Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  Hooke had found her before, somehow. It had to be sorcery. What would she do if she had to face him another time?

  She wouldn’t meet his gaze, for starters. She would keep moving, and hope that by the time he caught up to her next, she was powerful enough to handle him.

  The compass had led them out of the Quarter again at its other end, across a wide avenue that was all light and vibrant carousing on the near side, a staccato screen of tall oaks down the middle, and dark-windowed commercial establishments on the other. Sarah had hunkered down in the knot made by her three male companions to hide.

  Beyond the storefronts, they had moved into neighborhoods of free-standing homes with wrought iron fences, street lanterns on poles, and flickering tapers just beginning to show in their parlors and dining rooms.

  “We be movink toward the Palais,” Obadiah had observed. “I trow that be as should be, an’ the ’ex be in effect.”

  They had passed some larger buildings that looked as if they had government functions, with legends like City of New Orleans written above their doors in iron letters and contingents of gendarmes providing security. Sarah had thought of the sole building with any kind of government function she had ever seen in all of the Calhoun lands—the Elector’s Thinkin’ Shed—and almost laughed out loud.

  Among the government buildings, Sarah had begun to see more and more people on the street, principally riders in large coaches, pulled by two, four, and even six horses in matched teams. At her request, Cathy had slowed the pace to give them all an opportunity to assess what was happening around them, and it had been Cathy herself who had made the key discovery.

  “Look in that red and white carriage there,” she had said. “They’re holding Venetian masks.”

  In all her relentless drilling by the Elector, Sarah had never heard of a Venetian mask, but she had seen that the passengers in the carriage held little masks on sticks up to their faces as they rode laughing by, looking out through the windows of their coaches, and she had inferred that must be what Cathy meant.

  “It’s a ball,” Sir William had said.

  When they had finally gotten close enough to see the Palais, it had taken Sarah’s breath away. It was the largest building she had ever seen, by far, and it sparkled with the light of a thousand lanterns, torches, and braziers, and a thousand glass windows to further reflect and shine. Dozens of masked footmen walked about the cobbled courtyard before the front door of the Palais, white-wigged, -gloved, and -stockinged, and dressed in blue and gold coattails. A line of coaches crawled one at a time up the wide street, each examined by footmen and gendarmes within the large gatehouse, and then admitted within the courtyard to deposit its occupants before the open doors.

  “Impressive, is it not?” Sir William murmured. “Count Galvéz of New Spain destroyed the old one in the war, so the father of the current chevalier built this replacement. One hears the quip in the salons of New Orleans that when Andy Jackson developed his famous interest in the real property of the city five years ago, it was principally because he wanted to own this particular lot.”

  “Did you fight in the battle?” Sarah asked him.

  Sir William shrugged modestly. “I threw a few bullets in the direction of King Jackson. Not as part of any organized unit, you understand.”

  The hairball strained on its leash all the while, suggesting that René du Plessis was at the ball.

  “I jest don’t see any other way in,” Cal said. “Iffen it was quieter, we might could climb the fence, but no way we can do that tonight without gittin’ seen, they’s far too many people.”

  Sarah hesitated. She saw the logic of Cal’s suggestion, but she didn’t know whether she could do it. She could jump them all over the fence, but that would be exhausting, even with the handful of pigeon dropping paste and feathers she had kept and secreted away in Thalanes’s pack, and once inside, they’d stick out like sore thumbs in their tattered clothes. She could use some variant of a facies muto spell, but it wasn’t just a matter of changed faces—they had to have specific faces to be on the guest list, and she would have to provide illusory clothing and masks.

  And even once inside, she’d still have to maintain all the illusions.

  She was already carrying the hairball compass spell and had kept it up for their entire march across town. She already felt weak, and she didn’t want to be completely drained if and when the Sorcerer Hooke showed up.

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It would be…difficult.”

  “I have a suggestion, ma’am,” said Sir William, “if you’re able to make bodies invisible, even briefly.”

  “I can.” Sarah hoped she was right.

  “It will only be for a few moments,” Sir William told her.

  “I can do it,” she repeated.

  “Well, then,” he said, “it’s only a matter of choosing the coach that suits us best and inconveniencing its occupants. Allow me to reconnoiter first, if you will.”

  Sir William left them in their shadowed observation post down the street, across from the Palais, and strolled casually along the line of coaches, looking into the window of each and occasionally tipping his hat as passengers greeted him. Well before he reached the gatehouse, he turned and ambled back.

  “The white coach pulled by six horses, with the lion and griffin rampant,” Sir William told his waiting companions, “will do very well.”

  “What is your plan, Sir William?” Sarah asked.

  “In my experience,” he said, “the best plans are simple. If you will now render us invisible, Your Majesty, we’ll open the door to that coach, take it at gunpoint, and ride it through the front gate in the costumes of its current passengers.”

  “Its current passengers likely include the Prince of Shreveport,” Cathy observed, “or someone in his household, since those are his arms.”

  “One of the Cotton Princes.” Sir William smiled. “Then I dare to hope that our borrowed costumes will be comfortable to wear. I suppose we should hold hands, so that we can stay together when unseen.” He bowed to Cathy Filmer, as if he were asking her to dance. “Might I have the honor of holding yours, Mrs. Filmer?”

  They formed a chain, Sarah in the middle and Sir William in the lead, a long pistol in his free hand. She was glad for the hand-holding, because, per the Law of Contagion, she could run her spell through the physical contact of all its targets and ease the drain it imposed.

  She had seen Thalanes perform exactly this spell before. Reaching down to the edge of the street, she collected a blob of mud on two fingers and smeared a little on each person’s cheeks, then took Calvin’s hand again. “Oculos obscuro.” She blinked.

  When she opened her eyes, she still felt Cathy’s hand in her own right and Calvin’s in her left (they locked fingers around the Elector’s ash staff), but she could no longer see any of her companions or even her own limbs.

  “Well done, ma’am,” she heard Sir William say. “I’ll walk slow. Stay together, and don’t bump into anyone. When I signal you, Your Majesty, release me from your spell.”

  A couple of minutes later—dazzling minutes in which Sarah watched through coach windows a sitting parade of finery such as she’d never witnessed in her life, and kept reminding herself not to drop her friends’ hands—they stood at the side of the white coach.

  The two coachmen perched stoically on top were armed, each with a well-polished blunderbuss and short sword, but their attention was elsewhere, at the line ahead of them and the approaching gatehouse.

  The coach waited its turn several lengths from the gatehouse, and Sarah stood in its shadow, looking into the carriage filled with light from the Palais.

  Its passengers looked Bantu, three men and two women, their complexions blue-black in the artificial light. The men had shaved heads and the women wore their hair long and bound in wire. Their clothing took Sarah’s breath away, all white with gold thread and buttons. All of them, men and women alike, had hands thick with gold bands and heav
y hoops of gold through each ear. The passengers held large furs across their laps, and each bore a little mask on a stick, designed to cover the upper part of the face only, concealing it behind a bird-like nose and a spray of feathers shooting back over one’s hairline. One of the younger men stroked a plump white cat in his lap. It was a family. The prince, the princess, and three children; she was charmed by the domesticity of the scene. The Bantu had all been pirates, not too many generations ago, and in all the gold of the prince’s finery, she imagined she could see an echo of that heritage.

  The near carriage door opened—it must be Sir William—and then Sarah’s heart stopped.

  Inside the doorframe of the carriage, hammered into the wood all around, ran a thin, dully gleaming bit of filigree.

  Silver.

  Inside the door, it was hidden except when the door was open, so its purpose could only be to intercept malignant hexing.

  Sir William winked into view, in the moment of climbing into the carriage door, a pistol in each hand, both of them pointed at the oldest of the men.

  The Prince of Shreveport looked up, startled.

  “Drop the spell now!” Sir William hissed, not realizing it was too late.

  The Bantu stared, but said nothing, and Sir William smiled.

  He sat on the broad back seat of the coach, across from the prince, and continued to hold both his guns pointed at the man. “Shhh!” Sir William quieted the astonished family, and pulled back the hammers of both pistols to make his point.

  “This is outrageous!” the Prince of Shreveport whispered, eyes flashing.

  “It is indeed, suh,” Sir William nodded, “and I hope it works. Now take off your clothing before I feel myself compelled to pull the trigger and spoil everyone’s evening.”

  The carriage had paper blinds that could be pulled down over each window for privacy, so once Sarah’s entire party had crept inside, each popping into view as he or she climbed over the thin line of silver, they pulled down the blinds. Sarah noticed thin filigrees of silver inside the windows, too.

  All the people entering made the carriage jostle.

  Tap, tap, tap. The sound came from the roof of the carriage, and then it was followed by some words that might be in Bantu, and sounded like a question.

  Sir William pressed his pistols into the prince’s chest and raised both his eyebrows. “Everything is just fine in here, thank you very much,” he prompted his prisoner.

  The Prince of Shreveport flared his nostrils in anger, but when he called back to the coachmen his voice sounded efficient and calm. “We’re fine, thank you, Sergeant.”

  “Well done, suh.” Bill eased the hammers of his pistols down. “Now undress.”

  “You can’t get away with this for long!” the prince warned them, handing his coat to Sir William and reaching for his belt.

  “You’re probably, right, suh,” Sir William agreed genially, “and I certainly hope I don’t have to. Please cooperate, and no one will be harmed. I expect that it’s no great consolation, but know that I hold you, your office, and your family in the highest respect.”

  The Prince of Shreveport snorted his derision and pulled off his breeches.

  Sir William stood watch with his long guns while the prince and his family stripped down to underthings and Calvin hog-tied them all with strips of improvised rope torn from clothing.

  The coachmen didn’t interrupt again.

  Then Sarah and her companions changed, all at the same time, elbowing each other in the face and stepping on each other’s feet as they did so—the carriage was large, but intended to seat six capaciously, not ten.

  The cramped space slowed the process, as did the occasional gentle jerk as the carriage rolled forward. Sarah’s own progress was further slowed by her simultaneous close examination of the faces of the prince’s party, so they had barely finished changing into the white formal clothing (all more or less fitting, though Obadiah burst a button in his collar and had to hide the damage with his neckcloth, and Cal’s wrists jutted out of his borrowed sleeves nearly two inches), covered the prince and his family awkwardly under the furs—their cat looked on placidly without objection—and picked up the masks when the coach pulled forward and there was a knock at the door.

  “Facies muto.” Sarah willed mana through the mask in her hands and replaced all their faces with images of the prince’s and his family’s. “Captivos occulto,” she added, almost as an afterthought, touching the furs and hiding the prince and his family from sight. She felt a flush of pride in her work for both the idea and its execution, but also a strain from casting so many spells in quick succession. How long would she be able to hold out?

  She felt lightheaded and a little feverish.

  Sir William, in the prince’s clothing, opened his blind; they were stopped inside the gatehouse. “Yes, gentlemen?” he drawled to a paper-bearing footman and two gendarmes. Sarah heard his unmistakably Chesapeake tones and wondered whether she should have done something to disguise all their voices.

  Too late.

  “Are you ’ere for ze ball?” asked the footman blandly, holding a quill pen black with ink up to the paper.

  “No, I’m here for the kidnapping.” Sir William held his bird mask up to his face. “Have you not heard? We batheads are all pirates in our deepest hearts, as we are in our family trees.”

  “Yes, sir,” the footman smiled a completely perfunctory smile. “I just need to check you against ze list. Name, please?”

  From her drill sessions with the Elector, Sarah knew that the Princedom of Shreveport was held by the Machogu family, and she thought the prince’s own name was Kimoni. How much did Sir William know?

  “Dammit, man, can you not read?” the Cavalier thundered, and he reached an arm outside the coach to thump it against the heraldic lion and griffin.

  Sarah nearly fainted. The moment that Sir William reached outside the carriage, his disguise fell away. From inside the carriage she saw his black perruque reappear, and she knew they were doomed.

  Sir William, though, didn’t notice. He swelled to his full height, even sitting down, until his shoulders blocked the window and he loomed over the French footman. “I’m the Prince of Shreveport, damn your eyes! Party of five!”

  “Yes, sir, ze Prince of Shreveport,” The footman notated his sheet and stepping away.

  Sir William brought his arm back inside the window, pulled down its paper blind, and dropped his mask. He looked at Sarah and must have seen an expression of fear. “Don’t worry, Your Majesty. There is an art to dealing with men who are accustomed to taking orders.”

  The coach rolled forward, and Sarah felt her heart start beating again.

  Cathy pulled out the hairball-and-pearls compass. It hung inert, the spell dead from crossing the carriage’s silver threshold.

  Sir William turned to face Cathy, again lifting up his mask. “I find I rather enjoy being a prince.”

  * * *

  Ezekiel went alone, first, to the Bishop’s Palace, and there he learned to appreciate the cunning of the dead heretic Thalanes. Berkeley, after the riotous action at the cathedral, had fallen into some reverie from which he could barely shake himself to give orders to the dragoons. And even with the rain and Hooke’s scarf, hat, and long hair to mask his pale face, Ezekiel preferred not to be seen much with the Lazars.

  He limped, tired from his spellcasting and wounded. The Sorcerer Hooke had offered to heal him, and Ezekiel had declined.

  The palace was mostly given over to an association of red-robed Polites, and Ezekiel imagined with horror a showdown with himself and the Sorcerer Hooke on one side and an entire squad of thaumaturgical monks on the other. Thalanes, from beyond the grave, had almost led him into that trap.

  Ezekiel inquired of the Polite doorkeeper about a party from Appalachee that he was to meet at the Bishop’s Palace.

  The Polite, a fat, cinnamon-colored Amhara man with tight buttons for eyes, scratched his bald head. “I keep the door both for the
sisters and brothers of the Humble Order of St. Reginald Pole,” he said chirpily, “as well as for the Johnnies. I can tell you none of us has any guests at the moment, nor has had any for more than a week.”

  Ezekiel was perplexed; Thalanes and Hooke had both seemed to enter their battle of wits with the expectation that Thalanes would be unable to lie. “I was told to meet them at the Bishop’s Palace. Does the Bishop of New Orleans keep more than one palace?”

  “As to that,” the Amhara grunted, raising his eyebrows and turning down the corners of his mouth, “he can barely be said to keep this one. If you’re looking for the bishop himself, you may find him around the side, in the servants’ quarters that face the cathedral. That’s where he lives. Though there’s been some commotion at the cathedral this afternoon, and I have heard the bishop himself may have been involved.”

  Ezekiel knocked at the indicated door. As he waited for an answer that never came, the Lazars and several of the Blues, including Berkeley, joined him. “Ani poteach et hadelet.” He opened the locked door with a very simple spell (cast with his fingers touching on old iron key hanging around his neck) that nevertheless nearly knocked him unconscious, and then Hooke entered. Ezekiel hadn’t the stomach to join him in breaking into the bishop’s home, and Berkeley wasn’t able to rouse himself from his slump.

  “Wake up, man!” Ezekiel said to the captain of the Blues as they stood on the doorstep in the rain.

  “Bad luck, Parson,” Berkeley ground out his words through gritted teeth. “A man does what he must do, but killing a bishop…” He trailed off, staring out into the gray, wet afternoon. “Bad luck.”

  Ezekiel shivered. Had Berkeley killed the bishop? Before he could ask, the Sorcerer exited the bishop’s apartments, coming away with a bundle of clothing and a clump of dark hair. The female of the species is entirely predictable, he said. I found it in a bathing tub, and I can tell it is hers. It only goes to show the wisdom of the Royal Society’s advice against too frequent immersion in water.

  Ezekiel heaved a sigh of relief to get away from the Bishop’s Palace and the cathedral; the chevalier’s Creole had withdrawn with his gendarmes much earlier. As the dragoons rode across the Place d’Armes in double file, he looked back and saw the first intrepid onlookers brave the cathedral doors. Soon the rumors would be confirmed as fact, and New Orleans would know it no longer had a bishop.