The Shirt On His Back - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,70

out of the shadows and through the staked circle. January gestured him into the shelter - he didn't quite trust Edwin Titus's motives - and followed him inside.

'Where's Shaw?'

January shook his head. 'He stayed behind with the Beauty and Morning Star, to bury the Dutchman.' Quickly, he outlined what they'd found in Dry Grass Coulee. 'It never occurred to me they'd quarantine us. It should have.' He slapped at a mosquito. 'New Orleans is such a pest hole, I've gotten used to thinking that everyone's in the same danger of whatever disease is around.'

'You think Titus is behind this somehow?'

'I think he's glad Gil's out two clerks. Beyond that?' He shook his head. 'Whatever this is, it's bad. It strikes hard and swiftly—'

'Rather like the Blackfeet,' said Hannibal grimly. He held up the two folded letters. 'I've got them translated,' he added. 'And what they say isn't good.'

Chapter 18

The letter dated April of 1834 begins: I have found the monster.' Hannibal drew himself closer to the fire that burned on the open side of the shelter, for even in early July, the mountain nights were chill. 'It's in the Bavarian dialect, and that bears about the same relation to German as Portuguese does to Spanish. I'll have some of that,' he added as January poured himself some of the coffee Frye had made. Frye settled for a half cup of Seaholly's contribution to the plague tent. After the day he'd had, he said, he needed a drink, and January couldn't argue with him there.

'I have found the monster.' For an instant, January saw in his mind the image of the doomed Baron Frankenstein, chasing the creature he had made across the Arctic ice into the darkness of eternity. He was from Ingolstadt, too.

'Franz Bodenschatz is, obviously, Frank Boden.' Hannibal angled the faded letter toward the low orange light of the flames. 'He describes Fort Ivy, and the enmity between the AFC and its rivals, pretty accurately. He calls Tom Shaw a dullard and Johnny a schwammerl - a simpleton - and describes how he, Bodenschatz, came up there from New Orleans, through St Louis. I assume this is the reason his father had the letter with him—'

'His father?'

'The letter starts out: Honored Father. At one point he says—' Hannibal turned the creased, discolored sheets ninety degrees; obviously there was little paper available at Fort Ivy, and what there was, January guessed, had begun its life as the flyleaves of Franz Bodenschatz's books. 'Thank you for the news of Katerina. I am sorry that even after your efforts, she seems incapable of understanding why I do as I must. What is wrong with these women? How can her heart be so hardened as to forget what Escher did? I fear I misjudged her, seeing in her facile pity for - something-or-other, some kind of bird, I think - and kittens the illusion of true capacity of the heart. When I have returned from America - when I have destroyed the Thing which martyred our Beautiful One - I will naturally pursue the honorable course and return to her. Yet how can True Love exist, knowing as I do now the shallowness of her selfish heart?'

He folded the letter. 'And how's Katerina Bodenschatz going to have True Love for a husband who runs off to America on a mission of vengeance, leaving her with two children, one of them a babe in arms at the time of Franz's departure, which as of April of 1834 had been - he mentions it somewhere in here - nearly seven years previously?'

'The Thing which martyred our Beautiful One.' From his pocket January took the locket, and he opened it in the firelight. The childish face of the girl within smiled out at them, and a bead of pine resin, popping in the fire, threw up a trail of yellow sparks and gave the illusion for a moment that she was about to speak. 'Escher, I presume.'

Hannibal unfolded the other sheet. 'Honored Father,' he read. 'All stands now in readiness. We have found an ally at last, whose heart bleeds as ours does, with wounds no balm can heal; an ally unshaken in the righteousness of our cause.'

'Or who says he is, anyway.' January spooned stew on to the tin plates that had come along with it: cornmeal, grouse, an assortment of Mexican spices. 'A man on a mission of revenge is one of the easiest to enlist to whatever cause you please, because he isn't