A Calculus of Angels (13 page)

The long shadow Ben saw gliding through the trees was not a stag or a boar, however, but the lithe black panther. Even from here, it looked dangerous, as if the mere touch of its sleek fur could kill or the light reflecting from it give one a fever.

It looked up at him, exactly as if it knew he was there, and for an instant its eyes flamed red. Ben gasped and jerked back from the edge of the bridge, heart twisting. He had seen eyes like that before, on a man named Bracewell, a man who had killed his brother and tried to kill him. But it wasn’t the cat’s eyes that shocked him so—for he had seen dogs and house-cats with red night eyes—but rather the third, rather faint orb, floating above the panther, blinking open for only an instant and then closing lids of air to vanish.

One of the things that Newton named the malakim. Such creatures had accompanied his brother’s killer as well.

Drawing a strengthening breath, he looked back down.

Cat and unnatural eye were nowhere to be seen.

“Something disturbing in the moat?” a voice asked from almost in his ear. Ben jumped a second time: he had not heard the prince of Savoy approaching, A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

pantherlike in his own way.

“Perhaps, Your Highness, perhaps a trick of the light,” Ben replied, affecting the briefer, less complicated bow that was due nobles other than the emperor.

The prince nodded knowingly. “In Prague, one is never certain what one sees from the corner of the eye. It is a haunted sort of place, one I do not find comfortable.”

“Neither do I,” Ben replied, gazing back down into the moat.

“No? I would think that a scientific man would find the ghosts of Prague quite fascinating.”

“Ghosts? Do you speak metaphorically, sir?”

Eugene shrugged his narrow, hunched shoulders. “I suppose. The marks of the past, I suppose I mean. Poor Mad Rudolf stained this city so deeply with alchemy and the necromantic, there are more than a few echoes still. The soothsayers, right here in the castle, on Golden Lane, the arcane books in the libraries—why, even your own presence in the court could be said to arise from that lingering ghost of Rudolf.”

“How is that?”

“They take such things very seriously here—astrology, alchemy.”

“Science is taken seriously in all civilized countries, sir. That is the pursuit of my master and myself. These other things you speak of—the astrology and alchemy of a hundred years past—these were not science.”

“What difference do you see?”

“Your pardon, sir, but the difference between superstitious nonsense and empirical experimentation.”

The prince laughed briefly and seemed to examine the sky. “Which is which?”

he wondered.

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Ben stared at the man. “What do you mean?”

“You just walked upon water. You and Sir Isaac arrived here in a flying boat.

Sir Isaac himself, a man of some eighty years, wears the face of a man just twenty—these are things I heard about long ago, in fairy tales. Are these things scientific? They do not seem so to me. A few years ago, philosophers said that the world was like a great clock, a machine that God set in motion and is now merely watching, knowing how it will run. That seemed scientific to me. But Newton has returned us to mysterious attractive forces, the weird harmonies of the spheres, the unseen and the unknowable. To a simple man like myself, Mr. Franklin, the new science seems like the old sorcery.”

“But these forces are not mysterious,” Ben countered. “Or they need not be.

That is the crux of our work, what makes us different from those alchemists of the past. We discover the laws by which God operates the universe, create mathematical systems that can explain them. That is what allows us the invention of the things the old ones merely dreamt of, told tales of.”

“Or perhaps remembered? From an earlier day? That is what your master seems to think.”

Ben nodded. “I know. I disagree with him there. I think him too humble in that respect.”

“Sir Isaac? Humble?”

“In that he believes that he is not the first to discover the wonders of gravity and other sympathies, to create the calculus, and so forth. Yes, he believes that the ancients had them all, and more, and we .but merely rediscover what has been long obscured.”

“But you think not? The apprentice has his own head in this matter?”

“Yes, sir, I do. If these things had been once discovered, on what possible account would they have been lost?”
I am arguing with a prince,
Ben thought.

Just the sort of thing that Robert would warn him against. But Eugene seemed to take the argument as just that, not something to find offense in. In fact, he was nodding again, as if he accepted Ben’s verdict. But then he turned back, a A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

taunting smile on his lips.

“Perhaps… let’s see. You claim that you have systematized the laws by which God operates the universe.”

“Some of them, yes. Much remains to be done.”

“And yet, without a fullness of knowledge—without the complete knowledge that God has—you have taken it upon yourself to meddle with those laws, to operate with them, to build devices which never were and do things that were never done.”

“I… that is true, insofar as it goes, Sir, but—”

“No, no, hear me out. Let us say you were, for instance, God. Might you not perceive that this fiddling about with the divine laws had consequences of which the meddlers were unaware? That, in fact, it upset the rightful order of things? Were you God, might you not take steps to set things to rights?

Perhaps the ancients
did
have the knowledge of Newton. Perhaps they created many strange and scientifical things. And perhaps God simply
stopped
them.”

Ben’s scalp tingled. “Do you fear he will stop us?” he asked, trying to sound suitably skeptical.

“Look about you, Mr. Franklin. The world has descended into madness. Fire rains from the heavens, and winter sits enthroned in August. Perhaps he has already begun.”

Ben fidgeted. He and Newton had not explained what had really happened two years before: that the meteor had been intentionally summoned, not by God, but by men.

The prince laughed at Ben’s expression, perhaps mistaking it for an intense effort to address his argument. “Who can know how God works? Certainly not I.I am no theologian.”

“Do you wish for Sir Isaac and me to cease our experiments?”

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“I? Heavens no. You are our only hope. I merely voiced some vague misgivings I have. I have misgivings about guns, too—occasionally they explode in one’s fist. But if I see an enemy, I will sight down my barrel and fire. No, I dearly value Sir Isaac’s work for us, especially now.” He faced Ben fully, all trace of levity gone. “The Muscovite who led the attempt to kidnap you was not a strong man under torture. Few are, really. It rarely takes more than a few hours to learn all there is to know. First they are silent, then they threaten, then beg, and finally tell. When this man made his threats, he said we would all die, every one of us, that the emperor would be humbled, that Prague would fall. ”Death from the sky,“ he said.”

Ben stared back down at the moat, stiff, his pulse beating like some cannibal’s drum in his temples.

“Does this mean aught to you?” the prince asked.

For an instant, Ben’s tongue lay frozen in his mouth. There were more comets in the sky than grains of sand on a beach. But if he said, he would have to explain: and if he explained, he would have to admit that there was nothing he could do. But there
had
to be something he could do. There had to. He had to think, alone.

“It means nothing to me,” Ben lied. “But with more information— Did this Muscovite say anything else? When this death would come or how?”

“He did not.”

“Then he must be made to.”

“If you have some science by which to speak with corpses, you may ask him yourself,” the prince replied. “He was indeed a weak man, weaker than we thought.”

Ben blinked, remembering the fellow’s blue eyes, the intensity of his voice.
But
he would have killed me,
he remembered. “The others, then? Weren’t two others captured?”

“We are still discussing matters with them, but I think they know nothing—

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just big hands to hold swords and carry apprentices.” He paused, and his eyes narrowed a bit. “You are certain that it means nothing to you?”

“It could mean so many things,” Ben said, a little weakly. “But I swear to you I shall discover it for you. It will have my every thought. Have you told Sir Isaac?”

Prince Eugene shook his head. “I leave it to you. But let me have some word from him soon.”

“I shall, sir,” Ben replied. But in his mind, he was watching the fall of heaven, God smiting London with the fires from which hell had been built, the blackening of the sun.

“Oh, God,” he murmured, just at the edge of breath, as he watched the prince move back into the castle, “if you wanted us to stop, why didn’t you just tell us so?”

8.

Shadowchild

They were cast into a pit some ten feet deep and as many square, dug into the loose soil of the valley and buttressed by black stones. Saplings lashed with wire formed the roof. He supposed that if they could reach it, they might tear their way through it, even without tools. But even Tug—the tallest of them—could not reach it. Someone standing on the big man’s shoulders might, were it not for their guardian, now armed with Saint-Pierre’s musket.

So they lay in the pit, tired, stinking, and wounded, trying out ideas for escape A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

in hoarse whispers, discarding each in turn.

“Very strange,” Red Shoes told Nairne, “that I should travel so far to die as I might have died among the Chickasaw or Shawano.”

Nairne chuckled dryly. “Your people talk of some rather miraculous escapes.”

Red Shoes nodded. “So they do,” he said.

“If you have any ideas, let me know.”

“I will.” But he lied. If he told Nairne, the one-eyes might find out, and the one-eyes would tell the blind men.

Night came again, and most fell fitfully asleep. When all was quiet, Red Shoes closed his eyes and imagined a rhythm. He imagined a song, and he gave himself up to the ghost vision, to which his lids were meaningless.

Most of the
Nishkin Achafa
had gone or were attending the blind men, not paying attention to him as he dropped deeper into the soul behind the flesh of the world.

It was an unknown place, a terrifying one, one that human eyes could not see.

Instead, they made figures of reality— the way that the white man’s writing was a figure of actual speech, and speech itself only an echo of thought. And so he descended into a square that was not a square, surrounded by houses that were not houses, looking into a fire that was not a fire, regarded by a little man who was not in any way a man. He was
Kwanakasha,
a powerful spirit.

“What have you come for this time?” Kwanakasha grumbled. He was naked, so brown he was almost black, and no taller than Red Shoes’ waist.

“I’ve come to make another child.”

“Why? When I could do anything you want with so much less trouble? I can draw down the lightning, command the winds, see the future, perceive the far distances. I can find what is lost, summon game or a woman—” He grinned. “—rend open cages.”

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“Yes, I am certain you can do all that. That is why you are chief of the world,”

Red Shoes sarcastically replied.

“Ungrateful wretch! I chose you, came to you when you were just a child, spoke into your ear…”

“Yes, you did. And if my elders had not noticed me listening to you, I would have grown up to be your tool, a sorcerer, an accursed being.”

“More powerful by far than you are now.”

“No, I would be dead, for my people would have wisely killed me. My people long ago learned the danger in the ‘aid’ you offer us. And I tire of this conversation, which you insist on each time I summon you.”

“You may have me in your grip, but my speech is still my own.”

“And as crooked as ever. Now, be still.”

Kwanakasha watched sullenly as Red Shoes produced a knife made from the stuff of ghost. Tapping his chest, he passed the knife to the little man.

The dwarf pursed his lips in anger, leaned over, and stabbed the knife into Red Shoes’ chest.

There was agony, but not the agony of the flesh he was likely to endure soon enough. This was a mother dying, a homeland lost—a taste of death.

“Leave me now,” he told Kwanakasha.

Without another word, the creature did so.

Tears sparkling down his face like diamonds, Red Shoes fought against the black gloom, reached into the incision, and withdrew the substance of his shadow. It was both spongy and malleable, and he began to knead it into a new shape. Quietly, the cut in his chest closed up as his soul—abhorring the vacuum

—stretched itself thin to make up the loss. Soon he would be whole, but with A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

altogether less essence.

After some thought, he made his child a falcon. He searched above him for the ghost world trace of the grill above them. The wood itself was too complicated to scent and understand, but the metal wire had a simple taste. He awakened the falcon to the scent of iron, trying to ignore the dislocation he always felt when he made a new child, as if he were two places at once. The child tasted the iron, knew it, and slept.

Black clouds boiled overhead, and Red Shoes knew that he had tired himself too much. If he fell asleep in the ghost world, he would be at the mercy of whatever spirit happened along. He began withdrawing, hoping he could do so quickly enough to avoid being caught.

Kwanakasha reappeared, and, as the square darkened and blurred, he began to resemble a dark, winged creature with many eyes. “The great ones are awakening,” Kwanakasha purred with mixed glee and disdain. “A new time comes. You will see, my friend, how different things can be, and you will wish you had accepted me on my terms.”

“Go to sleep,” Red Shoes commanded, and the eyes of the thing dimmed.