The Shadows of God - J. Gregory Keyes [129]
“Franklin?”
He was fortunate to hear the voice, barely louder than a frog's croaking. A figure sat folded against a tree, a man so crusted in gore it took Franklin several pulses to recognize Oglethorpe.
“General!”
“Mr. Franklin?” He sounded distinctly puzzled.
“I'm looking for my wife. For Lenka. Or Voltaire, the Frenchman.”
“First we all ran,” Oglethorpe told him, “and then they began to fight again. They must be mad. Look!” He pointed west, toward something Franklin could not see—the engine, no doubt. “It's coming for us all, and they keep shooting at us.”
“She might be with the French.”
“Eh?” Oglethorpe muttered. “The French were that way, last I knew. But I don't know anything.” He gestured vaguely north.
Franklin left the general and ran north, shouting, lungs burning.
He ran until his shoulder exploded, spattering his face with blood, and he fell like a man slipping on ice. And it hurt, Lord of Hosts, it hurt! He fumbled at his weapon, barely aware that he was still calling his wife's name.
A young fellow in a green uniform stood some thirty feet away. He was frantically trying to work his plug bayonet into its socket.
Franklin gave up on the gun and started trying to get his aegis key back in. The man, bayonet finally set, stumbled toward him.
“I would not go so far as to say you won,” said someone new. The illusory world rippled, became vortices and figures again before a new dream asserted itself.
Adrienne stood in the broken grotto of Thetis, on the grounds of long-lost Versailles. In it were statues of Apollo and Thetis, carved as Louis XIV had commissioned them— Thetis had her face, Apollo had his. Thetis was missing a hand, the one Adrienne, in her dream, had taken and made her own.
Red Shoes—Metatron, whatever he was—appeared as an ornate sea monster plated with dulled silver and lapis scales. “You?” He snarled, steam puffing from brass nostrils.
“Yes,” said the statue of Apollo, its marble lips moving but its eyes still fixed, still those of dead Louis.
“Sophia?” Adrienne asked.
“As he said, just a name. I am no more Sophia or Lilith than he is Jehovah. We are simply—the first. Those from which all others were born.”
“You were dead,” Metatron protested. “My children scoured the universe in search of you. You were not in it.”
The statue stood, became Crecy, Hercule, Nicolas, and finally—Leonhard Euler. “Yes,” Euler said. “I found a way— the philosopher Swedenborg, you know—when he made the dark engines, he made other things. And his student Euler— one of my children—we found a way together, to make me clay. To remove me from that place where we dwell. To render me mortal, and thus invisible to your children.”
“You sacrificed—you clothed yourself in matter?”
“To defeat you, yes.”
“Why? Why now, when things can finally be as they ought to be? When we at last have the power not only to rid ourselves of these pests and reclaim our stolen children but to break our very bonds?”
Euler laughed. “Now suddenly you believe again? If so, you know things are as they ought to be. Now you provoke change, and so change must happen. But not as you wish. Never that.”
“What can you do? I see you now. You have no power over me—you gave that up, to hide yourself.”
“I don't need power. Adrienne has it.”
“She has only what we gave her. Everything she has ever done came from us. You gave her the hand.” Metatron had become Red Shoes again, though this time dressed in the ridiculous finery that had once passed for “Indian” costume at the fetes of Versailles.
“Did I?”
“What do you mean?” It seemed to Adrienne that a certain wariness crept into Metatron's voice.
“Do you know, Adrienne?” the form of Euler asked.
“No. I thought