Leopard in Exile (48 page)

to gain the sympathy of the mob at the same time.

"Gib' me whut yo' done stole from me!" Annie bellowed.

The serpents slid over her neck and shoulders, but she paid no attention to them.

"Kneel and I will let you live," d'Charenton answered.

Beside Annie's vitality the diabolist looked even more like an old man rotted through with drugs and age,

held to life by malice alone. He raised one bloated white paw and gestured toward her.

At first, whatever d'Charenton had done did not seem to have any effect.

Annie uncoiled an enormous black snake from around her neck, held it out in her two hands, and flung it

toward d'Charenton. It should have struck him, but somehow it fell short, writhing against the

blood-covered stones for a moment before squirming away, and it was as if that failure had hurt her

somehow. Close as he was, Wessex could see the beads of sweat that sprang up against Annie's skin,

and her face twisted as if she were suddenly in pain. She grabbed for another of her serpents, but this

time the one she touched turned on her, sinking its fangs deep into her hand.

She cried out in shock and pain, and all the snakes she carried dropped away from her body as though

she had suddenly shed a fabulous cloak. Wessex heard scattered outcries from the crowd as people

jumped to avoid them, but still he could not get a clear shot at d'Charenton.

Now Annie coughed, and suddenly her mouth was painted red with fresh blood. She shook her head

Like a bull maddened by flies, and took a step forward, her hands outstretched, obviously intending to

choke the life from d'Charenton.

She never reached him. At the next step her knees buckled beneath her and she fell, vomiting bright

blood. She gazed up at d'Charenton, and Wessex saw her furious eyes glaze over in death. She died

trying to reach her enemy.

"Does anyone else challenge my power?" d'Charenton cried in glee. The crowd murmured in confused

agitation. D'Charenton bent over to kiss Annie's bloodstained mouth.

"Dead or alive, I believe the lady would find your attentions unwelcome," Wessex called into the silence

as he thrust open the door of the armory. The soldiers guarding d'Charenton had been stunned by the

uncanny nature of Annie Christmas' death. Still Koscuisko did not fire. This was the best chance Wessex

would have.

D'Charenton recoiled at the sound of the familiar voice. His eyes widened as he recognized Wessex, but

he made a quick recovery, rising to his feet and bowing slightly.

"M'sieur le Due d'Anglais! How odd to find you here—but how fitting. You, of all men, should

understand what I have come here to do, for death has always been your tool."

D'Charenton's guards looked behind themselves at Wessex, unsure whether he was friend or foe. They

shuffled uncertainly—but the sight of a pistol raised against their master would decide them. Wessex

lowered it and stepped forward.

"I do not care to listen to your ravings," he answered coolly. "I have come to destroy you, d'Charenton.

If your power is as great as you say, you will not need your soldiers to stop me. If it is not, perhaps it is

not enough to protect mem, either."

It was a gamble—a calculated insult both to d'Charenton's vanity and his followers' self-interest. Wessex

took another step forward, hoping his bluff would get him close enough to fire.

But d'Charenton threw up his hand, and the guards turned toward Wessex, closing ranks again.

"Throw down your gun, M'sieur le Due d'Wessex," d'Charenton called from behind them. "I think guns

are so uncivilized, don't you? The sword is the true weapon of the aristocrat. Throw down your gun,

English spy, and perhaps I will let you try your steel before you die.
Do it
! If you do not, I will order

them to shoot."

Still no shot came from above, and now Wessex feared that Koscuisko had met some foe of his own

there in the darkness. Reluctantly, Wessex did as he was bid, turning the pistol to shake the powder out

of the pan and then tossing it to the stones. D'Charenton beckoned him forward, mad eyes alight, and

now the soldiers fell back.

Wessex stepped from the doorway into the square. His boots slipped on the blood-wet stone as he

came ever closer to d'Charenton. The point of his sword angled upward
en garde
, moments away from

finding its home in the diabolist's heart, and he wondered what d'Charenton could hope to gain by this

mummery. Even if he used against Wessex whatever force had slain Annie, Wessex would have enough

time to plunge the point of his sabre into d'Charenton's heart before he died.

Slowly the air seemed to grow darker, as if black flames licked at the edges of Wessex's vision. He

knew better than to take his eyes from d'Charenton's face, but even the torches behind the diabolist

seemed to be growing dim. Somehow, though, that seemed only to be expected, a natural and

unremarkable event. Wessex's sword-point remained steady as he paced forward to within striking

range.

But the metal burned his fingers in a puzzling way, and his fingers seemed suddenly clumsy. Wessex

stopped and shook his head violently to clear it, but d'Charenton did not take advantage of his inattention

to riposte. Heartened by his luck, Wessex paced forward once again, beginning to wonder why he had

not yet reached striking distance.

He was cold.

It was that sudden lash of unnatural sensation that galvanized Wessex out of the daze into which he had

fallen. He swung his sword in a wide arc, staring around himself, but there was nothing. Only the

blackness of shadows, and d'Charenton's white face shining before like a captive moon. The man was

smiling, daring Wessex to come against him, and Wessex knew that somehow he had fallen into a trap of

magie
worse than the one that had killed Annie Christmas. He lunged, committing everything he had in

one great attack.

Now Wessex ran forward, slashing with his blade as though he engaged a multitude. He knew he must

be in position, but somehow the sword-thrust did not reach d'Charenton, though d'Charenton had not

moved. He
must
reach his foe—he
had
to have reached him by now, but still d'Charenton stood,

inviolate as the moon, and Wessex felt his limbs tremble with mortal fatigue. He would never move, and

Wessex would never reach him.

"You see, M'sieur le Due?" d'Charenton said pedantically, as though the two of them were scholars

engaged in the bloodless pursuit of knowledge. "My power is greater than yours, as Magic is greater than

Science. The pallid day of Reason is past, and I will usher in an era of eternal night."

Why doesn't Koscuisko fire
? Wessex wondered desperately. Koscisko could see the square—he must

see that Wessex was in trouble.

Unless Illya Koscuisko was already dead.

"It is, in its way, a pity. You could have been so much more fitting an opponent for me than you chose to

be. But you restricted yourself to mechanical tricks, renouncing the hermetic birthright of your noble

blood. You stood upon the shore of a vast sea of knowledge, and you never even played among the

waves."

D'Charenton's voice grew somehow larger. Wessex's sight was fading, and his fingers were already so

numb that he could not tell whether they still grasped the hilt of his sword or not, but as his senses had

dimmed d'Charenton's voice had taken on shape, and color, and texture, until each word he spoke was

somehow a separate entity, and Wessex stood amidst them, surrounded by his enemies.

I have lost
, he thought in a last brief moment of clarity, and cursed his own arrogance, for even when he

had seen what d'Charenton had made of Nouvelle-Orléans, he had thought the man's Satanic games of

torture and humiliation only a nasty recreation for a madman, and not that they had true power…

In the darkness, Illya Koscuisko waited at the window overlooking the Square, waiting for Wessex to

appear. He did not see Annie Christmas approach and die, nor the moment when his partner stepped out

of hiding. He gazed down at the Square, and did not see that the images before him were tangled in a

terrible web of
potential
, forever on the verge of action, never yet reaching that moment. And so he

waited…

Their progress toward the Cathedral became a terrible game of cat and mouse. Sarah and Meriel fled

across back gardens and through alleyways, always away from the sound of marching feet. Each time

they thought they had lost the soldiers and began heading for their destination, the sound of booted feet

followed, forever between them and their destination, harrying them away. If not for her faery sight,

which showed them every escape route, the two of them would have been caught and killed already.

Meriel's face was streaked with frantic tears, and as the minutes stretched to hours, a slow terrible anger

grew in Sarah, until it shook her with every beat of her heart. They had reached the street once again, six

hundred yards from their destination, and ahead of them Sarah heard the tramping feet once more.

Meriel cowered back against the steps of some absent Creole's fine house, her face drawn with

weariness and the anguish of failing once again.

I will not permit this to go on
, a voice from Sarah's deepest self said slowly.
It is not right
.

It was as if her will alone became her weapon, her sword and shield against the darkness.

"Meriel," she said gently. "Will you do something for me?"

"Of course—if I can," her friend answered in a low whisper.

"When the soldiers come, run. Run around them, run toward the Cathedral as fast as you can," Sarah

said. "Do not wait for me."

"But—but where will you be?" Meriel asked. The cup trembled in her hands with the exhaustion of the

hours of running.

"I will be here," Sarah said, baring her teeth in a terrible smile of anger. "Now stand back in the alley

where they will not see you."

Meriel nodded, and Sarah knelt behind the brick steps of the nearest house. The moment the light cast by

the cup left her, Sarah was drowned in a suffocating sense of terror and despair. The soldiers would fire

when they saw her. She was asking Meriel to run into a hail of bullets. This plan would not work. It

would fail. She would fail. They would both die here, for nothing.

No
. The denial came from a place deeper than reason, deeper than sense, from the place where the

instinct for survival lives. But Sarah's instinct was not for her own survival. It was for the victory of the

Light over the Dark, an instinct as uncompromising as a mother's need to protect her child. In its service

men had died upon sword-blades and upon the gallows, and now Sarah was one of their number. She

swung her ammunition bag down off her shoulder, pulled back the rifle-bolt, and waited, her entire being

concentrated down to one tiny ferocious flame of indomitable will. She would triumph here, even in

death.

No matter what, she would not run.

The soldiers appeared—twelve men and their leader—their faces clear to her magical sight. And it

seemed to Sarah now that she saw them that there was something oddly beast-like about their

faces—not in the way that Grandfather Bear was a beast, but as if whatever was human in the spirit of

these men had suffered some terrible injury, and their faces bore the scars. The leader of the soldiers

pointed toward Sarah, and red firelight shimmered down the blade of his sword.

Sarah fired, kneeling. And then lay down behind her cover, reloaded her breech-loading rifle, and fired

again.

A soldier of His Majesty King Henry could fire three shots a minute with the Baker rifle, but the Baker

had to be charged with ball, powder, and patch, and the whole rammed home down the length of the

barrel with the ramrod. The Farland she bore loaded at the breech, and did not take a ramrod. Every

fifteen seconds—four times each minute—working in the darkness with the certitude of one who might

have been blind for life, Sarah fired again. She did not have to rise to her knees to load. She did not have

to expose herself to the enemy. She fired again and again, as steady and remorseless as a ticking clock,

as the soldiers' shots exploded around her, spraying her face with brick dust and filling the night with

rolling clouds of black powder gunsmoke.

She did not hear the moment when Meriel fled toward the church, and blinded by the repeating flash of

gunfire, Sarah did not see the Grail's glow depart. Walls of gunsmoke rolled through the street, and Sarah

knew that soon the enemy soldiers would flank her, would catch her in an unanswerable cross-fire, and

her life would be over.

But Meriel would get through to do the thing that the enemy would kill to prevent. Sarah would have the

victory she fought for.

Another bullet struck the bricks, but this one came from behind. Sarah swung her rifle around and fired at

the flash. She heard a scream, and dropped to load again.

It was only a matter of time.

Hurry, Meriel!

She had thought she would never be able to run out into the shots as Sarah had asked, but the guns

began to fire and Meriel found herself bolting, without remembering how she began. Ahead lay the black

bulk of the Cathedral, and for the first time there were no soldiers between her . and her goal.

And then all at once the stones of the church were under her free hand. She groped blindly along the