Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  Sarah was to be sold into slavery. She’d pull a wagon, or worse.

  “You won’t git nothing for me,” she warned him. “I’m ugly.”

  “You’ll do jest fine.” Orange Cape ran a shivering gaze up and down Sarah’s body. “Don’t you worry, I’ll teach you everythin’ you need to know to make the Memphites happy.”

  Sarah spat. She wanted to cast a spell, but she was weak and tired. She had to do something quick, easy, and effective.

  “Git movin’,” he ground out through his rotting teeth, and gestured again with the pistol.

  Sarah walked slowly toward the mule. “My husband and my father git back here and catch you,” she said, “you’re a dead man. On the other hand, I got a bit of cash in my pack, and iffen you want it, you can jest take it and go.”

  She stopped, standing deliberately a couple of paces to the side of the pack mule.

  “Like Hell,” Orange Cape said. “But you got somethin’ else I’d like to have very much, and I reckon I’ll jest go ahead and take it from you, soon as we get safely outta here and away from your menfolk. And when I’m finished, I reckon they’ll be enough left over to sell to the Memphites.” His face hardened. “Now git on my damn mule—”

  He gestured with his pistol again, pointing at the mule.

  “Ignem mitto,” Sarah muttered, and she sent a tiny spark into the firing pan of his pistol.

  Bang! Orange Cape’s gun fired—

  the horse and mule both jumped, jerking the tether away—

  and Sarah ran.

  “Damn you!” Orange Cape shouted.

  Sarah didn’t look back. She heard the whinnying of the man’s horse and the braying of his mule and the crashing sounds of both animals plunging into the thick trees, but she couldn’t tell whether Orange Cape was dealing with his animals or chasing her.

  She’d had a head start, but she was exhausted and the few extra yards would never be enough to save her. She counted on him to need the horse more than he wanted her, and to be afraid of tangling with Calvin and Thalanes.

  She staggered and fell into a crinkling bed of leaves. When a man’s hands picked her up moments later, she was enormously relieved to find they belonged to Calvin.

  * * *

  They continued to follow the ley line south and west. They stayed away from inns except when they all went into a stand or a village together to buy food. They stayed off the Trace, though parallel to it, and avoided people. When they could, they ate off the land—berries, apples, hickory nuts, birds, small game.

  The little monk was uncomplaining, could walk forever, slept on the ground and ate anything, but it was Calvin who had the skills that fed and sheltered them, building lean-tos tight under the bases of large pines when it rained, shooting and preparing game, and keeping them out of sight of the Trace but always close. He was even more than usually solicitous of Sarah’s comfort, which made her feel ill at ease. On the one hand, it made her think it might be nice to be married to Calvin Calhoun. On the other, she felt guilty for having hexed him.

  At least she ought to let him in on some of her secrets.

  Sarah didn’t feel comfortable showing Cal her eye directly, but she let him see it, as if casually, while she had her patch off and was using her Second Sight—she didn’t want him to feel as if she was hiding from him. She practiced her Second Sight several times a day, and found that if she tried to use it more than that, she became exhausted and her head hurt. She learned to see increasingly subtle changes in the aural tones of Thalanes and Calvin, and found she could guess their feelings very well, along with such things as, for instance, whether they were lying.

  She also found, over the course of a couple of days, that she could read the ley line. The energy flowing through it was disrupted by things traveling on it, and she found that she could thereby predict the size of an approaching party miles before it rolled into view.

  Sitting up during her turn at watch through the night, Sarah watched the ley line and wondered whether she’d be able to tell from the disturbance of the line that an approaching party was, for instance, a Mocker—could the line somehow tell her that?

  As she felt better, she practiced her gramarye, trying to make it second nature to undertake such simple tasks as firestarting and locating plants. With practice, the short Latin sentences came easier. Sentences and gestures she practiced a lot almost became rote spells, like wizards in stories cast.

  She also took guidance from the little monk on tending to the wounds they had each received, gathering herbs and binding them by gramarye into healing compounds that were ingested or made into poultices. After a few days, all their bruises had disappeared, Calvin declared he felt as whole as new, and even her eye had lost the soreness, redness, and inflammation she’d lived with her entire life.

  She worked all this magic using the energy of the Natchez Trace ley in carefully controlled amounts. She could only channel a small amount of it through herself at once, and when she took in too much it burned her; also, the ley resisted, it wanted to give her only a little bit of itself, and she had to wrestle with it to draw power from it for larger spells. Could the ley be depleted, say, by a natural disaster? And if it were, would it then draw the life energy out of people and other creatures along its length to replenish itself?

  She also learned and practiced various kinds of arcane concealment. She erased their physical tracks from time to time, and made them personally invisible, and cloaked their auras, and created illusions of them walking the other way up the Trace to Nashville just in time to pass New Orleans-bound travelers, and cast spells to lay blankets of forgetfulness on the creatures watching them as they passed. It was too much of an effort to cast any of the spells together, or to sustain any of them for very long, but the hope driving the strategy, devised by the three of them together over a campfire on the second day out from Crowder’s stand, was that constant rotation through the various tricks would baffle anyone tracking them.

  On the third night after the encounter at Crowder’s stand, Sarah sat watch, alternately chanting her way through Latin paradigms and talking to herself in the Biblical-Shakespearean cadences of Court Speech, as Thalanes had hinted she should. They camped without a fire in a small hollow above the Trace, and she gazed on the multicolored strand of power flow beneath her. The moon was nearing full and the sky was clear, so out her normal eye she had a ghostly-silver view of the valley, with its skeletal trees and occasional rail fences. Out the other she saw a landscape alive with crawling, creeping, and hopping things.

  She watched the Trace, and she also watched the two travelers.

  They had trudged to a halt and laid down their bedrolls late, after Calvin and Thalanes had fallen asleep. They made their camp at the bottom of the hill on the other side of the Trace, by a spring of fresh water that also been the reason Calvin had settled on the campsite he’d chosen. Sarah knew they were Firstborn by the blue of their auras—through her normal eye, they were undistinguished, just a couple of men with broad-brimmed hats and long coats.

  She had seen Eldritch before, in Nashville with some frequency and more occasionally traveling through the countryside on the Imperial Pikes, about perfectly ordinary business. But she had not before had occasion to watch the Firstborn secretly, knowing she herself was one of them.

  After the excitement of watching people with blue auras wore off, Sarah realized that once again she was watching the Eldritch do completely mundane things: they ate bread, they drank water, they stashed their food in a tree away from their bedrolls, they lay down and—she could tell by the tone of their glow—went to sleep. She felt kinship for them the warmth of which surprised her. Was that despite their ordinariness, or because of it?

  When the six riders appeared, coming from the direction of Nashville, Sarah thought nothing of them. There were dressed in long blue coats and blue tricorner hats, reminding Sarah of the soldiers who had besieged Calhoun Mountain, but their auras were white.

  They were
riding very fast, for such a small road at night.

  The riders saw the Eldritch travelers and stopped. Sarah couldn’t hear what was said, but there was some conversation, and the riders lingered. What were they talking about? The tones of both parties’ auras changed.

  The riders looked angrier.

  The Eldritch looked fearful.

  Pop!

  She heard the gunshot like the explosion of a toy gun’s cork, perfectly audible in the still night air. And suddenly there answered a volley of pops that sounded enormous in the small valley, but that could not have lasted more than a dozen shots. She couldn’t see the guns or the smoke or even, with her good eye, the physical bodies of any of the people, but she saw the Eldritch die.

  One moment, their auras glowed healthy blue, with a fear-tinged note to them, and the next, almost simultaneously, the auras exploded, dissipating into rings of light that washed Sarah, the voiceless, fear-clenched witness on the hill above, with a wave of energy.

  She felt their deaths in a way she had never before felt any death. Sarah knew that if she had wanted to, if she had been sufficiently self-possessed, she could have harnessed that energy. She felt sick at the thought, it was vile to imagine someone could do such a thing, but Sarah knew that with her Second Sight, she’d be able to see and feel when the rings of such energy struck her, and that the energy could be used just like the power in any ley line.

  The battle was over, and Calvin and Thalanes were up. She couldn’t talk, stunned by the violence as well as by the strangeness of experiencing the Ophidians’ deaths, but she gestured down at the valley, and her companions saw the horsemen ride away.

  Five days of magic-coffee-fueled marching after they left Crowder’s stand, in the silver light of a moon that was just shy of full, they arrived at Natchez.

  Natchez proper sat on a bluff, huddled behind a palisade of sharpened logs like the fierce wooden teeth of some guard dog set to fend off the forest and the river. It looked like a trading town of maybe a thousand people in houses mostly made of rough logs, squatting at the great junction of the long highway and the Mississippi River, fiercely trying to mind its own business and jealously guarding its privileges.

  The forest gave way to planted fields a few miles outside the town walls, and they found themselves compelled to travel again directly on the Natchez Trace. Sarah felt exposed as she walked under the most open sky she’d seen in nearly two weeks. She slipped off her patch to sneak a glimpse of the ley line and was reassured that the traffic behind them seemed ordinarily sparse and showed no signs of being…unusual.

  Thalanes cloaked their faces with his gramarye.

  They followed the Trace to the gates of Natchez, which were shut and watched by four helmet- and cuirass-clad guardsmen. The Trace continued around the town and steeply down to the base of the bluff, where Sarah saw in yellow torchlight a long line of wooden wharves insulating the impossibly wide river from its bank, and jammed up against the wharves a wide planked road and an even longer line of ramshackle buildings. The place swarmed with traffic, humans and boats, carts and dogs alike.

  It was as if the town of Natchez above had let down its hair, and that hair jumped and crawled with vermin.

  “Natchez-under-the-Hill,” Cal said to them. “I been here once or twice to sell cattle, and I’s always glad to escape with my skin.”

  “We can get a boat ride from here to New Orleans,” Thalanes asserted blandly.

  “Likely,” Cal agreed. “Also, we can git knifed or shot. These Hansa towns are tough iffen you ain’t Hansa yourself.”

  Sarah stared at the river as they descended into Natchez-under-the-Hill. It was like a sea, it was so far to the other side. She could see the opposite shore—it lay thick with tangled forest, and there were no lights. On an impulse, she slipped her patch up and turned her Second Sight upon the Mississippi River.

  It almost blinded her. It pulsed and throbbed like a sleeping dragon, a gigantic strand of energy dwarfing the Natchez Trace ley as the river itself physically dwarfed the Trace. An immense ley line coursed up and down the Mississippi, in the water and above it, and she wondered what mighty spells could be cast using its power, and how powerful a magician would have to be to draw from it, and what a cinder that vast channel of power would reduce her to if the entire thing were turned to flow through her body. Its color, too, was distinctive. It was multicolored like the Natchez Trace ley line, but the Trace ley was predominantly white, whereas the river ley luxuriated in shimmering deep green. Was that…river energy? The spiritual tracks of thousands of years of catfish?

  Sarah looked down at the wharf town before replacing her patch, and was reassured by the more human glow of white, like a phosphorescent anthill swarming on the riverbank. Between them and the town, though, stood two figures.

  Two figures whose auras were green, like the Mississippi’s.

  She snapped her patch back into place and they stopped.

  “Evenin’,” Cal said affably. “We ain’t lookin’ for trouble.”

  Looking through her good eye—not her good eye, Sarah reminded herself, but her normal eye, her mundane eye—she saw that the two figures both wore hooded robes, and had their faces deep in shadow. The figures both pulled back the hoods and Sarah was shocked to see emerge from those shadows a tortoise’s head and the head of a lovely woman with a duck’s bill incongruously sprouting out of the middle of her face.

  Beastmen! No, beastkind, since at least one of them seemed to be a female. She had never seen one close up before, and only rarely from a distance, in Nashville.

  “Your Majesty,” they said together, the tortoise’s bass croak undergirding the melodious flute-like voice of the duckfaced woman. They bowed low.

  They were bowing to her.

  “Please,” she said, “that’s enough.” She scrambled to regain her composure and protect her dignity. Had anyone else noticed? “Please rise.”

  They straightened out of their bows.

  “Your Majesty,” Tortoise-Head repeated in its (his?) low, throaty rumble. “Peter Plowshare is dead.”

  “I see I’ve gone mad. Was it the whippings, or the whisky?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Bill awoke in near-complete darkness, his head pounding and his throat dry, tongue swollen like a wad of cotton. He needed whisky.

  He rolled around, discovering that he was chained, wrists and ankles. He had a bump on the back of his head the size of an egg and tender to the touch, but the real pain was inside his skull.

  Whisky.

  He groped with trembling fingers and found water in a metal bucket. He forced himself to drink it, though the taste was stale. He felt like throwing up, and he was dimly relieved that Charles would never be able to see him in this wretched state.

  Surely, he would die here.

  He could smell the Pontchartrain’s salty tang and feel the curving of one wall; he was still on the hulk. The back left part of the ship, or aft and port, as he thought sailors would say—he’d never been on anything bigger than a riverboat, himself. Bill had always fought on land and ridden to his battles on a horse.

  Bill explored his chains and found them anchored to the ribs of the ship. He heard breathing in the darkness, and Bill called out “hello!” in the hope of initiating a conversation.

  Nothing.

  “Bonjour!” he tried, in vain.

  “Buenos días,” he tried again, “como está? Están? Quantos…er…”

  Bayard heard him.

  The traitorous weasel came stumping through the belly of the ship with an oil lantern in one hand and a cat o’ nine tails looped in the other. In the yellow puddle of light Bayard dragged with him, Bill briefly saw his fellow prisoners: emaciated, broken creatures, chained in their own filth and barely breathing, only a few of them conscious enough to even raise their heads.

  Were these men awaiting trial, or just the final mercy of death? Or did the chevalier keep this hulk in the Pontchartrain for the permanent detention of
prisoners, like a medieval dungeon, an oubliette-on-the-sea?

  Beelzebub’s bedpan, this is a dark place.

  Bayard brought with him three guards in blue vests. Two of them were bulky men who spoke French with the former Philadelphia Blue. Their voices were thick and their eyes dull—simpletons. Still dangerous, but it gave Bill hope to see that Bayard was assisted by idiots. Hope, and curiosity.

  At first it seemed to Bill that the third guard spoke no French, as Bayard continually tapped him on the shoulder and told him what he wanted done with a great deal of exaggerated pointing and gesturing and pantomiming of actions. Then, however, Bayard uncoiled and cracked his whip—

  Snap!

  Though the third man stood just a few feet away with his back turned to his master, he didn’t flinch at the sound.

  The man was a deaf-mute. He dressed like a Dutchman, in knee-length brown trousers, white stockings and a brown coat of a very simple cut over his blue uniform waistcoat. His shoes shone dully in the lamplight with large brass buckles.

  “Have you brought me whisky, gentlemen?” Bill asked.

  The frog simpletons ripped his shirt from his back and Bill offered no struggle. They snagged his manacles onto hooks that hung from the ceiling and Bayard flogged him, cursing in French. Bill didn’t count the blows, focusing his will on not crying out, on showing no weakness.

  He was almost successful.

  When they laid Bill again on the floor, on his side, Bayard and his idiots looked smug, but the deaf-mute appeared troubled. Or at least, not triumphant.

  He slept again. When he next awoke, he still wanted whisky, the craving so strong it made his hands shake. It must have been daytime, because white light blazed through chinks in the hulk’s hull like shafts of lightning.

  He crawled to his water pail, begging God to repeat and even outdo the miracle of the feast of Cana, but unable in his utter weakness to curse his luck when God saw fit not to change the water into Kentucky bourbon. If only he had more faith and said his prayers a little more often. Still, he sucked the metallic-tasting liquid down and felt better. This time, at least, he didn’t want to vomit.