Witchy Kingdom

by D. J. Butler

“Is that Christian, O son of Isaac?” Abd al-Wahid was surprised at the thought that after all these years of exposure to the true faith, his Jewish companion might become a follower of the man from Galilee.

  “Yes, O son of Ishmael, these are famous sermons written by a famous Christian priest of Philadelphia. But fear not, I have no interest in his words.”

  “What possible reason could you have for reading a book, if not the words contained therein?” Omar al-Talib asked. “When I read every book in al-Qayrawan, was it not for the sake of their words?”

  “Your question about al-Qayrawan is fascinating,” al-Muhasib said. “Tell us more about that experience. Which book was your favorite?”

  “Who can love one star more than another?” Al-Talib shrugged. “Who can truly say that one flower has a more delicate scent than another?”

  “I like lilies,” al-Muhasib said.

  “I read this book,” Ravi said, “not for its words, but for its language.” He switched suddenly to English. “‘Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.’ ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’”

  Omar, who knew no English, frowned.

  Al-Muhasib clapped Ravi on the shoulder and spoke in English as well. “Very good, my friend! I like the way you talk!”

  Abd al-Wahid returned the conversation to Arabic. “And there is even wisdom in the words you have chosen. Well done, Ravi.”

  He turned and led them to the chevalier’s audience chamber. The other three followed.

  Omar snorted. “If I did not read the words in one of the books of al-Qayrawan, then the words cannot contain wisdom worth learning.”

  “‘The way to see by faith,’” Ravi declared in English, “‘is to shut the eye of reason!’”

  “And the way to learn by hearing,” Abd al-Wahid told him, “is to shut the jabbering mouth.”

  Ravi fell silent, but his smile was contented.

  “How long do we remain here?” al-Muhasib asked. Al-Muhasib had two wives in Paris, and one of them was quite young.

  “I’ve received a letter from the Caliph’s secretary,” Abd al-Wahid told him. “We are instructed to kill this Bishop Ukwu and then come home.”

  It was no longer a matter of Ahmed’s own deal with the chevalier. Implied in the Caliph’s missive: do not come home until you have killed the bishop.

  Abd al-Wahid had no feeling about the matter; he didn’t hate the young bishop. But he would do as he was ordered.

  Only as he thought about the task, he realized that he did have a feeling; he felt camaraderie. He had chosen the mameluke warriors to come with him for their skills and by reputation, but, to his surprise, he found he had begun to think of them as his friends.

  “If you had told me this before we began our attempts on this man’s life, I would have pronounced it an easy task,” Omar said. “Now, I am not so certain.”

  “A dagger between any man’s ribs will bring his days to an end. Probably, Ravi’s Richard the priest even says so in one of his sermons. It can only be a matter of bringing the dagger to the man.”

  They entered the audience room of the Chevalier of New Orleans. The discovery of the Vodun curse doll—and whatever the mambo had done to counteract its efficacy—had restored color to the chevalier’s face and breath to his lungs. He looked up as the mamelukes entered with a folded letter with a large, official-looking seal.

  He saw it only for a moment, but he thought the seal showed the eagle, rattlesnake, and cactus of New Spain.

  “Thanks be to God,” Abd al-Wahid said. “You are looking well.”

  “Thanks be to you,” the chevalier answered.

  “The witch also should receive credit,” Abd al-Wahid said.

  “I have been considering the challenge we face with our enemy, the bishop,” the chevalier said. “And trying not to repeat previous errors.”

  “‘Today is yesterday’s pupil!’” Ravi blurted out in English.

  The chevalier squinted at the Jew. “Are you quoting Bishop Franklin to me?” he asked, in the same language.

  “Yes.” Ravi grinned. “I am sorry.”

  The chevalier laughed. “You have been here too long. We must end this now. The challenge, as I see it, is that in destroying the cathedral, we have driven the beast from its lair rather than kill it. Now it stalks free in the woods, and we do not know where to seek it.”

  “We must make it come to us,” Abd al-Wahid said.

  “Agreed,” the chevalier said. “And I believe I know just how to do that. In addition to you, my plan has two components. First, these men.” He raised his voice and called out, “Come in!”

  The door behind his desk opened and four men trooped in. They were unarmed, and they trooped slowly up to stand beside the mamelukes, one Frenchman with each mussulman warrior.

  Abd al-Wahid saw it and laughed with immediate approval.

  A few moments later, his comrades began to bob their heads up and down as they too began to understand the chevalier’s thinking.

  “And what is the other component, O Chevalier?” Abd al-Wahid asked.

  “We only need one other thing, which is the bait. The thing to which the beast must come, sooner or later.”

  “And do you possess this bait?”

  The chevalier laughed and rubbed his hands together. “Yes I do, my friend. Yes I do.”

  “He’s not a hypocrite. And many love him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Monsieur Bondí sang.

  L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre

  Mironton, mironton, mirontaine

  L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre

  Ne sait où dormira

  Ne sait où dormira

  Il dormira par terre

  Mironton, mironton, mirontaine

  Il dormira par terre

  Ou dans la Pontchartrain

  Ou dans la Pontchartrain

  Etienne set down the hot pepper he was gnawing and laughed; to his own surprise, the song brought a lightness to his heart.

  “Yes, that is the tune I heard. Poor John Churchill,” he said, “that a beggar such as I should steal his glory second hand.”

  The two men sat in a dark room in the Onu Nke Ihunanya, a hotel within sight of Etienne’s casino. Only a few days earlier, the chevalier’s mamelukes had launched an attack on Etienne from this very room, with the assistance of a captive mambo.

  The irony gave Etienne grim amusement, but it was the direction of the Brides that brought him here. Through slitted shutters, he and Bondí watched as those same mamelukes stood watch on the street outside the casino. They were hidden in shops and taverns, no longer dressed in their scarves and black pourpoints, but Etienne knew them by their beards and their lean, staring faces.

  They watched for Etienne.

  “You aren’t stealing it.” Bondí shook his head. “The people are giving it to you. And you know what they are calling the song?”

  “It should be ‘L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre,’ no?” Etienne suggested. “As the original is ‘Churchí s’en va-t-en guerre’?”

  A third voice joined the conversation unexpectedly. “They call it ‘Le sou de l’évêque,’” Onyinye Diokpo said, her eyes twinkling like the eyes of a grandmother on Christmas morning. “The Bishop’s Penny. It is the penny you give them in lieu of the taxes the chevalier demands.”

  “Say rather that my father gives it to them.” Suddenly, despite the fire the peppers stoked and the constant alluring susurrus of the Brides, Etienne felt exhausted. “They loved him.”

  “But he is dead,” Diokpo said, “and you are fighting. He may be a saint, but only you can be a leader. Only you can wear the Big Crown—or be it.”

  Etienne laughed out loud at the hotelier’s literal translation of his name. Etienne came from Greek stephanos, which was a crown; he knew no Greek, but his father, as former theology student, then as deacon, and finally as bishop, had repeatedly told him the name’s meaning, urging his son to seek Paul’s crown of rejoi
cing every day and after death, Peter’s crown of glory.

  It had been his mother, a mambo devotee of the loa Ezili Danto and Ezili Freda, and frequently their horse, who had never given up her faith, who had told him that the other name he had from his father—Ukwu—meant big. “Be big, Etienne,” she had whispered to him as he sat on her lap in services in which his father officiated as deacon, “be great.”

  “Stephen Big.” He chuckled. “Don’t tell the Irishmen. They’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

  “How long?” Onyinye asked. A member of New Orleans’s City Council, she had joined the revolt against the chevalier’s taxing authority; in response, the chevalier had ordered the council disbanded. Now Renan DuBois and Holahta Hopaii increasingly stayed away, avoiding New Orleans entirely, leaving Onyinye and Eoin Kennedie effectively as the City Council, working with Etienne clandestinely. “How long do you think the chevalier will allow the casino to continue to operate?”

  Etienne shook his head. “He won’t shut it down. For the moment, he hopes to flush me from hiding. When he gives up on that, he’ll be too anxious for revenue to destroy the casino. He’ll try to take control of it instead.”

  “Also,” Onyinye said by way of concurrence, “he won’t want to offend the casino’s clientele.”

  Etienne ruminated on that thought.

  “You’re not going to let him have that money, are you?” Bondí said.

  “You could move the gaming activities into my hotels,” Diokpo suggested. “I do not fear the chevalier. My god is as great as his.”

  “It is not a question of gods,” Etienne said. “The only thing that protects your wealth from the chevalier right now is that he can’t be sure which hotels belong to you. As it is, how many has he discovered and seized?”

  “Too many.”

  “Too many. Let us not attract attention to the others by setting up casino operations in their foyers.”

  “Or, for that matter,” Onyinye said, “mass.”

  “Tents and street corners will suffice for church services,” Etienne said. “But we control the rebuilding of the cathedral.”

  Bondí grunted agreement. “We’ll want to make sure that whoever does the accounts of the casino reports to us.”

  “A corrupt accountant,” Etienne said. “St. Bernardo de Pacioli forbid.”

  Bondí chuckled. What neither of them said, because Onyinye Diokpo didn’t know it and didn’t need to know it, was that an underground passage connected the casino and the cathedral site. If Etienne could control the accounting of the casino, he could easily smuggle cash out through the church.

  “This is a savage game,” Onyinye said. “Who will starve to death first, the chevalier or the bishop?”

  “Oh no,” Etienne corrected her, “it is considerably more savage than that. The chevalier and I each have a hand on the other’s throat and we are crushing each other’s windpipes. His hand is brutal force, exercised in the name of good order; my hand is corruption, fostered under the auspices of heaven. One of us will die of suffocation sooner or later.”

  “If neither of you manages to stab the other in the belly first,” Onyinye concluded.

  “And we definitely intend to stab the chevalier in the belly. I am, after all, houngan asogwe of the Société du Mars Vengeur. Vengeur, not Mars Danseur or Mars Frivole. But speaking of savage games, Onyinye…I have had a question about you in my mind for a few days now.”

  Onyinye arched an eyebrow of acknowledgement. “Tell me.”

  “Your man who died in this hotel,” Etienne said. “He had his throat slit, as if by ambush. And yet, the ambush was ours, perpetrated upon the mamelukes.”

  “Are you asking whether I killed my own cousin?” Onyinye smiled.

  “Yes.”

  “In that case, I have a question for you, Stephen Big.”

  Etienne nodded his consent.

  “The Synod appointed you bishop very quickly upon your father’s death. And I have heard it said that they were doing your bidding.”

  “Are you asking whether I was seeking the office while my father was still alive?” Etienne asked.

  “Yes.”

  Etienne smiled. He didn’t want to explain that his mother, his gede loa, had urged him to take steps to become bishop even while his father was alive. He didn’t want to reveal his connection with her, or with the Brides, unless necessary.

  So instead, he laughed. Onyinye laughed with him.

  “So we both have questions,” Etienne said. “How goes your work with the pawnbrokers, Monsieur Bondí?”

  “It goes,” he said. “We must choose our candidates carefully.”

  “But you have good prospects?” Etienne asked.

  “I like a certain Frenchman. And I think there’s a Jamaican who might do. He certainly has the enthusiasm for the job. It’s still far too early to tell.”

  Etienne nodded. “The pious, I think, are with me.” He felt the Brides stirring within him. “Ironically. They are for me because they were for my father. I should like to have more of the wealthy on my side.”

  “Perhaps you should think about establishing another casino, then,” Bondí suggested. “We could keep it secret. Or we could put it in a tent, as well. Or outside the city, on a boat.”

  “I think you had it right the first time,” Etienne said. “I think it’s time for me to think about who is sleeping in the Pontchartrain.”

  * * *

  “Party from Philadelphia for you,” Schäfer said. He was a good agent, a Youngstown German with a keen eye for quality in beaver pelts. Behind him in the open tent door stood Dadgayadoh, a Haudenosaunee tracker and factor who wore a red blanket over his shoulders and a silk top hat on his head. Director Notwithstanding Schmidt trusted these men more than she trusted the militia under her command; they were Company men, and had been with her for years.

  They’d been with her longer than Luman Walters, the magician she had briefly made her aide-de-magie, before the combination of his impatience and her desire for a stronger wizard had driven him away. She had gotten her stronger magician, in the form of the walking corpse Robert Hooke.

  Whom she trusted least of all.

  “Courier?” She set aside her quill pen and carefully placed her hands to either side of the book of accounts, so as not to smudge the ink.

  Dadgayadoh shook his head. “Hotgö’.”

  “Wizards,” Schäfer added, rather more helpfully.

  “Earlier than I expected.” Schmidt stood and strode from her tent.

  Her men were accustomed to her brusque pace. Schäfer immediately pointed in the direction of the Imperial arrivals, away from the Mississippi and the alien Treewall of Cahokia. Both traders paced the director step for step, one on either side of her.

  Schmidt had learned two lessons early in her days with the Imperial Ohio Company. The first was that she must give direction early and often, and ask for it almost never; the second was that she must move quickly and show energy at all times. If she failed to do those two things, men saw her as a heavy woman and expected her to be slow, torpid, and passive.

  If she succeeded in doing those two things, she took men by surprise. She much preferred taking men by surprise.

  Always.

  In a way, it was a lesson she had first learned from her father. After attaching himself to one charismatic prophet too many, he’d been disfellowshipped by the Ministerium. He promptly began redistributing the pain he felt from the separation, inflicting it on his wife and daughter by physical beatings. His wife had faded, died inside, and taken the beatings with little complaint. Her daughter had resisted the beatings and being called knothead in grim silence for years before she tried to run away.

  He’d chased her and brought her back once, and then a second time.

  The third time he chased her to bring her back to more pain and insult, he’d found her camped along the banks of the Wabash with a man named Joe Duncan. This time, Notwithstanding had stolen all the money she could o
n her journey and had hired Duncan, a man of no morals or fixed abode, to be her bodyguard. At her instruction, Joe Duncan had taken her father by surprise and killed him, sinking an Arkansas Toothpick into his belly.

  That same night, when Duncan had tried to force Notwithstanding to submit to his lecherous attentions, she had surprised and killed him in turn. She’d hit him in the head with a horseshoe, something she never could have brought herself to do to her father.

  She had buried the two men in a single muddy grave.

  Notwithstanding Schmidt called her canoe or her horse—her principal means of travel—Joe Duncan as a perpetual reminder. Freedom was necessary. Power was necessary.

  Even if the means to acquire them was a crime.

  She looked about as she crossed her camp. On three sides of Cahokia, she and her Imperial forces had besieged the city. Its gates were shut. Its gray-caped defenders glowered down from the tops of its wooden Treewall, their cheeks pitted by hunger. A hundred yards of mud- and blood-stained snow surrounded the city’s wall, and beyond that lay the trenches Schmidt’s men had dug.

  Warfare of any kind was not Schmidt’s métier. She had had the trenches dug after the turncoat Imperial artillerists within the walls had demonstrated their ability to kill her men with impunity. Within the trenches, huddling in shadow during daylight hours, were corpses. Walking dead. Not Lazars like Robert Hooke, who seemed preserved and was articulate, but shambling, moaning draug who rotted, festered with worms, and fell apart. Their preference for avoiding direct sunlight meant they drove all but the strongest-willed and -stomached of her men from the trenches during the day; at night, the draug dragged themselves about the base of the city’s walls, groaning and scratching like homeless burrowing beasts.

  Behind the trenches were tents, and in the tents, milling restlessly about, were the Imperial Ohio Company militia. The best of these men were used to protecting markets in border towns and guarding caravans from Wild Algonk or Comanche depredation, and had never participated in anything like a siege.

  The worst of them had been prisoners only two months earlier and could hardly be kept from knifing each other over the bad roll of a sheep’s knucklebone. They were far better put to use as marauders and looters in the seven Sister Kingdoms.