“Then we must go to Philadelphia, and perfect the world.”
Chapter Two
Sarah looked upon the veil of her goddess’s temple and saw.
She looked from the inside, a vantage point she had held for weeks. She sat on the goddess’s Serpent Throne, with its seven lamps—through Sarah’s Eye of Eden, they appeared as seven salamanders, or the seven visible planets—or she stood before the veil. The throne sustained Sarah. She slept on it, and awoke mostly rested. She reclined on it, and did not hunger. Though her only exercise was to stand before the veil and gaze upon it, or pace the few steps it took to cross the goddess’s sanctum in any direction, her body did not wither.
She hadn’t left the sanctum for weeks, not since the day she had successfully ascended through magical, sacred space to take the Serpent Throne, as her father never had, during an Imperial siege of her father’s city, Cahokia.
She itched to get out, to breathe fresh air and feel warm sunshine on her skin, but she was afraid she might not be able to leave. Before the ascent, the magic Sarah had worked in the short months since leaving her childhood home in Appalachee had left her stretched and exhausted, unable to sleep anywhere but in the goddess’s temple, and from time to time even bleeding.
She found respite on the throne, but the throne didn’t heal her.
You cannot escape me.
She was also afraid of the door in the corner of the sanctum. It was framed by pillars that looked like vine-wrapped tree trunks, with a gnarled vine-like lintel across the top. With its vegetable stylings, the door resembled the front entrance of the goddess’s home, the Temple of the Sun, but through the door lay darkness that Sarah’s eye could not penetrate, and from the door came distant screaming, and from time to time, a voice like the piercing cry of a hunting bird.
The priestesses who tended to Sarah could not see the door, and they did not hear the voices.
You and I are bound. And I shall be master.
She hadn’t heard the voice immediately upon her ascent to the Serpent Throne, but it had come to her in the days shortly after. It was the voice of Simon Sword. Whether it was the Heron King himself speaking, or some echo from her own mind, or something else still, was a question Sarah wasn’t sure she could answer.
Sarah ignored the voice and gazed upon the veil. Since the blow of a clay-made Mocker had dislodged from her eye socket the acorn by which her father had transmitted to her mother his dying blood, allowing her to conceive three children, Sarah had had gifts of vision. She saw ley lines and could both draw mana from them and transmit her vision along them. Since the land’s great rivers, the Mississippi and the Ohio and the Missouri and the others, were all mighty ley channels, Sarah by her own power had a wide-ranging view of the Ohio Valley.
The veil let her see farther.
What she saw looked something like the magic lantern she had seen in a Nashville tent show as a child. Despite the name, the lantern had nothing of gramarye or hexing about it; in a dark tent, a man calling himself the “projectionist” had charged two pennies a head and talked up the marvels of what he was about to display until he had packed his tent, children (including Sarah) sitting on the dirt up front, then those willing to pay an extra penny sitting on two rows of folding wooden chairs, and then everyone else standing behind. The projectionist himself had stood at a wooden box on three metal legs, with a steel snout poking out the front, and a rotating steel cylinder in the middle, and at the back a powerful mirrored light. The “magic lantern” had cast still, colored images onto a hanging white sheet: angels, bogies, romantic vistas.
But those images had been still. The images Sarah saw on the veil moved, shadows that seemed to be cast by the throne’s salamanders. By force of will, she could find places she knew, and people she had connection with, and observe them. Instinctively, though it didn’t seem necessary, she moved her hands in front of her face as she watched, gripping images to draw them closer to herself or push them farther away, and sliding images from side to side and up and down as she sought the visions she wanted.
From the towers of my land, you can see the entire world.
“You ain’t got no land!” Sarah snapped. “You’re a usurper and a thief!”
I am the truest king there could be. I am inevitable. I am the one who always returns, by right as well as by nature. My people all welcomed me. Did yours welcome you?
“The goddess chose me!” Sarah barked. The words cost her physical effort, but they silenced the voice that cried through the door, at least for a time.
She had tried her arcane arts to shut the portal, and to stifle the sounds, and had failed to accomplish either.
With the veil, she could see, if not the world, then at least the empire. And Sarah didn’t need to look for people and places within Cahokia’s Treewall. Instead, she felt and heard and saw Cahokia, all at once, all the time. She experienced the city of the goddess. She was the city, and knew herself. The veil was how she looked outward.
Knowledge and vision flowed through her constantly.
She looked for her brother and sister most often. All three of them had been raised separately as foster children, unaware that their mother was Mad Hannah Penn, the empress sequestered by her brother Thomas Penn on the grounds of insanity, and their father was Kyres Elytharias, the Lion of Missouri, the wizard-king of Cahokia, greatest of the Moundbuilder kingdoms of the Ohio, or, as Sarah had learned to call them, the Seven Sister Kingdoms. Only when Thomas had learned of the existence of the three children and set out to kill them had Sarah discovered her identity, and then helped rescue and unite her siblings.
As she had many times before, Sarah watched the images of Nathaniel and Margaret, tramping along a muddy forest track, and wished the veil allowed her to see across time as well. She longed to see her mother and father before death had divided them, her brother as a foster child called Nathaniel Chapel in the care of the Earl of Johnsland, her sister as Margarida, the ward of the smuggler and pirate, Montserrat Ferrer i Quintana.
Sarah followed the line of the trail they were walking and frowned. Where were Nathaniel and Margaret going? Thomas wished all three of them dead, so Sarah wanted Nathaniel and Margaret to join her in Cahokia. Cahokia was not safe for them—no place was safe for them—but it must surely be one of the least dangerous places they could be.
Instead, Sarah’s sister and brother followed a path that joined larger and larger trails, flowing toward Philadelphia. Once their mother’s capital, now Thomas’s. She must reach out and urge them to take a better road.
Sarah and Nathaniel communicated easily across distance. As she had a gift of sight, bestowed by her father’s acorn in her eye, he had a gift of hearing, acquired from an acorn that had been wrapped inside one furled ear at birth. The voices young Nathaniel heard had left him fragile and shattered until, with the aid of an Ojibwe visionary guided by his personal spirit, Nathaniel had been healed. Sarah did not fully understand how that had happened, but Nathaniel was able to enter the realm of spirits, and had the ability to speak with some spirits of the dead. Of the dead who stayed closed to this earth, perhaps.
Also, when Sarah wanted him to hear her, he could.
Margaret’s gift from their father was a brutal strength and a heroic capacity to shake off blows, both of which were only available to her when she was angry or afraid.
You think yourself a queen. You shall be a slave, chained to my throne.
“I’ve got one,” Sarah said. “Don’t require a second. Thanks, though.”
And her uncle Thomas?
Sarah found him quickly. She could not always see what he was doing, and she wasn’t sure why her mother’s brother sometimes disappeared from her vision. Was he shielded from view when in the presence of his dark lord, the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell? Sometimes he seemed to disappear when putting on certain articles of clothing, or entering certain places—Philadelphia’s College of Magic, for instance.
She saw him now, growling at a man who resembled Benjamin Franklin, the old Lightning Bishop. That would be Franklin’s grandson, Temple Franklin, who was the emperor’s counselor and errand boy. Nathaniel had crossed paths with Franklin, and the result had been the death of one of Sarah’s most prized servants, a Dutchman named Jacob Hop.
Franklin looked resolute, though not daunted, and Sarah followed the machiavel from the scene. The man left Horse Hall, the Imperial palace, and walked Philadelphia streets shaded by tall elms until he came to a hotel. Sarah watched, not hearing any sound at all, as Franklin pleaded with a burly Dutch woman in the lobby for half an hour before finally stomping away.
What errand had Thomas so furious, and his aide so thwarted?
Sarah and her people—but mostly Sarah’s goddess, the goddess, the Mother of All Living, who was Wisdom and the Serpent and Eve—had defeated Imperial artillery and a besieging force of Imperial Ohio Company men and Imperial militia on the spring equinox, a month earlier. That victory had earned them breathing room; the Imperials had retreated a short distance eastward, where they were rebuilding their forces.
Sarah looked for and found Calvin Calhoun in a brick building in Philadelphia, lodgings he shared with the Elector Charlie Donelsen and the Cahokian soldier Olanthes Kuta and a man who appeared to be a lawyer. After her siblings, the person Sarah most watched was Cal. They had been childhood playmates and Sarah was still in love with him, though her rejection had driven him away.
And she would never see him face to face again.
Cal and those with him met in smoky rooms, and huddled in the corners of restaurants, and in basement chambers accessible only via secret passages. At the instruction of his grandpa, Sarah’s foster father, the Elector Iron Andy Calhoun, Calvin was leading the charge to remove Thomas Penn as Elector and Emperor under the Philadelphia Compact of 1784.
Did Calvin ever think of her?
She hoped he succeeded, though she thought the odds were long. Under the compact, he needed a two-thirds vote, and many of the Electors were on Thomas’s side of the issue. Some resisted out of conservatism, and a desire not to be too hasty; others resisted Thomas’s removal because they were beholden to him, for land or cash or preferment or other favors; others still might in better circumstances have voted against Thomas, but needed his help now because they needed Thomas’s soldiers to defend their lands again the rampaging beastkind of Simon Sword, the vengeful face of the Heron King, god of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
So Calvin talked and collected testimony and presented motions, but Thomas was still emperor.
Cahokia itself had a right to send an Elector. Sarah was legally entitled to be Cahokia’s Elector, under the Compact, but Sarah hadn’t gone to Philadelphia and she hadn’t given anyone her proxy. She was afraid that if she sent anyone, Thomas would have the person hanged.
I will sacrifice you and I will drink your blood. Whatever threat you think you represent to me shall end when I swallow your heart, witch.
“My grandpa always told me that iffen a feller knew how to do somethin’,” Sarah grunted, “he ne’er had to waste his breath certifyin’ it to other folks. ‘A wind bag is an empty bag,’ he’d say.”
Sarah fell to the floor of the sanctum, pain shooting through her arms and legs where she struck the floor. She heard a thousand screams. Her body shook, like the spasm of a violent fever. Reflexively, she looked back at the door in the corner, but it remained dark.
She heard a long laugh, in the tones of Simon Sword.
The screaming had come from outside the Temple of the Sun. It had come from Cahokia, from her city. Sarah’s city was shuddering, buildings collapsing, fires springing up from the ruins. She felt it all. The sound of collapse and terror was enormous.
Sarah ran.
She didn’t stop to think about her fears that she couldn’t live beyond the veil, that she was being sustained only by the power of the goddess. The veil was heavy, but it parted for her, and she rushed down the steps into the temple nave.
Through her earthly eye, Sarah saw the long narrow hall rush past her, its mosaics of earthly paradise below, and astral imagery above, illuminated by the daylight flooding through the open doors. Through her Eye of Eden, she saw angel ministers and glowing salamanders and a passage as long as the entire world. At the same time, she knew that buildings were collapsing, trapping and killing her people inside, and homes were bursting into flame.
Just inside the temple’s doors, she rushed past the oathbound Podebradan, Yedera. Yedera had sworn herself to defend and advance the interests of all Firstborn generally, but in particular, the interests of Sarah’s family. She pivoted to follow Sarah.
Sarah burst from the doors to find the world shaking. Three priestesses knelt on the flat, cultivated top of the mound; they had been weeding the goddess’s furrows, but now they looked up in terror, eyes traveling westward.
Across the Mississippi River, storm clouds roiled.
And Sarah could see the earth rolling toward her, like a sheet shaken over a bed before being allowed to drift into place. Waves from the river slammed across Cahokia’s docks, already shattered by war, and swept trees from both banks. The living Treewall surrounding the city rippled and danced. Cahokia shuddered as the earth tossed beneath it.
Simon Sword. This came from him. What terrible new phase of the reign of Simon Sword did this herald?
Simon Sword’s power was her fault, and she must stop him.
“Terram confirmo!” she shouted, pushing her soul and her will down through her words into her feet and into the earth.
The Treewall stopped moving. The ground continued to shudder, but, as if a heavy blanket had been thrown across the entire city to weigh down the jumping of the earth, the ripples were subdued and slower.
Sarah’s breath left her and she fell.
Yedera tried to catch her, but missed. Sarah crashed to the ground and lay on cold, wet grass. Her face felt wet and warm. The ground trembled still, so she murmured again, “Terram confirmo,” wishing she had brought with her the Orb of Etyles, which would have channeled more power into her act of gramarye, even as the power she channeled threatened to burn her to ash.
The earth shook one final time and then stopped.
Sarah touched her lips, and when she looked at her fingers they were covered in blood. Her ears rang, and Sarah began to vomit.
Far away, she heard the priestesses screaming again.
And beyond that, she heard the laughter of Simon Sword.
* * *
“Butterfly, butterfly, show me where to go.” Ma’iingan opened his eyes.
His twin sons, Ayaabe and Miigiwewin, had both vanished. Ma’iingan saw their tracks plainly in the disturbed earth and leaves of the forest floor; when they were older, he would follow such marks directly to them, and teach them to hide the indications of their passage. But his sons were scarcely more than a year old, and today he would reward them for finding good hiding places and keeping silent.
He had to keep silent, too. That was the game. So, quiet as a butterfly, Ma’iingan ignored the marks on the ground and stalked through the forest.
His sons were both healthy. Ayaabe had been healthy from birth, but his son Miigiwewin had been born in a ritual fault, and had not prospered, until Ma’iingan had traveled deep into Zhaaganaashii lands and brought him a healer. In the months since, Miigiwewin—who also had the second name Giimoodaapi, given to him in an act of rebellion by his uncle—had shot up in height, though he remained quite thin.
“Baabaa!” Father. That was Ayaabe, who could not contain his excitement. Ma’iingan pretended not to have heard, looking inside a hollow tree and lifting a rock to look beneath before Ayaabe’s repeated calls to be noticed became so much that he had to find his son.
“Ingozis!” he cried, scooping up his son and kissing him on the forehead. My son! “Now, do not tell me where your brother is.”
“Gaawiin ingikendansii,” the boy said. I do not know.
Miigiwewin, whose second name meant he laughs in secret, was a good hider, because he was very quiet. Ayaabe wanted to be heard by his father at all times, and now followed close at his heels as Ma’iingan crept through the forest, but Miigiwewin had yet to speak a word in his life.
After ten minutes of searching and listening, Ma’iingan gave up and resorted to tracking his second son. The boy’s footprints led directly away from the glade in which they had been playing, in a straight line. Ma’iingan and Ayaabe followed the footprints, Ma’iingan singing a song to his son to keep him amused even as his own heart beat faster and his fears of wild animals and other dangers grew.
When he found Miigiwewin, he nearly ran the boy over. His son stood perfectly still in the center of a small clearing.
Ma’iingan laughed and picked up both his boys. “Miigiwewin! I have found you, and now it is your turn to look for us!”
“The man with wolf ears just left,” Miigiwewin said.
They were his first words, and Ma’iingan nearly dropped his son in astonishment. “Wolf ears?” he asked. Ma’iingan’s name meant wolf, and his manidoo, the several times Ma’iingan had seen it, had taken the form of a shining man with a wolf’s ears.
“He said he has been calling you, but you have not heard him. You are too distracted. He said you might listen to me instead.”
Ma’iingan set his boys down. He smiled, though his limbs shook. “Listen to you say what, Miigiwewin?”
“I am Giimoodaapi, Father. A second messenger is coming, and you must not miss this one. For the good of all of us, you will have to leave.”
* * *
Rememberest thou this place? the Lord Protector asked.
Oliver Cromwell, the Necromancer, inhabited the body of a child. It was a vehicle he had taken during the recent Imperial attempt to take the city of Cahokia. The child stood pale and naked, with white, empty eyes, beside the stone wall encircling a church outside Boston.
Lucy is buried here, Ezekiel said. His betrothed. Dead in a carriage accident years ago.
Both men spoke without using their tongues. In Ezekiel’s case, his tongue had rotted away as his body had grown cold. Nathaniel Penn and his Indian ally had called Ezekiel a wiindigoo, an ice cannibal.
Ezekiel had resisted the description, but it was apt. His muscles were cold as ice, and he ate the flesh of men. He traveled at night, or avoided roads, or veiled his face. A man whose appearance was as terrifying as he knew his now was could stand scrutiny if traveling with an armed company—as the Lazar Robert Hooke had done through the streets of New Orleans—but risked being attacked if caught alone.
Ezekiel had followed the summons of his master Cromwell, heard in his dreams and in quiet moments in his thoughts, to this church by traveling at night, and now the two stood side by side in darkness.
I have told thee a partial truth, the Necromancer continued. I am here to tell thee the higher truth, and to offer thee a choice.
Ezekiel Angleton, once a priest of the order of St. Martin Luther and now a walking corpse, knelt before his master.
Upon the Mississippi, I told thee that I was no haunt. That was a partial truth, my son.
Yaas, My Lord, Ezekiel said.
I have had the first resurrection, Cromwell said. And upon the Mississippi, I administered the same resurrection to thee, as thou hast since given it unto others.
Yaas, My Lord.
The second resurrection awaits us still. In that resurrection, our flesh will be restored to perfection, and escape the rot of this world. It is to this end that we wrap our fingers around the Firstborn throat, and it is to this end that Thomas Penn serves us.
Yaas, My Lord.
Cromwell paused briefly, as if to let Ezekiel consider. If thou wish it, I shall administer the first resurrection to Lucy Winthrop.
Ezekiel trembled. Did he dare hope for so much? He raised his hands in supplication to his master—
and then saw his own dead, white flesh.
My Lord…will Lucy be but bones, after these long years?
Cromwell rested a cold child’s hand on Ezekiel’s shoulder. I can give her flesh. But she will not be as thou rememberest her. She will be as I am, and as thou art.
Ezekiel thought of Lucy sitting beside the Winthrop hearth, rosy cheek and fair ear pressed against the bell-shaped end of the courting stick. He remembered the warmth of her body in his bed, separated and yet bound together by the bundling board. He had never before or since slept in a bed so warm.
Or, Cromwell continued, we may await the time when we may administer the second resurrection to her directly.
Ezekiel heard the soft plop of drops of liquid falling into the grass. He touched his face and, in the light of the stars, found that tears moistened his fingertips.
Black tears.
No, My Lord. His body shook and he touched the earth with a hand to steady himself. The time is not ready for her. If we are to bring Lucy Winthrop back into this earth, I would bring her into a perfected world.
Cromwell nodded. Then we must go to Philadelphia, and perfect the world.
* * *
~You should think of this as an act of healing,~ Isaiah Wilkes said.
Wilkes was dead.
~Yes, that’s definitely what you should think. Rescue is healing, isn’t it? ~ Jacob Hop countered. ~We are rescuing the land from the scourge of Simon Sword, and perhaps also rescuing Kinta Jane Embry.~
Hop was also dead.
~We are healing the land, ~ Wilkes added.
Nathaniel and his two familiar spirits—living men who had died and chosen to stay in Nathaniel’s service—rode a horse that was also a drum across a rolling plain beneath the starry sky. Nathaniel was alive, but had the ability to enter this land of the spirits and the dead, and to travel within it. He rode now to fulfill a promise.
In life, Isaiah Wilkes had been the head of a secret society called the Conventicle. The Conventicle had been founded by old Benjamin Franklin himself, and it existed to be the secret glue keeping together three allies who had sworn to stand against Simon Sword at his return. The alliance had fallen apart, and been killed in his efforts to reassemble it. An agent of his, a woman named Kinta Jane Embry, had survived to continue the mission. Nathaniel had promised Wilkes he would find Kinta Jane, and try to help her if he could.
~Are you listening?~ he asked.
~Yes,~ Wilkes said. ~Is this Montreal?~
They descended toward a pond, in the center of which stood an island with three buildings.
~Yes,~ Nathaniel told him. ~Things look different in this place.~
~Hold still, so I don’t have to listen over the drumbeats.~
Nathaniel paused, stroking the neck of his horse, smelling sweat and leather. He’d been raised among the people of Johnsland, who were riders, so the transition to this world of riding across infinite grass was not unpleasant.
Jacob Hop had not been a member of the Conventicle. He had been a deaf-mute turnkey, and Simon Sword had inhabited his body for a few weeks. When the Heron King had left Hop, the Dutchman had found himself possessed of an astonishing capacity to learn and a fierce loyalty to Sarah Elytharias Penn. He had helped rescue Nathaniel from the grasp of the emperor’s servant Ezekiel Penn, and then been killed by another Imperial servant, Temple Franklin.
Nathaniel suspected that Wilkes stayed with him in order to continue to carry out his mission, and Hop stayed with him to help Sarah.
~How do you feel?~ Hop whispered to Nathaniel.
He asked because he knew that Nathaniel’s ability to travel in this place, and do all he could do here, had been given to in order to be a healer. When Nathaniel attempted to do other things with his gifts, he was ill.
Nathaniel nodded.
~Over there!~ Wilkes pointed at the far side of the pond, where the land rose slightly and was capped with sheets of ice.
Over the rise, they found a trio surrounding a small fire. Nathaniel saw the largest first, and immediately turned his horse aside, pulling back from an encounter.
The man was a giant.
Nathaniel had never seen one in real life, but he had heard stories about them, in Acadia or in Algonk lands. The man was half again Nathaniel’s height and had red hair; he leaned on a long spear, as if it were a walking staff. Of the three, he was the only one standing, and he looked away from the flames, turning his head left and right and watching.
The other two were a man and a woman, both huddled around the flames and wrapped in wool blankets. He wore a badger-pelt hat, making him look as if he had an animal lying over his forehead; she had a dog’s tail.
~That’s her!~ Wilkes said.
~The beastwife?~ Nathaniel asked.
Isaiah Wilkes chuckled. ~She’s not beastkind. Whatever mark of animal you are seeing on her is her tongue. She had had her tongue removed, but I needed her to witness to Brother Onas…to Thomas Penn…so I arranged for a hexenmeistres to give her a new one.~
~From a dog?~ Hop asked.
~Should I have cut out a man’s tongue to use instead?~
~Are you afraid of dying, Dockery?~ the woman asked.
Badger Hat shook his head. ~I’ll keep my oath. Even if it means that Thomas Penn kills my son, when I could have rescued him.~
Were they the giant’s prisoners? Nathaniel couldn’t tell.
~This is far.~ Nathaniel looked at the ice sheets and shook his head.
~We have to help them,~ Wilkes said. ~I left them alone, and they’ve lost their way.~
~They’re far,~ Nathaniel said. ~And there’s something else I must do, something much closer to hand. Can you do anything to help them without me?~
Wilkes shook his head, defeated.
Nathaniel considered. ~Then we will have to involve someone else. I believe I know the right person.~
* * *
Maltres Korinn was meeting the general in the Hall of Onandagos when the earthquake struck. The building shook and he heard cries of surprise, but Maltres’s ancestors had built well, and the hall didn’t fall.
The hall was a sacred building, but Cahokia knew gradations of sacredness. The Hall of Onandagos was less sacred than any of the precincts of the Temple of the Sun, less sacred than the city’s Basilica, perhaps less sacred than its graveyards. The hall was where the city’s kings and queens met in council, received foreign dignitaries, and hosted state occasions.
Since Her Majesty Queen Sarah Elytharias Penn did not leave the Great Mound, the Hall of Onandagos was the domain of her Vizier, Maltres Korinn. Maltres was the Duke of Na’avu by inheritance, and had been invited to be Regent-Minister of the Serpent Throne during its vacancy by the great and good of the city, and then appointed Vizier by Sarah as she had come to power. By preference, Maltres would be at home in the north, on the border of the German Duchies, tending to his farms.
Instead, he was discussing sources of silver with the Cavalier, Sir William Johnston Lee. Lee was a former Imperial officer who had been instrumental in saving Hannah Penn’s children from her brother Thomas, and was now general of Cahokia’s armies, which were steadily taking shape under his hand. Lee was a big man, solidly built. His hair and mustache were going white, but still streaked with gray, and his eyes were a piercing green.
They sat in Maltres’s office, which was furnished with three chairs, a large but simple desk, and abundant shelves. The earthquake shook the hall, casting papers from the shelves onto the floors, and nearly knocking Maltres from his seat. Repositioning himself, he levered his weight by gripping his staff of office, which lay against the desk beside him.
The tall black staff, capped with an iron horse’s head, was known as the Earthshaker’s Rod. Maltres wrinkled the corner of his mouth at the irony.
“I would like to have considerably more silver than we at present have access to, suh,” Lee said.
“Our iron coins are readily accepted by every partner with whom we trade, General,” Maltres said. “From Chicago to New Orleans. Is there some market you believe we are not accessing, for our lack of silver?”
“Heaven’s chamber pot, no.” The general grunted, adjusting himself in the wooden seat on the other side of Maltres’s desk. “I know nothing of trade, and would like to know less. What worries me, Korinn, is the return of the Imperials. They will come in larger numbers next time, and I fear what black sorcery Cromwell and his allies have yet to throw at us. I want silver bullets, and, if possible, silver cannonballs.”
“For that quantity of silver, we’d need to be trading with the Lord of Potosí,” Maltres said. “Or the silver miners of Georgia. Or, of course, Thomas Penn.”
“Quite.” Sir William shifted again in his chair.
“Your legs hurt,” Maltres said. That winter, William Lee had been injured several times in succession in his thighs.
Sir William nodded. “So long as my queen needs me, I am choosing not to dull the pain.”
During the siege, the Cavalier had several times seemed distracted or lethargic. “Your wedding approaches,” Maltres reminded the other man. “That, too, should keep you from wishing to blunt your sensations.”
Sir William smiled and was opening his mouth to say something when the door was thrown wide.
“The Great Mound!” a boy in a gray and gold messenger’s tunic yelped. Wet hair was plastered to his head, and water streamed down his face. “The queen is ill!”
Maltres sprang to his feet, and was astonished to see that the general did the same. Maltres leaned on the Earthshaker’s Rod, Lee gripped the heads of two sturdy walking sticks.
“Tell the priestesses.” Maltres rushed through the door. Lee followed, the messenger now hurrying to keep up.
“They know!” The boy’s face was distraught and his voice strained; Maltres stopped for a moment to pat the young man on his shoulder.
“Perhaps Cathy may attend the queen,” Lee suggested. “She is a healer, and now a member of the queen’s order, so she can treat the queen in her…abode.”
Lee touched upon an interesting question: What kind of healer could treat Sarah, if she never left her goddess’s holy of holies? And a related question was: What kind of healer could do any more for Sarah than she could do for herself, if she was ill? She was the most powerful magician in Cahokia.
“The queen isn’t in her abode,” the boy chirped. “She fell down outside, during the tremor.”
“Outside?” Maltres ran, and Lee ran with him.
The Hall of Onandagos was not far from the Great Mound; the greatest effort in running from one to the other lay not in the distance, but in the descent down the first mound and especially in climbing up the second, made worse by the fact that rain slashed across Maltres’s body and slicked the earth under his feet. Still, they were only minutes apart. The messenger must have come running immediately after the earthquake had ceased.
Even focused as he was on reaching the Temple of the Sun, Maltres saw that the tremors had caused more damage than he would have guessed. Climbing the mound, he saw several houses burning, despite the rain, and several more flattened. He would need to see to the relief of the occupants.
In the streets below the mounds, and again rushing up the Great Mound, Maltres dodged among trees. The city had always had trees within its walls, but they grew in neat rows to provide shade to avenues, or in small fruit-bearing groves. At the end of the Siege of Cahokia, trees had sprouted throughout the city.
They had sprouted wherever one of the Imperial draug had stood, or lain defeated, at the final moment when Sarah and the goddess had worked their great act of gramarye to drive the Imperials out.
Maltres barely beat Lee to the top of the mound, despite the other man’s greater age and his injuries. There he found a swarm of eunuchs and several priestesses laboring over Sarah, raising a stretcher upon which she lay. The Podebradan Yedera stood to one side, her scimitar in her hand. Her face held a fierce scowl, but if anything, she looked helpless. What did her oath, her sword, her armor, and all her martial skill, avail her, when her queen simply fell to the earth, broken?
Sarah was swathed in the white linen she had worn since entering the sanctum. Now she also had linen bandages over both her eyes. There was dark brown blood crusted around her nostrils and at the corners of her mouth, and seeping red blood soaked through the bandages.
“Her eyes,” William Lee groaned. “Great god of heaven, she’s bleeding from her eyes.”
Sarah moaned and stretched out a finger weakly. Lee reached to grasp it and was barely able to touch his queen’s fingertips before a tall priestess with an angular face thrust herself into his path and raised a warning finger.
“Lady Alena,” Lee gasped. “I’ve sent for Mrs. Filmer to come see to the queen.”
A second figure intruded upon the space between Lee and his queen. It was a man this time, broad hipped and shaved bald, and with snakes tattooed on his face, converging in blue spirals upon his open mouth. The man was a eunuch, and Lady Alena’s voice.
“Mrs. Filmer will not be allowed to see the queen!” the eunuch hissed. “Mrs. Filmer is corruption!”
“Easy, Bill,” Maltres said, using the familiar form of the general’s name to get his attention.
Sarah groaned and the eunuchs carried her within the temple and out of sight.
“You understand,” William Lee said slowly to the eunuch, “that I have killed more men than you have plucked hairs from your greased chest?”
The eunuch trembled, but stood his ground.
“I have killed men because it was my job, suh,” Lee said. “I have killed men for honor. I have killed men in anger, and with a calm heart. I have killed men of every nation I know, and I have killed men whose nations were a mystery to me. I have killed enemies, and I have killed men who had been my friends. I have killed by day and by night, at land and on sea, mounted and on foot, with sword and with gun and even with my bare hands.” He took a deep breath. “Now tell me again, slowly this time so that there is no mistake, what you just said about my betrothed.”
Lee’s hand rested easily on his belt, but his voice was iron.
“Bill,” Maltres said again, in a low murmur.
“The queen,” a new speaker said, “where is she?” The voice had an imperious tone to it, and an urgency that would not be denied.
Maltres, Bill, the Lady Alena, and her eunuch all turned to look at the new arrival.
The speaker was tall and thin. His eyebrows were white, though his long hair, high above the forehead and long upon the shoulder, was still an iron-gray. He wore a long Ohioan tunic, gathered by leather wristbands on each arm and a slender belt, but his feet were bare. On his head he wore a thin gold circlet, but no entourage followed him.
The Lady Alena bowed deeply and her eunuch knelt.
William Lee squinted. “I have seen you before, suh, but I am struggling to remember where and when.”
“You rode with the Lion.” The newcomer smiled, a taut and impatient expression.
“This is His Majesty Kodam Dolindas.” Maltres bowed. “The King of Tawa.”
“The spirit of understanding,” the King of Tawa said.
“Have you come to help my queen, suh?” Lee asked.
“I have. And I see that I come just in time to meet the storm.” The King of Tawa swept into the Temple of the Sun. Yedera marched in on his heels.
The eunuch rose to his feet and William Lee punched the man in the face. The eunuch dropped to the earth, bouncing and falling into one of the muddy furrows that covered the top of the Great Mound.
“Do not speak that way of Cathy Filmer again,” Lee growled. “In my hearing or out of it.”
* * *
Thou hast asked for a demonstration of my intent. Oliver Cromwell’s voice rang in Thomas’s ears like shattering glass, though Cromwell’s lips didn’t move.
Only it wasn’t just Oliver Cromwell. It was Cromwell, and it was also in some way William Penn, Thomas’s own ancestor. Cromwell has escaped final destruction at the hands of the zealot John Churchill by traveling to the new world in the breast of William Penn, to whom he had granted Pennsland.
Cromwell had anointed Penn king of the granted lands, and he had anointed Thomas in the same fashion, in a secret ceremony in Shackamaxon Hall. He had shared with Thomas his vision of an eternal commonwealth, with Thomas at its head as the man who had finally vanquished death.
Now Cromwell, in the child’s body he wore, and Thomas Penn, and Temple Franklin stood in a warehouse a short distance from the Port of Philadelphia. A fourth man sat tied in a chair against the wall. Tall windows in all the walls stretched toward a high ceiling, allowing in a flood of early summer light; beneath the windows stood worktables laden with carpentry tools, potter’s wheels, lumber, and raw clay. Thomas gazed on two man-shaped replicas.
One was a wooden puppet. It lay on a table, but if it were to stand it would be six feet tall, or perhaps slightly taller. Its body was planed smooth but was only approximately the shape of a man; its head had been finely carved and painted, and resembled Thomas Penn. A younger Thomas Penn, as he looked when he had ridden to war against the Spanish.
The second was made of clay. It sat on a wooden chair, head slumped forward almost to its chest; the features of this replica were very approximate, and it smelled of wet earth.
“I’ve browbeaten the Electors into raising taxes,” Thomas said. “Then I borrowed against future tax receipts to be able to spend the money now, and I am recruiting the army which I shall use to raze Cahokia to the flat plain of the Cahokian Bottom. But you said that if I got you bodies, Grandfather, you could make soldiers of them. Here are two bodies, and as we agreed, more are being produced in Pittsburgh and Youngstown.”
“Thousands more,” Temple Franklin said. “Of various scales.”
“I would understand this army you speak of, Grandfather,” Thomas said. “I would see.”
The naked child Cromwell nodded. And thou hast brought this live man, too.
“I assume you intend a sacrifice,” Franklin said. “This fellow is a pickpocket and a cutpurse. He won’t be missed.”
“None of us will be missed,” Thomas murmured, “save for a few moments, and excepting only those of us who build things of eternal worth.”
Cromwell nodded. Help me lay these creatures upon the floor.
Franklin hesitated, but Thomas did not. Urging on his advisor, he stretched the wooden mannequin out upon the hard floor, then laid the second figure out as well, so the two rested side by side, separated by two feet of open floor. The gray wet clay stuck to his hands as he worked, and he wiped them off on a dry rag sitting on one of the tables.
The man tied to the chair struggled. He was blond, young and strong, with big shoulders and strong arms. By rights a man with that physique should be working or fighting, not stealing coins in the street. Thomas scowled at the shirker. The blond man strained at his ropes and groaned, stretching his head toward Thomas like a dog asking to be scratched behind the ears.
How literal a sacrifice did Cromwell and Franklin mean?
While he had been distracted, Cromwell had drawn a large circle on the floor with chalk, enclosing himself and both models within it.
No, not quite. There was a small gap in the circle still.
Before I finish the seal, Cromwell said, lay the sacrifice in the middle.
“What’s his name?” Thomas asked.
“Benjamin Trumbull,” Franklin said.
Thomas raised an eyebrow at him and nodded his head.
“Good,” Franklin said. “If we are going to take the life of a man, we should know his name. Benjamin Trumbull. Former apprentice blacksmith, but broke his articles and took to thievery as a way to live. Also pandering, allegedly, and maybe even a little road-agenting.”
Trumbull groaned.
Excellent, Cromwell said. Thou hast spoken truly, Franklin, son of Franklin.
Franklin snorted contentedly and grabbed Trumbull’s ankles. Thomas put his hands under the man’s armpits, and together they hoisted him into position, between the two models.
Trumbull wriggled, but couldn’t escape.
Thomas stepped back and stood at ease, hands clasped behind his back. Franklin sat.
Cromwell chanted. Thomas knew more languages than most, but still could neither understand the words nor even identify the tongue. The Necromancer closed his circle and then added numerous additional markings—Thomas recognized astrological signs and seals along with Hebrew characters, but couldn’t add any of it up into a coherent sum.
With a start, he realized that the light was gone.
Stepping to the window, he looked through the glass and saw hints of the city street outside: the outline of a tree, the silhouette of a man, the steady back and forth of things floating in the harbor. But he saw no light and no sun. The street looked as if the sun had simply been taken away.
A thick gurgling sound made Thomas turn again. Trumbull lay between the two models still, thrashing in his bonds. Blood sprayed in jets from his throat with the dying beats of his heart, spraying the mannequin, spraying the clay man, spraying Cromwell.
Franklin pulled his eyes from the spectacle to look coolly at Thomas, then returned to watching.
Thomas made himself watch, too. He had seen death before, on the field and in the hospital. He’d killed his own sister, after torturing her into giving away the location of her daughter Sarah.
He wasn’t repulsed by Trumbull’s death, he was…bored?
Cromwell was speaking again, and he addressed a shadow that hovered over the corpse. Squinting to focus, Thomas saw that the shadow resembled nothing so much as a squid. The extremities that dangled down toward the dead man at first made it appear that the smoky shadow-squid had emerged from Trumbull’s slit throat, but as he looked closer, Thomas saw that the dangling protrusions weren’t tentacles, but tongues, dangling from something that resembled a levitating skull.
The tongues dangled into Trumbull’s mortal wound, and were drinking from it.
Cromwell’s address rose in pitch and volume. Franklin’s breath hissed in and out between his teeth.
A second shadow appeared, of the same shape as the first. Thomas forced himself not to step backward. Cromwell raised his hands, scattered chalk dust though the dusky shapes, and for a brief moment, they appeared solid.
They were not red. Thomas had imagined that demons would be red, but instead they were a bright pink, the pink of the lips and tongue of a newborn baby, an obscene pink that would be unsurprising as the color of some internal organ. They were covered with eyes, whose visible sockets drooped as if they were melting, and whose lidless gaze stared in all directions. From the outside of their bell-shaped hulks, a viscous white slime dripped, raising acrid smoke where it dropped onto the wood of the floor.
In the split second during which it was visible, one of the monsters emitted a sound like a purring cat.
Trumbull was still trembling.
“Delightful,” Franklin murmured.
Thomas only smiled.
Then the chalk dust dissipated and the creatures became darkness again.
And sank into the models.
Thomas had the distinct impression that the clay model’s mouth yawned open to receive the creature being put into it, but it had to have been a trick of the light, because when he blinked, the sculpture appeared unchanged.
Trumbull lay still.
Cromwell stepped back. Thomas had grown accustomed to seeing his Mentor, his guardian spirit, in the body of this child, but the sight of the naked youth with blood covering its arms up the elbows, and chalk caked into that blood, struck him in the moment as bizarre.
“Is it finished?” Thomas asked.
Rise, Cromwell said.
The models stood. The wooden puppet rattled as it moved, but the creature of clay was virtually silent. If anything, Thomas imaged he could hear a very faint squishing sound as the creature’s limbs worked.
“These will fight, I take it?” Franklin nodded satisfaction.
They can be made to answer the orders of any battlefield commander, or relentlessly pursue any objective. They will not fire a gun with any skill, but they will swing a sword or stab with a pike.
“This fellow, though.” Thomas grinned, tapping the wooden model on the chest as if he were a private who had earned special recognition during inspection. “Don’t make him look too much like me. It wouldn’t do for my commanders to start taking their orders from a blockhead.”
He chuckled drily at his own joke.
Cromwell laughed along, a dry rasp. No, it wouldn’t. But the greater threat of that is from the other. This automaton of clay is sometimes called a Mocker.
“Surely I have a stronger jaw than the clay man,” Thomas joked, but his attempt at a smile fell completely flat; the Mocker’s face was changing.
So were its limbs, and its proportions. It took nearly a minute for the entire transformation to be completed, but when it was done, a tall, blond, muscular man stood before him. Benjamin Trumbull.
Thomas checked; Trumbull lay dead on the ground before him, and Trumbull stood in his presence, a ready grin on his face.
“He still smells like mud,” Franklin said.
“This will do,” Thomas said. “This will do nicely.”