A Plunder of Souls (The Thieftaker Chronicles) (3 page)

“I’m grateful to you, sir.”

Ellis led him from the study, back toward the front foyer. “Of course. If the opportunity arises, I’ll recommend you to my friends and colleagues as well.”

They reached the door, and Ellis pulled it open. Ethan proffered a hand, but the attorney looked down at it, wrinkling his nose. “I think not, Mister Kaille. Forgive me. But with the smallpox broken out in the city, I feel it best that we part with but a civil word.”

Ethan dropped his hand. “I understand, sir. In that case I’ll wish you a good evening and be on my way.”

He replaced his hat and started down the path back toward Winter Street.

“You think me overly cautious,” Ellis called to him.

Ethan stopped, turned. “No, sir. But I fear that even such precautions as these won’t save us from infection if this outbreak is anything like those of sixty-one or sixty-four.”

Ellis walked out onto the portico, eyes wide with alarm. “Do you think it will be as bad as that?”

“I don’t know,” Ethan said.

“I pray it won’t.”

“We all do, sir. Good night.” Ethan started away again.

“Good night, Mister Kaille.”

He walked some distance with his head down, his eyes fixed on the street. The only light came from the moon and stars overhead, and from candles burning inside the homes that lined the lane.

So, had it not been for the soft scrape of a boot on cobblestone, Ethan would have had no warning at all. As it was, he barely had time to grab for his blade and push up his sleeve before hearing several sets of footsteps converging on him.
Sephira’s men,
he had time to think.
Mariz will be with them.

He had but an instant to decide whether he was in greater danger from the conjurer or from Nigel, Nap, and the other toughs. He slashed at his arm.

“
Tegimen ex cruore evocatum,
” he said under his breath. Warding, conjured from blood. The conjuring rumbled in the cobblestones; his feet tingled with it. Uncle Reg winked into view next to him, his bright eyes avid, his brow furrowed.

Rough, powerful hands took hold of him, pinning his arms to his sides. One of Sephira’s men tore his blade from his grasp. He struggled to break free and retrieve it, but to no avail. Nigel loomed before him, huge, teeth bared in a harsh grin. The tough hit him in the jaw, his fist as solid and heavy as a brick. Ethan tasted blood; his vision blurred.

Ignis ex cruore evocatus!
Fire, conjured from blood! He recited the conjuring in his mind, using the blood in his mouth to fuel the spell. Power pulsed a second time.

Nigel staggered back, as did Gordon and Afton, who had been holding his arms and now lost their grip on him. But no flames appeared.

“They are warded, Kaille,” Mariz said from the darkness. “We all are.”

“What do you want, Sephira?” Ethan asked, ignoring the other conjurer.

“I want those pistols,” she said. “I wasn’t amused by your little deception.”

“Ellis has his pistols.”

“In which case, you have his money. I’ll take that, instead.”

Ethan shook his head. “I don’t think you will.”

In spite of himself, Ethan had always enjoyed the sound of Sephira’s laughter. It was throaty, like her voice, and unrestrained. Too often, though, it was directed at him. As it was now.

“How do you propose to stop us?” Sephira asked. “Mariz has rendered your magick harmless. Do you honestly believe you can fight off all of my men?”

She had a point.

“So much effort for two pounds,” Ethan said, stalling now, racking his brain for some way to escape with his nose unbroken and his hard-earned coin still in his pocket. “One would think you have one foot in the Almshouse.”

“The money is of no concern. Surely you understand that, Ethan. But I don’t want you thinking that you can get away with such antics in the future. Shoes for pistols? You should know better.”

Ethan opened his mouth to respond, but as he did, he saw something flash in front of him and off a bit to the right. It took him a second to realize that it was one of the lenses of Mariz’s spectacles catching the candle glow from a nearby house.

An idea came to him.

“Are you listening to me?” Sephira asked, sounding angry.

“Of course I am. What was it you said?”

He bit down hard on his cheek, drawing blood again.

Velamentum ex cruore evocatum,
he recited silently. Concealment, conjured from blood.

The spell thrummed, like the string of a harp. Reg grinned at Ethan.

“What did you do, Kaille?” asked Mariz, who, as the lone conjurer among Sephira’s men, was the one person other than Ethan who could have felt the spell.

But by the time the words crossed Mariz’s lips, Ethan was already moving. He stooped, grabbed his blade, and while still in a crouch, ran forward past Nigel and straight toward the other conjurer. He kept his shoulder lowered and barreled into the man, knocking him off his feet. Mariz grunted as he sprawled onto the street; his knife clattered across the cobblestones.

Ethan stumbled, but righted himself, a hand holding his hat in place, and ran on. He veered left and right, knowing that his spell would keep Sephira’s men from seeing him, but that his footsteps would give them some idea of where he was.

A shot rang out, echoing across the lane. A bullet whistled past, too close for comfort. Reaching Marlborough Street, Ethan turned left. He could hear Sephira’s men pursuing him, and already his limp was growing more pronounced, his bad leg screaming. Still he ran, turning off of Marlborough at the next narrow lane and cutting down across Bishop’s Alley and into d’Acosta’s Pasture, a broad expanse of grazing land. Cows eyed him as he passed, his footfalls now muffled by the grass.

He emerged from the lea onto Joliffe’s Lane, and from there followed back streets through the Cornhill section of the city. By the time he drew near to the Dowsing Rod, the tavern on Sudbury Street that he frequented, he felt reasonably sure Sephira and her toughs had broken off their pursuit. Even Sephira would think twice before stepping into a crowded tavern and hauling Ethan off for a beating. He wasn’t so foolish as to think that his escape would settle matters in any way; Sephira had a good memory and held tight to her grudges. But for tonight, at least, he was safe.

He grinned in the darkness. Victories over Sephira were about as rare as audiences with His Majesty the King; he wanted to savor this one. He had money in his pocket, and his spirits were so high that not even the sight of British regulars patrolling the streets of the city was enough to dampen them.

Nevertheless, as he passed the regulars, still concealed by his conjuring, he slowed, so as not to give himself away with a false step or the jangling of the coins in his pocket. He turned a corner and halted, the scene before him like cold water on his mood.

A torch burned in a sconce mounted on one of the houses near the intersection of Hanover and Treamount streets, next door to the Orange Tree tavern and just a stone’s throw from the Dowsing Rod. And beside the torch, a red flag rose and fell lazily in the soft breeze blowing in off Boston Harbor. A man stood outside the house, leaning against one of the iron posts that lined the street.

The red uniforms of the soldiers hadn’t darkened Ethan’s mood, but this red flag was a different matter. Smallpox. That was what it signified. The distemper had come to this residence, and those inside had chosen to remain in their home rather than be removed to the hospital in New Boston.

The flag was a warning, a symbol of infection, of quarantine.
Within this house dwells pestilence,
it said.
Fever, scarring, perhaps even death. These reside here now. Enter at your own risk.
And if the red cloth wasn’t warning enough, the guard out front was there to keep away the concerned and the curious. No one could enter or leave, save a physician.

The flag had been up for several days now, but it still made Ethan’s blood turn cold each time he saw it. He feared for Kannice Lester, who owned the Dowsing Rod, and who had been his lover for more than five years. He feared for those who frequented her tavern and who worked for her. And yes, he feared for himself. Smallpox was no trifle. The outbreak of 1764 had killed well over a hundred people, and those who were sickened but survived bore terrible scars on their faces and bodies. The practice of inoculating people against the distemper had proved somewhat effective, but it was an expensive process, one that few other than Boston’s wealthiest families could afford. And many remained leery of the science cited by physicians; using the disease to fight the disease seemed to make little sense. Despite advances in controlling the distemper, every person in the city lived in fear of another epidemic. Many fled to the countryside at the first report of an outbreak. He had known people to refuse newspapers, food, and other goods, out of fear that they carried infection. Andrew Ellis’s unwillingness to shake his hand, or even place coins in his palm, was more typical than he cared to admit. If more red flags appeared in the city, panic would set in.

Sobered, Ethan continued on to the tavern. Kannice, he knew, would be careful. But what if one or more of her patrons was less vigilant? If he had known a spell to ward Kannice and himself against the distemper, he would have cast it, but he wasn’t sure such conjurings even existed.

Reaching the Dowser, he slipped into a narrow alley between two buildings. There he cut himself again and removed the concealment spell. Once he could be seen, he returned to the main avenue and entered the tavern.

Upon stepping inside, he was greeted by the familiar din of laughter and conversations, and a melange of aromas: musty ale and savory stew, pipe smoke and freshly baked bread, and underlying it all, the faint, pungent smell of dozens of spermaceti candles. In spite of the apprehension that had gripped him upon seeing the red flag, he smiled, only to wince at the pain in his jaw from where Nigel had hit him. In his desperation to get away from Sephira, he had forgotten to heal himself. He considered retreating to the alley to cast another spell, but even as the thought came to him, the Dowsing Rod’s massive barkeep, Kelf Fingarin, caught his eye, grinned, and held up an empty tankard, a question in his eyes.

He would heal himself later. He nodded and crossed to the bar.

“Good evenin’, Ethan,” said Kelf, speaking so quickly that his words ran together into what would sound to most like an incomprehensible jumble.

“Well met, Kelf.” Ethan placed a half shilling on the bar as the barman set the tankard—now full—in front of him.

“That’s the Kent pale.”

“My thanks.”

“Diver’s in his usual spot,” Kelf said. He gestured toward the kitchen. “And Kannice is in back, workin’ on another batch of the chowder.”

Ethan sipped his ale. “I’ll be with Diver. She’ll find me eventually. She always does.”

Kelf winked, already grabbing a tankard for another patron.

Ethan wended his way to the back of the great room, slipping past knots of wharfmen and laborers, and tables crowded with men drinking Madeira wine and eating oysters. A few people looked up as he went by; fewer still met his glance or offered any sort of greeting.

More than twenty years ago, he had been convicted of taking part in the
Ruby Blade
mutiny and sent to the island of Barbados to toil on a sugar plantation. The conditions had been brutal: unbearable heat, food that was barely edible, sleeping quarters that were little more than jail cells crowded with vermin-infested pallets. A stray blow from another prisoner’s cane knife wounded his left foot; the resulting infection nearly killed him. The plantation surgeons removed three of his toes, and thus saved his life. But that was the least of what he lost during his fourteen years as a convict. His pride, his first and greatest love, the future he once had imagined for himself: all of this and more he left in the cane fields.

After enduring those conditions for fourteen years, he earned his freedom, returning to Boston in the spring of 1760. He soon established himself as a thieftaker of some minor renown here in the city. But those who remembered the
Ruby Blade
affair and Ethan’s role in it still regarded him with suspicion. Others who were too young to know anything of the
Blade
took their cues from those around them. And still others, who cared not a whit about Ethan’s past as a mutineer, might have heard rumors of his conjuring talents, and so shunned him because he was a “witch.”

Whatever the reason, Ethan had few friends here in the Dowser, and not many more beyond its walls. On the other hand, those he did consider his friends, he trusted with his life.

Among them, Diver—Devren Jervis—was the one who had known him longest. Diver was younger than Ethan by several years and though he was now in his early thirties, he still looked as youthful as he had nine years before, when Ethan returned to Boston from the Caribbean and almost immediately ran into Diver on Long Wharf.

At first, Ethan hadn’t recognized his young friend; Diver had been but a boy when Ethan was convicted. But Diver recognized him right off, and greeted him as he might a blood brother. For Ethan, it was one of the few bright moments in an otherwise difficult transition back to life as a free man.

With his unruly dark hair, his dark eyes, and a roguish smile, Diver was seldom without a girl on his arm. For years it had seemed to Ethan that it was a different girl every fortnight. But for many months now, since the previous autumn, Diver had been with the same woman: Deborah Crane, an attractive redhead who lived in Cornhill, near Diver’s room on Pudding Lane. The two of them sat together at a small table near the back wall of the Dowser. Seeing them engrossed in conversation, their eyes locked, their heads close together, her hand in his, Ethan faltered.

He found another empty table, also at the rear of the room, and sat with his back to the wall, looking out over the tavern and sipping his ale. A short while later, Kelf walked back into the kitchen and emerged again with Kannice, an enormous tureen of fish stew, or chowder, as Boston’s residents had taken to calling it, held between them. Ethan saw Kelf whisper something to Kannice. She looked up, searching the room. After a few seconds, she spotted him and they shared a smile. Just as quickly, her attention was back on her patrons and their empty bowls. She began to ladle out the chowder, saying something that made the men around her laugh.