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“I was unaware that we had differences, Lieutenant Berkeley.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Down in the crypt beneath the St. Louis Cathedral, surrounded by the shelved bones of hundreds of priests and other grandees, Bill realized he didn’t want to kill the bishop.

He tightened his grip on the hidalgo’s pistols.

Just because the bishop had a son and hadn’t personally wronged Bill, he shouldn’t get off the hook. The bishop’s death wasn’t a matter of merit, it was a matter of Bill’s duty to his new master, the Chevalier of New Orleans. After years in exile, Bill had a lord again, a position, a master who was a gentleman.

But was he? Was this all it was to be a gentleman? Or to be a soldier? Merely taking orders? Bill remembered something more, facing Spanish lances on the walls of Mobile and riding with the Lion of Missouri. Honor in defense of innocence.

Bill’s mouth tasted sour.

But he could regain all that. He had agreed with the chevalier to kill the bishop in exchange for his freedom, and the honorable man kept his bargains. Bill could kill the bishop, take his place in the chevalier’s service, and from then on live a higher law, fight with all his honor as a gentleman to protect the innocent, as he once had.

He only had to do this one dirty deed first.

And it wasn’t all that dirty. The bishop was a moneylender and a gangster. Those who live by the sword die by it, though he couldn’t remember whether that was in the Good Book or the sermons of old Ben Franklin.

He wished he had a bottle of whisky.

“Bill,” Jacob Hop asked, pausing from a minute inspection of a complete human skeleton, folded neatly into a mass of cobwebs within a cubbyhole six inches wide and tall, “do your people do this with their own bones?”

“Do you mean in the Chesapeake, Jake?” Bill asked.

Hop shrugged.

“We bury our dead. Those who are wealthy enough have a family mausoleum.”

“Do you have a family mausoleum?” Hop asked.

“Yes.” In his mind’s eye Bill saw the stone building in the cemetery on the hill, there in northern Johnsland. He hadn’t been to his family’s cemetery in…twenty years? Twenty-five? “We Christians, I mean. My pagan neighbors burn their dead. I don’t know how they treat their dead in the Cherokee towns. How do the Dutch do it?”

“I don’t know how the Dutch do it,” Hop said. “One moment.” He paused. “They bury their dead in the earth. Singly. In little plots of land, with stones to mark the location. Stones with writing on them.”

My deaf-mute protégé is a madman. “That’s common enough. It’s we mausoleum people, and the crypt folk, that are unusual. Though we’re not as odd as those who expose their dead to wild animals, or throw them into the sea, or shrink their heads, or eat them.”

“We burned my father.” Jacob Hop’s voice was unemotional. “I shall be burned someday by my son.”

“What, no headstone for the good old Dutchman? What was your father’s name?”

“Peter,” Hop said.

“Dearly beloved,” Bill intoned, “we are gathered here to pay our respects to that good old meneer, Peter Hop. Shall we give your father the ceremony he deserves, Jake?”

“Go ahead,” Hop said. His facial expression looked curious and amused, but not mocking.

Bill stood up and shuffled over to a bone-filled niche. He selected a skull, blowing the dust off it and propping it up in the opening of the cubby, where it glared into the greater crypt.

“Dearly beloved,” Bill began again. “I give you Peter Hop, nation: Dutch, homeland: Hudson River Republic, profession…what was your father’s profession, Jake?”

“King,” Hop said.

Bill laughed. “Profession: king. Jake, will you give the eulogy?”

Hop looked perplexed. “What is a eulogy?”

“Tell us—” Bill gestured at the walls full of bones to indicate who the audience was, “about your old father.”

Jacob Hop considered. “As always, he was a man of peace, law, stasis, and prosperity. His subjects were fat and happy.”

“Hear, hear!”

“I despise him and his works,” the deaf-mute continued, “as my son in turn shall despise me. I seek to overthrow his peace with war, his law with chaos, and his stasis with the colossal wheel of change.”

Bill snorted. “That’s the funniest eulogy I ever heard, Jake.”

The Dutchman considered. “Ought a eulogy to be funny?”

“The best ones always are.” Bill crossed himself sloppily in the direction of the skull, then shoved it back into the cubby. “Requiescat in pace.”

They waited awhile, the dark lantern shuttered. Bill drifted into a light sleep. In his dreams he ran back and forth between two giant specters, the bishop and the chevalier. The two Electors of New Orleans were puppets swinging enormous stick clubs at each other, and in his dream Bill threw himself flat to the ground or cringed behind gnarled oak trees. Dream-Bill feared both combatants, and loved neither, and couldn’t choose between them, sprinting to and fro in a space that continuously narrowed as the giants charged each other. The chevalier swung his club one final time—

Bill couldn’t evade, he was doomed—

tantara-tantara-tantaraaaa!

Horns blew, and a choir of angels burst from the heavens with voices and instruments ringing—

Bill awoke.

The choir was singing, and he fumbled to find and open the shutter of the lantern, stinging his fingers on the hot metal. The light snapped open on Jacob Hop, sitting quietly.

“Has Mass begun?” Bill nearly choked in consternation.

Hop shrugged. “I was waiting for you to wake up.”

“Dammit, Jake, I know you’re the apprentice in this relationship, but you’ve got to show a little more initiative!” Bill took a pistol in his hand and scrambled up the staircase.

If it was the bishop officiating, he could simply wait until afterward and kill the man. Or, if attendance was low enough, he might take the open shot when the man was defenseless and count on his ability to get away in the confusion. This was New Orleans; the bishop wouldn’t be the first priest assassinated in the middle of Mass.

The staircase door (the staircase went both down by spirals into the crypt and up by spirals, Bill presumed to the roof) was well behind the rood screen, hidden from the congregation and giving Bill an easy route to slip behind the choir’s high wooden benches. From there he could watch the bishop’s movements at and around the altar.

Hop stuck close behind Bill in the shadow.

The priest had finished at the altar and was climbing the short stairs to the pulpit, his movements followed closely by the choir as well as by the attendees sitting on the other side of the rood. This must be the homily; Bill focused on the back of the priest’s head. The man had short, tight, curly white hair, and the nape of his neck was dark brown.

It was the bishop.

Bill cocked his pistol slowly, muffling its click inside his long red coat. One dirty task.

Just one.

Bill stepped to his side, gaining a clear line of sight at the bishop’s back. He didn’t like shooting the man from behind. It stank.

The bishop was a usurer and a gangster.

Bill raised Don Sandoval’s large-bored pistol and sighted along it at the bishop’s curly white hair. At this range, he couldn’t miss.

“My children,” the bishop began in a loud voice, “my text today is from the twentieth chapter of the book of Exodus. The Ten Commandments.” The crowd was large; the cathedral was nearly full to capacity.

Bill felt a knot in his stomach.

He owed this act to his lord, the chevalier. He had promised. To be a man of honor again, he had to keep his promise.

“Thou shalt not steal!” the bishop shouted.

Bill touched the trigger with his finger…but he couldn’t pull it.

He lowered the gun again, feeling both shame and relief. He would serve the chevalier if he could. If not, he might have to leave New Orleans.

But he would be again the man who had ridden with the Lion of Missouri.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor!”

Bill eased his hammer back into place. Would he see Cathy again? What about Sally? What would the chevalier do?

He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket and enjoyed a long, deep breath.

“My children, there is a liar and a thief in New Orleans today.” This seemed like a strange thing for the bishop, of all people, to say, and the congregation laughed. Oddly, though, they seemed to be laughing with the bishop, rather than at him.

At the far end of the nave, the great front door of the cathedral swung open, rain gusting through and a flash of lightning crackling on the other side. Two figures staggered in from the storm. The one in front lurched up the aisle between the pews, reeling as if in some grotesque dance toward the altar, hands held out before him; his companion followed a few steps behind.

The bishop plunged ahead. “More than just the one, you might say, and you would be right. But today I wish to speak to you about the one.”

The dancer held a pistol in each hand, and was headed for the bishop.

Some portion of the crowd reached this realization at the same moment as Bill, and there was a general gasp. Bill knew what he had to do—he had decided that the bishop did not deserve to die because the bishop was, at least with respect to Bill, an innocent man; therefore, the bishop deserved his protection.

Bill rushed past the surprised Jacob Hop, sprinting at the rood screen and vaulting over a small door that cut through it. He landed in a crouch in the broad open space at the center of the cathedral.

The members of the congregation sitting nearest Bill gasped, but no one stood to stop him. Good, that would keep things simple.

“The liar that I care about!... the thief I must reveal!…the corpse in the temple of New Orleans!” The bishop was shouting again.

Bill stood to see that a third man had arisen in the congregation, holding a pistol. To his shock, Bill knew him—it was his former aide in the Blues and fellow gentleman of the Chesapeake, Daniel Berkeley. The crowd burst from its seats in a sudden hubbub.

“…is the Chevalier of New Orleans, Gaspard Le Moyne!” the Bishop of New Orleans howled.

“Berkeley! Help me!” Bill gestured at the lurching man and his companion. Berkeley had been an able lieutenant. The fellow was a skilled horseman and fighter, especially with his sword.

Bill saw the man lurching forward more clearly now; he was tall and rangy, with long red hair tied back on his shoulders, and he wore the breeches, moccasins, and long hunter’s shirt of an Appalachee. He was soaked, and he seemed to be holding on to the two pistols in his hands by main force, being dragged forward by them as if by horses he was breaking.

Stranger still was the fact that Bill thought he recognized the guns—he would have sworn, even from twice as far away, they were his own long horse pistols.

The lurching man’s companion was smaller, pale and dark-haired, and dressed in a gray monk’s robe. His shock continuing to mount, Bill realized he knew this man, too. He was Thalanes, Firstborn, itinerant mage, Cetean monk, chaplain to the Philadelphia Blues when Sir William Lee had been their captain, and Bill’s fellow conspirator in the concealment of the Empress Hannah’s children.

Thalanes carried a sword.

Bill’s sword.

Sweet merciful Heaven, now I’m the one who has gone mad.

Bang!

Bill jerked his eyes back to the Appalachee spastic, but no smoke poured from those long familiar guns. He spun to look at Berkeley, and saw that his old comrade in the Blues had his gun pointed at the bishop—

smoke billowing out—

and the bishop was collapsing sideways, toppling over the railing of the pulpit, crashing on top of the altar, bloodying its covering cloths and dragging them with him in his slow tumble to the floor.

The crowd exploded like a flock of pigeons at the shot.

“Berkeley!” Bill shouted again.

Berkeley turned to face Bill, and time slowed. Berkeley tossed aside his spent pistol, wheeled on the ball of his foot and charged at Bill, sweeping his sword free of its scabbard.

Bill yanked his own pistol from his pocket, raised it, and fired—

click!

“Hell’s Bells!” Bill was a fool to have rushed out of the damp crypt without refreshing the firing pans of his guns, or at least checking them. And then Berkeley was upon him, with his first murderous, disemboweling swing aimed at Bill’s stomach.

* * *

Sarah fought a boiling wave of panic. The first Lazar foot that slapped onto the dock had triggered her spell and her witchy eye had filled with a view of the Mississippi Gate. The sudden inpouring of greenish light almost blinded her.

At the same moment, her mind had echoed with a shout in the groaning rumble of Grungle’s voice. Beware, Your Majesty! The Lazars arrive!

His voice sounded only in her head, and yet it seemed to be coming from the small disk of tortoise shell in her pocket. Instinctively, Sarah wrapped her hand around the bit of shell and squeezed it.

“Grungle!” she cried out.

Her eye grew accustomed to the light of the Mississippi ley, and she saw she had a river’s-eye view, looking up at boats, wharves, and the shoreline. She saw the tattered brown backs of the Lazars’ coats as they disembarked. Their boat bobbed as they stepped onto the wharf, and the last one to come off the vessel held a long straight blade in his hands, something like an Arkansas Toothpick.

Black Tom Fairfax, wielding the knife that had taken its owner’s life and damned him to Cromwell’s service. Blood dripped from the weapon, and the sails of the Lazars’ hijacked ship were spattered with the blood of its crew.

Untied, the little yacht drifted out of her vision.

Run away, disengage! Sarah’s mind screamed, but a need to know the outcome kept her pinned. The Lazars padded toward the bank, Hooke and Tom Long-Knife striding quietly in front and the others clustering behind, hunched, gangrel things, rancid and festering.

She wondered what horrible services the other Lazars had done Cromwell, or what outrages they had perpetrated against him, that had led them to this end.

People on the shore pointed, stared, or ran away, and someone shouted for gendarmes. A thick-chested harbormaster with a blue cap bearing a gold fleur-de-lis stood with feet apart and a truncheon in his hand in the middle of the dock.

“Arrêtez-vous! Stop right there!” he barked.

Black Tom swung his long knife once, lightning-fast, and the harbormaster crumpled to the ground in a fountain of his own blood.

Splash!

His head landed separately, in the water.

Picaw and Grungle blocked the end of the dock to keep the Lazars from dry land. “No further, death-slaves!” Grungle croaked, and he produced from beneath his robes a pair of sharply curved blades. He swung them left and right and advanced upon the walking corpses, a thresher of men.

His forward motion halted in mid-flourish. His body slumped, but his eyes stayed fixed forward, and Sarah felt cold fear; the Heron King’s tortoise-headed servant had been snared by the Sorcerer Hooke. Whatever trap Hooke had been trying to lure Sarah into when their minds had touched on the Mississippi, had instead seized the beastman.

“Don’t look at his eyes!” she shouted.

Picaw cried something in a tongue Sarah didn’t recognize, and an array of knives, like a crescent of green-streaked steel, whipped from her hands. The weapons flashed and bit into the Lazars—

and they kept coming forward, knife hilts protruding from their cold chests.

Grungle seemed to be shriveling. His black eyes no longer glittered, his mouth hung open, and Sarah saw a green glowing vapor rising from him. The beastman’s aura faded and Robert Hooke sucked the bright mist into his own body.

“No!” Sarah shouted.

Black Tom Fairfax stepped past Grungle and lunged at his companion. Picaw, too, produced a scimitar from under her robe and gamely parried several quick stabs at her torso. When she counterattacked, though, Black Tom ignored it, and even as her blade bit into his ribs, cutting a deep slice into the tattered brown coat—but otherwise having no visible effect—Tom Long-Knife plunged his long dagger into her neck.

Picaw dropped her blade and as her blood jetted down the front of her robe, Black Tom jerked out his weapon. Seizing the beastwife by the tip of her beak, he dragged her to her knees and raised his blade over his head like a cleaver.

He’s going to chop off her beak! Sarah felt sick, and she jerked her vision away from Picaw and back to Grungle.

Thwack!

Grungle was gone, his aura snuffed. His body collapsed forward onto the planks beside the dead harbormaster. Further up the slope, gendarmes and the customs toughs backed off, making way for the wrath of the Sorcerer Robert Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax.

She wanted to scream.

I believe we are being spied upon. The Sorcerer began to turn back in the direction of the river, in Sarah’s direction, and she saw his pallid forehead over his shoulder, then his eyebrow, then—

Sarah yanked herself out of the vision.

“Sarah!” Cathy was shaking her. “Sarah, are you all right?”

They were not half a mile away; she had no time.

And now Obadiah Dogsbody wanted a wee chat.

Sarah pried herself from Cathy’s grip and faced the Englishman. He held a pistol in his hand, cocked and pointed at her.

“Obadiah,” she gasped, “terrible evil men’re not ten minutes from this here room, men as’ll jest as soon kill you as me. We gotta git outta here!” She hoped the truthful plea might soften the Englishman up.

“Oh, aye?”

Liberate nos!” She willed all the energy she could from Thalanes’s moon brooch through her words at the smiling Obadiah, commanding him to set her and Cathy free.

Obadiah stopped, cocked an ear, and seemed to think a moment. “What was that, poppet? I ain’t ever ’ad mickle of an ’ead for Latin.”

He slowly, melodramatically turned his free hand around, and then suddenly uncurled his fingers to show her his palm. Obadiah Dogsbody held a tarnished silver coin.

“Hell,” Sarah said.

“It be a bit ’arder when a chap ben’t taken by surprise, ben’t it?” His face tightened into an expression that hung between sweetness and a snarl.

“What do you want, Obadiah? If we don’t leave now, we’re dead, all three of us.”

“I want to come wiff you, poppet,” he said. “An’ I want you to forgive me.”

“What?” she and Cathy asked together.

“I fink I might love you,” he explained. “I ben’t right sure ’ow to explain myself, it’s been a confusing few weeks. But I definitely want to come wiff you.”

Sarah had no time to argue. “I might jest be able to agree, iffen you can git us outta here!”

Obadiah eased the hammer of his pistol back down, turned it around and offered its grip to her. “You take it, pet. Token of good faiff.”

Cathy Filmer leaped to her feet. “Let me get my things.” She knelt to pull up a loose floorboard, hoisting out from beneath it a stitched leather shoulderbag.

Should Sarah take the Englishman’s gun and then shoot him?

Or just leave him?

But she might need him to get past the soldiers out in the hall.

And besides, astonishingly, he seemed sincere.

She waved the offer of the pistol away, and Obadiah tucked it back into his belt beside its mate. “Can you git us outta here?” she asked him.

Obadiah smiled. “Of course I can, poppet.”

* * *

Berkeley’s blow was rushed, trying to take advantage of the fact that Bill had no sword. It was unlike the Daniel Berkeley Bill had known, who was a cool and efficient swordsman.

Bill deflected the attack with the metal barrel of the hidalgo’s pistol and then stepped inside Berkeley’s lunge to headbutt Berkeley in the nose.

Except that Berkeley slithered under Bill’s blow and the two men collided, shoulder to chest, neither very well balanced. Bill hopped back and drew the other pistol, leveling it at his former comrade-in-arms. People ran for the exits, swarming all around the combatants, but it was a close shot and Bill wouldn’t miss.

“Put down—” Bill started to demand Berkeley’s surrender, but the younger man regained his balance and flicked the tip of his sword, jostling the gun, so that Bill fired—the bang! was loud in the hollow drum of the church, with its people noises receding—and missed, the bullet gouging a bite out of the rood screen.

Berkeley’s backhanded return swing of the blade came for Bill’s face, but Bill was already in motion, retreating. “I would say it’s a pleasure to see you, suh,” he commented, “if you weren’t wholeheartedly engaged in seeking my death. Was it something I said?”

Berkeley made several neat slashes and pokes at Bill, never exposing himself to counterattack and forcing Bill back.

“Are you the bishop’s man, Lee?” Berkeley asked. “Is that how he knew? Blazes, did you tell him?”

Lucifer’s codpiece, what was Berkeley nattering on about?

Thalanes hovered at the outer ring of the fight, but as Bill sidestepped another series of jabs, the red-headed man came barging toward Bill, through a knot of frightened women and past Berkeley, catching the dragoon in the elbow.

Bill saw his chance and hurled a spent pistol at Berkeley, but the red-haired man was moving faster than he had thought—

the pistol clubbed the stranger in his head—

and he collapsed, Bill’s long pistols falling at Berkeley’s feet. Bill lunged for them, but was deterred by a length of sharp steel he suddenly found at his throat.

“These look like your pistols, Captain Lee,” Berkeley drawled. “You were once a famous shot. Are you still any good?”

Bill nodded warily.

Berkeley was breathing hard from the exertion, but Bill was breathing harder.

“Naturally, you’re hoping I will test you,” Berkeley ruminated. “You’re hoping we can resolve our differences with a pistol duel, which you believe will give you an edge, and remove my advantages of youth, strength, speed, stamina, and superior swordsmanship.”

“I was unaware that we had differences, Lieutenant Berkeley,” Bill said, as placatingly as he could through the huffing of his old man’s lungs. “I only hoped for an explanation as to why you’ve killed the bishop, especially in this manner. It is a surprising act for a man who once fought for the credo honor in defense of innocence.”

“It’s Captain Berkeley. I’m Captain of the Blues, now.”

“Someone has to do the job.”

“What are you up to, Lee?” Berkeley knelt, his sword still between them, and scooped up one of Bill’s guns.

To both their surprise the gun jerked forward, pulling Berkeley off balance. He stumbled over the unconscious Appalachee man and fell to his knees.

“Will!” Thalanes yelled.

Bill turned in time to catch the saber, his heavy cavalry saber, that the little monk had tossed to him, hilt-first and still in its scabbard.

Bill whipped the scabbard off and held it in his left hand.

The crowd was dissipating. Would the gendarmes show up? If they did, would they recognize him as a colleague, or would he find himself in chains and bound for the Pontchartrain again? Would the chevalier be upset that someone other than Bill had killed the bishop? Did Bill even want to serve the man?

Bill sighed. Life had once been so simple.

Berkeley regained his feet. “Who told you, Lee?” He leaped to the attack. Bill retreated, turning aside Berkeley’s attacks with a curtain of defensive steel.

Behind Berkeley, Thalanes chanted some hocus-pocus and then rushed over to the fallen man.

Why had Lieutenant Berkeley—Captain Berkeley—killed the Bishop of New Orleans, and why was he now attacking Bill? Could it possibly be coincidence that Thalanes had reappeared at the same moment as Berkeley, and carrying Bill’s weapons?

Captain Berkeley,” he said in his most polite tone, barely parrying a blade that whistled at his throat. Berkeley was right; he was a better swordsman than Bill was, and he was younger and stronger. “I congratulate you on your preferment. I regret I was unable to attend the ceremony.”

“You left the court.” Berkeley pressed his attack. “You became a deserter.”

That stung. “Captain Berkeley, suh, that’s hardly…”

“What were you thinking, Lee?” Berkeley pushed Bill hard. Bill retreated back at a ninety-degree angle around a cluster of pews, forcing Berkeley to come around the long way and gaining precious seconds.

“I had my reasons, suh,” Bill muttered.

“Where did you go, old man?” That jab hurt, and the anger almost distracted Bill from the attack that immediately followed. Berkeley lunged and Bill danced sideways between two pews. Berkeley chopped at him again and he skittered back further, slashing at Berkeley to keep the pursuit from being too eager.

“I bear you…no ill-will, Captain…but I insist that you…account to me for this death.”

“You have no authority to insist upon anything!”

Slash, duck, slash, and Bill stepped back again.

He and Berkeley had once been friends and fellow soldiers, and he had to believe Berkeley was attacking him now, somehow, by mistake. Maybe he’d also killed the bishop for mistaken reasons.

“A request, then,” Bill puffed. “If I lay down my blade, suh…will you do likewise…that we may converse?”

The bishop’s congregation had all emptied out, other than a lone woman who bent over the bishop’s body. She wore a white nun’s habit with a red cross on it over a stylized heart—a Harvite, a Bleeding Heart, a Circulator; one of the Sisters of St. William Harvey, and for a moment hope sparked within him that the bishop might yet survive.

“What have you been doing in this pit of whores?” Berkeley’s eyes boiled. “And does Sally know?”

Bill leaped forward with an attack that caught his opponent by surprise.

“I was minding—”

He slashed at Berkeley’s face, and the man parried, trapped between pews—

“my own—”

Bill whipped Berkeley across the head with his scabbard—

Berkeley crouched, trying to avoid the blow, but still took it in the ear, and yelped—

“damned business!”

Bill planted his boot in the dragoon’s teeth, sending Berkeley tumbling back, almost losing his grip on his weapon and falling out from between the pews onto the broad flagstones of the aisle.

With the kick Bill had lost his own balance, and he fell onto one knee on the seat of a pew. Berkeley spat blood and leaped to his feet, firming up his grip on his sword hilt.

“Hell’s Bells, Dan,” Bill growled. “What is this about?”

The dragoon drew his second pistol, pointed it at Bill, and fired.

Bang!

Berkeley had fired from a distance of scarcely fifteen feet, but the bullet went wide. That had to be Thalanes with his sly wizardry.

“Hellfire!” Berkeley cursed, and Bill flung his scabbard at the other man’s face.

Berkeley bounded away. Bill lurched after him, around the pews and toward the altar. “It’s no good, Dan! Honor—”

He stopped himself—where was his old lieutenant going?

Berkeley hopped the gate in the rood screen, swooped low and pulled the Bleeding Heart away from her work with his free hand. Bill stopped at the screen as Berkeley put his sword’s blade to the nun’s throat.

“In defense of innocence?” Berkeley snarled.

“Stay your hand!” Bill hollered.

“You’re right, Will,” Berkeley called, “it’s no good. I have no choice. I’ve done what I’ve done, and now I’m leaving. If you try to stop me, I’ll kill you…after I’ve killed her.”

The Bleeding Heart’s face was young and frightened, her hands and white habit bloodied from efforts to save the bishop.

“That’s fine, Dan. I’m not your judge. Take your guns and go.” Bill felt tired. Daniel Berkeley began edging his way to the exit. As the other man moved slowly out of the chancel and into the nave, Bill did him the courtesy of gathering up his pistols and presenting them to him.

Thalanes continued to bend over the Appalachee, who seemed to be stirring, and Jacob Hop sat on a pew, observing mutely.

Berkeley nodded, took his pistols and spat blood again onto the floor. “I’m leaving, Will.” He backed away with his hostage, his eyes darting constantly between Bill and Thalanes. Bill kept his position.

Finally, Berkeley released the nun and darted out the front doors.

Bill scratched his scalp. He didn’t like letting Berkeley go after he’d committed a murder, but, after all, it was a crime that Bill had come very close to committing himself, so he wasn’t in a position to judge. He brushed aside the unanswered questions.

Bill also set aside for later a sharp word to his apprentice, who had sat out the entire fight.

For now, he had an old friend to catch up with. Hopefully this one wouldn’t try to skewer him. Bill collected his pistols and headed for the altar.

As Bill approached, Thalanes and the redhead finished straightening the bishop’s robes and folded the dead man’s hands over his chest, then stood. In death, at least, the bishop didn’t look like a gangster; he looked like a nice old man.

Bill was glad he hadn’t killed him. He was sorry the bishop was dead.

“Thalanes, you little addict!” he called to his friend. “Hasn’t your gut thoroughly percolated yet?” He extended a hand in greeting, but Thalanes didn’t take it. There were tears in his eyes.

Bill cleared his throat uncomfortably.

“I’m Calvin Calhoun,” the red-haired man offered, and shook Bill’s hand. His eyes, too, were red with sorrow. “Jest plain Cal, you can call me.”

“William Lee,” Bill said. “Bill.”

“I reckoned so,” Cal said. “We come down from Nashville a-lookin’ for you.”

“Berkeley murdered Bishop Ukwu.” Thalanes spoke like a medium in a trance.

“Yes, he did,” Bill agreed. “I thought Berkeley might be with you, but I gather from your choice of verb that you disapprove of the man’s action.”

Thalanes glared at Bill with a distraught eye. “Why would I kill Chinwe Ukwu? He was my friend, and he was a saint!”

Bill shrugged and looked at his feet awkwardly. A saint? Was it possible he had been mistaken about the bishop? “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. This has…this has been a terribly strange time for me, old friend.”

Thalanes grabbed Bill by his shoulder. “There’s no time for this. We have to get Sarah, and get out of here.”

“Who’s Sarah? Hell’s Bells, Thalanes, what’s going on?”

Thalanes dug his fingers into Bill’s flesh and looked him in the eye. “Sarah is Hannah’s oldest child, the one I hid. Her life’s in danger. Berkeley and the Blues, among others, are pursuing her. She’s an innocent girl in danger, Will, and she needs your help.”

Honor in defense of innocence.

Bill smiled.

* * *

Sarah could hear Obadiah’s men in the hall outside, asking about the screaming. He sent them away with the curt disclosure that his ‘informants’ had known nothing after all, and then, Sarah’s urgency setting their pace at a gallop, the three of them ran downstairs and outside.

“I’ve got an ’orse!” Obadiah grunted, but Sarah ignored him, hitching her skirt up and running. Visions of the black worms in the corners of the Sorcerer Hooke’s eyes flooded her mind. Obadiah and Cathy followed, stumbling and cursing.

Fear cracked a loud whip behind her.

At the Place d’Armes she hesitated. People streamed out of the cathedral’s doors, frightened and yelling for the gendarmes.

King Andy Jackson grinned at her from his cage above the scattering mob.

Sarah steeled herself for the worst.

“He’s dead! They shot the bishop!” a heavy man in an apron yelled as he rushed past, and her blood curdled in her veins. She imagined cheerful, charming, generous Bishop Ukwu, wounded or maybe even dead, and she broke into a run.

Obadiah grabbed her elbow and held her still. “Bide, poppet. We wot not what ’appened, an’ it ben’t safe for you. Let’s ’ide a minute, bide an’ see.”

She knew he was right, though it galled her. “Facies muto,” she muttered, and though she felt it drain her strength to its dregs, she was satisfied to see Obadiah’s and Cathy’s faces change, and then Obadiah chuckled.

“You be sharpish, sure enough,” he said. “No wonder we ain’t ever found you.”

“I ain’t waitin’ long,” she warned him. “Jest a minute, and then I’m a-goin’ in. Devil’s on my tail, Obadiah Dogsbody, and iffen you look behind you, you jest might see he’s on yours, too.”

“Aye, poppet.”

They waited just a minute, as she’d sworn, but that minute lasted forever, and Sarah felt an itch between her shoulderblades the entire time, as if the Sorcerer Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax were standing behind her.

What was happening inside? The wait was rewarded when the cathedral’s front doors opened and spewed out one of the Philadelphia Blues, naked sword in his hand.

“’Erne’s blood and damn me,” the Englishman muttered.

“He’s one of Angleton’s men? The Philadelphia Blues?” Sarah asked.

“’E be Daniel Berkeley,” Obadiah whispered. “’E be the bloody Captain of the Blues. ’E’d gone missink this mornink. What be ’e doink ’ere, then?”

Sarah waited until Berkeley had passed and then she charged for the cathedral’s front doors.

She crashed through a few steps ahead of Obadiah and Cathy, pushing past a bloody white apparition who shoved her way out the doors at the same moment, and whose gory nun’s habit threw fuel onto Sarah’s already blazing bonfire of fear.

She hesitated halfway down the nave of the cathedral. The bishop lay on the floor, straight and stiff, smeared in blood, at the foot of the altar like some completed sacrifice.

Thalanes and Cal stood above him, talking with a third person she didn’t recognize, a large, big-chested man in a red coat, with long black hair flowing out from under a battered black hat, armed with a sword and pistols. Off to one side lounged a small blond man; he, too, was armed, with a long blade belted over his shoulder.

She didn’t mean to, but found she was weeping as she ran up, crossed the rood screen at a small gate, and threw herself on the body of the bishop.

“He’s dead, Sarah,” she heard Cal say, and he tried to pull her away.

Bishop Ukwu was bloodied, but could they be sure he was dead? Sarah raised her eye patch and turned her Second Sight on the bishop, hoping to see a glimmer of white light in him.

He was cold and dark.

“Berkeley killed him,” Thalanes said, kneeling to help her up. “It was murder, and I don’t know the sense of it, but it’s done. We need to get you out of here. This is Sir William Lee.”

Thalanes was presenting the big-chested man, but Sarah looked beyond him in astonishment at the other stranger. Through her normal eye, he was a plain, tousle-haired, blond man, disheveled and dirty in knickerbockers and buckled shoes, with a sword hanging incongruously on his back.

With her Second Sight, on the other hand, she saw something completely different. A white figure, a normal man, a son of Eve, sat crouched in the blond man’s place, but the white figure’s hands and mouth were bound with glimmering green, and his eyes were wide with wonder and fear. Above him, around him, towering over him, was a completely different being. It was green, it shone and throbbed like the Mississippi, and though it was humanoid, its head was the head of a gigantic crested bird.

“Satan on a stick,” she heard Lee mutter, and she couldn’t have agreed more. “Cathy?”

“Sir William,” Cathy Filmer said, “I’m so pleased to see you well. Your stick aside, I hope I have not just heard you refer to me as Satan.”

Sarah forced herself to act as if she hadn’t seen the mysterious green figure. She slipped her eye patch back on, returning to the conversation before the altar.

Sir William smiled. “Never, ma’am.” He bowed to Cathy Filmer. “I beg you to pardon an old soldier his rough expressions of surprise.”

“Why’s he here?” Cal jabbed a figure at Obadiah, who shambled up to the rood screen looking bashful, his travel-stained black tricorner hat held by the fingertips of both his hands.

“I’ll explain,” she said, “but not right now. We have to get out of here this very minute—the beastfolk have been killed, and the Lazars are in New Orleans.” As she spoke, she heard the distant click of the cathedral’s front doors swinging shut.

“Too late,” Thalanes said darkly.

Sarah spun and looked—at the far end of the nave stood two men whose names she had heard as history and folk tales all her life, men who had died and been raised by a fell power to pursue her.

The Sorcerer Robert Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax.

Undead slaves of Oliver Cromwell, the Necromancer.

The Lazars.


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Framed