Half-Witch

by John Schoffstall

  “That was lucky,” Strix said, releasing a breath. “Now let’s find one a little smaller, just for practice—”

  “It’s getting away!” Lizbet yelled. She ran after the retreating devil, dragging the protesting Strix behind her.

  The goat-devil was faster, though, and quickly put fifty feet between them. Frustrated, Lizbet yelled at its retreating back, “Stop! Stop! STOP!”

  The goat-devil stopped.

  Lizbet approached it. The goat-devil trembled from horns to tail. It cowered as Lizbet approached. “Don’t!” it bleated. “Don’t touch!”

  A few feet separated them. Its animal stink make Lizbet gag.

  “Now what?” Lizbet whispered to Strix. “What do I do?”

  “How should I know?” Strix said. Her tawny brows knit in thought. “It asked you not to touch it, so maybe you should touch it.”

  “Nooooo!” howled the goat-devil.

  “Okay, you should definitely touch it,” Strix said.

  Lizbet approached the goat-devil. Cringing, she grabbed its chest, a greasy, rancid handful of matted red hair and loose skin.

  The goat-devil screamed. Sudden thunder crackled overhead. Orange flames burst from beneath Lizbet’s grip, enveloping her hand in a ball of leaping fire. Oily black smoke poured out between her fingers.

  With a cry, Lizbet let go and jerked her hand back. She put her arm to her mouth, coughing from the smoke.

  “That looked promising,” Strix said. “Keep going.”

  “It burned my hand!”

  But now that the initial shock was over, Lizbet realized that her hand didn’t hurt. “I thought it did.” She turned her hand over and back. Except for some soot, it seemed fine. “Maybe it didn’t.”

  Flinching, again Lizbet grabbed a hunk of the goat-devil’s hair and flesh. Flames and choking black smoke burst forth. Livid storm clouds swept down the sky, and thunder crashed. The goat-devil screamed for mercy.

  In a minute, Lizbet’s grip had burned the fistful of flesh to ash. She grabbed another hunk. The goat-devil cried, “Mercy, mercy upon us! The pain! The burning!”

  “This is taking too long,” Strix complained after a while. “Are you going to have burn it to ashes handful by handful? We’ll be here all day.”

  “I’m hurting it too,” Lizbet said. “I don’t like that. Even though it’s a devil.”

  “Can’t you just banish it or something?”

  “I don’t know how!” Lizbet wailed.

  “Calm down,” Strix said. “Let’s think this through. It stopped when you commanded it to. So maybe it has to obey you. Try telling it to go away. Go back to Hell or something.”

  “Don’t you need sacred objects?” Lizbet said. “Bell, book, and . . . something. Bell, book, and skillet? You ring the bell, read from the book, and . . . beat the devil with the skillet? Oh, I can’t remember. And isn’t there a ceremony? I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”

  “Make something up,” Strix said. “‘Take thee away.’ ‘Begone.’ ‘Scram.’ ‘Adios.’ Say anything you want. You’re Christ. Who’s going to question you?”

  “Uh . . .” Lizbet pitched her voice down an octave and tried to sound commanding. “I abjure thee, in the name of my Father, Most High and Most Holy, betake thou to the Hell He hath consigned thee to, and never return hither to trouble the goodfolk of Abalia!”

  Strix clapped her hands delightedly. “Not bad, if a little wordy. Oh, look, something’s happening.”

  The light of leaping flames poured up from between the cobblestones of the street, beneath the goat-devil’s black hooves. The cobblestones shook. One after another, they lifted from their beds and flew into the air. They whirled around the goat-devil’s head like a swarm of angry bees.

  A cobblestone swung high overhead, and fell like a comet. It struck the goat-devil on the top of its head. Another cobble followed it, and another. Blow after blow, they smashed down on the goat-devil’s head as it cowered, whimpering.

  Like sledgehammers, the cobblestones pounded the goat-devil into the ground as if it were a fencepost.

  In less than a minute, there was none of it left. The ground rumbled one last time, and released a plume of sulfurous smoke. A wail from beneath the earth, diminishing into some unimaginable distance below. The cobblestones settled again into their beds, and the street was whole and empty once more.

  “Holy crap,” Strix breathed.

  “Strix?” Lizbet blushed. “Your language.”

  Strix put two fingers in front of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled through the fingers. “But that was damn good.”

  Not all devils departed in the same highly theatrical fashion as the goat-devil. For some, the earth simply opened and swallowed them, as it had for Toadwipe. Some were drawn wailing up into the sky by a sudden whirlwind. Some were consumed on the spot by furnace flames, leaving not even ash behind.

  One especially ugly specimen, all scales and horns, frantically jammed its head into its own anus, followed by its thrashing shoulders, arms, legs, and hips, its entire body falling into its bowels with increasing speed until, with one last, loud, malodorous fart, there was nothing left. Strix got the giggles and couldn’t stop. For days afterward, she would periodically break out in giggles over nothing, and Lizbet had to shush her.

  Lizbet tried to count the devils as she banished them, but lost her place somewhere after ten score and thirty. For six days, she and Strix walked the length and breadth of Abalia, from the rows of guillotines and black-iron gibbets at the Plaza of Fear, to the Hospital of St. Luke, at the center of a vast cemetery crowded with the tombstones of former patients.

  Into the fleshpots and dives of Abalia-under-the-Hill they went. With torches they descended into the sewers, driving the goblins before them. Everywhere, they shouted for all devils to show their noses and be properly banished.

  At night, they slept in Lizbet’s former home, as abandoned as the rest of the town. Lizbet took Strix through the rooms where she had lived. In her bedroom, Lizbet showed Strix her dolls: Gertrude, Hedwig, Christina, Berta, Sophia, Margaret.

  Strix walked a doll down a tabletop, moving its arms and legs with her hands. “They don’t move by themselves?” she asked.

  “Silly. I made them when I just a mortal.”

  In the cellar, they found hams and dry sausages hanging from the rafters, still sound, and a tub of fat with which to brown them. The bins of winter root vegetables had begun to sprout, but they salvaged what they could. Strix peered around the cellar. “There’s no firewood down here?” she asked.

  “No, the stove and fireplaces burn coal,” Lizbet said.

  “Your father beat you with a lump of coal?”

  “What? No, of course not.”

  “What did he beat you with, then?” Strix asked.

  “He didn’t beat me with anything!”

  “We kept firewood in the cellar,” Strix said, “and when Mrs. Woodcot wanted to beat me, she’d tell me to go down in the cellar and pick the stick to do it. I hated the cellar.”

  “This cellar was still cool on hot summer days,” Lizbet said. “I liked to take a lamp, a devotional manual or a book of poems, and go down to the cellar to read, when everything was hot and muggy upstairs. I liked the cellar.”

  “Your father really never beat you?”

  Lizbet shook her head.

  “Maybe that’s why you’re such a Goody Two-shoes.”

  Lizbet nodded. “Maybe.”

  “I wish . . .” Strix said. “I wish Mrs. Woodcot had maybe beaten me just a little bit less.”

  Lizbet, in a rush, threw her arms around Strix and hugged her as tightly as she could.

  Nights were troublesome. By never-ceasing effort, by a constant fight against exhaustion and despair, Lizbet bore up under the weight of mankind’s sins during the day. At night, th
ough, when she tried to sleep, nightmares came. She would wake up, groaning and thrashing. Strix held her and comforted her until she was calm, and sleep came again. Sometimes in anxious dreams Lizbet thought she heard God calling to her, from an unbridgeable distance. His voice, once powerful and reassuring, was now faint and melancholy, as if He had lost all hope.

  On the third day of Lizbet and Strix’s anti-diabolic campaign, the citizens of Abalia began to emerge from hiding. A pack of street urchins followed behind them, shrieking when a devil was encountered, cheering and clapping when it was banished back to Hell. Other children and adults soon joined them, until a small mob tagged behind. Sometimes they helped to ferret out a devil which had hidden beneath a bridge or in a sewer. Once they brought forth from a basement an old woman in rags.

  “A witch!” they cried, pushing her forward. “Banish her to Hell!”

  “Stop ’cher selves!” the old woman cried. “I ’ent a witch none or other!”

  “Come here, grandma,” Lizbet said. The old woman shuffled forward reluctantly. Lizbet touched her withered cheek, her bony wrist. She was not a witch. The woman was all warm flesh and skin, not paper, cloth, feathers or other witchy material.

  The old woman smiled toothlessly. “You’re a good girl, ’ent ’cher,” she said. “Your own hands, ’er be gentle through and through. You’re warms my rheumatiz.” She stroked Lizbet’s hand with her bony, wrinkled one.

  “No witches!” Lizbet shouted to the crowd. “Leave witches alone. We’re only after devils. If you can’t find any devils, then go about your business.”

  She had been afraid the crowd wouldn’t listen, and that she would be faced with a surly mob. But to her surprise, the people nodded, murmured their assent, and dispersed. One or two faced her, knelt, clasped their hands, and prayed briefly.

  “I think you could make them do whatever you wanted,” Strix observed.

  “I know,” Lizbet said. “The sooner this is over, the better.”

  After six days, no more devils were to be found. Abalia’s citizens emerged from hiding to reclaim their city. The streets once more filled with life, people coming and going, buying and selling, working and begging, gossiping, pickpocketing, shopping. Tunners and ankle beaters and draymen, feather-dressers and fellmongers, postboys and poulters.

  Through the streets and avenues Lizbet and Strix walked to the Margrave’s Palace. As Lizbet passed by, people who had been arguing lowered their voices and found reasons to agree. Brawling boys became friends again. Beggars found silver in their bowls instead of copper. Butchers confessed to astonished customers that the “lamb” they had for sale was actually mutton.

  But when Lizbet had passed, voices rose again in anger. Blows were thrown. The scheming, cheating, vanity, and lies of mortals reasserted themselves.

  Lizbet knew this. Although she bore up under it, she never escaped the terrible weight of human sin pressing down on her slender shoulders. She longed to give up her godhead. Divinity, even a little, was too great a burden.

  The guard boy was at the Margrave’s gate again, in a new set of pantaloons which didn’t match to the rest of his uniform. He grinned and made kissy faces at them.

  “Be respectful, or I’ll wither you like a fig tree,” Lizbet warned him.

  The Palace doors were open. The refugees were gone from the reception room. Bellows edged up to Lizbet in a servile manner and bowed so deeply his spine cracked audibly. “Your fame precedes you, Mistress Lenz,” he said. “I, I want to thank you for clearing out the devils from Abalia. Please forgive any rudeness you’ve previously suffered from me. The Margrave will be wanting to pay his respects to you as well.”

  Guards again accompanied Lizbet up the staircase. There was no talk of defenestration this time. Strix followed behind, a ghostly presence knit into the shadows. A boy ran up the stairs ahead, shouting Lizbet’s coming.

  If the Margrave’s presence had been powerful before, it was overwhelming now. Steel gray hair, vivisecting gaze, chest and shoulders like a mountain bear. Everything about him that had seemed hollow and empty when Lizbet first met him, now bespoke presence and strength and indomitable will.

  The litter of vials and tiny caskets was gone from the Margrave’s table. A pile of papers half a foot high sat there instead. They seemed to be blank, and Lizbet noticed a few tiny black q’s and m’s clinging to the Margrave’s nostrils. Fudge sat happily in a corner, snuffling up fanciful colored lithographs of lions and peacocks from an illustrated atlas of natural history.

  “Lizbet!” Hengest Wolftrow said. His voice reverberated about the room. He strode forward. He towered over her. “Lizbet Lenz! Beyond all hope, beyond all expectation, you have succeeded! You are as good as your word. I receive news that you have banished all the devils from our city. I have been going to and fro in Abalia, and walking up and down in it, and everywhere I hear the story of your deeds. The daughter outshines the father.” He bent over Lizbet and seemed about to take her hand. Then his expression darkened slightly, and he took a step back.

  “You are a remarkable young woman,” Wolftrow said. His eyes narrowed. “Even more remarkable than before.”

  “Thank you for your kind words,” Lizbet said. “Now, about my father. I’d like to have him out of prison. Please. As you promised.”

  Margrave surveyed her in silence. Then he said, “Lizbet, when I release your father from prison, what will you do?”

  The question was unexpected. For a moment, Lizbet could think of nothing. All her hopes had been focused on the very moment her father would be freed. She had not let her imagination go beyond that.

  “I suppose . . .” she began uncertainly. “I suppose we’ll just live our lives. As we did before.”

  “I must warn you,” Wolftrow said, “Abalia will not be safe for you, or him. Abalia’s citizens have not forgotten their grievance with your father for covering their homes and fields with a plague of mice. Gerhard Lenz is safer in prison.”

  “Then we’d have to leave,” Lizbet said. “In the past, we’ve traveled a lot.”

  Lizbet fretted. Why were they having this conversation? She had done everything the Margrave wanted. Why didn’t he just release her father from prison as he’d promised?

  “Come,” Wolftrow said. He strode to the door, beckoning Lizbet to follow.

  Out of the Margrave’s office they went, Lizbet half skipping to keep up with Wolftrow’s huge steps. Through the office filled with clerks, to the stairway. Hope bubbled up in Lizbet’s heart. Were they going directly to the prison to release Gerhard Lenz?

  At the head of the stairs, Wolftrow paused before the narrow iron-bound door that Lizbet had noticed on her first visit. From his robes he produced a key, and turned it in the lock.

  The wards clinked and thumped, and the door swung open. Behind it, a corkscrew stone staircase, leading upward. But surely this wasn’t the way to the prison? Wolftrow ascended the steps. Lizbet followed warily.

  Light from above grew brighter as they climbed. The stairs emerged beneath a little cupola.

  They stood at the highest point of the Palace’s roof, on a sort of widow’s walk ringed with a wrought-iron rail. It was a few dozen feet long and wide.

  Lizbet turned around and around. She felt as if she were standing in the middle of the sky. This spot must be the highest in all Abalia, higher even than the bell towers of the cathedral. She could see nothing above or around her but the immense blue dome of the sky, sun, and ragged clouds. A warm breeze against her cheek carried the scents of late spring, apple blossoms and lilacs.

  Strix, still transparent and ghostly, appeared at the top of the stairs and stepped out onto the roof, peering around. She spotted Lizbet, grinned, and put her finger to her lips.

  From the roof’s western edge, the Margrave summoned Lizbet with a crooked finger. As she approached, he swung his hand in a wide arc.

  �
��Behold,” Wolftrow said. “The kingdoms of the earth.”

  Lizbet turned her gaze downward. At the roof’s edge, she could see out over the tilted red-tile roofs of Abalia, the rising threads of smoke from its chimneys, the tiny people moving on its streets far below. To her left and right, the endless dark forested hills of the Piedmont. But before her, to the west, the land fell away, sloping down, and down forever. Beyond Abalia, falling hills, farms and forests, misty valleys and twisting shiny rivers diminished into distance and incalculable vastness, ever and ever wider, paler, dimmer, until the eye became lost in an unseen horizon.

  “Bohemia. Pomerania. Saxony, Franconia, Thuringia.” Wolftrow named them as a man names past lovers. “Beyond them, Normandy, Flanders, Gascony, Aquitaine, Provence, Aragon, Navarre, Lombardy, Venetia. All under the rule of our Pixie Queen.” Wolftrow gazed down at her. “Have you ever dreamed that all these lands might be yours to rule? That they all might quake at your word? That they all might worship your name?”

  “Well . . . no,” Lizbet said. “No, not really.”

  “Juliana rules with might unassailable,” Wolftrow said. “For now. But there are other worlds to conquer.” He turned. Lizbet followed Wolftrow’s gaze, toward the snowy Montagnes to the east, their peaks blinding white. “The world beyond the Montagnes is fully as large as our own. A world of marvels, riches, sorcery. He who masters it will rule an empire as large as all the known world. With the aid of powers and magics to be found there, he might conquer all this world as well. Such a man might be master of all the earth.”

  Strix, by Lizbet’s side, whispered in her ear, “What’s all this about? It’s taking too long. What about your father?”

  “What about my father?” Lizbet asked.

  Wolftrow made a gesture, as if to put his hand on her shoulder. Instead, he halted halfway and withdrew his arm. A shadow passed over his face, but quickly vanished. “Lizbet,” he said, “I have need of you. Your courage and imagination. Your spiritual strength. Think of it! You banished hundreds of devils from Abalia. The priests couldn’t do it. The Bishop himself couldn’t do it.” His eyes were blazing. “The priests say that God has vanished. They say He has abandoned the world. Do you understand what this means?”