“Pray do not tell the ladies of New Orleans, suh.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A saber wasn’t going to be enough.
Bill knew how to use a sword, and the bishop likely didn’t. But the bishop had bodyguards; also, the Quarter was a dangerous place and Bill had enemies. The last time he’d walked about New Orleans without pistols, Bill had been jumped by Etienne and taken by the gendarmes. He needed to defend himself.
Bill wanted guns.
It would have been presumptuous to ask the chevalier for further weapons, especially given that the chevalier had given Bill freedom, clothing, and a sword after Bill had murdered his son.
Much less could he ask for anything so base and venal as cash from his new lord.
What to do? Take a risk he wouldn’t need a gun? Steal one? He could break into Hackett’s shop and take his own pistols back, but Etienne had likely already redeemed the weapons, and besides, old Hackett had always treated Bill with dignity, and it would be wrong to repay that with burglary. Plus, Hackett’s shop would almost certainly be hexed to high heaven, or guarded by a spring-gun.
There was the debt—however dubious—owed him by Don Sandoval. Bill had been out of sight for a couple of weeks now, and it seemed unlikely that the hidalgo merchant would be on his guard, expecting Bill to resurface and demand payment.
Three figures stood on the pier as Bill’s boat approached. Waiting for him? Unlikely—two of the three dressed like monks. Bill’s boat bumped against the pier and Bill scrambled out. When he straightened up again, he looked up the dock and saw a solitary man, watching Bill.
Hand on the hilt of his newly bestowed sword, Bill sauntered up the wooden walkway to meet the stranger.
But it was no stranger. “Jake!” Bill cried on seeing his friend in captivity, and dropped his swagger. “Beelzebub’s teeth, man, I was worried they might have shot you!”
Hop laughed. “No one has ever shot me, Bill.”
“I wish I could say the same!” Bill’s shoulder twinged. “Well, Jake, you’ve not been given your leaving pay in lead, at least, but as your place of work has burnt to nothing and your colleagues are all dead, can I assume you’re no longer in the chevalier’s service?”
“I do not serve the chevalier,” Hop agreed. “I never have.”
“I like your fire, Jake! As it happens, I have undertaken some service for Monsieur Le Moyne, and I have a commission to attempt tonight. But perhaps afterward, we might meet for a drink, sitting at a bar, like men. Tomorrow, I think, is more likely to be good for me than later tonight. Where are you staying?”
Hop shrugged. “I was staying on the Incroyable.”
Bill felt a stab of guilt. “No family in New Orleans, I suppose?”
“None,” Hop said, “but I thought I might come with you, Bill. I could help you on your commission.”
Bill had worked alone during his time in New Orleans, but mostly because he could never manage to work well with frogs or dagoes. And once upon a time, not really so very long ago, Bill had been a leader of men. Also, the talking deaf-mute was at least a passable wizard.
“I’d be honored to have you, friend Jake.” He’d take care of the Dutchman. For a moment, he imagined Jacob Hop as his son, but then shook that thought from his mind. He already had a son. But he didn’t have an aide, a protégé, and Hop might fill that role. “If it should happen, in the course of our errands, that you are able to assist me with a minor cantrip or two, I encourage you to feel free to do so.”
“A minor cantrip or two,” Hop agreed, and they shook hands.
Sarah stepped out of Etienne’s anti-cathedral and was stopped by a wall of human flesh.
“Excuse us,” Father Chigozie said mildly, and was ignored by the throng. “I said excuse us. Please make way.”
He was answered by jeers and indifference.
“Git outta the way.” With elbows and shoulders forward Cal hammered into the crowd. Behind him a space opened up and Sarah darted into it, following him through the would-be dancers and gamblers until they reached open street. Etienne was right; Calvin would make a good ruffian, if he had the mind.
Sarah felt sick to her heart from her interaction with the Vodun priest. She regretted her promise to the man that she would owe him a favor. When she’d said it, she meant it as a trick on a stranger, like she’d have been happy to play on any foreigner around Calhoun Mountain. Like she’d tried to play on Thalanes, that day at the Tobacco Fair that now seemed an eternity ago. But when she had made her offer and met Etienne Ukwu’s gaze, her words had no longer seemed like a trick to her, and she had felt a little frightened.
The man was a Vodun priest. Sarah knew enough about Papa Legba to identify the images in Etienne’s mural, but that didn’t make her comfortable with the idea that she was trifling with dark powers.
Papa Legba was the man at the crossroads, the great Vodun spirit of the doorway and communication, but he had another aspect, too. Maitre Carrefour. Younger than Papa Legba, a demon, a killer, associated with black magic.
Time to find William Lee and get out of New Orleans.
If she was lucky, Etienne’s favor might never be called.
“Cal,” she tapped him on the shoulder, “git us a quiet spot for a minute, would you? No big deal, just git us off this main street.”
Cal nodded and steered down the nearest narrow alley. Light from the street pierced the narrow way, but the only occupants were two men huddling in the alley mouth, taking turns at a pipe emitting a sweet, cloying smell. They blinked slowly at Calvin and then retreated deeper into the darkness. Once the smell of their pipe faded, the alley stank like a privy.
“This all right?” Calvin’s voice was strained.
“Thanks,” she said.
Sarah cupped the ticket in her palms. It wasn’t much. “Ducem bellorum quaeso,” she muttered, and willed her strength into the little scrap of paper, urging it to move and show her where William Lee was.
It twitched, once, and then lay inert.
“Hell,” Sarah said. It had failed. She hoped that the failure was because the claim ticket did not have a strong enough connection to Lee. She wondered how long it had been in his possession and tucked the paper safely away with her acorn.
“We’ll get Sir William’s guns in the morning,” she announced.
“He probably didn’t have the ticket very long,” Thalanes said blandly, repeating her own guess.
Sarah nodded. Thinking of how to prosecute her search to find Captain Lee, she was reminded of the parties searching for her. “I need to go down to the river.”
“First thing in the mornin’ll likely be a sight safer,” Cal pointed out.
“I need to go tonight,” she insisted, a little more firmly than she meant to.
“Yes, Your Majesty,” he muttered, and led the way silently back onto the street. They crossed the dueling ground, passed the cathedral, and headed across the Place d’Armes toward the Mississippi River. A trio of drunks huddled beneath the mouldering remains of Andrew Jackson, serenading him.
Old King Andy Jackson, he was the best of men
He visited New Orleans, in eighteen hundred ten
The frenchies threw old Jackson out, but he marched back in again
Doff your hat to old King Andy Jackson
Old King Andy Jackson was thirsty for a drink
The Mississippi water’s wet, but it has a mighty stink
Jean met him on the Pontchartrain, and there he let him sink
Raise your glass to old King Andy Jackson
Old King Andy Jackson’s a fellow no one grieves
Some nameless soldier shot him, with stripes upon his sleeves
They hung him in an iron cage, between two Geechee thieves
Bow the knee to Old King Andy Jackson
The clicking of Sarah’s staff on the stones became loud in her ears, even over the drunken whistles and jeering of the makeshift choir.
On the far side of the Place d’Armes, Calvin’s pace slowed and he held up a warning hand slightly to his side. At the same time he moved directly in front of Sarah and completely blocked her view.
“Calvin!” She almost raised her walking stick to hit him with it, but then she heard Thalanes speaking behind her.
“Facies muto,” the little monk said.
He and Calvin had seen something she had missed.
She let herself drift to one side and look ahead. At the south gate of the Place d’Armes, exiting onto Decatur, she saw two men in blue uniforms. Not the gendarmes’ blue-and-gold with fleur-de-lis, but a plain blue with a tricorner hat. She had seen such uniforms before, the morning she had escaped with Thalanes and Calvin from Calhoun Mountain. She had seen them again on the Natchez Trace.
The Philadelphia Blues.
Calvin kept up his long-stepped amble, walking straight for the two men. Sarah followed him, trying her best to look unconcerned while at the same time keeping an eye on the soldiers.
The two Blues stood together, scanning the Place d’Armes and Decatur Street.
Calvin kept walking. His course would have him turn within an elbow of Angleton’s men, but he kept a steady pace. Sarah’s heart beat wildly. She breathed deeply and controlled herself.
Calvin was ten feet from the Blues.
Five feet.
He was passing them, nodding slightly. Sarah looked at her feet.
A horse neighed, directly ahead. Sarah lifted her eyes slowly, afraid to attract any attention from the soldiers, now within arm’s reach. More Blues had appeared in the gate, another half-dozen, riding up from Decatur Street—the horses were theirs, and they had nearly trampled Calvin. Calvin ducked and bowed and retreated, and as he shifted about, Sarah caught a glimpse of his disguise. She struggled to refrain from laughing at the sight of the dark-complected, bulbous-nosed face.
Then Calvin was past, and then Sarah, and they were heading along Decatur with the others in their wake. Sarah held her breath, waiting to hear yells and the thud of pursuing bootheels, but instead the nighttime crowd of the Quarter swallowed her and her companions, and the Blues disappeared.
Sarah quickened her step and caught up to Cal as they cut through the knot of gendarmes around the Mississippi Gate. His face looked sullen and withdrawn.
“Why’re you actin’ like a baby?” she asked. “What wrong with you?”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me.”
“Cal, don’t you git mad at me. What did I do?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” His face was hard. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I can’t stand it, Cal, not from you! Tell me what’s stuck in your craw.” Sarah was conscious that Thalanes, Cathy Filmer, and Chigozie were all only a step or two behind them, and afraid to have a public row with Calvin, but she was also stung by his cold shoulder.
Cal sighed. His normal easy lope had become a wooden clomp. “Nothin’, I suppose. I reckon I jest wanted more’n to be your servant.”
“Calvin, you are more,” she tried to assure him.
“Thanks,” he said dryly.
She knew what he wanted, or what he thought he wanted—Calvin was still fixated on the idea of marrying her. She’d turned his head with her hex, and it had never turned back. “Cal, you shouldn’t ought to confuse love with love-hexin’.”
“No.” His voice quivered. “I reckon you shouldn’t ought to do that.”
The Quarter piled right up against the tall gray stone walls of the city, and, as if the city had funneled at high pressure through the Mississippi Gate, the evidence of human activity exploded again just on the other side, in a long row of wharves, piers, and warehouses, stretching a quarter mile in either direction along a hard-packed gravel street. Despite the hour, there were still ships being loaded or unloaded, and men with lights moving up and down the quay.
Cal stopped. “What you lookin’ for, Sarah?”
Sarah stepped down onto an untrafficked pier. She slipped the patch from her eye and looked at the river, conscious of her companions filling in around her in a protective ring. The river pulsed green and scintillating, but it still showed the dark streaks indicating the presence on the ley of the Lazars.
The streaks were blacker now, and bigger.
“Hostes video,” she incanted, touching her eye, and her vision again rode the mighty green current of the Mississippi upstream at lightning speed—
but only for a split second this time, and then she saw them.
They were in a sailboat now, a small one, but between the wind and the river’s current it was moving at a frightening pace downstream—toward her. Rain soaked the boat and its occupants. Men worked the helm and the sails of the craft, men with frightened faces, but the Lazars all sat in a circle, unmoving and quiet, water dripping from the brims of their hats, faces hidden as they hunched down into long wool scarves.
No, not all of them.
One of them stood in the prow of the ship, hat, scarf, ornate and billowy cravat, and long, curly red hair all flapping in the wind, one hand gripping one of the small ship’s many ropes and one foot grinding against a gunwale. Some sense screamed at her mutely to look away, to end the vision, to pull back, but she ignored it and examined the Lazar. He looked ahead, downstream.
He was looking at her.
Their eyes met, and his were white and blank, oozing black in their corners. Suddenly his words cut into her mind, dry and rustling. Ophidian, he said-thought to her, Adam’s Bastard, Egg-Hatched, Unsouled, Unclean, Serpentspawn. I sensed thee before, and now I see thee plain.
“Robert Hooke,” she whispered, sounding less resolute than she liked. “The Sorcerer.” That sounded a little more respectful than she liked, so she groped for something more disparaging. “Newton’s little shadow.”
I know who thou art, too, child. The black in the corners of his eyes writhed. I have known many like thee, known and devoured. Thy people are serpents, there is no throne for thee or any of thine and no refuge, not on Earth, not in Heaven and not even in the blackest pits of Hell. Ye shall feed my lord the Necromancer with your undying screams, thou and all of thine.
The black substance in the corners of his eyes was a mass of tiny black worms, squirming as he spoke to her.
Sarah forced herself to laugh. “You ain’t nothin’ but rotten meat.” She released her vision.
But the vision did not release her.
Robert Hooke laughed. I have thee, soulless. His worms thrilled like perverse little harpstrings. Rotten meat or no.
Sarah pulled away, yanked to rip herself out of the vision, and found she could not. She closed her witchy eye and the vision did not go away. “Visionem termino,” she coughed out, willing the connection to end.
It didn’t.
I have not given thee leave to depart, Snakechild, the Sorcerer hissed into her mind, a sound like rustling leaves. The light seemed dimmer to Sarah, as if she were seeing it through a pall of smoke, or from underwater.
Hooke reached forward over the prow of the ship, reaching out to her face with the long, curled nails of his white hand.
Sarah couldn’t move; something brushed her and she looked down. She could see her body beneath her, but below that was neither the Mississippi River nor the New Orleans wharf, but infinite murky space, falling away forever. Fingertips brushed her, and she floated in a thicket of hands that groped and caressed and pulled at her—
far away from her vision, where her body was, Sarah tightened her grip on her white ash staff—
Hooke’s long, yellow nails touched her jaw and she felt cold to the marrow of her bones, knowing that she was not only about to die, but about to lose her soul to the Sorcerer Robert Hooke—
green fire flared in her vision! Sarah heard muttering and she was pulled to the ground, collapsing under Calvin’s weight. Her vision was snuffed into nothing.
“Sarah! Sarah!” Cal barked into her ear. “Sarah, can you hear me?”
“You’re crushin’ me, Cal,” she protested. “Not that it ain’t thoroughly enjoyable, but iffen you git off me a minute I might jest could breathe.”
Cal rolled away with a sound that was half-sob and half-laugh and Sarah sat up. The wharf about her was still untrafficked, and her companions stood in a screen, hiding her from the stevedores and gendarmes moving up and down the gravel. Thalanes looked strained, and Picaw and Grungle had joined them—the beastkind’s presence probably explained the green light in her vision at the end.
She wasn’t sure quite how, but the Heron King’s emissaries had helped save her.
Thalanes knelt and looked at her with concern. “Are you all right?”
Sarah nodded and pulled the patch back over her seer’s eye. “I saw the Lazars again.”
“And the Sorcerer Hooke saw you in turn,” Thalanes noted. “Did he say anything?”
“He called me names, but that ain’t nothin’. I git that a lot.”
Thalanes smiled, but didn’t laugh. “How close are they?”
“Close,” she said. “They’ll be here tomorrow, I reckon.”
“It ain’t too late to git on outta here,” Cal suggested. “I know you want to help your…your sister and brother, but you can leave me here to sniff out this Lee feller, and you and Thalanes can light out for someplace else. Someplace safer. They jest ain’t no reason to take the risk. Without you here, I don’t expect anybody’ll care two squirts about me and Lee.”
Sarah put her hand gently on Calvin’s forearm and shook her head. “I’ll find him faster, Cal. I’ll find him first thing in the morning, and then we’ll get out of here.”
Chigozie looked confused. “I am not sure what has just happened here, but I am certain of one thing: my father will be very disappointed if you do not spend the night with us. Even if at this point the night consists of only a few hours.”
Sarah looked to Thalanes for guidance and he nodded. “Thank you, Father,” she replied to Chigozie. “We gratefully accept.”
The two beastfolk looked at each other. “We shall watch the river,” Grungle croaked solemnly. “When the Lazars arrive, we will do what we can to delay them, and we shall warn thee.”
Sarah nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “And please thank your master.”
“Thou mayest thank him in person,” Picaw suggested with a twist of her beak that looked like a smile.
Grungle held his hand out to Sarah. Shadowed in his palm lay a smooth, rounded, flat object, like a small tile. She took it and found it warm and slightly flexible. She held it up to catch what light she could from stray lanterns on the quay and found it reddish-brown and streaked with other colors.
“What is this?” she asked.
“A bit of my shell,” he croaked. “I trust thou wilt know what to do with it, should Your Majesty have need of me.”
“You have a shell?” she asked, surprised.
“I am not a tortoise, Your Majesty,” the beastman said, “nor even part tortoise. But in some ways, I am very much like a tortoise.”
“Some time, we should all git nekkid and share secrets,” Cal suggested sarcastically. “But mebbe not tonight.”
Sarah pocketed the bit of shell. “Thank you very much.”
He nodded and executed a neat little bow. She bowed back.
Then Cal and Thalanes helped Sarah to her feet. She let them and the ash staff bear most of her weight to the landward end of the pier. There she pulled away, stepping down onto rocks dark with river water and crouching to gather mud on the tip of one finger.
“Adventum videbo,” she muttered, and lifted her patch to daub the mud on her witchy eye. No sense relying on the tortoise shell alone, when she could have the help of the Mississippi River.
“Sarah,” Cal asked, “what you reckon you’re a-doin’?”
“No disrespect,” she said to the beastkind as she lowered the patch over her eye, “but I intend to stand watch with you.”
* * *
The two men crossed New Orleans at a rapid pace. Bill tried to pass the time in conversation with Hop.
“Are you a Dutchman, then?” he asked collegially.
“No.”
“But Jacob Hop…isn’t that a meneer’s name?”
“Oh, yes, it is.”
“Where are you from, Jake?”
“I live on the Mississippi.”
“Some Hansa town, then. Is your family Dutch? Your parents?”
“No. My father lived on the Mississippi, like me. So will my son. We have always lived on the Mississippi, he and I, and we always will.”
Bill tried to stay focused. “Well, how did you come by a Dutch name?”
“By the exercise of my power, of course.”
Bill began to wonder if Jacob Hop were simple. Was it possible to be both an imbecile and a magician?
Kyres Elytharias had been a great man and a magician, but even he had had a bit of a mad streak, unpredictable and idiosyncratic. He’d run away to fight in the Spanish War without his father’s permission, and even as king he’d ridden the bounds of his lands in person, dealing out justice to road-agents and Comanche slavers on the fringes of the Great Green Wood. He’d been good, but he’d also been impulsive and wild.
Bill inquired about Hop’s profession. “How long have you been a prison guard, Jake?”
“I am not a prison guard.”
“I mean, how long were you a prison guard? I know you were a guard on the Incroyable…have you been a prison guard elsewhere?”
“Friend Bill, did I give you the impression that I was trying to keep you imprisoned?”
Bill couldn’t decide whether that was a good point or not, but it seemed to be denying the basic facts. He decided to switch tactics and approach Jake on the universal masculine level.
“So, Jake,” he said heartily, “tell me about Jacob Hop and his women! Do you have a lady love ashore? Do we need to find you one?”
“I do not love at all as you know it, Bill. However, I am looking for a queen.”
They had skirted the Quarter, passed under the shadow of the Palais du Chevalier, and were now at the edges of the Garden District, where mercantile buildings gave way to the elaborate columned homes of New Orleans’s wealthy.
The awkwardness thickened into tension and finally Bill stopped walking.
“You’re the strangest man I ever met, Jake, and that’s a fact. I can’t discover where you’re from, what your native language is or what kind of man you are, and I’ve been trying the better part of an hour!”
Jake stopped to consider this. “I am your friend, Bill,” he said. “Is that not enough?”
Bill reached under his perruque to scratch his itching scalp, wondering whether he’d picked up lice in the Incroyable. His head needed shaving.
“Yes, Jake,” he finally admitted, “strange though I find the fact, it is indeed enough for me. You’ve been good to me and I’ll not begrudge you your peculiarities. Hell’s Bells, I’m an odd enough man myself.”
“Would it help you if I told you that I am the rightful king of the great river valley in which you stand?” Hop asked with a faint and curious smile. “That my servants have slept during my father’s long reign, but that now I shall recover my power, the great might of the Mississippi will be roused again, and war and judgment will be loosed upon the land?”
Bill laughed heartily. “Heaven love you, Jake. A sense of humor is a necessary piece of a fighting man’s accouterment; nothing drowns out the whistling of musketballs like a good joke. Have you ever considered becoming a soldier?”
“I have not,” Jacob Hop said. “Tell me about soldiers.”
It had been a long time since Bill had been a soldier. “The greatest soldier I ever knew was the Lion of Missouri.”
“I have heard of the Lion.”
“You’ve heard the songs, I expect,” Bill predicted. “There are plays, also, and novels and poems and puppet shows.”
“Why does this man so interest your artists, then?” Hop asked.
“Understand this, Jake. A good soldier is loyal. To his king, to his country, to his flag, to his captain. A man who fights for money is a mercenary, which is little better than being a mere thug.”
“I understand that,” the Dutchman said.
“A great soldier also fights for ideals. He serves a king and country, but he fights for freedom, for honor, for justice, for peace, for brotherhood.” Bill’s eyes misted over, memories flooding through his mind.
“And the Lion of Missouri was such a man.”
“His toast,” Bill explained. “Military men drink, Jake, and they make toasts. They make the same toasts over and over again, like a ritual, like polishing your boots or keeping your sword sharp. One man toasts and the other men toast him back. Usually, the toasts are funny, in the nature of shared jokes, like to the girls we’ve left behind, and to the ones we’ll leave behind tomorrow, or they’re bellicose, like death to the Spaniard and confusion to the Turk.”
“These are things soldiers say to each other when they drink.”
“Yes,” Bill agreed, “exactly. The Lion of Missouri always made the same toast. After a few years with him, I found I was saying it, too. He toasted honor in defense of innocence, and the hell of it was, he meant it. He had a good sense of humor too, Jake, he could tell a joke and he could take one, but never once, when he made his toast, did I see him crack a smile. He was a truly unironic man.”
“He fought for the innocent, then?”
Bill nodded. “I met him as a young man. We were both youths, fighting off the Viceroy of New Spain when he decided that even taking New Orleans wasn’t enough for him. You’re a lad yourself, but you must have heard of this, there were regiments from the Tappan Zee, fighting under one of your Stuyvesant warlords.”
“I have heard of your Spanish War,” Hop said.
“It was everyone’s Spanish War, that’s the point,” Bill insisted. “It made the New World into the empire, because for once we all fought on the same side, more or less, because everyone was worried about New Spain and how far up the Mississippi they might get. Then the war ended and we were all friendly and Franklin put together his Compact to finish the job. That was when I learned my languages, in the war, because I had dago allies, and frogs, and iggies and Germans and Algonks and everything you can imagine. And I went because that’s what a gentleman does, he goes to war with his lord, and the Earl of Johnsland went.
“But Kyres didn’t have to fight. He was a prince, and his kingdom wasn’t in jeopardy, and his father forbade him to go. But he thought the Spaniards were killing innocent people, so off he went and fought himself, sword and gun and tooth and nail. He shed a lot of his blood in Mobile, and a lot more Spanish blood on the Ouachita River.”
Jacob Hop listened in silence.
“But even battling against a cruel and aggressive invader,” Bill went on, “he always fought fair. He honored the rules of war, he honored his foes, he loved his men. I knew him when he was a great soldier, and then I knew him in Missouri, when he was even greater.”
“What do you mean?” Jacob Hop asked.
How to explain? “They called him the Lion of Missouri,” Bill started slowly, “because he rode through that country half king, half outlaw, and all legend. The Missouri territory lies across the Mississippi from Cahokia—”
“I know,” Hop said.
“—and the Kings of Cahokia have always figured as major powers in the area, but the Lion made it his personal obsession. The small farmers had a hard life, squeezed by the landowners, the petty squabbling nobles, the banks, the gangs of outlaws, the beastkind, and what have you, and Kyres Elytharias took their side. He was the king, you understand? He was the Imperial Consort by then, too, and he protected these farmers, he gave them justice, he righted their wrongs. He risked life and limb for those dirt farmers, and attracted enemies like a dog attracts fleas.”
Hop said nothing and Bill groped through his chest of memories for something that would illustrate the awe in which he held his old master. It hurt him to talk so much about Kyres, but it hurt in a good way. Maybe Bill was finally digging a bullet out of an old wound, and now the injury might really heal.
“Once,” he said, “we came upon a small town where several barns had been burned. The burgomaster and the aldermen told us it had been an outlaw band and showed us the tracks of the bandits’ horses. We followed their trail into the hills and there, in a canyon, we were ambushed. The firefight lasted two days, and it was touch and go whether we would die of thirst or be shot full of holes. In the end, we gambled on a desperate ruse and managed to turn the tables on the outlaws, killing a couple of them and capturing the rest. It cost us four good men, four dragoons dead, and when we interrogated the outlaws, it turned out they were people from the town—the burgomaster and one of the aldermen were among our prisoners.”
To his astonishment, Bill felt his eyes misting slightly. Hop’s expression was fixed and intent. “The whole town was in on it,” Bill continued. “They burned their own barns to lure Kyres in. It turned out that some bank had put a price on Kyres’s head—think about that, Jake, he was the Imperial Consort and there were banks offering reward money for his death.” Bill remembered the sheet-white expressions of fear on the faces of the burgomaster and the alderman.
“So he killed them all?” Jacob Hop guessed.
Bill shook his head. “The Lion asked them what they needed the money for, and they told him they had had a drought and a bad harvest, and the town was in danger of starving to death.”
“He took hostages, at least, for their good behavior?”
“He let them go,” Bill said. “And he gave them his purse. All the money he had on his person, a small fortune.”
Hop stared at Bill.
“Kyres Elytharias was the greatest soldier I ever knew. He was more than just a soldier, he was a knight. Literally. I am a Cavalier, Jake, which means that I am a man of the Chesapeake, and I am an officer, which means that I hold, or held, military rank, and I hope to be a gentleman, which has something to do with my being born to a family that owns land and rides horses and something to do with not having disgraced myself. The Imperial Consort was a paladin. He belonged to a chivalric order of the Firstborn, something called the Swords of Wisdom. Perhaps that was where he got his ideals, I never knew. Perhaps he got them from his father, though he defied the man.”
“A man does not always share his father’s ideals,” Jacob Hop pointed out.
Bill thought of his son Charles and wondered what ideals the young man held, and whether he was the sort of man who would fight for them. “Come on, Jake. We have a cotton trader to meet.”
Don Luis Maria Salvador Sandoval de Burgos lived in a house that climbed up its own white columns and pink stucco walls, scattering wide fern-sprouting balconies and showers of lilies, orchids and jasmines that collapsed into a hubbub of garden barely contained by a fleur-de-lis-tipped iron fence. It nestled between two similarly aristocratic abodes, and two swordsmen idled just within its tall gate, watching the wide, calm street sleep through the pre-dawn light.
The other homes on the street were similarly large, opulent, and guarded.
Bill stood in the shadows several houses away and considered the tactical situation. He doubted the Don would welcome his arrival, but his alternatives to an open approach were problematic. Stealth was definitely not his forte, and it was not obvious to him that even a stealthy man could sneak past the guards; nor could he see any other way into the yard. Attacking the guards would put an end to any possibility that he might be paid what he was owed, even if he won.
“Friend Bill,” Jacob Hop said. “Is this an appropriate moment for a minor cantrip?”
“Yes, Jake, it might very well be. I don’t believe, however, that a letter in French is likely to serve our present need. What else might you be able to do?”
Hop looked at Sandoval’s manse. “Do you wish harm to that house? Shall I destroy it?”
Bill chuckled. “No, Jake, I merely need to speak with the house’s occupant.”
“That seems easy enough.” Hop considered. “Shall I put those two men to sleep?”
“Can you do that?” Bill asked.
“We are close to the river,” Jacob Hop explained. “Jibber jabber me honky wonk buggeroo,” he added, or something that sounded very similar. The two men at Don Sandoval’s gate crumpled to the ground.
Bill looked up and down the street—the other guards hadn’t seen the collapse, or possibly didn’t care.
“Excellent work, Jake.” Bill clapped his companion on the shoulder and strolled to the Don’s house.
Bill pushed the gate open, stepped over the snoring toughs, and marched up to the double-wide oak door. The little Dutchman followed, and whenever Bill turned to look at his companion, he found him grinning.
Bill revised his ambitions upward as he clanked the heavy brass knocker of the door. Jacob Hop was turning out to be a very can-do sort of wizard, and Bill might actually be in a position to demand his twenty looeys, rather than plead for them. Indeed, if his former employer didn’t cooperate, Bill might be in a position to simply take the money.
And why stop there? He could rob Don Sandoval.
He instantly dismissed the thought. He was the chevalier’s man, now, on the chevalier’s errand—he was only stopping here because he was owed money, and he needed the cash to arm himself.
The hatch opened and through the iron grill Bill recognized Don Sandoval’s face. The Don’s eyes opened wide, Bill groped through his fatigued wit to find some clever way to put his demand to the old hidalgo, and then Don Sandoval shut the hatch again.
Damn.
Well, maybe Hop could knock down the door with his gobbledygook. Bill turned to the deaf-mute to make the suggestion—
and Don Sandoval opened the door.
“Sir William!” He lunged.
Bill flinched and stepped back, reaching for the hilt of his sword, but to his utter astonishment, the Spaniard grabbed him by the face and kissed both his cheeks.
No matter how long he lived in New Orleans, Bill was never going to understand these dagoes.
“Sir William! Come in!” Don Sandoval pulled Bill in through his door, faltering only when he saw his crumpled guards. “My men, they are…?”
“They merely sleep, suh,” Bill assured him. What on earth was going on?
“Ah, fine,” said the merchant. Wearing only a long night-shirt, with no rouge on his face and his wizened musket-ball skull unadorned by a perruque, he looked different to Bill: fantastical, vulnerable, old. Bill shuddered, realizing that he must look the same under his own gear. “Forgive my disarray, I am awake early for doing the accounts. And this is your associate?” He shut the heavy door behind Jacob Hop.
Bill considered the Dutchman with a proud eye. “My protégé.”
“You will learn much from el Capitán, from Sir William,” the hidalgo advised the Dutchman, then took Bill by the arm and led them both across an unlit drawing room. “Tell me, Sir William,” he said confidentially to Bill, “where have you gone? She is two weeks since I last saw you. I was become worried for you.”
Hell’s Bells, but the world had gotten strange. Beastkind, talking deaf-mutes, magical French letters, and now this embrace from a man who had tried to kill him.
Was this a trap?
Bill hesitated at the threshold to the next room and almost stumbled, but Don Sandoval pulled him onward and Jacob Hop pressed at his heels.
It made no sense as a trap; if the hidalgo wanted to kill him, he never would have opened the door to him and let him in, especially undressed and unarmed. Or he would have let whatever warding spells he had protecting his house, and he must surely be rich enough to have something, prevent Bill’s entry.
“I had business with the chevalier, suh,” he said.
The next room was a study, paneled in dark woods and furnished with a dark wood desk, broad and heavy, an immense armoire of dark wood, dark wood shelves, and a striped orange pelt on the floor that must belong to a tiger. Across the desk lay an open book of scrawled columns of numbers. The light through the window had lost the blue tinge of pre-dawn and now looked clear and yellow, but the room was also lit by a candlestick on the desktop, holding glimmering candles of fine wax on three arms. Don Sandoval stopped and clasped Bill’s hand.
“I am sorry,” he told Bill. “I did you a great wrong, and I see that you have suffered. You look so thin. You have been in prison, no?”
Bill dismissed the past with a wave. “Pray do not tell the ladies of New Orleans, suh, or they will be rushing to take the waters of the Pontchartrain Sea.”
Don Sandoval laughed with delight. “Into the very teeth of death and hell, a true knight casts his defiant jest!”
A true knight. Bill felt tired, uncomfortable and confused. He was happy that Don Sandoval hadn’t unleashed a pack of thugs against him. On the other hand, this strangely ardent welcome left him disoriented.
“Don Sandoval,” he began tentatively, “I dislike to trouble you…”
“I owe you money,” the hidalgo interrupted him. “I should not make a caballero stoop to ask for something as low as recompense.” He released his grip on Bill’s arm and pounced upon his desk, where a raid into a top drawer produced a small purse, tied shut, which he rushed to put into Bill’s hands.
“Ten Louis d’or,” he said, “as agreed. And ten further Louis d’or, your bonus, as we discussed. And yet another ten Louis d’or as interest, though, like a true gentleman, you said you would not ask for it. But I know your creditors are men without mercy, and you should not suffer because of my delay.”
Thirty looeys! Bill felt guilt for killing the chevalier’s son, but he had come to ask for the money owed him, because he needed it. Now, with Don Sandoval praising him relentlessly, calling him Sir William and referring to him as a knight, he felt worse about the young frog’s death.
Hadn’t Judas got thirty looeys for kissing Jesus?
He couldn’t take the money, but he couldn’t go into the Quarter unarmed, or armed only with the pig-sticker. He’d be eaten alive. He squeezed the purse tightly in his fingers.
He couldn’t take it. Not for killing an innocent.
“I find my circumstances changed, suh,” he said slowly, pressing the purse back into Don Sandoval’s hand and closing the old man’s fingers over it, “such that I cannot accept the money you so generously offer.”
Don Sandoval looked up at Bill with eyes that were alert, sorrowful, and quizzical. “Please, Capitán Sir William, you have spared my life and I am in your debt. My son…my whole family is in your debt. Tell me how we may repay you.”
“I do not consider you to be in my debt, suh,” Bill said, astonishing himself.
The hidalgo looked surprised, too. “But you have come here for something, surely. Must I…shall I speak to the chevalier, and reveal to him that I was the cause of his son’s death?”
Bill scratched again under his perruque. “Well, suh, as it happens, I am desperately in need of arms. I would be very pleased if you could do me a service, one gentleman to another.”
“Anything.”
“I would be honored,” Bill said, “if you could lend me a brace of pistols.”