Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  Obey me, damn you! You cannot rebel against your lord and master! Hooke broke out of his dance and ran toward the other Lazars. He reached forward with his white hands—

  Black Tom Fairfax and the third dead man stood impassive, watching—

  and then Hooke ran into the withy.

  He might as well have charged a stone wall. Without a sound, he collided into an invisible impediment, a force that threw him backward and into the water, stretched at full length.

  The log, and everything on it, burst into flame. The handful of black hair Hooke held exploded into fire and smoke also, and he dropped it.

  And then the Sorcerer Hooke’s body began to move through the grass.

  He flailed and thrashed about him, but something unseen pulled him steadily away. Maybe it’s the running water, Berkeley told himself, knowing it wasn’t. Maybe it’s the strange current blowing through the air of the grove.

  Berkeley drew his sword and held it defensively between his own body and the trees.

  Smoke filled the grove. The log and the hair burned at an unnatural speed, not like wood at all, but like oil, evaporating into the flames.

  Ezekiel Angleton gasped.

  He slapped at his pockets, looking for something.

  Hooke’s coat plucked out at points, as if there were hands dragging him.

  No! he shrieked. Do as I tell you! You are my creatures, obey me!

  The fires snuffed out, their fuel all consumed and nothing left behind but greasy circles of ash, drifting on the water.

  “Ani ozer!” Angleton babbled, turning his pockets inside out and coming up with nothing. “Ani matzil otakh! Qumi!”

  Whatever spell he was attempting, it had no effect. Berkeley snorted.

  The unseen thing or things Hooke was talking to paid the sorcerer no heed. Berkeley, the Philadelphia Blues, Ezekiel Angleton, and the other Lazars stood and watched as the flailing dead man drifted through the grove—

  and out into the waters of the Mississippi—

  where he sank like a stone.

  “Great God of Heaven,” Ezekiel murmured.

  “He followed where the evidence conducted him,” Berkeley said.

  They stood awhile without saying anything further, and then Berkeley sheathed his sword, put away his pistol, gathered up the Blues, and directed them northward again. He knew where the Witchy Eye was going.

  He wanted to tell himself that whatever bad luck had been earned by the bishop’s death had been paid for in the destruction of the Lazar Hooke.

  But he didn’t believe it.

  * * *

  After carefully setting her trap, spattering the mock-up of herself with as much of her own blood as Cathy Filmer was willing to shed, setting the bit of Grungle’s shell down in the center of the mess, and then tying the whole thing to the river’s current with gramarye, Sarah had taken a swim.

  She had been exhausted to the point of trembling, her whole being emptied in the trap, so she hadn’t had the strength to do it alone. At her instruction, Cal had looped his lariat under her bare arms and had held her to his saddlehorn with it, riding his horse into the river until the animal was submerged to its shoulders.

  Cal had turned upstream, paralleling Sir William and Cathy Filmer on the river’s bank, and ridden nearly a mile. Sarah had mostly just hung on the saddlehorn, trying to let the Mississippi hide and obliterate her aura in its mighty stream. From time to time, she’d dunked her own head under the water as well and held it as long as she could, feeling the strong legs of Calvin’s horse churn up water and mud beside her.

  Finally she had staggered back onto the river’s bank, naked, exhausted, and chilled to the bone, wet and filthy as a sow.

  The next morning she had held the other half of Grungle’s piece of shell and watched through the beastman’s eyes as he and the other soul-prisoners of the Sorcerer Hooke, empowered by the resistless flow of the Mississippi ley, had dragged him away screaming. She’d seen tortoiselike clawed fingers as if they were her own, grabbing fistfuls of Robert Hooke’s mold-eaten coat and plunging him into the cold, green depths of the Mississippi River.

  Afterward, head throbbing and skin on fire, Sarah had lost contact with the trapped souls. She was disappointed her spell didn’t free the prisoners. She was even more disappointed it didn’t destroy the Lazar, but only swept him away, somewhere downriver.

  But he was gone for the time being.

  She said a short, mostly wordless, prayer over the other half of Grungle’s bit of shell and threw it into the river. She didn’t know whether the beastkind had either a psyche or a pneuma, but they had an aura. Grungle had done her good service, and he deserved whatever rest the river could give him.

  Two days later, at evening, Sarah rode through a skeletal gazebo of cottonwood trees and swallowed hard against the feeling of her own smallness. Before her two mighty rivers oozed sluggishly together, brown waters mingling and crawling, bigger than any lake, big as an inland sea—the rivers pooled together and continued to flow.

  “Behold, the Mississippi!” Sir William gestured grandly with one arm, sweeping at the westernmost of the two tributaries, flowing down from the north. Then he turned and pointed east, along the other inflowing river. “And her sister, Your Majesty, the Ohio!”

  Cal whistled low.

  West of the Mississippi, the Great Green Wood snarled in close to the shore, impenetrable and lightless. Beyond the wall of trees lay Missouri, where beastkind roamed and small farmers battled to carve fruitful fields and modest livings out of the wilderness. Sarah’s father had been called the Lion of Missouri. Could Sir William tell her, beyond the stories and the folk songs, what that name meant?

  Across the Ohio from her, in the triangular elbow-crook of land where the rivers joined, rose a high stone bluff. Its gray cliffs loomed above her; it ought to look forbidding, but instead it called to her.

  “What is that place, Sir William?”

  “That, Your Majesty,” he told her, “is the beginning of your kingdom. That is the southernmost point of Cahokia, called the Serpent’s Mound or Wisdom’s Bluff…”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s where my father died, isn’t it?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  Sarah slipped her eye patch off her head and looked at it all again. The rivers were immense glimmering ribbons, green and iridescent with light and life. The vast gray cliffs still stared without expression, but the hill was now in her vision crowned with light, blue and white and astral, as if the mountain had reached up to the heavens and brought down stars.

  Was her father up there, in all that blue and white?

  She missed him, which was odd, since she had never known him, and she found that sensation mingled in with a feeling of missing the Elector, and of missing Thalanes, and a pang of guilt shook her. Not an hour passed that she hadn’t thought about the little monk who had trained her to do effective magic, and remembered the moment of his death at her own hands. The Elector had saved her life, had hidden her for fifteen years from a vengeful and murderous emperor, and taught her almost everything she knew.

  What could the Lion of the Missouri give her that would compare?

  She looked at her companions, and saw from their auras they were as tired as she felt. “Come on, let’s boil water for a cup of coffee. We’re all exhausted, but if we cross the river tonight we’ll gain at least that much protection from Ezekiel Angleton and his boys.”

  Cal grinned. “I’ve always had an idea as it might be kind of fun to walk on water.”

  “That’s hilarious, Calvin,” she answered, “’cause I always thought you were jest the feller as had enough faith to try it.”

  * * *

  They crossed the river swimming alongside their horses, with their belongings tied down on a raft Calvin lashed together. They spent the night at the foot of Wisdom’s Bluff, huddling around a small fire screened all about by tall red oaks.

  By morning, they had all dried out and they cli
mbed the hill.

  The bluff was wedge-shaped and climbed to a high, flat, narrow plateau above the junction of the rivers. On two sides, the bluff rose from muddy water in sheer gray rock faces that Calvin judged could be climbed, but only slowly, in small numbers, and by unburdened climbers. Practically speaking, defenders of a position on top of the bluff would only have to worry about the third side, the side sloping inland, between the two rivers.

  He thought it possible they might be overtaken while they were up on the bluff, looking for the Cahokian regalia, and Calvin judged it prudent to consider in advance how a battle might go. Lord hates a man as doesn’t look after his own interests, and didn’t the Savior himself tell his disciples to be wise as serpents?

  The sloping approach up the bluff was by no means easy. There was a road, and though it looked old—old and alien, made of rounded stones perfectly flat and smooth, like river rocks sawn in half—it was solid, clear, and easy on the feet. To ascend the bluff, though, it zigged and zagged up the steep slope, among red oaks and gnawed, fanglike columns that might have been boulders or might have been ruins older than time itself, and through the cheerfully splashing rivulets of a small stream that trickled down from above. The climb looked easy on the feet, but hell on the legs, and Cal patted the neck of his big white horse in gratitude.

  They left their camp before the sun peeked over the horizon, for once foregoing the shot of hot coffee that was becoming habitual for Calvin. In less than an hour they were cresting the hill and Cal saw the tail of the Serpent herself.

  At first, the Serpent just looked like a low, grass-overgrown ridge, three feet high, in a long narrow clearing surrounded by leafless red oaks. The road paralleled the low ridge, though, and Cal soon realized the ridge and its clearing were long and narrow and stretched to the tip of the bluff, twisting like a snake.

  The road ended in a paved square, a courtyard surrounded by the oak trees, in which were embedded long stones, above knee height, worn smooth like the pavers beneath them so that they resembled nothing so much as benches. Cal turned to look back over his shoulder—from the edge of the plaza he could still see down the length of the slope.

  “I suggest we dismount,” Bill said, leading by example. “Heaven knows I have no art in sacred things, but I think it would be a sign of respect to Lady Wisdom if we were to enter her temple on foot. Kyres, at least, always did so. We might also remove our hats,” he grumbled, running fingers through the short white hair that grew close to the back of his skull. “That is, if we had any.”

  They all followed him in dismounting.

  “That ridge over there.” Cal pointed, though he felt pointing was impolite, or maybe irreverent, as if the ridge were not only a person, but a person who merited special respect. “It’s a serpent, ain’t it? When they call this place the Serpent Mound, they really mean it, don’t they?”

  Bill nodded, gravely. “The Serpent is a quarter mile long. Its head and its…eye…lie up at the tip of the bluff.”

  Sarah said nothing and avoided Calvin’s gaze.

  “Where did you bury the king?” Cal asked. “In the Serpent?”

  Bill shook his head. “I wanted to, but Thalanes objected.”

  “Why?” Sarah asked.

  Bill sighed. “As I recall, he said that would be both sacrilege, burying a dead body in a holy place, and also impiety, burying a dead body where there was already a burial. He could be pedantic at times, and I say that with affection for the little fellow. I deferred to the professional in the matter, but I did persuade him that we could bury Kyres elsewhere on the bluff. Would you like to see your father’s grave, Your Majesty? It overlooks the Mississippi.”

  “Take me to the eye,” Sarah told him. “We can walk.”

  Bill led them through the oaks to the edge of the clearing, and then they followed the line of the Serpent itself, to the side. Halfway along its length, the forest ended and they walked forward along the height of the bluff, only sixty or seventy feet wide. To either side of the grassy shelf, the ground fell away sheerly into the great waters below.

  “They’s some cover to hide behind back in the trees,” Cal observed to Bill, feeling an uncomfortable prickling between his shoulder blades, “but iffen we git surprised out here, we’re gonna have to lie down behind the Serpent itself or git shot to pieces.”

  Bill nodded. “Good eye, Calvin.”

  The wiggling body of the Serpent Mound ended in the point of a long triangle, the other two points of which curved forward and slightly in. Within those points of the triangle was another mound, three feet high and ring-shaped, with a depression in its center. Beyond the ring lay a third low mound, a semicircle that did not quite touch either of the other two shapes, but enclosed the great ring between it and the triangle. Beyond the semicircle, the ground disappeared, and Cal saw muddy water and forest, hundreds of feet below. He felt an electric tingle, the kind of sensation he only felt occasionally, in a tent where tongues were being spoken, or during the hymns at a riverside baptism.

  Bill called them to a halt at the edge of this exotic geometry.

  “I am uncomfortably out of my depth, Your Majesty,” the Cavalier admitted, “but Thalanes and your father told me this was a place of visions, hallowed secrets, and mighty miracles, very sacred to the…your father’s people. The ring is generally thought to represent the eye of the Serpent, and thus you have the visionary connection.”

  “It’s very abstract, isn’t it?” Cathy observed. “It could just as easily be a serpent swallowing something.”

  “Or a serpent disgorging something from its head.” Sarah stared, lost in some secret reverie.

  Bill looked perplexed. “These images are all quite barocco, Your Majesty, and I don’t pretend to be able to choose among them. Nevertheless, that ring is known as the Serpent’s eye, and I believe it must be the eye of the moon beneath which the murderer Prideux buried your father’s…buried your regalia.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “With your permission,” Bill continued, “Mr. Calhoun and I will enter the ring and dig, as it were, for buried treasure.”

  Sarah nodded her agreement again.

  What must she be thinking?

  “I don’t know how to measure the piety of digging into Lady Wisdom’s head with a pair of long-handled shovels,” Bill said. “Given the possibility that lightning may strike us down for temerity, perhaps you ladies should remove yourselves further down the mound and wait for us. You may easily find the spring in the trees; its waters are sweet, and you may rest at the plaza.”

  “You might should oughtta keep an eye on the road,” Cal offered. “Lessen they fly, anybody as is gonna catch us up’ll have to git themselves up that hill.”

  Sarah nodded. Her eyes were unfocused.

  “A wise suggestion, Calvin.” Cathy took Sarah gently by the hand and led her, horses both following on short lead ropes, back the way they had come.

  “Check the priming on your pistols, Mrs. Filmer,” Bill called. “And if you see anyone in an Imperial uniform, shoot first!”

  Cathy waved acknowledgement and the ladies disappeared into the trees.

  “Well, Calvin,” Bill said, grabbing the two shovels off the pack horse, “I know from personal observation that you can fight, hunt, trap, shoot, throw, trade, cook, and fly, and I suppose that makes you, as they say in Appalachee, a hell of a fellow. Are you also able to dig?”

  * * *

  From the very first push of his shovel Bill was grateful for the touch of his wizardly queen that had closed his wounds, and for the week’s ride during which his former aches and pains had had time to heal.

  Without any further discussion of the fact, both he and Calvin treated the site as sacred. They cut up the turf with their shovels and laid it out in careful squares on the ring, and then began to dig into the dark soil beneath.

  “You see any signs of diggin’ in the Serpent’s eye that night?” Cal asked the older man. “I mean, the night of the murder?”r />
  Bill threw a shovelful of dirt up onto the mound. “Not on the ring itself, no, and I believe I would have, if he’d buried anything in the ring. But it was raining hard, and this depression we’re standing in now was quite muddy. Bayard could easily have dug a shallow hole to hide the regalia, expecting no one else would ever dare dig here to look, and planning to return.”

  “Dirty thief,” Cal said.

  “Amen.” Bill looked at the dirt beneath his feet and snorted. “It’s been a long time since I farmed, and I confess I was never much good at it to begin with, but does this earth look like highland dirt to you, Calvin?”

  Cal shook his head. “No, it don’t. I’m a cattle man and no sodbuster, but it looks like pure river bottom to me, rich and dark. Queer.” He kept digging.

  “This is a strange place all together,” Bill agreed. “Full of wonders.”

  They dug awhile in silence.

  “Do you love Cathy?” Cal asked.

  Bill laughed. “Do I have a rival in you, Calvin?” They had dug the depression about a foot deeper, all around.

  Cal blushed. “No, I…I’s jest makin’ conversation. She’s smart and elegant and pretty. Jerusalem, Bill, I reckon iffen you don’t love her, they might be somethin’ wrong with you. She sure has her eye on you.”

  Bill leaned on his shovel. “I’m a married man, Calvin. Or at least, I was a married man, when I was thrown out of my home fifteen years ago by the earl. But I haven’t heard from my wife since. I don’t know whether she’s alive, or what happened to Charles—my boy, my oldest—and the other children.”

  “That’s hard,” Cal said.

  They both slung dirt for a minute.

  Bill stopped digging and drew a deep breath. “Hell’s Bells, Calvin, yes!” he bellowed. “Yes, I do love Cathy Filmer! I love her, and I have no damn idea what I’m going to do about it.” He returned to digging, feeling like a fool.

  “You’re lucky,” Cal said.

  Bill laughed. He laughed hard, and once he started, he couldn’t stop, laughing until he dropped his shovel and had to throw himself down on the ring-shaped mound and let the guffaws roll out so he could regain control.