A Calculus of Angels (34 page)

“Listen to me,” Adrienne shouted, her body shuddering with anger, “Listen to me, you
brave
soldiers, you men of Lorraine. You may take food for yourselves and your horses. But the people of this village, save those who try to harm you, you will not touch. If they lift ax or gun or sword against you, kill them. But otherwise, if you touch them—for pleasure, for perversity—I shall smite you dead, I swear it by God almighty. You are men, not
dogs!
If you behave like dogs, I will treat you as such, and bring you to heel.”

They ate, fed their horses, slept in short shifts and were under way again before dawn. There were no more incidents, the townsfolk supplying everything they asked. As the east rouged herself with sunrise, Adrienne counted their number at six less than it had been the previous evening, and was not greatly surprised—two of the missing were those she had stopped from raping the girl.

“I expected it,” Hercule commented quietly.

“They misliked my command,” Adrienne replied. It seemed almost that she should apologize, but could not quite bring herself to do it. “It is just that I have seen men at their worst, and I cannot ride with such again,” she explained instead.

“Nor will you,” he vowed. “They may
have
resented you, but that is between A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

them and the devil. You did what was right, what
I
should have done.” He reached over and squeezed her hand.

“Thank you,” she said. “You are a better man than you pretend, Hercule d’Argenson.”

“And you a better woman than I have ever known.”

That struck deeply, somehow. It was the sort of easy compliment he always gave, but this time he used no bantering tone, affixed no suggestive addendum. It troubled her to hear him so serious, but then, their situation was serious. When they came on better times, he would reform.

At noon they reached a small river—no one knew which— and paused for half an hour to water their horses. Adrienne sat with Nico beneath a tree, surveying the brambled, abandoned fields that stretched to the horizons, broken only by the dense hedges which now forced their flight into a labyrinthine course—a league north, a league east, a league north again. The djinni could no longer show her the duke and his forces, whether because they were dead or simply lost she could not say.

She turned when someone approached, and to her surprise saw that it was one of the men, a young fellow everyone called Mercure, for his fleetness of foot.

He bowed to her as if she were an empress, swallowed, swallowed again.

“Sir?” she prompted.

“Milady. The men have elected me to speak to you.”

“Concerning what?”

“They wish to apologize. You did remind us that we are soldiers and not mere cutthroats, and we are grateful for that. I, that is, we—” He stuttered off as he reached into his haversack and withdrew a wad of cloth—several steinkirks such as the men wore around their throats.

“What is this?” she asked.

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“The men, the ones who—ah, went too far yestereve—”

“The ones who deserted.”

“Oh. No, milady, they did not desert. We—well, we punished them for you. We executed them. We kept these as token.”

“What?”

“Without you, we have no hope, lady. These men displeased you, and to the rest of us, that is a great sin. We wanted to make it clear that your word commands us.”

A peculiar feeling tickled in her belly, a sort of horror, and yet it also felt…

something else. Pleasing, almost.

“Hercule was involved in this?” she asked, fighting for composure.

“No, Mademoiselle. We did not bother either of you with it. The lady de Crecy told us that we should not.”

“Crecy? Crecy came to you with this plan?”

A frightened look crossed Mercure’s face at her rise in tone, and he quickly shook his head. “No, milady. We went to her, once we made up our mind. To make certain we were doing right.” He looked down at his feet and added, “She told us that we were.”

Adrienne gazed at him for a long moment, remembering the girl, remembering her days with Le Loup and all the things she had witnessed. She smiled what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “You did the right thing,” she told him.

“Tell the men that I thank them. But do not do this again without asking me or Hercule, please.”

“Yes, milady.”

“You may leave the cravats. I will keep them.”

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His flush and furtive smile were so young, so endearing, that she could scarcely believe he had been a party to the calculated murder of six men. She watched him go, and, when he was out of sight, covered her mouth, fighting a sudden wave of nausea, but it passed. Nicolas hummed softly, paying no attention to any of it, beating a little rhythm on his leg with hands half closed.

16.

Matter and Soul

“Stay hidden,” Ben hissed to Lenka, “no matter what.”

He could not see her, but she shifted, and he felt the sudden tickle of breath on his cheek. “Be safe,” she said.

“My word on it,” he replied, and then quickly—before Newton himself came to investigate—slid from beneath the tarpaulin and stood, straightening his waistcoat, seeking as much dignity as one crawling from hiding could manage.

Sir Isaac sat at one of the tables, red waistcoat unbuttoned, steinkirk hanging undone, shaking his head. “It is you.” He rose, a very peculiar expression on his face. “Where have you been?”

“Where have I been?” he asked, incredulously. “You ask where I’ve
been?
I’ve been hiding from the army of the Holy Roman Empire, or don’t you remember a certain hunting trip? I do hope you weren’t inconvenienced, sir. I hope you did not need me to find you another book.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Benjamin. Of course I remember. I only meant to say that—well, I’m happy to see you alive, though I wonder that you came back to A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

the castle.”

“Well, sir, I do not intend to stay long,” he said, but it did not come out quite as forcefully as he’d intended. Newton sounded
concerned
—from him that was almost shocking.

“Not long, eh? And yet you have some sneak-thief business in my private laboratory.”

“Yes, sir, I do,” Ben retorted. “I have been neglected by you, nearly murdered by the emperor, chased through wood, river, and alley—and oh, yes, attacked by a demon—and I’m damn well past the point of needing the by-your-leave of anyone to do what I think needs doing.”

“And what is that, Benjamin?”

“I don’t have enough fingers to count.”

“Try.”

Ben pursed his lips. There was something odd about this confrontation.

Newton remained calm, even reasonable seeming, while he found himself nearly shouting in rage. Not that he didn’t have the right, no. But an angry man was a stupid man, as his father used to say. This was no time to be a stupid man.

“Well, then,” he said in a quieter voice, “here is what it comes to. The first thing is to stop your murdering innocents.”

“My murdering?”

“The monster that guards
The Sepher Ha-Razim
has killed at least three servants in the palace on account of you. I intend to end its threat.”

“Very well. Please go on.”

“I have also taken it as my duty to discover whether your claims of a ‘new system’ have any substance, whether it can avert a comet, and if so whether A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

you have any intention of
trying to.
If not, I shall raise the alarm.”

Newton nodded, his brow puckered but otherwise calm. “Despite how shamefully the emperor has treated us?”

Ben snorted. “When I
see you
chased through the woods by hounds and falsely accused of assassination, I’ll allow that you have been treated shamefully, Sir Isaac. Do you know the reason for that theatrical?”

“Of course. The emperor is trying to frighten me into explaining my new system and giving details on what happened to London.”

“If only he knew how little regard you had for me, he could have saved substantial effort.”

“Indeed,” Sir Isaac said mildly. “He could have merely contracted you to steal my secrets for him.”

Ben suddenly found himself nearly shaking with fury. “God strike you for saying that. He offered me my life to betray you, Sir Isaac, and I did not. It isn’t the emperor I came here for. Most people in this city have nothing to do with these petty intrigues, and they do not deserve to die—not for the emperor and not for your damned secrets.”

“I see.” Newton calmly reached for a decanter of red wine, poured himself a glass, and beckoned Ben closer. “Would you care to sit while I answer your charges, Mr. Franklin?”

Ben shook his head. “The subject stands while his majesty reclines. I shall continue standing.”

Newton sighed. “Very well, Benjamin, if you insist on childishness.” He sipped his wine. “Let me first congratulate you on entering the tower. It must not have been an easy thing, and I would never have known that you were here were it not for my servants.”

Ben bit his tongue; he was sure he knew what “servants” Sir Isaac meant, but there was no point in saying so. He hoped Newton did not also know about A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

Lenka.

“Next, let me ease your mind as to that first matter. The malakus that guarded the book has been contained.”

“Contained?”

“Yes. It took me some small time to contrive it, but it is no longer a threat.”

“Meantime three people died.”

“What would you have me do? I did not intend that they should die. May I go on?”

Ben set his mouth stubbornly. “Contained how? Where?”

Newton smiled, and waved in the direction of the strange automaton. “It is there, in my talos, and entirely under my control. Now, the rest requires a longer answer. Perhaps I was mistaken and should have taken you into my new system earlier, though I don’t see that it would have helped anything. In fact, if I had not made it clear to the emperor that you had no knowledge of it, you may well have been tortured. The emperor must
not
have my knowledge.

As to this supposed comet of which the Muscovite kidnapper babbled—I assure you, Benjamin, there is no comet.”

“No comet? But—”

“A tactic to frighten and confuse, nothing more. I have secure methods of discovering such things, and I assure you that there are no heavenly bodies threatening Prague. Really, Benjamin, did you think, after London, that I would leave myself no means of warning?”

“Begging your pardon, but how am I to believe that? You are the one who taught me only to believe the evidence of observations. You’ve as much as said that you would abandon Prague to its fate. How can I be sure that this isn’t merely a device on your part to convince me to leave? You do intend to leave, don’t you?”

A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

“Yes, presently. If I do not, the emperor will lose all patience. At the moment he is mollified, for I gave him part of what he wanted, but that will not last long.”

“What did you give him?”

“Youth. In the end, he will not thank me, I think.”

“I…” Ben was stunned. “I thought you said you could not replicate that feat.”

“Replicate it, yes. Comprehend it, no.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will. I am forced to it, now, Benjamin. If you will sit, and be civil with me, I’ll give you what you came here to steal. I will explain my new system to you.

And I will also explain that your fear of Prague becoming another London is the least thing that mankind has to worry about.”

Newton said, after a moment, “I must tell you of events that occurred some years ago. Exceeding strange events which changed the direction of my thoughts. My
Principia
had just been revised, and some fresh questions came to my mind. I began reflecting upon the prophecies and chronologies of the ancient kingdoms, and I saw that the ancients had knowledge of the laws of gravity, of the inverse-square law, and the like. I came to realize that they knew everything I had ‘discovered,” and much more besides, and that this knowledge had been lost. Or, rather, not lost, but stolen—stolen from mankind by the malakim.“

“Stolen? How do you mean?”

“More patience. It was about this time, you see, that I had my first contact with the malakim. They wrote to me upon my aetherschreiber. Naturally, I was at first skeptical of what they claimed to be, but I made certain tests—asking them to observe experiments that I conducted near at hand—and in the end I was convinced that there were, indeed, mysterious intelligences in the aether. I continued to correspond with them, and at first they seemed a great help to me.”

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“Do you know what they are?”

“Surely you have guessed. You tell me.”

“They seem— Well, if atoms are bound by ferments into particular forms, we can also guess that ferments exist without there being matter in them.”

“Yes, as Boyle proved. Go on.”

“I surmise that these malakim are ferments without matter, but ferments of a very special nature, such as those, perhaps, which contain our own souls.”

Newton nodded indulgently. “Very fine reasoning, and insofar as my experiments show, correct. They exist as configurations of harmonies and affinities, but with little or no matter in them. I have postulated that there may be a fifth sort of atom, a particle which makes up souls, but none of my investigations have borne it out conclusively. I now believe souls propagate more in the fashion of a wave, like the affinity linking aetherschreibers, an instantaneous wave unfettered by distance, as gravity and magnetism are.”

“You have proven the existence of the human soul?”

“Certainly—we have two of them. I have the proofs.”

“And the malakim are bodiless souls?”

“Not exactly. They are more and less than that. I would be disingenuous if I claimed I understood them entirely—as I said, many of my experiments have not borne fruit. The Bible and cabalistic texts speak of a separate creation of the malakim and human souls, and I am inclined to that view.” He leaned back, brow furrowed in thought.

“In any event,” Sir Isaac began again, “they are creatures of the aether. They