Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(32)

“All right. After we do the dishes and wrap up the leftovers.”

<I like how you assume there will be leftovers, Atticus. It’s so optimistic of you. I’m ready for my third plate of brisket. Or you could just plop the rest on my plate and I’ll gnaw on it at my leisure.>

The trouble began in Palermo, Sicily, in the middle of January 1848, when a Qabbalist summoned a demon to aid him in fomenting revolution against the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies—

<Wait, Atticus, is the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies like the Sausage King of Chicago?>

“No, Oberon. It means he was just one of several different kings from the House of Bourbon that ruled some European countries at the time. Monarchies were dying out and facing plenty of opposition in 1848—lots of people wanted constitutions and an end to feudal systems—but they weren’t entirely gone.”

<So his name is just Bourbon? He doesn’t have anything to do with manipulating the bourbon market, thumbing his nose at common decency, or destroying the livers of an entire nation?>

“Bourbon was his name, not his game.”

<Huh. Well, that’s a missed storytelling opportunity, Atticus. I’m not impressed. One star.>

“What? You didn’t even let me finish my first sentence!”

<That’s more than most books get these days. Lots of people post reviews before a book is even written.>

“What if there are poodles in this story, Oberon? You will have given one star to frolicsome, poufy poodles from another age.”

<You mean … vintage poodles? There are vintage Italian poodles in this story?>

“Let me continue without interruption and you’ll find out.”

As I was saying, the Sicilian rebellion had a bit of help from a demon summoning that allowed Sicily to remain free until May of 1849, when Ferdinand II—the Bourbon king in question—reconquered it. I never bothered to go there, because the demon had been dismissed successfully and I didn’t travel through Tír na nóg unless I absolutely had to. But I traced the trouble back there later on, to a Qabbalist named Stefano Pastore, who fled Sicily in May and came to California, having heard about the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada. Like so many others, he thought he’d find his fortune there, picking up gold nuggets off the ground as the first few prospectors in the area were able to do.

But by the time he got there in the fall of 1849, the easy grab-’n’-go gold was all gone. You had to dig a shaft or pan for it, and there was plenty of competition. Stefano Pastore didn’t have the patience for such labor. Once the snow fell in the Sierra Nevada, he spent the winter in San Francisco, watching the miners who struck it rich burn away their fortunes in gambling or grow them by investing in large chunks of real estate or business ventures. He didn’t think them particularly brilliant or deserving of their fortunes: They’d just been lucky enough to get there first. That thought festered and convinced him that working hard for his fortune was a sucker’s game. So when spring arrived in 1850 and the miners headed for the hills again with picks and pans, he stayed behind to make his own luck, with the help of a pet demon. He probably thought, What the hell, my last summoning gave Sicilians sixteen months of freedom under the rule of Ruggero Settimo, and I could use sixteen months or more of being ridiculously rich.

So he got his candles and salt and all the other paraphernalia he needed for a major summoning and carefully inscribed his circles and wards on the floor and waited for the proper phase of the moon to spin around on April 26. He completed the summoning just fine—I was chilling out at the southern tip of South America on that date and got the report from Sequoia, the elemental for that stretch of California coast from the Bay Area up to the Klamath Mountains.

But it wasn’t long before the report stating the simple fact of the summoning became an outright request for aid. Sequoia woke me in the dead of night, in fact. //Druid required now// the call came, shuddering up my body and filtering into my consciousness. //Large demon free//

I’d been staying out of North America as much as possible once the Old World discovered the New World, because it quite frankly depressed me. Gripped by the unshakable conviction that they were perfectly justified in doing so—that, in fact, it was all their god’s plan somehow and he’d be pleased by their behavior—Europeans were busy wiping out Native Americans and enslaving Africans and doing whatever they could to exclude all nonwhite people from sharing in the riches to be gained by exploiting the continent’s abundant natural resources. I would have been in a constant rage if I had to deal with that level of stupid cruelty on a daily basis—and there was nothing I could do about it if I didn’t want Aenghus óg to find me and deprive the earth of its only protector or get myself killed some other way while trying to protect humanity from itself—so my best option for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to chill out where other people were not.

Sequoia’s call forced me to shift into the redwoods near San Francisco and witness the great American Gold Rush. Once I got into town, I noticed immediately that I wasn’t dressed properly, and so did everyone else: It was the rare individual who wore a sword instead of a six-shooter. But I’d worry about blending in later.

I made my way to the boardinghouse where Stefano Pastore had taken a room. Sequoia directed me to where the portal in the planes had been opened. She could tell me the equivalent spot on the earth where the drain on her resources had occurred, but I discovered that it was a three-story building and had to search the rooms on each level until I found the gory aftermath on the third floor.