Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  “Cain was jealous because God loved his brother more,” Chigozie said. “God accepted Abel’s sacrifice of a lamb, and not Cain’s sacrifice of crops, so Cain killed his brother and fled into the wilderness.”

  “Cain was a farmer.”

  “Or a priest, perhaps. In Hebrew, the Bible says he worked the land, but to work is also to serve God as a priest. And Cain denied being his brother’s keeper, and in Hebrew to keep is to obey God’s covenant.” Was Chigozie mad to discuss subtleties of the Hebrew Bible with a rapist and pillager whose head was the head of a bison? He remembered a rainy evening in his father’s study, digging with his father and the Bishop of Miami into the connections between Cain, offerer of firstfruits upon the altar and, Genesis and Eve claimed, fathered by the Lord Himself, and Melchizedek, with his feast of grain. God was bread, indeed. “Cain was a priest who carried out the liturgy, but who in the end failed to keep the covenant.”

  Really, Chigozie was talking to himself.

  Kort snorted. “Your priest killed his brother and fled into the wilderness.” His black eyes bored into Chigozie’s soul.

  Kort’s choice of words gave Chigozie pause. Was he not the good son, then, but Cain? But that was ridiculous, he was guilty of no murder. “Cain fled God, who marked him with a mark of protection. Anyone who killed Cain was to be punished by God Himself.”

  “Judged by Simon Sword.” Kort’s voice sounded as if he approved. “So your god of bread is perhaps a real god after all.”

  Chigozie said nothing.

  “And this face of mine that you find so terrifying, perhaps it’s the mark of your Cain.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then isn’t your Cain my Simon Sword? Isn’t your story of a man fleeing murder really the tale of a god cast out for carrying out his nature, condemned for being, rather than for doing? My hands have often been reddened with my brothers’ blood.”

  Chigozie shook his head, uncomfortable at the sudden turn this theological conversation had taken. He tried not to think of the pools of Missourian blood he’d seen reddening this winter’s snow.

  “And might not your god, then, be Peter Plowshare, my god’s father and his son?” Kort continued. “Who casts out Simon Sword upon his return at every revolution of the wheel, every receding of the tide?”

  “You sound like a theology student,” Chigozie said. “The kind who is awarded his degree and takes to the practice of law, having decided he does not believe in God, after all.”

  Kort regarded him silently. “I believe in the gods,” he said at last.

  “God,” Chigozie said.

  “And Adam and Eve?”

  “God,” he insisted.

  “And the one inside the bread?”

  “God.”

  Kort chuckled slowly. “Be careful, priest. If everything is god, then nothing can be god.”

  Chigozie dragged himself to his feet using the tree trunk against which he was leaning. “And if there is no God,” he answered, “then everything is god. Every shudder of your loins, every pang of your belly, every boiling rage becomes the creator of the universe.”

  Kort stared, then began to laugh. “I like this!” Other beastkind, dozing gently in the thicket about them, started up in surprise. “I’m glad I haven’t eaten you, priest!”

  Chigozie turned and stumbled away. Is this what you want of me, Lord?

  “Yet!” Kort roared. “I’m glad I haven’t eaten you yet!”

  * * *

  The myrrh ink Luman had made himself, grinding the chunks of resinous tree sap into powder over the course of days with his stone mortar and pestle, and then bottling it up in a small flask of brandy, as if he were mixing laudanum. The myrrh he’d acquired from a Venetian trader in New Amsterdam, who’d parted with it in exchange for a curse of wakefulness cast on a romantic rival for the affection of a fat meneer’s daughter. Luman’s curse hadn’t been completely effective, but had deprived the man of so much sleep—reducing him to snatches of a few minutes’ length at a time, twice or three times a day—that it had deprived him also of his wits. After a week, the rival had walked chattering in front of a team of horses pulling a wagonload of beer and had his skull staved in. Whether the Venetian had then managed to seduce the burgher’s girl, Luman didn’t know—he and the myrrh had promptly crossed the Hudson and into Pennsland.

  He’d tried acquiring male eggs first by buying them from a chicken farmer, but the old Cherokee’s guesses as to the sex of the chicks had been unreliable. So he’d cadged a spell that sexed eggs accurately from a gramarye student in lieu of a cash debt owed after a bad night at Philadelphia’s gaming tables. The spell was simple enough, but collecting twenty-eight male eggs—even common chicken eggs, though some versions of the spell insisted on the use of doves’ or ravens’—and carting them around in a straw-packed crate in the Joe Duncan until he found himself in a place he planned to remain for seven continuous days had been a significant labor.

  Those seven days had finally come not at a trading post, but at a camp established only a few miles north of the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio. There raiding party captains had begun to come in to report the results of their marauding, and a war party that began the size of a bodyguard had swollen into a small army, fed mostly by depredating the communities of the Firstborn. Rumors of Ohioan armies of resistance scurried through camp, but no such forces actually appeared.

  Luman had begun the spell the first sunset after he’d learned they’d be staying, walking to a meeting of three faint paths in a stand of oaks a mile from camp. During the course of the casting, the camp had expanded so much that its ragged edges were within a quarter mile of the site now.

  He stood at the same crossroads, facing into an imminent sunrise, holding the last two eggs, one in each hand. Two eggs at sunset and two eggs at sunrise for seven days made twenty-eight, and he’d kept careful track of the passage of days as well as the number of eggs. He’d written his name in myrrh ink on each egg, as he had done on each of the previous twenty-six. Not the prosaic day-to-day exoteric name Luman Walters, but his secret name, the name bestowed on him by his Memphite initiator.

  The disc of the sun cracked above the rim of the world.

  Luman felt energy tremble within him, knocking his heartbeat into an irregular patter. This was by any reckoning the most powerful magic he had ever attempted, and he had felt the strength of it building in his bones over the seven days. Resuming his position at the place of casting with all the requisite tools, he felt as if he were on fire.

  Luman deliberately licked the ink off the egg in his left hand. He brushed thoroughly with a flat tongue to be sure he got all the ink, but he didn’t look at the egg, instead relying on patience and taste. When the tang of the brandy and the citrus curl of the myrrh had both given way to the porcelain blandness of eggshell, he threw the left-hand egg away into the forest without looking at it. He threw forcefully; the egg must crack.

  Again without looking at it, keeping his eyes fixed on the sun and feeling its rays sear their image into the back of his skull, he raised the final egg over his head. He tilted his neck back, cracked the egg into his open mouth with his thumb, and swallowed white and yolk in a single gulp.

  One reason to cast this spell with chickens’ eggs was that the taste was simply better. In any case, the churning he felt within him was proof that the hens’ eggs were efficacious.

  “Hail, Tyche,” he said, reciting words that were burned into his memory, “and you, daimon of this place, and you, the present hour, and you, the present day—and every day as well. Hail, Universe, that is, earth and heaven.” He turned his face side to side to align with his greetings, and up and down, and returned to gaze again into the sun. “Hail, Helios, for you are the one who has established yourself in invisible light over the holy firmament, orkorethara!”

  The magic words were the secret. They were the fragments of pharaonic lore passed down through Memphite magicians, and not written in the spell books,
but only whispered into the ears of chosen initiates. The magic words were the names of dead gods and other powers nearly as ancient and awful as the gods, which had to be invoked to bring their power to bear and effectuate any spell.

  And especially this spell. His shadow would give him power, but more importantly, it would teach him lore. Living on the other side as it did, it would have great secrets to impart, and Luman would thereby become the magician of his aspirations. He could stop stealing, and begin to truly learn.

  And he could do it without killing any bats.

  “You are the father of the reborn Aion Zarachtho; you are the father of awful nature Thortchophano; you are the one who has in yourself the mixture of universal nature and who begot the five wandering stars, which are the entrails of heaven, the guts of earth, the fountainhead of the waters, and the violence of fire, azamachar anaphandao ereya anereya phenphenso igraa; you are the youthful one, highborn, scion of the holy temple, kinsman to the holy mere called Abyss which is located beside the two pedestals Skiathi and Manto. And the earth’s four basements were shaken, O master of all, holy scarab, ao sathren abrasax iaoai aeo eoa oae iao ieo ey ae ey ie iaoai.”

  To an observer, he knew, he’d have sounded like a braying donkey. He didn’t care.

  His magician’s coat was buttoned up the front, with all the protection it provided.

  Closing his eyes and seeing nothing but the suddenly red crescent of the dawn leaping back and forth from one lid to the other, Luman turned away from the sun. Eyes tightly shut, he prostrated himself on his belly in the ancient gesture the Greeks called proskynesis, the gesture one made toward a king or a god, arms stretched forward in supplication, and he spoke the last part of the Memphite spell. The ground under his chest and face was frozen solid. Dry snow sifted down into the sleeves of his coat and promptly melted, trickling into his armpits in a cold stream.

  The trembling within him reached a higher pitch, like a guitar string struck with a heavy plectrum. Something out of sight, but within the reach of his feelings…touched Luman.

  Something was coming.

  The spell was working. It didn’t feel as his Memphite master had explained it would, a cutting that separated your shadow from your body. It felt, rather, as if a door inside Luman were opening, and something was coming through.

  Something cold.

  “Cause now my shadow to serve me, because I know your sacred names and your signs and your symbols, and who you are at each hour, and what your name is.” He finished by crying out his secret name three times more.

  He felt the invisible door shut, and footfalls he could neither see nor hear.

  Then, eyes still shut and facing west, he rose to his feet, knowing—feeling—that he was no longer alone.

  Luman opened his eyes.

  From his feet, his shadow stretched out in the dawn’s light down the faintest of the three paths and then rose against a snow-covered boulder. Luman wasn’t certain in this moment what he had expected; perhaps that the shadow itself would now speak to him, or would rise and stand beside him as his companion and guide.

  Instead, a man waited.

  Luman blinked to clear his eyes, which still danced with the burning red crescents of the dawn. The man was pale and had red hair falling in rings around his shoulders. He was barefoot, and Luman saw with a cold shock to his heart that long yellow nails spiked from the tip of each white toe, as from the tip of each long, pallid finger.

  The man’s eyes were solid white, but black jelly wriggled in their corners.

  Was this what the spell was intended to produce?

  Not his shadow at all. “Lazar,” he murmured.

  Such a hopeful name. Might he learn from one raised as Lazarus?

  The apparition strode forward. Luman looked down, and saw the Lazar’s feet making imprints in the snow—this was no illusion, no figment. The Lazar’s lips didn’t move as he spoke, but his words crackled in Luman’s mind with the sound of crunching dead leaves. To call death’s creature after the name Lazarus is to wish it hopefully to live, to try to coax the blasphemy of a moving corpse into the miraculous glow of the life-giving Shepherd of Galilee. Poignant.

  The thing coming through the door, coming to Luman, was a Lazar. And not just any Lazar.

  “I know you,” Luman said. “Hooke.”

  Learned, are we? A historian? A man of letters? We shall see how well thy learning aids thee in my service!

  The Lazar marched closer in the snow.

  “I didn’t summon you to serve you,” Luman ground out between his teeth. In fact, he hadn’t intended to summon the Lazar at all. What had happened? Had the spell gone wrong? Had he been tricked? Had his master, and the author of the Memphite grimoire, all been deceived?

  Or had he been told a half-truth, a story of a shadow concealing a deeper initiatic secret about a dead man?

  He reached between buttons into his coat to grab his Homer amulet, clenching it deep in his left fist. Dropping the crushed eggshell, he gripped the handle of his athame in his right hand and waited.

  No? A humorless grin curled the Lazar’s lips like the rictus of a corpse. He stopped in his tracks within arm’s reach of Luman. Then why didst thou summon me, hedge wizard?

  Luman would show no weakness. Somehow, his spell had gone wrong, somehow it had produced this specter of Robert Hooke, Sir Isaac Newton’s Shadow and underling to the Necromancer. “I summoned you to serve me, Lazar. To be my guide and my tutor.”

  The Lazar’s hand shot forward, nails curving inward like the teeth of an obscene shark, aiming for Luman’s neck—

  Luman managed to fumble the athame from his pocket, but not fast enough—

  the Lazar’s hand struck the front of Luman’s coat, and all his nails shattered, like a church window with a stone hove through it.

  Brittle fragments of nail snapped against Luman’s chin as they flew away from his chest. He raised his athame, putting it between himself and the dead Sorcerer in a defensive gesture.

  Hooke howled without sound and grabbed for Luman’s arm with his other hand. On contact, all the nails of that hand, too, snapped off like sugar glazing and fell into the snow. The Lazar stumbled, and his arms dropped to his sides.

  Luman grabbed Hooke by the front of his frock coat. The dead man smelled not of rotten flesh, but of river bottom. He stank as if he’d just climbed from the deepest trough of the Mississippi. Luman pressed the iron blade of the athame to the Lazar’s white throat and stared into the Sorcerer’s face.

  Tiny black worms quivered in the corners of the Lazar’s eyes and fell out, dropping onto Luman’s coat sleeve.

  “By the father of the reborn Aion Zarachtho,” Luman began, attempting to ignite his spell by resuming the incantation midstream—

  the world around him disappeared.

  He found himself floating in a sea of amber fluid. Hooke was gone, the athame was gone, and a hedge of groping hands and staring eyes closed in on Luman. What sorcery was this?

  Luman turned, as if treading water in a pond, and found that the hedge encircled him all around. Indeed, looking up and down, he found the hands and eyes in all directions. Only from one direction—up—filtered down to him a yellowish light, as if somewhere there was a sun he might see, if only he could swim far enough.

  In the opposite direction—below—Luman saw darkness beyond the hands.

  “Hooke!” he shouted.

  Somewhere, an answering laugh.

  “Lazar!”

  There is no mercy for thee, hedge wizard. Spare me thy calls for it.

  The first of the reaching hands arrived, and grabbed Luman by the front of his coat.

  Luman’s coat exploded in light. It flew open and light streamed forth as fire, as singing doves, and as beings Luman couldn’t quite see except out of the corners of his eyes, beings with six wings and serpents’ faces that appeared to be made entirely of lightning.

  Seraphim?

  The light and fire rang outward with a single chor
d Luman’s ears couldn’t resolve, as if each of the chord’s notes contained within it the secret whisper of every other note of the audible scale, and notes above and below audibility but conceivable by Luman’s mind in this state. The light above flashed bright, stars sang, the ring sprang away from Luman—

  sweeping away the hedges of hands—

  blasting away the amber sea.

  Luman stood again in the snow, staring into the face of Robert Hooke. The Lazar stepped back, suspicion or fear visible in his face.

  Luman laughed out loud, forcing a show of confidence he did not feel. “Who’s the master now?” he bellowed. “Serve me!”

  Hooke threw himself backward. Despite his demand for service and tutoring, Luman let him go, watching with relief as the Lazar turned and fled into the snow-covered skeletal trees.

  His limbs were shaking. He unbuttoned his coat slowly and reached into its lining, pulling out the fine sheet of paper on which he’d inscribed the himmelsbrief matching the one he’d made for Director Schmidt.

  The paper was sliced with long slash marks. And more: Luman blinked at first, not realizing what he was seeing, and then he leaned in closer to read the words, puzzling out the German with the sunspots still dazzling his eyes.

  All the sacred words—every mention of God, or an angel, or faith—were gone. Disappeared. As if they’d been scraped from the page, leaving blank spots that might have been virgin paper, never touched by ink.

  As if, Luman thought, the holy words had sprung from the page in the form of angels to defend him.

  Taking a deep breath, Luman returned the himmelsbrief to the lining of his coat. Most likely its potency was expended, but just in case…

  He definitely needed to write another. Maybe several.

  He staggered back into camp by the most direct route.

  * * *

  “This is the Earl of Johnsland’s great hall,” Nathaniel whispered.

  Ma’iingan nodded. He couldn’t imagine a possible use for a space this large; the room was three stories tall and ran the length of the building from front to back. Torches and candles on iron stands lit the room and choked its air with waxy smoke. If there were windows, they lay hidden behind long curtains or tapestries that were themselves buried in patches beneath a layer of moldering green fur. Two balconies ran the length of one side of the room on the second and third story level—they, too, sprouted moss and weeds like the mouth of a well. The moss hung draped like a long beard beneath the balustrades of the balconies, and where the rails within the banisters showed, they looked like teeth in a flat, humorless, or even threatening grin.