“My conscience may be less metaphysical than yours, suh.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The black coils looped around Thalanes’s soul vanished, dissolving in the rain. He kicked once, with both feet, and he was still. Just for a moment, Sarah thought she saw a smile on the handsome blue face of the aural Thalanes.
He smiled, and he exploded.
She knew the explosion would come and at the last moment she had the presence of mind to open herself up. A blue ring of mana-fire rolled out from his body and most of it flowed directly into Sarah. The experience was like drawing energy from the ley lines, only mixed in with the tingling power was something that felt like love.
She was an empty cistern, and the heavens suddenly opened and dropped a flood upon the land. The flood filled her, warmed her, made her skin dance. She channeled energy into Thalanes’s moon-brooch as well, filling it. Still the flood came on, and she sucked it in. She felt like a waterskin pumped too full. Her hair stood on end, her skin prickled, her Second Sight focused into crisp clarity.
She dropped the pistol.
Angleton hesitated, perhaps feeling Thalanes’s death, and Sir William beat him back a pace or two.
Robert Hooke stood behind Angleton; he raised his hands and closed his eyes. The blue light of Thalanes’s aura blackened as it touched Hooke, swirling tightly around the Sorcerer.
“Hooke,” Sarah gasped, “stop him.” She was trying to call to Sir William, but her voice was drowned out by the constant hammering of the rain. William didn’t hear her.
But Cathy did.
The tall woman strode over behind Sir William, unheeding of the blades that flashed near her and the ringing of steel on steel across the roof. Just as the Sorcerer Hooke raised his hands to shape his spell, Cathy pulled the trigger of the second Lafitte pistol—
bang!—
and Hooke went stumbling back down the walkway, black blood spraying from his chest. Sarah saw the murk that had been his building spell wink out like a snuffed candle.
Cathy stooped beside Sarah to pick up the second Lafitte pistol. “Waste not, want not.”
The wave of energy exploding from Thalanes’s death was gone, and Sarah felt the crackle of surplus power within her. Her limbs twitched like autumn leaves in the wind. She needed something to do with it, before it hurt her. She looked at Angleton; could she get rid of her persistent pursuer? She saw Hooke, climbing to his feet, and several of the Blues behind.
She should get herself and her friends off the roof.
Sarah scraped up a handful of pigeon feathers in a wet plaster of gray excrement from the stones beside Thalanes and she spun in a circle, hurling them at her friends.
“In aves mutamur!” She willed together all the excess power playing on her skin and through her hair and lurking in the rain about her, channeling it through the pigeon mess and her words and into her companions.
With a cooing and a fluttering of wings, Sarah sprang up from the rooftop.
She was disoriented by the change, and the struggle in her brain translated into the frantic flapping of wings. The flapping pulled her away from the sea of slick gray stone, and the raging men.
Other pigeons rose with her. What would happen if the pigeons separated? What would happen to poor Calvin if the spell ended and he was two hundred feet off the ground above the Place d’Armes?
But the other pigeons followed Sarah.
Sarah’s wings weren’t the same as arms, but if she concentrated and focused on controlling her movements, she could fly. Her flock struggled as she did, and they collided more than once in mid-air, but none of them fell.
They left behind the still, cold, smiling body of the Cetean monk.
They also left the blond Dutchman, but Sarah watched with a round, sharp eye as she beat away into the rain, and she saw the little man shimmer and disappear. A great crested heron rose in his place, lifting itself from the roof of the cathedral and swooping south over the Place d’Armes, heading for the Mississippi River.
Behind it, the heron left a sword clattering on the stones of the rooftop.
Shots were fired by the shrinking men on the cathedral, but they hit nothing.
And then the soldiers and the Lazars were gone, whipped away as Sarah and the other pigeons slipped into the gray cloak of the storm.
* * *
Ezekiel stumbled back down the steps. He was soaked and bleeding, but the injuries were minor. His combat magic had given him strength, speed, and resistance to bullet and blade, but the exertion left him so tired that now, with the fight over, he could barely walk.
He had lost the girl.
Who had transformed her and her companions into birds? Thalanes might have done it, the Cetean heretic had always been a better wizard than Ezekiel, but Thalanes was dead. He was fairly sure that Thalanes died before the flock of pigeons appeared and took flight. The girl herself had shot the monk, for reasons Ezekiel did not understand.
The girl must have done it. She must be a more powerful thaumaturge than he had realized.
Had Thalanes taught her?
And what about the blond man in knickerbockers who had gone off alone afterward, in bird shape—who was he, and what power did he serve?
Obadiah Dogsbody was now fighting for the little witch. Obadiah, with whose lack of faith and many mistakes he had been so patient, and on whom he had showered so much beneficence, had shown himself to be an ingrate.
Well, for every Judas there was a potter’s field.
Ezekiel stopped in the chancel. He leaned to rest against the shattered remains of the rood screen—he expected to be forgiven for that damage, as he’d only done it in pursuit of the Witchy Eye. The light was diffuse and tinted, coming through large and elaborate panels of stained glass.
Ezekiel preferred the more austere Roundhead churches of his native Boston. Not that his people eschewed images, but they were more restrained, and a cathedral this size was likely to contain only some central image of the Savior, and maybe a painting or a statue of a single patron saint, like St. John Wycliffe of the Book or St. Cotton Mather, the great Matthean of the northeast.
But he had to admit that the images carved, painted, or glazed into church architecture served a useful teaching function.
Ezekiel looked up, and his breath was taken away.
It was as if he was instantly transported into the first chapters of Genesis and the glories of God’s creation. From where Ezekiel stood he could see and interpret the whole story in the stained glass.
Here in the windows, for those who couldn’t read or wouldn’t listen to a homily, was painted a sermon about God’s creation of the world, the wreckage that sinful Adam had made of it, and the central and eternal salvage work of the great Second Adam, the Messiah. Imagery from Job, Isaiah, and the Psalms had been worked in, so that on the First Day, Jehovah on his great white-winged charger smote the dragon Rahab in the watery abyss. Allegorical, of course, but it was in the Bible. And when God divided the waters from the land, Ezekiel saw the great four-legged Behemoth grazing beneath snow-capped mountains while its aquatic counterpart, nine-headed Leviathan, dove beneath frothy waves.
Thinking of Adam, he turned in the chancel to regard the stained glass depiction of the Fall. Adam and Eve were both portrayed as young people, which was right and proper—an older Adam might remind viewers of the wife of his youth, whom God disfavored. Eve had eaten her bite of the apple and looked mournful; Adam was reaching out, his white teeth showing in a smile, unaware of the sorrow that was about to be his. It was a good picture because it was a true picture.
Without warning, Ezekiel’s vision spun out of control and he fell to his knees.
Was this fatigue?
But Ezekiel felt as if he were being called.
“Yaas?” He swallowed as much cold air as he could, but the world refused to stop turning. With an effort, he reached out to the naked altar, meaning to climb it like a ladder, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate.
Then, suddenly, someone was there in the chancel with him.
Ezekiel found he could not look above the knees of the personage. Feet paced up to Ezekiel and stopped, feet clad in tall black riding boots. Ezekiel saw the boots and the mail above them, but couldn’t lift his eyes any higher.
“Ezekiel Angleton,” said the personage. The voice was sharp and unmusical and impossible not to hear, and it rang with authority. “Ezekiel Angleton, behold thou the Fall of Man.”
Ezekiel looked to the windows, and again saw Adam reaching for the apple that had already slain Eve. Eve and Adam looked different, though, subtly. He thought he saw in the tall, long-haired Adam a reflection of himself.
And Eve was absolutely the perfect image of his lost Lucy Winthrop. Ezekiel choked back a sob.
Then he blinked, for the image was changing. Adam bit into the apple before Ezekiel’s eyes, and then dropped it, and Ezekiel saw the head of a worm protrude from the fallen fruit. Now Adam had a saddened mien, and Ezekiel, astonished, wondered what would happen next.
And who was this giving him this vision? Was it the same source that had given him the dreams that had led him to New Orleans?
The worm succumbed first, shriveling and fallen from the apple to be lost on the garden floor. As the worm died, the apple was already rotting, and Ezekiel thought he could actually smell the pungent cidery tang of the withering fruit. That odor thickened and darkened, until Ezekiel was assailed all about by the cloying stench of decay. The green leaves of the trees in the Garden turned red, yellow, and brown, and the whole scene was suddenly autumnal and tinged blue with a chilly wind, harbinger of a bad winter.
“Stop this,” Ezekiel muttered.
There was no answer.
“Please,” he begged. “I know what happens.”
Eve-Lucy and Adam-Ezekiel went together. His nose and ears grew longer in a bearded face, his chest sank and became hollow, his belly bulged out and fell, the fine muscles of his arms and legs died to nothing. Her breasts withered and drooped, the flesh around her eyes collapsed and became dark; Ezekiel whimpered. Both lost their teeth and their hair and the gleam in their eyes.
“Stop this, I implore you,” Ezekiel said, louder this time. His own years weighed on him and he felt death approaching inexorably on the road, a dark presence growing closer by the moment. Lucy’s loss rose above and behind him black and furious, an implacable angel of pain. He tried to turn his head to look at his merciless instructor, to learn who would want to pierce his soul with such withering knowledge and memories, but he could not move.
Green returned to the leaves in the Garden, and then autumn again, and then spring, and Adam-Ezekiel and Eve-Lucy still aged. Eve-Lucy succumbed first, but only by a hair’s breadth, and both the first parents of mankind died in the same horrible way under Ezekiel’s flinching gaze; they shrank and shriveled and the flesh fell from their bones until they collapsed, dead puddles of bone and corruption in a grove that flashed repeatedly from green to orange and back again.
“Stop!” Ezekiel saw in his mind’s eye his own form, already beginning to lengthen in tooth and lose muscle, rotting into the ground like Adam’s. He was horrified, though he knew he had no right to be.
Death was merely death; it was the common lot of mankind, and it was acceptable to grieve for the Fall, but nothing could be done about it, so one grieved while one was young and then learned to accept the world as it was.
Still, there it was, in his heart: fear.
As if responding to his secret thoughts, the sharp voice spoke to him. “Man dies by Adam’s fall,” it said, “but it was not ever thus, and it need not be.”
Ezekiel felt cold.
He strained again to look at his interlocutor and could not; after wrestling against the impossible for long seconds, he let his gaze fall back to the floor.
“Are you an angel?” he asked, drained and weak.
“God sends angels,” the voice answered, “but I am my own messenger, and the message is this: death is not necessary. It may be avoided, it may be ended, it is a curse that may be lifted. I have escaped death, Ezekiel Angleton, as may thou and, by the grace of God and through thine efforts, all the children of Eve.”
The ambition and arrogance in the voice—Ezekiel could not tell them apart—thrilled him. Death is unnecessary…could it possibly be true? He wanted to weep and he wanted to sing.
Wasn’t it blasphemy?
“Christ…” he struggled to regain control of himself. “Christ is the resurrection and the life.”
“Yes,” the speaker agreed. “God has wrought a salvation that is glorious. I am but the finisher, seeking to work a more glorious salvation still.”
More glorious? The finisher of God’s work? Who was this person, who spoke in riddles that were both blasphemous and divine?
“I do not require thee to love thy fellow servant Robert Hooke,” the voice shrilled, “but accept him, and thou shalt be rewarded.”
Hooke? Ezekiel felt his eye drawn up and he craned his neck to see again the stained glass windows from his dog-like posture. The windows now bore a different image, a vision of the corpse-like albino wizard Ezekiel had encountered at the cathedral doors, and who had been on Ezekiel’s heels in pursuing Witchy Eye up to the roof.
“Fellow servant?” Ezekiel croaked. “Is that why you give me these terrifying visions, sir? Would you have me for a servant? But I already serve the Order of St. Martin Luther, and His Imperial Majesty Thomas Penn.”
The voice laughed, a harsh sound like bells being slammed against a stone wall. “Rest assured, Ezekiel Angleton, that a man may serve many masters. And thou, good fellow, hast long been in my service.”
Ezekiel struggled. “In your service?” He thought again of the horrific apparition that had greeted him at the cathedral door. The Sorcerer Robert Hooke. “How can you employ such fiends, when you say you serve Heaven’s ends?”
There was silence in response, and Ezekiel was left to answer his own question: death. Was not any means worth employing that would overthrow the grim specter of death hanging over every child of Adam from the moment of his or her birth? Was that not the great evil, to be defeated at all costs?
He nodded in submission.
“I do not claim to serve Heaven’s ends,” said the voice of Ezekiel’s teacher. “I serve the ends that Heaven should have served.”
“I…” Ezekiel felt slow of thought and of tongue, drained in his soul and shattered in his body. “I would serve those ends, too.”
The discordant voice spoke again. “Then look now, and behold thy master!”
Ezekiel tried to rise from his groveling posture but could not. He turned his head to see the person to whom he had been speaking, the source of his visions. He saw a rather ordinary-looking man with a high forehead, long hair, and a tuft of beard below his lower lip. He wore black plate armor from neck to toe, the monotony broken only by his riding boots and a white neckcloth.
As Ezekiel recognized the man, though, it seemed to him that he saw, glowing dimly through skin that seemed almost translucent, a death’s head in the speaker’s face.
The source of his vision—and, Ezekiel now understood, the source of all his visions—was Oliver Cromwell. The Regicide. The Lord Protector of the Eternal Commonwealth.
The Necromancer.
Ezekiel groveled. “But I don’t understand. How can you end death? And what do you want with the Witchy Eye?”
* * *
The Sorcerer Hooke dumped Thalanes’s corpse beside the bishop’s on the floor of the chancel, where Ezekiel sat in dumb contemplation. Berkeley and his men had secured all the cathedral’s doors, probably with the collusion of the chevalier’s Creole and his gendarmes.
Who had killed the bishop?
In the confusion, he must have been shot on accident, though Ezekiel didn’t remember seeing it happen. The little monk’s corpse and robe were soaked, and he fell into a sloshing puddle that reminded Ezekiel of his vision of the death of Adam and Eve. He winced.
“I know you now,” Ezekiel said to the Lazar. “You’re Robert Hooke, the Sorcerer.”
I am the disciple who did not wish to see death until his master came again. Hooke’s voice rattled in Ezekiel’s mind. The bullet hole in his chest was no longer bleeding, but the long black stain down the front of his moldering shirt gave him a gory, nauseating appearance. Thou hast spoken with our master, then?
“You serve Oliver Cromwell,” Ezekiel continued.
Yes, Hooke answered, thou and I both. Now, wilt thou join me in making inquiries of this Serpentborn monk?
Ezekiel looked at the body of Thalanes, wet and cold and pathetic. He had never liked the heretic, but it still seemed impious to manhandle his body about like a sack of grain.
As it seemed impious to be working with Lazars.
But if Cromwell really could eradicate death, what then? Was that not a fine end to serve, to restore God’s creation to what it had been before man’s great mistake? Was that, after all, what Cromwell had been after, with his Eternal Commonwealth and his wars against the Firstborn? If Cromwell had his way, then all men would live eternally from birth, as God had always intended.
All would be saved.
And Lucy…wouldn’t he see Lucy again?
But…the Necromancer? He had always been taught to loathe and fear Oliver Cromwell. And Ezekiel despised black magic.
And, despite Ezekiel’s questions, Cromwell had not explained himself or his plans.
Two other Lazars joined them, a silent man whose arms hung at his waist and a man whose white skin had been burnt a crisp black, like badly overdone roasted chicken; he stank of sizzled flesh and rot at the same time, and he lacked one eyeball. Hooke nodded to them, and the two Lazars with working arms hoisted Thalanes’s body up and shoved him against the bloodied altar, in a sitting position with his chin slumped onto his chest.
He did not need to serve the Necromancer.
At least, he didn’t need to make a decision one way or the other, not yet. He could work with Cromwell’s creatures to serve the ends of St. Martin and the Penn family. He could walk away from an alliance with the Necromancer whenever he wanted.
It is time, Hooke said. Come here and join us, or get thee hence.
Ezekiel steeled himself and stepped closer to the altar. He would be like Saul, consulting with the Witch of Endor when he could get no answer from the prophets, and speaking with the shade of the prophet Samuel. That biblical touchstone quelled the disquiet in his bowels, though the thought crept through his mind that the comparison was rather more flattering to Thalanes, in the shoes of the dead Samuel, than it was to him.
We need blood. Hooke turned abruptly to Ezekiel, holding out a knife and a gold chalice.
“I don’t have any blood,” Ezekiel demurred, feeling this was asking too much of him. He had thought to be only a witness.
The weak-armed Lazar looked at him skeptically, eyes squirming.
Dost thou not? Hooke again pressed the tools upon him.
It was only for the moment. He would work with Cromwell and his disconcerting agents for now, until he could recover the Witchy Eye. Recover or kill, if he had to. Then he would wash his hands of them and ride back to Philadelphia.
He took the knife and chalice.
“Where should I…?” He gestured vaguely at his body with the blade.
Thou mayest find it convenient to mark the palm of thy hand, though it makes no odds to me.
Trembling, Ezekiel cut a line into the flesh of his left palm, letting the thin trickle of blood well up and then drip modestly into the chalice. He stared at the red beads that slid down the inside of the gold vessel, smearing it crimson and then pooling in the bottom. Had he gone too far already?
More. Hooke seized Ezekiel by the wrist and the burned Lazar grabbed his hand with surprising mobility and strength, squeezing the flesh of his palm and tearing it, bringing a torrent of bright red blood down into the cup. The red was shocking against the gold, an insult, a blasphemy, a wound.
Ezekiel gasped in pain and anger and tried to pull away; Hooke looked down into the cup with his dead white eyes.
That will do, he finally said, and the Lazars released Ezekiel.
Then the Sorcerer Hooke dipped his fingers into Ezekiel’s blood and daubed it on Thalanes’s face, anointing the corpse’s eyes, ears, and tongue, and smearing a great red line across his pale wet forehead. Ezekiel’s palm ached at the sight of his own blood being used this way.
Robert Hooke handed the chalice to Ezekiel. A small clot of drying blood remained in the bottom of the cup.
It will be safest for thee to destroy this, the Lazar said.
“Destroy it?” Obviously, if the Witchy Eye had Ezekiel’s blood, she could use it to ensorcel him.
It is safest of all to drink it.
Ezekiel imagined himself licking his own blood from the sacramental chalice and felt ill.
Then the Sorcerer was still a moment; he must be incanting a spell in his mind-speech, but one that Ezekiel couldn’t hear. Ezekiel felt even more vitality leach from him, and he nearly swooned.
Thalanes’s eyes opened and his chin snapped up off his chest.
For a moment, Ezekiel thought Hooke had made a mistake, that Thalanes was still alive, but then he saw the all-white eyes in the monk’s head and he knew he was in the presence of necromancy. He shuddered and took a step back, but not so far away that he couldn’t see and hear the interrogation.
Thalanes, Hooke intoned, crouching beside the corpse. Thou owest me three answers.
“I owe you nothing,” Thalanes replied. It was not in his natural, living voice, but in a basso mockery of it, a deep, rumbling grunt that seemed larger than the chest it came out of. “But I am compelled. Speak.”
Compelled to tell me the truth, mind thou. No tricks, Ophidian.
“Compelled to answer three questions only,” the dead monk countered. “Speak.”
Ezekiel had never seen such magic firsthand, and only read about it in Mather’s Denunciations. This was vile necromancy. Ezekiel clenched his wounded hand into a fist; he would cut ties with the Necromancer as soon as he’d found Witchy Eye.
Robert Hooke sneered. Where has Sarah Penn slept in the City of New Orleans?
Ezekiel thought he understood why Hooke had asked the odd question—this interrogation was a contest between the two dead men. The shade of Thalanes would answer three queries truthfully, but would not volunteer information or make up the weaknesses in defectively-phrased questions.
If the Sorcerer could find something of Witchy Eye’s, including, ideally, some small part of her body or her intimate toilette, he could use that to cast a spell to find her again. How had the Lazar followed the girl thus far? Ezekiel frowned.
Thalanes lay still for long seconds. “In the palace of the Bishop of New Orleans,” he finally groaned. A trickle of blood slipped from the bullet hole in his temple and onto his shoulder, as if from the mental effort.
Hooke grinned humorlessly at Ezekiel. Knowledge always begins with the asking of the correct question.
“Are you looking for material for a finding spell?” Ezekiel asked.
Hooke spat clotted black phlegm onto the floor. He turned his attention again to the interrogation. For what purpose didst thou bring Sarah Penn to New Orleans?
Thalanes was slow to answer again. “To find Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.”
“They found him,” Ezekiel confirmed. “He’s the big man in a red coat who was here in the cathedral today.”
What did Thalanes and Witchy Eye want with Lee? Lee was the former Captain of the Imperial House Light Dragoons, the one who had served under Kyres Elytharias. Could he have something of her father’s for the girl?
Or was the girl gathering her father’s retainers about her to aid her in a rush at the throne? Lee had almost said as much, standing beside the altar with guns in his hands and defying the emperor.
Hooke nodded and the weak-armed Lazar hissed, his breath a cloud of decay.
Hooke considered his third and last question at length. The last time thou hadst knowledge of her intentions, what did Sarah Penn plan to do when she left New Orleans?
Ezekiel nodded. Maybe they could get out ahead of the Witchy Eye, instead of always being a step behind. He leaned in closer to hear the answer; this information would justify the black magic taint.
“She intended to find her brother,” Thalanes said in his rumbling death rattle voice.
Ezekiel’s ears pricked up. “Her brother? Where’s the brother?”
The dead monk slumped, still and cold.
“Is that it? He must know more, make him tell us more!” Ezekiel demanded, almost yelling.
Robert Hooke shook his head. Thou art no necromancer, art thou, priest? We have finished here. Let us go see what we can find at the Bishop’s Palace.
Ezekiel looked down at the sacramental chalice in his hands, with the clotting lump of his blood in the bottom, and felt sick and foul.
* * *
It was cold inside the crypt. The heavy marble roof shielded them from the direct blows of the storm, but wind-flung spray still slicked and chilled their hands and faces.
At least, Bill thought with some wonder, they were mostly dry. After winging down to a landing among the glaring angels, sad-eyed gargoyles, off-centered stone memorials, and tall weeds that comprised the cemetery, they had shaken the water off. Pigeons must be water-resistant, being feathered and oily like ducks. And when he had suddenly found himself a man and clothed again, he had been a dry man in dry clothing.
Sarah and Cathy had tended to various injuries, Sarah with incantations and Cathy with bandages, and then they had begun to take counsel. Sarah told her story, and then Obadiah.
The storm-battered above-ground crypt had to be the strangest place Bill had ever held a council of war. The chiseled names of the dead to whom the crypt belonged stared at him from all sides, reminding him of his conversations earlier that morning with Jacob Hop.
Simon Sword. There is no such person as Jacob Hop, or if there is, he is a stranger to me.
Bill was chilled and wounded. He had betrayed his employer the chevalier, he’d been insulted by a former subordinate, and he’d watched two innocent men in a row killed, both of them priests, but Bill felt better than he had in years. He kept looking from Sarah to Cathy and back again, and trying to do more than just grin.
Bill did feel shock about Thalanes; after years of not seeing each other, he and his old friend, the little monk, had exchanged scarcely a handful of words, and now Thalanes was dead. The echo of the gunshot that killed the Cetean would be with him a long time.
It was Bill’s turn. He told his companions what he had to say, starting with the night the Lion of Missouri was murdered, fifteen years ago. He told about the storm at the junction of the great rivers, rain not unlike the rain from which they now huddled in shelter, about Kyres’s insistence on standing his turn at watch with Bayard Prideux, about Bayard’s foul murder and Bill’s subsequent pursuit into the rain, ending in Bayard’s escape.
He told of Kyres’s death under the oak tree, of the three bloodied acorns. He told of burying his master’s body in secret, as he had instructed them to do, along with Thalanes, then the Chaplain of the Blues, and of looking for, but not finding, the regalia of Cahokia—the sword, the crown, and the orb. He told of returning to Philadelphia to deliver the acorns, of the empress’s grief and terrible whispered suspicions, suspicions that were fully validated when Thomas had had his sister shut away, claiming she’d been driven mad.
“Thomas must have put Bayard up to the murder,” Bill concluded. “Bayard said there was another man involved, too. ‘Ze ozer,’ he kept saying, frog that he was.”
“Who is this other man?” Sarah asked.
“He deserves death, whoever he is, Your Majesty,” Bill said.
“Revenge?” Calvin asked, looking dubious. “I ain’t sure how I feel about that. Turn the other cheek, Jesus said. Seven time seventy.”
“My conscience may be less metaphysical than yours, suh,” Bill shot back. “Revenge is what the other fellow is after; what I want is justice. Besides, Cal, I saw how you turned the other cheek to the Lazars back there. I’m not fooled.”
Cal’s face colored. “That wasn’t revenge, though. That was jest self-defense.”
“He does deserve death, and we’ll return to it.” Sarah said.
Bill bowed, deferring.
He told them of the three babies born and smuggled out of Hannah’s prison chambers in a warming pan. He told what he remembered of Sarah, which was mostly that she was a perfectly beautiful baby with a swollen red eye, but he had more to say about Nathaniel, the infant he had nurtured, concealed, carried, and delivered to—
“Don’t tell me!” Sarah interrupted him.
“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty,” Bill said, “but I was under the impression that this was the information you came to New Orleans to seek.”
Sarah looked lost in a maze of thought, huddling into her purple shawl in the corner of the crypt. “It is. Only now I ain’t so certain my mind’s a safe place for the information, with that damned Sorcerer Hooke on the loose. Best you keep it to yourself for now.”
He resumed his story with circumlocutions to conceal the people and places. He told them he’d hidden the boy Nathaniel with a great man and friend of the empress, he told them of the great man’s son, who threatened to turn Bill and the child over to the emperor, of Bill’s duel with the young man that had led to his death, of the great man’s subsequent madness and Bill’s exile and flight.
He left out his tearful goodbyes with Sally, her grief and anger and suggestions that he was choosing his dead lord over his living children. He’d promised to write, and he had kept that promise for years, much as he disliked putting pen to paper. She had sworn never to write back, and she had kept her oath, too.
Bill swallowed back that irrelevant detail and continued.
He told them of his life in New Orleans, hiding nothing and fearing condemnation for it, but no one spoke against him. He told them of his night at Bishopsbridge and the improbable message of the two beastfolk. He told them of his imprisonment on the Incroyable, of meeting Bayard, of their conversations, and of beating the Frenchman to death.
“Thank you,” Sarah said simply, when she heard of the traitor’s end.
Bill bowed his head and said nothing. He burned to tell Sarah that he’d find the mysterious other man as well, and beat him to death, and that he would ride into the throat of Hell itself, if he had to, to bring justice to Thomas Penn.
“Have you seen this confession letter Bayard spoke of?” she asked. “In which he identified his co-conspirator, and hinted to the chevalier where he’d hidden the regalia?”
Bill shook his head. “The chevalier must have it, I presume.”
She nodded. “Go on.”
He explained the letter Jacob Hop—Simon Sword—had helped him write, his strange release and dark errand, and finally his decision not to kill the Bishop of New Orleans.
“Your letter must have provoked the chevalier,” Sarah thought out loud.
“Might Bayard a wrote to the bishop?” Cal asked. “I didn’t git nothin’ from it at the time, but I recollect a conversation between Thalanes and the bishop about bees, and in hindsight it sounds an awful lot like Bayard might a wrote the bishop, and then the bishop might a confronted the chevalier…”
“And then the chevalier commissioned me to kill the bishop,” Bill said. “Bayard may have, or maybe the little Dutchman…pardon me, ma’am, I mean Simon Sword, perhaps Simon Sword wrote a second letter without telling me.”
“Why would the chevalier only give you a saber, though?” Cathy asked.
Bill scratched his head. “I’m beginning to think it likely that the chevalier intended to have me killed after I had accomplished his errand, ma’am,” he said. “No blood would then be on anyone’s hands but mine, and I’m the sort of person the citizens of New Orleans are perfectly content to see executed by their chevalier. A sword would have been enough to kill the bishop, being a defenseless old man, but would have left me hard pressed to defend myself against the chevalier’s gendarmes. What puzzles me is why Daniel Berkeley should have killed the bishop instead.”
Bill looked to the Englishman for an explanation, but the Martinite’s servant only shrugged. “’E be stayink at the Palais,” Obadiah offered. “Mayhap the chevalier put ’im up to it. Mayhap it were the price of the chevalier’s cooperation in lookink for Sarah.”
“Speakin’ of the chevalier’s place,” Sarah said, “how do you reckon we can find that letter Bayard wrote?”
Bill nodded. “I don’t know, Your Majesty, and I fear we may have to ask the chevalier himself. But I’m pleased to serve you in the distribution of long-overdue justice.” He nodded deferentially to Calvin. “Or revenge, if you prefer.”
“Justice will come,” Sarah said, “but it’s not our errand today. We’re weak, Sir William, out of power and on the run. Our errand is to recover my regalia, so I can regain my throne. When we have wealth, power, and safety, we’ll be able to worry a little more about justice.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Bill acknowledged.
“How do we find out where Bayard hid them?” she asked.
Bill considered. “Bayard’s gone, so he can’t tell us anything helpful, and the only people he regularly consorted with to my knowledge are a gang of deaf-mutes who are all now dead at the bottom of the Pontchartrain, a Dutchman who turns out to be the Heron King, and a tongueless Choctaw whore. She may be alive, of course, but finding a particular whore in New Orleans is like finding a particular flea on a dog.”
“Kinta Jane Embry,” Cathy said.
“I beg your pardon?” Bill was caught off guard. “Do you know her?”
“New Orleans is a large city,” she answered him with a look that might have been amused, “but not that large. If there were a tongueless Choctaw duelist in New Orleans, Sir William, do you imagine you wouldn’t know his name?”
Bill blushed. Had he insulted Cathy? “Bayard claimed his…companion…was related to someone important in the chevalier’s house,” Bill said. “I suppose that makes some sense—the chevalier didn’t want anyone seeing his prisoner who couldn’t be trusted.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Cathy said coolly, “but I know where we can find Kinta Jane. Provided Your Majesty is willing to go to the rougher parts of New Orleans.”
“Rougher than we already been?” Cal muttered. “Jerusalem.”