Free A Calculus of Angels by J. Gregory Keyes Page B

I needed you?”
    She ignored that, continuing to paw through his wardrobe. “And for your A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    coat…” She pushed through a few and then pulled out a rather full-skirted coat of watered black silk. Starting to hand it to him, she frowned and reached back in. “No,” she said, “I should like to see you in these, first.” And she handed him a pair of black knee breeches with scarlet bows.
    Ben accepted them, stepping a bit closer to do so. “I have not met you before,”
    he said. “I wonder if you would tell me your name.”
    She raised her eyes to meet his, and they were nearly black. “I am a servant, sir, and so what need have I of a name? Call me what you will.”
    “There’s no need to be unpleasant,” Ben remarked.
    “Was I unpleasant? I hoped to be accommodating.” Her smile was bright and probably false as she returned to selecting clothes for him.
    A sort of funny feeling rumbled in Ben’s stomach, a slight vertigo, an uncertainty. He thought furiously for something else to say, but his throat remained empty of words until she had laid out the last of his suit. He pulled the breeches on, suddenly feeling foolish. “Thank you,” he finally managed.
    “You are welcome, sir.”
    “Please call me Ben.”
    At that she only smiled enigmatically, returning to her work, leaving him feeling as stupid as a child.
    5.
    London

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    “Goddamn,” Blackbeard muttered, tugging at his braided beard, and then more forcefully, "Goddamn. Where’s the Thames?" The pirate shook his fists at the coastline. Red Shoes stared at the brackish mudflat, verdigris with sickly and crouching scrub, trying to understand what the problem was. It bothered him that there were no trees anywhere—it was alien to his eye—but he had gathered in his time among Europeans that trees were scarce in Europe.
    “The longitude and the latitude are correct,” Thomas Nairne insisted. “Of that I have no doubt.”
    “No? Then where’n hell is the river?”
    Red Shoes turned to study Nairne and caught him staring sourly at Blackbeard’s back. Beyond Nairne the Pale Water stretched endless as time, dwarfing the remainder of the ships in their flotilla. They were eight, all told, and to Red Shoes they had once made an impressive sight, each larger than anything made by his own people. Swallowed by sea and sky for two months they had diminished in his eyes, and now, come to this strange, dead shore, they seemed smaller than ever, bubbles in the eddy of a swift stream.
    They had sailed toward Sun-Emerging, a direction where his people had always believed the sources of life were. And yet this place more resembled legends of the Darkening Land, where the sun dies. Even with his ghost vision he saw nothing save a few birds. It worried him, this place.
    And the Europeans were confused, too. This wasn’t what they had expected either.
    “But them’s the cliffs, han’t it?” one stout, knot-nosed sailor—everyone called him Tug—muttered.
    “Aye,” Blackbeard assented. “But not one damn house, not one single church steeple, not a tower, nor nothing, an‘ we’ve been on this coast for days. An’ this looks something like the mouth of the Thames—but where is the river?”
    “Could it have been stopped?” Red Shoes asked quietly. “The river—could it have been dammed up?”

    A CALCULUS OF ANGELS
    Blackbeard shot him a withering glance, and to Red Shoes’ surprise, he saw the rage there mixed liberally with what must be fear. In his experience, if Blackbeard was afraid, then the rest of them ought to be terrified.
    “You don’t know what a mad thing that is to say, Choctaw.”
    “Stupid In’yun,”Tug added.
    “Nevertheless,” Nairne quietly put in, “it is a possibility.”
    “Why? What army could do mis? Raze all the buildings on the coast, yes, but steal the Goddamned Thames?”
    “The latitude and longitude are correct,” Nairne insisted, voice determined.
    “This is—or