The Hollowed Tide The Templar And The Witch Book 2

The mornings came quietly now. That was the worst part of them.

Before the Cathedral, before the silver, before everything that had no clean name, the mornings had carried noise — the clatter of the market carts, the argument of gulls above the river wharves, the particular groan of old timber settling in the French Quarter's heat. Jean-Luc had taken those sounds for granted the way a man takes his own heartbeat for granted. He had never thought to listen to them. He had simply existed inside them, the way a stone exists inside a wall.

Now the mornings were quiet, and the quiet was wrong.

He stood at the window of the rented room on Rue Dauphine, watching the pale light come in across the rooftops. October light, thin and uncertain, the kind that gave no warmth but only illuminated. The cypress shingles across the alley were dark with last night's rain. The street below was empty except for a dog moving slowly along the gutter, and even the dog moved like it was uncertain it had the right to be there. Jean-Luc watched it disappear around the corner. Then there was nothing.

He turned from the window and picked up the short sword from the table.

Left hand. Always the left hand now.

He had been working on it for three months. Three months of early mornings in this room, three months of drilling footwork against the far wall, three months of his left wrist burning and his shoulder cramping and his body insisting that something was missing, that the weight distribution was wrong, that the whole arrangement of attack and defense had been built for a man who no longer existed. His right arm ended four inches below the shoulder. The stump was healed over cleanly, the skin smooth and oddly colorless, and from the center of it ran the silver scar — a raised, branching line, like a river seen from a great height, or like lightning caught and held in flesh.

He raised the sword and held the guard position. His elbow was too high. He corrected it. His stance was still too wide for a one-armed fighter, still defaulting to the two-handed geometry his body had memorized over years of training in France. He narrowed his footing. Better. Not good, but better.

He drilled the same four cuts for an hour.

There was no elegance in it. He was not becoming skilled so much as he was becoming less unskilled, which was a different thing entirely. A knight losing his sword arm did not simply relearn fighting. He mourned it first, in the way the body mourns, through failure and compensation and the stubborn refusal to accept a new center of gravity. Jean-Luc had passed through that mourning slowly, the way a river passes through stone — not quickly, but with enough persistence to eventually find a new channel. He was still finding it.

The silver scar pulsed.

He stopped. He lowered the sword and turned his attention to the stump, to the scar, the way a man turns his attention to a sound he thinks he might have imagined. The pulse was faint. It was always faint in the mornings, when the city was still and the river was low-voiced. But it was there — a vibration beneath the skin, a sensation that lived somewhere between pressure and temperature and something else he had no word for. He had started calling it the Void's breath, privately, in his own thoughts, because it felt like something exhaled from very far away.

He set the sword down and pressed his left hand over the scar. The silver was warm, always slightly warmer than the surrounding skin, and beneath it the vibration moved like a pulse that was not quite his own heartbeat. Slower. More deliberate. And this morning it was stronger than it had been yesterday, which meant something had shifted in the night.

Jean-Luc stood there a moment, listening through the scar the way you listen through a wall to a conversation you cannot quite hear.

Then he dressed and went out into the city.

The French Quarter in the autumn of 1743 was a city wearing its damage like a man wears a scar — visibly, inevitably, with no ability to conceal it and no particular desire to explain. The battle at the Cathedral three months prior had left its mark in ways both obvious and subtle. Several blocks near the waterfront still showed the signs of that night in their stonework, in the blackened timber of a collapsed arcade, in the mortar that had been hastily re-pointed and still showed differently colored against the old work. The iron balconies on certain buildings had been bent outward by some pressure from within, and though they had been straightened as best anyone could manage, they sat at angles that troubled the eye.

But the physical damage was not the worst of it.

The people were the worst of it.

Jean-Luc moved through the narrow streets with his left hand loose at his side and his cloak pulled over the stump, and he watched the faces of the people he passed. Most of them were going about their business in the ordinary way — buying bread, carrying water, conducting the small negotiations of daily survival. New Orleans was a city that had always known how to function in the presence of catastrophe. Its history was built from flood and fever and the particular violence of a place where three empires had pressed their interests against each other and against the land. The people knew how to continue. That was not in question.

What was in question was the silence beneath the continuing.

There were perhaps forty of them scattered through the Quarter. Jean-Luc had been counting them for weeks, mapping their positions in his mind the way he had once mapped enemy formations. He thought of them as the Hollowed, though he had never said the word aloud to anyone. They were survivors of the Cathedral night who had come through the Silver Covenant, or near enough to it, and something in the coming through had changed them in a way that no one discussed openly and everyone noticed. They moved through their days with an uncanny efficiency, performing all the outward motions of living — eating, sleeping, working at whatever trade they had — but their faces were emptied of a quality Jean-Luc could not name precisely. Not grief. Grief had expression. Not madness. Madness had its own agitation. This was something else, something like the expression of a man listening very carefully to something only he can hear.

And they turned toward the river.

That was the thing that caught in Jean-Luc's chest every time he observed it. At different hours of the day, with no apparent coordination or signal, the Hollowed would stop what they were doing and orient themselves toward the Mississippi. A woman setting out washing on a line would pause mid-movement, hands still holding the wet cloth, her face turned south and her eyes gone somewhere distant. A man hauling timber in the yard off Rue Chartres would set down his load and stand at the fence for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, watching the direction of the water with an attention that had no urgency in it, only stillness. Children — and there were children among the Hollowed, which was the part Jean-Luc found hardest to look at directly — would stop their games and stand in small clusters, their faces all aimed the same way, patient as herons.

Nobody intervened. That was the other thing. The neighbors and the tradespeople and the other survivors moved around these episodes the way you move around a piece of furniture placed inconveniently in a doorway. You accommodated. You did not ask. Jean-Luc understood the accommodation. He did not understand the not asking.

He found himself on Rue de la Levee by mid-morning, which was not where he had intended to go. He had told himself he was going to the market for salt fish and bread, the practical errands of a man maintaining himself in a rented room. But his feet had carried him here instead, to the street that ran along the top of the levee, and he stood now looking down the embankment at the river below.

The Mississippi was high for October.

He had noticed this before, in the way you notice a gradual thing — incrementally, over days, the observation building in the back of the mind before it reached the front. The river should have been settling into its autumn level by now, the summer floods long drained, the water pulling back from the embankment to leave its usual margin of dark clay. Instead the water was up. Not dramatically, not in the way of a flood that announced itself with force and spectacle. Just a quiet, persistent height. The kind of height that made you check your measurements twice and then stand there frowning at them.

The smell of the river was different too.

Jean-Luc had grown used to the smell of the Mississippi over the years he had spent in this city — the particular combination of silt and organic decay and the cold mineral undertone of water that had traveled very far. It was not a pleasant smell, but it was a known smell, the way the smell of any place becomes known and therefore unremarkable. What he noticed now was something layered beneath the familiar — an older smell, darker, with an edge of something that reminded him distantly of the Cathedral's crypt and the stone chambers below the altar where no candle burned long.

The silver scar pulsed again. Stronger here, near the water.

He pressed his hand over it reflexively, feeling the warmth through his palm, and he watched the river move. The surface was brown and slow, carrying its usual cargo of debris — branches, leaf matter, the occasional board from some upstream structure. But there was something in the way it moved that his eye kept catching and his mind kept refusing to fully interpret. A regularity in the surface disturbance. A pattern in the way the debris distributed itself. As though the water were not simply flowing in its accustomed manner but were organizing itself around some purpose that had nothing to do with gravity or terrain.

He stood there for a long time, watching.

Behind him, he heard footsteps on the levee road. He did not turn immediately. The footsteps had the quality of someone who was going somewhere, not someone approaching him, and he waited until they slowed and stopped a few feet to his left before he turned his head.

It was a man he recognized vaguely from the Cathedral night — one of the survivors, a cooper named Arnaud who had a workshop near the Place d'Armes. Arnaud was perhaps fifty, broad through the chest, with hands that showed the permanent staining of his trade. He was standing at the levee edge with his arms loose at his sides, and he was looking at the river with the expression Jean-Luc had learned to recognize. The Hollowed expression. Eyes present but focused somewhere beyond the visible surface, jaw slightly slack, breathing slow and regular as a sleeping man's.

Jean-Luc watched him for a moment.

"Arnaud," he said.

No response. Not even a flicker of the eyes.

"Arnaud." He said it more firmly this time, the way you say a name when you want it to carry weight.

Arnaud blinked. He turned his head slowly, like a man surfacing from deep water, and he looked at Jean-Luc with an expression that was working its way back toward ordinary awareness. For a moment it was almost there, almost the face of a man who recognized another man and was prepared to exchange the ordinary words of recognition.

Then his eyes drifted back toward the river.

"She's calling," Arnaud said. His voice was level. Not distressed, not ecstatic. Level, the way you report weather.

"Who is?" Jean-Luc kept his own voice even.

Arnaud didn't answer. He had gone back to the river, and whatever part of him had briefly surfaced to speak had retreated again. Jean-Luc looked at the man's profile for another moment, at the absolute stillness of him, and then he turned back to the water himself.

She's calling.

The pronoun sat in his thoughts like a stone in still water, sending out rings. He did not know what to do with it. He filed it away, the way a knight files away intelligence about terrain — not useful yet, but worth keeping.

He walked back from the levee through the tangle of streets that made up the lower Quarter, moving without hurrying, letting his eyes do their work. The city smelled of damp stone and wood smoke and the faint sweetness of the sugar refiners' fires, which had started up again after the long interruption of the Cathedral summer. Normal smells, the smells of a city attempting its commerce. But underneath them, threading through them the way a cold current threads through warm water, was the river smell. The dark, old smell. It followed him off the levee and into the streets, and it did not diminish with distance the way smells should.

On Rue Bourbon he passed a group of four women standing together at the corner. They were not talking. They were simply standing, and they were facing the direction of the river. One of them was holding a basket of vegetables as though she had been on her way somewhere and had simply stopped. The others had nothing in their hands. Jean-Luc counted their number as he passed, kept his pace steady, and did not make eye contact. He had learned that eye contact during these episodes did nothing useful. The Hollowed did not respond to it. They responded to the river, and to whatever the river was saying that he couldn't hear.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether the silver scar was keeping him from joining them.

The thought was not comforting. It implied that without the scar he would be standing at the levee with his eyes on the water and his arms loose at his sides, breathing like a sleeping man. It implied that whatever was happening to the Hollowed was something his body would have welcomed, that the silver had intervened between him and a transformation he might not have chosen to resist. He didn't know if that was true. He suspected it was, in the way you suspect things you'd rather not confirm.

He returned to Rue Dauphine by midday and ate his meal standing at the window, watching the street below. Salt fish from yesterday, hard bread, water from the cistern. He ate methodically, without pleasure but without complaint. Food was fuel. He had learned to think of it that way during the months of training, when the body's needs had become practical rather than pleasurable. You gave the body what it required and you asked of it what you needed and you maintained the arrangement as best you could. It was not an elegant philosophy, but it kept him functional.

After eating he drilled again. The same four cuts, the same footwork, the same corrections. His left wrist had developed a callus at the base of the grip that was still tender when he pushed too long, and he pushed too long every day because the alternative was accepting a ceiling on what he could become. He did not accept ceilings. It was perhaps the most consistent thing about him.

In the late afternoon he went to the church.

Saint Louis Cathedral still stood, which continued to strike him as faintly improbable. The battle three months prior had done things to that building that should have brought it down. The walls had held. The bell tower had lost one of its decorative spires and stood slightly asymmetrically against the sky, like a man who had taken a blow and healed imperfectly. The interior had been restored to the extent that restoration was possible — the pews reset, the altar refurbished, the damaged stonework patched in the way Jean-Luc had noticed throughout the Quarter, with new mortar that stood out against the old.

Father Henri was in the sacristy when Jean-Luc arrived. He was not the only priest remaining in New Orleans, but he was the most present — the one who kept the doors open, who said the morning offices with whatever congregation came, who sat with the bereaved and the frightened and the ones who came in simply to be inside a consecrated space because the unconsecrated spaces felt increasingly insufficient. Jean-Luc had noticed Henri doing all of this without being asked, without announcement, with the quiet persistence of someone who understood that his function was to keep a shape in place so that people would have something to orient themselves by.

He respected that. He did not entirely know what to do with his respect for it, but it was there.

Henri looked up when Jean-Luc came in. He was mending something — a vestment, by the look of the fabric — with hands that were clearly unaccustomed to needlework but were attempting it with determination. He set it aside.

"You look tired," Henri said.

"I'm always tired," Jean-Luc said. He sat down on the plain wooden chair across from the priest's workbench. The sacristy smelled of beeswax and old wood and a faint trace of incense that had soaked into the stone over decades. It was a good smell. It was the smell of continuity.

"The river," Jean-Luc said after a moment.

Henri waited. He had learned, in these conversations, to wait.

"The water is high. It shouldn't be high in October." Jean-Luc turned his left hand over in his lap, examining the callus. "And there are more of them at the levee today. The ones who go quiet and look at the water."

"I know," Henri said. "Marie Fonteneau was there this morning for three hours. Her daughter came to me afterward. She doesn't know what to do."

"What did you tell her?"

"That her mother was still present. That whatever was happening, she was still the same woman." Henri paused. "I'm not entirely certain that's true, but it seemed like the most useful thing."

Jean-Luc nodded slowly. He appreciated the honesty of the uncertainty. Henri was one of the few people in the city who did not pretend to understand what had happened and what was continuing to happen, and that restraint made him trustworthy in a way that certainty would not have.

"Arnaud spoke to me this morning," Jean-Luc said. "At the levee. One of them, not fully gone. He said the river was calling." He looked up at Henri. "She's calling, he said. The pronoun."

Henri was quiet for a moment. "The river has always been a she, in the old stories. The Creole ones, the older ones the enslaved people kept. The river as a woman, as a mother, as something with intent."

"This doesn't feel like a story."

"No," Henri agreed. "It doesn't."

They sat in the sacristy for a while without speaking. From the nave Jean-Luc could hear the distant sound of the city coming in through the damaged windows — the creak of a cart, a voice calling across a courtyard, the perpetual low argument of the gulls. Normal sounds. But beneath them, barely there, he thought he could feel the river. Not hear it. Feel it, through the scar, through the floor, through the stone of the building itself. A low, persistent vibration. A patience.

"You should eat more," Henri said finally, looking at Jean-Luc with the frank assessment of someone who had spent months watching a man reduce himself through discipline and insufficient meals.

"I eat."

"You eat like a man who's decided his body is an inconvenience."

Jean-Luc almost smiled. "It is, at the moment."

Henri picked up the vestment again and looked at his needlework without resuming it. "The Cardinal's fleet has been sighted," he said, in the tone of a man reporting something he would prefer not to report. "Three ships, possibly four. Coming up from the gulf."

Jean-Luc went Balize. He saw them at anchor below the bar, waiting on the tide." Henri set down the vestment again. "Red pennants. Vatican. And he said the soldiers on deck were wearing something around their necks — censers, he thought. Small ones, the portable kind."

Jean-Luc said nothing. He was mapping it, the way he mapped things — routes, positions, the geometry of threat. The Cardinal's fleet from the south. The river high and wrong and pulling at the Hollowed. The silver scar growing silver veins that he could trace, on the bad mornings, further up toward his shoulder than they had been the week before.

"When?" he asked.

"Days, perhaps. Less, if the wind is favorable."

Jean-Luc stood. He adjusted his cloak over the stump with the practiced movement he had developed for doing it with one hand. "Don't tell anyone else yet."

"People will find out."

"They will. But let them find out when there's something to be done about it, not before." He looked at Henri. "Keep the church open. Keep the doors open at night if you can manage it safely. People will need somewhere to be that isn't the levee."

Henri nodded. He looked, Jean-Luc thought, like a man who was frightened and was choosing not to show it, which was the correct choice and cost something.

"Be careful," Henri said.

Jean-Luc left without answering, because there was nothing useful to say to that.

The afternoon had gone to a grey overcast by the time he came out of the Cathedral onto the Place d'Armes. The light was flat and cold, the kind of light that drained color from things and made everything look provisional, as though the city were a sketch that hadn't been fully committed to. He stood on the square for a moment, orienting himself, feeling the wind off the river. The wind smelled of rain coming and something underneath the rain — that dark, old smell again, stronger now, the smell of the deep bottom of things.

The silver scar pulsed with a slow insistence that he was learning to read the way a sailor reads the sky. Not emergency. Not the sharp vibration that came when the Void was actively moving through something nearby. This was more like a tide coming in. Gradual. Relentless. Certain of its own arrival.

He walked back toward Rue Dauphine through the Place d'Armes, and he counted the Hollowed as he went. Seven in the square alone, scattered among the ordinary citizens going about their afternoon business. Standing with their faces toward the river. Two of them were children, and he looked away from them quickly and did not look back.

In his room that evening he sat at the table with a candle and a cup of water and did the kind of thinking that required stillness. The kind you couldn't do while moving. He spread his left hand flat on the table and stared at the candle flame and let the information arrange itself.

The river was high and wrong and the Hollowed were turning toward it with increasing frequency and the Cardinal's fleet was days away and the silver veins were growing up his neck and beneath everything, beneath all of it, the scar pulsed with the rhythm of something that had patience enough to wait as long as necessary.

He thought about Arnaud at the levee. The levelness of his voice. She's calling.

He thought about the children in the square, standing still in the afternoon light with their faces turned to the water.

He thought about what it meant that the river was not receding. That it held its height with a consistency that had nothing to do with rain or snowmelt or any of the natural explanations. That the debris on its surface arranged itself in patterns his eye kept catching and his mind kept refusing.

He thought about what Father Henri had said, the old stories, the river as something with intent.

The candle flame moved in a draft from under the door. The scar pulsed. Outside, the city was going quiet in the particular way of cities at nightfall, the sounds withdrawing to their interiors, leaving the streets to the dark and the river smell and whatever moved through the Quarter when the ordinary citizens had locked their shutters and said their prayers and convinced themselves that the night was nothing more than the absence of light.

Jean-Luc sat at the table for a long time.

He had not slept well in three months. This was not something he discussed or made complaints about. It was simply a condition of his existence, the way the missing arm was a condition, the way the scar was a condition. He lay down each night and his body rested and his mind did not, moving through the same territories over and over — the Cathedral, the silver, the cost of what had been done there and what it had made him. He woke each morning feeling scraped, as though sleep were a process that had been performed on him rather than something he had experienced. He rose and trained and moved through the city and came back and sat at the table and did it again.

He was not surviving, exactly. He was persisting. There was a difference.

Survival implied something was being preserved. Persistence was simply the act of continuing, one decision at a time, because stopping was not acceptable and stopping was the only alternative he could see.

He thought about the Cardinal's red pennants, coming up the river from the gulf.

He thought about the Hollowed, standing at the levee in the dark, which was what they did — he had checked, on three separate nights, going out after midnight to find them there, faces to the water, patient and still and absolutely unreachable.

He picked up the short-sword from where it leaned against the table leg and held it in his left hand in the darkness beyond the candle's reach. He could feel the balance of it, the particular weight he was still negotiating. Three months of work and the negotiation was still ongoing. He thought he had perhaps another three months before it resolved into something like competence. He did not know if he had three months.

He set the sword down.

Outside, very faintly, he heard something that might have been the river, or might have been the wind in the cypress trees along the levee, or might have been something else entirely that used the sound of water as its voice. A low, continuous sound. Patient. Deliberate. The sound of something that understood that time was on its side and there was no need to rush.

Jean-Luc sat with it in the dark room and let the candle burn down, and he pressed his left hand over the silver scar, and he felt it pulse in its slow, certain rhythm against his palm.

Tomorrow he would find Elara.

He had been putting it off, the way you put off a conversation you know will confirm the thing you are already fairly certain of. She would have observations. She would have the particular clarity of perception that her magic gave her, the ability to read the quality of cold in the air and what it carried. He had been managing without those observations for three months, telling himself he was gathering his own data first, building his own understanding before he added hers to it. That had been true for the first month. For the second and third months, it had been something else, something closer to the particular reluctance of a man who has seen what a conversation is likely to cost and prefers not to pay it yet.

But the river was high. The Hollowed were gathering at the levee in the dark. The Cardinal's ships were below the bar, waiting on the tide. And the scar pulsed with the certainty of a thing that knew exactly what was coming, even if Jean-Luc did not.

He blew out the candle.

The room went dark, and the river sound came through the walls, and he lay down on the narrow bed and stared at the ceiling, which he could not see, and he waited for morning the way you wait for something you have no power to hurry.

The city breathed around him, damp and heavy and threaded through with the smell of the river, and somewhere in the dark the Hollowed stood at the levee with their faces turned toward the water, and the water held its height, and the night was long and very quiet and full of the sense of something preparing itself, gathering its weight, arranging its patience for the work ahead.

The silver scar pulsed once, slowly, like a second heart that kept a different time.

Jean-Luc closed his eyes and did not sleep, and the river did not recede, and the morning was still hours away.