Witchy Eye

by D. J. Butler

  They pelted through the Serpent’s clearing without talking, and Sarah looked as closely as she could at the three precious objects in her hands. The crown was unlike any crown she had ever imagined; it bore no gems, no inscriptions, no elaborate inlay or fine filigree. It was a gray iron circlet with seven spikes rising from its brow, the center spike being the tallest and the others decreasing in height progressively to the right and left. The orb was even simpler; it was a perfect gray iron sphere, without mark.

  The Sevenfold Crown and the Orb of Etyles were mates, sharing also the blue aura of the acorn and the oak tree, while the sword looked utterly foreign. It had the appearance of gold, but its edge was sharp, to a degree impossible in true gold. The whole thing was of one piece, with no visible seams or joints, as if it had been cast in a single perfect mold. Carved into the side of the hilt nearest Sarah’s face was a blocky image, somewhat abstract, and it took her a few moments to realize that it was a simple picture of a plowshare.

  As the clearing ended, she twisted the sword in her grip to get a look at the other side of the hilt; she expected to see the mirror image on the reverse, and was surprised to see instead that the other side bore the carved image of the head of a crested bird. The weapon’s aura glowed green like the Mississippi River’s.

  Sarah bounced to a stop at the tethered horses, the stone courtyard, and the top of the long slope. She looked past her companions and felt her heart sink; there were no gendarmes at the bottom of the slope yet, but instead she saw two other clots of massed soldiers.

  The first group was the Philadelphia Blues. They were mounted and mustered in two lines behind Captain Berkeley and Ezekiel Angleton.

  Two Lazars sat astride horses to one side, and Sarah’s heart skipped a beat. Even after she realized that they were Black Tom Fairfax and another, and not Robert Hooke, she was still reluctant to let her gaze linger on them.

  Angleton and Berkeley faced a contingent of warriors as numerous as the Blues, and maybe even slightly more so—it was hard to count from this distance, and the men shifted and moved about as she tried to count them. These were men she had never seen before—creatures she had not seen before, beastfolk—their auras the green beast-and-man double auras Picaw and Grungle had possessed. They were dressed and armored like medieval warriors, in chainmail, greaves, and helmets, and they carried long spears and swords. A few had bows or crossbows slung across their shoulders. They stood on their own feet—or, in many cases, hooves or paws—in all manner of body shapes; Sarah saw goat-men, horse-men, lion-men, wolf-men, and more. She could hear a low, growling, snuffling animal rumble rising from the beastkind mob.

  At their head, also unmounted and calmly conversing with the Imperial officers, stood a little blond man she recognized immediately, the man whose white aura’s mouth was bound with green and who stood under the shadow of an immense being of shimmering green light, a monster with the head of a gigantic crested bird.

  “The calendar is with us, at least, Your Majesty,” Sir William observed mysteriously.

  “Oh?” Was this some astrological point?

  “It’s St. Crispin’s day, ma’am,” he explained. “Patron of those who fight against long odds. And, I believe, shoemakers.”

  Sarah would have liked to hear the conversation that was being had at the foot of the bluff. “Sir William, what tactical options do you see?”

  As she asked the question, the gendarmes arrived from the Ohio below. They rode on horseback in double file, with pistols, rifles, and swords, all in blue-stained leather and marked with the chevalier’s fleur-de-lis. She guessed their number at fifty, and at their head rode the Creole René du Plessis, and the chevalier himself.

  “Hell’s Bells,” Sir William muttered.

  “Yes,” Sarah agreed. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  “To hell with your Code Duello, suh, there is no honor between snakes. Texian rules, draw and shoot!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Serpent, the Horseman, and Simon Sword.

  Berkeley shivered though the day was only cool and he was fully dressed in waistcoat and coat, with a warm horse beneath him. He had cast the Tarock an hour earlier, standing in a commandeered keelboat, being ferried across the Ohio River by grumbling Germans. He knew well the place where he was headed; he recognized Wisdom’s Bluff towering above him and he remembered clearly the events of fifteen years earlier.

  He had only given the order for the kill, of course, promising to make Bayard a sergeant for his success as well as to pay him cash, knowing the Frenchman was always in debt and forever pestering his fellow Blues for loans. Berkeley had given the order and he had stood by, prepared to intervene and kill Kyres Elytharias if necessary.

  And it had been his job to intercept Bayard after the deed and eliminate the Frenchman. He’d waited in the rain with saber drawn, planning to impale the murderer without warning.

  But Bayard had come upon him craftily from behind, seen his drawn sword and escaped, and then fought and escaped William Lee as well, and then disappeared. Berkeley had been duly promoted, and Thomas had in time become emperor, all without suspicion. At least, without meaningful suspicion, without any suspicions that had threatened to unhorse the conspirators. All as the cards had promised, because of course, when Thomas Penn had put the scheme to him, Lieutenant Daniel Berkeley had cast his Tarock before he’d taken any action at all.

  The Serpent, the Horseman, and Simon Sword.

  Standing on the keelboat, he’d just stared at the cards numbly. He hadn’t drawn any of the Minor Arcana since…since before he’d left Philadelphia. It could not be a coincidence. It was impossible.

  For weeks, the cards had been speaking to him. Personally.

  And who was speaking through them? God in His Heaven? The Necromancer? The dead Lion of Missouri, Kyres Elytharias, manipulating Berkeley from beyond the grave? Berkeley was willing to believe each of those was a possible actor. He was unwilling to surrender his soul to any of them.

  Maybe the cards spoke with the pure voice of Fate. Maybe surrender was the only option.

  Now the Tarock had brought him here, again, to the bluff. Thomas feared discovery or a challenge from Kyres’s child, and Berkeley feared the mailed fist of Fate. The Serpent depicted a bronze-colored reptile, winged and mounted on a forked stick, spitting fire from its jaws with a crescent moon behind it, and he saw at once it could only mean this place; he remembered the long, low mound on the height.

  There was something wrong with the Horseman card, and Berkeley had stared at it long and hard before he realized what it was. The Horseman must be him, Daniel Berkeley, he’d known that as soon as he’d seen the horse and rider turn face up, but still something had caught his eye and tickled the back of his brain and he’d stared until he’d realized what it was.

  In the Tarock that Daniel Berkeley owned, and had owned for years, the Horseman was a soldier in a red coat, riding a white horse.

  But the card he had turned up on this day, identical in all other respects, showed a man whose horse was gray and whose long coat was blue.

  Berkeley had shivered and stared. He’d checked the back of the card to be certain it was his, and examined the image again.

  And again.

  Something had happened to the card. Someone, some power, had altered it.

  Fate. Was he to suffer violence on the bluff?

  And Simon Sword—judgment, again, the blond boy with the sword.

  The Serpent, the Horseman, and Simon Sword.

  Blazes!

  Berkeley had thrown the Tarock into the water, watching the cards float apart in the keelboat’s wake. He’d shuddered to gaze upon them, imagining that he could see their images spreading apart in the choppy flow, and that each and every card was now printed with the grinning image of Simon Sword, long blades swinging back and forth in the water, an army of judgment and death.

  The beastkind had been waiting for them at the foot of the bluff. Not attacking, b
ut looming menacingly. They looked as fitting an instrument of judgment as any. As soon as Berkeley had reassembled the Blues on dry land, he’d given the order to fix bayonets.

  If Fate came for him today, by Hell’s teeth, she’d have a fight on her hands.

  Now he sat tall in the saddle, the parson and the surviving Lazars at his side, facing two different mobs of fighting men, standing at right angles to each other like three sides of a square, with the fourth side occupied by the long, boulder-strewn slope up to the top of Wisdom’s Bluff.

  Fate was a fickle and vengeful mistress.

  The gendarmes sat still on their horses, too, armed and armored like the Blues. But for the gold fleurs-de-lis they bore on their chests and livery and the absence of the tricorner hats, they might have been a companion unit of Imperial troops. The chevalier stared back at Berkeley, puffing on a long cigar. His Creole seneschal rode calm and inscrutable at his side. Berkeley found the chevalier formidable, but he could talk to the Frenchman, understand his reasons, and perhaps negotiate with him, if necessary.

  The beastkind, on the other hand, were alien. He’d killed plenty of feral beastmen and beastwives in his time, and had occasional conversations with their more lucid kin, but he’d never faced a large number in the field. And these beastkind, for all their pawing, stamping, slobbering, and wild-eyed stares, were not feral; they were armed and armored like knights and they stood in ordered ranks.

  Beyond any strangeness Berkeley could have imagined, at their head stood a short blond man in buckled shoes, brown coat, and knickerbockers. Berkeley remembered the little man from the cathedral and assumed he must be a wizard, or some kind of beastman whose animal nature was occulted. He’d flown away from the cathedral’s rooftop, after all, in the shape of a bird.

  “May we assume,” Father Angleton called out to the chevalier, “that our interests are aligned? Or that they may become aligned? We wish to return this child, Sarah, to her uncle.” His tongue and ear were still black, which gave him a queer appearance, partaking something of the beggar and something of the corpse.

  “Do you, now?” the chevalier called back.

  “Yaas. We serve the emperor. This is our only errand. We have no quarrel with you, My Lord. Will you help us?”

  “A week ago she was a pretender.” Le Moyne blew a cloud of smoke their way. “I’m impressed she has managed to matriculate into the Penn family.”

  Angleton looked abashed, so Berkeley stepped in. “Are we then at an impasse, My Lord Chevalier?”

  The chevalier laughed harshly. “In New Orleans we prefer the term Texian standoff, in honor of our neighbors. And I don’t know yet.” He turned in his saddle to face the blond man. “Who are you then, and whom do you serve?”

  The two Lazars shifted restlessly, looking at each other.

  “I know the man’s face.” Du Plessis frowned slightly. “His name is Jacob Hop, he’s a Dutchman and a deaf-mute, and until the Incroyable burned down in that terrible accident, he served you, My Lord. He was an assistant to the man Prideux. I am surprised to see him here.”

  Prideux! Could the Creole possibly mean Bayard? Or was the better question whether he could possibly mean anyone else? The air around the bluff was thick with ghosts, and Berkeley half expected to see Kyres Elytharias himself rise from the tall grass. Perhaps he should not have thrown away the Tarock.

  The chevalier regarded the Dutchman.

  “It pleases me that you managed to escape the accident,” he said. “I find it peculiar that you’re at the head of a column of beastkind, but I welcome you back into my service. I welcome the beasts as well, if they’re willing. Do you speak for the beastkind? You may nod to acknowledge me again as your master.”

  “The beastmen are mine,” the little Dutchman agreed. Once Berkeley got over the astonishment of hearing a man described as deaf and mute speak, he found his accent not at all Dutch. It sounded musical and enchanting, like some stage actor’s invented elocution. “I will not serve you, Chevalier Le Moyne, and nor will I throw in my lot with Thomas Penn, or with any of the weak and benighted children of Eve. I have business of my own with the Queen of Cahokia, and you are well advised to stay out from under my feet.”

  Berkeley saw the chevalier’s Creole stiffen in his saddle. Did he dislike beastkind? Was he, too, shocked to hear words coming from the mouth of a deaf-mute?

  Bang!

  Berkeley twisted in the saddle, thinking for a moment that the shot must have come from one of his men; the dragoons all sat on their horses, tautly disciplined, weapons undrawn.

  The shot had been fired from the hill. Two hundred eyes swiveled at the same moment as Berkeley’s, turning to see who had pulled the trigger.

  It was a woman, who had ridden two thirds of the way down the hill unnoticed during the confrontation. She was tall and beautiful and had long dark hair. She wore a white and gold dress that had been elegant once, but was now filthy with the dirt and stains of hard travel. Her saddle was plain and poor, not matching her dress at all, and she rode a large white horse that looked, to Berkeley’s eye, more like a coach horse than a lady’s palfrey. She held in the crook of one arm a long stick, at the end of which fluttered a tattered square of white cloth.

  She lowered one smoking pistol (fired straight up into the blue sky), but she had a second gun in her lap. “My name is Catherine Filmer, and I come as herald of the Queen of Cahokia,” she called. “The queen invites you to a conference. She bids you send a delegation of two men each.” She surveyed them all with cool eyes. “By men, Her Majesty does not mean Lazars. She bids you identify your envoys to me before we ascend.”

  The chevalier recovered first. “I’m Gaspard Le Moyne, Chevalier of New Orleans. I’ll join you, and I’ll bring my aide, René du Plessis.” He nodded to indicate the Creole.

  “Very good,” Catherine Filmer said.

  Angleton had regained his power of speech, and jumped in. “I’m Father Ezekiel Angleton of the Order of St. Martin Luther, and with me will come Captain Sir Daniel Berkeley, representing His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Thomas Penn.”

  Berkeley looked up at the top of the bluff and felt the burden of fate on his shoulders.

  The Serpent, the Horseman, and Simon Sword.

  “Agreed,” Filmer said, and Berkeley thought her eyes lingered on him a little longer than they did on the others. He might have enjoyed that thought in another moment, but here and now it made him nervous.

  Long Tom Fairfax made a sour face and looked at Ezekiel Angleton.

  “Silence, Lazar!” Angleton barked.

  Then the Martinite turned pale, stared at the two Lazars, and scratched at his own blackened ear. Had the priest gone mad, rolling around in the fire and now hearing voices?

  “Yes,” the blond man said, staring down the white-eyed ghoul. “Keep your place, or I will blast you into the void whence you came.” He turned to address Catherine Filmer. “I will come. As your mistress well knows, I am two men.”

  What in Blazes? Berkeley felt gooseflesh on his arms and back at the odd declaration of the little fellow, and the chevalier’s man looked positively stricken. The lady herald, though, didn’t question it.

  “Understood.” She turned to make her way back up the slope. “Follow me.”

  * * *

  The sky overhead was a brilliant pale blue, a cool breeze furred its way through the short hair of his head, and Bill was armed to the teeth. His own horse pistols (loaded and primed) hung in the long pockets of his battered red coat. Obadiah’s smaller-bore guns (loaded and primed) were tucked into his belt. Various powder horns hung around his neck, along with picks and powder measures. At his left hip hung his heavy cavalry saber (sharp enough to shave with), and in his boot he carried a knife.

  A fight seemed unavoidable now, and as Cathy turned and headed back up the slope, with a handful of men in her wake, Bill itched to take the initiative. Sarah wanted to confer, and he hoped she was successful, but there were three small armies at the foot
of the hill, and she couldn’t talk all three out of wanting to capture them…or worse. He didn’t think talking her way out of it could possibly be her plan, in any case. Surely, Sarah must be seeking to play all the forces off each other until she could convert one of her pursuers into an ally.

  Maybe she thought they could take a hostage.

  One of the men drifting up the hill behind Cathy Filmer was Daniel Berkeley. Bill had known and respected the younger Berkeley, but now he was a traitor and he deserved to die. Bill would like to ambush Berkeley, simply kill him out of hand in a surprise attack; he’d given Kyres no more warning than that. He refrained, though—his queen had called for a truce and a parley, and he would honor it.

  Calvin Calhoun was armed too, with rifle loaded, war axe in his belt and lariat carefully coiled beside it, and a hunter’s knife in his boot. The Appalachee prowled the stone plaza like a mountain lion sniffing for prey. He also carried a silver knife that belonged to Sarah, which she hadn’t wanted to touch—maybe she was expecting to have to cast spells, and didn’t want the silver on her person.

  Hopefully.

  What she did have was the Sevenfold Crown on her head and the golden sword of Cahokia thrust through the shoulder straps of her satchel. She had the Orb of Etyles in the pouch, along with other oddments Bill had only glimpsed that looked like hexing paraphernalia, such as bird feathers and twigs. She was dirty and tired, but her eyes were defiant—defiant and alien, or maybe divine, with their piercing look and unmatched colors. She leaned on her burnt wooden walking staff but she looked, Bill thought, like a queen.

  His queen.

  She had a lot of sand, to be standing so coolly in the face of all the assembled men who wanted her captured or dead. Kyres would be proud.

  Cathy regained the top of the hill, tossed her white flag of truce into the trees, tied up her horse, and took her place behind Sarah and to one side, where she reloaded her fired pistol. Her guns were the Lafitte weapons, and she had carefully loaded one of them with their last silver bullet, the only one not fired in the melee at the St. Louis Cathedral.