corpses of the plague's dead. In the windows of the pharmacy across the street huge ornamental retorts glowed like rubies with the candles set behind them, all red, a warning to travelers of what the newspapers still denied. The day's rain had left the streets mucky, breathing with the stinks of wet and decay. Everything had a glitter to it, like the sheen of sweat on a dying man's brow.
In the silence it was easy to believe the disease roved the streets like the angel of death. Easy to half-expect the skeletal white shape of Baron Cemetery, the voodoo lord of the dead, coming around a corner in his top hat and his spectacles.
What was disease, anyway? The cholera that had squeezed the life out of Ayasha like a wet doll, the yellow fever that left him every day wondering if Olympe, or Gabriel, or Hannibal would vanish the way the Perrets or Robois Roque had vanished, struck down in their tracks so swiftly that they could not call for help.
The hair prickled on his neck. He was being followed.
This time by more than one person.
He quickened his pace, hopped over the gutter, and waded down the dragging muck in the middle of Rue Douane, keeping clear of the rough shacks and stucco cottages on either side.
Behind him nothing moved. Only a fleeting impression of something in the already wavering darkness away from the hanging lamps. His first superstitious dread-of the dark stalker Bronze John, the softly clattering bones of the bespectacled Baron-switched immediately to the more real dread of those bearded, whiskered Kaintucks, river pirates and killers who roved the streets looking for drink, or a woman, or a black man to beat up.
Ahead of him a man stepped out of the shadows. Then another, sticks in their hands. Every house between the Rue Marais behind him and the Rue Tr?m? before was locked, empty, their inhabitants enjoying the breezes of the lake in Milneburgh or Mandeville or Spanish Fort. January doubled on his tracks and bolted for the dark mouth of the Rue Marais. As he did so, another man appeared in the street behind him, running toward him, as all of them were running now.
It was like flight in a dream, the horrible slow movement with the primordial ooze gripping his feet. Grimly he wondered where the City Guards were, who were sup posed to be enforcing a curfew against colored and slaves. He reached the corner of the Rue Marais moments before they did and slithered into the long pass-through which led between two houses to the yard behind. It was a dead end, a cul-de-sac, knee-deep in garbage and night soil, and this house, unlike Agnes Pellicot's, had no convenient window to force. But one of the few advantages January had ever found in looking like a field hand was that he was tremendously strong.
He drove his foot through the jalousies that covered one of the rickety doors, plunged through in a tangle of curtain, in the dark stumbling into and knocking over unseen articles of furniture. He crashed and thrust his way into the front parlor, hearing the men behind him as they broke through into the rear, groped along the wall. He forced himself to slow down, to move carefully, to feel his way until he touched the door that led into the front bedroom.
He shut it behind him, big fingers shaking as they found the key that such rooms nearly always had, turned it in the lock with a click that made him wince. His pursuers were making far too much noise tripping over furniture themselves to hear. "The curse of Cromwell be after ye, ya stupid pillock!"
"Where the Sam Hill'd he go?"
"Ye got no more sense than to leave the lantern in the alley..." Silent, silent, desperately silent he followed the wall around the room, thrust open the casement window that looked onto the pass-through to the next house and opened the shutters, the reddish reflections of lamplight falling through to show him the door into the rear bedroom, the rough, battered-looking chifforobe with its broken mirror, and the big wooden bed, the mosquito-bar tied neatly back above it.
He slithered through, pulling shut the casements and pushing closed the shutters behind him. As he'd suspected, there was another man waiting in the street, but he was watching the front of the house.
January slipped along the pass-through to the rear of the next house. He used one of the scalpels from his