“Do you not believe in judgment, Parson?”
CHAPTER NINE
Cal’s height saved him.
A shorter man would have taken the rock in the temple. Calvin Calhoun, though he had been leaning forward in anticipation of hearing some sweet confession from Sarah, jerked backward as she swung at him, and the rock only struck him on the shoulder.
Still, it hurt.
“Jumpin’ Jerusalem!” He staggered sideways. “What in tarnation has got into you?”
She swung again, backhand with the rock, and thumped him in the breast. A little higher, and his collarbone would have been broken.
“Iffen you’re mad, Sarah, go ahead and slap me!” He stumbled back. “Jest put down the rock afore one of us gits hurt!”
She jumped at him, clawing for his eyes with her left hand. He twisted away, feeling her nails rake down his cheek and draw blood.
He smelled her earthy odor again. Dirty person was a smell Calvin knew well from his years on Calhoun Mountain, where bathing was permitted but not enthusiastically encouraged, and Sarah’s reek didn’t quite fit that description. She smelled like wet earth, or clay. Somewhere in his head Cal heard a dim warning bell.
He tried to push her away gently, but she was too strong, and he ended up just pressing the bread and the fried chicken against her chest. She swung the rock again, catching him this time in the ribs. Cal felt something snap in his side.
“Dang it, Sarah!” he barked, and then he realized where he had smelled that riverbank smell before.
This wasn’t Sarah.
It was one of those clay-not-a-man things he’d struggled with on the slopes of Calhoun Mountain. But how? He narrowly avoided another swipe at his face. How did this monster get a face and a voice at all, and especially how did it come to look and sound exactly like Sarah?
Well, in any case, he knew how to deal with them.
Lord hates a man as can’t throw an honest punch when it’s called for. He winced with both the emotional and the physical pain of it, but hauled off and slammed not-Sarah as hard as he could with his knuckles, right in the face. Its nose flattened and completely disappeared into its Sarah-face, without the faintest hint of blood. It rocked back from the force of Cal’s blow, and he grabbed for his purse, yanking it from underneath his belt and jerking at the drawstrings to open it and get at the silver inside.
Not-Sarah slapped his hands, stinging his fingers with the violence of the blow. He lost his grip on the purse, bobbled it, and then not-Sarah smacked his hands up and the bag went sailing away—in a high arc that dropped it, splash!, into the middle of the river.
Jerusalem! He thought of the silver bullets he’d cast…but his pouch of bullets was with his powderhorns and the Elector’s rifle, back at Crowder’s. He didn’t relish the thought of sprinting through the woods with this beast slashing at his back. There had to be another way.
Cal dropped a shoulder and punched it into not-Sarah’s chest, grabbing it by the shoulders as if to wrassle, and then heaving with all his might. It punched at him, landing blows on his chest and back that would show as bruises the next day, and then he threw the clay monster into the air and—
whumph!—
hard on the ground onto its back. The sound it made as it hit the river rocks was wet and squishy. It sounded boneless. It sounded like a sack of wet corn mush slapping onto a hardwood floor. He turned to face not-Sarah and backed away, grunting from the pain in his ribs and slipping the tomahawk into his hand.
The tomahawk hadn’t worked very well against these things on Calhoun Mountain; he had gone for the creature’s head, and the axe had just sunk in harmlessly. This time, he’d go for a different target.
Not-Sarah pulled itself off the ground with a sucking sound, rolling sideways, and Cal got a glimpse of its back. It was dimpled with large indentations now, cratered and pocked like one of the fancy cheeses Cal had tried once in an overpriced tavern in Raleigh, and its spine, if it had one, now bent sideways. Landing on the stones had smashed the creature all out of its Sarah-shape.
Calvin hesitated and not-Sarah launched itself at him again, hands extended and arms growing longer.
Was that even possible?
Cal stepped aside and swung the tomahawk down in a swift overhand blow. The sharp, heavy head of the war axe sliced cleanly through not-Sarah’s wrist, completely severing the hand. No bone. The blow felt like cutting through rich, rock-free soil with a spade or a mattock, and the severed stump was gray and bloodless.
What unearthly thing was this? He didn’t think any of the Poor Richard Sermons mentioned shapechanging clay people, and nothing on the subject came to Cal’s mind out of his considerable repertoire of songs, either.
The hand dropped to the leaves and not-Sarah spun away and fell to its knees, roaring in rage. It no longer had Sarah’s voice, but that deep, ragged howl Cal had drawn out of it on Calhoun Mountain. Good, Cal thought. I hurt the blasted thing.
He stepped forward, grunting in pain as he raised the tomahawk.
Something caught his foot and Cal stumbled. He looked down; not-Sarah’s severed hand was stuck to the sole of his moccasin, fingers gripping his foot tightly.
“Jumpin’ Jerusalem!” Calvin swore, shaking his foot but not freeing it from the tenacious white fingers.
Not-Sarah lumbered to its feet and turned to face him. The severed stump of not-Sarah’s wrist writhed and bubbled as it stepped forward. Gray knobs popped out of it, and then elongated into tendrils, and the tendrils hardened into fingers that sprouted nails and then webbing among the fingers thickened into a palm.
It grew another hand to replace the lost one.
The hair on the back of Calvin’s neck stood up. Part of his brain screamed at him, telling him to run, to get back to Sarah and warn her. But he couldn’t run, he couldn’t take the risk that this thing would get past him.
There had been two of these things before—where was the other one? Maybe Thalanes had been tricked out of position and was already dead, and Cal was the last line of defense. Calvin had promised the Elector he’d take care of her.
Dread filled him, and resolve. His tomahawk hand trembled with the will to strike.
He wished he still had his purse, but his precious silver shillings were at the bottom of the river.
He needed to chop off bigger pieces.
Calvin lurched forward, off-balance because of the hand that clawed at his foot and ankle, and smashed down with the war axe. He aimed for the creature’s bicep, but it saw the attack coming, and rather than move aside, it stepped closer to Calvin.
The tomahawk bit into not-Sarah’s shoulder and sank deep into its torso, releasing more clay-stink but no blood or gore.
Not-Sarah punched Cal in the stomach, pushing his breath out of him in a painful gasp.
Cal wrenched at the axe handle in vain, crying out from the effort and the sharp stabbing pain in his ribs.
Not-Sarah dove forward, wrapping its arms around Cal’s chest in a bear hug, burying its face in his shoulder and squeezing. “Aaaaaaaggh!” Cal yelled, tears whipping from his eyes. He flailed at the axe and knocked it free, but with the same motion sent it flying out of his reach.
The creature squeezed again, and Cal howled. He scrabbled at not-Sarah’s face and wrapped both his hands around it, pushing. He felt its skin sliding around under his fingers, like the loose peel of a grape.
With a desperate sob, he snapped its head back.
Nothing broke, nothing cracked, but not-Sarah’s neck bent at a sharp angle, and its head twisted back to touch its own shoulder blades. And stayed. Cal stared in shock and horror down into the noseless face of the creature, smelling the reek of the river rising from its orifices and stretched and torn skin.
“What are you?” Cal demanded.
“My name is Legion!” not-Sarah growled in a deep, rotting voice, and then laughed like a maniac, eyes staring up past Cal at the late afternoon sky.
It squeezed him again, and Cal wept from the pain.
* * *
Obadiah Dogsbody slapped the mule’s hindquarters. “Get on, ye!” he shouted at the balky string of animals.
The hindmost beast rooted its hoofs in the ground and brayed.
“’Ark ye, I said to move!”
Once, he would have diverted himself by imagining the rump he was spanking belonged to something other than a foot-planting, cantankerous jenny, and idled away time on the trail looking forward to his next visit to a town large enough to have a significant complement of generously proportioned women. But Nashville had such women, he’d seen them hanging out of second-story windows and whispering to him from the darkened doorways of the seediest taverns, and their lush, juicy blandishments had left Obadiah completely cold.
The pleasure of rough sport had dried up for him, as had all his others. Beer was sour, tobacco turned his mouth bitter, food he ate only because he needed to live. Obadiah was losing weight, enough that his jacket and breeches began to hang off him in an unseemly fashion, and he was preoccupied.
He kept thinking about her.
He was so appalled with his own behavior, he could barely bring himself to even identify the her in question, but it was the little Appalachee minx, Witchy Eye, Sarah Calhoun, as the other Appalachee called her.
He remembered his first glimpse of her, replayed it over and over again in his mind, her standing in the bubbling crowd of the Fair, purple shawl with gold suns proud and queenlike around her shoulders, eye flashing, back straight and strong. Obadiah had seen proud Queen Caroline once, on his first day at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich. That was before the officers had told him he didn’t have the makings of an artilleryman or an engineer after all, and begun drilling him with a pike, and Obadiah had stood proudly in line in his scarlet brushed wool coat, black tricorner, and white sash.
He’d heard the chanters and the drums and smelled the estuary on the breeze as the queen rose under a slate-gray sheet of English sky to the great menhir, straight-backed in her silk dress to pour out a libation of strong ale to Wayland Smith before the academy’s ranking godi dragged the first of his sheep onto the unhewn stones.
The queen had been glorious and indomitable in English red and white and she’d touched Obadiah’s heart. He’d been a little bit in love with her, and in that moment he’d been proud to be a soldier. He’d have given his life for Queen Caroline, much more readily than for her husband, King George Spencer.
Witchy Eye touched his heart, too. Not in quite the same fashion.
It wasn’t that he thought of her in a…in a fleshy way. He wished that was it—lust was something he was familiar with, lust he could understand, and he could gratify it or distract it with the satisfaction of some other desire. This was different. He didn’t think of her with physical feeling at all, but with something sweeter, something that might have been kindness and tenderness.
He was beginning to think of himself as weak, as Obadiah-who-had-gone-soft. By the Hammer, sometimes he caught himself wondering what he needed to do to be a better man for Witchy Eye.
He disgusted himself.
It had all started with her curse. She’d hexed him, and he remembered that during her hex, he’d felt tingly from his head to his toes. His ears had echoed full of birdsong and his every step had been cushioned by soft, sweet grass. Then the Right Reverend Father had undone the spell with a bit of silver—and Obadiah wasn’t interested in being hexed again—but the world hadn’t gone back to normal.
Instead, it had become a cold, dead thing, a dry husk, a mouthful of parched corn that Obadiah chewed because he had to, when what he really wanted to do was to spit it all out and sink what teeth remained to him into something sweet, bite into the fruit of the tree of life, juicy and cool and perfect.
He wanted the feeling back, and he hated himself for wanting it, but he didn’t think he could live any longer in such a flat, tasteless, unsalted world. He had lived a life with meaning for those precious minutes while he had been hexed, and he wanted that back. He wanted Queen Caroline at the menhir.
He wanted to be in love again.
It had been so long.
It was afternoon, crisp and cool, and Obadiah was returning from Nashville. The mules loped into the Blues’ camp, a little further up the slopes of Calhoun Mountain than Obadiah would have liked, but he understood that they needed to be this close to keep their cordon around the Elector’s people. The Blues stood twelve-hour shifts at key points around the mountain, watching to make sure Witchy Eye (as she was coming to be generally called among the Imperials) didn’t escape.
The Calhouns took no notice and hid nothing, walking in and out through the blockade as bold as mice, spitting at the soldiers and mocking them. Faces grew harder on both sides and the mountain bristled with rifles, but nothing had yet come to blows. When they weren’t standing watch, the Blues slept in camp or drilled, riding, moving in and out of formation on foot and on horseback, and especially shooting. For hours at a time, Calhoun Mountain was covered in a shroud of blue gunpowder smoke from their obsessive practice.
Obadiah assumed that one purpose of the drilling was to menace the besieged Calhouns, but the Appalachee didn’t seem intimidated. They just watched with disdainful grins, and once in a while one of the dragoons would find his notched bark target snatched out of his sight by the shout of a distant rifle, generally followed by gleeful hollering from the limestone redoubt.
Responsibility for keeping the whole operation fed and watered had devolved upon Obadiah. That was fine with him. He’d driven the wagon for his father’s cooperage many hard miles around southern England; he’d done it again for the Royal Pikemen in the Academy; and more than once, his duties for the Right Reverend Father Ezekiel Angleton had included acting as muleskinner or teamster.
He tied the mules and checked the regiment’s heavy iron cauldron that he kept bubbling over the fire on a tripod of lashed logs. Someone had eaten—that made it time to throw in more ingredients.
Obadiah set about unloading the mules’ packs and organizing himself to tend to the perpetually-cooking stew, picking his way among Blues dozing in their little two-man tents. He occasionally kicked at an arm or leg flopped in sleep across his trail, but doing it made him think of his Witchy Eye and feel guilty, so he tried to restrain himself.
Obadiah set a scarred cutting plank and piles of meat and vegetables on a camp table beside the cooking fire and began to cut.
“I’m not soft in the head, and what I’m telling you is no mere whimsy,” Father Angleton was saying. He and Captain Berkeley sat at the light wooden folding table under the high-walled tent that served as the camp’s headquarters. “My mind is as clear as it’s ever been, and I’m an honest and a God-fearing man.”
“But are you a prophet, Parson?” Berkeley asked in a cold and insolent drawl. He had his ever-present deck of Franklin’s Tarock, and was dealing cards out face up in front of himself, in the simple triplet that he favored.
The Tarock was a New World obsession, something the old Lightning Bishop had borrowed from the Florentines or the French (before Bonaparte imposed his Caliphate and ended such occult frivolities) and fiddled with to fit it to the land of the Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi River. It was effeminate, the kind of thing women did for entertainment behind closed doors. No self-respecting Englishman could take seriously any purported attempt at divination that didn’t involve the death of at least one animal.
“I endeavor to be sensitive to the things of the spirit, myself,” Berkeley continued. “See—again I draw Simon Sword. Simon Sword, the wild child, the berserker, the forces of the natural world unhinged, the bringer of trial, and above all the harbinger of judgment. Always judgment, everywhere I see. Judgment and the Horseman. Judgment and the Emperor. Judgment and the Priest. Judgment and the Lovers.”
Obadiah chopped turnips and tried to hide his interest. The Lovers—could that mean him? Was his love to be judged? Or what did the Lovers card signify—relationships and choices, he guessed, wishing for once that he had been behind more fortune-tellers’ curtains in his life. Sacrifice, maybe. Permanence. Sharing, intimacy, giving, love.
It had been a long time since Obadiah had thought of such things.
“You cannot pretend to equate such parlor games with the word of the Lord.” The Right Reverend Father’s disdain was clear in his voice.
“Do you mean the word of the Lord in the Bible?” Berkeley spoke slowly, which made his speech sound insulting. “Or do you mean the word of the Lord to you personally?”
“Both!” Angleton snapped. “The disciples didn’t sneer upon the writings of the prophets just because they had the Lord Himself with them.”
“Oh, I had misunderstood.” Berkeley smiled devilishly. “I had thought you were merely a prophet, but now I see that you consider yourself the Lord God of Heaven.”
Angleton’s face stiffened and his voice grew cold. “Do not insult me and do not blaspheme. And do not pretend that a man who believes in God must believe in any other manner of foolishness that happens along.”
“Blazes, Parson, do you not believe in judgment?” Berkeley asked, teasing. “Or do you not believe in Simon Sword?”
Obadiah cut pork into strips and threw them into the stew.
“I believe in judgment.” Angleton set his jaw in a straight line. “Judgment comes for every man, as surely as death.”
“And taxes, Parson,” Berkeley finished the saying for him.
“As for Simon Sword and other such bogeys,” the Right Reverend Father continued, “a man may believe in many powers and yet not serve them, nor approve their service.”
“Judgment is but change,” the captain observed. Obadiah realized he’d stopped working on the stew and was staring. “We all change, we’re all judged. The Horseman, the Priest, the Emperor…” He considered the cards. “It’s the damnedest thing, Parson.”
“Yaas. And yet you play with it constantly.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean that I haven’t drawn one of the Minor Arcana since I came to Nashville. Not one key, not one coin, not one cup, not one bolt of lightning. I’ve been turning the cards for days, and all I ever find are the Major Arcana.” Berkeley drew another card, smiled at it, and then held it up for Father Angleton to see. “I had hoped speaking of it might break the spell, but here again I have drawn the Drunkard.” He turned and waved the card in Obadiah’s direction before slapping it down on the table.
Obadiah’s ears burned and he went back to work, stowing casks of beans and flour under an oiled cloth. It wasn’t fair. He drank, but he didn’t drink more than any of the dragoons. Or not much more, anyhow.
And besides, since he last saw Witchy Eye, he hadn’t been drunk once.
“My Lord has given me a vision,” Angleton insisted quietly. “Your belief or lack of it, and your endless mooning over a deck of cards, are utterly irrelevant. The one to be judged will be the girl with the bad eye. And I shall preside over her trial.”
* * *
Sarah surveyed the room’s contents in a single glance: half a dozen pallets, wool blankets, rough stone fireplace, stack of split wood.
She leaned her white ash staff into a corner. “It isn’t homey, but it’ll do. At least we don’t have to sleep three to a bed.”
Thalanes hitched up his gray robe and knelt. He swept aside a carpet of ash with a log and stacked several thick pieces of wood in the fireplace. “Let’s get the fire going. We don’t want to delay your bath.”
“Calvin’s got flint and steel,” Sarah said.
“Why don’t you just hex it? Or as they might say in Philadelphia, why don’t you use a little gramarye?” Thalanes’s eyes twinkled; Sarah felt like she was in on the joke this time, so she laughed along. “Ordinarily, I’d say it probably wasn’t worth the effort to do something by gramarye that you could as easily do by hand, but I’d like to see you practice.”
“I don’t know a fire hex.” She furrowed her brow and thought a moment. “I guess I could try something with ‘ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.’”
Thalanes squatted beside the stacked firewood. “I want you to try three things, Sarah.”
The little monk was teaching Sarah to do gramarye the way he did it, and she hadn’t even had to ask. “Sure.”
“First, I want you to try to form the spell with Latin. Just basic words, no need for a song or a rhyme. Just think of a simple sentence that tells what you want to happen, and use those words to vocalize your magic.”
Sarah nodded. “I think I can do that. I suppose that’s the difference between hexing and gramarye, then—hexing is nursery rhymes in the hills, and gramarye is dead languages in the city? I guess that kind of thing must make a good impression on the fancy folk.”
“Well, yes.” Thalanes smiled. “And some magicians go in for big dramatic gestures and trappings. You know what I mean: candles, colored powders, and smokes. But my purpose isn’t to impress the fancy folk. Being able to cast spells using Latin—or some other dead tongue, if you know another one—frees you from the necessity of having to know a nursery rhyme for every piece of magic you want to do. It gives you flexibility and power.”
“I see that.” Sarah had always protested against the Latin, telling the Elector she didn’t plan to become a barrister or a land conveyancer or a priest. Now she was grateful for it. She sat down beside the fireplace. “Latin it is. What’s the second thing?”
Thalanes dug into Calvin’s pack and pulled out his powderhorn. He shook a pinch of the gunpowder into the palm of one hand. “I want you to use this gunpowder as a material component of the gramarye. I doubt you’d find it necessary—will and word suffice for many purposes—but a material component helps. Just like you used three drops of blood back in Nashville, in your love-charm in Father Angleton’s tent.”
Sarah blushed, thinking of poor Calvin, still smitten. “I think I can do that.”
“The gunpowder serves the same function as the words,” Thalanes explained. “They both build a bridge, to get power from you into the fire.”
“Of course.” Sarah felt slightly offended. “Like the blood in my love-charm.”
“Forgive my lecturing,” Thalanes said. “I am, after all, a priest. Sir Isaac Newton, you probably know, was a great wizard.”
“Everyone knows that.”
“He was a great practicing magician and an even greater theoretical one.”
“What’s a theoretical magician?”
“I mean a scholar of magic, and how magic works.”
“You mean that Sir Isaac wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Magica just the year before he joined John Churchill’s Glorious Revolution against the Necromancer’s Eternal Commonwealth. Everyone knows that, too.”
Thalanes smiled. “Perhaps not everyone.”
“Fine, but I know it.”
“Have you read the book?”
Sarah shook her head. “The Elector’s got a library, but it isn’t that good.”
“Read it when you can. Newton formulated two laws to explain the efficacy of a material component in any work of gramarye.”
“This I don’t know.”
“I’m glad to hear I am finally able to teach you something.” Thalanes laughed. “Newton’s Law of Sympathy states that things that appear to be connected, are in fact connected. And his Law of Contagion states that things that have once been together, are always together.”
Sarah tried to apply Newton’s laws to the lighting of the fire and the little pile of gunpowder in Thalanes’s palm. “So Sir Isaac would say that the gunpowder is an efficacious material component,” she said slowly, “because gunpowder and fire appear to be connected, so they really are.”
“Very good.”
She considered further. “I suppose if I hold the gunpowder in my hand and then throw it into the fire when I cast, then I also catch up the Law of Contagion. Me, the gunpowder, and the fire will always be together, because we were once together.”
“Excellent,” Thalanes said. “You would have run circles even around old Palindres.” He poured the gunpowder into her hand, carefully dusting all of the grains off his fingers into the neat little pile.
“Colored powder and smoke. What’s the third thing?” Sarah tried not to show her pride.
“The third thing I want you do,” he said, “is the trickiest of all, and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to do it.”
“I reckon I’ll be able.” Sarah lapsed into her Calhoun Mountain accent.
“Instead of using the words to bring magic power out from inside you to light the fire, I want you to use the ley line.”
She felt daunted, but tried not to show it. “Wouldn’t it work better if there was a bridge between me and the ley line, something like the Latin words and the gunpowder? Or maybe if I went and stood in the ley line directly.”
“Yes,” he said, smiling, “proximity matters. You can’t just stand anywhere in the world and tap into a ley line anywhere else. But I think we’re close enough that you’ll be able to do it, using the same words you use to the light the fire. Will you try?”
“How do I go about it?”
“Close your eyes,” he instructed her. “Can you feel your own energy?”
“Inside me,” she told him. “Like burning. Not like a fire, like a tiny sun.”
“Very good. Now, keep your eyes closed and feel around you. With your heart, if that makes sense. Try to find my energy.”
Sarah concentrated. It was like sitting in the darkness by a bright flame, turning away to look beyond the comforting radius of her own light to see if there were others.
And there were. She could feel him, suddenly, in the same room. “There you are!”
“Here I am,” he agreed. “That’s very good. Most people aren’t able to detect the mana of others, at least not so easily, not without a spell. If you can sense me, you’re probably able to perceive and use ley lines. Keep your eyes closed. Try to find the ley line. It’s close.”
She let her feelings drift further out into the darkness. She sensed a pool of magical energy nearby that wasn’t human, but was warm and friendly to her. It was also uneasy.
“I think I found the dog,” she told Thalanes. “He’s nervous.”
“That’s what makes him a good guard dog,” the monk said. He was quiet for a moment. “It’s interesting that you can sense his feelings. I can’t do that much. Now search out beyond the dog.”
And there it was. Like a huge river of flame, not far from where she sat, like a roaring bonfire that she had been unable to see before because she had been blinded by the candle in her own hand.
“I have it,” she informed him.
“Use your words to make yourself a bridge between the line and the fireplace. The bridge will have to come through you. Light the fire.”
Sarah took a deep breath and opened her soul to the shining light of the ley line. “Ignem facio,” she uttered, and she tossed the gunpowder into the fire.
Light and heat poured through her. It was what she thought it must feel like to be hit by lightning, her whole body crackled and hurt and then she felt drained…and fire sprang from the wood.
“It turns out that you’re able to use ley lines,” Thalanes said as she opened her eyes. His face looked gentle and proud in the flickering yellow light of the fire, and on impulse, Sarah leaped forward and hugged him. He patted her back awkwardly at first, but then wrapped his arms around her and hugged her back.
The hug hurt a little; her skin felt strangely tender.
The dog barked outside and the door opened. Calvin stood in the doorway, his lanky body framed and his features hidden by the cold sunlight behind him.
“Cal!” she called, disentangling herself from the monk and scooting aside to give Calvin a clear view of the flames. “Look, I lit the fire! I mean, using hexing…gramarye…Latin and a bit of your gunpowder and the ley line!”
“Very good.” Cal sounded distracted, but he came and crouched down beside her and looked close at the flames. He needed a bath, too—he smelled like wet riverbank.
Cal reached into the fireplace and grabbed one end of a burning log. He shifted it around, adjusting the pile of wood.
“I thought you were going to get food,” Sarah pressed him, seeing he had returned empty-handed.
“Careful,” Thalanes said to him. “You don’t want to put the fire out.”
“No,” Cal answered, “I don’t.” He swung the blazing log out of the fire and cracked it against the monk’s head, striking him to the floor in a shower of sparks.
* * *
Calvin felt himself starting to swoon and he figured he had just one chance left.
Not-Sarah’s head was still bent back to touch its own shoulderblades as it squeezed Cal. He staggered back, gasping from the pain, until he could feel a tree behind him, and dug his heels into its lower trunk. His ribs ached and breath barely squeaked in and out of him as the thing crushed his chest. It was now or never; he covered both of not-Sarah’s eyes with his hands, ignoring the muddy stench that rose from its face—
and kicked himself forward with both legs.
He rode not-Sarah down with his chest, feeling its wet head and body thumping horribly into the rocks, cushioning his fall as they hit.
Calvin rolled away and scrambled to his feet, sucking cool air into his lungs. He was tempted to turn and run up to Crowder’s and get help, but a blow to the back of his head with a stone would kill him and put paid to any thought that he might rescue—much less marry—Sarah.
Besides, he had a plan.
Not-Sarah sprang to its feet with a limberness that was horrible when matched with the creature’s deformity. It slid partly out of its Sarah-hide like a rabbit halfway skinned for the pot. Its head poked backward and down from its shoulders, and its skull and back were punched up like a ball of kneaded bread dough.
The monster charged.
Cal was ready.
He slipped the lariat off his belt and threw the loop over not-Sarah’s shoulders. Its head, knocked askew as it was, made a perfect hook for the braided leather, and Cal’s long-practiced muscles overcame his exhaustion and pain. He neatly lassoed not-Sarah’s head as it charged him, pulled it hard in his direction and then jumped aside, turning the lariat around a tree trunk behind him as he moved. Not-Sarah fell to its side, lariat tightened around its neck. Cal heaved with all his weight against the heavy dragging clay. He looped the other end of the rope around its leg and then pulled it tight to the tree trunk, finishing it with a quick hitch.
Not-Sarah lay twisted around the trunk of the tree, tied bent head to pelvis like some hideously mutilated calf. It glared at Cal with banked fire in its open eye. It rattled once, and then was still.
“I reckon that’ll hold you.” Cal picked up his tomahawk, wiping greasy clay residue from its sharp head in the leaves and replacing it on his belt.
Not-Sarah grunted, and Cal peered at it again. It was straining, as if by the strength of its broken, boneless neck it could pull the tree down.
“That ain’t gonna work,” Calvin sneered, but he took a closer look.
The lariat was beginning to dig into the clay of the creature’s neck. That would have been an excruciating—and very bloody—wound in a man, but not-Sarah grunted and snuffled and continued to pull, sawing the braided leather of the lariat loop deeper into its neck.
It was going to cut its own head off to escape.
“Dammit!” Cal shouted. “Don’t you ever give up?”
Not-Sarah laughed, deep and hollow.
Cal splashed out into the river, searching among the stones.
Not-Sarah continued to pull. The lariat was halfway through its neck now, and the head hung free at a gruesome angle, like the loose stopper of a wineskin or a tent flap in the wind.
Where was his money pouch? Calvin cursed the stones for being the same brown-leather color as his wallet. He wasn’t sure exactly where in the river the purse had fallen. He splashed to his knees, shivering, and felt his way across the stones.
Plop! Calvin looked over and saw that not-Sarah’s head had fallen completely off. It lay in the leaves on one cheek, staring at him. Not-Sarah kicked and fumbled to dislodge itself from his rope.
He searched more urgently. The water was chilled by the season and his fingers quickly lost all capacity for subtle discernment—they had barely enough sensation in them to check each stone for slime before moving on to the next half-seen, submerged object. Where was that purse? He felt his heart hammer in his chest and the twinge in his ribcage became a spear in his lungs.
Not-Sarah jerked itself free and jumped to its feet.
Waaaaraaagh!
It rushed at him.
Cal’s hand found the leather of his purse and plucked it from the freezing torrent. “Jumpin’ Jerusalem!” He stumbled up and away from the charging monster.
He tugged at the drawstrings and found them swollen and sticking.
Cal nearly tripped over the rocks as he exited the river on the far side and kicked through leaf drifts. The wet clay smell and the squish-splash of the heavy feet warned him that not-Sarah was upon him. He ducked and spun away, cutting upstream at a sharp angle. The creature lunged past him, then turned on his trail.
His hands were as numb as the rest of him was seared and screaming, but Calvin managed to yank open the drawstrings and jam his fingers down inside. His hands closed around a fistful of coins just as not-Sarah plowed into him from behind, knocking him sprawling.
Stunned, reeling, battered, he held on to the money.
Its arms were wrapped around his neck, and he felt the wet, squishy clay of them as they screwed tight, crushing the air out of his body.
With one eye pressed down against a cold, damp river rock, Cal managed to peer into his gnarled claw of a fist with the other. Three silver shillings.
He clamped his open palm down on not-Sarah’s forearm.
Graaaawraagh!
He was rewarded instantly with a howl. Eerily, the howl came not from the body clinging to his back and neck but from the disconnected head, still across the river.
Cal shuddered in disgust.
The thing jerked spastically and tried to disengage. Cal’s head spun with pain and lack of oxygen, but he refused to let not-Sarah go, wrapping his own arms around its bicep, choking through the cloud of yellow sulfur that billowed out from the three coins.
It dragged him and they rolled, thrashing on the rocks.
Grwaaaaaagh! the head cried, like a pint-sized wailing goblin.
Not-Sarah heaved him off and they both scrambled to their feet. Swaying, Calvin gouged for a handful of clay flesh under the yellow fumes and came away with the coins in a gobbet of muck. Not-Sarah whimpered for a moment, and turned as if to run.
Cal tackled it. His body screamed as they went down again onto the rocks together, this time with the headless not-Sarah facing forward and Calvin on top, his fist free and armed. He rose up above his attacker, fist held high, and punched his hand full of vengeful silver down into its chest with a loud wet plop.
Aaaghaaaghaaaaarahghg! not-Sarah wailed. Cal looked across the river, and saw the disembodied head twitching.
“Shut up!” he roared, and swished his hand around inside the muddy mess. The creature’s chest was liquefying as the sulfur jetted out. It quivered and thrashed under him.
Nghaagh! Nghaagh! Nooooo!
Suddenly, sulfur erupted from the bad eye of not-Sarah’s head and its body’s thrashing became a wild bucking, like a horse in need of being broken.
Cal held on. His body ached, his eyes stung, his tongue tasted of brimstone, but he knew he’d won. He rode out at the last few seconds of flailing, then found himself kneeling in a puddle of wet clay, his clothing soaked, muddy and rimed in yellow, the fingers of his fist closed around his three precious silver coins.
He lurched to his feet, urgently aware that there had been two of these things before, and that the other might at any moment attack him or, worse, might now be attacking Sarah. He hobbled to retrieve his clay-smeared lariat. Looping it, he took the opportunity to spit on the gray and yellow lump where not-Sarah’s head had burned itself out like a firework on the emperor’s birthday.
“You should a stuck to pigs.”
He turned his face uphill and stumbled as fast as he could toward Crowder’s stand. Sarah might need him.