The Shadows of God (26 page)

And did not hate him for it.

He clutched her to him so tightly that after a moment he was afraid he might break her. He held her that way for a long time.

Finally, the terrible thing in his chest subsided, ebbed enough to be put back in its bottle and to be stoppered tightly. He released her gently.

“Come,” he murmured. “There is still time to make amends. What’s done is done. We have a new problem to solve.”

“Can we be friends, Benjamin? Can you ever forgive me, and be my friend again?” She stroked his cheek.

“I think so,” he replied, his voice unsteady. “I think I can do that.”

They worked the rest of the day on various proofs, seeking the repulsion for
niveum.
Swedenborg had described the material in some detail, which gave them a good starting point, but it was still no easy task.

Vasilisa fell asleep, slumped over her notes; and Franklin, rubbing his eyes, noticed it was sundown. He stood and stretched, then went to find a servant to THE SHADOWS OF GOD

conduct Vasilisa to her room.

He went out into the cooling air and walked into the briny wind from the sea, following the mud-puddled road to Fort Conde. What remained of the thunderheads rolled over, painted gold and flame by the retiring sun, and once he was out of New Paris, the salty air mingled with the heavy perfume of flowers and the lingering scent of the rain. A whippoorwill started to sing, the cicadas chirped, and he almost felt he might have been walking along the edge of Roxbury Flats on a particularly hot summer night in his native Boston.

Very ordinary. Very pleasant.

As a boy
ordinary
and
pleasant
had bored him to tears. His real life always lay around some approaching bend, when he would go to college, or take to the whale roads like his brother, or run off to apprentice in the new sciences.

Well, his road had taken a number of bends, hadn’t it? And always, somehow, even with everything that had happened to him, he still imagined that his real life was just about to start. That he would soon find his real position in life, his real home, his real —

He stopped, watched the sky ebb darker.
His real wife
.

That was the trouble, wasn’t it? It had nothing to do with any defect in Lenka.

It was his flaw, his…

Up ahead, at the fort, a bell suddenly began to ring. He stood for a second, wondering what it could mean, then began to run as quickly as he could in the near darkness.

Fort Conde loomed ahead, a brick and timber structure some three hundred feet square. At the moment it was aglow with lanthorn light, and a lot of the lanthorns were in motion.

The soldier on duty at the gate challenged him and recognized him at about the same moment, but Franklin gave the password anyway as he hurried past, through the yard, and into the command post, breathing heavily.

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Nairne was there, along with a French lieutenant, one Regis Du Roullet.

“What’s the noise?” Franklin asked.

Nairne was grimacing at one of the three opticons Franklin had built the previous week.

“Four airships have just come up to the northwestern perimeter,” he said. “The debt for the time we borrowed is come due.”

Franklin felt his heart go
chunk-a-chunk,
like the water-filled drums some of the Indians used. “Did the depneumifier prove effective?”

“I don’t know. The ships stopped short and infantry debarked. Then the ships flew off, still out of range.”

“Oh.”

“I was afraid of this,” Nairne went on. “They used the same trick against us in Carolina. They can’t use the airships direct, for our devil guns, but the ships are still terrible weapons. Moving troops without having to march them is an incredible advantage.”

They’re hastening the war,“ Franklin noticed. ”Even with their ships—and I’m told they have only a few—they can move only small numbers of their total host. Why rush them in here in numbers we might be able to account for, rather than waiting for their mass to settle on our frontier?“

“To give us less time to prepare, naturally,” Nairne replied.

“How many men did they land?”

“We don’t know yet,” Du Roullet said. “We also have some intelligence that the underwater boats are putting troops ashore about thirty miles up the coast.”

He smiled grimly. “One of our Taensas scouts reported a great deal of bubbles boiling up somewhat closer. They must have found our mines too impeding.”

Nairne rubbed his eyes. “Two fronts,” he murmured. “With the permission of THE SHADOWS OF GOD

you gentlemen, I should like to take command of the northwestern line. That will be where the hardest and most immediate fighting will be. They may have made a mistake, coming at us in pieces, like this. We might manage to swallow a number of small bites as we could not the whole meal.”

“True,” Du Roullet mused. “Which makes me wonder, with Mr. Franklin, why?

Do they so fear what we might do in just a few days?”

They might,
Franklin thought,
if they got wind of what Vasilisa and I are
working on.

He didn’t say anything, though. If there was a traitor, best not to let him know his existence was suspected. “Have you sent for the tsar?” Franklin asked. “He might have some insight into this strategy.”

“A runner just went for him.”

Franklin nodded. “I had hoped we had a few more days.”

Nairne shrugged. “We got more than we did at Venice, and that turned out well enough. I have faith in you, Mr. Franklin.”“

It struck him, then, that they
did
have faith in him, and it went cold into his bones.

“I will meet with you gentlemen later,” he said. “I need to talk to someone.”

Euler stirred awake almost instantly. It was disconcerting the way he went from sound sleep to complete attentiveness. Franklin didn’t like it.

“Mr. Franklin. Back out of my box?”

Franklin took a deep breath before beginning. “Mr. Euler,” he said, “it may be that I have treated you shabbily. I see no sense in apologizing for it. Trusting you comes hard, and I think you understand that. But you’ve done us more good than the people I trust. You warned us of the ships in Charles Town harbor and you told me how to provoke Sterne into revealing himself. I need you again.”

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Euler looked frankly at him. “I am your prisoner,” he said.

“No. I’ve already given the order—you are no longer confined to the palace.

You can leave without listening to another word from me. If I were you, I probably would. But I’ll be plain. I need you.”

“Of course you do,” Euler snapped, his brow wrinkling. “You needed me weeks ago.”

“I know, but it’s too late for that. Will you help me now?”

“Help you how?”

“Two things. First, the answer to a question, if you know it.”

“Ask it.”

“The army from the west hastens to attack us. But I have seen Swedenborg’s designs for the engines.”

“From Mrs. Karevna?”

“You know her?”

“Of course. Go on.”

“It’s a tidy question. They can be used at great distances.
Why haven’t they
used them?”

“I thought I explained that. They won’t use them until it’s clear their military assault is a failure. Once they commit, the war in heaven will break full gale, and it will be a terrible one. Why risk that, ”tvhen it seems clear that their forces can dispatch you —us, I should say—with relative ease?“

“You mean if we contrived to lose, the engines will never be used?”

“Never is a long time, Mr. Franklin. But possibly. Make no mistake— humanity THE SHADOWS OF GOD

will still perish—slowly. Or, if luck is with us, the Liberal faction will return to power in time to save a few of us, though our great cities and all our learning will be stripped from us by then.”

“But our race might live.”

“Might.”

Franklin sighed and raked his hand through his hair. “They attacked earlier than we thought, using the most mobile elements of their forces rather than waiting until they have the whole bear trap about us. Why? That only increases the likelihood, however small, that they will lose and have to use their engines.”

“They must suspect you are near a countermeasure. Or else…” He trailed off, then flicked his sharp gaze up at Franklin. “There is something else, something they fear themselves. I think they worry that if they unleash the engines, they might somehow turn on them. I don’t know how—it’s mostly intuition, gleaned from a word here and there, nothing I can put my finger on.” He considered another few seconds. “Does Swedenborg say how the engines are made?”

“I think they aren’t machines that empower malakim —I think they are a new sort of creature, created
from
malakim. I’m not sure.”

“Think. Think what else you might do, if you had that sort of power. Wonder what might also be created, what the malakim might fear enough to make them hesitate.”

“Nothing comes immediately to mind.”

“Not to mine, either.”

“But will you be willing to help me? In the laboratory? So that when the time does come, we will have countermeasures?”

Euler smiled faintly. “Mr. Franklin, I thought you would never ask.”

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

7.

Ghosts and God

Adrienne rode sidesaddle on a muddy road, surrounded by brambled fields that rolled gently to the horizon. The air was perfumed with the acrid scent of gunpowder and horse dung. Behind her she heard the creak of wagons, the chattering of the sutlers and the whores, drums beating.

Nicolas d’Artagnan rode beside her, his rangy body swaying comfortably in rhythm with his horse, colichemarde slapping gently in time against his leg.

“How is it with you, beloved?” he asked.

She didn’t know the answer. She couldn’t remember. She closed her eyes and saw only colored clouds, shifting and breaking.

“Where are we, Nicolas?” she asked.

“Where are we?” He repeated her statement, frowning a little. “We are together, I think.”

“I- I — ” Her tongue clove thickly to her lips for a moment. “I love you,” she managed to finish.

“I know.”

“I have a son.”

“I know that, too. You named him for me. But he isn’t mine.”

“I wanted to give you sons. If children could be born of hearts instead of THE SHADOWS OF GOD

bodies, he
would
be yours. I have never loved anyone as I loved you.”

He smiled gently, as if to himself. “One of the great benefits of dying in the first days of love, I think.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“I always spoke what I felt with you, when I had the courage. Now courage and cowardice are equally absurd.” His saddle squeaked as he shifted to face her.

“You are thinking of killing him, this child of our hearts.”

“No.”

“Yes. As you killed me.”

“Nicolas, no.”

“As you killed Hercule.”

“No,” she whispered, collecting herself. She looked at Nicolas again. He was a boy, a child. What did he know? “You killed yourself,” she accused. “You could have lived.”

“We could have gone away together, you and I,” Nicolas said. “I planned it. I offered it to you.”

Adrienne shook her head. “But I had to— You’re trying to confuse me. Are you one of my enemies?”

“You’re starting to remember.”

“Yes. Are you Nicolas? Or are you the one who came before? Lilith? Sophia?”

Nicolas smiled, that infrequent, cryptic, annoying smiled of his. “Maybe I’m your son. Maybe I’m Hercule. Who else shall we add?”

“What do you want? Have you just come to torment me? To remind me that everyone I love dies? My skin is thickened to that.”

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“Thick enough to kill your own son?”

“I do not know him. He does not know me except to hate me. How is he my son?”

Nicolas just chuckled at that.

“What do you want of me?” she demanded again.

“ ”And God so loved the world…‘ “ Nicolas began. He turned his byzantine eyes fully on her then. ”God does love the world, Adrienne.“

“Last time we spoke, you said you were not sure God existed.”

He frowned almost imperceptibly. “Perhaps that was another, or perhaps my faith has returned. Or perhaps J love the world, and that is enough.”

“Real or not, God does not love me.”

“Maybe not, not as you mean. When you loved Nicolas, did you love each atom that composed him? Did you mourn each breath that was in him when he exhaled, cherish the new air as it entered his lungs? Did you weep when he lost a fingernail, grieve when his hair was cut? God’s is a different sort of love, Adrienne. A more profound sort. It is a terrible sort of love, the love of the world. It is a love that requires, at times, bitter things.”

“What sort of bitter things?”

“You,” he whispered. “You.”

Her hand glowed, and she held it up in front of her.

“I have no power left,” she said. “My djinni have all died or deserted me.”

And Nicolas began to laugh. Not his usual chopping, reserved, good-natured chuckling, but a full roar from the belly. She could only watch him in astonishment.

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“My predicament amuses you?”

“You would use a sword to trim fingernails. You would use a cannon to snuff a candle.”

“What do you mean?”

Instead of answering her, he leaned suddenly and kissed her. It was as if some potent distillation had been poured between her lips, a tonic of every sort of love. He tasted like Nicolas, Hercule, Crecy, her son.

And he was gone.

“Uriel?” she asked the gray sky. “God?”

But no answer came.

She awoke in a cathedral, the largest she had ever seen, whose columns supported a roof so vast she had difficulty making it out. She heard priests chanting the Te Deum, smelled the incense.

Another dream?

But no — the columns were the boles of pine trees so enormous in girth that four men could not link hands around them. The Te Deum was in a language she did not recognize, and the incense was tobacco and the scent of popping, hissing pine resin in the fire nearby.