Ganymede (The Clockwork Century 3)

“Hm. ”

“I do not think she was lying, and I do not think her control is absolute. Nor,” she added quickly, “do I think any magic is involved. ”

“How did she control them?”

Josephine hesitated. “I should say instead that she stopped them. She stunned them, with a very loud noise, and something about it … the timbre of it, or the tone. Something made them all stand still. But I don’t know if I could repeat her success, and I would not dare to try. ”

“It’s wise of you, to defer to her judgment. ”

“I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe in cards, or curses. But I believe that Madame Marie has power, and I have no interest in offending her. Besides, she saved me. ”

“You believe that?”

“I know that,” she confirmed. “I was trapped between the dead and the alligators, and she intervened. ”

“Then she wants something from you,” Agatha said coolly.

“Whatever it is, she can have it. ”

The fortune-teller retrieved her cards again, and resumed her slow shuffling. “If I were you, I’d be careful what I promised to the little queen. I would not offend her myself, but beware of what you offer unbidden. ”

“Does that advice come from your cards?”

“No, it comes from my heart—one old friend to another: Be careful of her motives, and the favors she asks of you. I believe she means well for the city, but also that she leans quite hard on the ends justifying the means. At any rate, look: you’ve used up all your tarot time, which will come as a relief, I’m sure. ”

Josephine heard the rolling-crawlers before she saw them. She’d know them anywhere; she listened to them for the last three nights patrolling beneath the Garden Court windows every hour on the hour as the curfew that seized the city was forced into effect. Ostensibly, this new measure was meant to address the disappearance of Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff four days previously, and just this once, Josephine didn’t doubt the Texians and their sincerity. They wanted to know what had happened to their officers, and they didn’t understand anything about the Dead Who Walk, the “zombis” whose population had risen so much over the last year.

It was hard to blame them, except that they’d failed so thoroughly to listen. Anyone could’ve told them.

The people who worked the docks, who managed the piers, who loaded and unloaded cargo both virtuous and clandestine. The men who drove the ferries over the river, who worked the engines on the little flat boats that carried people across the bayous and into the islands in the bays; the women who separated shells from seafood in the old canneries, who mended the nets down by the shore under the heat of the sun reflected off the river, and off the ocean.

They could’ve asked the rich children who were warned by bedtime stories about the zombis, or the poor children who were threatened with zombi punishment when they misbehaved. They might have asked the old folks who knew to shutter their homes against the dead as if against a storm; or they could have inquired after the young folks, who were fast enough to run and knew all the ways of escape from the in-between world down by the water.

Anyone in the city could’ve said, “Yes, the men-shaped things Walk the shores and roam the abandoned spots where no one else dares to go. They moan and cough, and chase and bite. They kill, and you’d best be leaving them alone. ”

But the Texians had largely kept to their barracks and bases, and they did not ask about the occasional soldier or sailor who went missing … and later, perhaps, was seen again in a terribly transformed state. Desertions were not so very rare, after all.

Over the years, the occupation had become a stable and sedentary thing. The men on top of the command chain ignored the citizens’ complaints, just as they ignored Marie Laveau and her church, and her graveyard pastimes.

Anything out of sight can be ignored, when knowing the whole story is too much trouble.

But Colonel Betters and Lieutenant Cardiff were gone, or worse than that—and if anyone but Josephine knew precisely what had become of them, no one was saying. If any bodies had been found, no one had honored them with a public burial. If anyone Walked, no one was speaking of it. Instead, the Texians went to ground like frightened animals, enforcing old rules and instituting new ones to keep people indoors at night.

And so the rolling-crawlers came puttering on their diesel engines, around the corners and through the alleys toward the Square in front of the Saint Louis cathedral. The last of the determined fortune-tellers and corner preachers and salesmen offering boiled crawdads or knuckles of sugarcane, everyone who’d insisted on staying until the final moment … they all admitted defeat, and grumbling, they put away their stalls, their makeshift stands, and their wares.

The rolling-crawlers were called such because they patrolled on hard-rubber wheels that bounded independently of one another on floating axles, allowing the carriage-sized craft to climb forward over curbs and navigate the narrow streets of the old Gulf city.

They were both better and worse than horse-drawn affairs. Better because they left no manure. Worse because they were louder, and the diesel stink of their exhalations polluted the damp, heavy air—which locked on to the best and worst of odors, keeping all smells close to the earth.

The fortune-teller said, “There’s the new fellow. He came tonight, after all. ”

“I heard he only just arrived yesterday,” Josephine replied, scanning the scene.

“Two days ago,” Agatha corrected. “I’ll say this for the Texians: They replace their own fast. ”

“I hope they don’t replace Cardiff anytime soon. ” Josephine rose to her feet and stretched, then began to help her friend break down the little station from which she earned most of her living. “I won’t be too brokenhearted if there’s no one to focus on a certain lake project anymore. ”

“It wouldn’t break my heart either, but I won’t hold my breath. I hear Travis McCoy is more trouble than two Cardiffs and a mule. He’ll be patrolling for your prize”—she used her preferred euphemism—“sooner rather than later. ”