Barbara Hambly - 03 Graveyard Dust

Yellowjack cursed him and stuck the knife in his belt, reached to grab his shoulders with both hands.

Gabriel writhed like a snake and rammed his head into the man's groin. At the same instant January sprang forward, yelling, "Gabriel! Roll clear!" and flung himself on Yellowjack's back.

His weight slammed the smaller man to the ground; the lantern bounced away.

"He's got a poison sticker! " yelled Gabriel from the darkness, and January sprang back as he felt Yellowjack wriggle and lunge. Yellowjack twisted from beneath him and fled up onto the bridge, January ripping loose a pistol from his belt to follow. Yellowjack was yards ahead of him on the bridge, mists already closing around him, when he stopped, and threw up his hands.

"No!"

Just for an instant, January thought he saw clearly the silhouette in the darkness and the fog: thought he saw the outline of a top hat, the gleam of spectacles, the white glimmer of bones.

What Yellowjack believed he saw-Baron Cemetery or something else-January never knew. But the wangateur veered from the end of the bridge where the dark form waited, and flung himself over the edge, into the water. The dark form vanished into the mist again, and January doubled back, sprinting to catch Yellowjack if he emerged from the water on this side of the bayou.

Mist and water roiled, and he heard another cry. He saw something heave itself from the water on the far side and snatched up the lantern in time to see Yellowjack scramble, stumbling, out of the bayou on the far side, and limp across the marshy ground for the trees, half a mile away.

He never made it. As January ran across the bridge he saw the man fall, and saw a dark shape stride from the mists toward him, a shape that resolved itself into a tall woman in a tignon with seven points. How either he or Yellowjack could have mistaken her for Baron Cemetery January didn't know-a final dream-shape born of poison and smoke-but when he reached Yellowjack's side, it was indeed Mamzelle Marie who knelt there.

The wangateur was gasping, clutching at the wet weeds in terror and pain. A knife gleamed in Mamzelle Marie's hand as she looked up at January in the lamp light. "Snake," she said. "In the water." She took January's lantern from him and held it close, and slashed an X in Yellowjack's already swelling arm.

"He thought you were Baron Cemetery," said January uncertainly. "He saw you in the fog on the bridge." Mamzelle Marie looked up with blood on her lips where she'd sucked clean the wound of its poison. Dried blood crusted her temple where Yellowjack had struck her from the gallery of the house. "I was never on the bridge," she said. "I came around over the bayou a ways back, and through the cipriere."

January walked back the half-dozen paces required to shine a lucifer's dim quick flare on the bayou. He saw the sleek zigzagged backs, the arrowing ripples of wake as they swam away.

Water moccasins, two of them, six feet long, the largest he had ever seen.

Footsteps crunched on the shells of the bridge. The rope still dangled from Gabriel's neck and his hands were still bound but he wasn't limping. In fact he walked with his usual jaunty stride.

"The Grand Zombi's her friend," said the boy, without a trace of the pitiful agony that had rent his voice only two minutes before. Without a trace of surprise, either. '"Course all the snakes in the bayou would go after Yellowjack, once she told them to. He was really stupid to try and swim."

Judge Canonge was not best pleased, after a day in the courtroom hearing all those cases left behind by ill or absconding colleagues, to be summoned from his own packing yet again to the Cabildo. Nevertheless, half an hour after Constable LaBranche left the watch room where January, Mamzelle Marie, Gabriel, and Isaak waited, the deep golden voice could be heard through the open doors in the arcade.

"Ridiculous? Of course it's ridiculous! If the man had had the sense God gave a goat he'd have seen there was something amiss in the confession... What have we here?" The Judge squinted around the grimy semidark of the watch room, then touched his hat brim. "Madame Paris."

Mamzelle Marie nodded like a queen.

"Your Honor." The young man got shakily to his feet, aided by the stick January had cut for him out by the bayou. "My name is Isaak Jumon. I understand you have convicted my wife, and this man's sister"-he gestured to January-"of my murder."

The Judge's dark eyes flicked from Isaak's face to January's, and he remarked, "You again." He looked back at the young marble carver. "You look like you've been buried, anyway. Sit down, for God's sake. LaBranche, get ilris boy some brandy. I never liked that jiggery-pokery with your brother and his mysterious carriage rides in the middle of the night. And I understand some poor bastard has been buried under your name. Where have you been?"

"In the care of a good couple named Weber." Jumon glanced self-consciously around him at the various guards in the room, then sipped from the glass he'd been handed. "Germans, who spoke no English. They feared moreover they would be sent back to Bavaria if they spoke of my presence in their house. They found me, soaked to the skin and dying, close by the gates of the Old Cemetery, and took me in, though they believed me to be stricken with the cholera."

"Weber worked with me at Charity early in the month," January explained. He had not been asked to sit, and though his head had cleared considerably with the walk back to town he felt weak and a little shaky, and still half-expected to see snakes moving in the corners when he wasn't paying attention. "Members of the City Council were at pains to impress upon all of us there that there WAS no epidemic, and especially that no mention was to be made of cholera."

"That idiot Bouille," said Canonge. "As if the pilots of the steamboat on the river don't carry the news. Though with that imbecile Blodgett giving cry in the newspapers I don't blame the Council for acting like a bunch of ninnies. They'd arrest the Samaritan on the road to Jericho for operating an unlicensed hack service, belike. I take it," he added, studying Isaak's drawn face and emaciated shoulders by the glare of the oil lamp in its socket above, "that cholera wasn't your problem."

Jumon shook his head. "As it happened, I had nursed Monsieur Nogent's wife during the cholera the summer before last. I know the symptoms, and I knew that, similar as my own were, I had been poisoned, I think with arsenic. I was lucky to survive."

"Do you know who administered the arsenic?"

Jumon was silent for a time. "I think now that it has to have been Dr. Yellowjack. At the time-and I am ashamed to say it-I thought that it was through some agency of my mother's. I was-I was upset, and very frightened, and I thought all sorts of things about her that cannot have been true. I went to Dr. Yellowjack's house, you understand, to ask his help against her..."

"Thus putting yourself remarkably in accord with your good wife as to the proper way of dealing with the lady," remarked Canonge grimly. "Far be it from me to speak ill of a man's mother to his face, but Madame Jumon makes Lady Macbeth appear doting by comparison, and amateurish to boot."

January stepped unobtrusively back to Abishag Shaw's desk, and leaned his weight on the corner of it, his knees abruptly weak. His body ached and although the mere thought of food was nauseating, he felt overwhelmed with a desperate craving for sweets. The air in the watch room felt stifling, like a dirty liquid in his lungs and throat, and he wondered if the hallucinations were returning. Everything seemed suddenly distant, like a Rembrandt painting-the judge's craggy face in lamplight and shadow, the straggling curls of Jumon's hair, the buttons on Gabriel's shirt. "I was naturally appalled-horrified-to see poor young Madame Coughlin in such a place," Jumon was saying. "And her daughter, too. She told me she had come there only to ask Dr. Yellowjack's help. I had not imagined she could be so superstitious as to believe that his potions and gris-gris would 'change her luck,' as she said. She swore that she was perfectly safe, but the more I thought of it, the more uneasy I became. I begged her to do nothing foolish, or without consulting my uncle..."