The Shadows of God (22 page)

from Venice is the most important measure, as we all know.” He clapped Unoka on the shoulder. “You see the plan of the fort? This battery sticks out from the rest of it, an arrow pointed at the sea. We have to hold the gates and the walls. See about constructing some sort of cover for us, and set all of the smaller guns facing back into the rest of the fort. They don’t know we have only fifty men. I have no idea how many they have, but I’ll guess at least twice that, and taloi besides, which we have no good defense against now.”

“You sayin”‘t’ey will win this.“

“I’m saying we can only hold out for so long, but the longer the better. Are you good for it?”

“T’at I am, mad General,” Unoka said.

Satisfied, Oglethorpe nodded, then stared back out over the river, waiting for the light, hoping that there would be no mist.

They fired their first shots an hour later, letting loose with the eighteen pounders. The big guns roared like titans and exhaled a black brimstone fog, snapping the brittle morning. A thousand cormorants lifted in a cloud from the trees, and the air itself felt as if it had cracked.

By then they could see what
Azilia’s Hammer
was up against: two steam galliots and a line of barges chained together. They could never have made it through, not even with what the men had begun to call “Oglethorpe’s luck” and every gun blazing.

Every shot from the eighteen pounders fell short.

“Raise elevations,” Oglethorpe said quietly. Behind him, the fort was still oddly silent. He had expected a quicker response—but then, it had only been seconds, hadn’t it? The clock chiming in his chest said hours.

They fired again, and one shot from this volley struck the barge chain dead center. A plume of water and black smoke kicked up.

“Put the other guns at that range,” Oglethorpe commanded. “Damn, but I wish THE SHADOWS OF GOD

their fervefactum still worked.”

“No, sir,” Parmenter explained. “The Spanish got that in Queen Anne’s war with their seeking cannon, and it was never replaced.”

“Maybe the redcoats or Russians replaced it.”

“Maybe. But ”tis an obsolete weapon.“

“That might be just the sort of thing they would put in a place like this, if they had it. Take some men down, Mr. Parmenter. It should be in that wall by the water, yes? The demilune?”

“That’s where it was, Margrave. But you’ll need me up here.”

As if to prove his point, a sudden pattering of small-weapons fire started up.

“If they’ve a fervefactum in place, we can boil the whole channel. It’s worth a look, Mr. Parmenter.”

“Aye.”

Oglethorpe then turned to see what was happening on his side of the wall, as the guns again shouted their tuneless anthems.

The gate to the bastion on the spur still held firm, which meant their attackers had to come along the walls. Until they pulled up guns big enough to blow the gate in, Oglethorpe and his men were the Greeks at Thermopylae, able to defend against a few at a time from a position of strength. When the gates went down, they would meet the same fate as those brave Athenians. He looked back down at the entrance to the sound. His artillerymen had truly found their range, now, and the blockade was suffering. Of course, there were surely underwater boats involved, and somewhere out there was a fleet poised to sink King Charles and all of his men in one fell stroke. Even if
Azilia’s
Hammer
got through this, she still had much to brave. But she was at least invisible now, when underwater.

The fighting on the walls was stepping up. His men had thrown up shelters of THE SHADOWS OF GOD

planking around the small guns, but it wasn’t much. And where the hell was Unoka?

Then a shadow fell across him, and a chill ran through his bones. It was one of the flying ships, the bird-shaped ones, and it heralded its coming by blowing six of his men and two eighteen pounders off the wall.

“And now the fight really begins,” he murmured. Drawing his
kraftpistole,
he ran along the wall, trying to get as close to the flying thing as he could. Below, something thudded against the gate.

4.

Defeat

In the middle heavens, three armies of angels clashed: the dark, strange forces from the forest, hidden by a mist; the bright avenging cherubim of Adrienne’s son; and her own pitiful array.

Through the clash, through the ferments of shattering matter and dissolving spirit, she saw Nicolas, and he was dying. His forces were collapsing around him, and fire ate toward his center. Airships fell from the sky and alchemical artillery burst asunder, split by the very energies that motivated them. Nicolas was losing the fight for his life.

High above the battlefield, something else was forming, something Adrienne recognized. The keres was opening its wicked eye. For the moment it was nothing, just the nucleus of the vast, destroying storm it would become. But she recognized it.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

For an instant she was paralyzed. She could not let Nicolas die. She could not let the keres spring to life. And her son’s strange enemy was ignoring the waking god.

“The keres, Uriel. Stop it from forming!”

I—The pause went on, too long.
Very well. Farewell, Adrienne
.

Grimly, Adrienne stretched out her aetheric fingers to the heart of the maelstrom, where Nicolas lay dying.

Apollo!

He took me by surprise!
The Sun Boy sounded desperate.
He cinched my
power, somehow. Many of my servants do not know me. I’m
going to
fail,
unless I can form the dark engine.

That will slay us all, Nicolas.

I
am your mother
.

No. They told me to expect you, but I didn’t recognize you. I thought you were
my friend. But I have no friends.

They? Swedenborg? Golitsyn? They are liars!

They are my servants,
Nicolas answered,
as the angels are my servants. They
cannot lie to me.

Adrienne!
It was Uriel, shrieking again. At once her vision split, her son’s face fading as the ship reappeared. A sky full of flame, the steady thrumming of guns, lurching impacts of enemy fire. A nearby sailor shriveling in a cocoon of flame.

And the death, stooping on her. And Uriel falling upon the death from above, like God’s great hawk. The aether screamed about her.

Gritting her teeth, she strengthened the forces connecting her to Nicolas, but THE SHADOWS OF GOD

he was fighting her, withdrawing—and then, from outside, something grabbed, tripled the affinity between them and they slammed together, she and Nicolas.

For an instant she saw his face again, and then for an eye blink saw through
his
eyes. She saw Swedenborg, a laboratory, a brittle-looking device—

Then white light. Uriel reappeared, his form shredding apart, but the death was not to be seen.

“I told you,” the seraph said faintly. “We are undone. I am undone.”

And he was. “Finish what we started.” He sighed, then fell apart. All her servants tore apart, as the ship beneath her lurched sickeningly.

She awoke to the world of matter, to screams of despair, the deck of the ship tilting. Two of the globes that supported it had flickered out and crashed amongst the crew. The other two were almost bursting. For an instant, her sense of deja vu almost paralyzed her: this had happened before, at the siege of Venice—when she had lost Nico the first time.

Now her son hated her. Now he wanted her dead.

In that instant she might have welcomed death, but she was vaguely aware of Crecy and Hercule, shouting at her. She should save them, if she could, if it was possible. Gathering what remained of her strength, she grasped the two malakim as they struggled free of their prisons, held them where they were by sheer force of will.

The ship bucked again, and an iron clamp seemed to close on her arm. She understood suddenly that she was dangling in space. Crecy’s face above her was a study in determination.

“Help yourself,” Crecy gasped. “My grip — ”

Two globes would not support the ship, of course. Below her feet, the great river hurled by, and then a rushing green, closer each instant. She felt Crecy pull harder, screamed as her arm came out of the socket, and then she lost even her tenuous grip on the malakim. She suddenly had no weight, and she heard Crecy’s shriek of despair come from far away. Then everything in the THE SHADOWS OF GOD

world broke. The ship, her bones, the air.

Red Shoes sagged against a tree, recovering his strength, watching the storm recede. Triumphant war whoops went up all along the river, and musket fire beat an unsteady tattoo. He fumbled out his pipe and Ancient Tobacco and lit it with one of his few remaining shadowchildren. He watched his hand shake, not believing that it was his own.

“Are you well?” Grief asked.

“No. I am not. I am not well. I — ” He tried to stand, but it was suddenly too terrible, all of it.

“Kill me,” he groaned. “Kill me now, before I grow strong again. Before the power grows in me again.” Tears streamed down his face, and he dropped the pipe, falling to the ground and curling up like an infant. “Kill me,” he whimpered.

But she didn’t kill him. She sat and rocked his head in her lap, stroked his head.

“Your heart came back?” she asked.

“Yes,” he gasped. “It may go again—kill me.”

“No. I will keep you, with or without a heart.”

Some time later, he heard warriors coming.

“Help me stand,” he told her. “Help me lean against this tree. I will not have them see me like this.”

Together, they managed it. Heartbeats later, he recognized Minko Chito coming along the path.

“Victory,” the chief said. “We will cover our scalp pole from top to bottom.”

“It looks like victory,” Red Shoes told him, forcing the words, the stupid, THE SHADOWS OF GOD

useless words.

“Smells like it and feels like it, too.”

Red Shoes shook his head. “It isn’t. We’ve barely touched their army, and we lost how many warriors?”

“No telling,” Minko Chito grunted. “Not as many as they did. That is victory, isn’t it? We are few and we attacked many, and they came out much the worse.”

“I failed, which means we lost. Do you know what they will do next? Salvage their big guns, mount them on the opposite bank. Shell and burn this forest until nothing remains alive while they finish building their bridge. We surprised them—we won’t get that opportunity again.”

“The Sun Boy survived?”

“Yes. I overestimated my power.” That was putting it mildly, but it was the truth.

Minko Chito shrugged. “We kept them from crossing once—we can do it again.”

“No. They will kill us all, and we will slow them only by a few days.”
h

“Then what? Return home?” “

“Even worse. No. The best we can do is to make them go where we want them to go.”

“Where is that?”

“New Paris.”

Minko Chito looked puzzled. “So they will kill the French instead of the Choctaw?”

“No. Because there we will have one last chance to beat them.”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

The chief considered that. “They won’t all follow you down there.”

“I know. But it’s the only thing left to do.”

He turned at the hiss of moccasins on the forest floor. It was the boy, Chula.

“One of the sky boats fell on this side,” he told them excitedly. “Some of them still live.”

“The other spider,” Red Shoes muttered.

They both gave him puzzled looks.

“Let’s go and see them,” he said, leaning on Grief.

* * *

Adrienne tasted blood in her mouth and wondered what that could mean. She wondered, also, what the strange sounds all around her were. It was dark, and she was wet. It wasn’t cold, but she was shivering.

She couldn’t seem to remember what had happened. It was like one of those strange night terrors, when you awoke not knowing where you were, panicked, only gradually realizing that you were in your familiar room, that your sleep-addled brain had played a trick on you.

Except that somehow she felt that this place would never be familiar.

She commanded light.

Nothing happened.

She called for her djinni. There were none.

She might have slept, for she didn’t remember seeing a light approach; but there it was, suddenly, a few feet away. And in its light, a familiar face framed in copper.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“Veronique?”

“My God. Adrienne.” Crecy fell to her knees in the mud—she was lying in mud!

—and pressed against her. The redhead was weeping. “I’m sorry,” she gasped.

“I let you go. Like I let Nico go. I always fail you, when —” She pushed back at Adrienne’s groan, and raised her voice. “Hercule! I’ve found her! She’s still alive.” She looked back down at Adrienne, her tear-filled eyes sparkling. “Still alive,” she said more softly.

“Thank God!” Hercule shouted from somewhere unseen above her.

“Where are we, Veronique? Why does my leg—”

“Your leg?” Crecy knelt and pulled Adrienne’s skirt up. It caught on something underneath—a branch perhaps—and ripped a little. Then she had exposed the leg.

Or
a
leg. It did not look like hers. It was strangely bent, covered with blood, and from the distorted thigh, a sort of bloody pipe protruded, the thing her dress had snagged on.

“My God,” Crecy murmured. “Dear God.”

Hercule’s face appeared now. He was less religious, when he saw. “Fuck!” he exploded.

“She’s already lost much blood. Adrienne, can you still hear me?”

“Yes, of course, Veronique. Where are we?”

But she was remembering, now. She had seen Nico, and then they had fallen.

She closed her eyes.

“Put something in her mouth,” Hercule said. “Quickly. So she doesn’t bite her own tongue.”

Fingers gently pried her mouth open, and something came between her teeth.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

She wanted to look and see what it was, but it seemed like far too much trouble to open her eyes again.

Then she felt a sort of grinding and scraping, and the most exquisite pain she had ever known. It filled her like the surge at the pinnacle of lovemaking, but was infinitely more powerful, drawing every muscle and organ in her body to convulse. She tried to scream, but instead ground her teeth into whatever they had put in her mouth.