Ethan turned and walked to the stairs. “I’m sure. But it’s late, and I have no desire to answer them.”
He started to climb out of the vaults, and a moment later heard Rickman hurrying after him. Uncle Reg walked at Ethan’s side, watching him expectantly.
“Sorry,” Ethan whispered. “Dimitto te.” I release you.
“Perhaps we can speak tomorrow,” the doctor said, the words echoing in the narrow stairway.
Ethan said nothing.
The air aboveground had grown as cool as that in the vaults, and a fine gray mist had settled over Castle William, partially obscuring the stars overhead. Ethan could still hear a few men singing on the ships, but the choruses of “Yankee Doodle” seemed to have stopped.
Rickman and Ethan walked to the officers’ barracks, a short distance south of the vault, and found a pair of empty cots set just inside the door of the first building. Ethan was famished and would have liked to wash off the faint musty smell of the vaults. He thought he could also smell the stink of rot and death on his clothing, but he might have imagined it. He had spent too much of his day among the dead. Despite his hunger and his desire to bathe, he fell onto one of the cots and soon had drifted into a deep, dreamless slumber.
He awoke to find himself alone in the barracks. Daylight streamed in through the building’s small windows, and a steady wind whistled in the stone. Officers shouted commands on the parade nearby, their calls a counterpoint to the rhythm of marching and the rattle of rifle drills.
Ethan climbed out of bed, ran a hand through his hair, and headed outside. The sky was covered with high, white clouds. Ethan shielded his eyes with an open hand and looked around for Rickman or any other familiar face. Seeing no one he knew, he walked back to the vaults and descended the stairs. Before he reached the corridor he heard voices and thought he could smell a hint of rot coming from all those bodies.
Stepping into the torchlight, he saw the doctor standing with the corporal from the previous night and a second British officer he didn’t recognize.
“Ah, Mister Kaille,” Rickman said. “Welcome. If you can bear with us for a minute or two, I think we’ll have a name for you.”
“All right.”
The three men wasted little time moving down the line of dead. They bothered only with those men who hadn’t been identified the night before. When they reached the last of the bodies, Rickman looked through the manifest once more and nodded, a satisfied grin on his face.
“Simon Gant,” the doctor said, looking at Ethan.
“Gant,” Ethan repeated. The name sounded familiar. He said it again and looked at the corporal he had met the night before. “Do you know him? Can you tell me anything about him?”
The young officer’s jaw tightened. “Aye, I know him, the deserting bastard. I’d like to get my hands on him, too. Never liked him. Always thought he was hiding something, if you know what I mean. I should have known he’d come to this.”
“Maybe I can find him for you,” Ethan said. “Tell me what he looks like.”
“He’s a big man,” the corporal said. “Tall, brawny. He has red hair and a ruddy face. I suppose some might say he’s good-looking; he always seemed to have a lady with him when he was on leave.”
An image had started to form in Ethan’s mind. He had seen this man; he felt certain of it.
“His nose looks like it had been broken a couple of times, but the really odd thing about him is that his eyes-”
“Are different colors!” Ethan broke in.
“That’s right!” said the man, sounding surprised. “One’s blue and the other’s green. You know him?”
“It seems that I do,” Ethan said. “I needed the reminder. Thank you.”
The corporal grinned.
Ethan knew Gant, all right. He had met the thief once, years ago, when he first returned to Boston from Barbados. But the memory of their encounter remained clear, because of all that had come after. As the corporal said, Gant was a brute of a man; tall, broad-shouldered, thick around the middle. He had stolen some coin and jewelry from a home in the North End, and the man he robbed, a shopkeeper of some limited means, was one of the first to hire Ethan as a thieftaker.
Ethan had little trouble tracking Gant down; the thief had been blessed with great physical strength but little intellect. But at that time Ethan wasn’t as skilled with spells as he was now, and Gant managed to get away.
The next thing Ethan heard, Sephira Pryce had intervened, retrieving the goods from Gant and returning them to the shopkeeper. Initially, Ethan blamed poor luck for the loss of his commission. Only later did he come to realize that any time he took a job he risked losing money to Sephira and her toughs. But in the weeks and months that followed this first incident, Ethan began to hear stories about Gant and Sephira. Some said that he worked for her. Some said that she wanted him dead. Some said that their feud was all a ruse, that in fact they were partners.
And then, in the fall of 1761, Gant left Boston to fight the French, and that was the last Ethan heard of him. Until today.
The corporal and his friend still stood in the vaults watching Ethan and the doctor. Ethan sensed that they expected-or at least hoped-to be assigned some new task.
For his part, Ethan needed time alone with the dead-or if not alone, at least not in the company of the soldiers. Apparently Rickman sensed this.
“Thank you, gentlemen,” the doctor said to the officers. “Your help has been invaluable. We’ll be certain to convey as much to your superiors.”
The corporal’s face fell. “There’s nothing more you need?” It seemed that working in the vaults, even with scores of dead men arrayed before them, was preferable to laboring on the ships.
“Thank you, no,” said the doctor.
The two men exchanged a look and offered a reluctant salute to Rickman. The corporal nodded once to Ethan and led his companion back up the stairs.
“My thanks, Doctor,” Ethan said, walking to the body of Jonathan Sharpe, the first of the dead men Uncle Reg had indicated the night before.
There were active conjurers-men and women like Ethan who cast spells with some frequency. And there were others, like Ethan’s sister Bett, who out of fear, or ignorance of their family history, or some odd sense of righteousness, never conjured. Ethan wanted to know which best described the two dead conjurers in the corridor.
He lifted the first man’s arm and pushed up his sleeve.
“What are you doing?” Rickman asked.
Ethan paused over the dead man. Admitting to the doctor that he was a conjurer was one thing; he wasn’t prepared to explain Uncle Reg to the man. He didn’t know how Rickman would react to the notion of a ghost joining them down here in the vaults. “I have reason to believe that this man and one other down at the end of the corridor were both conjurers. I want to see if they were active spellers or if they merely had speller blood in their veins.” He went back to working the sleeve up the dead man’s arm.
“How can you tell?”
“From that,” Ethan said, pointing to the dead man’s forearm. It was scored with a lattice of white scars, which had been made even more stark than usual as the man’s arm had started to grow bloated.
“The scars?”
“That’s right.” He pulled Sharpe’s sleeve back in place, laid the man’s arm back down, and pushed up his own sleeve to reveal similar marks. “You see?”
“But why-?”
“Blood,” Ethan said. “Conjurings need a source, usually a living source for more powerful spells. Blood is the most easily available, as well as the most effective.” He pushed his sleeve back down and walked to the second conjurer, Caleb Osborne, the older man with silver-flecked hair.
Osborne had no scars on his forearm. At least not his left forearm. But when Ethan looked at the corpse’s right forearm, he found that it was thick with scarring. Osborne must have been left-handed. Ethan looked more closely at the man’s hands and found that the left was more heavily callused than the right.