thomas. “This is not eternal life.” His voice was the grating sound of church bells being ground to pieces, the Lord Protector’s voice. He reached a hand forward to grip Thomas by the shoulder. This time Thomas felt flesh and bone, if not warmth. “This is puppetry. But eternal life will come.”
“Yes.” Thomas was surprised at how eager he felt. “Tell me what to do.”
* * *
Calvin Calhoun’s ride down the Mississippi was troubling.
An Imperial Ohio Company canoe intercepted the keelboat early and exacted a toll. After that, two Memphite barges threatened, though the keelboat captain and all his crew waved, smiled, and promised not to dock at Memphis, and the Memphites let them pass. But the perils of the river were not what disturbed Cal.
The work didn’t bother him. He poled, he sang, he cooked grits and bacon to earn his keep, but Lord hates a man as don’t know how to work when it’s called for, and this was light going, by his standards.
The refugees carried by the boat were distressing. Cal heard tales of ravaged farms, of men impressed into the local militias or the military entourages of backwoods barons, leaving women and children defenseless when the beastkind attacked. A kingdom Cal had never heard of before, some kind of Firstborn land out beyond the Missouri, raided and stole from the farmers as well. It was as if something had driven all the beastkind mad, and their riot had knocked everything out of order, so everyone in the Missouri was fighting everyone else for land, food, and the joy of killing.
What had happened to start the frenzy of killing, Cal knew, was the death of Peter Plowshare and the coming to the throne of his son, or self, or alter ego, or shadow, or whatever—Simon Sword.
The refugees’ stories broke his heart, and Cal gave half his food at every meal to the Missourians huddled in their match coats, blankets, and furs. When not poling or sleeping, he threw a line into the river and tried to catch fish. His success was limited, but the occasional bass or catfish he managed to pull from the water was expertly dissected by his knife, cooked at the boat’s small stove, and then passed in chunks to wide-eyed, sooty-faced children.
The refugees didn’t trouble him. If anything, they gave him the opportunity to show what the New Light meant to him.
He needed that, after what he’d seen and heard in the Firstborn city, Cahokia.
What troubled Cal were thoughts of Sarah. Was she queen of Cahokia now? Was she an angel? Was she some kind of Firstborn girl Jesus?
He didn’t know.
He hadn’t abandoned her; he’d been driven away. He would tell his grandpa, Iron Andy Calhoun, with a clean conscience, that he’d protected Sarah all along her road. He’d brought her to her throne, and there, to defend her rights, he’d killed a man.
And then she had rejected him.
Maybe she had to. Maybe the goddess had made her do it.
Maybe the necessary killing Cal had performed had left him unclean, and unfit for her company.
Still, it hurt.
If she’d come to the throne and the news had gone out, Cal was outracing it. He felt a pang of regret wishing he could meet his grandpa in the Elector’s Thinkin’ Shed and tell him proudly his foster daughter had become queen.
Still, he did have some astonishing things to report.
He also had something to show, something he’d been carrying close to his skin for weeks—a letter. It was a confession, written by Bayard Prideux, confessing to the murder of Kyres Elytharias.
The letter identified Thomas Penn as the man who had ordered the murder.
Cal disembarked by jumping into the river in shallow water and splashing ashore. He did it under cover of night and on land he knew belonged to the Clays. This was deliberate; he had personally lost cattle to Clay rustlers, taken from spring pasture. Cal had seen beasts he knew as well as he knew his own cousins, for sale in Knoxville in the autumn. The Clays were rustlers as much as the Calhouns, as much as Cal himself.
Not these particular Clays, of course, but the family.
That meant he didn’t feel the slightest bit bad about stealing two of their horses.
They’d shoot him if they caught him, that was the game. But Cal was good at what he did. He had the patience to sit quietly for a long time, watching the movements of the farmhouse occupants, the beasts, and the moon. He had the self-discipline to count how many slugs that single guard had taken from his bottle, and wait until the man nodded off against the wall. He had half a catfish wrapped in a bit of wool to break into three pieces and throw to the rangy dogs when they raised curious muzzles at his appearance. He had the silent step to creep without being caught to the stable, the muscle control to freeze and escape notice when a late-night visitor to the jakes wandered by, and the wisdom to avoid opening hinged doors that might not be well-oiled.
Jerusalem, if the Clays were half as cunning as Calvin or Iron Andy, they’d deliberately not oil the hinges, precisely to catch rustlers and horse thieves.
So Calvin climbed over the door, a few feet from the sleeping guard, and let himself in. He picked two beasts that looked like fast runners and helped himself to a rope hanging on the stable wall. He cut off a length, tied it with a slipknot, and dropped the loop gently around the drunk and snoring guard.
Mounting up and leading the second animal, he opened the stable door.
With the loud creak, the Clay snoozing under his slouch hat stopped snoring and looked up.
Cal kicked the horses into a gallop. He yanked the rope with him and the Clay guard hit the ground and bounced, dragged in Cal’s wake. He dropped the bottle and, more to the point, his rifle.
The man was too drunk, surprised, and knocked breathless to yell, at least for a few minutes. That was as Cal planned. He dragged the fellow eastward into the forest along a wide path for a mile. At that point, the fellow began to catch his breath and yell, “horse thief, dammit! Horse thief!”
Cal cut him loose and rode faster.
A mile farther along, where the road plunged through deep shadow on a straightaway, Cal tied half his stolen rope across the path at chest level. He was just beginning to hear the sounds of pursuit behind him.
He tied the second half a mile later, in a bend in the road.
That would make the Clay boys peer really carefully into every patch of darkness before riding through, and take it slow.
Then Cal rode like hell.
He rode to the Memphis Pike. There was the risk he might attract Imperial Foresters, watchful to impose their tariffs and tolls on illicit commercial traffic, but even if he did, he didn’t think they’d try to stop him. He wasn’t carrying anything for sale. If they asked why he was riding so hard, he’d tell them he’d tried and failed to kidnap a bride, and now he had to worry about the girl’s brothers.
He stuck to the paved pike for a couple of miles, and then plunged off into the forest again on a narrow trail he thought he recognized.
No pursuit short of the supernatural would follow his trail over those changes, and if the Clays were willing to use magic to track him, he wasn’t going to get away. Another mile farther on and over the crest of a rocky ridge, Cal let himself slow down.
He rode up the approach to Calhoun Mountain two days and four trades later, riding only a single horse, and that one exhausted. At the foot of the defile leading up to the mountaintop, his fatigue was cracked wide open by familiar shouting.
“Calvin! Calvin Calhoun, hot damn iffen you ain’t come back!”
Red Charlie took Cal’s horse and Caleb gave Cal a shoulder to lean on as he hitched himself up the slope, one ragged step at a time. Caleb was full of questions, as were the younguns who bounced into view at the top, Young Andy at their head.
“You ain’t brought back Aunt Sarah!” Young Andy hollered, announcing the obvious conclusion before anyone could beat him to it. “That mean she’s Empress now?”
Cal grabbed his cousin by the ears and roughed up his hair. “Iffen you don’t know too much, you know too little. I can’t rightly say which it is. No, I don’t expect Sarah is Empress.”
“Queen of the Ohio, at least?” Andy insisted.
“Mebbe that,” Cal conceded.
He crossed the meadows as briskly as he could manage, shooting a loving wave and a grin at every friendly face he saw on the way. When he reached the Elector’s Thinkin’ Shed, he was surprised to see two men standing on the covered dogtrot.
“Grandpa.” Cal nodded to show his respect. “Mr. Donelsen.”
Charlie Donelsen showed his missing teeth in a broad grin. “I heard of you afore, Calvin. I have boys as say you’re a pretty impressive hand with a lariat.”
“Lord hates a man as can’t work for a livin’.” Cal shrugged. “I’m right glad that horse I rode up on ain’t wearin’ a Donelsen brand, though.”
“What brand was it?” Donelsen asked.
“I come up from near Memphis at a dead gallop, Mr. Donelsen,” Cal said. “Wearin’ out horses and tradin’ down all the way. I set out with a pair of fine, fresh beasts. I didn’t look too close, but I expect they mighta had Clay brands on their hides. The one I jest turned over to Red Charlie—and I reckon it’s a miracle if she don’t end up in the cookin’ pot—looks like her brand’s been stamped over three or four times.”
“That won’t be a Donelsen animal, then.”
Cal shook his head. “I believe it’s one of Emperor Thomas’s. Used to pull a cook wagon for some Foresters as are camped out about thirty miles west of here, and are happy to git a younger beast.”
Charlie Donelsen laughed. “Iffen it had been one of ours, hell, son, we got bigger fish to fry.”
Iron Andy threw his one arm around Calvin in a tight embrace, dragging the younger, taller man up onto the wooden porch. “Sarah?” The lines in his face looked as deep as rivers.
“Alive,” Cal said. “In Cahokia. Mebbe…mebbe queen, I can’t say for sure. Jest as things was startin’ to git interestin’, I had to leave. Iffen she is, I reckon we’ll hear soon enough. But she’s with good people. William Lee, mebbe you heard of him. Dragoon captain. And the regent of Cahokia, he took her in. And one of the high-rankin’ priestesses.”
Cal felt worse than ever for leaving.
Iron Andy nodded. “And Thalanes? I ain’t heard you mention my old friend.”
Calvin felt a ball of lead in his belly. “He died, grandpa. Savin’ Sarah from a sorcerer as tried to take her soul.”
Iron Andy set his jaw in a straight line. “Full of fire to the end, I expect.”
“Yessir,” Cal agreed. “Brave as e’er a feller could be, too.”
Iron Andy Calhoun sighed. “Well, come on in, Cal. We got some thinkin’ to do—little Tommy Penn wants a great big war.”
Calvin pressed his hand to the Frenchman’s letter to reassure himself it was still there. “In that case, Grandpa…I might have brought a solid cannonball to heave at the bastard.”
“I like this one!” Charlie Donelsen laughed. “Tell me your name again, son.”
* * *
They called themselves the Village of the Merciful.
Some had argued for Kingdom. There had even been a few votes for the idea that the community should name itself after Chigozie Ukwu—the Ukwites, or the Chigozi. Chigozie himself had pleaded against those options and in favor of a name that sounded more like a church: the Community of Christ, or the Church of Christ the Merciful.
Kort and Ferpa had argued energetically in favor of the word Merciful.
Though Kort never raised a hand in threat or raised his voice, the other beastkind that streamed to join Chigozie’s followers all deferred to him. Was it size? Fearsomeness? A general air of charisma? A reputation he had earned with previous ferocity?
Whatever the source of his influence, Kort’s view carried the day.
Within a week of Christmas, Chigozie had thirty followers. Many of them had been within the walls of Cahokia on the morning of the solstice, the same morning Kort had been there. Something had happened to them, though none of them could say what. Their madness subsided like a retreating wave, though the wave still carried many of their fellows with it.
And the madness didn’t disappear entirely. When hungry, or afraid, or provoked, the Merciful could still react with energy and even violence.
But mostly, they reacted as Chigozie would have expected any child of Adam to react. Sometimes with mirth, sometimes impatiently, sometimes with a short temper, but mostly with a cheerful decency and a desire to get along. They came to join the Merciful of their own free will; they tried to live in peace.
It wasn’t hard to find Chigozie. He didn’t try to hide. On the hill with two springs of fresh water where they made their camp, he erected a twelve-foot-tall wooden cross. At dawn, the Merciful gathered to face eastward and sing the songs Chigozie taught them.
Many thought he should have a title. Again they tried King, but also Lord, General, Prophet, and Duke. Chigozie demurred, though at the title Bishop his heart broke and he very nearly agreed to be called Priest…which, after all, he was.
But he held fast. “Call me Brother,” he insisted, whenever anyone showed the slightest hint of an intent to do otherwise. “Brother Chigozie. As I call you Sister Ferpa, and Brother Kort, and Sister Lanani. We are all children of Adam. We are all creatures of the same God.”
The hill was theirs to occupy because the village and castle adjoining had been destroyed. Chigozie resisted suggestions that he move into the remaining roofed rooms of the castle—instead, when any of the Merciful were injured or ill, he housed them there, beside a large fire. They came to refer to the three connected rooms (formerly a dining hall, a kitchen, and a pantry, though most of the stores had been depredated before the Merciful arrived) specifically and the ruined castle generally as the Houses of Healing.
Chigozie built a small shelter for himself to live in. It was simple, as he had no art in the matter, and he was only able to do it at all because he could salvage planks and tables from ruined houses of the village.
He lay down a rectangle of bricks. On top of that, out of flooring stolen from elsewhere—tabletops, and stray planks—he stitched together a rough floor. At this point, the Merciful ignored his insistence that he do it alone and helped him raise walls and a peaked roof. A salvaged iron stove provided warmth. Chigozie hung blankets and furs on all the walls, with a twice-folded wool blanket hanging in the doorway.
The structure had no windows. To circulate the air inside, Chigozie had to open the door to the winter’s blast. But it gave decent shelter, and no one had been killed inside it.
After burying his club, Kort had lost his taste for theological dispute. He grunted assent to Chigozie’s statements that they worshipped God the Son, God in the Bread, and after the morning hymn he drank from the bowl of blessed water and ate a fragment of the blessed loaf Chigozie passed around.
If they gained too many more adherents, he’d have to appoint a suffragan to help him with the morning liturgy. The thought gave Chigozie pause—it would introduce rank, something he’d been steadfastly resisting. Fortunately, the numbers of the Merciful grew slowly. After an initial influx of beastkind who had participated in the assault on Cahokia, they reached an essentially stable size.
Kort now seemed to live to do two things: serve his fellows with manual labor, and sing.
Come, we that love the Lord
And let our joys be known
Join in a song with sweet accord
And thus surround the throne
Let those refuse to sing
Who never knew our God
But children of the heav’nly King
May speak their joys abroad
Chigozie stood on a boulder on a low knob of earth two thirds of the way up the hill, facing the Merciful. They sang with a call and response technique, because other than the words to a few Christmas songs they’d worn out in the first week, Chigozie was the only one who knew any hymns.
The hill of Zion yields
A thousand sacred sweets
Before we reach the heav’nly fields
Or walk the golden streets
He was preparing to begin the song’s fourth verse when a bugle interrupted him. To his surprise, soldiers in sallet helmets and red cloaks rode out of the forest at the base of the hill and began to climb. A pack of hounds accompanied them, racing ahead as well as following behind.
Several of the beastkind hooted and pawed the earth in anxiety, fear, or perhaps bloodlust.
“No!” Kort bellowed. “We are the Merciful.”
Chigozie swallowed his own fear and waited.
The Merciful far outnumbered the men who rode to the edge of the gathering. Nevertheless, a thick energy burned below the surface among the beastkind as the newcomers arrived. They numbered twenty, and they were dressed like riders, with tall black boots, black trousers, and black coats, and then over the top a broad-brimmed red hat and a long red cloak. They wore breastplates and also armor on their thighs. The armor appeared to be carved of lacquered red wood. They carried a short rifle or carbine holstered alongside their saddles and pistols. They rode in two files—the second rider of one of the files carried a banner. Chigozie didn’t recognize it, but thought the black image against a red field might have been a cuckoo wearing a crown.
The man to the right of the banner-carrier raised a bugle and blew his call again as the riders came to a stop. Their posture was alert but not threatening, close enough to attack the Merciful but far enough back to turn and ride away.
Curiously, the faces of the men might have been pulled from a New Orleans dance hall. Some had the pale features and dark hair of the Eldritch; others were Indians, though Chigozie could not have identified a specific tribe; still others looked like they might have Bantu blood in their veins.
He raised his arms and voice. “Welcome. Did you come to sing?”
One of the riders at the front of the troop took off his hat and wiped sweat from his brow. He had a broad face and wide nose, skin that was slightly dusky, and straw-blond hair. Some kind of German, or part-German Creole?
Chigozie couldn’t place these soldiers, and that made him uncomfortable.
“We don’t know the words, preacher.”
“I sing them first, and then the congregation sings. You don’t need to know words. You only—”
“Stop!” The rider waved Chigozie into silence with his hat. “This is Zomas land.”
Chigozie pointed at the rubble on the adjacent hill. “Until three weeks ago, this land was claimed by a man calling himself Baron McClane.”
The rider snorted. “Welcome to the Missouri, preacher. Any idiot who could pile one stone on another has been claiming noble status around here for decades. Well, no longer. My name is Captain Naares Stoach. Turim Zomas the second, Lord of the White Towers, sends me to tell you that you must vacate this land or submit.”
A hound with wolfish features and a thick leather collar planted itself at the side of Stoach’s horse and growled, as if in punctuation.
An angry mutter ran through the Merciful. Kort raised a hand and they fell silent.
“What does ‘submit’ mean?” Chigozie asked.
Captain Stoach replaced his hat on his head. “In a more peaceful time, it would merely mean ‘agree to pay taxes.’ One fifth of all your produce. We would begin by taking one fifth of what you now possess.”
Chigozie stroked his chin. “That seems a little high. Though you might find the fifth part of what we currently possess to be disappointingly little.”
“Understand that what you produce includes your young. If you submit to Zomas, we will begin by taking one in five of you to work in our slave camps.”
A beastman with the upper body of an ape shrieked in protest. Kort spun and thrust his heavy face close into the space of his fellow, roaring a dull roar that left no room for disagreement.
Despite Kort’s bellow, the beastkind shifted back and forth from one foot or hoof to another and grumbled. But Chigozie didn’t want to provoke an open battle. The riders would simply shoot his people.
“I see,” he said. “Since we live in a less peaceful time, does that mean you will leave us all our possessions and all our people?”
Captain Stoach shook his head. “We will return tomorrow. If you are still here, we will take one fifth of you into slavery. We are reasonable. We’ll let you choose. We’ll send the brutes, the idiots, those with the broadest shoulders and the tiniest brains into the slave camps to work the fields and the mines.
“The rest of you will join the Host of the White Towers. You will serve Zomas in this conflict that now overtakes us.”
“We are peaceful people,” Chigozie said.
Naares Stoach let his gaze wander over the Merciful. “You may be peaceful, but I think you could be terribly effective in combat. Since we battle to fight off rampaging beasts on our land, the Lord of the White Towers will be especially satisfied to have fighters such as you in his service. And consider that it would mean dependable food and warm places to sleep. And pay.”
“And death,” Kort rumbled. “And murder. We have no use for your pay.”
“Don’t be so quick to decide,” Stoach said. “Have you been to Memphis, or New Orleans? Many enticing things can be had for money, even when the coin is iron rather than silver.”
“We’re not warriors, Captain,” Chigozie said. “We’re peaceful people. We’re just looking for a place to be left alone.”
“Then tomorrow morning, you’d better not be here. I’m a merciful man, but I’m willing to kill.”
* * *
The Firstborn had treated Miqui’s wound, pulling the bullet from his thigh and then stopping the bleeding with a linen bandage and heavy and thick yellow salve. The boy lay on a flat wooden cot hanging from a wall in the same cell as Montserrat, sleeping.
Montse eased up the edge of his bandage to peek at the wound; it was clotting and didn’t look angry. The Ophidian healers knew what they were doing.
She looked up from the wound to see Kyres Elytharias.
No, not Kyres, though the girl standing outside her cell looked like Hannah’s husband. She had his face and his thin build, but she was smaller, and the expression in her one visible eye was like the stab of a dagger. Her other eye lay beneath a strip of cloth.
This had to be one of the other two children.
“My name is Sarah Penn.” The girl held an iron key ring in her hand. She was alone. “I guess maybe you know that.”
She slipped the bandage from her head, revealing her other eye. It was white as ice and reminded Montse of the eye of a wild animal, or a bird of prey.
“I would have known you from a mile away,” Montse said. “You have your mother’s fire behind your father’s face.”
“Sir William says I should trust you, Montserrat Ferrer i Quintana. He says you’re of an old noble house.”
Montse nodded. “My family has earned respect, if not always wealth. Please call me ‘Montse.’ I loved your parents dearly.”
Sarah paused long before her next words. “Especially my mother.”
Montse’s heartbeat was loud in her own ears. She nodded and looked away.
“Sir William also says you’re a smuggler, a pirate, and a positive magnet for scandal.”
Montse chuckled, the dry laugh rasping in her throat. “But more to the point, your mother entrusted me with the care of your sister at her birth. Hannah Penn trusted me, so you can do the same.”
Sarah unlocked the door and stepped into the cell with the two Catalans. She gazed on Miqui for a few moments. “He’ll recover.”
“I think so,” Montse agreed.
“I grew up in the mountains of Appalachee,” Sarah said. “Thalanes placed me with Iron Andy Calhoun, who raised me as his daughter.”
“You were watched over by good men.”
“My brother Nathaniel was not so lucky. His foster father was the Earl of Johnsland, whose madness began at about the time he took Nathaniel into his care.”
“Ah.” Montse smiled slightly. “The Elector of the Birds. Thank you for telling me this. I saw you all at birth, and many times I have wondered.”
Sarah nodded. “I can see your honesty and your loyalty.”
“A vision that clear is a powerful gift.”
“My father only gave powerful gifts. I think you knew him.”
“Your father gave powerful gifts,” Montse agreed. “I did not place your sister Margarida—excuse me, Margaret—into the care of another. I kept her. She came into life a princess, but she has lived as a smuggler and a wharf rat, a crew member of La Verge Caníbal, a notorious evader of stamp duties, a bearer of illicit goods, and sometimes a raider of the bounty of the Imperial treasury, or the treasury of the Chevalier of New Orleans.”
“And a carrier of wanted persons.”
“Even so.”
Sarah fell silent and studied Montse’s face. Was there something she wanted to ask?
What did she know?
“Perhaps it was your father who gave Margarida her most extraordinary gift,” Montse said tentatively.
Sarah reacted with a brief look of surprise that she immediately smothered.
“You can see,” Montse said. “Your brother?”
“He can hear. Which…has had surprising consequences.”
Consequences? “Your sister has queer hair. When I tried to cut it in her childhood, she complained. Loudly. Later, when she consented to letting me cut it, her hair broke the scissors unless they were made of the strongest steel. It is a curly mass of hair, long and sprouting in all directions like a fern, and tangled into a ball on top of her head.”
“The gift of magical hair is…not what I expected,” Sarah admitted.
“When she is angry, and when she feels fear, that hair stands on end. And then she has the strength and the endurance and the hardiness of twenty men.”
Sarah nodded slowly. Something was coming together for her. “But she isn’t with you now.”
“The Chevalier of New Orleans took us prisoner.” Montse felt her face color with shame as she told of her defeat. “He hid her from me. I don’t know where. I attempted to rescue her and failed. And the chevalier sent me to you with a strange message.”
“Yes?” Sarah’s face was impassive.
“I am the embassy you were expecting. He offers the gift of your sister’s life.” Montse hesitated. “May I ask what he means?”
“He means he would marry me and dominate me, own my lands in the east and despoil my father’s kingdom, and in exchange he would set my sister free.”
“You cannot give in.”
Sarah’s laugh began slowly, but quickly became sharp and loud—a cackle. With the splitting sound of her laughter and her gift of vision, she suddenly reminded Montse of Cega Sofía, the blind seeress murdered by the gendarmes of the chevalier. “Oh hell, no, Montse. Oh hell, no.”