“Hell’s Bells, suh, stop winking at me.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bayard Prideux’s wooden leg drilled through Bill’s stupor and pried his eyelids apart.
He wanted the whisky so bad he almost crawled immediately over to his water pail, where he’d hidden the remaining quarter bottle of Elijah Pepper’s aqua vitae. He checked himself in time and instead trundled his carcass up into a sitting position. Time to be whipped.
The hold of the hulk was mired in the pitch black of night on the Pontchartrain. Bayard came alone. He lit his stomping path with the yellow wash from a stinking taper held high in his right hand; something heavier swung in shadow, clutched in the fingers of his left.
A pistol?
“Have you come to kill me, suh?” Bill called gamely.
Bayard stopped in his tracks. “You are awake.” His voice was slurred. The yellow light drew out his nose and made him look like a bird of prey, perched in a high eyrie from which it considered diving for Bill the hare.
Bayard sniffed.
He swayed, slightly, his eyes pools of shadow beneath his streaked and greasy forehead. He bent over and set the candle on the floor to one side. He shifted from foot to foot, hawked, and spat into the darkness.
He thrust his left hand forward, the thing he clutched sparkling amber in the candlelight. Bill flinched, expecting a shot or a blow—and instead, Bayard fell over.
By pure good luck, the candle landed upright, its flame still burning. The Frenchman smelled strongly of liquor and lay still. Bill lunged forward, gratifying images filling his mind, visions of tearing Bayard’s head from his shoulders, of strangling him with Bill’s chains, of beating his jailor to death—
the shackles pulled him up short.
He strained and pushed, but the chains stayed firmly anchored and Bayard remained safely out of his reach, snoring through a stupor of precious alcohol.
Bill wept. He shrank back against the curved belly of the whale that had swallowed him and shed hot tears of anguish and anger.
When the weeping washed the last of the sleep-fog from Bill’s brain, he assessed his situation. Bayard breathed deeply and raggedly, the phlegm in his nose and throat making a noise like several forests being simultaneously sawed to the ground. The candle was out of Bill’s reach. The thing Bayard had been carrying, though, lay in shadow beside Bayard’s body, on the near side of him. If it was a pistol, or even a long enough knife, Bill might still have his justice. He crawled forward and stretched as far as he could, grabbing the object with the tips of his fingers and caressing it to himself.
He found he had requisitioned a bottle. A full bottle. A tall, square, full bottle of Kentucky bourbon. Bill took it in his trembling hands and retreated to the wall. “Honor in defense of innocence,” he murmured.
He drank, and considered.
The bottle was not long enough to strike Bayard with it. It was too heavy to conveniently turn into a bladed weapon by smashing it. But Bill could throw it. Bill was weak and his arms were chained, but Bayard was still, and would never be an easier target.
Bill drank some more, not to stiffen his resolve but because he hated to waste good whisky. Even on killing a varmint like Bayard. It wouldn’t do to totally empty the bottle though, so he cut himself off after a few long sips, and tamped the cork back into place.
Bill was a pistol man, really, but a soldier fights with the weapons he has to hand. Bill attempted a few positions and decided that his best shot was to rest the weight of the long chain over his shoulder. This forced him a couple of steps further back from his target, but it took most of the burden off his throwing hand.
Bill practiced a couple of dry casts; each time he swung the sloshing missile, he imagined it hurtling down in a straight line, a comet of high-proof justice, cracking Bayard’s traitorous skull open. Maybe then the talking deaf-mute Hop would find Bill a key, and he would escape. And if Bill wasted away and died in the belly of the Incroyable, he would die satisfied.
He was ready. He checked the other prisoners; but for the recurring moans, they might be dead.
One more practice cast, and then Bill threw the bottle.
Thunk.
The bottle hit Bayard on the shoulder and back, missing his head entirely, and dropping with a slosh to the floor.
“Damn me.”
If only he’d been wearing his lucky hat, Bayard Prideux would be a dead man right now.
He considered grabbing the other bottle, the one hidden in the water pail, and throwing it, too, but he didn’t have the heart.
He sat and might have wept again, except that Bayard stirred. “Ah…eh….” The French former Blue tumbled over, away from Bill and further out of his reach. He rubbed his shoulder and rolled up, stiffly and woozily. The two men sat facing each other.
“I regret, Bill,” Bayard said blearily.
“To hell with your regrets, suh!” Bill spat.
Bayard took this calmly through his stupor. “I mean, I am sorry.”
“To hell with your sorry, too.”
“Do you not feel remorse? Do you not ever sorrow for ze wrong choices you ’ave made?”
Bill said nothing. His remorse was none of Bayard’s damned affair.
“I do,” Bayard confessed.
Bill bit his tongue. How could he get Bayard to come close enough so that Bill could strangle him?
“I am so lonely,” Bayard said. “’E surrounds me with deaf-mutes and idiots, I speak to no one. Even ze ’ore he sends me once a month is a tongueless Choctaw. All my communication with ’er is animal, and degraded.”
Bayard was as much a prisoner as Bill was.
“I am not ze man I once was. I am not a man at all anymore, Bill. Captain Lee. I am not permitted to even be a man, I am nothing. ’E leaves me nothing. I gave ’im wealth, and ’e gives me only isolation and darkness.”
“Who, Bayard?” Bill just wanted to keep Bayard talking, get his guard down, and draw him close enough to murder him. “Who gives you nothing?”
“Ze chevalier, of course.” Bayard moped, and Bill sneered inside at the other man’s misery.
“I thought the chevalier was your friend.”
“’E should be. I made ’im a rich man.”
Bill’s brain caught on this statement in surprise. Bayard had been a penniless soldier, a failed poet, some bankrupt Louisiana planter’s youngest scion sent off to make his unhappy career as a soldier. He had treated the military mostly as an opportunity to raise hell. He had gotten into the Blues by some family influence, Bill remembered, and not because of wealth. None of that made Bayard particularly unusual, and neither did it suggest any way in which he might have brought the Chevalier of New Orleans wealth.
“What are you talking about?” Bill asked. “The Chevaliers Le Moyne have always been rich.”
Bayard shook his head and patted the floor about him in the darkness. “Ze Chevaliers ’ave always ’ad ze ’ead of ze New Orleans government,” he said, “and land. Generally, zey ’ave ’ad no cash.”
Bill nodded; he knew how that was. “And taxes. The chevalier collects taxes and tariffs and tolls of all kinds.”
“Yes,” Bayard agreed. “But zen ’e must pay for many things with zis money. Ze gendarmes, and ze magistrates, ze public buildings, and so on. Zis is ze curse of ze great man. Taxes do not make ’im rich.”
Bayard continued to grope in the dark.
“What are you doing?” Bill asked.
“I ’ad a bottle. Where’s my bottle?”
Bill gritted his teeth and said nothing.
“Zere it is.” Bayard found the whisky and took a long drink, wincing visibly. “I seem to have ’urt my shoulder.”
“You fell,” Bill told him.
“We all fall,” Bayard said.
“Some farther than others, suh,” Bill muttered, his heart dark.
“I told ze chevalier, you know.” The Frenchman took a drink.
“Told him what?”
“I told ze chevalier I was a murderer. ’Ow did you say it? Zat I was a foresworn man.” Drink. “Of course, I was obeying orders. And I did not tell ’im everything.” Bayard winked.
“No, suh? What treachery, tell me, did you conceal from the chevalier?”
“No, Bill.” Bayard clucked his tongue. “I did not conceal ze treachery. I told ze chevalier zat I stole ze king’s regalia. But I did not tell ’im where I ’id it.” He winked again.
“You hid the regalia?” Bill and the other House Light Dragoons had never found Kyres’s sword, orb and crown.
“Oui. Yes. Anyway, I wrote down in ze letter where I ’id zem, but in a riddle, in a way ze chevalier will never understand.” Bayard winked again several times, exaggeratedly, his eye a fluttering yellow-black butterfly in the candlelight.
“Hell’s Bells, suh, stop winking at me. I am not your beau. What orders? Who gave you orders?” Surely Thomas Penn had been behind the murder of his brother-in-law Kyres Elytharias, but Bill had had no proof—only Thomas’s immuring of his sister and his own rise to the head of the Penn family and election to the Imperial Throne.
“A great man. A great man ’oo zen turned on me.”
“Thomas, I suppose. And your exile to this rotting pile of planks was your punishment?”
Bayard laughed and drank again. “Zis was my reward. I came ’ere to New Orleans fifteen years ago fearing for my life, and I asked to enter ze chevalier’s service. I told ’im everything, I wrote down everything in a letter zat ’e ’olds, and ’e took me into ’is service and protected me.”
“Here? On this hulk?” Bill was incredulous.
Bayard nodded.
“You’ve been here for fifteen years?”
“Most of zat time, yes, on zis ship. Occasionally, ’e permits me to go ashore. Only occasionally. I do not miss it so very much, you know.” Bayard spat. “Zis city is full of witches and crazy people, always Papa Legba zis and Grande Al-Zan zat, cut me off ze ’ead of a chicken to ’ex my neighbor and make me a doll for good mojo at ze races.”
“And he surrounds you with the deaf and the stupid,” Bill said thoughtfully.
“It keeps me protected,” Bayard said.
“It keeps you imprisoned, suh.” Suddenly and painfully, Bill felt a twinge of sympathy for the other man. “What did the chevalier do with your confession?”
Bayard hesitated, and took another drink.
“How did you make him rich? You didn’t give him the regalia, did you, Bayard?”
“No, zat would ’ave been foolish.”
“More foolish than writing him a letter with the location in a riddle?”
“’E will never decipher it,” Bayard sneered. “Ze regalia are safe from ’im.”
“He told somebody, didn’t he?” Bill probed. “About the murder.”
Bayard nodded.
Bill snorted with surprised laughter at sudden insight. “You told him that Thomas Penn put you up to it, didn’t you?”
Bayard took another slug of the bottle.
“You came down here to New Orleans with this sordid tale of treachery and murder, you blamed the new emperor, and the chevalier has been blackmailing His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn ever since!”
“’E won’t get rid of me,” Bayard said. “I am in ’is service.”
“He won’t get rid of you because you’re his witness. And he keeps you chained up here with the deaf, the stupid, and the damned to keep safe his very precious, very profitable secret!” Bill laughed out loud. He now had a weapon to use against Bayard.
The Frenchman drank again.
“Bayard, I’m surprised at you.” Bill spoke softly, to try to insinuate himself into Bayard’s sodden brain as the voice of sagacity—the wise serpent, the enemy offering advice that is nevertheless not to be ignored.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how a weasel like you can hold such a powerful moneymaking opportunity in his hand and not see it,” Bill said.
“What, blackmail ze emperor?” Bayard shuddered. “I would not dare. Ze chevalier can do it because ’e ’as men and land to keep ’im safe. ’E is ’ere in New Orleans, far from Philadelphia.”
Bill harrumphed. “Not the emperor. Give me the bottle, you coward. You don’t deserve whisky.”
Bayard corked the whisky bottle and slid it across the floor to Bill. “I am no coward, and I am also no fool.”
Bill suppressed the urge to hurl the bottle again. Instead, he took a long drink—the whisky was almost gone. “Blackmail the chevalier,” he said, slowly and distinctly. “Tell him you want money, or you will publish his crime. You could get better lodgings than this, suh, even in isolation. You don’t have to live like a condemned man.”
Bayard was silent, considering.
“Come on, man! He could get you a whore with a tongue, at least!”
“Ze ’ore is not so bad,” Bayard protested. “She ’as culture, she is from a good family. ’Er brozer is ze right hand man of ze chevalier ’imself, du Plessis.”
“I am no expert in what passes for a good family in New Orleans or among the French,” Bill admitted. “But none of my sisters was ever heard to be called a whore.”
“It would never work,” Bayard said faintly.
Bill shrugged, letting his suggestion play out in Bayard’s head.
Bayard’s eyebrows shot up. “’E would kill me.”
“He needs you. Just write him a letter and tell him that you want your fair share of the riches he’s getting from Thomas Penn.”
Bayard looked very serious. Bill laughed inside in anticipation of the little worm threatening the chevalier and getting crushed for his trouble.
But then Bayard lurched to his feet. “No! Don’t you understand? ’E doesn’t need me, I wrote ’im a letter fifteen years ago, and I told ’im everything! Don’t you see? I told ’im my guilt in writing, and if I make trouble now, ’e doesn’t need me! If I demand money, ze chevalier will kill me! Or even if ’e does not kill me, ’e may simply not protect me, and I will be in danger!”
“From Penn?” Bill snorted. “The emperor is very far away.”
“And ze ozer!” Bayard shrieked. “In danger from Penn and ze ozer!”
“Zee Uzzah?” Was Bayard shrieking the name of some Biblically-minded Dutchman? “Do you mean the other?” he asked, but Bayard was already staggering away; his flight was so precipitous, he left behind the candle.
The conversation hadn’t gone quite as Bill had hoped, but all was not lost. Bill swallowed the last of the whisky and grinned. Maybe he could get Jacob Hop to bring him paper, ink, and a quill, and he would write the chevalier himself…on Bayard’s behalf. If he could provoke the little French viper’s master to action against him, he might be able to see a little justice. That would be something to be proud of, something Charles would be proud of, even if Bill ended his days as a rotting carcass in the belly of the Incroyable.
But who was the other of whom Bayard Prideux was so afraid?
* * *
“Prepare yourself,” Sarah said. “I think the schnitzels are about to kill another cat.”
“Aw, the melodies ain’t that bad,” Cal said. “I only wish I knew what the words meant.”
“I think I’m just as happy not having any idea,” Sarah disagreed. “If I knew they was going on and on about the Serpents War and Albrecht von Wallenstein, with Queen Adela Podebradas divorcin’ the Holy Roman Emperor by choppin’ the head off his emissary and him divorcin’ her back by chopping off her very own head, and so forth, I believe I’d still find it tiresome.”
“I dunno,” Cal mused. “If they’s a song about them fellers as got themselves threw out a window, that might could be hilarious.”
They lay wrapped in their bedrolls on the keelboat cabin’s roof, looking up at the bright blue sky of an early morning. The boat was long and thin, bowed up fore and aft to sharp points, and filled in the middle with a long cabin consisting of a single room.
Fore, the keelboat’s prow was carved into the shape of a horse’s head, which Cal had commented at least half a dozen times must be a sign for them of good luck, since the Elector had carved Sarah a walking stick with the same shape. He’d even mentioned the coincidence to the Germans in Natchez-under-the-Hill, when he was trying to talk down their suggested price—in the end, the last of Crooked Man’s moonshine had gone a long way to alleviating the cash burden of their fare—and the blond men had seemed duly impressed.
Aft, it ended in a thin pole, from which snapped the flag of the Duchy of Chicago, seven horizontal stripes, yellow and black. Over a hundred fifty years now, the descendants of old Albrecht von Wallenstein had ruled in Chicago. That made their arms safe colors for a Mississippi riverboat to fly.
The half-dozen Germans who poled them downriver (supplementing the money they planned to make selling their cargo of carefully-packed cheese and beer) sang as they worked. Since there were always at least two of them at the poles, Sarah had been hearing volksmusik belted out by iron lungs for twenty-four hours straight, and expected to hear it for another solid forty-eight. It was already pounded so deeply into her brain that when the Germans’ dog, a big, indolent wolfish-looking creature, opened its mouth to yawn or stretch its jaws, she imagined it singing o Wandern, o Wandern, du freie Burschenlust, whatever that meant.
Thalanes sat upright nearby; the beastfolk were elsewhere on the boat, lurking quietly in some corner. They had paid for their own passage, with gold coins Sarah didn’t recognize.
“I would have liked to sleep in,” the monk said. He still looked better than he had on the Natchez Trace. Maybe he was less worried about pursuit. Or maybe he felt better because he didn’t start every morning with tiring gramarye.
“I reckon they sing so’s other boats can hear ’em,” Cal volunteered. “In the fog, for instance, and at night.”
There were plenty of other boats. Keelboats were common, but Sarah had seen many flatboats too, and a few Memphite barges. Sails and multiple banks of chained rowers combined pushed the sharp-prowed Memphite ships with staring hawks’ eyes painted on either side of the keel at speeds that surprised Sarah, even against the current.
“They did sing all night,” Thalanes confirmed with a weary smile, “though they had the decency to lower the volume. Ever so slightly.”
“Why don’t we see big ships?” Sarah asked. “The river’s so wide, it’s like a sea. Why all the small boats, and no big ships?”
“It’s wide, all right,” Cal agreed, “but it ain’t deep. Some places you can practically walk across on foot, I heard.”
“That’s true.” Thalanes yawned. “Now, who’s going to make me some coffee?”
“Don’t go wearing yourself out with gramarye when we don’t need it,” Sarah admonished the monk.
“I want the coffee,” Thalanes said, “precisely so I won’t feel worn out. But I promise, I don’t plan to do anything with it but drink it.”
“I wouldn’t half mind some myself.” Calvin rolled out of his blanket. “I’ll go tell Hans and Franz and Dieter we’re gonna use a corner of their stovetop.”
He rattled down off the cabin roof, scooting the singing dog out of his way with a friendly push, and tried to find one of the Germans who spoke English. That was a surprisingly difficult task, in part because the six Germans were all family and looked, to Sarah’s eyes, identical.
Dieter alone stood out for the fact that he dressed all in black and never smiled—Sarah had initially assumed it was for some profoundly German reason, like a family curse or a broken vow or a murdered love. At sunrise and sunup, though, Dieter stood in the water beside the prow, cut the palm of his hand, and rubbed small amounts of his own blood into certain angles of the horse’s head.
A runemaster, then. A vitki. Ohio River Germans were Christians and their wizards were called brauchers, but Sarah had read that their Mississippi cousins were mostly pagan, and consulted wise men who carved runes. And here was an apparent vitki in the flesh.
“You could pass on the little brown devil bean this morning and try some sleep instead,” Sarah told Thalanes. She tried to sound wise rather than fretful.
Thalanes looked to be sure that Calvin wasn’t too close and spoke softly. “Something is following us.”
“You haven’t seen anything…it isn’t that close,” Sarah half-asserted, half-asked.
Thalanes shook his head. “I can sense it. I don’t know what it is, but I know it seeks you and it stinks of death.”
Sarah shuddered. “Can you tell where it is? Help me see.”
Thalanes nodded at the Mississippi. “Upstream. A couple of days behind us is my best guess, but I could be wrong. There’s no need to panic.”
Sarah turned her face upstream. A lone German stood in the stern of the keelboat, intent on working his pole against the river bottom and pushing away drifting objects that threatened the vessel and its sweet cargo. She had carefully kept the patch over her eye since Natchez-under-the-Hill, not wanting to be blinded by the proximity of the river, but now she slipped it off her head and looked upstream.
She plunged into a green-stained, multicolored glow that surrounded the boat. Sarah was disoriented for a moment, and then realized that she had expected to see the ley line, and instead she was standing inside it, seeing everything else through it.
“Are you all right?” the monk asked her.
Sarah brushed him away with her hands, trying to concentrate.
She shaped her will. She formed an intention to see upriver, along the Mississippi ley, and she poured her perception into the intent. She wished she had something material she could use—a crystal, a seeing stone, a spyglass—but she didn’t. She was actually touching the ley, standing inside it, that was something. Or was it? Was the ley material, like a physical object? But whether or not it was, she knew it could conduct magical energy.
Sarah considered using the acorn in her dress, which had, after all, spent fifteen years tucked against her eyeball, but that didn’t seem quite right. Then, without knowing exactly what she was doing, she focused her intention through her witchy eye itself, willing the spell through it in the same way she would have through a bit of blood or skin she might use in a hex.
“Hostem video.” She touched her witchy eye and drew the smallest trickle of green-tinged power from the Mississippi. Even that tiny sip jolted through her like lightning.
She sucked in cool morning air as her vision raced along the ley. Faster than falling, faster than flight, her eye rocketed up the river in a tunnel of green, trees and buildings and bluffs and swamps and stockades streaming by in a whirl. She passed Natchez, and the staggering pyramids and necropolises of Memphis, and a high hill towering over the junction of two mighty rivers.
Suddenly, she was there.
She saw a keelboat. Its crew worked with frowns and furrowed brows, and the cabinless boat carried no cargo other than a circle of men huddled in the center. The banner on the back of the boat, a pair of standing sheaves and a rising sun, tickled her memory, but she wasn’t sure whose it was.
Imperial Youngstown, maybe.
“I see them,” she said. Black-evil-murder-smoke wisped off the men, similar to the auras of the Mockers.
“Tell me what you see,” the little monk urged her.
“There are five…six men,” she counted. She absorbed their faces, which were dirty, pale and impassive. Two of the men sat apart, and might have been commanders or leaders of some sort. They all had long hair. “They don’t talk. There’s something wrong with their auras, they’re not natural. They have…their eyes…they’re white. They just sit there. They are all armed, knives and some pistols. They’re on a boat. I don’t recognize any of them. Their clothing is torn up pretty bad. The boatmen are afraid of them.” She paused, focusing to be sure before she said anything. “They seem to be moving much faster than we are, though I don’t know how that’s possible.”
She felt Thalanes touching her arm, as if it were something happening very far away. “Let me see,” he told her, and she nodded.
“Visionem condivido,” she heard him say, and then she felt the monk inside her head. He was there as a weight, a presence that tired her, but only slightly. He gasped. “Sarah,” he murmured appreciatively, “your vision is so…clear…so powerful.”
“Tell me what you think of these men.” Sarah was too nervous to feel proud.
Thalanes spoke slowly. “Look at their hair and their nails. See how long they are? And their skin is so pallid. And their clothing isn’t tattered, it’s rotten.”
“Yeah,” Sarah agreed, “they got a real deficit of fashion sense. What are they?”
“Can’t you guess? They’re Lazars. Dead men,” Thalanes whispered, and Sarah felt a chill in her bones.
“Do you mean they’re like Black Tom Fairfax?” she asked. “And the sorcerer Hooke?”
“They aren’t like them,” Thalanes said. “They are them.”
Sarah’s mind revolted at the thought and she started to panic…the vision blurred…
“Calm down.” Thalanes squeezed her forearm. “Breathe.”
Sarah took a deep breath and re-inserted herself into her vision.
“We have a great advantage,” she heard the monk say. “You have an extraordinary natural talent, a seer’s gift. They’re far away, and we can see them.”
“They’re coming fast,” Sarah objected in a whisper. “Lazars.”
“True,” Thalanes agreed, “but the river’s long, and they’re still a couple of days behind us. We know they’re coming, we can keep track of them and maybe throw them off the scent.”
“What else do we need to look at?” she asked.
“I’ve seen enough,” he said, and as he let go of her arm, she felt his mind withdraw.
She released the vision and it disappeared, leaving her again on the roof of the keelboat in cheerful autumn morning sun. She looked north into the green ley energy and realized now that she could see flecks of black filtering to her witchy eye. Those were hints of the band of dead men on her trail, hundreds of miles upriver.
“I can see so much,” she whispered, and she slipped the patch back down over her eye. “But I know so little.”
“You can.” Thalanes lay down on the roof of the cabin. “And you know much more than you think you do. It gives me comfort to know that I’m traveling with such a visionary. So much comfort that I’m not afraid of a couple of old Englishmen, just because they have a bit of grave-mold on them.”
“I thought Lucky John’s men killed them in Putney,” Sarah said. “Wasn’t that the whole point of the Silver Lancers, John Churchill’s special squad? I read that equipping those men sucked the coffers of William of Orange dry. All that, and they failed?”
“All that and they won,” the monk reminded her. “They drove the Necromancer out of England, along with Tom Long-Knife and the Sorcerer Hooke.”
“And sent ’em on over here to the New World so’s they could chase after me. I jest git luckier by the day.”
Thalanes waited a moment. “Are you frightened?”
“Hell yes,” Sarah shot back. She could feel her pulse racing and her breath was short.
“Would it help you to think of them as tragic figures?” Thalanes asked.
“I don’t reckon it would,” she guessed.
“Tom Fairfax was a rebel,” Thalanes said, as if he was bound and determined to make his point anyway. “He rose up against his king, and then when he realized Cromwell was worse than what he’d replaced, he rebelled against Cromwell, too. Cromwell crushed the Rising of York, and his punishment for poor Black Tom was cruel.”
“Black Tom killed a lot of people with his knife, afore and after he was dead. I reckon that was cruel, too.”
“Yes,” Thalanes agreed. “And then his old friend Cromwell killed him with his own knife, and bound Tom into Cromwell’s service, forcing him to wield that same knife in the service of the man he hated, eternally.”
“Cry me a river.” Sarah gestured beyond the boat. “Cry me the damn Mississippi.”
“And Hooke asked to become what Cromwell made him.”
“What?” Sarah was startled. “Why in Hell would anybody ever want to become a walking corpse?”
“To live forever,” Thalanes explained. “Hooke was a great wizard, practical and theoretical, much like Sir Isaac. When the only thing that drives you is curiosity, the thing you want most is time.”
“And then what? They all jest came to the New World and hid for a hundred years, waitin’ to jump out and grab me?”
“No one knows quite what happened to Cromwell,” Thalanes said. “There are persistent rumors that William Penn sheltered him.”
“My grandfather?” In context it was only a minor surprise. Sarah was beginning to regain control of herself and her accent. “Why would he have done anything so stupid?”
“Great-great-grandfather. Cromwell gave him his original land grant. That’s where your family estates come from, Sarah…they were bestowed by the Necromancer. And after he’d been driven out, the Penns were established and King John had his hands full of other matters and no one was in any position to do much about it. Besides, people liked William Penn. He was a good man.”
“Who made a deal with Hell.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he didn’t shelter Cromwell, and those rumors are just the baseless gossip of your family’s enemies.”
“Dammit,” Sarah complained, “life is complicated.”
“Many atrocities committed along the banks of the Mississippi over the years have been attributed to the Lazars,” Thalanes continued. “Your father hunted them, though without much success.”
“Oliver Cromwell is my enemy, then,” Sarah said.
“The Lazars are, at least,” Thalanes yawned again, “but we have a head start and we can see them. I’m sorry that you feel disquieted; your vision has put my mind at ease.” He lay flat on the cabin roof and laced his fingers together over his breast. “So much so, that I’m now going to take a nap, and you’ll have to drink my share of the coffee.”
He shut his eyes and instantly he was breathing the soft, deep rhythms of sleep.
Calvin clambered back up onto the cabin roof. “I put water on the stove,” he said, and then he saw the monk dozing. “I reckon it’s jest coffee for two, then.”
“Cal,” Sarah told him, feeling shaky, “best keep the Elector’s gun loaded with silver from now on. We got trouble a-comin’.”
The talkative deaf-mute returned the next night. At Bill’s politest request, he disappeared again for a few minutes and came back with writing materials.
Bill lay on his belly and spread the sheet of paper out before him. He dipped the quill into the pot of black ink and considered carefully.
“Hell,” he said.
“What vexes you, William Lee?” Hop sat cross-legged across the sheet from Bill, and he looked amused.
“For starters, Mr. Hop, you might consider calling me Bill. When you call me William Lee every time, it sounds as if you’re reading an obituary.”
Hop looked delighted. “Very good, Bill. I do not know what an obituary is, but perhaps you could call me Jake.”
“Excellent, suh,” Bill agreed. “Don’t be offended at my provincialism, but YAH-cobe is difficult for me to remember, and Mr. Hope makes you sound like a fairy.”
Hop laughed.
“An obituary, Jake,” Bill continued, “is a printed notice, in a news-paper or similar publication, of a person’s death. I’m surprised to learn the Dutch don’t publish them. I’ve been to New Amsterdam, and it seemed a civilized enough place.”
Hop shrugged.
“Secondly, although you’ve promoted my scheme in a most excellent and prompt manner, Jake, procuring these writing implements as you have, I find myself realizing that there are at least two tremendous weaknesses in my plan.”
“What weaknesses? Perhaps I can help,” Hop said.
“I can write well enough,” Bill said, “to my grandfather’s shame, who thought it beneath a gentleman, but I can’t write Frog, and I don’t expect that the chevalier will read a letter in English and believe it comes from Bayard Prideux. In addition, I find that I have no way to get a letter to the chevalier. My plan is ill-thought out and I am thwarted.”
Hop clapped his hands together once. “I can solve both those problems, friend Bill!” He leaned forward, touched the inkpot, and muttered some jibber-jabber that didn’t sound Dutch to Bill—or French, or Castilian, or Latin, or anything else remotely familiar.
The quill Bill was holding tingled to the touch.
“Why, Jake,” Bill was surprised. “Have you been holding out on me? Are you a knickerbocker wizard, my good meneer?”
“I have some talent,” Hop conceded, smiling.
“Heaven be praised,” Bill said. “I may get out of here yet.” He held up the quill and admired it in the candlelight. “And what will this enchanted pen do?”
“Write what you will, my friend,” Hop explained. “The pen will turn it into French.” He furrowed his brow. “You did mean French, yes, and not actually the language of frogs?”
Bill laughed loud. “Yes I did mean French, you delightfully simple Dutchman! The language of frogs, indeed!”
Hop only raised his eyebrows and smiled.
“Very good, Jake!” Bill shook his elbow out of habit, as if shaking a sleeve out of the way, though he was naked to the waist. He dipped the quill into the inkpot again and attacked the blank sheet. “My dearest Gaspard,” he said aloud as he laboriously wrote. “Gaspard is the chevalier’s Christian name. A touch of insolence will help provoke the desired reaction,” he explained in an aside to Jacob Hop.
You, sir, he continued, owe me. I have shared my secret with you, and it has made you great wealth. The source of your new riches, in turn, I have told no man, but I find that the recompense for service to you is miserable. You treat me as a prisoner, sir, as an outcast and as a disgrace. I deserve better. You should share your bounty with me, and give me place at your side. I warn you out of the warmest affection I have for you, that failure to so reward me may result in the alienation of my regard.
He looked back at what he had written and what he saw made him laugh out loud. Not only was it all French—he could barely puzzle out the odd word, here and there—but Bill’s native hand, hacked out of the page like fire-cleared brush, had been transformed in the act of writing into something elegant, letters curling and twisting on the paper like dancing sprites.
“This is the first time I’ve ever written a French letter.” He winked. “You’re a genius, Jake!” He signed the letter with the initials B.P.
“Very good, Bill,” Hop said, beaming. “Shall I see to the delivery as well?”
Bill folded the letter, printing to the Chevalier on the outside in his accustomed blocky letters and marveling again that it came out as au Chevalier, in lovely script. “Can you? Will you give the letter wings?”
Hop laughed. “No, I cannot do that. Not here. I told you before, friend Bill, my power is weak upon the sea. There are other powers here, and they contest me, and then I am not yet come into my full strength. It is hard enough for me to be here at all, and to accomplish small magics, like putting words into your pen. I do not have the strength to manipulate physical objects on this ship—if I did, I would simply remove your manacles and we could swim away. It would be another matter entirely, you understand, if you were imprisoned upon the Mississippi.”
Bill was disappointed. “You will find someone, though, to deliver it.”
“Yes,” Hop said. “Yes, Bill, I will. Besides, what madman would take delivery of a letter that arrived flapping its own wings?”
* * *
Kinta Jane Embry pitied the Frenchman on the hulk. She pitied most of the men she knew, and all of the men she served. They were lonely, they were needy, they were sad. Whatever it was they paid her to do, however much of her time and body they bought, what they really wanted was someone to pay them attention.
And most importantly, the men who hired Kinta Jane were usually men who wanted a woman who wouldn’t talk back. They got what they wanted; for years, Kinta Jane had been an expert in keeping her mouth shut.
The Conventicle had equipped her for that.
The saddest of them all, though, was the Frenchman on the hulk. He talked so much. She understood him and she let him speak, but she tried to ignore everything he said and hold him, and she did what he wanted when he was ready.
His talk was insane, drunk talk, the grand scheming of every failed criminal, with constant hints at dark secrets and at his importance to the chevalier. He was pathetic, he was lonely, he was eager, he was desperate. And if he was so important to the chevalier, why was he a guard on a rotting prison ship? Her half-brother René was important to the chevalier, and he lived in the Palais.
Not that the chevalier’s motives mattered to her. She served René and the Conventicle, René and the Conventicle wanted the Frenchman watched, and Kinta Jane was the one to do it. She took the Conventicle’s orders—when the Conventicle gave her orders, which was a rare event—but it was the chevalier, or at least, René, who was the chevalier’s seneschal, who paid her every month to visit the Incroyable. Paid her, and gave her money to pay the scarred boatman who rowed her out.
Kinta Jane did her duty by the sad Frenchman, and when she could she made a little extra cash by letting the Frenchman’s idiot assistants grope her or kiss her for whatever copper coins they had scavenged. Visiting the sad Frenchman did not bring Kinta Jane much money, but she had other clients.
She needed those other clients—the Conventicle didn’t pay. One joined the Conventicle and did its work for the greater good, in order to protect Adam’s children from the coming storm, because one believed in Franklin’s vision. Kinta Jane believed in Franklin’s vision. She also believed in René, who had recruited her and who was her cell leader. To this day she only knew two other people in the Conventicle—the other members of her cell. That, and she had an address in Philadelphia to which she could send a message, if something happened and René, her cell leader, was disabled.
She finished with the Frenchman and held him while he fell asleep. Then she dressed, first pulling the cluster of beybey medallions over her head and laying them on her breast, then covering them with her tight blouse and stepping into her wide-flounced skirt.
René couldn’t protect her from everything, and Pritchard didn’t protect her from anything at all, so Kinta Jane Embry walked the streets with Papa Legba. New Orleans was the meeting place of two armies of gods, as she saw it. Jesus and His saints came down to it from the heavens, and Papa Legba and his mystères crawled up to it out of the ground and the forests and the cemeteries and the swamps.
Where Kinta Jane worked and lived, she was closer to the swamps.
She took her lantern and went back out onto the creaking deck of the hulk. The idiots were nowhere in sight—it was late, they were likely all asleep, and the only one who had been interested in any of Kinta Jane’s ministrations had already had his petty favors and paid for them—but the blond man, the deaf-mute, stood by the side of the ship’s ladder.
Kinta Jane shrugged deeper into her shawl against the night’s chill. She smiled and nodded at the deaf-mute; he had always seemed oblivious to her, though he nodded and waved politely enough.
He smiled back and she moved to pass him.
“May I ask a service of you?” the deaf-mute said in an unfamiliar lyrical accent.
She could say nothing in return—she had voluntarily had her tongue removed, when the Conventicle judged that it was necessary—but she had grown up speaking and still had verbal reflexes. Out of sheer surprise she grunted, a sound of which she was immediately embarrassed.
She touched the beybey through the thin material of her blouse and nodded.
The deaf-mute held up two folded letters. “Will you please deliver these for me?” Then he produced a coin.
Kinta Jane took the letters and examined them. They were clearly addressed, in French, in the same elegant hand, to the chevalier and to the bishop. This was an easy commission, so she nodded. The deaf-mute handed her the coin, spun on his heel and walked away into the darkness.
She climbed down the ladder and got in the boat. As the boatman pulled at his oars to drag them from the hulk to the shore, Kinta Jane opened her hand discreetly and looked down at the coin she had just taken.
The letters were strange enough; the coin was positively exotic. In the light of the full moon it glowed large and gold, like a Louis d’or, but it bore no letters or numbers. She had never seen its like. On its obverse was stamped the clear image of a plow, and on the reverse a sword.
She knew who minted coins like these, and the sight of it chilled her. The time had come, she mused, looking back for another glimpse of the deaf-mute as the lights of shore drew nearer.
Franklin’s terrifying vision was coming true again.
Peter Plowshare must be dead.
Another god had come to New Orleans.