“As of right now, your life ain’t worth a chewed plug.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Sarah was having a hard time counting. The moonlight was dim, and that didn’t help; nor did the fact that she was slung over the scratchy, bony shoulder of an ill-smelling Nashville tough, bouncing with every rough spot on the slope; nor still did the fact that, to begin with, she only had the one good eye.
Still, she knew Obadiah was in front, leading his gang down the hill in a rolling limp. Back to Nashville? But the Imperial Town shut its gates at dusk and didn’t open them again until dawn, out of fear of things that might go bump in the night, including the rowdier members of the Calhoun family. The brute manhandling her down the slope was second in line, which she was sure of because Obadiah periodically pinched her bum or slapped her thighs and made a tut-tut-tut of disapproval.
She yanked her imagination away from thoughts of cutting Obadiah’s throat. She needed to be working on her escape.
Following Sarah—and, because she faced backward over the man’s shoulder, in her line of sight—marched three more ruffians. They were dirty, tough, and armed, the kind of men who were too dangerous and too lazy to make an honest living. Nashville was full of such desperadoes; the Imperial Highways were sufficiently well patrolled to make banditry risky, but there was still plenty of traffic on the Natchez Trace and other old ways, or on the rivers, and travelers in town were often easy prey. A few of Nashville’s criminals even got desperate or bold enough to take to road-agenting on the Imperial Pikes, or interfering with Thomas Penn’s tax collectors. Their depredations were why the Imperial Foresters existed, and if the armed men in Imperial Blue sneaking through the forest discouraged attempts to evade the Toll Gates, so much the better for the Penn family coffers.
Sarah forced herself to laugh out loud, though it hurt her belly. “The Elector’s gonna kill you boys, sure enough,” she muttered, just loud enough for the toughs nearest her to hear.
“Shut up,” the thug immediately in her line of sight said. He huffed and puffed under the combined weight of the packs she and Calvin had brought. Hers wasn’t all that heavy, but knowing Calvin, he’d probably packed half the contents of his tidy little half-dogtrot in that bag.
“That fool Englishman tell you that I’m Old Andy Calhoun’s daughter?” she asked.
The ruffian looked surprised for a moment, but then hardened his face. “You’re lyin’,” he said. “I know you’re a foreigner. Pennslander, the Englishman told us all about you. Besides, the Elector ain’t gonna find out.”
“Do I sound like a Pennslander to you, gump?” she snapped.
He shrugged.
She would have spit on him, had she been able. Beyond him, the last two thugs carried Calvin, one lugging him by the feet and the other with arms looped under his shoulders. His hands and feet were tied with rope, as were Sarah’s. Sarah assumed the only reason they hadn’t killed poor Calvin was to be able to motivate her with the threat of violence. They’d stripped him of his weapons and he still languished unconscious. Calvin was tough, but Sarah had seen men die from lesser blows to the head.
Nobody carried Cal’s old musket—the Englishman had smashed it on the limestone cliffs. Obadiah himself only carried the alcohol. He had rifled through their packs and found two full skins of wine, which he had promptly appropriated. He had been suckling at one of them all along, and as they trudged down the side of the mountain, he broke into a song, surprisingly loud in the night, of climbing and plunging melody.
To Anacreon in ’eav’n, where ’e sat in full glee
A few sons of ’armony, sent a petition!
“Really?” Sarah tried again to get under the thug’s skin. “That’s the feller you believe when he tells you I’m a Philadelphia belle? You think that fool’s gonna be able to keep his mouth shut?”
“Shut up!” he hissed back.
There they were again, as she looked up to try to make eye contact with the pack carrier. Over his shoulder, out of the corner of her eye, she would have sworn she saw two more men, not carrying anything and trailing along behind the others in silence. When she focused on them, they disappeared. When she had first noticed them, as she was being carried away from the maple tree where she’d been caught, she thought she had seen one of them bend down and pick something off the ground; otherwise, they did nothing but follow mutely.
Obadiah kept singing:
That ’e their inspirer an’ patron would be
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian!
“Iffen you’re lucky enough to git out alive,” she advised the ruffian, “you might should beat it outta Nashville and ne’er look back. By the time my pa finishes with you, you’ll wish you’d turned into a pillar of salt. You’ll wish you’d been tore into twelve pieces and rode to the wind by Imperial couriers, like that old Levite concubine, rather than have to stand afore the righteous wrath and judgment of my pa.”
Sarah didn’t have a plan. She was antagonizing this man in the hope that if she managed to create a little chaos, she might find a way to escape. And if she couldn’t escape, any delay she created would give the Calhoun boys more time to come after them. The Calhouns and even the odd little Cetean; she wouldn’t turn up her nose at his help.
“Stop it, you little witch!”
Voice, fiddle an’ flute, no longer be mute
I’ll lend you my name an’ inspire you to boot!
Obadiah was hit and miss at best on the tune, but he had enthusiasm.
There they were again, the two shadow figures, and then they were gone.
Cal stirred.
“As of right now, your life ain’t worth a chewed plug.” Sarah lowered her face, expecting a blow and hoping to duck it.
The fist pounded her in her shoulder and neck, and also thumped the man carrying her.
“Hey!” he shouted, and threw her to the ground.
Sarah landed hard; the ground was grassy and carpeted with fallen leaves, but she was stunned, and lay still to collect her breath.
The man following also dropped his burden.
“The hell you hittin’ me for, Angus?” demanded the injured thug.
Cal moaned piteously as the men carrying him tossed him to the ground, too.
“Shut up, Bob, I weren’t hittin’ you, but the little tricksy-mouthed vixen!”
Obadiah had stopped singing. “Shut it, the lot of ye! You, what be your name, Angus? Did I ’ear you say you ’it the girl?”
“She won’t shut up!” Angus snarled. “She keeps goin’ on ’bout how the Elector’s gonna kill me!”
Bob clucked like a chicken. “Po’ little Angus, gittin’ scairt by a girl!”
“To hell with the girl!” Angus barked. “I’d chop her to pieces right here and now and eat her heart raw and not miss a wink of sleep over it. But iffen she really is Iron Andy’s daughter? Damn right, I’m a mite nervous! Ain’t you?”
Bob spat in the leaves. “Don’t be such a goddamned coward.”
“I ain’t afraid. I jest don’t relish gittin’ my tongue cut out, and havin’ my fingernails torn off, and bein’ hung from a tree by my own guts. They say he crucified people in the Ohio Forks War. They say he took scalps. They say he’s the one as killed George Washington, stabbed him in the heart in his sleep with Washington’s own sword.”
“All that shit you heard about the Elector jest ain’t true,” Bob said. “The Calhouns spread those notions around to make folks scairt of ’em. Besides, didn’t nobody kill George Washington; John Penn bought him off with a bunch of land somewhere and he jest up and quit. Pontiac’s the one they killed, and it was hangin’, not no midnight assassination. And iffen any of it is true, it happened a long time ago. He’s jest an old feller now with a lot of rough cracker grandsons who live out in the woods, stealin’ cattle, drinkin’ home-made corn likker, and sportin’ with their own sisters.”
“You ain’t from around here,” Angus muttered. “You don’t know.”
Obadiah laughed and sucked at the wineskin again. “Don’t ye worry, lads, I wot what’ll fix ’er.” Kneeling in the blanket of leaves, he looked Sarah in the eye. “I’d tell you that this’ll ’urt me worse than it’ll ’urt you,” he said to her, “but it’d be a lie.”
He punched her in her good eye.
Her field of vision filled with stars. Her head spun. Very clever maneuvering, Sarah, she told herself. Well done.
Blood ran down around her eye and onto her cheek.
The men laughed. Sarah had to yank her imagination away from thinking about slitting all their throats but Angus, and leaving him hanging from a tree by his own guts.
Her vision cleared, she saw Obadiah still looming over her, and she found she had a plan.
“Get that devil drink away from me!” she snapped. She hoped he was stupid enough—or drunk enough—not to wonder why she would have wine in her pack, if she hated it so much. Maybe he’d think it was Cal’s, that would be ironic. Maybe he’d think it was medicinal.
“New Light, eh?” Obadiah had another swig. “One of Barton’s Children, eh? Followers of the former Bishop Stone?”
Sarah put her face down, doing her best to look sulky and defiant. With her chin tucked against her collarbone her face was in shadow, and she took the opportunity to tear her own lower lip with her teeth. She was rewarded with the warm metallic tang of blood on her tongue.
“’Im, too?” The Englishman gestured at Calvin. Cal was stirring into wakefulness, and two of the thugs kept pistols trained on him. “’E goes in for the tent-preachink an’ the speakink in tongues?”
Sarah nodded sulkily. She wondered about the other two men, the shadowed ones she had such a hard time pinning down in her field of vision. Well, seven to one against wasn’t much worse than five to one. She’d have to try to get Obadiah moving in the right direction, and hope all the others would all follow.
“Right, drink up!” Yanking her to a sitting position, Obadiah shoved the wineskin to her lips.
Sarah spluttered and coughed to look convincing, and carefully, with her tongue and teeth, forced blood into the wineskin. Three pulses with her tongue should make three drops. As she bled her own lip into the wineskin, she focused her mind, hexing the wine with blood and will. She trembled, feeling energy flow from her into the wineskin. If her mouth had been free, she would have chanted a rhyme, but she’d have to do without. It was taking a long time to get three drops squeezed out, and she hoped Obadiah wouldn’t notice her eagerness to keep her mouth on the wineskin’s opening.
Obadiah did notice, but misunderstood. “Look at that, the wee squaw likes it mickle well after all!” he laughed raucously. “Let’s try it on ’er brave!”
He threw Sarah back into the leaves.
Cal looked groggy but his eyes were open. He must have seen Sarah resist the drink, because he played along, shying away and whimpering before allowing wine to be poured down his throat. She was proud of him for focusing and trying to help her, even not knowing what she was up to. Of course, now he’d be hexed, too, and that might complicate things.
She would just have to deal with that later.
The men all laughed and one of them kicked Calvin in the chest.
“I don’t see as any of this is gonna make the Elector any happier,” Angus muttered, “iffen he catches us.”
Obadiah resumed his song, louder and merrier than before.
And besides, I’ll instruct you, like me, to entwine
The myrtle of Venus wiff Bacchus’s vine!
He took a long swig.
Her captors all roared with laughter and Sarah held her breath. Angus reached for the wine but Obadiah rebuffed him with an elbow, and then drank deeply, finishing off the skin, tossing it aside, and finally relieving pressure from his chest with a long, loud belch.
Immediately, he reached for the second wineskin.
“Obadiah, my dear,” Sarah called in her sweetest, clearest Penn’s English. “These ropes are uncomfortable.”
The Nashville thugs laughed again, but Obadiah Dogsbody looked merely puzzled. He scratched his head. “Aye, poppet.” He pulled a clasp knife from his pocket, snapping the blade open.
“Hell, no!” Angus snapped. “Don’t kill her, and if you’re gonna do it, don’t do it right here under the old man’s nose!”
The other ruffians laughed again. “Give it to her!” one of them shouted as Obadiah trudged back to Sarah’s side and knelt. Then carefully, even gently, Obadiah slipped his blade between her wrists and cut away the ropes. He also cut the rope from her ankles.
The men from Nashville stopped laughing.
Sarah stood. She had him, the fat bully. “Would you help my nephew Calvin?”
Obadiah cut Calvin loose, and he staggered to his feet too, staring at Sarah just a little too intently. Uh oh. A brawl between the two of them would do her no good.
Obadiah put away his knife and took Sarah’s hand, stroking her arm. “My master the Right Reverend Father mickle wishes to see you, my pet,” he whispered. He stank of wine and sweat and horses, but she forced herself to smile lovingly at her captor.
“Of course,” she said. “I am very honored to go see him. Please take me there directly.”
Obadiah grinned and turned to go, still holding her hand. She threw a quick glance at Cal; he was balling up his fists and flaring his nostrils.
“Dear Obadiah, wait a moment,” she said. It wasn’t a strong enough hex to control the man, it just infatuated him, and maybe confused him a little bit where she was concerned, so she needed to be careful. And subtle, like the serpent.
The big man stopped and listened.
“Did the Right Reverend Father ask to see my nephew Calvin, as well?”
“Nay.” Obadiah frowned.
“His mamma will be so worried.” She knitted her brows. “If you would be so kind, I would like to take my nephew home. I’ll go with him, because I’m not sure he knows the way. If you tell me where I can find you, I’ll come join you later this evening, and we’ll speak to the Right Reverend Father together.”
Obadiah shot Calvin a suspicious look. “Your nephew?”
Sarah nodded. “He’s my brother’s son.” It was a lie she herself would have believed a day earlier. “He’s a good boy.”
Obadiah smiled. “Very well, my pet. I’ll tell Father Angleton to expect you, shall I?”
The Nashville ruffians stood with their jaws open, blinking in disbelief.
“The hell’s goin’ on here?” Bob demanded.
Obadiah spun and struck Bob in the mouth, then drew his pistol. Bob dropped to the ground and held his jaw.
“Anyone else got a question, lads?” Obadiah menaced his men.
“We just don’t wanna git ourselves shot,” Angus said, raising trembling hands in surrender. “Or worse.”
“She be comink back straight away,” Obadiah grunted. “Ben’t you, poppet?”
“Of course, my love,” she told him.
“Very good.” He smiled placidly.
* * *
Calvin Calhoun loved Sarah.
He had always loved Sarah, he knew that. Even when they had both been children, and she was his dear little auntie, his father’s sister though she was younger than Calvin himself, he had adored her.
He loved her because she was funny. He loved her because she was smart, smarter than anyone, even as smart as Old Man Calhoun, maybe. He loved her because she was tough, and proud, and a leader. He even thought she was pretty, though it was hard to say that about a girl with such an unfortunate eye, but then his own face had more than once been compared to the head of his tomahawk. He was in no position to go casting stones at the homely.
He could never say anything about his feelings because she had been his aunt, which was too close. You could marry a cousin, but not your father’s sister, that was bad and if you tried it, they wouldn’t let you marry in church or even in public and nobody would acknowledge that you even were married, much less recognize your kids. And everybody knew your children would be sickly and deformed. The Elector himself had reinforced this point when Cal was a boy, dragging all his grandchildren down to Nashville with pennies in their fists to see a traveling circus that featured a two-headed bull calf, stuffed and mounted, and warning them in dark whispers that the calf’s sire and dam had been brother and sister. Cal had often wondered if that was the real story behind Sarah’s eye, that her mother hadn’t been some Shawnee concubine warming his bed in his old age, like the Elector’d put about, but some close kin of the Old Man’s.
It turned out neither was true. Sarah was somebody else entirely, a Penn or an Ohioan, if Cal had understood correctly.
Sarah was not a Calhoun, and he could marry her.
He had proposed already, she had accepted, and he had abducted her almost in the traditional fashion (without notice to kin, though that was due to the circumstances and could be remedied later). Lord hates a man as can’t recognize the sound of opportunity knocking at his door. She hadn’t seemed too thrilled about it, but she had accepted him, and she’d come around, especially if he could prove himself as a protector and provider.
Then something had happened, he wasn’t sure what, but he had been knocked out. His head still throbbed.
When he’d woken up, it had been to watch Sarah pretend she was New Light and resist a drink of Calvin’s wine. Cal had played along, and then somehow—he wasn’t quite sure how, he had still been groggy from whatever blow he’d suffered—she had talked the fat Englishman into letting them both go.
The love for her in his heart had exploded then, into a million flowers and singing birds. He felt tingly all over, and lightheaded, and he knew in some corner of his mind that he was overreacting, that she had saved his life from the ruffians and his natural gratitude was being blown all out of proportion by his love.
He knew that, but still his lips wanted to sing and his feet wanted to dance, to stomp out a bright rhythm of courtship for Sarah Calhoun. Sarah Penn.
The sudden riot of love in his head was so powerful, it almost made him forget the evening’s other strange event. This was a night on which Cal had perpetrated one abduction and had himself been kidnapped twice. His first kidnapping had been at the hands of his grandfather, whom he now knew as Grand Master of the Calhoun Mountain Lodge, and under the direction of the Grand Master, Cal had been inducted into the Craft as an Entered Apprentice, and then promptly raised to the degree of Fellow Craft, and then raised to Master Mason.
This was not normal procedure, his grandfather had explained, and it might be seen as rushed, but it was something he had done in order to give Cal all the help he could in preparation for his upcoming journey.
Calvin Calhoun’s head spun with signs, tokens, and passwords almost as much as it spun with love.
He wasn’t entirely sure why his grandfather had inducted him into the Craft. The old man had only said, as he’d walked Cal back to his cabin through the woods, that a Mason was obligated to help another Mason in need, and that the signs and tokens and passwords could be used to call for that help.
Cal wondered how that would work. If Sarah hadn’t rescued them from the Nashville men, could he have used the passwords to find out if any of them were Masons, and ask them to let him go?
Maybe. In the meantime, his head spun.
He stumbled along, haggard and weary and Cupid-smitten, humping one pack on his shoulder and dragging the other under his arm. He wished the Englishman hadn’t shattered his pa’s old gun, but at least it made one less thing for him to carry.
“Sarah,” he gasped, “you’re pretty as a picture from any angle, but iffen you’d slow down, I might could look at your face once in a while!”
She didn’t answer and she didn’t slow down.
He noticed something that surprised him, then, cutting through the fog. “Sarah, are we goin’ the right way? It seems to me we ain’t got off Calhoun Mountain yet, so we should be goin’ downhill.”
“I can’t say for sure how long that hex’ll hold him,” she shot back over her shoulder, “or how long he can keep his hired men in check. And the gun’s gone, and you been hit on the head and need lookin’ at. We can leave tomorrow, iffen you’re still fixin’ to come with me.”
“Hold who?” Where did she get all her energy? Cal wanted to stop, catch his breath, maybe lie down. Touch her hair softly and say kind things.
“Obadiah Dogsbody. The Englishman.”
Cal laughed. “You hexed that muttonhead? No wonder I couldn’t make out why he’s lettin’ us go!” He slapped his knee and stopped walking. “How about we celebrate your cleverness with a kiss, girl?”
She kept walking.
“Come on, Sarah!” he called after her.
Still walking.
“My head’s jest fine!” he yelled.
Calvin heard a rustle on the slope behind him. He was in love, but he was neither deaf nor stupid, and the senses he’d trained in a lifetime of hunting deer and sneaking other men’s cattle out of their pastures had not deserted him. He spun on the balls of his feet, whipping out his tomahawk with his free hand.
Something manlike—and not a man—stood in a clearing among the trees on the slope below him. Cal saw it clear as could be, with the moon shining full down on the not-a-man. The near-human thing had no features and no clothing. It was like a statue of the humanoid form, unfinished. It didn’t shine or glow or reflect light; in the moonlight, it looked like it might be brown or gray, top to bottom.
As Cal turned, the not-a-man froze. Cal got a good hard look at it, and then it bolted into the trees. Cal thought he saw a second…thing…behind the first, disappearing into the night. He waited a moment, staring holes into the forest, but nothing stirred.
Cal whipped back around and trotted up the slope again after Sarah. He strained his ears to listen, conscious of eyes, or at least vision, on his back as whatever it was he had seen watched him from behind. The hair on his neck stood, and he shivered. He kept a tight grip on his war axe, brandishing it to the side occasionally so the unseen watchers would know he was armed.
Sarah paused to look down at him, panting. “Come on, you danged slowpoke!”
Then her eye widened. “Run, Cal, run!” she yelled. “Run like the Devil hisself is after you!”
Cal ran, his moccasin-clad feet slamming ball-first into the soft dirt of the hillside as he tore up it, as fast as he could make himself go. He threw a quick look over his shoulder, and almost tripped.
There were two of them, and they were gray. They looked soft, or muddy, slippery and half-formed. They looked like nothing so much as clay men, faceless, featureless, naked, terrifying, like something a child might mold out of riverbank dirt and play with, only six feet tall and running. Their breath hissed out of ragged, flapping mouths as they came, and their bare gray feet thumped and rustled on the hillside.
They were right behind him and running faster than he was. He was doomed.
At least he could protect Sarah. If he died but she escaped, that would be a noble sacrifice and a fair trade. He’d do it for love, and the Elector would be proud of him. He might call Cal a hell of a fellow at Cal’s funeral and bury Cal in his own lambskin Mason’s apron.
Cal swung his head back around downhill and then let the motion carry him into a turn of his whole body, shoulders first, arms swinging around, feet planted. He whipped the pack in his left hand up like a comet—
and then down—
and released it, hurling it straight into the chest of the first not-a-man.
It whooshed breath out but made no other noise as it staggered and fell back, entangling the legs of its companion and buying Calvin enough time to shrug off the other pack and free up his tomahawk arm. As the second not-a-man stumbled over its companion and lunged at him, Cal struck as hard as he could with the war axe, burying it deep in the clay thing’s head.
The clay creature didn’t stop. It didn’t even slow down.
It landed on Calvin with its elbows, pounding him in the chest and wrapping its cold wet hands around his neck. The creature wrenched the tomahawk handle from his grip. The not-a-man’s fingers were long and clammy, and Cal struggled to breathe as he fell.
The stink of mud and clay clogged his nostrils. He was being attacked by a river bottom.
Cal pushed, but the monster was stronger than him and it bore down, crushing his windpipe with its cold fingers. He stared up into the eyeless space where a face should be and saw only blank, merciless nothing. The mouth opened, showing only darkness, and hissing the vegetable stink of a swamp into Cal’s face. His own fingers dug into the moist clay of the not-a-man’s chest, scrabbling large slippery furrows but gaining no grip. He felt his lungs emptying and the skin of his neck beginning to tear.
He thought of his lariat, looped on his hip, but he couldn’t imagine it would hurt this enemy. Cal had no weapons that could do any damage to this thing.
He was going to die.
He heard Sarah running down the slope and he tried to call her off, but could only wave and gasp out useless choking sounds. He wanted her to run, to escape, Sarah his love, Sarah whom he could marry after all, because she wasn’t a Calhoun, she was a Penn, and Eldritch, to boot.
Sarah whom he would never marry because he was going to die under an avalanche of fighting mud-man.
Sarah, who was allergic to silver.
Silver and magic didn’t mix.
Cal’s head started to spin as he fumbled for his belt, and knew the rest of his life might be measured in moments. He dug into the purse, grateful that Obadiah Dogsbody hadn’t found it, and even more grateful for his own thrifty habit of saving.
His fist closed around several coins—at least one of them had to be silver. He pulled the fistful of change from his purse, and slapped it into the thing’s face.
Aaaaaaaaooooowwwarrragh!
The creature arched its back and howled, its humid, earthy exhalations filling Calvin’s lungs as it let him go and he was able to suck in air. His neck stung; he was bleeding.
The thing had eyes now, one in its forehead and one in its cheek, each formed by a dull silver Pennsland shilling and each spluttering and emitting a foul yellow smoke as the silver burned its way into the clay. Cal saw his blood on its fingers and shuddered at the nearness of his escape. The not-a-man reared back, clawing and slapping at its own head, and tumbled away down the hill.
Rraaagraaaaaaooggh!
Calvin swallowed cold night air into his chest and dragged himself to his feet. The second not-a-man, its balance recovered from tripping over Cal’s pack, hesitated. Cal scrounged another shilling from his purse and raised it over his head like a weapon. He just needed a sling, and he’d be King David Calhoun, shooting mudmen Philistines in the face with money.
“Git back, you…thing!” Sarah reached his side, and he was foolishly proud.
“Cal, what did you do?” she panted.
Waaaraaawraaaagh!
His vision firmed up and he stepped forward, threatening with his shilling. The wounded not-a-man disappeared into the trees, still bellowing in pain and scratching at its own head, and its companion hissed and then retreated, disappearing into the shadow.
Calvin grinned weakly and checked his purse. “Don’t be vexed with me, dear. I jest spent half our savings.”
* * *
Obadiah whistled a drinking song as he approached the camp: “To Anacreon in Heaven.”
Even just whistling the bawdy parts reminded him of his sweet poppet and brought a smile to his face. She’d rejoin him in camp soon, and he looked forward to it. He’d dawdled on his return path, in part because his foot still troubled him but also to give her more time and in the hope that they might arrive at camp together. He imagined holding her, being kind to her, giving her gifts, and receiving her tender smiles.
He’d released the Nashville men. They had protested strongly, especially the one named Angus, who had cursed a lot and threatened to go retake the girl. Obadiah had a hard time understanding their objections, but he had been firm, and pointed out that they’d already been paid, and their services were no longer needed.
Eventually they had given up trying and left. Angus, in particular, had fled in a full sprint.
Obadiah finished the verse verbally as he strolled into the firelight, “the myrtle of Venus wiff Bacchus’s vine!” In Obadiah’s absence, the Right Reverend Father had lit a small fire, but he had pitched no tent, and he sat on a fallen log in his tall black hat and his cloak, looking expectantly at his servant.
“Well?” Father Angleton asked in his high-pitched nasal whine.
Obadiah wanted to ward off any grumpiness on the priest’s part, and offered the last of the second wineskin to the priest. “Drink, Father?”
Angleton rose to his feet, brows knitted. “Obadiah, have I dreamed true? Have you failed me again?”
There was a dangerous edge to his employer’s voice, and Obadiah willed himself to be sober as he tamped the stopper back into the skin. “Nay, sir, I’ve ’ad mickle great success tonight.” He cleared his throat and spat into the leaves.
“You’re drunk, Obadiah Dogsbody, and you’re alone. Explain to me this great success you believe you’ve had.”
“Ah, aye.” Angleton would be happy once Obadiah had explained the matter to him. “I trow this must look a mite surprisink to you.” He straightened his back and collected himself. “I sent the men off, you see. An’ the wine—” he looked at it cheerfully, “I took it from the girl.”
“I don’t care about the men!” Angleton roared.
Obadiah shuffled back a step.
Angleton pressed forward, spittle flying out of his mouth with every word. “And I certainly don’t care where you got your wine! Where’s the girl? You remember the girl, don’t you? The girl with the deformed eye? The girl whose hair I bound into a lodestone so even you could find her? You took her drink apparently, so you must have seen her—where is she?”
“She be comink, she be comink,” Obadiah hastened to reassure his master. “I did see ’er, as you well wot was the plan, an’ she be comink ’ere. She’ll be ’ere by and by.” He smiled to put the Right Reverend Father’s mind at ease.
Angleton backed away from Obadiah, doubt in his eyes. “Is someone bringing her? Did you send your Nashville men to get her?”
That might have been a good idea. Obadiah could have gone with her, and then the Right Reverend Father wouldn’t be so nervous. “Nay, she be comink ’ere on ’er own.” He widened his grin. “Released wiffout bond, as a magistrate might say it.”
Angleton’s look of confusion faded and was replaced by a suspicious stare. He reached into his purse and pulled out a silver coin.
“Be that a gift, Father?” Obadiah was flattered. “You needn’t, sir.” Still, he held out his hand, rough palm up. It was starting to feel to Obadiah as if Yuletide had come early this year. He half expected to hear the firing of celebratory guns.
But Father Angleton reached up and pressed the money against Obadiah’s forehead. Obadiah was startled, but submitted. He felt nothing, other than the coolness of the coin on his face and the slight humiliation of being touched by his master in this fashion.
“Where’s the girl?” Angleton asked him.
“Blast an’ confound it!” Obadiah roared, surprising himself. “Wayland’s blood, but that scab-eyed wee witch hexed me!”
“Yaas.” Angleton’s teeth ground together. “The fault is mine. After your first failure, I should have gone myself. She defeated you completely, Obadiah.”
“That she did,” drawled a lazy mountain voice from outside the circle of the fire. Its owner was a tall Appalachee youth with a long Kentucky rifle crooked in his arm, its muzzle aimed not at Obadiah and his master, but near enough that it could be immediately brought to bear. “And I reckon she done a powerful job of it, too, from the gump look on your face as you was traipsin’ about the woods tonight.” The cracker spat into the brush.
Obadiah growled and reached for his the hilt of his broadsword—the man would only get one shot off with that rifle, and Obadiah calculated he’d likely miss, in the dark and the excitement, and then Obadiah would cut him down. Then Obadiah noticed several other long-bodied mountaineers lurking in the shadows, all armed with rifles, and he paused.
“’Erne’s teef,” he said, “but you be a right coward. Aye, ye be all a bunch of cowards, the lot of ye.”
“Says the armed desperado as goes about kidnappin’ girls,” rejoined the mountaineer. “But we ain’t here for no ruckus.”
“Be ye not?” Obadiah felt a curious hollowness inside, and it seemed to him Father Angleton’s hex-dispelling coin had taken something from him. Life was flatter, duller, harder than it had been ten minutes earlier.
“What do you want?” Father Angleton spoke up.
“Name’s Calhoun,” the rifleman said. “Shadrach Calhoun.”
“You won’t shoot me,” the priest told him. “I am chaplain to the Philadelphia Blues, and the personal confessor of the emperor.” He sounded as wary as Obadiah felt.
“We ain’t gonna shoot you,” Shadrach agreed. “You’re on Calhoun land, and we come to welcome you.”
“We’ll leave,” Angleton offered, his voice smoldering, and turned to go, but Shadrach swung his rifle up and stopped the man.
“No, you won’t,” he contradicted the priest. “Not yet. Every priest has e’er come onto Calhoun land, we ain’t let him leave without he preached us a sermon first. I reckon a half hour ought to do, so long as it’s a half hour of solid noisy hellfire and brimstone. Approximate, as I ain’t got no hourglass.”
“I can certainly preach to you about the Day of Judgment,” Angleton said sharply. Obadiah saw the fire in his master’s eyes and was a little nervous, even though the Right Reverend Father was snapping at the Appalachee. “The great and terrible day when all will stand naked before the Lord to be judged for our sins.”
“I reckon that’d be perfect.” Shadrach Calhoun he raised his rifle, pointing it at Obadiah, and his shadow-hidden companions all took aim as well, surrounding the strangers with a bristling hedge of firearms. “I reckon I’d git a great deal of benefit out of a noisy hellfire and brimstone sermon ’bout how we appear afore the Lord on Judgment Day. And I reckon it’d be especially effective iffen the preacher and the congregation—” he nodded at Angleton and Obadiah, “both demonstrated the finer theological points in dramatic form.”
Obadiah didn’t understand, but he had a sneaking suspicion that his evening was about to get even worse. “What do you intend?”
“Ain’t it obvious?” Shadrach drawled slowly, and then spat a great brown squirt at Obadiah’s feet. “I mean I want to hear this sermon, and I want you and the preacher both to be like the man said. Nekkid afore the Lord.”