The Shadows of God

by J. Gregory Keyes

  Then the illusion vanished, and he again saw a vulnerable old man.

  “Tie a rope to the chief ‘s ankle,” Oglethorpe commanded, “so he can find his way back.”

  Tomochichi slipped into the opaque waters at about the same time they brought the sullen Russian captive before Oglethorpe. He was a young man, perhaps twenty-two, with a heavy beard and mustache. He still wore the green breeches of his uniform and a sweat-stained white shirt.

  Oglethorpe already knew the fellow spoke English, from the earlier interrogation.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Feodor Yurivich Histrov.”

  “Very good, Mr. Histrov. No doubt you are aware of our present troubles. It seems your friends have a method of locating us, and of knowing we are unfriendly to their cause. I'm sure you were aware that would happen, and I congratulate you on your bravery in keeping silent. You must have known you would die with us, or that we would kill you for your omission.”

  Histrov did not answer, but his face pinched tighter.

  “Come here,” Oglethorpe said softly. “I want you to see something.”

  He pulled the Russian forward, then crowded with him into the watchtower, where one of the windows looked upward.

  “There? You see them? What are they waiting for?”

  “For you to surrender,” the Russian replied. “By now the narrows is blockaded as well, so you will not escape.”

  “No? Then is it worth your life to keep the secret of our detection from us?”

  “Yes.”

  Oglethorpe motioned to Unoka, who pulled an ugly-looking bone-handled dirk. With a swift motion, the little man cut off one of the Russian's ears. The sailor's shrieks were piteous until Oglethorpe stuffed a rag into his mouth.

  “You think we have no chance of escaping. I think we have a slim chance, yet you know more of our situation than I do, yes? Let me help you. You are a brave man, and I wish every chance to give you your life. If you don't tell me what I want to know, and we are captured, your countrymen will find your corpse floating in the water, if they find you at all. If you tell me, and they capture us, I will let you live to rejoin them. You say we will be caught no matter what. Tell me.”

  He removed the rag from the fellow's mouth.

  “It's—” He paused, and Unoka shrugged and brought his knife up again.

  “No!” Histrov said. “It's the aetherschreiber in the cabinet. In the captain's room.”

  “I saw no such device.”

  “Yes. It is a secret. They would have schreibed you, and when you never answered they would know the ship was in enemy hands.”

  “Tell me exactly where that is?”

  “I don't know. I was not the captain.”

  Oglethorpe lifted an eyebrow. “Tear the room apart,” Oglethorpe told Parmenter. “Find that schreiber and throw it into the sea.”

  At about that moment, the lights above them started to descend. Oglethorpe held his breath, almost, as they came level and then continued down.

  “Well,” he said. “So much for those three. That gives us a breath to draw, I think. The chief met with success, it seems. MacKay, as soon as Tomochichi is back on board, move this scow.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And put Mr. Histrov back in chains.”

  Oglethorpe went back to the lower hatch, where his men were taking in the rope tied to the old Yamacraw's leg. He waited with a small smile on his face, ready to congratulate his old friend.

  But what rose up from the hatch was no Tomochichi, chief of the Yamacraw. It was a monster in the shape of a man, a construction of what resembled dull ceramic, but which bunched and knotted like the muscles of a man. Its head was a mirrored globe, and it had four arms. Two ended in sword blades, the other two in kraftpistoles.

  “Talos!” Oglethorpe shouted, but it was already too late for his men at the rope. The automaton sheered through both with its scimitar limbs so that each fell apart at the waist. Neither man knew he was dead, but pitched back, trying to find legs he no longer had.

  Then twin searing kraftpistole bolts jagged through the crew compartment. Oglethorpe felt the heat, stepped aside, and fired his own weapon at the thing. Likewise, Parmenter drew a Fahrenheit pistol captured from one of the English officers and directed a white-hot spray of molten silver against the talos.

  It rose up, giving no indication that it was hurt.

  With a howl, Unoka leapt into the air and landed on the ta-los’ shoulders, hacking at the silver globe with his throwing ax. It rang like a bell, but did not crack. Sword blades shot up to pierce him, but he wrapped his legs around the monster's neck and swung his body back to dodge, as nimbly as any acrobat.

  Not completely distracted by this, the talos fired its kraft-pistoles again, and more men died in flaming agony.

  Parmenter suddenly lunged forward, not at the talos, but at something behind it. Just as Unoka finally dropped from it, dodging the scything arms, Parmenter came up behind, and Oglethorpe saw what he was about as the captain looped a long steel chain around the talos’ head. Bellowing, Oglethorpe rushed beneath the weapon arms and grappled with it, trying to keep it occupied while Parmenter finished.

  Never in Oglethorpe's life had he felt something so strong or relentless. Though inside the reach of its guns, the arms scissored together, pinching the life from him.

  Meanwhile, however, Parmenter finished his task. The anchor cable wrapped firmly around the unholy thing, he now released the anchor.

  When it went, it nearly took Oglethorpe's head off, but by a miracle, his long hair oiled the demon's grip, and allowed him to slip away from it with no more than a bloody scalp. Down through the hatch the talos went.

  “Cut that damned chain!” Oglethorpe shouted, “else it will just crawl back up.”

  “Aye,” Parmenter shouted.

  “And get this ship in motion!”

  A moment later they were under way and they began to count the dead. Oglethorpe's momentary feeling of triumph at seeing the enemy ships sink was so far gone as to have belonged to a different age.

  And Tomochichi, his friend and adviser for much of that age, was gone with it.

  “Margrave?” Parmenter had given him the best part of an hour before interrupting his thoughts. Good man, Parmenter.

  “Captain.”

  “What do we do now, sir?”

  “It's still night. We still can't see, and the Russian is no doubt correct—the way to open sea is no doubt well blockaded. I'm accepting suggestions.”

  “There may be another way around the island. The map shows two passages.”

  “Both are narrow enough to block, I think, even if they no longer have a way of finding us precisely.”

  “Yes, but the north way is under Fort Marlborough's guns. The south way is not.”

  Oglethorpe was stopped by that, and by the lightning of a sudden thought. “Parmenter, you served at Marlborough, didn't you?”

  “Briefly, sir.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Margrave Montgomery built her to guard the Spanish border. She has four bastions and a spur out toward the narrows. The rampart ain't too high, but the wall is brick.”

  “Details, Captain. More details.”

  Morning was still a thought in the mind of God when Ogle-thorpe's booted feet came to rest inside the sandy keep of Fort Marlborough. Night birds whined in the distance, and the crickets, frogs, and other marsh singers filled the night with music.

  The wall had proved little trouble. The earthen rampart was steep, but not too difficult to climb without shot flying down from the walls. Parmenter chose the spot where the rampart had been cratered once by Spanish mortars. After the the capital of Azilia had been moved inland, the wall had never been fully repaired, the gap patched only with un-mortared brick and rubbish. It had taken a little excavation to open a crawl-through, and meanwhile Yamacraw marksmen laid low the handful of men on the bastions.

  “The spur is north,” Parmenter sai
d. “That's what we'll want.”

  “We shall have it, then,” Oglethorpe promised.

  Parmenter suddenly whirled at a faint sound behind them.

  “Someone else comes through the gap!” he hissed.

  “Knives, not guns!” Oglethorpe cautioned.

  But when the figure came up from its belly and swayed to two feet, Oglethorpe was barely able to restrain a whoop of joy.

  “Chief!” he whispered, clasping the old Indian to him. “Are you impossible to kill?”

  “So they say,” Tomochichi replied, grinning. “The knife arm cut me away, but he had no interest in me. I swam to shore, then saw you arrive. You will take the fort?”

  “And turn their own guns on their blockade.”

  “Good. That is good.” Tomochichi paused and looked down at his feet. “I lost the devil gun. I swam down seven times, but could not find it.”

  Oglethorpe took that grim news with a shrug. “It's done. You're the more valuable of the two, and we have you back. Now, we'll go.”

  They passed through the courtyard like hunting owls, dressed again in the stolen uniforms they had obtained from the amphibian boat's crew.

  Two guards at the gate by the spur paid their silent passage into the sleeping battery, and they reached the guns without much trouble at all.

  In the East, the sky grew rosy as dawn spread her fingers.

  “Now comes the trick,” Oglethorpe told his men. “We need enough light to see, so we can find their blockade, get our range, and put their ships below the water. If not before, when the first gun is fired, we'll have to hold these guns until Azilia's Hammer is through.”

  “And after that, sir?”

  “After that, we do as we can. If we can fight free, we'll try and rendezvous with our companions. If we can't, MacKay will know what to do. Finding the fleet from Venice is the most important measure, as we all know.” He clapped Unoka on the shoulder. “You see the plan of the fort? This battery sticks out from the rest of it, an arrow pointed at the sea. We have to hold the gates and the walls. See about constructing some sort of cover for us, and set all of the smaller guns facing back into the rest of the fort. They don't know we have only fifty men. I have no idea how many they have, but I'll guess at least twice that, and taloi besides, which we have no good defense against now.”

  “You sayin’ t'ey will win this.”

  “I'm saying we can only hold out for so long, but the longer the better. Are you good for it?”

  “T'at I am, mad General,” Unoka said.

  Satisfied, Oglethorpe nodded, then stared back out over the river, waiting for the light, hoping that there would be no mist.

  They fired their first shots an hour later, letting loose with the eighteen pounders. The big guns roared like titans and exhaled a black brimstone fog, snapping the brittle morning. A thousand cormorants lifted in a cloud from the trees, and the air itself felt as if it had cracked.

  By then they could see what Azilia's Hammer was up against: two steam galliots and a line of barges chained together. They could never have made it through, not even with what the men had begun to call “Oglethorpe's luck” and every gun blazing.

  Every shot from the eighteen pounders fell short.

  “Raise elevations,” Oglethorpe said quietly. Behind him, the fort was still oddly silent. He had expected a quicker response—but then, it had only been seconds, hadn't it? The clock chiming in his chest said hours.

  They fired again, and one shot from this volley struck the barge chain dead center. A plume of water and black smoke kicked up. “Put the other guns at that range,” Oglethorpe commanded. “Damn, but I wish their fervefactum still worked.”

  “No, sir,” Parmenter explained. “The Spanish got that in Queen Anne's war with their seeking cannon, and it was never replaced.”

  “Maybe the redcoats or Russians replaced it.”

  “Maybe. But ‘tis an obsolete weapon.”

  “That might be just the sort of thing they would put in a place like this, if they had it. Take some men down, Mr. Parmenter. It should be in that wall by the water, yes? The demilune?”

  “That's where it was, Margrave. But you'll need me up here.”

  As if to prove his point, a sudden pattering of small-weapons fire started up.

  “If they've a fervefactum in place, we can boil the whole channel. It's worth a look, Mr. Parmenter.”

  “Aye.”

  Oglethorpe then turned to see what was happening on his side of the wall, as the guns again shouted their tuneless anthems.

  The gate to the bastion on the spur still held firm, which meant their attackers had to come along the walls. Until they pulled up guns big enough to blow the gate in, Oglethorpe and his men were the Greeks at Thermopylae, able to defend against a few at a time from a position of strength. When the gates went down, they would meet the same fate as those brave Athenians. He looked back down at the entrance to the sound. His artillerymen had truly found their range, now, and the blockade was suffering. Of course, there were surely underwater boats involved, and somewhere out there was a fleet poised to sink King Charles and all of his men in one fell stroke. Even if Azilia's Hammer got through this, she still had much to brave. But she was at least invisible now, when underwater.

  The fighting on the walls was stepping up. His men had thrown up shelters of planking around the small guns, but it wasn't much. And where the hell was Unoka?

  Then a shadow fell across him, and a chill ran through his bones. It was one of the flying ships, the bird-shaped ones, and it heralded its coming by blowing six of his men and two eighteen pounders off the wall.

  “And now the fight really begins,” he murmured. Drawing his kraftpistole, he ran along the wall, trying to get as close to the flying thing as he could. Below, something thudded against the gate.

  In the middle heavens, three armies of angels clashed: the dark, strange forces from the forest, hidden by a mist; the bright avenging cherubim of Adrienne's son; and her own pitiful array.

  Through the clash, through the ferments of shattering matter and dissolving spirit, she saw Nicolas, and he was dying. His forces were collapsing around him, and fire ate toward his center. Airships fell from the sky and alchemical artillery burst asunder, split by the very energies that motivated them. Nicolas was losing the fight for his life.

  High above the battlefield, something else was forming, something Adrienne recognized. The keres was opening its wicked eye. For the moment it was nothing, just the nucleus of the vast, destroying storm it would become. But she recognized it.

  For an instant she was paralyzed. She could not let Nicolas die. She could not let the keres spring to life. And her son's strange enemy was ignoring the waking god.

  “The keres, Uriel. Stop it from forming!”

  I—The pause went on, too long. Very well. Farewell, Adrienne.

  Grimly, Adrienne stretched out her aetheric fingers to the heart of the maelstrom, where Nicolas lay dying.

  Apollo!

  He took me by surprise! The Sun Boy sounded desperate. He cinched my power, somehow. Many of my servants do not know me. I'm going to fail, unless I can form the dark engine.

  That will slay us all, Nicolas.

  Better that than this! I cannot fail!

  Let me help you. I have power. Together we can stop your enemy.

  I am the Sun Boy! The prophet!

  I am your secret friend. Let me help you.

  For torturous moments, nothing happened, and then matterless fingers closed in hers.

  And there came a jolt, like a breath of God, and Adrienne saw a tree rising into the heavens. No, not a tree but a tower, Nimrod's tower— or Jacob's ladder—and high above, at the very top, a light that might be God, at long last might—

  Then the images dissolved. Her son swelled like a thunderstorm, like a great wave of the sea; and she felt herself rushing with him, an arrow in flight, the charge of a huge cavalry. She saw the enemy in the woods as Nicolas saw him—a gr
eat horned man, shaggy, wrapped with serpents.

  Satan! Nicolas cried. Lucifer!

  They met, and the devil's power snapped. He was strong, yes, but Adrienne and Nicolas were more powerful than heaven.

  Red Shoes blinked at the sky, not understanding at first. Not understanding why he was still whole and alive, why his enemy had withdrawn even as he tasted his flesh. His masterly plan had been destroyed at a stroke, his power scattered to the winds, the power of the snake within him snuffed to a mere glow. The hand of the Sun Boy had done all that. His power was without limit.

  And yet Red Shoes lived. The Sun Boy had turned away, as if from a gnat. The airships had fallen from the sky, long lines of horizontal lightning and sputtering plumes of flame, one-eyes and Long Black Beings turned against themselves.

  The iron people were under attack by someone else—a small fleet of ships, yes, but someone or something powerful came with them. In his otherworld sight, two spiderwebs now stretched across the sky. At the center of one was the Sun Boy, at the center of the other, the unknown. But whoever it was was connected to the Sun Boy in strange ways.

  Once he had traveled with Blackbeard, the Charles Town king, and Thomas Nairne, who ruled that city now. Nairne had ventured that the enemy of his enemy was his friend. Blackbeard had scoffed.

  Red Shoes agreed with Blackbeard. One man like the prophet was one too many. Two was two too many.

  And he, of course, made three.

  He shook back his pain—there were three webs, after all. He was still a spider, if a crippled one. Thinking him defeated, they had forgotten him. That would prove to be a mistake.

  He noticed that the strands linking the two sorcerers were strengthening. Maybe he could be of some help, there.

  As the serpent's power uncoiled, in the rushing colors that the aether made perceptible to Adrienne, Nicolas’ face appeared, and his eyes widened in shock. Overhead, Uriel screamed, and the keres whirled away into nothing.

  You! Nicolas shrieked. I know you now! I remember you! You left me! You aren't my friend. You aren't my friend!

  Nicolas, no! I helped you!