Empire of Unreason (48 page)

“It seems the prince has lost his taste for this province,” Crecy
remarked dryly.

Adrienne returned her attention to the keres. From above, even to
the unaided eye, its spiral structure was obvious. So was its trail—a
path that looked very much like snow. It even lay on the landscape
like snow—nothing that resembled trees, houses, or people
remained along its path—only the curves of the earth itself.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“It’s rising,” Crecy shouted. “It’s coming after us.”

“So it is.” Adrienne felt her first tingle of real fear.

The keres turned and stood on its edge like a wheel—much as they
had first seen it. It turned a bit more so that it was aimed at them,
like a giant target seeking its arrow, and began to rise, pushed up
by its own heat and the force of its exhalations. It sounded like a
grinding wheel amplified a million times. Loud, but not so loud that
she could not hear the screams of her shipmates as it rose to take
them.

10.

Red Paths

Ben Franklin was a god.

Not
the
God, of course, not the Creator—that distant, omnipotent
being who hears prayers as rarely as an emperor hears the
complaints of the least peasant in his country. No, Franklin was
one of the clerkish gods, low on the ladder, busy with the daily task
of looking after the planet Earth. Just now he was sifting through
stacks of paperwork that seemed to grow larger by the instant. He
signed the usual forms that would bring summer into autumn,
initialed several memos to the god of the solar system, put through
a request for more Stardust.

He picked up the next document, squinting his eyes. They had been
failing for the past several years. It was time, perhaps, to begin
EMPIRE OF UNREASON

wearing glasses. He had tried reading glasses but disliked them
because he had to take them off to see anything at a distance, which
was a nuisance. What he needed was glasses that could help with
both. Maybe two sorts of lenses in the same frame, the stronger
lenses below, where the eyes naturally went when reading…

Then he noticed the sheet he was staring at.

Provision for ye annihilation of the Towne of London by means of

a Comet.

A chill clutched his godly heart. He could imagine, with divine
imagination, exactly what that meant. A bar of light creeping with
deceptive slowness down the sky. A horizon of flame. The terror as
a light brighter than the sun washed over the million people in the
City of Science, as they looked up for the last time.

Nope. He wasn’t going to sign that.

And then he noticed that he already had.

He rushed to his window and threw it open, saw the terrible star
descending.

Well, he was a god, wasn’t he? He leapt from the window and began
bounding across the earth in titanic leaps, arms outstretched. At
first it went well, but then his feet touched ever more lightly on the
ground, so he couldn’t get purchase. He tried harder, but the faster
he tried to run, the less contact he could get with the ground.

And all the while, he felt something awful coming behind him. He
could not look over his shoulder, either, could not bear what he
knew he would see. The gleaming red eyes of the devil, the floating
orbs of his diabolic servants. He knew who followed him, risen
from the dead, unkillable. It was Bracewell, now wearing the face
of Sterne.

Or was he wearing a stern face?

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

A hysterical little laugh ached its way out of his chest. He should
hide, but there was no place, and he felt the horror coming ever
closer to his back, heard Bracewell-Sterne’s sickening laugh.

He suddenly realized he had forgotten all about the comet.

Frantically he looked up again, just in time to see a hemisphere of
light rise on the horizon, and then a black column, lifting forever
into the sky. Suddenly he could not breathe in the ash-thickened
air. He could not breathe, and the warlock was upon him, and still
he could not turn to see. He tried to scream, but it caught in his
throat, kept there as if by a hand pressed over his mouth.

Then he did feel it—a hand—and awoke, thrashing in the dark, his
heart trying to kill itself by battering against his breastbone.

“Hsst! Quiet, senor! I have come to rescue you!”

His body was slow to hear that, for the hand over his mouth still
frightened it; but then his mind caught up slowly, and he relaxed.

The hand came away.

He was still hanging in the frame, as he had been for two days. Now
and then they had been brought water and a little sour cornbread.

Now and then children beat them and women threw urine on them.

The real torture still hadn’t begun. Franklin had almost begun to
wish it would.

Suddenly one of his arms sagged free, and it hurt more than
anything had hurt him in a long time. He heard himself groan.

“Shh!” his benefactor hissed, cutting the rest of his bonds. Franklin
fell from the frame like a child’s puppet. The smell of dark earth
filled his head, and he thought of worms and bare bones.

Enough of that. Marshaling his willpower, he lifted his head and
noticed other shadows moving about the frames.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“Who—who are you?” Franklin managed.

“It is I, Don Pedro de Salazar de Ivitachuca,” the voice proclaimed
very softly. “And it is my honor to rescue you from these wretched
heathens. But you must help me, too. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Franklin whispered.

“Good. In a moment, we will creep from here. My man Francisco
will be your guide, while I go about diverting the foe. You must be
very silent, you understand?”

“Yes.”

Moonlight spilled from behind a cloud, and Franklin caught
glimpses of the rangers, readying themselves. As Don Pedro
ghosted away, someone else squatted unsteadily nearby.

“Robin?”

“Aye. Here, take this.” He pressed something in Franklin’s hand. A
little ax, such as Indians and rangers carried. He found he could
barely get his hand to close on it.

“This is the best we have?”

“A couple of pistols. I thought they would go better in the hands of
the rangers. Not to worry—if we actually have to fight out of the
village, I suspect it won’t matter how we’re armed.”

“I suspect you’re right. What about the guards?”

“They have grins on their throats. Our Apalachee friends seem
pretty accomplished at this sneak warfare.”

A third person joined them.

“Francisco, me,” he said. “You hold on my shirt, stay close, yes?”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“Yes.”

“Okay,” McPherson said from somewhere near. “Let’s go at it, boys.

Let yar feet be specters.”

Franklin had done his share of sneaking—stealing into Prague
castle, filching a book from a Jewish wizard, most recently in the
harbor at Charles Town. But always he had been aided by his
inventions. Tonight he had nothing but darkness to render him
invisible, in unknown territory, surrounded by leagues of enemies.

He glumly reflected that even with his aegis, he had usually
managed to get a bit tripped up.

They started across the square. A cool breeze wove around them,
but Franklin was still wet with sweat, his shirt clinging to his skin
as if he had been swimming.

To Ben’s ears, their party sounded like a herd of elephants. A dog
somewhere agreed and began yapping.

Of course, the dogs here howled ‘most all night, but this one had a
knowing sort of bark. How long could it be before someone noticed?

He felt better once they got through the palisade, though he knew
he had no right to. They still had a long way to go. He gripped the
ax, thinking that here he had finally learned something about the
use of a sword—only to be placed in the position of having to use yet
another unfamiliar weapon.

But, as Robert said, if he had to actually
use
it, things were done
anyhow.

They had just entered a narrow lane of darkness when gun-fire
erupted and shrill shrieks. First just a few, but then many more.

The gunfire escalated.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“Run,” Francisco said.

They did, and it was curiously like his dream. No, it was worse,
because in a dream Franklin always had some distant sense that he

was
dreaming… and a tiny but real comfort that he would awaken.

Here was no such comfort. Though his feet had plenty of purchase,
the only thing he could make out at all was Francisco’s shirt a few
feet in front of him, and that more by tactile sense than sight.

Then they broke into a clearing. The half moon was already behind
the trees—when it set, the night would be even darker. Ahead
horses whickered, and more shadows bounded to their feet.

“Our men,” Francisco informed him.

Franklin couldn’t see how many there were, but it seemed a fair
number. Things were looking up.

Until the men they were approaching began firing their guns, that
is.

The night sang to Red Shoes as he trailed his paddle in the water.

The water was so smooth, his vision so clear, that it looked as if his
stolen canoe was sailing upon a river of stars, for he could see their
pale reflections blurred by the passage of water, broken by the
ripples his vessel made.

Grief’s eyes held starlight, too. She was watching him, more still
than the river, like the carved figurehead of an English ship, though
facing in and not away.

“Are your bonds too tight?” he asked softly.

She did not answer, but instead eclipsed the light in her eyes with
heavy lids and lay back into the bow of the canoe.

Red Shoes shrugged and returned his attention to the night.

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

Ten years before, in Venice, he had heard music unlike any he had
ever known. The songs of the Choctaw were spare, chants with a
single melody accompanied by a pair of sticks for rhythm,
sometimes a rattle, most rarely a water drum. The music in Venice
had been many songs together at once, played on many
instruments of cleverly captured wind and chirping strings. As
complicated as science, its rhythms and harmonies were—to him—

elusive, alien, and beautiful.

Tonight, the night sang so. It pulsed with the cadences of frogs,
soared with the crooning of whippoorwills, the wild cries of shriek
owls and their witchy kin. All of this he had noticed before, of
course—but now there was more, a structure he had never heard
that put it all in place. It was beauty, and he stayed caught in it, not
thinking but only being—until he heard the voice.

He was annoyed when the voice interrupted the song, calling him
from the channel of the river to the backwater cane swamps, where
the glassy columns hissed and rattled like ghostly snakes. But he
followed the voice because he knew it was one he ought to answer.

It was time.

Red Shoes.

I am coming, scalped man. lam coming to kill you.

The swamp stank of rot, as if its surface was the bloated skin of a
corpse, the canoe a sharp blade opening it. He paddled on, into
shadow, until one of the shadows stood.

“Here I am,” the scalped man said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

“You’ve been awaiting your death.”

The scalped man chuckled, very low. “Why should you want to kill
me? We are brothers, you and I, and you are the elder brother.”

EMPIRE OF UNREASON

“We are no kin.”

Again, the laugh. “Feel your strength, brother, like the deep roots
of a tree. You made a shadowchild and sent it to your people, to
warn them, I guess. I tell you now, it was destroyed like all the rest.

Did it weaken you? You made a hundred more to serve you here—I
see them there about you, your hungry children. Were you
weakened, drained—did you grieve, as once you did, when your
messenger died?”

“No.”

“You don’t find that strange?”

“I do.”

“Were you attacked, as you thought you would be—by me, by my
spirits, by those who travel with the Sun Boy? You were not,
because they know you now. /know you.”

“You attacked my messenger, as you just said.”

“The attack was by mindless things, set to watch, before you
became what you are.”

“I know you, scalped man. My enemy. You tried to kill me—you
wounded me. You and yours chased my friends. You still chase
them.”

Now the scalped man laughed low and deep. “You really don’t
know, do you? How have you blinded yourself, brother?”