Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  “Show us,” Sarah demanded.

  “It’s in the nature of a travel potion.” The priest smiled. “I’ll do better than show you—tomorrow morning, before we go, I’ll share it with you. I’d have done it this morning, but I was drained already, from lack of sleep and all the hiding spells through the night.”

  “Where are we going?” Sarah asked. It was interesting to see Cal making bullets, but only because he was doing it with silver. Why did the Elector think he would need silver bullets? Had Cal told the Elector about their faceless claylike attackers? “You said you’d tell us.”

  “New Orleans,” Thalanes answered immediately. “I am sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but I had the sensation, back at the mountain, that there were eyes upon us. I think we’ve left our pursuers behind, now, at least for the moment.”

  “What’s in New Orleans?” she pressed.

  “Who is in New Orleans, is the right question,” the monk said. “When I took you, as a newborn baby, to hide you with the Elector and his family, two other trusted servants of your mother took your two siblings—your brother and your sister—and hid them elsewhere.”

  “You think one of them is in Louisiana?” Talk of Sarah’s new identity made her jumpy.

  “I don’t know where they might be.” Suddenly Thalanes seemed tired. “Wherever they are, they must be in danger, as you’re in danger. I wish to find them, and take all three of you and hide you some place where you’ll be safe from the ruthless ambition of your uncle, at least for a few more years.”

  “Well, who’s in New Orleans, then?” Cal plunked out another bullet.

  “The man who hid Sarah’s brother was a soldier,” the little priest said, “a good friend to your father, as I was, and present at your father’s death…as was I. He’s not the sort of man who readily disappears for very long, and after he hid your brother, he resurfaced in New Orleans. He’s been there, I believe, these last fifteen years. He can help us find your brother and sister.”

  A shiver ran down Sarah’s back, and she leaned back to focus on the night sky. That her mysterious unknown siblings were a brother and a sister made them begin to become real. She felt cheated that she had not been able to know her mother, Mad Hannah. And her father, too—Andrew Calhoun had been as good to her as any father could be, but knowing she was tied to some other man, a man she could never know or even see, made her feel bitter. Her sister and brother lived, though—might be alive—and she longed to know them.

  “You described the regalia as ‘things of power,’” she said. “If I had them, maybe I could use that power to protect my brother and sister. Maybe I could take back my father’s throne.”

  Thalanes made no comment.

  “What are their names?” she asked.

  There was a brief silence, interrupted by the plunk! of another silver bullet falling onto the leather.

  “Nathaniel Kyres Penn is the name your mother gave your brother,” Thalanes said. “As she gave your sister the name Margaret Elytharias Penn. And, of course, you’re Sarah Elytharias Penn.”

  “Calhoun,” Sarah muttered, retreating from a sudden surge of hot emotion. “I like the name Calhoun.”

  “Sarah Calhoun sounds jest fine to me, too,” Cal allowed, cutting away more silver sprue. She looked at him, on the verge of tears, and was grateful for the shy, slightly flirtatious eye he cast in her direction. The gratitude came with a pang of guilt—she’d hexed Cal with the same love charm she’d put on Obadiah, and clearly he hadn’t yet recovered.

  “I like it, too,” Thalanes agreed, “but not for now. For now neither one of you can be a Calhoun, in case your uncle’s agents are using that name to search for you.”

  “We could be called Carpenter,” Cal suggested with a mischievous grin. “Like the Holy Family, fleein’ your uncle King Herod, goin’ down to the fleshpots of New Orleans.”

  Sarah laughed out loud and it felt good. “Only I ain’t pregnant, Calvin Calhoun, and iffen I was, no child of mine’d e’er turn out to be the Baby Jesus.”

  “I don’t intend no comment on neither the pregnancy nor the virginity of any party,” Cal said. “Likewise, though I do carry an axe, you shouldn’t ought to imagine that I have any great skill at carpenterin’. I remain at best, like my father afore me, a halfway decent cattle rustler.”

  They all laughed. Sarah thought for a moment that she might tell Thalanes about the clay creatures, but she didn’t. After all, they were a thing of the past, and the monk had said he thought they’d left their pursuers behind. Besides, a silver bullet should make short work of such creatures.

  Instead, she asked a question. “You told me yesterday my father was killed by one of his own dragoons. What can you tell me about that man, the killer?”

  Thalanes looked into the fire in silence for long moments. “Bayard Prideux,” he named the traitor softly, and Sarah’s heart felt a sharp pinch. “He was a young soldier. Not a very good one; he was undisciplined and lazy. I never understood why he did it. He killed your father in a terrible storm. We tried to catch him, but failed.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Sarah asked. “Were you there, then?”

  “I was there,” Thalanes said. “I was your father’s confessor, and chaplain to the Philadelphia Blues. ‘We’ is the rest of the dragoons, the men who stayed faithful to your father. All old men now, if not dead.”

  “What’s the name of the man we’re going to find, then? The soldier who hid my brother, I mean?”

  “Will,” the monk said. “He was Captain of the Dragoons at the time and a minor hero of the Spanish War. He fell from grace. Rather, Thomas threw him from grace, immediately upon his rise to power.”

  “Will what?” Sarah insisted, “or is his name a secret, too?”

  “William,” Thalanes told her. “Captain Sir William Johnston Lee.”

  “I had hoped for at least a chicken gizzard, or some John the Conqueror Root.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They took Bill’s hat away.

  They were rough about it, punching him, smashing him down with heavy boots, and shouting in French. They also took his coat.

  Bill had never been arrested before, and had only the vaguest idea of what to expect next—and that was nothing good. The gendarmes of New Orleans didn’t generally bother to arrest people, at least not in the Quarter. They weren’t part of any judicial process, they were rabble control, and their job was to arrive after the commission of a crime, rough up a few people on the scene—ideally, but not necessarily, the guilty parties—and leave everyone duly admonished to stay on the chevalier’s good side and stick to the Quarter.

  For crimes committed elsewhere in New Orleans, people got arrested. Bill understood there were actual investigations, and even trials, though he’d never seen anything of either. He knew prisoners sat and rotted in the Hulks on the Pontchartrain Sea while they were being investigated and tried and he knew that most prisoners were found guilty.

  Bill also he knew that there were essentially two punishments: payment of a large fine (the Chevalier’s Ransom, la rançon du Chevalier, as some thought such payments had created the chevalier’s proverbial wealth) and death by hanging (commonly called the Bishop’s Penny, le sou de l’évêque, after the amount that the executed paid for the privilege of being buried in the potter’s fields owned by the bishopric).

  Bill half expected the gendarmes simply to shoot him on the boardwalk. Instead, they bound his hands together, tied them to a short lead rope behind one of their horses, and led him stumbling through the Quarter. Somewhere along the way a knotted noose was thrown around his head, and Bill struggled to keep from tripping over the length of line that dangled down his chest.

  A good portion of that run was nothing but a blur of mocking faces to Bill, which was merciful. With great clarity, though, he observed Grissot’s as he was made to trot past. He watched Cathy come out the door to join the jeering crowd on the boardwalk, and he saw her turn her head and look away.

  Bi
ll thought the shame might kill him.

  They rode him right out of the Quarter and tossed him into the back of a cramped two-wheeled cart. Bill had never seen New Orleans from quite this vantage point, sky rattling over his face, teeth rattling against his jaw, the tops of tall buildings rattling past, and the warped wooden sides of a cart rattling in a frame around it all. Bouncing under the befouled and lichen-begrimed stones of one of the city’s gates, Bill recognized it as the St. Louis, between the cemeteries.

  They were bound for the Pontchartrain Docks, one of New Orleans’s two commercial ports.

  That meant the Hulks.

  The gendarmes jerked him from the cart at the docks and kicked him into a splintering rowboat. In his still-oscillating vision, Bill saw the rows of tall warehouses, the wagons, the ships, the crowds of merchants and their servants, all staring. Two gendarmes climbed into the boat, before Bill and behind, and then the filthy boatman began to row.

  “Merci,” Bill managed to force through his teeth, with a smashed purple grin.

  The boatman nodded.

  “I must warn you, suh. I have no cash with which to offer a gratuity.”

  The gendarme Bill faced pulled two pistols, cocked their hammers and trained them both on Bill. Bill assumed the man behind him was similarly armed and occupied, and four guns were enough to keep Bill in line. He was battered and broken, his head swam, he could barely see, he felt like retching, and his hands were tied. It took a Herculean effort on Bill’s part to sit up; that, and the tiniest amount of repartee, were all he could manage.

  He focused on the small details of the gendarme’s uniform to keep from vomiting. They wore blue and gold, which were also the Imperial colors, so the gendarme looked like a constabulary version of a member of Bill’s old unit, the Philadelphia Blues. The fleur-de-lis was not nearly as handsome as the Penns’ ship-and-eagle, but he would have been willing to wear it, in better circumstances.

  Bill had in fact tried, shortly after his arrival in New Orleans fifteen years earlier, to get a post as a gendarme, or in the chevalier’s house. He had thought that the combination of his military experience in the area and his Imperial credentials would make his acceptance inevitable, but he’d been mistaken. The recruiters had spoken only French, and had laughed at him until he’d given up and left.

  The whole city was the same—no French, no Castilian, no work. Even the smugglers wouldn’t take him on, without a little Igbo or some Catalan. And so Bill had found himself at the arse end of the empire, hiding from Thomas Penn’s wrathful eye, unable to get work consistent with his station and forced to turn for his daily bread to low violence.

  If only he’d been a Frenchman, it would have gone so much better for him. He would certainly be free now, and he might even be rich.

  On the other hand, then he’d be a frog.

  Bill’s vision began to calm down and he looked past the gendarme before him to the front of the boat, at the Frenchman rowing. He was big-chested and long-armed, with the large, knuckly hands of a fighter. His visage was a fighter’s too; he lacked one ear and the opposite side of his face had been badly burned.

  Damn me. He probably couldn’t even get work rowing the boat out to the Hulks, with his tiny smattering of French. How had he lived so long in this town and not learned the language?

  The Frenchman eyed Bill, and Bill felt himself blush. Making a show of bravado, Bill sneered back at the man, eyes lingering deliberately on his burns and scars.

  A gendarme cuffed him on the shoulder and the pain nearly knocked Bill to the bottom of the boat.

  They were approaching the Hulks, and Bill squinted to get a better look. There were six of them, large sailing ships that had once prowled the seas against New Spain, or up the river after those Bantu who hadn’t surrendered their ancestral occupation of piracy and settled down to the raising of cotton, or east along the coast of the Caribbean after Igbo and Catalan smugglers. Louisiana was a small territory, but its Chevalier was a wealthy and powerful man, and he cast a large shadow in the region.

  After their years of service, the ships had been brought through the deeper-dredged channels of the sea and run aground here, then demasted and ballasted with rock to keep them permanently anchored. Bill saw shattered timbers in the forecastle and aftcastle of some of them, well above the waterline; those must be scars of the ships’ final engagements, not worth repairing at the end of the great beasts’ lives. They were green-ribbed and moldy, necrotic leviathans of wood breaching the surface of the water to feed.

  The boatman directed the vessel toward one of the hulks, and Bill peered at its hull to try to read the gold-lettered name through the caked green: Incroyable. That sounded good, whatever it meant. It sounded tough. If Bill was going to be imprisoned on a ship, he preferred it to have a good, soldierly name. No Queen Henrietta for him, thank you, or Adela Podebradas, however much he admired the lady’s verve.

  On their slowly-rotting decks walked men in simpler blue uniforms, consisting of mere waistcoats—not gendarmes, but prison guards, still in the service of the chevalier but with much less dignity.

  Bill wished he had a coin with which to tip the boatman, and tried to think of some other gesture of gallantry. Hatless and with hands tied, he couldn’t even execute a proper bow. Well, he would do his best. He concentrated, summoning his most polished French phrases.

  The boat bumped against a ladder on the side of the Incroyable and the boatman steadied it with one hand. Bill stood and bowed to the boatman.

  “Merci beaucoup, Monsieur,” he said, and he was pretty sure that this far, he was on solid ground. “Je me presente. Je suis le célèbre Bad Bill, Mauvais Guillaume, du Vieux Carré.” He was reasonably sure that those were his name and the name of the Quarter in French.

  The frog seemed to appreciate Bill’s gesture. He stood and turned to Bill, still holding the ladder with one hand, and then he, too, made an uncomfortable bow, after which he jabbered some French. Bill tried to smile, and then submitted to the goading of his captors and went up the ladder.

  Bill made it to the deck of the hulk with great effort and pain. He hauled his weight with his one good arm, the injured one flapping uselessly tied to it. All his strength and will would not have sufficed regardless, but for the constant pushing of a gendarme’s shoulder below him.

  When he staggered onto the deck he felt sick, tired, and weak, and his shoulder was howling at him. He leaned over to rest his elbows on his knees, panting and staring up close at the boards under his feet, the cloth and caulking between them fraying frighteningly. How old was this ship?

  Bill stood upright, still breathing heavy, to face three prison guards in blue vests, hefting cudgels, and their leader, an ill-looking man Bill knew, but hadn’t seen for fifteen years.

  Was it possible, after all this time?

  And here?

  The man was thin and curved, with eyes too close together and lips too large for his face. Lank, greasy black hair fell to his shoulders. He wore the blue vest of his fellow guards, but, in what looked like an indication of superior rank, he also wore a blue cap and blue trousers, one leg of which ran down to a canvas shoe, while the other was knotted in a slovenly fashion around a wooden dowel.

  “Captain William Lee,” the peg-legged man sneered. “’Ow I would like to say zat I ’ave missed you.”

  Anger and lust for revenge welled up in Bill like a river in flash flood, but he forced himself to be cool. “I’m surprised to see you looking like this, Bayard,” he said, pointedly addressing the other man familiarly. “I thought reptiles’ legs grew back.”

  “You should not imagine zat it was you zat wounded my leg so,” the Frenchman responded. “I broke it in ze fall.”

  Bill shrugged.

  “God moves in mysterious ways, Bayard,” he said. “Perhaps someday you’ll fall again, and break the rest of you.”

  Bayard Prideux.

  It had been fifteen years, and Bill’s mind flowed with images. Kyres Elytharias, th
e Lion of Missouri, king of the great Ohioan kingdom Cahokia and Imperial Consort, dead of multiple stabbing wounds among the red oak trees, Prideux standing over him, a chase in the rain, a sword battle. Bill had wounded the traitor, but he had disappeared in the lightning and the trees. Escaped, flown over the cliff as if he were a bird. They’d never found a body, and Bill had always hoped the man had drowned in the Ohio.

  How long had he been in New Orleans? Had the two of them been in the same town all this time? Hell’s Bells.

  Bill really needed to learn French.

  “You will not enjoy your new life, Captain Lee,” Prideux informed him gleefully. “I am ze warden ’ere.”

  “I’m glad you’ve found your station,” Bill snarled. “I have long thought you belonged among condemned men.”

  “I am a personal friend of ze chevalier.” Prideux’s haughty tone clashed with his grubby uniform. He said chevalier the Frog way, shuh-VOL-yay. “It is no accident ’e ’as given you to me.”

  Could that possibly be true? “I suppose that means that you’re going up in the world, Bayard,” Bill drawled. “Shame you aren’t smelling any better.”

  “’E ’as made me promise not to kill you,” Prideux told Bill.

  “The chevalier is a gentleman.”

  “Of course, ’e ’as also insisted zat I make you suffer as much as I possibly can.”

  Something hard smashed onto the back of Bill’s skull and he collapsed.

  * * *

  In the morning, Thalanes unveiled to Sarah and Calvin the mystery of his satchel, which turned out to contain a sack of roasted coffee beans and a small pot. When they awoke, they found the monk already up and a handful of the beans smashed between two rocks and boiling in water.

  “I’m disappointed,” Sarah admitted. “I’d hoped for at least a chicken gizzard, or some John the Conqueror Root.”

  “This will do us much more good,” Thalanes assured her. “The potion will be ready momentarily and then we should go.”