Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  Cal stopped. “What you lookin’ for, Sarah?”

  Sarah stepped down onto an untrafficked pier. She slipped the patch from her eye and looked at the river, conscious of her companions filling in around her in a protective ring. The river pulsed green and scintillating, but it still showed the dark streaks indicating the presence on the ley of the Lazars.

  The streaks were blacker now, and bigger.

  “Hostes video,” she incanted, touching her eye, and her vision again rode the mighty green current of the Mississippi upstream at lightning speed—

  but only for a split second this time, and then she saw them.

  They were in a sailboat now, a small one, but between the wind and the river’s current it was moving at a frightening pace downstream—toward her. Rain soaked the boat and its occupants. Men worked the helm and the sails of the craft, men with frightened faces, but the Lazars all sat in a circle, unmoving and quiet, water dripping from the brims of their hats, faces hidden as they hunched down into long wool scarves.

  No, not all of them.

  One of them stood in the prow of the ship, hat, scarf, ornate and billowy cravat, and long, curly red hair all flapping in the wind, one hand gripping one of the small ship’s many ropes and one foot grinding against a gunwale. Some sense screamed at her mutely to look away, to end the vision, to pull back, but she ignored it and examined the Lazar. He looked ahead, downstream.

  He was looking at her.

  Their eyes met, and his were white and blank, oozing black in their corners. Suddenly his words cut into her mind, dry and rustling. Ophidian, he said-thought to her, Adam’s Bastard, Egg-Hatched, Unsouled, Unclean, Serpentspawn. I sensed thee before, and now I see thee plain.

  “Robert Hooke,” she whispered, sounding less resolute than she liked. “The Sorcerer.” That sounded a little more respectful than she liked, so she groped for something more disparaging. “Newton’s little shadow.”

  I know who thou art, too, child. The black in the corners of his eyes writhed. I have known many like thee, known and devoured. Thy people are serpents, there is no throne for thee or any of thine and no refuge, not on Earth, not in Heaven and not even in the blackest pits of Hell. Ye shall feed my lord the Necromancer with your undying screams, thou and all of thine.

  The black substance in the corners of his eyes was a mass of tiny black worms, squirming as he spoke to her.

  Sarah forced herself to laugh. “You ain’t nothin’ but rotten meat.” She released her vision.

  But the vision did not release her.

  Robert Hooke laughed. I have thee, soulless. His worms thrilled like perverse little harpstrings. Rotten meat or no.

  Sarah pulled away, yanked to rip herself out of the vision, and found she could not. She closed her witchy eye and the vision did not go away. “Visionem termino,” she coughed out, willing the connection to end.

  It didn’t.

  I have not given thee leave to depart, Snakechild, the Sorcerer hissed into her mind, a sound like rustling leaves. The light seemed dimmer to Sarah, as if she were seeing it through a pall of smoke, or from underwater.

  Hooke reached forward over the prow of the ship, reaching out to her face with the long, curled nails of his white hand.

  Sarah couldn’t move; something brushed her and she looked down. She could see her body beneath her, but below that was neither the Mississippi River nor the New Orleans wharf, but infinite murky space, falling away forever. Fingertips brushed her, and she floated in a thicket of hands that groped and caressed and pulled at her—

  far away from her vision, where her body was, Sarah tightened her grip on her white ash staff—

  Hooke’s long, yellow nails touched her jaw and she felt cold to the marrow of her bones, knowing that she was not only about to die, but about to lose her soul to the Sorcerer Robert Hooke—

  green fire flared in her vision! Sarah heard muttering and she was pulled to the ground, collapsing under Calvin’s weight. Her vision was snuffed into nothing.

  “Sarah! Sarah!” Cal barked into her ear. “Sarah, can you hear me?”

  “You’re crushin’ me, Cal,” she protested. “Not that it ain’t thoroughly enjoyable, but iffen you git off me a minute I might jest could breathe.”

  Cal rolled away with a sound that was half-sob and half-laugh and Sarah sat up. The wharf about her was still untrafficked, and her companions stood in a screen, hiding her from the stevedores and gendarmes moving up and down the gravel. Thalanes looked strained, and Picaw and Grungle had joined them—the beastkind’s presence probably explained the green light in her vision at the end.

  She wasn’t sure quite how, but the Heron King’s emissaries had helped save her.

  Thalanes knelt and looked at her with concern. “Are you all right?”

  Sarah nodded and pulled the patch back over her seer’s eye. “I saw the Lazars again.”

  “And the Sorcerer Hooke saw you in turn,” Thalanes noted. “Did he say anything?”

  “He called me names, but that ain’t nothin’. I git that a lot.”

  Thalanes smiled, but didn’t laugh. “How close are they?”

  “Close,” she said. “They’ll be here tomorrow, I reckon.”

  “It ain’t too late to git on outta here,” Cal suggested. “I know you want to help your…your sister and brother, but you can leave me here to sniff out this Lee feller, and you and Thalanes can light out for someplace else. Someplace safer. They jest ain’t no reason to take the risk. Without you here, I don’t expect anybody’ll care two squirts about me and Lee.”

  Sarah put her hand gently on Calvin’s forearm and shook her head. “I’ll find him faster, Cal. I’ll find him first thing in the morning, and then we’ll get out of here.”

  Chigozie looked confused. “I am not sure what has just happened here, but I am certain of one thing: my father will be very disappointed if you do not spend the night with us. Even if at this point the night consists of only a few hours.”

  Sarah looked to Thalanes for guidance and he nodded. “Thank you, Father,” she replied to Chigozie. “We gratefully accept.”

  The two beastfolk looked at each other. “We shall watch the river,” Grungle croaked solemnly. “When the Lazars arrive, we will do what we can to delay them, and we shall warn thee.”

  Sarah nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “And please thank your master.”

  “Thou mayest thank him in person,” Picaw suggested with a twist of her beak that looked like a smile.

  Grungle held his hand out to Sarah. Shadowed in his palm lay a smooth, rounded, flat object, like a small tile. She took it and found it warm and slightly flexible. She held it up to catch what light she could from stray lanterns on the quay and found it reddish-brown and streaked with other colors.

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “A bit of my shell,” he croaked. “I trust thou wilt know what to do with it, should Your Majesty have need of me.”

  “You have a shell?” she asked, surprised.

  “I am not a tortoise, Your Majesty,” the beastman said, “nor even part tortoise. But in some ways, I am very much like a tortoise.”

  “Some time, we should all git nekkid and share secrets,” Cal suggested sarcastically. “But mebbe not tonight.”

  Sarah pocketed the bit of shell. “Thank you very much.”

  He nodded and executed a neat little bow. She bowed back.

  Then Cal and Thalanes helped Sarah to her feet. She let them and the ash staff bear most of her weight to the landward end of the pier. There she pulled away, stepping down onto rocks dark with river water and crouching to gather mud on the tip of one finger.

  “Adventum videbo,” she muttered, and lifted her patch to daub the mud on her witchy eye. No sense relying on the tortoise shell alone, when she could have the help of the Mississippi River.

  “Sarah,” Cal asked, “what you reckon you’re a-doin’?”

  “No disrespect,” she said to the beastkind as she lower
ed the patch over her eye, “but I intend to stand watch with you.”

  * * *

  The two men crossed New Orleans at a rapid pace. Bill tried to pass the time in conversation with Hop.

  “Are you a Dutchman, then?” he asked collegially.

  “No.”

  “But Jacob Hop…isn’t that a meneer’s name?”

  “Oh, yes, it is.”

  “Where are you from, Jake?”

  “I live on the Mississippi.”

  “Some Hansa town, then. Is your family Dutch? Your parents?”

  “No. My father lived on the Mississippi, like me. So will my son. We have always lived on the Mississippi, he and I, and we always will.”

  Bill tried to stay focused. “Well, how did you come by a Dutch name?”

  “By the exercise of my power, of course.”

  Bill began to wonder if Jacob Hop were simple. Was it possible to be both an imbecile and a magician?

  Kyres Elytharias had been a great man and a magician, but even he had had a bit of a mad streak, unpredictable and idiosyncratic. He’d run away to fight in the Spanish War without his father’s permission, and even as king he’d ridden the bounds of his lands in person, dealing out justice to road-agents and Comanche slavers on the fringes of the Great Green Wood. He’d been good, but he’d also been impulsive and wild.

  Bill inquired about Hop’s profession. “How long have you been a prison guard, Jake?”

  “I am not a prison guard.”

  “I mean, how long were you a prison guard? I know you were a guard on the Incroyable…have you been a prison guard elsewhere?”

  “Friend Bill, did I give you the impression that I was trying to keep you imprisoned?”

  Bill couldn’t decide whether that was a good point or not, but it seemed to be denying the basic facts. He decided to switch tactics and approach Jake on the universal masculine level.

  “So, Jake,” he said heartily, “tell me about Jacob Hop and his women! Do you have a lady love ashore? Do we need to find you one?”

  “I do not love at all as you know it, Bill. However, I am looking for a queen.”

  They had skirted the Quarter, passed under the shadow of the Palais du Chevalier, and were now at the edges of the Garden District, where mercantile buildings gave way to the elaborate columned homes of New Orleans’s wealthy.

  The awkwardness thickened into tension and finally Bill stopped walking.

  “You’re the strangest man I ever met, Jake, and that’s a fact. I can’t discover where you’re from, what your native language is or what kind of man you are, and I’ve been trying the better part of an hour!”

  Jake stopped to consider this. “I am your friend, Bill,” he said. “Is that not enough?”

  Bill reached under his perruque to scratch his itching scalp, wondering whether he’d picked up lice in the Incroyable. His head needed shaving.

  “Yes, Jake,” he finally admitted, “strange though I find the fact, it is indeed enough for me. You’ve been good to me and I’ll not begrudge you your peculiarities. Hell’s Bells, I’m an odd enough man myself.”

  “Would it help you if I told you that I am the rightful king of the great river valley in which you stand?” Hop asked with a faint and curious smile. “That my servants have slept during my father’s long reign, but that now I shall recover my power, the great might of the Mississippi will be roused again, and war and judgment will be loosed upon the land?”

  Bill laughed heartily. “Heaven love you, Jake. A sense of humor is a necessary piece of a fighting man’s accouterment; nothing drowns out the whistling of musketballs like a good joke. Have you ever considered becoming a soldier?”

  “I have not,” Jacob Hop said. “Tell me about soldiers.”

  It had been a long time since Bill had been a soldier. “The greatest soldier I ever knew was the Lion of Missouri.”

  “I have heard of the Lion.”

  “You’ve heard the songs, I expect,” Bill predicted. “There are plays, also, and novels and poems and puppet shows.”

  “Why does this man so interest your artists, then?” Hop asked.

  “Understand this, Jake. A good soldier is loyal. To his king, to his country, to his flag, to his captain. A man who fights for money is a mercenary, which is little better than being a mere thug.”

  “I understand that,” the Dutchman said.

  “A great soldier also fights for ideals. He serves a king and country, but he fights for freedom, for honor, for justice, for peace, for brotherhood.” Bill’s eyes misted over, memories flooding through his mind.

  “And the Lion of Missouri was such a man.”

  “His toast,” Bill explained. “Military men drink, Jake, and they make toasts. They make the same toasts over and over again, like a ritual, like polishing your boots or keeping your sword sharp. One man toasts and the other men toast him back. Usually, the toasts are funny, in the nature of shared jokes, like to the girls we’ve left behind, and to the ones we’ll leave behind tomorrow, or they’re bellicose, like death to the Spaniard and confusion to the Turk.”

  “These are things soldiers say to each other when they drink.”

  “Yes,” Bill agreed, “exactly. The Lion of Missouri always made the same toast. After a few years with him, I found I was saying it, too. He toasted honor in defense of innocence, and the hell of it was, he meant it. He had a good sense of humor too, Jake, he could tell a joke and he could take one, but never once, when he made his toast, did I see him crack a smile. He was a truly unironic man.”

  “He fought for the innocent, then?”

  Bill nodded. “I met him as a young man. We were both youths, fighting off the Viceroy of New Spain when he decided that even taking New Orleans wasn’t enough for him. You’re a lad yourself, but you must have heard of this, there were regiments from the Tappan Zee, fighting under one of your Stuyvesant warlords.”

  “I have heard of your Spanish War,” Hop said.

  “It was everyone’s Spanish War, that’s the point,” Bill insisted. “It made the New World into the empire, because for once we all fought on the same side, more or less, because everyone was worried about New Spain and how far up the Mississippi they might get. Then the war ended and we were all friendly and Franklin put together his Compact to finish the job. That was when I learned my languages, in the war, because I had dago allies, and frogs, and iggies and Germans and Algonks and everything you can imagine. And I went because that’s what a gentleman does, he goes to war with his lord, and the Earl of Johnsland went.

  “But Kyres didn’t have to fight. He was a prince, and his kingdom wasn’t in jeopardy, and his father forbade him to go. But he thought the Spaniards were killing innocent people, so off he went and fought himself, sword and gun and tooth and nail. He shed a lot of his blood in Mobile, and a lot more Spanish blood on the Ouachita River.”

  Jacob Hop listened in silence.

  “But even battling against a cruel and aggressive invader,” Bill went on, “he always fought fair. He honored the rules of war, he honored his foes, he loved his men. I knew him when he was a great soldier, and then I knew him in Missouri, when he was even greater.”

  “What do you mean?” Jacob Hop asked.

  How to explain? “They called him the Lion of Missouri,” Bill started slowly, “because he rode through that country half king, half outlaw, and all legend. The Missouri territory lies across the Mississippi from Cahokia—”

  “I know,” Hop said.

  “—and the Kings of Cahokia have always figured as major powers in the area, but the Lion made it his personal obsession. The small farmers had a hard life, squeezed by the landowners, the petty squabbling nobles, the banks, the gangs of outlaws, the beastkind, and what have you, and Kyres Elytharias took their side. He was the king, you understand? He was the Imperial Consort by then, too, and he protected these farmers, he gave them justice, he righted their wrongs. He risked life and limb for those dirt farmers, and attracted enemies
like a dog attracts fleas.”

  Hop said nothing and Bill groped through his chest of memories for something that would illustrate the awe in which he held his old master. It hurt him to talk so much about Kyres, but it hurt in a good way. Maybe Bill was finally digging a bullet out of an old wound, and now the injury might really heal.

  “Once,” he said, “we came upon a small town where several barns had been burned. The burgomaster and the aldermen told us it had been an outlaw band and showed us the tracks of the bandits’ horses. We followed their trail into the hills and there, in a canyon, we were ambushed. The firefight lasted two days, and it was touch and go whether we would die of thirst or be shot full of holes. In the end, we gambled on a desperate ruse and managed to turn the tables on the outlaws, killing a couple of them and capturing the rest. It cost us four good men, four dragoons dead, and when we interrogated the outlaws, it turned out they were people from the town—the burgomaster and one of the aldermen were among our prisoners.”

  To his astonishment, Bill felt his eyes misting slightly. Hop’s expression was fixed and intent. “The whole town was in on it,” Bill continued. “They burned their own barns to lure Kyres in. It turned out that some bank had put a price on Kyres’s head—think about that, Jake, he was the Imperial Consort and there were banks offering reward money for his death.” Bill remembered the sheet-white expressions of fear on the faces of the burgomaster and the alderman.

  “So he killed them all?” Jacob Hop guessed.

  Bill shook his head. “The Lion asked them what they needed the money for, and they told him they had had a drought and a bad harvest, and the town was in danger of starving to death.”

  “He took hostages, at least, for their good behavior?”

  “He let them go,” Bill said. “And he gave them his purse. All the money he had on his person, a small fortune.”

  Hop stared at Bill.

  “Kyres Elytharias was the greatest soldier I ever knew. He was more than just a soldier, he was a knight. Literally. I am a Cavalier, Jake, which means that I am a man of the Chesapeake, and I am an officer, which means that I hold, or held, military rank, and I hope to be a gentleman, which has something to do with my being born to a family that owns land and rides horses and something to do with not having disgraced myself. The Imperial Consort was a paladin. He belonged to a chivalric order of the Firstborn, something called the Swords of Wisdom. Perhaps that was where he got his ideals, I never knew. Perhaps he got them from his father, though he defied the man.”