Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  “Hell’s Bells, Dan,” Bill growled. “What is this about?”

  The dragoon drew his second pistol, pointed it at Bill, and fired.

  Bang!

  Berkeley had fired from a distance of scarcely fifteen feet, but the bullet went wide. That had to be Thalanes with his sly wizardry.

  “Hellfire!” Berkeley cursed, and Bill flung his scabbard at the other man’s face.

  Berkeley bounded away. Bill lurched after him, around the pews and toward the altar. “It’s no good, Dan! Honor—”

  He stopped himself—where was his old lieutenant going?

  Berkeley hopped the gate in the rood screen, swooped low and pulled the Bleeding Heart away from her work with his free hand. Bill stopped at the screen as Berkeley put his sword’s blade to the nun’s throat.

  “In defense of innocence?” Berkeley snarled.

  “Stay your hand!” Bill hollered.

  “You’re right, Will,” Berkeley called, “it’s no good. I have no choice. I’ve done what I’ve done, and now I’m leaving. If you try to stop me, I’ll kill you…after I’ve killed her.”

  The Bleeding Heart’s face was young and frightened, her hands and white habit bloodied from efforts to save the bishop.

  “That’s fine, Dan. I’m not your judge. Take your guns and go.” Bill felt tired. Daniel Berkeley began edging his way to the exit. As the other man moved slowly out of the chancel and into the nave, Bill did him the courtesy of gathering up his pistols and presenting them to him.

  Thalanes continued to bend over the Appalachee, who seemed to be stirring, and Jacob Hop sat on a pew, observing mutely.

  Berkeley nodded, took his pistols and spat blood again onto the floor. “I’m leaving, Will.” He backed away with his hostage, his eyes darting constantly between Bill and Thalanes. Bill kept his position.

  Finally, Berkeley released the nun and darted out the front doors.

  Bill scratched his scalp. He didn’t like letting Berkeley go after he’d committed a murder, but, after all, it was a crime that Bill had come very close to committing himself, so he wasn’t in a position to judge. He brushed aside the unanswered questions.

  Bill also set aside for later a sharp word to his apprentice, who had sat out the entire fight.

  For now, he had an old friend to catch up with. Hopefully this one wouldn’t try to skewer him. Bill collected his pistols and headed for the altar.

  As Bill approached, Thalanes and the redhead finished straightening the bishop’s robes and folded the dead man’s hands over his chest, then stood. In death, at least, the bishop didn’t look like a gangster; he looked like a nice old man.

  Bill was glad he hadn’t killed him. He was sorry the bishop was dead.

  “Thalanes, you little addict!” he called to his friend. “Hasn’t your gut thoroughly percolated yet?” He extended a hand in greeting, but Thalanes didn’t take it. There were tears in his eyes.

  Bill cleared his throat uncomfortably.

  “I’m Calvin Calhoun,” the red-haired man offered, and shook Bill’s hand. His eyes, too, were red with sorrow. “Jest plain Cal, you can call me.”

  “William Lee,” Bill said. “Bill.”

  “I reckoned so,” Cal said. “We come down from Nashville a-lookin’ for you.”

  “Berkeley murdered Bishop Ukwu.” Thalanes spoke like a medium in a trance.

  “Yes, he did,” Bill agreed. “I thought Berkeley might be with you, but I gather from your choice of verb that you disapprove of the man’s action.”

  Thalanes glared at Bill with a distraught eye. “Why would I kill Chinwe Ukwu? He was my friend, and he was a saint!”

  Bill shrugged and looked at his feet awkwardly. A saint? Was it possible he had been mistaken about the bishop? “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. This has…this has been a terribly strange time for me, old friend.”

  Thalanes grabbed Bill by his shoulder. “There’s no time for this. We have to get Sarah, and get out of here.”

  “Who’s Sarah? Hell’s Bells, Thalanes, what’s going on?”

  Thalanes dug his fingers into Bill’s flesh and looked him in the eye. “Sarah is Hannah’s oldest child, the one I hid. Her life’s in danger. Berkeley and the Blues, among others, are pursuing her. She’s an innocent girl in danger, Will, and she needs your help.”

  Honor in defense of innocence.

  Bill smiled.

  * * *

  Sarah could hear Obadiah’s men in the hall outside, asking about the screaming. He sent them away with the curt disclosure that his ‘informants’ had known nothing after all, and then, Sarah’s urgency setting their pace at a gallop, the three of them ran downstairs and outside.

  “I’ve got an ’orse!” Obadiah grunted, but Sarah ignored him, hitching her skirt up and running. Visions of the black worms in the corners of the Sorcerer Hooke’s eyes flooded her mind. Obadiah and Cathy followed, stumbling and cursing.

  Fear cracked a loud whip behind her.

  At the Place d’Armes she hesitated. People streamed out of the cathedral’s doors, frightened and yelling for the gendarmes.

  King Andy Jackson grinned at her from his cage above the scattering mob.

  Sarah steeled herself for the worst.

  “He’s dead! They shot the bishop!” a heavy man in an apron yelled as he rushed past, and her blood curdled in her veins. She imagined cheerful, charming, generous Bishop Ukwu, wounded or maybe even dead, and she broke into a run.

  Obadiah grabbed her elbow and held her still. “Bide, poppet. We wot not what ’appened, an’ it ben’t safe for you. Let’s ’ide a minute, bide an’ see.”

  She knew he was right, though it galled her. “Facies muto,” she muttered, and though she felt it drain her strength to its dregs, she was satisfied to see Obadiah’s and Cathy’s faces change, and then Obadiah chuckled.

  “You be sharpish, sure enough,” he said. “No wonder we ain’t ever found you.”

  “I ain’t waitin’ long,” she warned him. “Jest a minute, and then I’m a-goin’ in. Devil’s on my tail, Obadiah Dogsbody, and iffen you look behind you, you jest might see he’s on yours, too.”

  “Aye, poppet.”

  They waited just a minute, as she’d sworn, but that minute lasted forever, and Sarah felt an itch between her shoulderblades the entire time, as if the Sorcerer Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax were standing behind her.

  What was happening inside? The wait was rewarded when the cathedral’s front doors opened and spewed out one of the Philadelphia Blues, naked sword in his hand.

  “’Erne’s blood and damn me,” the Englishman muttered.

  “He’s one of Angleton’s men? The Philadelphia Blues?” Sarah asked.

  “’E be Daniel Berkeley,” Obadiah whispered. “’E be the bloody Captain of the Blues. ’E’d gone missink this mornink. What be ’e doink ’ere, then?”

  Sarah waited until Berkeley had passed and then she charged for the cathedral’s front doors.

  She crashed through a few steps ahead of Obadiah and Cathy, pushing past a bloody white apparition who shoved her way out the doors at the same moment, and whose gory nun’s habit threw fuel onto Sarah’s already blazing bonfire of fear.

  She hesitated halfway down the nave of the cathedral. The bishop lay on the floor, straight and stiff, smeared in blood, at the foot of the altar like some completed sacrifice.

  Thalanes and Cal stood above him, talking with a third person she didn’t recognize, a large, big-chested man in a red coat, with long black hair flowing out from under a battered black hat, armed with a sword and pistols. Off to one side lounged a small blond man; he, too, was armed, with a long blade belted over his shoulder.

  She didn’t mean to, but found she was weeping as she ran up, crossed the rood screen at a small gate, and threw herself on the body of the bishop.

  “He’s dead, Sarah,” she heard Cal say, and he tried to pull her away.

  Bishop Ukwu was bloodied, but could they be sure he was dead? Sarah raised
her eye patch and turned her Second Sight on the bishop, hoping to see a glimmer of white light in him.

  He was cold and dark.

  “Berkeley killed him,” Thalanes said, kneeling to help her up. “It was murder, and I don’t know the sense of it, but it’s done. We need to get you out of here. This is Sir William Lee.”

  Thalanes was presenting the big-chested man, but Sarah looked beyond him in astonishment at the other stranger. Through her normal eye, he was a plain, tousle-haired, blond man, disheveled and dirty in knickerbockers and buckled shoes, with a sword hanging incongruously on his back.

  With her Second Sight, on the other hand, she saw something completely different. A white figure, a normal man, a son of Eve, sat crouched in the blond man’s place, but the white figure’s hands and mouth were bound with glimmering green, and his eyes were wide with wonder and fear. Above him, around him, towering over him, was a completely different being. It was green, it shone and throbbed like the Mississippi, and though it was humanoid, its head was the head of a gigantic crested bird.

  “Satan on a stick,” she heard Lee mutter, and she couldn’t have agreed more. “Cathy?”

  “Sir William,” Cathy Filmer said, “I’m so pleased to see you well. Your stick aside, I hope I have not just heard you refer to me as Satan.”

  Sarah forced herself to act as if she hadn’t seen the mysterious green figure. She slipped her eye patch back on, returning to the conversation before the altar.

  Sir William smiled. “Never, ma’am.” He bowed to Cathy Filmer. “I beg you to pardon an old soldier his rough expressions of surprise.”

  “Why’s he here?” Cal jabbed a figure at Obadiah, who shambled up to the rood screen looking bashful, his travel-stained black tricorner hat held by the fingertips of both his hands.

  “I’ll explain,” she said, “but not right now. We have to get out of here this very minute—the beastfolk have been killed, and the Lazars are in New Orleans.” As she spoke, she heard the distant click of the cathedral’s front doors swinging shut.

  “Too late,” Thalanes said darkly.

  Sarah spun and looked—at the far end of the nave stood two men whose names she had heard as history and folk tales all her life, men who had died and been raised by a fell power to pursue her.

  The Sorcerer Robert Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax.

  Undead slaves of Oliver Cromwell, the Necromancer.

  The Lazars.

  “Jerusalem, Sarah, is they any feller I don’t have to compete with for your attention?”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Father!” Ezekiel heard Captain Berkeley shout, and it snapped him out of his thoughts. He turned from the fetid alley down which he had been peering to see Berkeley, mounted on a skittish horse in the middle of the street. The downpour spouting off the front of the dragoon’s tricorner hat made him look like a gargoyle.

  “I found her!” Berkeley shouted.

  “Where have you been?” Ezekiel resented Berkeley’s disappearance without notice, or least without decent, intelligible notice.

  Berkeley and pointed down the street. “Your Witchy Eye, Father! Fate favors us this morning—I saw her little monk at the cathedral, the St. Louis on the Place d’Armes!”

  Ezekiel wheeled his own horse around, directing it the way Berkeley indicated. “Why didn’t you take him?”

  “He wasn’t alone, Parson,” Berkeley spat out. “Gather any men you can and get to the cathedral! I ride for the barracks!”

  Ezekiel wanted to object that he didn’t take orders from Berkeley, but he knew Berkeley was right, and before he could think of anything else to say, the captain had plunged off into the rain.

  * * *

  “Beware, Will,” Thalanes said. “They’re Lazars. Walking dead. One of them is a sorcerer. And you should know that I’m almost drained already, and am unlikely to be very much use to you.”

  “I’m out, too, or near enough that I won’t be throwing Franklin bolts around.” Sarah grinned, trying to communicate a confidence she didn’t quite feel.

  Sir William seemed to be taking control of the tactical situation, which eased some of the weight off her shoulders. And though she’d only just met the man, he gave the impression of having enough blunt courage for the entire party.

  “I got silver bullets,” Sarah heard Calvin offer, and that reminded her of the knife in her own belt. She gripped its hilt for comfort, careful not to touch the silver.

  “How many?” Sir William asked, holding out a hand, and Cal passed him the lot.

  “Jest the seven. I made eight, but kept one loaded in the Elector’s rifle.”

  “Seven is a lucky number, suh,” Sir William observed. “Not that I wouldn’t rather have one more.”

  Sarah could see Hooke and Black Tom pacing slowly up the nave and two more Lazars standing by the door in one transept. They must be moving slowly so as to coordinate their attack. There had to be two others, somewhere. She made out now a detail she had missed in her visions, that all the Lazars’ feet were bare and that long gnarly nails grew forward from each white toe.

  “I count four of ’em,” she called, “and they oughtta be six.”

  “There be two more in the apse, poppet,” Obadiah responded.

  “Poppet?” Cal asked.

  “These are half-inch balls,” Sir William noted regretfully, “too small for any of my pistols. What did you cast them for, Cal, a hunting rifle?” He set the bullets down on the altar.

  “The Elector’s rifle’s got a half-inch bore,” Cal answered, squinting suspiciously at Obadiah out of the corner of his eye, “only it’s at the bishop’s, and I find I can’t run a-gittin’ it jest now.”

  I would not shed unnecessary blood, the Sorcerer Hooke said-thought. Surrender the Penn child to me, and in return I shall give the rest of you your lives. Sarah could tell by the looks on the others’ faces that they all heard him. He and Black Tom Fairfax strode up the aisle in the center of the nave, shoulder to shoulder in quiet menace.

  “You, suh, can go straight back to Hell!” Sir William drew his sword. Sarah wished she could radiate that kind of charisma.

  But what could one aging soldier do against the Necromancer’s pet sorcerer and his entire undead gang?

  Black Tom drew his famous short sword.

  Sarah saw Cal staring at the altar; what was he looking at?

  “I have a different proposal,” the small blond man said quietly, and in an unfamiliar accent. The Lazars stopped in their tracks.

  “Jake,” said Sir William, “if you have a minor cantrip up your sleeve that’s effective for banishing the walking dead, now’s the right time.”

  “I will do better than that.” The man he called Jake stood and faced Sarah.

  Sarah tried not to look at him. “What do you want, Jake?”

  “Sarah Elytharias Penn,” he addressed her, “I will incinerate these troublesome Lazars, I will strike dead your Captain Berkeley and all his men, and I will take you away to my hall, where you will be safe and worshipped as the queen you are.

  “In return, you must marry me.”

  Stunned silence filled the cathedral.

  Sarah considered the man’s two auras, and the great crested heron-headed creature she knew him to be. She remembered the worms swarming in the eyes of the Sorcerer Hooke and the groping hands of the spell he had unleashed upon her. This man—this being—might save her, might save them all, and he even seemed to want to save her as a queen.

  But as his queen.

  Could she surrender her freedom? Any man she married would become a factor in her decisions, but to agree to marry someone—something—this powerful was a devil’s bargain, and might mean the complete surrender of her autonomy.

  Was the devil worse than Robert Hooke and Black Tom Fairfax, and the Necromancer who must lurk behind them?

  “Jerusalem, Sarah,” Cal muttered, “is they any feller I don’t have to compete with for your attention?”

  She laughed at
Cal’s wisecrack. “You’re the Heron King,” she said to the blond man. “Your servants Grungle and Picaw died for me, fighting these creatures, and I am grateful.”

  The blond man shrugged. “They died for me, as others have, and as many others yet will. You have guessed who I am, or almost.”

  “Almost?” Sarah asked.

  “I am Simon Sword,” the man said. “Together with my father, I was the Heron King, as together with my son, who was my father, I will be the Heron King.”

  Sarah let this information sink in. It resisted easy analysis, but it sounded like reincarnation to her, and the dynastic politics of gods. It didn’t make her any more interested in marrying the creature.

  She considered her words carefully.

  “I am flattered by your offer,” she told him, “and I look forward to further entertaining the possibility when I am come into my kingdom.”

  Simon Sword laughed. “You have a keen mind, Sarah Elytharias Penn. I hope you survive long enough for me to propose again.”

  He sat back down.

  “Jake!” Sir William snapped peevishly. “Your treatment of my queen is unbecoming of a gentleman.”

  “Is it?” Jake asked.

  “I am amused by your oddities, suh,” the cavalier growled, “but now is not the time—I demand your assistance!”

  The man who had identified himself as Simon Sword smiled gently. “Friend Bill, you should not mistake me for a child of Adam, with human affections and loyalties. Do not force me to kill you.”

  Sir William looked stunned.

  The Lazars resumed their advance.

  “Ain’t they supposed to be guns here?” Cal asked. He was looking at the altar again.

  “What guns?” Cathy asked him.

  “The Lafitte pistols, the ones as drove old Andy Jackson out of town back in eighteen and ten. I heard tell over and over about guns on the altar, only they ain’t here.”

  The Lazars moved closer. The four nameless undead drew pistols, as did Obadiah Dogsbody.

  Cathy pointed above the altar, and Sarah saw two pistols, mounted on a gold frame.