A Calculus of Angels (51 page)

More than a little rotten, the wood tore, and he burst up through it and another foot of water and was breathing again. The air was sweet, but not so sweet that he did not notice a man, some thirty feet away, pop-eyed and gaping in the flickering light, raising a pistol.

Snarling, Ben drew his sword and threw it, following it as fast as he could, water sucking at his legs. The man—seated on a small stool—cursed and scrambled away from flying steel, lost his balance and fell to one knee. The smallsword spanged against the wall behind him, and though he kept his A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

pistol, he did not manage to get it back around in time to meet Ben’s charge.

Ben crashed into him, and the two of them smacked into the wall, the guard getting the worst of it. Ben got a brief impression of a roundish face and the stink of wine, felt the stranger’s hard muscles writhe beneath him before the gun clubbed against the side of his head. Yowling, he jerked back, and a hand fastened onto the front of his face, clawing at his eyes. He punched weakly at his opponent’s gut, and then, as nails dug around his eye sockets, drove a right fist into the fellow’s throat. The claw on his face slackened, and Ben hit him again so hard that it felt as if his hand were broken. The man let go completely then, and Ben scrambled up. Seeing his opponent still trying to rise, Ben kicked him hard, once in the side of the head and once in the ribs.

The guard stopped moving, though he continued to breathe, and Ben spun wildly around, feeling a hundred other pistols aimed at him. But there were no other guards, and no place for them to hide either, and so he relaxed and finally let himself glance at the two figures chained to the far wall, a man and a woman.

“Lenka?” he said. “Lenka?” She was manacled with hands behind her back, blindfolded. The Indian was next to her, contorting, trying to get his feet up and through his arms so that his hands would be in front of him.

“Benjamin? Benjamin, is that you?”

He rushed over and nearly collapsed next to her, tugging the cloth from her eyes, stroking her hair. “Are you hurt? Lenka, did they hurt you?”

Her eyes were bloodshot, her hair bedraggled, her face smudged with dirt. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. “No,” she said. “No, Benjamin, I’m well. We have to hurry. There are more of these men.”

“Lenka, I—I’m very glad to see you.”

“And I you. But quickly!”

Ben nodded, a little chagrined, wondering where that perfect thing to say had gone. He returned to the guard and searched him, discovering a ring of keys in his coat pocket. He hurried back and tried them in Lenka’s manacles until one A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

fit and reluctantly turned. She shook her hands free, groaning.

“Thank you,” she managed.

“Lenka—”

“Red Shoes,” she muttered, crawling toward the Indian. She removed his blindfold, revealing haggard, dark eyes.

“Merci,”
he mumbled, and then to Ben, “Many thanks. You are a brave man.”

“I told you we would be freed,” Lenka said, squeezing the Indian’s hand.

Ben snapped out of his paralysis and unshackled Red Shoes.

“I am sorry for any discomfort I may have caused you,” the Indian said, stretching his arms and trying to rise.

Ben stared at him without comprehension for a second, and then gaped. “You!

You sent me the vision.”

“Yes. I hoped you would understand.”

“But how—”

“Please,” Lenka said. “Please, talk later.”

“Aye,” Ben said. “Lenka, can you swim?”

“She is weak,” Red Shoes said. “You must help her.”

“And you?” But the vision surged through Ben again, and he knew that the Indian could not swim.

“I will follow you.”

“But you can’t—”

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“I will follow you,” Red Shoes insisted, his black eyes sparkling. “The rope is still there?”

“Yes.”

“Take her, then.”

Ben nodded. “I can come back and help you, too.”

“No need.”

Ben nodded and hurried to retrieve his sword. He eyed the gun, but saw no point in carrying it with him through the water. Besides, he had a pistol in the boat.

“Come on, then,” he said to Lenka. “Hold around my neck.”

She nodded, and they entered the water again. His fight with the guard had given him a febrile new strength, but it was now flagging, and he found even Lenka’s slight form a burden, though one he bore gladly.

They came up, gasping, in the dark of the canal.

“Hassim!” he hissed.

“Here,” came the answer, and a slender hand closed on his own. Treading water, he helped Hassim draw Lenka into the boat and then painfully dragged himself in, too, nearly upsetting the gondola. For a long moment, he could only lie back and draw labored breath.

“We go now?” Hassim asked.

“No,” Ben managed, “one more coming.”

“Yes, and someone there, too,” Hassim said, gesturing. Down where another canal connected with the one they were in, the corner of a building was visible, illumined by an approaching light.

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“Shh,” Ben hissed, feeling around for his pistol. He found it, wishing he had enough light to check the prime, and cocked back the hammer. A moment later, two gondolas came around the corner, lanthorns dangling from their jutting, ornamental prows. For an instant, his heart seized as it had when the Golem touched it, for beneath their black tricorns, the faces of the passengers were bone white with almost no features.

“That’s them,” Lenka gasped, even as the masked men began shouting. Ben did not know Italian, but he knew a curse when he heard one, and now he heard a string of them. He also noted them reaching into their dark cloaks.

“Hold!” Ben shouted, standing in the rocking craft, pistol pointed at the closest man, a fellow with a red plume in his hat that Ben guessed to be some mark of distinction. “Hassim, translate!”

“No translation is necessary,” one of the masked men said.

“Well enough. Let me tell you who I am. I am Benjamin Franklin from Boston, the apprentice of Sir Isaac Newton, and I am the one with gun already drawn.

You, sir—” he said, waving at a fellow in the back, shadowed, who seemed to be moving stealthily, “if you please, do not move, or I shall be forced to kill you.”

“You can only shoot once,” the English speaker said reasonably.

“Not so. This gun can shoot many times. Do you think that the man who invented the firedrake and the fervefactum cannot make a pistol that will fire more than once?”

He could not tell what effect this had, but he noted that the men in the boats seemed to have become quite statuelike.

“Now,” Ben went on, “I’ve told you who
I
am. Let me tell you who
you
are. You are the men who wronged my friends.”

“We do what we do for Venice,” the fellow replied.

“Well, and here I would be saving your precious Venice were it not that I had to come and fetch my friends from the likes of you. Now, understand this: I A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

don’t really give a good God-rot-you who owns Venice in a few days, or whether she sinks into the sea—far less what happens to you clown-faced fellows. But at the moment, I do care; for I am her guest, and I do not want my accommodations moved to Muscovy. And so I will go back to defend your city, whilst you brave patriots skulk here in the dark after fierce young women to kidnap. You have my leave to go, my fellows.”

“That won’t do,” the man said, reaching into his cloak.

“Well and good,” Ben replied, and shot him clean in the face, smashing the mask below the nose and all his teeth besides. “Away,” he snapped to Hassim, reaching for his other pistol, marveling at the luck of his shot. He was amazed at how cold and calm he felt.

A second gun—one of the enemy’s—blazed in the narrow way, and Ben heard the bullet whine from one wall to the next. Hassim had begun working the oar when Ben pointed carefully, slowly, the way Robert had taught him, and fired again, producing a harsh gurgle from someone.

Then Ben turned on his aegis and tried to stand so as to shield Lenka and Hassim.

“Red Shoes—” Lenka shouted from behind.

“Later!” Ben grunted. “It’ll have to be later!”

Then the real thunder began, and Ben had barely time to hope that the aegis would withstand a fusillade better than it had a single bullet back in Prague.

Weirdly enough, it seemed that the shots somehow resounded, not just in the alleyway, but in the sky itself.

11.

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The Long Black Being

Red Shoes stretched his stiff muscles and glanced around the chamber, knowing that he didn’t have long to prepare himself. The scent of his soul drifted thickly in the deeps surrounding him, and he had no place left to hide.

A pragmatic part of him noted the guard’s fallen pistol, and he picked that up, taking his smallsword and dagger as well before manacling the unconscious man where he himself had been imprisoned a few moments before. That done, he righted the stool, sat on it, and began a chant.

“Red Panther of the East

Loan me your eyes, Loan me your strength,

I stand amongst graves in the Darkening Land. I have need of you.

“Red Peregrine of the East

Loan me your sharp breast,

Loan me your flint talons,

The Imprecator names me in the Ghostland.

I have need of you.

“Red Thunder of the East

Loan me your copper war club,

Loan me your rattlesnake armbands.

The Black Spider watches me from the Sundeath Country.

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I have need of you.“

As he chanted, his ghost sight awoke. In his weakened state, it was hard not to be pulled entirely in, to forget about his mortal eyes—as had ancient Panther Dreaming in the village of Abika, who never remembered how to see the living world again, who mumbled constantly of things unseen and did not notice the drool on his own chin. Thus did
isht ahollo
die, when they died. Not the harsh, bright victory of a battlefield death, but the terrible unraveling of soul bereft of shadow.

Courage,
he thought, and chanted a little more of the war song, the quickening song, the song for remembering the path. And now the spirit water engulfed him. He took it into his lungs and began to drown.

A ball of molten shot spattered red an inch from Ben’s eyes, but the other projectiles twisted around him, struck sparks from the walls; and despite himself he laughed. Hassim had his stroke, now, and the gondola was gliding fast. As they turned the corner, their attackers remained stationary, frantically reloading their weapons or trying to doctor their companions. In the distance, titans still pounded on their drums. The attack on Venice was renewed.

“We have to go back for Red Shoes,” Lenka insisted.

“We can’t,” Ben said. “I’m sorry. I’m grateful to him, for he helped me find you; and I swear that afterward, if I can, I will find him. But listen! The tsar is firing his cannon, and we do not want to
be
in Venice when he reaches her, I assure you. Never mind that I am sworn to be elsewhere at the very moment, that many more people are depending upon me. The Indian made his choice.”

“He might not be able to swim. Did you think of that?”

“I thought of it,” Ben snapped, angry at his own guilt—for he
knew
the Indian couldn’t swim. “But if we go back, those men will kill us, do you see, and this will have all been for naught, for I’m
not
going to let you die.”

A shaft of light glanced down from a high window, and her face appeared for a moment, determined, tear wet, astonished. “Listen,” he said, “Red Shoes was ransomed, too. They won’t do anything to him.”

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“You
shot
some of them,” she said. “That might make them a bit unreasonable.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Ben asked, exasperated. “Leave you to have bombs dropped on you? Hand you back to those nice fellows? Come, Lenka, with your sharp tongue, tell me what, in hindsight, I
should
‘have done!” He caught his breath for a sullen second. “And to think that I thought—” Then he checked himself, glad for the darkness, and took another deep breath, and another, relieved to have stopped short of making an even greater ass of himself.

“Thought what?” she asked.

“Nothing. Keep quiet—they might be following.”

She did keep quiet, too, long enough for him to begin to regret himself. He was so tired, so worn—yet Lenka must have endured much more, chained in the dark for days.

“Listen,” Hassim hissed, but Ben had already heard— Among the duel of giants, from back the way they had come, a sudden flurry of small gunfire echoed. Lenka gasped, but said nothing, and they traveled for a while in silence.

Drowning, he gazed into the stillness of a swamp, its water like iron in the last minutes of the sun’s rays. Between the sinewed columns of cypress rose the inconstant green glow of fireflies, and the air creaked with frog songs and the disconsolate imprecation of a whippoorwill. He knew where he was: near the beginning of things. The obscure shadowed hill behind him was Nanih Waiyah, from whose caves the Choctaw had first emerged. It was a thin place on the skin of the Earth, saturated in the swamp his people called Lunsa, the Darkening.

Something across from the Darkening, grinning a faintly phosphorescent grin.

It was as long and lean as a snake, nearly as sinuous, but as it emerged it unfolded narrow limbs—like a praying mantis or a walkingstick, with fingers as thin and sharp as porcupine quills. Its skin was not uniformly black, but mottled like a frog’s, or even more like the tail of a peacock, darker and A CALCULUS OF ANGELS

somehow more iridescent. As it towered over him, eyes blinked open in its palms, fingers, wrists, elbows, scattered across its torso, green as the fireflies with the vertical black pupils of a copperhead.

“I have been awaiting you, Long Black Being,” Red Shoes said.

“Indeed?” The thing even sounded drawn thin, as if its voice were still under the earth and water, traveling up through a long pipe. “I thought you were hiding from me.”