by D. J. Butler
Sarah dove for the corner. Her knees wobbled, and she felt like vomiting. Too much, she realized, she hadn’t been careful enough, she had put out too many fires at once and poured out too much of her body’s own energy.
She grabbed the Elector’s staff, wheeling to keep Calvin at bay. Good against evil spirits, white ash, and Calvin stepped back warily, eyes impassive and searching.
Was he possessed?
Sarah’s hands shook, holding a staff that she had walked with all the way from Calhoun Mountain but that now felt like lead in her grip. She couldn’t fight him off, ash staff or not; he was bigger and heavier and had a longer reach. She groped into her mental drawer of Latin and tried to put together an attack spell. She didn’t have much strength left, but she figured it was all right if her spell knocked her unconscious, as long as it got Calvin, too.
“Corporem—” she began, and Calvin threw his log weapon—
slamming her in the chest.
“Whooomph!” she gasped, and she lost the spell along with the air in her lungs.
She rocked back, slamming into the cabin wall.
“Corporem—” she squeaked.
Calvin fell on her like a hammer on an anvil, pounding her in the mouth, in the cheek, knocking her to the ground. She couldn’t bring her will to bear under the onslaught, couldn’t think of a way to fight back, didn’t think she had the power to muster a decent magical counterattack, anyway.
Terror and pain gripped her, but she wouldn’t give in. Gripping the ash staff, she raised it to try to ward him off.
He punched her in her bad eye.
A flash of scorching agony and light flooded her mind and she rolled forward, facedown onto the hard dirt. She dropped the staff and buried her face in her hands.
Too much, too much pain, in her skin, in her chest, and especially in her head.
She felt something loose and moving inside her eye socket, the one that had never opened.
Was her skull shattered? Calvin punched her again in the back, and then stopped. She realized from the sound of his footsteps and the scrape of wood on packed earth that he was picking up his club again.
She was too hurt to care anymore. She touched her battered eye tenderly, wincing at the fresh pain. Something moved behind the always-closed eyelid, which then opened, and in a soft dribble of warm fluid, a small, hard object fell into her fingers.
Had she lost her eye?
She almost laughed at herself for caring. Any second now, Calvin—the thing that looked like Calvin—would bash her brains out with a hunk of firewood, and here she lay, worrying about whether she had lost, of all things, her bad eye.
Through split lips, she laughed defiantly.
Calvin yelled without words. She didn’t brace herself, just relaxed, closed her eyes, and prepared for her death.
But the blow didn’t fall on her.
Sarah heard a scuffle and looked up.
The world was different, wildly different from anything she had ever seen before, and she almost vomited at the suddenness and extremeness of the change. Two figures struggled in the center of the room, wrestling with arms on shoulders, and through her good eye they looked like two identical Calvin Calhouns.
Nearly identical, because one of them looked beat all to hell, was caked in yellow grime, and had a tomahawk and lariat on his belt.
Hammered yellow Calvin seemed to be attempting to slap a clenched fist to the other Calvin’s face, and the other Calvin, bad Calvin, the Calvin who had been attacking her moments earlier, fought to get his hands around battered Calvin’s neck.
What made the room suddenly alien, though, what disoriented her, were the images coming through her other eye, the eye through which she had never before seen. She saw two figures still, but neither one of them looked exactly like the Calvin Calhoun she was accustomed to seeing.
One of them was a column of warm, white light.
The other was a smoking, black, cold fire, sucking brilliance and heat out of the room.
With her witchy eye, too, she saw the light of the dog, barking madly from the doorway, and the wan light of Thalanes, slumped on the floor, and out the door, coursing through the stand’s yard like the Mississippi, a giant river of multicolored light.
The ley line of the Natchez Trace.
If she could see out her witchy eye, though, what was she holding in her hand?
“Git outta here! Sarah, git up and git on outta here!” It was column-of-light Calvin, hammered yellow Calvin…real Calvin.
The ash staff lay on the floor. Looking at it through her witchy eye Sarah saw that it, too, was a thin, hot line of light. She picked it up and levered herself to her feet, moving slowly and feeling that the wrestling Calvins moved even more slowly, lumbering back and forth across the room, each fighting to get at the other’s head and neck.
She took a deep breath. Then she readied the staff, rotating it to point its butt end at the struggling columns of light and darkness. She kept wrapped in her fingers, and held tight to the staff, the hard, rounded thing that had fallen out of her eye socket.
“Diabolum expello,” she muttered, running her fingers over the staff and channeling into it the energy torrent of the ley line outside the door. Her skin burned and she couldn’t breathe.
Light-Calvin was gaining the upper hand, pushing dark-Calvin’s throat with one forearm; he was within inches of clapping his balled fist to dark-Calvin’s face.
“Run, Sarah!” he shouted again. His expression was harrowed. How must she look, with her bad eye smashed open? Something awful.
Then dark-Calvin jerked light-Calvin sideways bodily—
light-Calvin gasped in pain—
and dark-Calvin grabbed his foe by the throat. The real Calvin Calhoun tried to shout again, but only choked and gagged.
“Diabolum expello,” Sarah murmured again.
Stepping forward, she jammed the Elector’s white ash staff into the chest of dark-Calvin. The bruises on her chest and arms flared painfully and she gasped, but still she shoved with all her might, and the staff sank into the creature’s flesh, piercing it like a spear.
Sarah’s body exploded in heat and pain and she fell.
Immediately, dark-Calvin released his grip on light-Calvin’s neck. Light-Calvin—just plain Calvin—stepped back unsteadily, rocking on the balls of his feet.
The thing impaled on her walking stick howled and began to convulse. She watched it from the floor, wishing she’d been able to hold on to the staff, to keep the creature pinned. Instead, it jerked and spun wildly about with the wood sticking out of its body.
The black fire she saw through her witchy eye popped and jumped like water on a hot skillet, sometimes seeming to pull right out of the physical body that held it, only to snap back. Finally the black column gripped the staff to pull it out—
and Calvin slapped his open hand onto the thing’s chest.
Graaaaraaaraaaarghhhhh!
The scream pierced her brain, the convulsions redoubled, and bitter yellow brimstone filled the air in long plumes firing from the creature’s body. Calvin kept his fist pressed against the monster and grabbed Sarah’s ash staff with his other hand to pin it in place. It jerked, it tumbled, it spun like a pinwheel, throwing off yellow smoke thick mud. It shrank and melted as it spun, and then finally the ash staff fell through empty air to clatter on the hard floor and the black fire was gone.
Calvin fell to his knees. “Jerusalem, Sarah. Lord hates a whiner, but I b’lieved we’d had it for a minute there, you and I.”
Sarah closed her witchy eye, and found she could thereby shut out the strange images of Calvin as a figure of white light and Thalanes as a glowing blue puddle. “I b’lieve Iron Andy sent the right man on this here journey,” she said.
“Iffen he’d a knew about these mud fellers, I expect he might a sent more’n one.” His cheerfulness, weak and wry as it was, was almost shocking to her. She felt as if she’d been trampled by a herd of flaming mustangs. “You’re
a sight, Sarah.”
She laughed. “I reckon I might prefer you not see me at this moment, Calvin Calhoun, iffen I look half as bad as you do.”
“Iffen you feel half as bad,” he replied, “you could use a barrel of cold beer and a week’s sleep. Mebbe we should ought to tell Thalanes about these here clay things now, do you reckon?”
“For that bump on his noggin, he deserves to know. And I still need a bath.”
She kept her witchy eye firmly shut so Calvin couldn’t see it—she wanted to examine herself in a mirror before she let anyone else look at her—and climbed gingerly to her feet. He helped her limp to the light of the doorway, where she shook him off.
She stood on the stand’s porch looking down at her clenched fingers. Did she dare open them?
“Sarah, what’s wrong?” Cal called over her shoulder. “Don’t be shy, you look jest fine in yeller!”
She slowly uncurled her fingers.
Lying in her palm, now caked in soggy yellow brimstone, was an acorn.
Through her good eye, Sarah saw it plain, brown, and ordinary, but through her witchy eye it burned with the brilliance and power of a lighthouse, blue and white.
* * *
Ezekiel Angleton dreamed, as he’d dreamed every night for weeks, of running through the forest. He was a tireless creature that followed its quarry along a narrow track through deciduous skeletons and clumps of bristling pine.
In the dreams, he ran south and west. He knew that from the sun that rose on his left shoulder and set before him by day, and by the sinking end of the zodiac into which he charged through the night.
His quarry ran ahead of him, and though he could not see it, he sensed it. He could taste it on the wind.
Since his dream of attacking Sarah…Sarah…he couldn’t bring himself to attach a surname to her anymore, connecting her either with the Imperial family or with these obstinate sniping hill-rat Calhouns…since he had dreamed of attacking Witchy Eye and battling the strange youth with fire in his hand, he’d passed all his sleeping moments running. He had not dreamed again of Calhoun Mountain, and though he didn’t doubt his God, or God’s servant St. Martin, he began to wonder whether, after all, he’d been correct to judge his dream a prophecy.
This time, again, he dreamed that he fought.
He dreamed of racing along the narrow track, following the scent—the taste—of his prey, a wet river crossing, a large stone- and timber-built waystation, a courtyard, a well, a long-eared dog that growled and yapped at him.
Suddenly he was looking at her, inside a chamber red with fire. The Witchy Eye, the abomination.
Also the traitor monk, Thalanes. He saw them tall and liquid in his dream, flowing before his eyes in flickering light, but he could not mistake their identities. They welcomed him; they didn’t know he was their enemy.
Ezekiel rejoiced in his heart when his dream-self struck down the priest with a sword of fire. He thrilled towering over the abomination, forcing her to cower as he prepared a killing blow.
But he was shaken by the dream’s end. He was surprised again, and the abomination was spared, by the appearance of the tall young man, the demonic angel with his fistful of fire. They fought, and Ezekiel struggled mightily to keep that fire from his face, and to wrestle down the young man, and he was on the cusp of winning, had his strong fingers wrapped around the fire-thrower’s throat—
when a spear was shoved into his side.
Even as my Lord, he thought as he collapsed, shuddering, in his dream and awoke, shivering, in his tent. My cross alone is not enough, my enemies must pierce my side with the spear as well.
He lay still, recollecting where he was. It was late afternoon, and he sprawled on a blanket in his tent on the slopes of Calhoun Mountain. Lazy Appalachee birds chirruped their defiance and the air was just beginning to turn cold.
He had been dreaming.
It wasn’t a dream of his death. Not did it seem prophecy. But if not prophecy, what was it? The Lord helped his servants, and Ezekiel believed this dream must be of God, it must be telling him something.
But what?
The dreams ended in defeat. Not his defeat, though, if they were not prophetic, but the defeat of something else, some unknown ally. Some creature through whose eyes Ezekiel could see in his sleep. Not prophecy, but still a divine gift of vision.
Where his ally had failed, Ezekiel would triumph.
What were the dreams telling him?
They gave him a direction. South and west. In the dreams, some ally followed the Witchy Eye south and west on a narrow track through the wilderness. It was no Imperial road, it was some other trail, some well-traveled backcountry highway.
South and west.
He ruminated as he pulled on his boots and rolled to his feet. “Captain Berkeley!”
“In the tent, Mr. Angleton,” Berkeley drawled.
Ezekiel found Berkeley sitting at the table, laying out his cards. God curse the Crown Land Cavaliers! Either they were outright pagans or they were verminous with silly superstitions, always blathering on about horoscopes and fortune telling.
“Captain Berkeley,” he started again, “am I right to think that the north end of the Natchez Trace is near here? It’s a narrow road, isn’t it, cutting through the forest?” Ezekiel had traveled in the empire, but hadn’t often been this far south and west, and he generally rode on the emperor’s highways.
“I believe you’re correct,” Berkeley agreed, “though I’ve always had a preference for the speed of the Imperial Pikes.”
“That goes south and west, doesn’t it? Where does it end up?”
Berkeley raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Blazes.”
“What’s wrong with you, man?” Ezekiel snapped, in no mood for the captain’s pettishness.
Berkeley pointed at the table, where he had laid out three cards: the Highway, the River, and the City. “You’ll notice that my luck continues. I turn up the Major Arcana.”
“Damn your superstition, man,” Ezekiel growled. “Tell me about the Natchez Trace.”
“Damn yours, Parson,” Berkeley snapped back.
Ezekiel wanted to hit the man. “Is that what I must tell His Imperial Majesty, then? That the Captain of his dragoons damned the Lord God and refused to answer a simple question put to him by the emperor’s confessor?”
Berkeley sighed and looked down.
“The Natchez Trace does go south and west.” He picked up the Tarock identified as the Highway and showed it to Ezekiel. The painting was not of an Imperial Pike, of course, since Franklin had designed his Tarock before the signing of the Compact, but of an older, narrower highway, barely more than a dirt track, winding away from the viewer toward a distant river, between wooded hills.
Berkeley set aside the Highway and continued. “It runs from Nashville and it carries traffic toward the city of New Orleans.” He showed Ezekiel the City, a horizon of spires and a busy marketplace underneath.
“That’s the Lightning Cathedral,” Ezekiel said.
“Or the Cathedral of St. Louis on the Place d’Armes.”
“That’s a painting of Philadelphia,” Ezekiel snapped. “Stop imagining things. The cards do not talk to you, Captain.”
Berkeley shrugged and traded it for the River, the card showing a muddy brown expanse so wide it might have been a sea. Thick green forest bordered the river on the left side of the card, and the lights of houses twinkled in the darkness on the right. “New Orleans, of course, being the city at the mouth of the Mississippi River.”
“If I’d a knew it’d be such a blessin’ to you,” Calvin said, “I’d a beat you years ago.”
Sarah had not, after all, had a bath. When Thalanes had awakened, Calvin and Sarah had recounted to him their previous encounter with the clay not-men, and their battles with the ersatz Sarah by the riverside and Calvin in the cabin.
“Mockers,” he had said, holding his injured head. “There may be others with them, or something worse. We must flee.”
They had quickly tended wounds—Thalanes pronounced Calvin’s rib probably bruised, possibly cracked, but definitely not broken—and had gathered their packs again. Calvin had gone back to Mrs. Crowder’s pantry for a loaf of oat-flour bread and salt ham, and then they’d resumed their march, all three dusted yellow from crown to toe. They moved slowly, and Sarah knew it was because of her, but she didn’t object. She felt stretched and burned.
Thalanes led them under cover of trees off the road but parallel to it, keeping the Trace in sight and stopping to scrutinize every group of travelers they saw.
He had said nothing since they had left Crowder’s stand.
Sarah had torn a strip of fabric from her skirt and wrapped it around her head, covering her witchy eye with a makeshift patch—the visions of light and power made ordinary movement nauseating, so she shut them out.
She leaned on her staff, scorched and stained yellow but unbroken. After a couple of hours of silence from Thalanes, she had tried to draw him out of his shell by telling them both about her revelations of the afternoon. Sarah recounted that she’d been hit in the head by the not-Calvin Mocker, that it had opened her eye and that through her witchy eye she saw living things as columns of light, and that she could see the ley line through it.
She didn’t mention the acorn, which she had tucked hidden away inside her dress.
Thalanes hadn’t taken the bait, but Calvin had been impressed. Every few minutes, for the rest of the afternoon, he whistled in inarticulate amazement.
“I guess you’ve got a right to be grumpy,” she said to the monk.
Thalanes sighed. “I’m not grumpy.” He paused for several long seconds. “I’m a little grumpy. But much more than that, I’m terrified. Also, I’m trying to concentrate, to be sure that we’re not being followed by further Mockers, or by other foes. The effort drains me.”
“I find it a mite unsettlin’ that the Mockers leave you feelin’ scairt, too,” Cal commented. “I’s hopin’ you’d be more…nonchalant.”
“They do scare me,” Thalanes admitted. “But what scares me more is that I’m quite certain that Ezekiel Angleton didn’t send those things. He’s a strict man, and a dangerous one, and he can work a bit of gramarye, but Mockers are black magic. I’ve known Angleton for years, and I’m confident that’s something he would never knowingly touch.”