Outlander 03 - Voyager

by Diana Gabaldon

  The Reverend Campbell had gone pale, whether from shock or rage, I couldn’t tell. I was pale, too—from fear. I wet my dry lips and forced myself to speak.

  “Mr. Willoughby—”

  “Not Willoughby.” He didn’t look at me; the correction was almost indifferent. “I am Yi Tien Cho.”

  Seeking escape from the present situation, my mind wondered absurdly whether the proper form of address would be Mr. Yi, or Mr. Cho?

  “Get out at once!” The Reverend’s paleness came from rage. He advanced on the little Chinese, massive fists clenched. Mr. Willoughby didn’t move, seemingly indifferent to the looming minister.

  “Better you leave, First Wife,” he said, softly. “Holy fella liking women—not with cock. With knife.”

  I wasn’t wearing a corset, but felt as though I were. I couldn’t get enough breath to form words.

  “Nonsense!” the Reverend said sharply. “I tell you again—get out! Or I shall—”

  “Just stand still, please, Reverend Campbell,” I said. Hands shaking, I drew the pistol Jamie had given me out of the pocket of my habit and pointed it at him. Rather to my surprise, he did stand still, staring at me as though I had just grown two heads.

  I had never held anyone at gunpoint before; the sensation was quite oddly intoxicating, in spite of the way the pistol’s barrel wavered. At the same time, I had no real idea what to do.

  “Mr.—” I gave up, and used all his names. “Yi Tien Cho. Did you see the Reverend at the Governor’s ball with Mrs. Alcott?”

  “I see him kill her,” Yi Tien Cho said flatly. “Better shoot, First Wife.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! My dear Mrs. Fraser, surely you cannot believe the word of a savage, who is himself—” The Reverend turned toward me, trying for a superior expression, which was rather impaired by the small beads of sweat that had formed at the edge of his receding hairline.

  “But I think I do,” I said. “You were there. I saw you. And you were in Edinburgh when the last prostitute was killed there. Nellie Cowden said you’d lived in Edinburgh for two years; that’s how long the Fiend was killing girls there.” The trigger was slippery under my forefinger.

  “That’s how long he had lived there, too!” The Reverend’s face was losing its paleness, becoming more flushed by the moment. He jerked his head toward the Chinese.

  “Will you take the word of the man who betrayed your husband?”

  “Who?”

  “Him!” The Reverend’s exasperation roughened his voice. “It is this wicked creature who betrayed Fraser to Sir Percival Turner. Sir Percival told me!”

  I nearly dropped the gun. Things were happening a lot too fast for me. I hoped desperately that Jamie and his men had found Ian and returned to the river—surely they would come to the house, if I was not at the rendezvous.

  I lifted the pistol a little, meaning to tell the Reverend to go down the breezeway to the kitchen; locking him in one of the storage pantries was the best thing I could think of to do.

  “I think you’d better—” I began, and then he lunged at me.

  My finger squeezed the trigger in reflex. Simultaneously, there was a loud report, the weapon kicked in my hand, and a small cloud of black-powder smoke rolled past my face, making my eyes water.

  I hadn’t hit him. The explosion had startled him, but now his face settled into new lines of satisfaction. Without speaking, he reached into his coat and drew out a chased-metal case, six inches long. From one end of this protruded a handle of white staghorn.

  With the horrible clarity that attends crisis of all kinds, I noted everything, from the nick in the edge of the blade as he drew it from the case, to the scent of the rose he crushed beneath one foot as he came toward me.

  There was nowhere to run. I braced myself to fight, knowing fight was useless. The fresh scar of the cutlass slash burned on my arm, a reminder of what was coming that made my flesh shrink. There was a flash of blue in the corner of my vision, and a juicy thunk! as though someone had dropped a melon from some height. The Reverend turned very slowly on one shoe, eyes wide open and quite, quite blank. For that one moment, he looked like Margaret. Then he fell.

  He fell all of a piece, not putting out a hand to save himself. One of the satinwood tables went flying, scattering potpourri and polished stones. The Reverend’s head hit the floor at my feet, bounced slightly and lay still. I took one convulsive step back and stood trapped, back against the wall.

  There was a dreadful contused depression in his temple. As I watched, his face changed color, fading before my eyes from the red of choler to a pasty white. His chest rose, fell, paused, rose again. His eyes were open; so was his mouth.

  “Tsei-mi is here, First Wife?” The Chinese was putting the bag that held the stone balls back into his sleeve.

  “Yes, he’s here—out there.” I waved vaguely toward the veranda. “What—he—did you really—?” I felt the waves of shock creeping over me and fought them back, closing my eyes and drawing in a breath as deep as I could manage.

  “Was it you?” I said, my eyes still closed. If he was going to cave in my head as well, I didn’t want to watch. “Did he tell the truth? Was it you who gave away the meeting place at Arbroath to Sir Percival? Who told him about Malcolm, and the printshop?”

  There was neither answer nor movement, and after a moment, I opened my eyes. He was standing there, watching the Reverend Campbell.

  Archibald Campbell lay still as death, but was not yet dead. The dark angel was coming, though; his skin had taken on the faint green tinge I had seen before in dying men. Still, his lungs moved, taking air with a high wheezing sound.

  “It wasn’t an Englishman, then,” I said. My hands were wet, and I wiped them on my skirt. “An English name. Willoughby.”

  “Not Willoughby,” he said sharply. “I am Yi Tien Cho!”

  “Why!” I said, almost shouting. “Look at me, damn you! Why?”

  He did look at me then. His eyes were black and round as marbles, but they had lost their shine.

  “In China,” he said, “there are…stories. Prophecy. That one day the ghosts will come. Everyone fear ghost.” He nodded once, twice, then glanced again at the figure on the floor.

  “I leave China to save my life. Waking up long time—I see ghosts. All round me, ghosts,” he said softly.

  “A big ghost comes—horrible white face, most horrible, hair on fire. I think he will eat my soul.” His eyes had been fixed on the Reverend; now they rose to my face, remote and still as standing water.

  “I am right,” he said simply, and nodded again. He had not shaved his head recently, but the scalp beneath the black fuzz gleamed in the light from the window.

  “He eat my soul, Tsei-mi. I am no more, Yi Tien Cho.”

  “He saved your life,” I said. He nodded once more.

  “I know. Better I die. Better die than be Willoughby. Willoughby! Ptah!” He turned his head and spat. His face contorted, suddenly angry.

  “He talks my words, Tsei-mi! He eats my soul!” The fit of anger seemed to pass as quickly as it had come on. He was sweating, though the room was not terribly warm. He passed a trembling hand over his face, wiping away the moisture.

  “There is a man I see in tavern. Ask for Mac-Doo. I am drunk,” he said dispassionately. “Wanting woman, no woman come with me—laugh, saying yellow worm, point…” He waved a hand vaguely toward the front of his trousers. He shook his head, his queue rustling softly against the silk.

  “No matter what gwao-fei do; all same to me. I am drunk,” he said again. “Ghost-man wants Mac-Doo, ask I am knowing. Say yes, I know MacDoo.” He shrugged. “It is not important what I say.”

  He was staring at the minister again. I saw the narrow black chest rise slowly, fall…rise once more, fall…and remain still. There was no sound in the room; the wheezing had stopped.

  “It is a debt,” Yi Tien Cho said. He nodded toward the still body. “I am dishonored. I am stranger. But I pay. Your life for mine, First W
ife. You tell Tsei-mi.”

  He nodded once more, and turned toward the door. There was a faint rustling of feathers from the dark veranda. On the threshold he turned back.

  “When I wake on dock, I am thinking ghosts have come, are all around me,” Yi Tien Cho said softly. His eyes were dark and flat, with no depth to them. “But I am wrong. It is me; I am the ghost.”

  There was a stir of breeze at the French windows, and he was gone. The quick soft sound of felt-shod feet passed down the veranda, followed by the rustle of spread wings, and a soft, plaintive Gwaaa! that faded into the night-sounds of the plantation.

  I made it to the sofa before my knees gave way. I bent down and laid my head on my knees, praying that I would not faint. The blood hammered in my ears. I thought I heard a wheezing breath, and jerked up my head in panic, but the Reverend Campbell lay quite still.

  I could not stay in the same room with him. I got up, circling as far around the body as I could get, but before I reached the veranda door, I had changed my mind. All the events of the evening were colliding in my head like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope.

  I could not stop now to think, to make sense of it all. But I remembered the Reverend’s words, before Yi Tien Cho had come. If there was any clue here to where Geillis Abernathy had gone, it would be upstairs. I took a candle from the table, lighted it, and made my way through the dark house to the staircase, resisting the urge to look behind me. I felt very cold.

  The workroom was dark, but a faint, eerie violet glow hovered over the far end of the counter. There was an odd burnt smell in the room, that stung the back of my nose and made me sneeze. The faint metallic aftertaste in the back of my throat reminded me of a long-ago chemistry class.

  Quicksilver. Burning mercury. The vapor it gave off was not only eerily beautiful, but highly toxic as well. I snatched out a handkerchief and plastered it over my nose and mouth as I went toward the site of the violet glow.

  The lines of the pentacle had been charred into the wood of the counter. If she had used stones to mark a pattern, she had taken them with her, but she had left something else behind.

  The photograph was heavily singed at the edges, but the center was untouched. My heart gave a thump of shock. I seized the picture, clutching Brianna’s face to my chest with a mingled feeling of fury and panic.

  What did she mean by this—this desecration? It couldn’t have been meant as a gesture toward me or Jamie, for she could not have expected either of us ever to have seen it.

  It must be magic—or Geilie’s version of it. I tried frantically to recall our conversation in this room; what had she said? She had been curious about how I had traveled through the stones—that was the main thing. And what had I said? Only something vague, about fixing my attention on a person—yes, that was it—I said I had fixed my attention on a specific person inhabiting the time to which I was drawn.

  I drew a deep breath, and discovered that I was trembling, both with delayed reaction from the scene in the salon, and from a dreadful, growing apprehension. It might be only that Geilie had decided to try my technique—if one could dignify it with such a word—as well as her own, and use the image of Brianna as a point of fixation for her travel. Or—I thought of the Reverend’s piles of neat, handwritten papers, the carefully drawn genealogies, and thought I might just faint.

  “One of the Brahan Seer’s prophecies,” he had said. “Concerning the Frasers of Lovat. Scotland’s ruler will come from that lineage.” But thanks to Roger Wakefield’s researches, I knew—what Geilie almost certainly knew as well, obsessed as she was with Scottish history—that Lovat’s direct line had failed in the 1800s. To all visible intents and purposes, that is. There was in fact one survivor of that line living in 1968—Brianna.

  It took a moment for me to realize that the low, growling sound I heard was coming from my own throat, and a moment more of conscious effort to unclench my jaws.

  I stuffed the mutilated photograph into the pocket of my skirt and whirled, running for the door as though the workroom were inhabited by demons. I had to find Jamie—now.

  They were not there. The boat floated silently, empty in the shadows of the big cecropia where we had left it, but of Jamie and the rest, there was no sign at all.

  One of the cane fields lay a short distance to my right, between me and the looming rectangle of the refinery beyond. The faint caramel smell of burnt sugar lingered over the field. Then the wind changed, and I smelled the clean, damp scent of moss and wet rocks from the stream, with all the tiny pungencies of the water plants intermingled.

  The stream bank rose sharply here, going up in a mounded ridge that ended at the edge of the cane field. I scrambled up the slope, my palm slipping in soft sticky mud. I shook it off with a muffled exclamation of disgust and wiped my hand on my skirt. A thrill of anxiety ran through me. Bloody hell, where was Jamie? He should have been back long since.

  Two torches burned by the front gate of Rose Hall, small dots of flickering light at this distance. There was a closer light as well; a glow from the left of the refinery. Had Jamie and his men met trouble there? I could hear a faint singing from that direction, and see a deeper glow that bespoke a large open fire. It seemed peaceful, but something about the night—or the place—made me very uneasy.

  Suddenly I became aware of another scent, above the tang of watercress and burnt sugar—a strong putrid-sweet smell that I recognized at once as the smell of rotten meat. I took a cautious step, and all hell promptly broke loose underfoot.

  It was as though a piece of the night had suddenly detached itself from the rest and sprung into action at about the level of my knees. A very large object exploded into movement close to me, and there was a stunning blow across my lower legs that knocked me off my feet.

  My involuntary shriek coincided with a truly awful sound—a sort of loud, grunting hiss that confirmed my impression that I was in close juxtaposition to something large, alive, and reeking of carrion. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted no part of it.

  I had landed very hard on my bottom. I didn’t pause to see what was happening, but flipped over and made off through the mud and leaves on all fours, followed by a repetition of the grunting hiss, only louder, and a scrabbling, sliding sort of rush. Something hit my foot a glancing blow, and I stumbled to my feet, running.

  I was so panicked that I didn’t realize that I suddenly could see, until the man loomed up before me. I crashed into him, and the torch he was carrying dropped to the ground, hissing as it struck the wet leaves.

  Hands grabbed my shoulders, and there were shouts behind me. My face was pressed against a hairless chest with a strong musky smell about it. I regained my balance, gasping, and leaned back to look into the face of a tall black slave, who was gaping down at me in perplexed dismay.

  “Missus, what you be doin’ here?” he said. Before I could answer, though, his attention was distracted from me to what was going on behind me. His grip on my shoulders relaxed, and I turned to see.

  Six men surrounded the beast. Two carried torches, which they held aloft to light the other four, dressed only in loin cloths, who cautiously circled, holding sharpened wooden poles at the ready.

  My legs were still stinging and wobbly from the blow they had taken; when I saw what had struck me, they nearly gave way again. The thing was nearly twelve feet long, with an armored body the size of a rum cask. The great tail whipped suddenly to one side; the man nearest leapt aside, shouting in alarm, and the saurian’s head turned, jaws opening slightly to emit another hiss.

  The jaws clicked shut with an audible snap, and I saw the telltale carnassial tooth, jutting up from the lower jaw in an expression of grim and spurious pleasantry.

  “Never smile at a crocodile,” I said stupidly.

  “No, ma’am, I surely won’t,” the slave said, leaving me and edging cautiously toward the scene of action.

  The men with the poles were poking at the beast, evidently trying to irritate it. In this endeavor,
they appeared to be succeeding. The fat, splayed limbs dug hard into the ground, and the crocodile charged, roaring. It lunged with astonishing speed; the man before it yelped and jumped back, lost his footing on the slippery mud and fell.

  The man who had collided with me launched himself through the air and landed on the crocodile’s back. The men with the torches danced back and forth, yelling encouragement, and one of the pole men, bolder than the others, dashed forward and whacked his pole across the broad, plated head to distract it, while the fallen slave scrabbled backward, bare heels scooping trenches in the black mud.

  The man on the crocodile’s back was groping—with what seemed to me suicidal mania—for the beast’s mouth. Getting a hold with one arm about the thick neck, he managed to grab the end of the snout with one hand, and holding the mouth shut, screamed something to his companions.

  Suddenly a figure I hadn’t noticed before stepped out of the shadow of the cane. It went down on one knee before the struggling pair, and without hesitation, slipped a rope noose around the lizard’s jaws. The shouting rose in a yell of triumph, cut off by a sharp word from the kneeling figure.

  He rose and motioned violently, shouting commands. He wasn’t speaking English, but his concern was obvious; the great tail was still free, lashing from side to side with a force that would have felled any man who came within range of it. Seeing the power of that stroke, I could only marvel that my own legs were merely bruised, and not broken.

  The pole men dashed in closer, in response to the commands of their leader. I could feel the half-pleasant numbness of shock stealing over me, and in that state of unreality, it somehow seemed no surprise to see that the leader was the man called Ishmael.

  “Huwe!” he said, making violent upward gestures with his palms that made his meaning obvious. Two of the pole men had gotten their poles shoved under the belly; a third now managed a lucky strike past the tossing head, and lodged his pole under the chest.