The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  Smith felt that slight shift in perception as a new meaning was revealed to him. The gaffer was, as he suspected, a senior enlisted man, a sort of nautical NCO.

  “Mister Partridge,” Smith said, making no move to retrieve his knife. “My name is John Titanic Smith, and yes, I am lookin’ for my good lady wife.”

  “She said you would be. Also said you’d have reward in plenty for any man what came to her aid.”

  “And that’d be you, would it, Gaffer Partridge?”

  “Aye. It would. I’ll take mine in gold or silver. You can keep your swag.”

  30

  Lighter by the weight of three small silver ingots, Smith hastened away from the rowdy tavern on the waterfront. By the gaffer’s reckoning, he’d just missed Cady back at the Red Lion where she had moseyed in the company of some stuffed shirt called Bowditch. A notorious ladies’ man, according to Partridge, who found Smith’s discomfort at the revelation almost as rewarding as the silver he pocketed for the telling of it.

  Smith told himself he was not fussed that Cady was keeping company with some other feller—although that story was a hard sell to a doubtful audience. Instead it were his fierce needfulness of not losing her trail again that drove him at a gallop through the streets of old Boston. He had been at least two hours absent from the Red Lion. Anything might have happened in that time.

  He did not mean, of course, anything between Cadence and this new fancy of hers.

  Heaven forfend, no.

  Smith charged through dark and unlit streets. He ran, not knowing exactly where he ran, but pursuing a generally ascending course through the now deserted streets, trusting that simple geography and the limited extent of the island settlement would deliver him to that wide, elevated avenue where she waited—he hoped, he sorely, ardently, frantically hoped—at the rendezvous point they had agreed upon all the way back in Seattle. A truly bitter cold had stolen in over the town in the deep of night, and hot breath plumed in thick white clouds from his mouth as he ran.

  By Koffler’s account Cady had waited there for nearly a week until finally giving up, but events had already diverged from Koffler’s account. The fever of Smith’s frantic anxieties and euphoria dispelled the ales he’d consumed, burning them as fuel for his headlong dash. Only once did he rein in, coming to a skidding halt to take cover in an alleyway while he waited for a redcoat patrol to march by. On any other night he would’ve taken his leisure to marvel at the thing: him, a peace officer of the blessed Republic, eyeballing the ancient enforcers of royal writ and power. It would have been a pleasing diversion to unship that German pistol in his belt and pot a few holes through those monarchic Janissaries. But he demurred, and in due course the redcoats stomped off into the darkness.

  Their time would come.

  Given now to caution by the encounter, Smith hurried on, but at a trot rather than a sprint. He was impressed by how completely the byways of the town had emptied themselves with the advent of full darkness. The gatekeepers had warned on his arrival that faithful obedience to the ordinances against carousing after dusk was the surest way to avoid the stocks, but it was still remarkable even in this biting cold how completely traffic had retreated from the streets in such a short time, at least in this, the tonier quarter of the town.

  So quiet was it that Smith had no trouble finding the Red Lion or Ms Cady.

  The shouts of the redcoat patrol as they captured her could have been heard all the way back on the mainland.

  They manacled her with heavy irons that caused her real trouble walking to the jailhouse. Hands and elbows bound behind her back, ankles chained so closely she could not take a normal step, Cady was forced to shuffle all the way. A few hardened drinkers, probably insulated from the wintry night by rum and the heat of their own raised voices, tumbled out of the tavern to crow at her arrest. But a hard frost and the shouted orders of the guard captain to back the fuck off, or something, bundled them back inside. Cady could make out the intent, but not the literal phrasing of whatever he yelled at them in his thick and unintelligible accent. He sounded like a fucking Klingon from the Scottish moors.

  By the time they’d marched the mile or so to a low-set stone building with thick bars on every exit, her legs burned with fatigue and her shoulders screamed at the stress position the bindings forced upon her.

  She tried to talk to the Klingon, but he bitch-slapped her with such speed and ferocity it split her lip. She fell awkwardly to the road surface, crying out at the bright electric jangle that shot up her arms from the impact. It was so painful, and so shocking, that she started to pass out. A rough hand pulled her back onto her feet, and the promise of another back-fist was more than real enough to get her moving. Blood, warm and coppery, filled her mouth and when she tried to spit it out, her swollen lips caused her to simply dribble a long tendril of pink drool down her coat front.

  It took all of her resolve not to cry.

  All of her rage.

  All of the emotional scar tissue she had built up over her years as a single woman in a world full of vicious manbabies.

  If she could hack a gig rewriting all the shit code for Ubisoft during crunch month for version one of Watchdogs, she could handle these assholes. She still had her tin of Altoids with the handheld wiresaw. She would bust out of this shitcan in…

  “Search her.”

  Cady looked up in time to see the magistrate—no, the Apprentice—Granville, just before a musket, swung like a club, struck her in the back of the knee and collapsed her to the ground with a scream. A supernova of pain exploded in her leg. She was kicked, punched, prodded and groped from head to toe, a violation far more comprehensive than the opportunist ass-grabbing she suffered in the transfer to Le Sournois. The redcoat troopers denuded her of everything she carried, including her gold and silver ingots and the Altoids tin. Her father’s wrist watch, which had survived the search back in Salem, disappeared and with it went Cady’s sense that she had any hope of controlling her fate. A few minutes of rough handling left her half-naked, shivering with cold and fear, and burning with the remembered touch of every leering shithead who’d ever laid a hand on her without invitation.

  That was when she cried, sobbing miserably as she hurried to dress herself.

  “Boot-hale the witch unto her durance,” Granville said. She heard him, but couldn’t see him. The night had dissolved into a watery miasma of dull earth tones and dark shadows, all of them hopelessly muddied to opacity by her tears. More hands pulled her to her feet, where she stumbled, before slumping into the rough grip of two soldiers who dragged her through the front door of the jailhouse and down a switchback flight of wooden steps into a basement cell. There they threw her to the flagstone floor and removed her shackles. She was to be held in an enclosure of thick cast-iron bars and no windows to the outside world.

  No Mary, either.

  No Smith.

  Not even Bowditch. The useless douchenozzle was probably still fondling his ruptured ’nads back at the hotel.

  She was utterly alone as the gate swung shut behind her with a heavy metal crash.

  “Attend me, witch.”

  Gritting her teeth and taking a deep breath to gather herself, Cady looked up, expecting to find the Apprentice grinning or even winking at her. Granville did stand before her on the other side of the bars, his cheerless features rendered even darker and more forbidding by the light of burning torches in the underground dungeon. Shadows pooled and danced in the pits under his eyes, but she saw no spark of triumph in there; merely grim purpose. He was flanked to the left by the redcoat officer, who trained his antique pistol on her, and on the other side by another man dressed in a brown coat and wearing an old judge’s wig with flaps that reached nearly halfway to his belt.

  “You stand tried and convicted of congress with Satan. Will you repent of your sins?” Granville boomed.

  She snorted. “Will you let me go if I do?”

  The question seemed to surprise them all.

  �
��Of the course, no!” Granville snarled. “You will swing on the morrow as you should have in Salem town.”

  The other man, the older, portlier guy in the giant muppet wig—or at least she assumed it was a wig—looked worried. He stepped forward.

  “I implore thee to take heart of grace, madam. Save your immortal soul, because your life is done.”

  Cady felt herself standing at the edge of a cliff, or maybe an abyss. Smith was not coming. Mary was not here. She could not hide behind the blades and guns of Captain Garvey and his crew.

  These men were going to kill her.

  She tried to fake a smile, but her split lip made a bloody grimace of the gesture.

  “And I implore thee to take care of this one,” she said, pointing a shaking finger at Granville. “He is the Devil’s own apprentice, and not of this world, I promise you.”

  Granville actually blanched and retreated a step, and Cady felt her heart swell with the minor victory. She was not done yet with this time-traveling douchecanoe.

  “Yeah, not so fucking cool when it’s you who gets called out, is it, Judgey McJudgerson?”

  “Who is this McJudge person?” the muppet wig asked in an urgent whisper.

  “I know not the origin of her nonsensical blasphemies, Reverend Mather,” the Apprentice lied, “but we know the source of all blasphemy is the Devil himself, and forsooth she holds aloft his own black candle before us.”

  “Will you make repentance and save your soul, woman?” the Reverend Mather asked, wringing his hands like he actually cared.

  “Sure,” Cady said, shrugging. “I repent whatever I did that got you so pissed off. But this fucking guy here,” she jabbed a finger at Granville, “he is a bitch for Diablo, I’m telling you.”

  Again, just making the accusation had an almost physical effect on Granville while confusing the other two, at least in Cady’s eyes.

  “Coy yourself, vile shrew,” the magistrate spat. “Your slanders will not save you from God’s justice.”

  “Yeah,” she said. But they might cause you some fucking grief when these paranoid wingnuts decide they got a half-chub for stretching you on the rack as a rent boy for Satan, because a convicted witch flipped on you.

  “If God’s justice is to be served by me,” she continued, “it will only be as a witness against you, Magistrate, and the vile pact you have entered into with Diablo.”

  She could tell the redcoated Scottish Klingon asshole and Reverend Muppet Wig were getting head-spins, but even a vague suspicion that you might go gay for the Antichrist was enough to get you murdered by the inquisition around this place. She could see, she could actually see, the schism she’d just up opened between them and Granville with her bullshit allegations. The division between the accused and the innocent manifested itself as a furtive side-crabbing shuffle by the other two men away from Granville.

  Fuck, Cady thought. This mass hysteria shit is fucking dope.

  “Ask him where the profane artifacts are,” she improvised, following a hunch that was as much a whim as a strategy. It was like shooting boxes in a destructible game environment to see what spilled out.

  “You know, my satanic instruments? Granville took them in Salem. He has them now. Where are they and why won’t he let you see them? If they are so powerful, surely one man cannot be trusted with them. They will infect him with the Devil’s seed.”

  Granville looked genuinely horrified. The redcoat with the Antiques Roadshow gun didn’t know where to point it anymore, and the Reverend Mather had lost all interest in her.

  “These artifacts, Magistrate? Are they indeed within the boundaries of the city?”

  “I have them secured by lock in my chambers, yes,” Granville said quickly, almost choking on his own words. His Adam’s apple visibly bobbed up and down. “They are indeed dark wonders, and I thought to remit them to the seminary at Harvard for safekeeping and cautionary study…”

  “They are within the town?” Reverend Mather gasped.

  “In his chambers,” Cady helpfully threw in. “I know that because… Satanic artifacts. And Satan’s hottest bitch… right here.” She jerked a thumb at herself. “And my hellboy over there, he’s the one you need to lock up.”

  The soldier actually turned his gun on Granville at that point, and Cady marveled at how quickly a couple of lines of trash talk could turn into an underground snuff film. Like, literally. The redcoat looked like he was about to shoot Granville in the face on general principles.

  She congratulated herself on so completely fucking with their heads and discovering where her stuff was stashed. All she had to do now was MacGyver a way out of this cell, break into Granville’s chambers and jetpack her ass out of Boston.

  Easy.

  Especially with Granville and Muppet Wig yelling at each other. That asshole was probably going to end up in the cell with her.

  “What ruin hath you brought upon us with this folly, sir?” Reverend Mather shouted.

  “I do my duty unto God, sir, and with more constancy of rigor and foreset devotion than the lithering dizzards who allowed this chancre to spread upon the body of the colony before my indagation.”

  Cady was almost enjoying herself, when Granville turned on his heel and stalked out of the basement, yelling something that sounded like Latin. Reverend Mather hurried after him, still demanding to know what sort of apocalyptic shitstorm was about to go down because Granville had hijacked her profane artifacts. The soldier followed, and as their voices faded she realized she was still trapped here with no allies, no equipment, and no way to even get a message to Mary or the Herald.

  A dark, cold tide rose within her, and she started to shiver.

  That hadn’t gone quite to plan.

  Not that there’d been much of a plan.

  She was gonna die when the sun came up.

  31

  Cady did not sleep. More than once, dizzy with fatigue and terror, she passed out on the floor, but the arctic cold of the flagstones and the hard bite where they lay against her skin soon revived her. The hours before her execution disappeared in a strange, contrary passing that was both unbearably long and impossibly, fleetingly brief. She wasted the first hour raging and calling to her captors, who did not show their faces again. She searched her pockets for anything she might use to pick a lock—despite knowing nothing about how to do so—or to dig her way out through the cell wall, which was a foot thick and solidly constructed of field stone and mortar.

  She cried.

  She wailed.

  She cursed and kicked at the iron bars, and that really fucking hurt so she stopped.

  She could not believe she was going to die.

  She could not believe she could possibly escape and live.

  She cocked her ear to every little sound and faint disturbance, dreaming of sudden violent intervention by the crew of the Herald, perhaps even by Lieutenant Bowditch who had to know of her fate.

  She even prayed, but that felt weird and kind of pointless, so she gave up on that too.

  This was worse, so much worse, than the jail cell she’d shared with Georgia and Smith in ancient Rome. Because she’d had Georgia and Smith with her.

  Here she was alone, and as the hours both dragged and sped toward sunrise, she knew she was doomed.

  Cady was slumped at the back of the cell when a young woman, flanked by two soldiers, appeared in the gray light before dawn to offer her a bowl of soup.

  “You will need your strength, madam,” she said.

  Cady snorted bitterly.

  “I need Jessica fucking Jones’s strength,” she said, but she took the bowl anyway. She could barely swallow one spoonful.

  The spoon was more of a thick wooden ladle, so there was no prospect of sharpening it into a prison shiv. And they took it off her anyway.

  Sometime after that, a few minutes, an hour—her sense of time was so confused she couldn’t say—a man in a sort of brown dress and a wig appeared with more soldiers and read from a piece paper.
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  “It being found that Goodwife Cadence Smith has consorted with the Devil, she is sentenced to be taken from this place to a place of execution and there hanged by the neck until she is dead.”

  Cady felt so faint she nearly passed out again.

  She could not believe this shit.

  It was not happening.

  It couldn’t be happening. Not to her. She had the number one game in the app store for fuck's sake. She lived in the world of iPhones and UberEats, not hanging women from trees for no fucking reason that made any sense at all.

  Then entered Granville, the Reverend Mather, their differences patched up, two soldiers, and another man whose appearance caused such a sudden jolt of terror to Cady that her bladder almost loosed itself into her pants.

  Her executioner.

  He wore a black hood over his face, with two cold, bloodshot eyes staring at her from within.

  “No…” she said quietly as the guards unlocked her cell door. “No.”

  Her vision grayed out on the edges, and her arms and legs felt numb, but she ignored the infirmities of terror and she lashed out, kicking one of the soldiers in the knee so hard he actually went over, opening a small gap through which she saw her path to freedom. The cell door stood open. Her murderers were so astonished that she might not want to be murdered that they stood paralyzed by the unexpected violence of her resistance.

  And Cady bolted.

  Exploding from a standing start into a full sprint, she broke for her freedom.

  Granville swung the cell door closed.

  It smashed into her face and knocked her back to the cold flagstone floor. The soldiers, both of them cursing, and one limping, took her by the arms and hauled her to her feet. The Reverend Mather looked distressed. Granville’s face was a thin-lipped mask of disgust and… something else. Victory?

  The guards tied her hands behind her back but left her feet unchained.

  “If she should attempt escape again,” Granville said, “do not await the noose, but rather fire upon and into her without surcease.”