“I’m the Prince of Shreveport, damn your eyes!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The war was coming, but Kinta Jane Embry still had to eat. She had had to hand the Heron King’s coin over to René, because there were important people who needed more to convince them than just Kinta Jane’s word at second hand. But would she have been able to spend such a coin, in any case?
On evenings like this, when she had no standing client appointments, she walked the street. The rain didn’t deter her, but it did keep her close to her rented room, slowly circling her own block on the edge of the Faubourg Marigny.
Deeper into the shabby maze of the Faubourg, closer to the Franklin Gate on the east side of the city, were the strange fires, the dark alleys where chickens and cats lost their lives to houngans seeking to know the future or to mambos who wished to placate the mystères. If rumor was true, the loa themselves sometimes crawled the alleys deep in the Faubourg Marigny, in search of entertainment, worship, or blood.
The mystères didn’t generally walk Kinta Jane’s neighborhood, which made it not nearly so spiritually powerful, though also considerably less dangerous. She was close enough to the trees of the Esplanade that decent clients came her way, and when the clients weren’t so decent, well, she didn’t mind the occasional Irishman or Portugee, especially if he was clean.
The tall red-headed man looked clean enough. He also looked like a chawbacon, a total Reuben, a hick, with his hair long and loosely tied back on his neck and his frayed wool coat with the long-sleeved hunter’s shirt beneath. He had a bony Appalachee face that could be charitably described as homely, but the look in his clear eyes was gentle, and even nervous.
“Evenin’, ma’am,” he squeaked in a thick mountain twang, shaking water onto the boardwalk.
Kinta Jane smiled her best sultry smile and twisted her shoulders in a way that emphasized her curves. She slapped her thigh, pumped her hip in his direction and winked.
He chuckled. “I reckon I know what that means. Might could I git jest an hour of your time?”
She smiled and took his elbow, leading the bony young man around the corner and up the iron steps to the third floor of the boarding house. He smiled at her and kept looking around, nervous as a cat. The young man’s uncomfortable innocence was refreshing; in this town, she’d become used to men who were too hard, too worn, or too cold to feel any embarrassment at all.
Kinta Jane turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Suddenly, the Appalachee shoved her into her bedroom. She stumbled, reaching as she fell for a stiletto in her long sleeve. Before she could draw it, other hands were seizing her wrists and pinning her, and then the door slammed.
Others were in her room. How many?
She couldn’t see in the dark. She bucked and twisted but could not escape, realizing that there were at least two men, two large, strong men, holding her down. This might be an assault, which was horrifying enough, since her pander, Elbows Pritchard, was a useless drunkard and as likely to beat her for the cash deficit as to take any meaningful action against her assailants, but they could also be black magic men, after her hair or her heart or other parts for some wicked ceremony.
Worse still—they could be servants of the Heron King.
Had the Appalachee had some beastkind feature, and she had missed it?
A Lucifer scritched and sputtered into flame, and then the oil lantern beside her bed was carefully lit and replaced on the cheap three-legged table, and Kinta Jane could finally see her attackers.
The Appalachee stood in the door, and he twisted open the wooden slats of the blinds with their control rod ever so slightly to peer out. “They ain’t nobody followin’.”
The two men pinning Kinta Jane were rougher than the Appalachee, with none of his backcountry innocence. One was heavy, with a thick head, neck, and torso, but bony legs; he wore a ratty black coat, smelled sour and badly needed a shave. The other was tall and more muscular, though showing his age in the iron gray of his long mustache; he wore a red coat, and a black perruque under a battered, broad-brimmed hat. This last man seemed vaguely familiar.
All three men were armed, with swords, pistols, and, in the case of the redhead, a tomahawk and a lariat that he now picked up from Kinta Jane’s own bed.
There were two women, too; so this was not a simple assault. They didn’t look like Vodun people, either—mostly, they gave the impression of being from out of town.
Kinta Jane steeled herself to say nothing to the Heron King’s agents, but then she had another shock—she recognized one of the women. It was Long Cathy, a very high-class girl who worked in a French tavern called Grissot’s in the Quarter and tended to see rich men. Cathy sat on a stool to one side holding two pistols, not exactly aimed at Kinta Jane, but nearly enough and with hammers cocked so that she could effortlessly shoot the Choctaw if she wanted.
The last person in the room was another woman, and she now shoved herself into Kinta Jane’s view. She was young and thin, with dark hair, pale skin, and a bandage hanging loose over one eye. She looked Kinta Jane in the face, studying her for long moments while the two big men hoisted her and flung her onto the bed, never letting go of her arms.
This was to be her interrogator, then. Kinta Jane wondered whether they would torture her, and began taking slow, deep breaths to prepare.
“I know you ain’t got no tongue,” the eye-patched girl said, “but I reckon you can still tell us yes and no by noddin’, can’t you?”
Kinta Jane refused to answer even this question. Every question she answered would make the question following it harder to duck.
Instead, she smiled coldly, slapped one thigh and cocked her hip to the side.
The redhead laughed, in an embarrassed-sounding way, but the scrawny girl didn’t look amused.
Instead, she removed her bandage.
Kinta Jane shivered, profoundly unsettled by the sight of the girl’s unmasked face. She had one eye that was a normal, human blue, and the other that was the color of ice, like a bird’s eye, or the eye of some other proud animal. What beastkind was this? The girl blinked, and Kinta Jane felt drawn in and known by her piercing gaze.
“Can you read and write?” the girl asked.
Kinta Jane only smiled, controlling her breathing. Of course she could write. And of course she wasn’t going to tell this beastwife witch. Answer no questions at all, she told herself.
“She can,” the beast-eyed girl said to her companions, and Kinta Jane’s heart sank.
That might be a bluff.
Calm. Breathe.
“Is it true you’re sister, or half-sister, to the chevalier’s man, René du Plessis?” the witch continued.
Kinta Jane tried to force from her mind all thoughts of René and his kindness to her over the years, how he’d fed her when she couldn’t feed herself, or given her clothing discarded by ladies of the chevalier’s household, or even arranged clients for her when the chevalier needed services such as she provided. René had told her of Franklin’s vision, too, and brought her into the Conventicle, and trained her in the ways of secrecy, patience, and watchfulness.
Good René, kind René, she would not betray him.
“Yes, she is,” the witchy-eyed girl said.
The beastwife was reading her mind!
Kinta Jane felt despair. She knew now that she would give up all her secrets and then be killed, killed and not missed by this cold city. At least she couldn’t give away anyone else in the Conventicle beyond her little cell. Thank Heaven for the wisdom of old Ben Franklin.
“Now,” the girl said, and her ice-white eye pounded into Kinta Jane’s soul like a sledgehammer, “you’re going to help us meet your brother.”
Kinta Jane’s mind spun.
Who were these captors? Was the Conventicle already betrayed, and was the Heron King hunting down its servants? Did they already know René was her cell leader? She looked again to Cathy, but the other woman sat calm and impassive, with loaded pistols ready.
Kinta Jane wouldn’t betray René. Nor would she even shake her head to dignify the order with a response. She couldn’t bear to meet the gaze of those eyes any longer, and just stared at the dirty white ceiling, trying to calm her racing heart.
“Ought I ’it ’er?” asked the thick-headed man, and Kinta Jane recognized his accent as London English.
“A gentleman doesn’t hit a woman, suh,” the mustached man told his companion, “even if she’s a whore.”
“Why, Sir William,” Long Cathy drawled, teeth of steel audible in her voice, “you are a true cavalier.”
The tall man blanched and fell silent. What kind of interrogation was this? Kinta Jane expected to be tortured or beaten or at least shouted at. And could the witch not read her mind after all?
“You’re gonna take us to your brother,” the cracker witch insisted, “or you’re gonna write us how to find him.” She shoved a scrap of paper and a bit of charcoal in Kinta Jane’s face, and the Choctaw turned away.
“All right, then,” the witch said, retracting the writing implements, “we’re gonna have to do this the hard way. Cal—”
The redhead pulled a knife.
Kinta Jane braced herself. Would it be an eye or an ear, or maybe her nose?
The Appalachee Cal stooped and cut off a lock of her hair. Without a word, he handed it to the beastwife sorceress and resheathed his knife.
“Tarnation, Cal,” she said. “You cut me enough to braid a rope.”
“Jerusalem, Sarah,” he answered, “how’m I supposed to know how much you need? I couldn’t hex away a wart iffen my life depended on it and I had a whole forest of stumps full of rain water.”
“Where’s my little Dutchman when I need him?” the mustached man asked, then looked suddenly crestfallen.
The witch, Sarah, laughed, but in a surprisingly kindly way. “I think we can do this without the help of Simon Sword. Best tie up the Choctaw, though.”
Simon Sword!
The two big men tore her carefully laundered sheet to strips and then proceeded to bind Kinta Jane hand and foot. Without the help of Simon Sword, she had said, and for Kinta Jane the mystery of the encounter deepened and became more ominous.
“Are you sure this will work?” Cathy asked.
“No,” Sarah answered, “and I sure as shootin’ wish youins could git a better magician than me to give it a try, and one as wasn’t already tuckered out, but I reckon it ought to do the trick, and I’m all we got.”
“You can do it, Sarah,” Cal told her.
“Huh,” she answered. “We got anything else, anything…stringy, like a bit of ribbon, mebbe?”
Kinta Jane watched helplessly as the invaders of her very small private space ransacked her drawers and cracked armoire and came up with a faux pearl necklace. The witch Sarah knotted the long hank of Kinta Jane’s hair around the pearls and then balled the necklace up into her two hands and closed her eyes in concentration.
“Fratrem quaeso,” she said. Kinta Jane didn’t know what it meant. Was it Latin? This might be no hedge witch, then, this but a classically trained wizard, and dangerous.
She wasn’t wearing Polite red, though, and New Orleans didn’t have another college for gramarye. Philadelphia did, and New Amsterdam and Memphis, and Kinta Jane wondered which of them had accepted this whippet of an Appalachee girl.
Maybe the girl maybe wasn’t what she seemed. Maybe her appearance was an illusion. The mystères, the loa, did that sort of thing all the time.
Did the Heron King appear in disguise?
She still had no idea who these people were.
Sarah then opened her hand and let the pearls dangle from her fingers, the hair knot at the bottom. For a moment nothing happened, the necklace hanging perfectly still, and then the hair knot twitched and rose, dragging the pearls a few degrees to one side, looking like a tiny hairball dog straining on a very expensive leash.
“Thank you, Miss Kinta Jane Embry,” the witch Sarah said. “I reckon that’ll do.”
* * *
“A bit more of the amo, amas, amat might could be in order here,” Cal volunteered. Cal’s Latin litany reminded Sarah of every incantation she’d ever heard Thalanes say. She was barely able to choke back tears.
Mercifully, the rain had stopped. Sarah had handed the pearl-and-hairball compass off to Cathy, who had calmly accepted it and then led them with long, confident strides through the darkening evening and the thickening crowd in whichever direction the hairball indicated.
That had turned out to be back across the Quarter, and Sarah wanted to disguise their faces. She was just too conscious of the low level of her remaining reserves of energy to expend any of it unnecessarily. Instead, she suffered with the uneasy foreboding that the Sorcerer Hooke must inevitably catch up to her, and that when he did, he would know her from a mile away.
“Keep an eye out for gendarmes and Imperials both,” she’d reminded her friends, huddling deeper into her shawl. She was cold and wet, and part of her wanted to just run away, burrow into the warm earth somewhere, and hide.
But she couldn’t give up. It wasn’t just her life, it was the lives of her brother and sister she didn’t know, and justice for her murdered parents, that kept her marching through the storm, into the teeth of her almost-paralyzing fear of the Sorcerer Hooke.
Hooke had found her before, somehow. It had to be sorcery. What would she do if she had to face him another time?
She wouldn’t meet his gaze, for starters. She would keep moving, and hope that by the time he caught up to her next, she was powerful enough to handle him.
The compass had led them out of the Quarter again at its other end, across a wide avenue that was all light and vibrant carousing on the near side, a staccato screen of tall oaks down the middle, and dark-windowed commercial establishments on the other. Sarah had hunkered down in the knot made by her three male companions to hide.
Beyond the storefronts, they had moved into neighborhoods of free-standing homes with wrought iron fences, street lanterns on poles, and flickering tapers just beginning to show in their parlors and dining rooms.
“We be movink toward the Palais,” Obadiah had observed. “I trow that be as should be, an’ the ’ex be in effect.”
They had passed some larger buildings that looked as if they had government functions, with legends like City of New Orleans written above their doors in iron letters and contingents of gendarmes providing security. Sarah had thought of the sole building with any kind of government function she had ever seen in all of the Calhoun lands—the Elector’s Thinkin’ Shed—and almost laughed out loud.
Among the government buildings, Sarah had begun to see more and more people on the street, principally riders in large coaches, pulled by two, four, and even six horses in matched teams. At her request, Cathy had slowed the pace to give them all an opportunity to assess what was happening around them, and it had been Cathy herself who had made the key discovery.
“Look in that red and white carriage there,” she had said. “They’re holding Venetian masks.”
In all her relentless drilling by the Elector, Sarah had never heard of a Venetian mask, but she had seen that the passengers in the carriage held little masks on sticks up to their faces as they rode laughing by, looking out through the windows of their coaches, and she had inferred that must be what Cathy meant.
“It’s a ball,” Sir William had said.
When they had finally gotten close enough to see the Palais, it had taken Sarah’s breath away. It was the largest building she had ever seen, by far, and it sparkled with the light of a thousand lanterns, torches, and braziers, and a thousand glass windows to further reflect and shine. Dozens of masked footmen walked about the cobbled courtyard before the front door of the Palais, white-wigged, -gloved, and -stockinged, and dressed in blue and gold coattails. A line of coaches crawled one at a time up the wide street, each examined by footmen and gendarmes within the large gatehouse, and then admitted within the courtyard to deposit its occupants before the open doors.
“Impressive, is it not?” Sir William murmured. “Count Galvéz of New Spain destroyed the old one in the war, so the father of the current chevalier built this replacement. One hears the quip in the salons of New Orleans that when Andy Jackson developed his famous interest in the real property of the city five years ago, it was principally because he wanted to own this particular lot.”
“Did you fight in the battle?” Sarah asked him.
Sir William shrugged modestly. “I threw a few bullets in the direction of King Jackson. Not as part of any organized unit, you understand.”
The hairball strained on its leash all the while, suggesting that René du Plessis was at the ball.
“I jest don’t see any other way in,” Cal said. “Iffen it was quieter, we might could climb the fence, but no way we can do that tonight without gittin’ seen, they’s far too many people.”
Sarah hesitated. She saw the logic of Cal’s suggestion, but she didn’t know whether she could do it. She could jump them all over the fence, but that would be exhausting, even with the handful of pigeon dropping paste and feathers she had kept and secreted away in Thalanes’s pack, and once inside, they’d stick out like sore thumbs in their tattered clothes. She could use some variant of a facies muto spell, but it wasn’t just a matter of changed faces—they had to have specific faces to be on the guest list, and she would have to provide illusory clothing and masks.
And even once inside, she’d still have to maintain all the illusions.
She was already carrying the hairball compass spell and had kept it up for their entire march across town. She already felt weak, and she didn’t want to be completely drained if and when the Sorcerer Hooke showed up.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It would be…difficult.”
“I have a suggestion, ma’am,” said Sir William, “if you’re able to make bodies invisible, even briefly.”
“I can.” Sarah hoped she was right.
“It will only be for a few moments,” Sir William told her.
“I can do it,” she repeated.
“Well, then,” he said, “it’s only a matter of choosing the coach that suits us best and inconveniencing its occupants. Allow me to reconnoiter first, if you will.”
Sir William left them in their shadowed observation post down the street, across from the Palais, and strolled casually along the line of coaches, looking into the window of each and occasionally tipping his hat as passengers greeted him. Well before he reached the gatehouse, he turned and ambled back.
“The white coach pulled by six horses, with the lion and griffin rampant,” Sir William told his waiting companions, “will do very well.”
“What is your plan, Sir William?” Sarah asked.
“In my experience,” he said, “the best plans are simple. If you will now render us invisible, Your Majesty, we’ll open the door to that coach, take it at gunpoint, and ride it through the front gate in the costumes of its current passengers.”
“Its current passengers likely include the Prince of Shreveport,” Cathy observed, “or someone in his household, since those are his arms.”
“One of the Cotton Princes.” Sir William smiled. “Then I dare to hope that our borrowed costumes will be comfortable to wear. I suppose we should hold hands, so that we can stay together when unseen.” He bowed to Cathy Filmer, as if he were asking her to dance. “Might I have the honor of holding yours, Mrs. Filmer?”
They formed a chain, Sarah in the middle and Sir William in the lead, a long pistol in his free hand. She was glad for the hand-holding, because, per the Law of Contagion, she could run her spell through the physical contact of all its targets and ease the drain it imposed.
She had seen Thalanes perform exactly this spell before. Reaching down to the edge of the street, she collected a blob of mud on two fingers and smeared a little on each person’s cheeks, then took Calvin’s hand again. “Oculos obscuro.” She blinked.
When she opened her eyes, she still felt Cathy’s hand in her own right and Calvin’s in her left (they locked fingers around the Elector’s ash staff), but she could no longer see any of her companions or even her own limbs.
“Well done, ma’am,” she heard Sir William say. “I’ll walk slow. Stay together, and don’t bump into anyone. When I signal you, Your Majesty, release me from your spell.”
A couple of minutes later—dazzling minutes in which Sarah watched through coach windows a sitting parade of finery such as she’d never witnessed in her life, and kept reminding herself not to drop her friends’ hands—they stood at the side of the white coach.
The two coachmen perched stoically on top were armed, each with a well-polished blunderbuss and short sword, but their attention was elsewhere, at the line ahead of them and the approaching gatehouse.
The coach waited its turn several lengths from the gatehouse, and Sarah stood in its shadow, looking into the carriage filled with light from the Palais.
Its passengers looked Bantu, three men and two women, their complexions blue-black in the artificial light. The men had shaved heads and the women wore their hair long and bound in wire. Their clothing took Sarah’s breath away, all white with gold thread and buttons. All of them, men and women alike, had hands thick with gold bands and heavy hoops of gold through each ear. The passengers held large furs across their laps, and each bore a little mask on a stick, designed to cover the upper part of the face only, concealing it behind a bird-like nose and a spray of feathers shooting back over one’s hairline. One of the younger men stroked a plump white cat in his lap. It was a family. The prince, the princess, and three children; she was charmed by the domesticity of the scene. The Bantu had all been pirates, not too many generations ago, and in all the gold of the prince’s finery, she imagined she could see an echo of that heritage.
The near carriage door opened—it must be Sir William—and then Sarah’s heart stopped.
Inside the doorframe of the carriage, hammered into the wood all around, ran a thin, dully gleaming bit of filigree.
Silver.
Inside the door, it was hidden except when the door was open, so its purpose could only be to intercept malignant hexing.
Sir William winked into view, in the moment of climbing into the carriage door, a pistol in each hand, both of them pointed at the oldest of the men.
The Prince of Shreveport looked up, startled.
“Drop the spell now!” Sir William hissed, not realizing it was too late.
The Bantu stared, but said nothing, and Sir William smiled.
He sat on the broad back seat of the coach, across from the prince, and continued to hold both his guns pointed at the man. “Shhh!” Sir William quieted the astonished family, and pulled back the hammers of both pistols to make his point.
“This is outrageous!” the Prince of Shreveport whispered, eyes flashing.
“It is indeed, suh,” Sir William nodded, “and I hope it works. Now take off your clothing before I feel myself compelled to pull the trigger and spoil everyone’s evening.”
The carriage had paper blinds that could be pulled down over each window for privacy, so once Sarah’s entire party had crept inside, each popping into view as he or she climbed over the thin line of silver, they pulled down the blinds. Sarah noticed thin filigrees of silver inside the windows, too.
All the people entering made the carriage jostle.
Tap, tap, tap. The sound came from the roof of the carriage, and then it was followed by some words that might be in Bantu, and sounded like a question.
Sir William pressed his pistols into the prince’s chest and raised both his eyebrows. “Everything is just fine in here, thank you very much,” he prompted his prisoner.
The Prince of Shreveport flared his nostrils in anger, but when he called back to the coachmen his voice sounded efficient and calm. “We’re fine, thank you, Sergeant.”
“Well done, suh.” Bill eased the hammers of his pistols down. “Now undress.”
“You can’t get away with this for long!” the prince warned them, handing his coat to Sir William and reaching for his belt.
“You’re probably, right, suh,” Sir William agreed genially, “and I certainly hope I don’t have to. Please cooperate, and no one will be harmed. I expect that it’s no great consolation, but know that I hold you, your office, and your family in the highest respect.”
The Prince of Shreveport snorted his derision and pulled off his breeches.
Sir William stood watch with his long guns while the prince and his family stripped down to underthings and Calvin hog-tied them all with strips of improvised rope torn from clothing.
The coachmen didn’t interrupt again.
Then Sarah and her companions changed, all at the same time, elbowing each other in the face and stepping on each other’s feet as they did so—the carriage was large, but intended to seat six capaciously, not ten.
The cramped space slowed the process, as did the occasional gentle jerk as the carriage rolled forward. Sarah’s own progress was further slowed by her simultaneous close examination of the faces of the prince’s party, so they had barely finished changing into the white formal clothing (all more or less fitting, though Obadiah burst a button in his collar and had to hide the damage with his neckcloth, and Cal’s wrists jutted out of his borrowed sleeves nearly two inches), covered the prince and his family awkwardly under the furs—their cat looked on placidly without objection—and picked up the masks when the coach pulled forward and there was a knock at the door.
“Facies muto.” Sarah willed mana through the mask in her hands and replaced all their faces with images of the prince’s and his family’s. “Captivos occulto,” she added, almost as an afterthought, touching the furs and hiding the prince and his family from sight. She felt a flush of pride in her work for both the idea and its execution, but also a strain from casting so many spells in quick succession. How long would she be able to hold out?
She felt lightheaded and a little feverish.
Sir William, in the prince’s clothing, opened his blind; they were stopped inside the gatehouse. “Yes, gentlemen?” he drawled to a paper-bearing footman and two gendarmes. Sarah heard his unmistakably Chesapeake tones and wondered whether she should have done something to disguise all their voices.
Too late.
“Are you ’ere for ze ball?” asked the footman blandly, holding a quill pen black with ink up to the paper.
“No, I’m here for the kidnapping.” Sir William held his bird mask up to his face. “Have you not heard? We batheads are all pirates in our deepest hearts, as we are in our family trees.”
“Yes, sir,” the footman smiled a completely perfunctory smile. “I just need to check you against ze list. Name, please?”
From her drill sessions with the Elector, Sarah knew that the Princedom of Shreveport was held by the Machogu family, and she thought the prince’s own name was Kimoni. How much did Sir William know?
“Dammit, man, can you not read?” the Cavalier thundered, and he reached an arm outside the coach to thump it against the heraldic lion and griffin.
Sarah nearly fainted. The moment that Sir William reached outside the carriage, his disguise fell away. From inside the carriage she saw his black perruque reappear, and she knew they were doomed.
Sir William, though, didn’t notice. He swelled to his full height, even sitting down, until his shoulders blocked the window and he loomed over the French footman. “I’m the Prince of Shreveport, damn your eyes! Party of five!”
“Yes, sir, ze Prince of Shreveport,” The footman notated his sheet and stepping away.
Sir William brought his arm back inside the window, pulled down its paper blind, and dropped his mask. He looked at Sarah and must have seen an expression of fear. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty. There is an art to dealing with men who are accustomed to taking orders.”
The coach rolled forward, and Sarah felt her heart start beating again.
Cathy pulled out the hairball-and-pearls compass. It hung inert, the spell dead from crossing the carriage’s silver threshold.
Sir William turned to face Cathy, again lifting up his mask. “I find I rather enjoy being a prince.”
* * *
Ezekiel went alone, first, to the Bishop’s Palace, and there he learned to appreciate the cunning of the dead heretic Thalanes. Berkeley, after the riotous action at the cathedral, had fallen into some reverie from which he could barely shake himself to give orders to the dragoons. And even with the rain and Hooke’s scarf, hat, and long hair to mask his pale face, Ezekiel preferred not to be seen much with the Lazars.
He limped, tired from his spellcasting and wounded. The Sorcerer Hooke had offered to heal him, and Ezekiel had declined.
The palace was mostly given over to an association of red-robed Polites, and Ezekiel imagined with horror a showdown with himself and the Sorcerer Hooke on one side and an entire squad of thaumaturgical monks on the other. Thalanes, from beyond the grave, had almost led him into that trap.
Ezekiel inquired of the Polite doorkeeper about a party from Appalachee that he was to meet at the Bishop’s Palace.
The Polite, a fat, cinnamon-colored Amhara man with tight buttons for eyes, scratched his bald head. “I keep the door both for the sisters and brothers of the Humble Order of St. Reginald Pole,” he said chirpily, “as well as for the Johnnies. I can tell you none of us has any guests at the moment, nor has had any for more than a week.”
Ezekiel was perplexed; Thalanes and Hooke had both seemed to enter their battle of wits with the expectation that Thalanes would be unable to lie. “I was told to meet them at the Bishop’s Palace. Does the Bishop of New Orleans keep more than one palace?”
“As to that,” the Amhara grunted, raising his eyebrows and turning down the corners of his mouth, “he can barely be said to keep this one. If you’re looking for the bishop himself, you may find him around the side, in the servants’ quarters that face the cathedral. That’s where he lives. Though there’s been some commotion at the cathedral this afternoon, and I have heard the bishop himself may have been involved.”
Ezekiel knocked at the indicated door. As he waited for an answer that never came, the Lazars and several of the Blues, including Berkeley, joined him. “Ani poteach et hadelet.” He opened the locked door with a very simple spell (cast with his fingers touching on old iron key hanging around his neck) that nevertheless nearly knocked him unconscious, and then Hooke entered. Ezekiel hadn’t the stomach to join him in breaking into the bishop’s home, and Berkeley wasn’t able to rouse himself from his slump.
“Wake up, man!” Ezekiel said to the captain of the Blues as they stood on the doorstep in the rain.
“Bad luck, Parson,” Berkeley ground out his words through gritted teeth. “A man does what he must do, but killing a bishop…” He trailed off, staring out into the gray, wet afternoon. “Bad luck.”
Ezekiel shivered. Had Berkeley killed the bishop? Before he could ask, the Sorcerer exited the bishop’s apartments, coming away with a bundle of clothing and a clump of dark hair. The female of the species is entirely predictable, he said. I found it in a bathing tub, and I can tell it is hers. It only goes to show the wisdom of the Royal Society’s advice against too frequent immersion in water.
Ezekiel heaved a sigh of relief to get away from the Bishop’s Palace and the cathedral; the chevalier’s Creole had withdrawn with his gendarmes much earlier. As the dragoons rode across the Place d’Armes in double file, he looked back and saw the first intrepid onlookers brave the cathedral doors. Soon the rumors would be confirmed as fact, and New Orleans would know it no longer had a bishop.
However uncomfortable he felt with breaking into the dead priest’s home or witnessing black magic performed on his altar, Ezekiel found he just didn’t think the bishop’s death was his problem. Even if it had been Berkeley who had shot him.
The Lazars rode, too, on spare horses belonging to the Blues; their long-nailed bare feet looked strange in the stirrups, though they sat like practiced horsemen. The party rode west, then north, then circled east again, all in the wet, frothy tail end of the storm, Hooke ignoring repeated queries other than to say I follow where the evidence conducts us, priest. A man of reason cannot do otherwise. She is on the move. Be thou patient.
Hooke seemed to follow the Witchy Eye by sense of smell, sniffing at the hair in his hand and then at the air of New Orleans like a hound given the scent of a fox or a raccoon.
Ezekiel disliked riding with the dead, but between the thick weather and Robert Hooke’s scarf, he didn’t think anyone noticed the Lazar for what he was.
As afternoon turned into evening, the rain stopped, and Ezekiel found himself riding west again, with the Sorcerer Hooke and a morose Captain Berkeley, exposed at the head of a restless column of dragoons, hoping night came soon. They skirted the edge of the Quarter, headed back toward the Palais du Chevalier. They passed fine homes and streets lit by lantern poles.
Then they turned a corner and the Palais itself was in sight, hurling its shafts of light into all directions. A line of ornate coaches beetled its way one at a time through the gatehouse, each disgorging passengers at the front door and then trundling to a stop within the cobbled courtyard. A second gatehouse, further down the street, would permit exit later.
She must be inside. Hooke held the clotted ball of damp black hair in his hand, alternating sniffing it and nosing the air. She is near.
“I can get us in,” Ezekiel said.
Hooke wrapped his scarf more closely about his face and Tom Long-Knife followed suit. The burnt, one-eyed Lazar could do nothing about his appearance and simply fell back slightly, hovering between his fellow undead and the first of the dragoons. Berkeley and the other Imperial soldiers kept impassive faces, but the presence of the Lazars made all the horses skittish.
Ezekiel ignored glares and teeth-clenched curses from the drivers and guards on the foremost coaches and rode up to the gatehouse. After hours of riding around in the dark and wet, to feel the air only damp about his face and to stand in the blazing light of the thousand lamps and torches of the Palais’s exterior made him feel warm, dry, and exposed to view.
He hoped no one noticed the strangeness of his companions.
The gatehouse crawled with gendarmes; two stood in the gate itself, with a list-toting footman, in the act as Ezekiel approached of signing off a carriage and sending it on through to the front door. They glared at him.
“Good even,” Ezekiel called. “May we enter?” Out of the corner of his eye he watched the Lazars, who hung a little behind.
“You don’t look like invitees to ze ball,” the footman sniffed.
Tom Long-Knife reached for his weapon and Hooke held up a restraining hand.
“We’re not,” Ezekiel agreed. “I’m staying here as a guest of the chevalier.”
The footman shook his head. “Only invitees to ze ball are to be admitted at zis time.”
Now Robert Hooke hissed, his rancid exhalations drifting into Ezekiel’s nostrils like the stink of a dead skunk. Ezekiel shot him a pleading look.
“There must be a mistake,” he protested, “please contact the chevalier. Or perhaps his seneschal, Mr. du Plessis.”
The footman looked bored but he waved another gendarme to his side and sent the man into the house. Ezekiel and his company stepped back from the gate while the footman processed several more coaches. She is here, I am certain of it, Hooke whispered into Ezekiel’s mind. In this light, no scarf would hide the Lazar’s peculiarity, and Ezekiel imagined stares of disapproval and fear boring into his back from each passing coach.
Finally the chevalier came out the front doors of the Palais, accompanied by another half dozen of his men. They were prepared for combat, wearing blue-stained leathers and festooned with weapons, but he wore an elegant blue and gold coat, waistcoat, and breeches, cut tight to display his trim physique, and an enormous white cravat. He strode directly through the gate to Ezekiel, and his gendarmes drew up into a disciplined line behind him.
Elsewhere about the gatehouse and the courtyard, the chevalier’s presence made his men snap to even tighter focus, and Ezekiel felt watched by a thousand eyes.
“My Lord—” Ezekiel began, and the chevalier immediately cut him off with a wave.
“You gentlemen will have to bunk in the station with your men tonight,” he said, nodding to Berkeley and Ezekiel. “I appreciate your patience. Your things will be brought out to you.”
“But, My Lord…” Ezekiel began, but didn’t know how much to say. “There are other…”
“Yes,” the chevalier cut him off again. “I had suspected your pretender might have reason to try to enter my home. Your presence here with these—” he indicated the three Lazars with a twist of his wrist, “these things confirms my guess.”
“My Lord?” Ezekiel could think of no better answer.
A flicker of a smile crossed the chevalier’s lips. “How much do you think Thomas will be willing to pay me to keep her hidden? Annually, I mean.”
Tom Long-Knife and the burnt Lazar hissed and lunged forward at the same moment, pushing past Ezekiel but pulling up short of the chevalier as a bristling hedge of steel sprang into the fists of his men, forcing them back.
No, not steel, Ezekiel realized, recognizing the gleam of the weapons: silver.
The chevalier had armed all his men with long silver daggers. It was a shocking display of wealth.
Ezekiel and the Sorcerer Hooke shared a brief glance; the sorcerer’s cold face was unreadable, but Ezekiel knew he was broadcasting confusion and alarm from his own. He looked about the courtyard and the gatehouse and saw dozens of well-armed men, all now brandishing silver daggers. Bewigged heads stared shamelessly from the line of ornate coaches.
“We expected you might not wish to cooperate.” The chevalier turned his gaze to the Lazar. “Now the sorcerer will want to try some arcane attack, but I advise against it.”
Robert Hooke squinted, and Ezekiel involuntarily stepped back a pace. He worried Hooke was trying something, incanting in his silent mindspeech, and if his incantation exploded, Ezekiel didn’t want to be caught in it. There were no explosions, though, and then Hooke said-thought sardonically, I am not generally in the habit of taking advice from men in frippery. Still, tonight I shall heed the Lord Protector’s counsel and keep my powder dry.
The chevalier laughed. “The wisdom of the ancients. Good night, gentlemen.” Then he turned and walked back into his mansion, leaving his silver-armed men behind to reinforce the gate.