Empire of Unreason (47 page)

She reached over and grasped his hand. It was the first time they
had touched since before Irena died. He did not return her grip,
but he did not shake it off, either.

“It’s so wonderful to be right, once in a while,” he muttered.

Nearby, Father Castillion broke into fervent prayer.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

9.

Keres

“Fire!”

Oglethorpe felt like Zeus, calling the lightning. But the hill he
commanded was somewhat less than Olympus, and after the
redcoats were done falling, they sent their own bolts right back up,
drumming the ancient oaks and hickory, ripping into the rich black
loam—but not into his men. Trees eight feet in diameter made good
shields.

“That got their attention,” Parmenter whooped.

Oglethorpe nodded, peeking out from behind the tree. The redcoats
had formed ranks again right in the open heart of the old fields,
despite the fact that they certainly couldn’t see the Continental
Army above them. All around him, Indians, rangers, and dragoons
slunk from tree to tree, hunting for a better angle for the next
volley.

When Oglethorpe felt cowardly, he reminded himself that the army
that had once outnumbered them two to one now had four times
their number, despite the plenitude of redcoats they had emptied.

More troops had arrived from Charles Town, probably ferried
there by airship—which meant that Unoka had failed in his mission.

Or abandoned it
, a nastier part of him thought.

“Fire!” he shouted again, and a hundred or so muskets bellowed.

Again, the return volley; and again it left him and his men
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untouched. Below, the redcoats closed ranks where their fellows
had fallen.

“They’re draggin‘ up ordnance.” Parmenter grunted. “Looks like
the wildfire guns.”

James saw the long tubes Parmenter had noticed, carried by taloi,
two to a gun.

“We’ll retreat over the hill,” he said. “We already know how these
work.” They had received a nasty surprise two days before, when
the weapons were first used. They jetted a viscous, burning
substance for unlikely distances. He had lost thirty men in the last
exchange.

Fortunately they were big, and took a few minutes for even the
supernaturally strong automatons to get into place. Now that he
knew what they were, it was a simple matter to hit fast and hard,
then vanish back into the forest.

The signal for retreat went back, but Oglethorpe himself kept
watching. They still had a few minutes before the guns could
threaten. He called the drummer over, a boy scarcely more than
fourteen.

“Beat the ‘Grenadiers March,” “ he said, ”to taunt ’em.“

The boy nodded, and without a single worried glance down the hill,
began beating the tune. His rangers caught the sound, and as they
retreated, they whooped and shouted insults down the hill.

Aside from insulting them, Oglethorpe’s fondest hope was that one
of the redcoat commanders would lose his temper and lead a
charge up the hill.
He
sure as the devil would, if he were in their
situation.

Instead, they sent up another useless volley as the taloi situated the
guns.

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“That’s enough, boy—go on over the hill.”

“I’ll wait for you, sir.”

“Do
not
question my command. Go!”

Still beating the march, the boy followed his orders.

Oglethorpe unlimbered his flintlock, took careful sight on the
fellow who seemed to be supervising the automatons, and squeezed
the trigger.

The redcoat took two steps, head turning this way and that, as if he
thought one of his own men had struck him with a fist. Then he
looked down at his coat.

One thing about the redcoats—you didn’t usually see them bleed at
this distance. But you could see them fall, which the fellow did after
another confused second or two, though by that time two soldiers
had rushed up to support him.

The first of the wildfire guns shot then, and a trail of blazing oil—or
whatever it was—splashed up through the trees toward him. It
missed by thirty yards, but just the same, he figured it time to go.

He slung the musket over his shoulder and started up the hill at a
brisk pace. The guns
whooshed
behind him, but he didn’t look back.

His men cheered as he joined them on the ridge, and he
acknowledged them with a wave as he found his steed and
mounted. Tomochichi, already on his horse, gave him a nod.

“We’ll devil ‘em into chasing us up here yet,” he said. “Once we’ve
got ’em in the hills, I daresay we can do some good work.”

“They have restraint, but no other sort of sense,” Tomochichi said.

“Will they even take cover when we attack?”

“Not if we’re lucky. It’s not how they fight in Europe.”

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“Your men are European.”

“Most were born here, and have been fighting with Indians and
Spanish their whole lives. I was trained on the Continent, and at
first could not understand the American method of fighting myself.”

“You do it well enough now.”

“Yes. I don’t like it, though. I’m a man for the hard charge, not for
this sort of skulk fighting. But winning is more important than my
sensibilities.”

“
We
count it an honorable way to fight,” Tomochichi reminded him.

“I know,” Oglethorpe replied. “And—”

He never finished the thought, for at that instant a pillar of flame
exploded scarcely four yards from him, and then three more. It
deafened him—for all of the gaping mouths and rearing mounts, he
heard nothing but the biggest damn church bells in the world, right
in his ear.

He fought for control of his mount, furious. How had his scouts
missed the redcoats placing guns high enough to reach them here?

Seeking cannon would do it, if they had something to seek, but—

Then a shadow passed over, and he saw an airship like the one that
had attacked Fort Moore. And another, and another.

Adrienne studied the approaching storm. “This is a very bad thing,”

she said.

“Ah,” Hercule said, “ah. And here I, with no scientifical training,
was not worried in the least. How fortunate that I have a
philosopher to enlighten me. What say you to
this,
demoiselle de
logick? What say we take our ships and leave,
now,
before this ‘very
bad thing’ has opportunity to prove to us just how bad it
is?
What
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say you to that?”

“It seems in no great hurry,” Adrienne observed. “We will not leave
until all the ships are ready and everyone back aboard.”

“That will take several more minutes. Minutes we may not have.”

“What have they done?” Crecy asked in a voice that sent little chills
up Adrienne’s spine, as even the sight of the thing did not. “What in
the name of all unholy have they
done?”

The storm was sliding down the mountain, as if anegg had been
broken on the misty peaks, an egg with a sun for a yolk. It left
behind it a trail of white vapor several miles wide. The eye grew
brighter and larger as it moved, gone from its original sulking red
to the color of lightning.

Adrienne referred to her instruments and revised her first opinion
of the storm’s speed: it looked slow only because of distance. She
now calculated it was moving some thirty or forty miles an hour,
which was around the top speed of the airships. For the moment, it
was following the contours of the land, but they had already seen it
airborne. Hercule might be right—it might be able to move more
quickly in the air.

“What is it doing?” Crecy asked.

Adrienne studied it, trying to understand it herself.

“I see two vortices,” she said after a moment, “one on top of the
other, joined at the eye—that burning point. The bottom one turns
clockwise and draws matter in. Not all matter, but a certain
compound—I think it is the substance of graphite, or coal. The trees
and soil become vapor when it leaves them, or they catch fire from
the heat first and the dark ash of the smoke is sucked in. That
spirals into the center, where—I’m not sure
what
is happening
there. It’s not exactly transmutation—it’s as if the ferments
themselves are being crushed together, mangled into a new
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substance. Much heat and lux are released—you see that part—and
a hurricane of gas and some new substance comes whirling out
anticlockwise.”

“Poisonous gases?”

“Perhaps. It does not really matter, because they are so hot they
would kill any living thing.”

“My God.”

“I imagine God has little to do with this. This is one of
Swedenborg’s engines. It is also alive—a malakus.”

“A destroying angel.” Crecy’s voice was flat. “An old dream of
theirs, made finally real.”

“If you have held anything back concerning this, you should speak
now, Veronique.”

“I keep nothing from you,” Crecy replied softly. “Nothing like this
has ever existed before save in the darkest desires of the

malfaiteurs.”

“Thanks to Swedenborg, it exists now. What could he have been
thinking? He is not an evil man.”

“He doesn’t have to be,” Crecy replied. “He only need be gullible.

I’m with Hercule. We should leave. Now.”

“When all are aboard,” Adrienne repeated absently.

She was mesmerized by the beauty of it, the sheer audacity of scale.

The substance of graphite was a universal one in living things. She
had studied it and written a small treatise on it some years before.

It was present in the earth and plants and beasts, even in the very
atmosphere. Diamonds were made of it. When this thing finally
quenched its thirst, nothing living would remain on Earth—nothing
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composed of matter, that is. The malakim would be immune to its
appetites.

In her paper, she had speculated that graphite was the substance
into which God had breathed life—the clay metaphorically referred
to in Genesis. If that was so, then life would not only end, it could
never exist again. That aspect of God’s creation would be undone
forever.

She had never bothered herself to conceive of something like this—

another unforgivable stupidity, for evidently Swedenborg had.

She heard a soft gasp; Linne and Emilie had joined her at the rail.

“There is a new sort of angel for you, Linne. How will you name it?”

she asked softly.

He didn’t answer. By now the fringes of the monster had reached
the outer settlements of New Moscow, and it seemed to gather
speed. The burning eye was far too bright to stare at directly, even
obscured by the ash swirling in and the inferno rushing out. It was
still miles away, but she could smell it. It was a sharp smell,
metallic, not at all like smoke.

“A new genus?” Linne asked finally, his voice thick with fear. “As
we discussed, a creation, like the taloi? Is it then the same?”

“You are the namer,” she said.

“Angelos keres,”
he murmured.
“Keres
for the Greek bringers of
death.” His voice was shaking.

“Well done,” Adrienne told him. “Don’t forget to write it down.”

The ship was beginning to sway with the force of the wind. They
were all now sweating, for the approaching air was steaming.

“All are aboard, Adrienne! For pity’s sake!” Hercule seemed unable
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to look at the thing chewing toward them. She had never known a
braver man than Hercule, but everyone had a different breaking
point when it came to terror. Some men who would sneer into the
mouth of a cannon would run cursing from a spider. To her,
however dangerous, the keres was beautiful. But to Hercule, or
anyone who could not see its full complexity, it must appear more
unnatural than any spider.

“Let’s go, then,” she said.

The airships below were already rising to join them as their own
lumbered into forward motion, swaying unsteadily. Above, the
ruby globes with their captive ifrits howled a thin counterpoint to
their approaching cousin.

“Heading?” Hercule asked.

“Inland. Over the mountains.”

“That’s where that thing just came from.”

“I know.”

“God damn it all,” Hercule snapped, but he did as she directed.

They rose as quickly as they dared, and the heat followed them up
as the keres gorged on New Moscow. Even as it did so, she saw two
spots of red fire rise above—the airship Menshikov had stolen and
another—one of the governor’s.