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“Haven’t we all?”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Obadiah was getting tired. The bare-knuckle boxing matches of his youth and the wrestling polls at county fairs he attended in the New World produced plenty of hard men to fight, but they were still men; if you broke a man’s nose, or his finger, he stopped the match and, like as not, you won the purse.

This walking corpse just kept coming.

Obadiah had early on ripped the knife from the corpse’s hand, but hadn’t counted on losing his own broadsword when the Lazar smashed his fingers against a fluted stone column. Since then it had been brutish, animal combat, no quarter given and no dirty trick omitted, while guns went off and swords flashed around them.

The Lazar had smashed out one of Obadiah’s teeth on the floor.

Obadiah had put a knee in the Lazar’s crotch with all his weight behind it.

The Lazar had pulled two of Obadiah’s fingers so far back they had broken.

Obadiah had gouged out one of the Lazar’s eyes with his thumb.

It was during this last operation that Obadiah realized he couldn’t win. Any Sunday Fair wrestler would have surrendered at the mere suggestion that a thumb was about to go into his eye, but the Lazar didn’t flinch. Lying prone with the dead man’s arms about his waist and squeezing, Obadiah dug one callused, horn-nailed thumb into the writhing mass of black worms at the corner of the Lazar’s eye, slid it under the blank, white, iris-less eyeball and popped the eye out. No fiber held the eye in place. It fell on the floor and splattered into a viscous gray puddle.

Still the Lazar squeezed.

“Wayland’s petticoats,” Obadiah grunted, “’ow in the ’Ell am I meant to put you down, you rottink bugger?”

The Lazar hissed, spraying the stench of death into Obadiah’s face.

Obadiah grabbed a spent pistol and bashed the Lazar repeatedly in the face with its butt, cursing all the while, until the Lazar released him to grab the gun.

Obadiah rolled away and climbed to his knees. Sarah was running from him now, toward the front of the church. The Appalachee redhead was in motion too, and the big gunfighter, but he had no time to try to see what the commotion was. He launched himself at his foe, knocking the other man forward and wrapping his arms around his neck and shoulders.

“Time to give over, you wee manky git!” Obadiah swung the Lazar’s forehead against the stone floor with all his weight and strength.

Smack!

The Lazar grunted and pulled his leg in, getting one knee on the ground under him. This feat would have caused any ordinary man serious pain from Obadiah’s hold, but the Lazar did it, snorting like a boar.

“I wot not what you be, mate,” Obadiah grunted, still casting about for some kind of effective weapon, “but I ’ope I never see your like again.”

His eye landed on one of the row of oil lanterns lighting the chancel from white-painted hooks set in the stone walls. Springing from his knees, Obadiah cracked the Lazar’s head against the stone floor again—smack!—and then jumped to his feet, leaping for the lantern.

The Lazar was up instantly after him, and yanked Obadiah back with hands at his shoulders and then a cold forearm about his throat. The Lazar had him by the windpipe and was cutting off his air.

Obadiah leaned forward, picking the Lazar off his feet and then running backward into a column, but to no effect.

His vision began to swim; Obadiah had only seconds left. Staggering forward, he grabbed a lantern off its hook.

The Lazar squeezed tighter, and Obadiah felt himself begin to slide into unconsciousness. He swung the lantern backward in a wide arc, smashing it toward his own back—

shattering the glass and spreading liquid fire on the Lazar.

Gwaaaraaaraaaraaaarghhh!

The ungodly howl pierced Obadiah’s skull. The Lazar released him.

He tripped. His vision went black but air rushed into his lungs again, and he crashed to the floor.

Obadiah floated with no sensation for some time, and then he felt a searing, stinging pain on his back.

Roll over.

A woman’s voice. Gentle.

Was it his angel, Sarah?

He rolled. As he did, the angel threw her wings about him like a great white shroud, and patted him with her hands, and he was comforted and floated, on the billowing clouds of heaven.

His eyes snapped into sudden focus with the realization that his back and shoulders and neck hurt. “Wayland’s bloody balls!”

He lay on his back, in pain. His body was swathed loosely in the white altar cloth, stained dark red with the bishop’s blood and now also splotched black here and there by the ichorous spray of the Lazars’ wounds. Smoke rose from the cloth, and the stench of scorched flesh filled his nostrils.

A woman knelt over him. “You lit yourself on fire to kill that thing.”

“Eh,” said Obadiah, unable to force any more complex thought through his lips. To his disappointment, the angel of his delirium was not Sarah, but the woman he’d captured her with, the tall brunette Cathy.

Graaaaaaraaaaaaaagh!

He could still hear the Lazar’s shriek, and light bounced off the chancel’s columns like the glow of a dozen dancing torches. He struggled to stand, wincing.

“I’ve loaded the pistols again,” she said, and he saw that she held one of the Lafitte guns in each hand. “But I don’t see any of them left to shoot.”

Had they won, then? Obadiah surveyed the cathedral.

The Lazar Obadiah had been wrestling was staggering away down the long nave of the cathedral, a twisting column of flame throwing great orange sheets of light against the walls. Sarah and the two men—the Appalachee and the Cavalier, he couldn’t remember their names—both ran back toward him. The front doors of the cathedral were open, and Obadiah saw a familiar party coming in. His heart sank.

Ezekiel Angleton stood in the doors, at the head of a squad of the Imperial House Light Dragoons.

“You’ll ’ave summat to shoot at soon enow, dearie,” he promised Cathy.

“Pardon me, Mr. Dogsbody?”

“You keep those pistols, love.” He threw off the shroud and collected his own weapons from the floor. “You’ll want ’em by an’ by.”

“Why, Mr. Dogsbody,” Cathy said, “you call me dearie and love. Are you playing the flirt with me?”

“Nay, ma’am,” he said, fighting back tears from the pain scoring his back, “I be just playink the Englishman.”

* * *

The sea above his head was infinite. The sea below his feet was infinite. All around him, infinite undulating sea of bile, and he died of drowning every second.

At least, Thalanes thought, I’m the one dying, and not Sarah.

Elsewhere, Thalanes felt other things. He felt a burning on his arm and he knew it was Sarah, trying to help him. He called to her and she couldn’t hear, not through all the hands.

Cold hands scrabbled at his throat. Cold hands groped at his heart. Cold hands clutched at his face, his limbs, his torso. Everywhere, cold dead hands. They were the hands, the spirit-hands, the mana-hands, of the dead man, the Sorcerer Robert Hooke.

The hands had once belonged to others, and Thalanes caught wisps that hinted at faces behind the hands. Their expressions were sorrowful and angry, bitter and surprised. They were the faces of stolen souls, lives damned and converted into power to be consumed by the Sorcerer. Many of those faces must belong to Firstborn, but he couldn’t tell those from the children of Eve. There were beastkind muzzles behind the hands, too, and those stood out, badger snouts and women with fox’s ears and things that had human faces but glittering black, impenetrable eyes, like animals.

You won’t have my life, he vowed, and he pushed back. His heart strained and he heaved with all his soul, and he threw the hands off, at least for a moment. In that moment, he looked into a thousand eyes and saw their deaths, the great gulfs that separated them from their loved ones, even from their beloved dead, saw their permanent sense of betrayal and their undying grudge.

He didn’t have a name for what he was seeing. Robert Hooke was some sort of soul-thief. This was damnable magic, malign craft worthy of the name sorcery, and the sort of engine in which Jock of Cripplegate must have ended.

If he succumbed to it, if he died this way, he would only add to the power of the Sorcerer and his master, the Necromancer, and put Sarah at even greater risk. It could be his face staring at her from the wall of lost souls, and his hands grabbing to pull her in and destroy her.

He must not succumb. He thrashed about, striking back with all his limbs and pushing with the energy of his heart, fighting to keep a small space about him free of the grabbing hands. He didn’t have the strength to resist, so he tried to be clever, ducking around the hands instead of wrestling with them.

But there were too many, and he had nowhere to run.

Yield thou, Serpentspawn, Hooke spoke into his mind, and there, through the writhing hedge of hands, Thalanes saw him. Robert Hooke floated in the amber-colored infinite sea, long, curling red hair drifting about his head like a halo and a devilish beatific smile on his pale face. Thou canst not win, Cahokian. Waste not the effort.

Behind Robert Hooke loomed another presence, darker than him, and larger, but something that seemed only half-formed. A stink of decay permeated the infinite sea.

You keep bad company, Hooke, Thalanes told him. I can win, and I will. Your master’s heart is rotten and evil, and I’ll see his schemes all spoiled.

He fought to move his lips, to speak. He had a very important message he had to give Sarah, the last he would ever give.

* * *

The nave of the St. Louis Cathedral was a warm respite from the storm. Ezekiel blinked while his eyes adjusted, and then he realized that he was seeing the backs of people.

There was the back of someone wearing a long brown coat that fell all the way to the floor and a broad hat.

There was the back of someone rising to his feet, arms queerly hanging at his sides, also in a brown coat.

Beyond them, running away and therefore also showing him their backs were three more people, and one of them was a young woman who might be Sarah Calhoun.

Ezekiel would have liked to investigate carefully, and to act with great discrimination shown as to the different fates of innocent and guilty parties. That would have been consistent with the Covenant Tract’s long history of careful and wise adjudication, and also with the dignity and legitimacy of the Penn family’s place on the Imperial throne. But he had been wrestling for weeks, with the Witchy Eye, with Obadiah, with Berkeley, with his dreams, with the chevalier, and with the bishop. He was tired.

“Shoot them all,” he said to Captain Berkeley.

Berkeley nodded. “Two rows!”

Waaaaraaararaaararghh!

A shrill howl erupted from the bowels of the church and an orange light flared. A flailing, running pillar of flame, a fire with a man inside it, rushed up the aisle of the nave in Ezekiel’s direction. The fleeing figures broke past it and disappeared behind the veil of its brilliance into the vault of the church.

The Blues didn’t hesitate. The eight dragoons at the front door (eight more had been sent to the apse and the remaining eight to one of the transepts, thus covering all three doors that the Imperial party had identified in its scouting) formed into two rows of four.

The front row took aim with their carbines and fired.

Bang!

The report boomed loud in Ezekiel’s ears and stung his eyes with its acrid smoke. The shooters repeated the process twice more, each with his two pistols, then they knelt to reload and the row behind them began to fire.

Bang! Bang!

Ezekiel looked out into the rain and saw twenty-four gendarmes, the chevalier’s men who had participated in the search for Witchy Eye. They had mustered in neat order and stood with the chevalier’s harsh-faced and laconic Creole du Plessis at their head, maintaining formation and watching.

Fine, let them watch. Let them learn to respect Imperial discipline and power. Maybe that would make the chevalier think twice about his blackmail scheme.

The Creole left his men and walked up to join Ezekiel, standing by the open cathedral door. He said nothing, and watched.

Ezekiel turned again and looked into the cathedral, and was stunned to see the brown-coated man walking purposefully through the bullet fire in his direction. The man’s appearance was shocking—he had pale skin, like an albino or even a corpse, his eyes were white and his fingernails were long and twisted. Under the rotting coat, his clothing looked a hundred years old, at least; he had a billowing cravat that had once been white, and was now a sort of putrid yellow, and a waistcoat and breeches that might have fit well into a country ball during the reign of King Charles Stuart.

He didn’t react as bullets plowed into his body, only occasionally stumbling from the impact. Ezekiel was looking death itself in the face, and he took a step back.

The apparition stopped a few feet from Ezekiel and met his gaze with strange eyes, white, black around the edges. The black writhed, like a mass of bees on their hive. Ezekiel shuddered.

He pictured the face of his youthful love, Lucy Winthrop, with this undead specter’s pallor upon it and such twitching orbs. He felt nauseated. This was foul magic indeed, and he despised Witchy Eye for having deployed such a fearsome agent.

Ani gibbor,” he murmured, quickly deploying his favorite all-purpose magic for rough situations, a spell that enhanced his own speed, strength, and toughness. He couldn’t maintain it for long, but combat seemed imminent.

Ezekiel touched the hilt of his father’s sword to cast his spell, and he heard as if in an echo the marching songs of the Order of St. Martin.

Words entered his mind in a voice Ezekiel didn’t recognize, a voice like dry leaves rustling in the wind. My lord instructs me to give thee passage, the strange voice said, and Ezekiel knew somehow that it came from the corpselike man, though his pale lips were still. Be thou grateful, Roundhead; today I am not required to kill thee.

Did Ezekiel’s face show the horror and confusion he felt? Why would Witchy Eye instruct her creature to let him past?

Was it possible this apparition was not in the service of Witchy Eye? The phrase my lord didn’t seem to fit the Appalachee girl, even in the mouth of one of her creatures. Ezekiel shuddered.

I lose patience, priest, the mind-voice growled. Thou art a distraction. Move thou, before I break my oath and kill thee. Behind him came the man with arms hanging at his sides; he too was pale as a corpse, and had the same repulsive eyes.

“Let’s go, Captain,” Ezekiel said to Berkeley, and the albino and the numb-armed man both stepped aside to let the Imperials advance.

The third creature, the column of flame, thrashed limply about on the ground in a corner, the fire slowly dying.

The Creole and the chevalier’s men stayed behind.

As he and Berkeley rushed down the aisle, Ezekiel felt the power of his spell course through him, and he longed for battle. Urgently. “Where are they? I saw them, but I was distracted. Where did the Witchy Eye go?”

Ahead, other contingents of dragoons entered by the side and from behind the chancel.

“This is a cathedral, Parson,” Berkeley drawled, “so the only two likely possibilities are that they went down into the crypt or that they went up onto the roof.”

* * *

Suddenly, Robert Hooke was gone, and so was the presence behind him.

The hands hesitated, and Thalanes took his chance. He pressed against a wall of inert fingers, cold and deathly, wiggled, and, having made a hole, he swam through it. Above him he saw light, a shimmering ball like the sun on the surface of the water—the infinite sea was abruptly finite above him.

He scissor-kicked his way toward the light—

and felt hands grab at his ankles.

* * *

Bill sent the ladies up first.

He didn’t think there would be anything on the roof of the cathedral to attack them, and if there were, Cathy at least had the two Lafitte pistols, primed and loaded with silver shot. Even a gargoyle would have to beware the lady from Virginia.

Then Cal backed up the stairs, hunching his lanky frame over but never enough to avoid banging his head against the stone ceiling of the narrow staircase. He shuffled backward, kicking each foot heel-first up over the next high stone step, because he had his arms under Thalanes’s shoulders to carry him, the monk’s head slumped to one side in semi-consciousness, lips moving but no sound audible.

The burly Englishman came next, carrying the Cetean’s feet, and he mumbled curses involving the anatomy of Wayland Smith, Herne the Hunter, and other members of the English pantheon too obscure for Bill to recognize them. As his ankles disappeared up the stairs, Bill saw that his neck and the back of his skull were burnt from ear to ear, and his coat was charred.

Bill respected the toughness of the man.

After the Englishman, Jacob Hop marched up the stairs without a comment and without an invitation. He smiled at Bill, and Bill glared back; Hop wasn’t a Dutchman, Bill reminded himself, or maybe he wasn’t only a Dutchman, he was also the Heron King.

Hell’s Bells, Bill was living in a fairy tale.

It wouldn’t have mattered who Hop was if Bill had remained alone. But Bill had responsibilities once more, he had a mistress and a position, and it mattered very much that Hop couldn’t be relied upon and might betray them.

Though Hop wasn’t helping their enemies and he wasn’t interfering. He was deliberately refraining from doing anything at all.

Bill scowled.

And Bill’s position wasn’t Captain of the Blues. On the contrary, the Blues were marching in his direction with hostility, coming at him from three sides.

Bill would go last. He wasn’t idling as the others went up, he was reloading and priming the four pistols now in his possession, his two long horse pistols and the hidalgo’s brace of large bore mankillers, as fast as he possibly could. Which was very, very fast.

He couldn’t defeat all twenty-four of the Philadelphia Blues, but he could put a little fear of God in them. Fear of God, and fear of Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.

Looking down at his feet, he saw drops of his own blood on the white stone floor, and he remembered the wounds Tom Long-Knife had inflicted on him. The pain in his ribs and his thigh flared sharply, and he felt old.

Eight Blues marched down the nave toward the altar in the wake of Daniel Berkeley. Bill’s old lieutenant walked beside a tall man in a Martinite tabard and a black Yankee hat with a naked sword in his hand.

More dragoons came in through the transept door, and more still picked their way through the devotional chapel in the apse. Bill stood out of sight near the altar, at the tight spiral staircase that descended into the crypt and climbed toward the ceiling, his guns all ready. He squinted at the Blues in the nave and recognized a few faces, men he had known as young, idealistic soldiers, and who were now grizzled veterans.

They might similarly recognize him.

He stepped out beside the altar and into sight, a pistol in each long pocket of his coat and another in each hand. The carved wood of the rood screen still separated him from Berkeley and his party, but it didn’t impede visibility and he doubted it would give him adequate protection from flying pistol balls, either.

Bill wished, not for the first time that day, that he had a bottle of whisky.

“Atten-shun!” he bellowed in his best parade ground voice. Despite themselves, several of the Blues straightened, and they all stopped.

“What are you doing here?” the Martinite demanded in a shrill Yankee whine.

Berkeley looked wary. “Get out of the way, Will. This affair needn’t concern you.”

“Oh, but it does, suh.” Bill wondered how much the man knew. And the Martinite—times had changed, indeed, for the Imperial House Light Dragoons to have a devotee of St. Martin Luther for a chaplain. “This affair and I have a long history together.”

“Do you understand that I am on the emperor’s errand?” Berkeley demanded. “Do you remember, Captain, what it was like to serve the empire? I will not be deterred or further delayed! Stand aside!”

“I think I know what it must be like to hold up the skirts of little Tommy Penn,” Bill granted. “Do you know whom you are pursuing?”

“Kill him,” snarled the priest, but none of the dragoons raised a weapon.

The Martinite resumed walking forward, though none of the other Imperials followed his lead.

“Yes,” Berkeley said. “Do you? Do you know she is a pretender, that the emperor wants her apprehended so she can’t raise a rebel flag against him?”

“She has a valid claim to the Penn land, suh,” Bill said, “and if there is a Penn usurper, it isn’t she.” His eyes searched the Blues, trying to discern how much of this information was new to them. They were an elite unit, but they were soldiers, and he guessed they had no idea whom they were hunting.

“That’s a lie, Lee!” Berkeley shouted.

“I’m no liar, Dan. She’s the Empress Hannah’s daughter.” The dragoons were too disciplined to gasp or cry out, but Bill saw looks of astonishment on several of their faces, and not just the old men who had served Kyres. “I stood outside the door at her birth with pistols in my hands to protect her and her mother. I’d have killed any man who dared attack her then, and I’ll do the same today.”

“Mad Hannah’s daughter by whom?” The Martinite sneered.

Bill remembered the rain, fifteen years earlier, a storm much like the one that now dumped water on New Orleans. He remembered the three acorns lying in Thalanes’s palm, then the chaplain of the Blues and soon to become Hannah’s confessor in her confinement. He remembered the blood on them, Kyres’s blood, which Kyres himself had smeared on the acorns with his dying breath.

He remembered Hannah’s secret pregnancy, possible to keep secret because virtually no one was allowed to see her, shut out of the Palace as she was and hidden away in the old Slate Roof House above the Delaware River. He remembered three disfigured babies, smuggled out of her apartments in a warming pan. He thought of young Nathaniel, the boy with the puckered red ear folded to the side of his head, whom Bill had taken to hide, and Margaret, with the grotesque scabs on her scalp.

He’d ridden, alone and hard, to Johnsland, to deliver little Nathaniel to the earl because the earl was the empress’s friend and at the time had not been fallen into madness. Bill remembered feeding the boy with the oozing milky rag that Thalanes had enchanted, singing soldiers’ songs and campfire ballads to him on the road. He had only seen the other two children once, briefly, and Thalanes had taken the one with the disfigured eye to hide her.

That child was Sarah.

“By her husband, King Kyres Elytharias, suh,” Bill said firmly. “Which makes her also the rightful Queen of Cahokia. If there is a God in Heaven, I’ll see her restored to her family lands and the upstart Thomas Penn kicked to the gutters of Philadelphia to shake a begging bowl.”

“Silence!”

The Martinite roared and jumped, and Bill was astonished to see him fly into the air and crash through the rood screen. He plummeted earthward again with sword raised, exploding toward Bill in a cloud of flying splinters.

Bill was surprised, but not taken flat-flooted. As the Martinite rushed through the air, Bill raised both the hidalgo’s pistols and squeezed their triggers.

BANG!

Both shots blasted the flying priest in the chest. The simultaneous explosions shivered Bill’s arms; the priest landed off-balance, and slipped.

Bill didn’t wait to see what happened next. Spinning on the balls of his feet, he sprinted for the door of the staircase.

“Fire!” Berkeley yelled. A ragged volley of bullets plowed into the stone wall about the doorway, several pinging through the open door and ricocheting briefly inside the staircase.

Bill was already on the stairs, and though lead whizzed around him through the air, none of the balls hit him, and then he slammed the door shut behind him. He wished he had something to bar the door with.

Tucking one pistol into his belt and reloading the other, Bill began his slow backward climb up the stairs. The years of experience it took to reload a pistol under these circumstances, measuring quantities by feel alone, tamping in patch and ball without needing to look at them, were unbearable to think about. Bill felt ancient. The tightness of the passage made it easy for him to stay upright, and he had one of the pistols reloaded by the time the door below—now barely in Bill’s sight around the curve of the spiral—opened.

Bang!

Bill shot at the head that peered through, hoping it was the Martinite, or one of the Blues he didn’t know. The shot resounded gigantically inside the stairwell, and Bill didn’t stick around to see who owned the head and whether he’d hit it—shoving the empty gun into his belt alongside its mate, he turned and charged up the stairs.

At any moment the door below would be thrown open, and guns would be fired after him up the stairs. In this spiral tube, even bullets that missed would ricochet and continue to be deadly, though with each impact with the wall, a bullet would lose some of its force; he needed to get far enough around the stairs that the coming fusillade would not tear him to pieces.

He’d gone three or four times around, these calculations pounding through his brain as his feet pounded on the white stone steps, each worn down into a deep rut in the center, when the attack came.

B-B-BANG!!!

The guns’ explosion resolved into a single crashing boom that left Bill’s ears. He felt the ricochet; bullets struck him in the back of the neck, and the calf, and the buttock, each feeling like a sharp stinging punch rather than a bite that tore flesh.

Bill stumbled, but didn’t fall.

The stairs were built with sconces for candles to light them, but the sconces were empty, and the little light by which Bill made his way came filtering from above or streamed through slits in the wall that periodically opened into the main vault of the cathedral. Bill heard booted feet on the steps below him, but risked stopping a moment to peer through one narrow window.

Below, a group of the Blues crowded the chancel around the dead body of the bishop and pushed one at a time into the staircase. Other Blues jogged for the exits; they would be looking for a way up the outside of the church, or blocking off escape routes.

He turned and kept running.

Bang! Bang!

The occasional bullet sped past him or pounded into his back as he ran, and Bill was grateful for the slimming effect his stay in the Incroyable had had—two weeks earlier, he would not have been able to run up the steps. As it was, he reached the top bruised in the head (from the low ceiling), back (from the occasional flying bullet), and toes (from the stone steps) and very happy to see daylight, even if it was the gray light of a rainstorm.

He exploded onto the roof of the cathedral, rain blown sideways cooling the flushed skin of his face. The others must have reached the rooftop only moments before him; the Appalachee and the Englishman were laying Thalanes down under eaves, while the two ladies ran to the edge and looked down. Cathy held her skirt hitched up as if it were wrapped about something to protect it from the elements.

Bill stood in a small courtyard that covered the roof of one transept, ending in two steep shingled towers with slat-barred windows at the far corners. Stone-flagged paths led up around the edge of the roof of the nave, and down similarly around the edge of the apse.

“Find a way down!” Bill barked to Calvin, and was pleased to see that his command was unnecessary—the young man was already sprinting for the edge.

The Englishman joined Bill in the opening of the doorway where, sheltering from the wet, they both reloaded pistols. The sound of boots pounding on stone echoed up the staircase to Bill’s still-ringing ears.

“My name be Obadiah Dogsbody,” the Englishman said. “I should tell you I ’ave been a very bad man.”

“I’m Bill, suh,” Bill offered in exchange. “Haven’t we all?”

The first face to charge up the stairwell belonged to a young dragoon Bill didn’t know, and he and Obadiah fired at the same time, sending the soldier falling back into his comrades. Then they both stepped aside to avoid the inevitable response of a burst of whizzing lead.

Another dragoon, two more shots, and then Calvin was at Bill’s shoulder, reporting that he didn’t see a way down. “Lessen you’re a pigeon,” he grimaced, holding up a handful of gray feathers.

“What about that rope you carry on your belt?” Bill asked.

Cal shook his head. “It ain’t long enough, not by half.”

“Get down to the front of the nave, gentlemen,” Bill told the other men, reloading. “Find some defensible spot, and find a way down, even if it means jumping or climbing down St. Louis’s face. I’ll hold them here as long as I can.”

Cal and Obadiah ran to pick up Thalanes. “And wake the monk up!” Bill yelled after them.

Thalanes was their best hope. Without him, they couldn’t hold out for long.

Another volley rocketed out of the stairwell and then, to Bill’s surprise, the Martinite came scrambling up the stairs, sword in hand. He didn’t know how the man was still moving, having taken two bullets to the chest. Maybe he was wearing armor under that tabard, or maybe he’d protected himself somehow with magic—his jump through the rood screen stank of combat wizardry.

Bill raised the hidalgo’s loaded pistol and pulled the trigger.

Click! The gun misfired.

Behind the Martinite he saw the Lazar sorcerer.

“Hell’s Bells,” Bill muttered, hurling the pistol at his attacker and ripping his sword from its scabbard.

* * *

Thalanes was trying to say something.

Cold rain poured into his face as Cal and Obadiah slung him along the roof of the cathedral nave between them. Sarah didn’t know if the motion had pricked Thalanes from his stupor, but he was formulating words.

Her heart pounded with panic, but she was still able to feel concern for the monk. He’d been a sort of father to her, at least for a little while. Besides, she didn’t see how they could possibly escape the trap they were in without him.

Simon Sword seated himself on the cathedral rooftop’s southern parapet, overlooking the Place d’Armes. Through Sarah’s mundane eye, he looked like a wet, unassuming little Dutchman in brown knickerbockers and buckled shoes, incongruous sword on his back.

Should she have accepted his offer?

“Sarah,” Thalanes croaked.

“Talk to me,” she said. They reached the front of the nave and the walkway became another small courtyard between the higher nave, with narrow iron-latticed windows, and a shingled steeple tower rising at the very front of the church. The men set Thalanes down against the nave and Sarah took his hand.

His skin was cold.

“Kill me,” Thalanes said, and her heart froze. He was delirious. His eyes were shut, he might be sleeping. 

He couldn’t mean what he said.

“I hate to do this,” she heard Cal say, and she turned in time to see him bring his tomahawk down hard into the wooden slats covering the tower’s windows. Pigeons exploded out from under the blow with a squeak.

“Listen,” the monk murmured, his eyes fluttering faintly. “I’m a dead man. You can’t let Robert Hooke take my soul.”

Tears welled into Sarah’s eyes. She remembered her vision of Hooke at the prow of the little ship sailing down the Mississippi, the hands that clutched at her, and her distinct sense that her soul had been in peril.

“I’ll free you,” she insisted.

Calvin smashed the slats again with a loud crunch!

Thalanes shook his head feebly. His body twitched and shivered on its bed of pigeon droppings and feathers. “Your father left you many gifts. You have his courage and his charisma and his gift for gramarye.” He squeezed her hand as he said gramarye, and Sarah thought of the acorn she carried hidden on her person.

“It ain’t over,” she objected.

“You aren’t strong enough to save me, Sarah,” the monk mumbled. “I’m not strong enough to save myself. You must…you must kill me. For your sake, and for mine.”

“I’ll jest kill Hooke.”

“No time.” His voice sounded distant, and receding further away every moment.

“I don’t think I can do it,” Sarah said.

“Now, while he’s distracted. Use…the silver…knife...” The Monk’s lips stilled. He was white as chalk. White as a Lazar.

“Jerusalem.” Cal peered through the hole he had smashed. “Iffen we had wings, I’d be havin’ a much better day.”

Sarah began to weep.

Clang! Clang!

She heard the clash of steel on steel and looked back along the path down which they’d come. She saw Sir William’s red-coated back as he retreated slowly in her direction, sword flashing before him as he fended off some foe.

“They be on this side over ’ere, too,” Obadiah called from where he stood looking up the far side of the nave’s rooftop. He drew his sword and Calvin crossed the little courtyard to join him, war axe in his hand.

Sarah armed herself with the little silver knife and looked at the monk, shivering beneath her. The cross of leadership had fallen on her. She wanted to be the person who had the stomach, who was decisive enough to do this horrible, necessary thing, but she cringed from the task.

She wanted Sir William to take away the burden, but he was busy. So were Calvin and Obadiah.

Would it matter, anyway?

Would it make a difference if she did what he asked? However Thalanes died, he would be dead, and without him, Sarah didn’t see how they could escape. Thalanes had always been clever, and he would know some spell that would get them off this rain-blasted rooftop, but Sarah was out of ideas, and she had no strength left for magic, in any case.

But by killing him, she might save his soul. She remembered the short moments she had had under the influence of the Sorcerer Hooke’s baleful magic, the hands grasping her, the infinite uncrossable space around her, and the sense that she was in damnation’s own clutches. She tightened her grip on the knife.

“I’ll do it.” She thought he smiled. She held the blade up to his exposed throat…

And still she couldn’t bring herself to kill him.

The clashing steel and stomping boot sounds of Sir William retreating before the onslaught were close now, and Sarah trembled. On the other side of the rooftop, Calvin and Obadiah scuffled with someone she couldn’t see. She heard all the noises, the yelling, but could make out no words. She floated in a tiny bubble that contained just her, the dying monk, and the silver knife.

She couldn’t do it, it was just too brutal.

They would all die, and Thalanes would lose his soul to the Sorcerer Hooke.

Poor Thalanes. He had served her parents and saved her life, time and again from the moment of her birth until now, and she didn’t have the strength to do this tiny thing that would save his soul.

“It is not too late,” Simon Sword said in his strangely accented English. She turned to look at him, sitting calmly on the stone parapet, water running out of his hair in rivers. “I can save him, too. I can save you all. I will turn your enemies to dust and take you all from here. Only say that you will marry me.”

He looked calm and human, almost handsome, and Sarah was sorely tempted. He could save them. She valued her freedom, she valued her independence, but did she value them more than she did Thalanes’s life?

She hesitated, the knife trembling, and the sounds of combat closed in on both sides of her.

Why had she resisted Simon’s offer in the first place? She didn’t remember now. It must have been her own vile selfishness. Her personal freedom was not worth the death of any of her friends.

Fffffft.

Sarah heard the sound of tearing cloth.

But there was something else, she remembered. Something…something about Simon.

Something about the way he looked.

She pushed the eye patch out of the way and looked at the Dutchman, and the shreds of fog and fear bedeviling her mind fell away. Through her witchy eye she saw him loom tall, green, and dangerous over the imprisoned white soul of the little Dutchman. His heron-crested head leered down at her through piercing eyes, waiting for her answer, expecting a yes. Behind those eyes, though, was no human compassion, no human mind or heart. She couldn’t trust Simon Sword; she feared him immensely.

“No,” she whispered.

“Try this.” The woman’s voice seemed wildly out of place, until Sarah realized that she was still on the church rooftop, and Cathy Filmer, tall and glowing white in her Second Sight, was talking to her.

Talking to her and holding out to her a loaded pistol, covered in a strip of torn white cloth. One of the Lafitte pistols.

She took the gun and the little cloth that shielded it from the rain.

“It’s loaded with silver,” Cathy said.

Sir William backed into view, ducking a swing of his opponent’s sword, and Sarah saw that he dueled Father Angleton. The priest moved fiendishly quickly, and where his long iron sword crashed into the walkway’s balustrade or the wall of the nave it threw up stone chips. The Cavalier resisted his opponent with economy of movement, slipping back only as much as he had to, deflecting rather than catching blows with his saber. Sarah could see Angleton had been cut deeply several times and bled great red gushes, but still he came on in unstoppable rage. Sir William might be the better fighter, but he was injured too, bleeding from his side and his leg, and his breath came hard and fast.

Beyond the dancing white glows of Lee and Angleton she saw the dull dead aura of the Sorcerer Hooke. He showed concentration in his face, and he walked slowly, and she knew he was sucking the life out of her friend.

On the other side of the nave, Cal and Obadiah skidded back, forced onto their heels by several dragoons that crashed out onto the little courtyard, sabers weaving.

Thalanes jerked, his body quivering down its entire length, and she looked at him through her witchy eye. He was blue and, as she had told him, looked younger and more handsome to Second Sight than he did to her normal vision. Now, though, he lay wrapped in a cloud of black, a sinuous, serpentine coil of darkness that nearly enveloped him—only the lower half of his face was free of it. Within the coil, Sarah saw a multitude of crawling, pricking, stroking movements.

It had been Thalanes who had intervened, had saved her from the Sorcerer Hooke. Both times. She owed him this.

“Goodbye,” she said, and then her voice caught in her throat. “I love you.”

She snatched his satchel with its precious little sack of roasted coffee beans, slinging it over her own shoulder. Then Sarah Elytharias Penn pressed the muzzle of the pistol against Thalanes’s temple.

“It ain’t over,” she said.

And pulled the trigger.


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