I sighed and looked at Roberta. Might as well give everybody a vote.
The parrot peered through her shiny spectacles at me like a snippy schoolmarm. “Never sail into a blind cove. You’ll take a broadside sure as shootin’. Riggin’ gone and rudder blown away.”
Just as I opened my mouth to give my opinion on the matter, a fourth voice interrupted the thought I’d formed. “Since you’re takin’ a poll, kiddo,” Jasper volunteered, “I think that they’re all of ‘em right. Even the silly mouse.”
I swallowed a giggle. Ernie couldn’t hear Jasper. “So there it is. Four votes to one against swingin’ by home. Just leave my poor ma to her fate. She could be turned into a cockroach and hidin’ under our kitchen stove, but we just ignore that and move on.”
After a pause, I got a chorus of, “Yeah, that’s about how we see it.”
“Besides,” Ernie added, “I happen to know that all the bugs in your kitchen work for the Equity.”
“That cat’s a dif’rent matter, though,” Romulus growled.
“Do you speak of the pathetic one-eared creature which imagined itself immune from chastisement?”
The giant Marshal’s eyes widened. “One-eared? I got’s new respect for you, Master Ernie.”
Ernie bowed. “I accept your merited acclaim. Don’t worry about the traitorous feline. By now he’s shoppin’ for stickin’ plaster.”
“So,” said Roberta, flexing her wings. “Are we off?”
“We are,” I announced, stepping out with a bold stride.
Fifteen minutes later we were passing as close by St. Bart’s as we dared, heading east. It’s good to be Stone-Warden.
Jasper whined. “Did I misunderstand how the votin’ thing works?”
“No,” I whispered, keeping my extra-sharp eyes peeled for Bullies. “You just misunderstood that we actually held a vote.”
“Oh, so this is like when the President has a Cabinet meeting and then ignores all of their sage advice and worldly wisdom?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
“What’s that make me, then? Secretary of Shut-Up-You’re-Just-the-Magick-Sword?”
I snorted. “And Ernie’s Boastmaster-General.”
Gliding back from her scouting trip, Roberta circled over me and said, “Clear sailin’. No sign of Bullies or anythin’ else,” before landing on Romulus’ outstretched arm.
That sounded good to me. And the Stone felt toast warm against my skin. But if Horace and his cronies, maybe with reinforcements this time, lurked about St. Bart’s, we might not know it till they were on us. Romulus had handled them that afternoon, and Jasper could scatter them like chaff in the wind, but I preferred to get home with no trouble at all. We were all tired, me especially. Tired people made mistakes, and that we couldn’t afford.
St. Bart’s sat on our left, looking like a bulldog ready to charge. No Bullies dropped from its trees, but just the memory of that sight proved enough to make me grit my teeth and grip the handle of Morphageus. I scanned the soot-stained old building, alert for anything odd. And what might that be? What counts as ‘odd’ now? Witches on broomsticks? A troop of Headless Horsemen? Countless cobras spittin’ lightnin’ bolts? All I noticed was a single candle in a top-floor window. Nobody could be seen in its light.
“Ernie,” I said to my tiny friend, who rode atop my haversack like a sultan on an elephant. “What gives with this place?”
“What gives? It’s Honourable Merchantry headquarters for Washington City, that’s what gives.”
“Yeah? Why a school? Why not some government building? Heck, why not the Capitol, come to that?”
“The Merchantry works behind the scenes as much as they can. They have a real and legitimate presence in London as the Honourable Merchantry of Esteemed Gentlemen. That’s the tradin’ company they founded way back in Good Queen Bess’s time.”
My eyes widened. “They’ve been around that long?”
“Oh, dear me, yes. But then it was just a shippin’ business, for the spices. Nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon. Worth more than gold. All of the Merchantry men got rich as Croesus. Had their own navy and army and courts, to enforce their private law on the islands. Paid off members of Parliament and the Crown to keep things that way. Long as the money flowed and they kept their political meddlin’ to just trading matters, no one complained.”
“But?” In asked, sensing I might be getting some of the answers I’d been looking for all night.
“But about fifty years ago, things stopped goin’ their way. Some of ‘em backed Bonaparte, for a start. Hedgin’ their bets, they called it. That ruffled some feathers in Whitehall when it got out, I can tell yer. Heads rolled. Some things money can’t cover up. Spice trade wasn’t the gold mine it had been before, neither. Plants themselves were bein’ cultivated all over the world, from stolen seeds and whatnot, in places the Merchantry couldn’t always control. The Proprietor and his Council saw that their ships alone weren’t gonna keep the company in power.”
“So what did they do?”
“Started usin’ that money o’ theirs to buy influence. Very subtle, they was. And patient. Helped their kind o’ man to get himself elected here and there, to smooth their way with the law and with governments. Bought all the right companies in every country to help ‘em control its commerce. Did most of it through third parties so most folks didn’t know what they had their hand in. That’s still how they work, for the most part. The magick came later.”
Now this is gettin’ interestin’. “So the Merchantry is a real company, then? Folks go to work in regular offices and have jobs, like?”
“Oh, absolutely, duckie. Most of what they do is all legal and aboveboard. It just goes deeper and darker than people know.”
Ernie stopped and cast his beady little eyes about, as if he feared that spies were going to swoop down and catch him spilling the beans to me. I couldn’t blame him for it, after what I’d seen so far that night.
“Go on,” I urged. “Don’t leave me hangin’.”
“Like we said before, they run the whole world now, indirect. Everyone thinks that elections matter, and judges are honest, and there’s real competition in trade. It looks like that, at first glance. But it’s the Merchantry that manipulates things, like a puppeteer, to its advantage. And its advantage lies in misery.”
I frowned. Doin’ a lot of that lately. “Misery? How so?”
“Well, look at wars. Very profitable. Their shadow firms can sell to both sides. So it’s just good business to encourage those sides to keep fightin’. A little sabotage at a peace conference, a few ships flyin’ the wrong flags and attackin’ a convoy, that sort of thing. And economic panics. Make a country’s stock market plunge, and plenty of money-makin’ schemes come to mind. Buyin’ cheap shares, for one. Land prices go down, too. Then bring the economy back up, sell what you bought for a premium, and there you are.”
“They make all of that happen, everywhere?”
“Not always. Some things happen naturally and the Merchantry just takes advantage. But they don’t mind helpin’ things along, that I can tell you. The cholera epidemic in Naples? They caused that, sad to say. And there’s plague in the Caucasus right now, courtesy of the so-called Honourable Merchantry.”
“So where does the magick come in?”
Ernie puffed out his furry cheeks. “That’s a point of considerable debate, don’t you know. They’ve kept that under wraps as much as they could. But we do know that on the spring equinox of 1850, twelve years ago, everything changed. Our sources have found out some of it, but not all.”
This is startin’ to worry me now. That’s my birthday.
“Seems they found a magick source, a power never known before. Magick’s always existed, of course, though most people denied it. That made it nigh invisible. Your average man doesn’t want to believe that his neighbor can witch him into the sky. So he puts the evidence down to ‘coincidence’ or ‘mass hysteria’ or what have you. Magick stayed low-key, like the ma
jor practitioners preferred. Power never likes to share.
“Anyway, the Merchantry found a magick power of some kind. We don’t know what yet. And in March of 1850, they used it…and the world changed overnight.”
“What happened?” I shuddered at what the answer might be, but justhad to know. That’d be my situation for months to come.
“They cocked it up, that’s what happened. Too greedy to think about what they were doin’. Remember, ‘can’ and ‘should’ are two very different things. Instead of the spell givin’ ‘em easy dominion over the earth, it twisted things round most awful. They’d been manufacturin’ chaos, keepin’ the world as violent as they could, and by jiminy, that’s what they got. A chaos spell. Every country in a different time, Irlann filled with literary characters, Scandia hip-deep in fairies and dragons and trolls. Total lunacy.”
My jaw swung down around my knees. “This is all just a stupid mistake? A bunch of greedy idiots played with fire and that’s how I got burnt?”
Romulus spoke up for the first time since Ernie’d began his story. “That’s how we all gots burnt, miss. Don’t go thinkin’ you’s alone in all this. The whole wide world’s in flames.”
“And you’re holdin’ the only hose,” Jasper said, turning himself into a fireman’s nozzle.
I stamped my foot. “Golly Moses! Are all grown-ups imbeciles?”
“Pretty much,” Ernie chuckled. “I invited a Merchantry boss to take a flyin’…uh, jump at the moon. Now look at me, four inches of holy terror.”
Roberta ruffled her feathers. “My ship got ambushed and sunk by a Merchantry man-o’-war. Their captain offered me a choice of hangin’ from the yardarm or…this.”
“All I did was piddle on my owner’s rug,” Romulus said. “Next thing I knows, I’s pickin’ cotton in Alabama. How’s that make me an imbecile?”
“By volunteerin’ for the Equity, me bucko,” explained Ernie, climbing up onto my shoulder so he could speak straight at his partner.
Romulus laughed, then realized how loud he sounded and hunched down. “Cain’t argue with you there, mister Ernie.”
“You two need to learn a thing or two about inspirin’ confidence in your young charge,” I told them. “This fireman is about ready to hide in a hollow tree till this whole thing goes away.”
Ernie bit my ear. “Ow!” I squealed. “What the---?”
“Don’t say that, even as a joke,” the chubby mouse barked. “You’re the sole hope for millions and millions of people who’ve just about given up.”
I stopped dead in the middle of the street, not a block from home, so upset that I hardly noticed the pile of horse dung my foot was parked in. “You and Romulus and Jasper keep sayin’ that, but I don’t see that you or the Equity have thought this through. Look at me! I’m a bony girl who likes to play-act that I’m a great hero. Verity the Valiant! Who in their right mind decided that I could be the one to overthrow the Honourable Merchantry and set things right? What kind of sense does that make?” I sniffed. Here I go, startin’ to blubber again. Hope no Bullies are waitin’ to jump us.
“Nobody decided,” Ernie said with a shrug.
“Just happened,” added Romulus.
“What you mean?” I asked through my quivering lips.
“We mean,” the mouse went on, “that you seem to think that they held some kind of bloody meetin’ in the Great Lodge of the Equity and your name got bandied about. Didn’t happen that way, precious.”
“Then how---?” I blurbled.
“The Grand Mage left a prophecy. He used to say that he wouldn’t always be among us, and that a black evil would come when he’d gone and we’d have to stop it our own bloomin’ selves. But he’d prepared a mighty weapon that we could use to make the difference.”
I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “The Morphageus.”
Romulus shook his broad head at me. “No. The weapon weren’t no thing. It were a livin’ person.”
Ernie nodded, agreeing. “He was quite clear about it. ‘Take comfort not in blade of fame.’ That’s the prophecy. ‘Trust hair of flame and truth of name.’”
A little laugh crawled out past my tears. “That’s so corny.”
“Most true things are, lovey. A baby’s giggle. A puppy’s tail. Your mama’s lullabies. Don’t you go discountin’ things because you think they’re sentimental.”
“I get that ‘hair of flame and truth of name’ might mean me,” I said, “but it could also mean lots of other folks, too.”
“’Tain’t the whole prophecy. It went on: ‘An outcast childe of Gaulle is she; beneath an unmade dome they be.”
Boy, that’s worse than the first line. Who writes the Equity’s prophecies? Don’t they have a Guild for that sort of thing?
“OK, that narrows it down more,” I agreed. “Ma says our people were Huguenots who came from Gaulle almost two hundred years ago, from some dinky village in the south. And the unmade dome is obvious. But Jasper insists that nobody can truly tell the future. So how---?”
Jasper’s perky voice spoke up in my head. “There’s tellin’ the future and there’s makin’ it happen. Listen to the final line of the prophecy.”
“Uh, he says that there’s more to the prophecy?”
Ernie cleared his tiny throat and said, “Yep. ‘Her mother she shall live alone; the child will wear a russet stone’.”
“Ah, so it’s no accident that my pa left me this,” I whispered, touching the Legacy Stone which still hung warm and dark around my neck.
“Doubtful,” Roberta said with a shake of her scarlet head. “That Stone’s been handed down to the most worthy for ages.”
“And just how do they know who’s most worthy?”
“Coin toss, maybe?” Jasper offered.
“Ha, ha,” I growled.
“What?” asked Ernie.
“Nothin’. Never mind.” I frowned. “Then the Equity’s been around for a long time, then? Not just twelve years.”
Romulus said, “Equity’s existed as long as they’s been in-equity, chile.”
“That’d be forever, shipmate,” Roberta added.
“Older than the Pyramids, we is, duckie,” Ernie said.
“Speak for yourself,” the parrot retorted, preening.
My head didn’t just swim, it was waterlogged and going down for the count. Were my folks both with the Equity? Had Pa, who I had no memory of at all, been the Stone-Warden before me? Or had he just found a pretty rock and put it on a string? Could I really go up against something that seemed as all-powerful as the Honourable Merchantry? Or would I just end up as somebody’s pet monkey in a London office? Heck, would we even make it that far? We were planning to go across Confederate territory and into what the papers called ‘the very mouth of hell’. Everybody else was running out of there as fast as their legs would carry them.
Most important question of all…could I make it to the privy behind my house before the Great Savior of Humanity wet her overalls?
I must’ve looked awful brave, dashing toward what my friends thought could be certain doom. Tell the truth, I just had to answer the call of nature. Things had been so wild and crazy that I hadn’t been paying any attention to what you’d call normal things. Monsters, magick, and more had pushed everything else from my mind. Ignoring Ernie’s warning, and the fact that he had abandoned me for Romulus’ pocket, I raced through the very same alley where Venoma had jumped us. If she’d been lurking there right then, the great quest would’ve been all over in a hurry. I’d even shifted Morphageus into the tin cup again, to make running easier. Verity the Valiant gave no thought to battle.
Crashing into the outhouse, I dropped my overalls and drawers as if they were on fire. I did my business with a sigh and a smile. It was the first time I’d relaxed in hours. I know it’s not lady-like to say, but there you have it. Come on, even Queen Gwenivere had visited the jakes every day, hadn’t she?
Right then I first started to feel real hatred for the Honourable Merchantry, the
rage that I have yet to let go of. For just at that moment, with the evening breeze tickling my bare bottom and my feet tangled in my overalls, I smelled a bad thing.
No, not that bad thing. This was worse. Much worse.
Rotting flowers. The perfume of a Bully.
Even worse, something moved. Something big and hurtful.
And it’s right underneath me.
11/ Mr. Pitts Barks at Verity
My innards twisted, caught in an orange-green tornado that stank like brimstone and lilies. Dull razors sliced into every inch of my skin. The bones of my face felt like they had split into a dozen new chunks and rolled under a wagon.
The Legacy Stone icicled my chest. OK, this is about as bad as it could be. That thought threatened to overwhelm my mind, which didn’t have a lot of ‘whelm’ left anyhow.
“Could be worse,” Jasper said in a cheery voice.
“How?” I tried to slide my drawers up my shaky legs without catching the notice of whatever crawled around in the bottom of the privy.
“Door could be locked.” He still acted too perky by half.
I pushed against the door. It didn’t move. Something on the outside had jammed it closed. I ground my teeth till they squeaked. “Someday this Proprietor and I are gonna have a real serious conversation.”
“And with any luck I’ll be doin’ the talkin’, kiddo. But what do you plan to do right now?”
“I suppose screamin’ and bawlin’ would be undignified?”
Jasper snorted. “From where I sit, seein’ where you sit, I’d say dignity and Verity keep little company nowadays.”
Wonderful. A misquote from Nick Bottom. You would pick that character. Ha, ha. The sword is such a card.
“You know Shakespeare?” My clothes were almost all the way up. The goopy ploppy rumblings underneath me grew louder and closer.
“Well, not personally, no. I’ve been wedded to Morphageus for a long time.”
I fastened the last button. Time to go! My hand gripped the cup and aimed it at the hole I’d been sitting on. A roar came out of it, accompanied by a smell that rotted, yes, but nothing like flowers. Bracing myself against the jammed door, I spread a shiny steel shield hard against the opening. Boy, Jasper’s gonna have plenty to say about this.
Brimstone and Lily (Legacy Stone Adventures) Page 10
