A Calculus of Angels (26 page)

means of transportation than horseback, and certainly no better for your wounds.”

“I agree,” Crecy muttered, massaging her young scars. “A horse between my legs would better suit my health.”

Adrienne passed up the obvious gibe, and instead called for the driver to stop.

They climbed out into the pungent mud, where Adrienne saw the cause of their discomfort: The road—really a track some two yards wide—was rutted nearly two feet deep in places.

Crecy slogged off to the side and held Nicolas while Adrienne set about finding them horses. Her own mare was nearby, but Crecy needed a steed. There was no hurry; the little army was limited by the speed of its wagons, and on this road—if a road it could be called—that was no faster than the pace of a one-legged man. The heavy wains and carriages that bore supplies and artillery were better suited for these conditions than the pretty nobleman’s carriage they had just abandoned, but even these labored mightily, horses frothed in sweat and mud, axles and wheels shattering with increasing regularity.

Walking back, she caught someone waving at her from one of the wagons—a flaxen-headed girl of some sixteen years named Nicole. She waved back.

Nicole was new; the expedition had grown by perhaps a hundred in the month since it had set out, most of that inflation female.

“Whore,” a nearby man muttered. For a frozen instant, Adrienne thought he was addressing her, and a violent, even murderous thing twisted her to face him. But the man was staring angrily at Nicole. Beneath his mud-spattered coat he wore the habit of a priest.

“Father, what cause have you to speak so of her?”

The priest—she had never learned his name—turned apologetic gray eyes to her. “I am sorry, Mademoiselle. I should not have spoken so in your presence.”

“Nevertheless, you did.”

He sighed, doffing his hat. “So I did. I am concerned, that is all. The farther we A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

travel the more of these—young women— we acquire. The duke makes no effort to turn them away, even on my advice.”

“And why should he?” Adrienne wondered aloud.

“On a moral level, they encourage sin. On a pragmatic one, our supplies of food run low.”

“And yet we allowed you to join us.”

“Indeed, lady, but I am a man of God.”

“We already had a chaplain from Lorraine.”

The priest frowned. “Two priests and near three hundred whor—camp followers. Which of us eats more?”

“That is not the question,” Adrienne softly riposted. “The proper question is, who better earns their keep?”

His mouth gaped for an instant, then closed angrily before he spoke again.

“Demoiselle, that is a statement offensive to God, as you well know.”

“I know that it is a statement offensive to you, which I meant it to be,”

Adrienne said, smiling sweetly. “As to God, I do not pretend to know what He thinks.” He seemed about to interrupt her, but she held up one hand. “No, Father, no more debate. I have things to be about.” She nearly slipped in the mud turning from him, and laughed aloud at the ruin of her dramatic exit.

It was a heady thing, berating a priest, not something she could have done in her younger days. She smiled, realizing that as she had spoken, she had imagined herself as saying what Crecy might say. Not exactly, for Crecy would have offered to demonstrate the power of even simple fornication to build morale. She would have hated the priest, whereas Adrienne understood him; in some ways, she had once
been
him.

“There is no spirit in this nag,” Crecy complained, a half hour later.

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“You have no need of a spirited mount,” Adrienne replied distractedly, watching her son’s changeable face. Nicolas seemed intrigued by the
schlock!

schlock!
that the hooves of their mounts made as they sucked in and out of the mud. It was as if he sensed the connection between their motion and the sound.

“Perhaps not, but I’m always happier on a horse I know can really race, if I need to.”

“We will do better for you soon,” Adrienne promised.

“How are you faring with your calculus of angels?”

“Well enough. I have been experimenting.”

“And what have you concluded? Have you found anything of practicality? Can you fashion wine from water?”

“I doubt it,” Adrienne replied. “I can mediate certain simple changes, but such complex compounds as wine—”

“Hush, Adrienne. You never did know when someone was joking.”

Adrienne checked herself and grinned. “My apologies. I spend too much time thinking about this, I suppose.”

Crecy nodded. “Still, the ‘djinni’—as you insist on calling them—seem concerned that you are reluctant.”

“Reluctant? Cautious, rather,” Adrienne replied. “The first of my experiments proved to me that even commands which seem simple can have unforeseen consequences. Suppose, for instance, I told them to make lead of copper?”

“Suppose you did?”

“Copper has more philosophic sulfur than lead. Moreover, copper has an extra lux atom per hundred.”

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Crecy faked a huge yawn.

“What that
means‘’
Adrienne continued stubbornly, ”is that if they simply did as I commanded—made lead of copper by the most expedient means—the lux would suddenly be liberated, with a quantity of philosophic sulfur. The result would be an inferno, even if so much as a coin’s worth were changed, charring anyone near to the bone.“

“Oh!” Crecy said. “As I said, you should use caution in these experiments of yours—or perhaps work at greater distance from the rest of us.”

Adrienne smiled lavishly. “I’ll bore you no more. Come!” She put heel to her horse. “Hercule and Duke Francis are just ahead. Let’s see what they have to say.”

Crecy clucked her tongue and followed. They passed their own carriage, knocking along passengerless; a half dozen artillery wagons; then a crooked caterpillar of infantry a hundred yards long. A black wave of doffing hats followed them up the marching column, which Nicolas took great delight in, pointing stubby fingers and cooing. In fact, he seemed almost to be singing a song.

Beyond the infantry marched the duke’s van of musketeers, twenty smartly dressed men, who also doffed their hats as they arrived.

“Good day, ladies,” Duke Francis cheerfully cried as they rode up. “To what do I owe my good fortune?”

“That our carriage has become a torture rack, Your Grace,” Adrienne replied.

“Yes, the roads are terrible, aren’t they? These are indeed unfortunate times.”

Hercule snorted. “The roads have never been good,” he said. “I traveled tracks worse than this before you were born. And always the roads are worse when armies march.”

“You think other armies have marched here recently?” asked Crecy.

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“Certainly in the past year, but recently? Not too, for the villages hereabout are still provisioned, and a real army would have picked them clean.” He cocked his head. “It is good to see you back in saddle, Mademoiselle de Crecy. I wonder if you would care to again take up a uniform as well? We’ve few enough officers.”

Crecy smiled. “My identity is already known,” she said. “I cannot pose as a man here.”

The duke cleared his throat. “You would not be asked to don disguise, Mademoiselle.”

“Then what is the use? Men will not follow me if they know I am a woman—or if they do, still they would be distracted by thoughts other than obeying me.”

“If I say to obey you, they will,” Francis piped.

“Please do not take offense, Your Grace,” Crecy said, “but I fear that might only compel resentment.”

“Well, then,” Hercule returned, “at least ride with me and the light horse. We could reminisce on old times.”

“Perhaps, then, I too shall ride with the light horse,” the young duke interjected gallantly.

Crecy favored him with her loveliest smile. “Perhaps,” she answered. “I am not yet up to anything so exerting.”

Adrienne patted Nicolas, watching the exchange and wondering at how quickly she seemed to have been forgotten. After weeks of being pursued by Hercule and Francis both, it was strange to feel suddenly ignored in favor of the redhead. She supposed that if Crecy had been in good health all the while, she would hardly have been noticed at all.

Then again, she had been withdrawn lately, and she did have little Nico with her. Children seemed to make women invisible to men, or at least translucent.

As Crecy chatted gaily with the two, Adrienne began to excuse herself to go A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

and find Nicolas’ nurse. The distant patter of gunshots stopped her.

“Shit,” Hercule muttered. “That’s from where our outriders were.” He raised his voice to a shout, standing in his stirrups. “Captain! Bring up that cannon.

Infantry!” He wheeled his horse. “Another time, Mademoiselles.” He grunted.

“Crecy, you must look to yourselves.”

“We will.”

A few more shots rang out, somewhat nearer. The duke peered intently ahead, as his guard drew up around him, checking the prime of their carbines and pistols. “It is perhaps nothing,” Francis remarked. “Bandits or drunken soldiers play fighting.” He drew his pistol and laid it nervously across his lap.

“It is likely nothing,” Crecy agreed, “but perhaps we should draw further back.”

“I can’t do that!” Francis muttered. “My men should not think me coward.”

He continued to scan the landscape. They were traveling through a small valley with forested hills around, just the sort of place a marching army ought to avoid. Behind her, Hercule barked orders, echoes of his shouts going down the line.

The mud at their horses’ feet began to spit at them, hissing and flinging up droplets, and at the same moment, a red lotus bloomed from the ear of a young man at the front of the column. He swayed in the saddle long enough for the sound of gunshots to finally reach their ears and for Adrienne to realize that the road had just swallowed a half hundred shots from less accurate snipers. Then the young musketeer joined them in the mud, and all became chaos.

She flattened in the saddle as guns thundered all around her. A thin blue cloud drifted from the trees on the hillside above them, but they could not see the enemy. Their own cavalry screen charged toward the source of the shots; and as Adrienne watched, two horses went down. She wondered where she ought to take Nico. Under Hercule’s direction, the train was drawing up into fighting order; but they were already under attack, and it was impossible to tell where the main enemy thrust would come.

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The answer to that question came all too soon, as horsemen in green uniforms poured down the hill like a wave, sweeping over the Lorraine cavalry.

Hercule’s infantry fired a volley, and though a horse or two tumbled, the general effect was of tossing stones at the ocean.

“Come,” Crecy snapped, wheeling her horse about, but they had nowhere to go, pressed in by the duke’s van. And turning only revealed to Adrienne what she knew she would see: a similar wave, hurtling down the other side of the valley, blades of cloud-gray steel churning above like foam.

Nicolas pointed at them and laughed, not understanding what was happening, and Adrienne gritted her teeth, swallowed down the weak girl she had once been, and did what she had to do. The moment stretched, frozen in time, as she opened the eyes of her
manus oculatus
and saw the malakim clustered about, awaiting her commands. It only took an instant to know what to do.

Seeing for the blind malakim, she looked anew at those ranks of swords, saw them linked by the affinity of the iron for iron, saw further in the iron the bonds of mercury and sulfur, the shivering lux and damnatum, the spidery forces that kept them bound.

“Mediate that,” she told Djinn. “Strengthen the affinities between the iron, liberate the sulfur. Now.”

The webwork connecting the swords thickened, brightened, and then, like lovers divorcing, the mercury and sulfur which made up the iron flew apart. A geometry of lightning connected each blade with the other, pure and white, while the air purred like a giant cicada.

“Now, once more,” she said, turning to the other slope.

When the fire faded, there was no sound at all for a long, long moment. The entire army of Lorraine, struck dumb, gaped at the hillsides, where nothing at all moved, save the swords which—now liquid—trickled from seared, dead hands. Adrienne was aware that she still stood in her saddle, her own hand thrust high, the bright glow from it just dimming, and of eyes and mouths turned to gape at her, as if she were surrounded by fish tossed upon a bank.

But then a sound did begin, starting as low, hoarse cries but finally swelling to A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

fill the valley with joyous shouting.

Cheering. They were cheering for her.

She looked again at the dead men on the hills, and the sluggish breeze brought the roasted smell of them to her. She swayed in her saddle as clamor grew louder, handed Nico to Crecy.

“Take him,” she pleaded, though she could not hear her voice. “Take him before I faint.” And then the saddle fell from under her, and a dark cloud filled her head. And still she heard the shouts, and mixed with them, her name.

10.

Golem

“Far be it fr‘ me’t’ question y’r judgment, Herr Lehrling,” Robert muttered, his face a floating yellow mask in the lamplight, “but this hardly seems sanctuary.”

“Afraid for your Christian blood?” Ben asked mildly.

Robert’s hands appeared, as disembodied as his face, gesturing inconclusively at the low-pressing brick ceiling, the ossuary table and arcane contraptions crowded upon it. “Blood, my eyes. Y’r certain that
it
is gone?”

“No. But the old man said it was, and we’ve proof enough that the demon haunts the castle now.”

“Ah, yes, the wonderful proofs of science. How do you know it cannot haunt
both
places? Or that it has no brother, mother, or uncle left behind?”

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“If you knew of a better place to hide, you should have said so,” Ben grumbled sourly, picking at the dank floor of the vault with thumb and forefinger, wondering if the larger grit he felt might not be bone.