The Shadows of God (37 page)

THE SHADOWS OF GOD

“When you saved me,” he said. “You
did
save me, didn’t you?”

“Nico, you saved me when you were born. Without you, I would have died.

And died again, that night when I was stabbed. Me saving you— I am your mother. What else could I do?”

“I still don’t like what you’re doing,” Nico said.

“Do you know what I’m doing?”

“No. But I don’t like it. You have to stop. If you don’t stop, I will hurt you.”

“I love you, Nico.” She looked squarely at him, willing him to believe it, desperate that he should know. Stop.

“I can’t,” she said, her voice catching.

“Very well, then,” he said, now sounding cross. “But you will be sorry.”

He vanished. Reluctantly, Adrienne returned to her work.

* * *

Franklin closed his eyes again.
Lenka
. He ought to go watch, but he couldn’t.

“Damn, the stones on them,” Robert said again. “Look at that. I wish I was closer. Hell, I wish I was
down
there.”

“Can they win?”

“I don’t see how—ah, Jesus, there they are at the guns, and still comin”, half of’em must’ve — “ He suddenly choked off, and Franklin understood his friend was crying.

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“They’re fightin” Armageddon, and here we sit.“

He seemed to have forgotten his own words of a moment before. Franklin could only nod.

Peter watched the guns grow closer, and he didn’t care. He lifted the carbine, not to aim it but to brandish it in the air; and for a moment he felt like one of the untamed Cossacks he had watched his army cut down in the past.

He noticed, behind the guns, the green uniforms of his own troops—or those who had once been his—and that filled him with an almost limitless fury. “I am your tsar!” he bellowed, shaking the gun furiously. “I am Peter, son of Alexei, the emperor, the—” His words were drowned out by the first volley.

It was a sound like ice cracking in the Baltic, all at once, everywhere. He remembered Catherine, his empress and love. He remembered his son, who betrayed him and paid with his life. He remembered building ships, with his own two hands, in Holland; the taste of brandy, Tokay, and chocolate.

He remembered being a little boy, hiding in the Kremlin as the Strelitzi searched for him and his mother and brother. Hiding, cringing, afraid.

Never again. Never.

And then he suddenly understood—a hundred guns had fired at him, and he still sat his horse. He had won!

But no, the damned devil Charles was still in the saddle, too though his chest was open in two places. In fact, the Swedish kin? gave a hoarse cry and fired his pistol.

Peter turned grimly back to the waiting guns, where something odd was happening. It looked like their enemies were fighting each other. They were!

Russians were turning their sabers on Mongols and Indians.

The second volley crashed, and this time what felt like hot raindrops pattered all over his chest. Blue outlines surrounded everything, and the neck of his horse rushed up to meet him. By chance, his head turned to see that Charles THE SHADOWS OF GOD

was still mounted, though there was a gaping red hole where one of his eyes ought to have been.

That’s when he noticed—the bastard had lashed himself in the saddle. When had he done that?

Peter’s horse fell, but it hurt no more than diving onto a feather bed. He smelled salt, the wet metallic scent of the sea, and remembered the little boat he used to sail, imagining the day when he — when
Russia
—would have a real navy.

Somewhere, a storm must be coming. He heard the thunder. Or was that just the wind?

He opened his eyes once more, to see a young man in a green uniform, weeping, kneeling over him, trying to tell him something. It sounded like an apology of some sort.

“I have to go,” he told the boy. “Catherine and I are sailing today.”

The sky was blue. A good day for it, and the storm, by its sound, was receding.

Ilya Petrov knelt in the midst of the terror, took his tsar’s head in his lap, and wept. “God!” he cried to the men milling around him. “It’s the tsar! I met him four times, rode on campaign with him! We have been betrayed by that snake Golitsyn!”

Across the field now, he saw a small company of riders coming through the confusion, wearing the uniforms of the Russian royal guard. They rode with the enemy, as the tsar had.

“We could not have known!” his friend Vasily shouted. “Who could know this?

And he rode against us!”

“Then
we
are wrong! I never thought this was our damned war! I never thought this was right!”

“But now he is dead…”

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“Yes, and, by God, I will have my answers. Send out the word everywhere, to every Russian soldier. We are betrayed!”

The guards had arrived, now, and Ilya rose to meet them. Their leader, face smudged with soot, swung down and, ignoring him, knelt to look at the tsar for a long moment, despite that the air still whined with lead. Then he —no,
she —

removed her hat, and her long black hair fell about her shoulders, and she knelt and kissed the dead tsar on the forehead.

“Sleep, father,” she said.

And Ilya recognized her. “Tsarevna Elizavet!” He had danced with her once, admired her in her velvet evening gown. Beautiful, she had been, a goddess of love.

But now, when she looked up at him, he saw instead a goddess of war, fierce and terrible as her father.

“Who are you?” she snapped.

“Captain Ilya Stepanovich Petrov, Tsarevna.”

“You fight for the devil, you know,” she told him. “You’ve murdered your rightful tsar.”

“I— We didn’t
know
, Tsarevna.”

“And now you do. And now you will take up your weapons, and you will follow me, yes?”

“Yes, Tsarevna. By the true tsar and the true God, yes!”

A bullet chose that moment to cut past his cheek, and Ilya watched his friend Sergei sink to the earth in surprise, a red stain in the center of his chest.

“God!” Ilya shouted! “Yes! Up, you men! Fight with our tsarevna! Lay low these dogs who have betrayed us into hell!”

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And like the roar of a monster, the name of the tsar went out of the mouth of every Russian there, a word of death. And Elizavet, the tsarevna, took up her father’s bloody sword and lifted it high; and as they had done for a thousand years, in bitter cold and furnace heat, in mud or on dry sand, on taiga and meadowland, Russians went to fight and die.

Oglethorpe understood what was happening just in time to make some use of it.

Some of the Russians had turned. Maybe they had heard rumors that their tsar was alive —maybe they suddenly recognized him. It didn’t matter—all that mattered was that impossibly, there was a hole in the artillery. He sat up straight and pointed the way with his sword, and they rode into the breach.

“Holy Mother,” Robert swore. “What—what’s that?”

Franklin dragged himself to the window and stared down.

Something was forming, perhaps a half mile west of the ships. An axis of pure light, a black wheel spinning about it, growing larger.

“Oh, no,” Franklin said. “Look at that.”

“What
is
it?” Robert repeated.

“The dark engines,” Vasilisa said in a leaden voice. “It’s the end.”

“The devil, you say.” Franklin grunted. “Robert, we’re going
down.
Down there, right now.”

“Aye, cap’n.”

“Benjamin, no!” Vasilisa shouted. “Our only hope now is that Adrienne and the Indian — ”

“No thank you, Mrs. Karevna,” Franklin said. “We let that thing go, and it kills everyone I hold dear—if they aren't dead already. The hell with the world. I’m THE SHADOWS OF GOD

saving
them.
And as to trusting this mumbo-jumbo our friends are up to—the devil with that, too.”

“What can I do?” Don Pedro asked.

“Help Robert bring down the countermeasures, and then check your weapons.

We’re goin” into the lion’s den for sure.“

16.

Castle, Tree, and Cord

Red Shoes grew, like the giant in the story of the Wichita priest. His feet sank deep into the earth; his head brushed the sky; his skin bloated with the pressure of the rattlesnakes and hornets that filled him up, stretching him toward the stars.

The world turned lazily about him, a disc of shadow and light.

Far below, he could see the meaningless little battle, the wrathful wind the Sun Boy had finally released. He remembered, long ago, telling Thomas Nairne the story of Wind, who killed his enemies and then went to sleep in the deep waters, promising that when he awakened he would sweep the world clean.

Well, Wind had awakened, but even he was as nothing to the stirring of the Great One. Himself.

None of that matters now,
he said to himself. Adrienne had tricked the Sun Boy, stolen his fire, but he had tricked her, stolen hers.

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I
am the oldest there is. I am the youngest. I am every one of my lineage
.

Now his thoughts became faces he did not recognize. Now his desires became scents he had never known. Now the clay that was his body itched so he wanted to throw it off.

And still he grew, watching everything that had once seemed so important dwindle, diminish, become a light smaller than a star.

But the real stars—ah…

Soon he would be able to reach to the ends of the universe, and all would be as before, water and stars, nothing between.

How much better this way. The Peace camp, at least, had done this one good thing: if he had managed to slay humanity earlier, this would never have been possible. And these little seeds they planted — no, not seeds, but eggs, like the sort that dirt daubers buried in their paralyzed prey—ah, how well he had turned them to his advantage.

And still she did not know. Still the Sun Boy was oblivious. And still time marched forward to its own end.

He looked and saw that it was good.

“What in the holy hell —” Franklin sputtered, as the ship rang like a bell and the deck fled from beneath his feet.

“The mines are gettin” through again,“ Robert said.

“Mines, my arse. That was no explosion. That was something big, smacking into us.”

“I don’t see nothin”.“ Tug grunted, looking—as they all were — around and out a window.

“Up above,” Franklin snapped. “They’ve done our own trick, vanished a ship and crept up on us.”

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If they needed further confirmation of that fact, a sudden screech of metal against metal supplied it.

“Grapnels!” Robert said.

“Seal the hatches,” Franklin said, “now.”

Robert and Tug hastened to do so, but even as they did, Franklin noticed that the deck beneath their feet was beginning to get warm. They were through the aegis, whoever they were, which meant they could do all manner of things—melt steel, boil blood, release lightning.

He didn’t figure on giving them the chance. He aimed the depneumifier up through the ceiling and fired it. Fired it again and again.

And, not too surprisingly, the ceiling suddenly creaked, as if a hundred tons of brick had been laid on it.

“Brace yourselves! I’ve robbed ”em of motive power!“

“That means we’re holding both them and us up!” Robert said.

“No, I wouldn’t go that far,” Franklin replied, pointing down through the floor portal, where the Earth was growing perceptibly larger each second.

To make matters worse, the ship began tilting, first slowly, then quite quickly, onto its side.

“What in hell’s name are you doing?” Crecy shouted, grabbing Adrienne and trying to shake her back to awareness.

“Saving our lives, at least for another few moments. We were already done, otherwise. I advise strapping our friends into the braces, and ourselves as well.

I imagine this thing will flip all the way over.”

“If we live through this—” Crecy snapped in a promising tone.

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Adrienne and Red Shoes were sleeping through it all, it seemed. They got them strapped in just in time. Once the craft had rolled onto its side, it flipped the rest of the way over quite quickly. The ceiling was now the floor, and they could no longer see how fast the ground was approaching. It couldn’t be too fast—his belly wasn’t all that light.

He opened the hatch and jumped down in a hold that was now where a hold ought to be, Robert and Don Pedro right behind him, then threw open the upper—now lower—hatch.

A vehicle made of great wheels hung there, latched onto them with clawlike grapnels. Or rather, a sphere compassed by wheels, something like a globe of the Earth mounted with rings around the poles and equator. An open portal was pointed toward them and a hand with a gun poked out of it.

Franklin yanked his head back into the ship as a jagged bolt of phlogiston struck the frame of the portal. Then, with a hoarse cry, he leaned back out and fired his own
kraftpistole
and had the satisfaction of seeing that arm withdrawn with great alacrity.

“How fast we fallin”?“ Robert asked.

“We’ll find out when we hit the ground,” Franklin replied. “At least they’ll break our fall. But let’s see if we can’t drop a few grenados into that window in the meantime.”

When Oglethorpe’s saber broke, he knew he was a dead man, and though he would have hit the ships with a stone, still they were too far away. His mount was long dead, but even mounted —too far.

He couldn’t imagine why he was still alive, anyway. More than miraculous, it seemed perverse. But he was alive, with the battle still surging around him.

Just now, he wasn’t in reach of an enemy—his men had formed a hollow square around him, and the French were accounting for themselves on his right flank. God knew where the Swedes had gotten to. Now that he was in the valley itself, his perspective on the carnage was limited, to say the least.

He stumbled to the ground from sheer weariness, and noticed a tomahawk THE SHADOWS OF GOD