Witchy Winter

by D. J. Butler

  “Cahokia has a queen?”

  “Some have wondered whether Johnsland has an earl.”

  “Harsh words, but not false. But a new day is dawning in Johnsland, friend. Those who’ve sung of feathers and eggs will shut their mouths.”

  “A new day dawns in Cahokia, too.”

  The soldier nodded. “I expect the earl will be happy to hear your message later in the day.”

  “I did say urgent.”

  “The earl rides at any moment,” said the guard standing in Jacob’s path. “Since the sun is not yet up, you must guess that his errand, too, is urgent. Unless it has to do with the location of the earl’s son, your message will have to wait.”

  “My queen is a lady of mighty gramarye. She woke me in the middle of the night to tell me the location of the earl’s son,” Jacob said. “He’s surrounded by enemies. We must go to him now!”

  The guards shot each other a questioning look.

  “Come with me.”

  One guard led Jacob down the lane and around the back of the earl’s house, where a posse comitatus of fifty men on horseback stood in a semicircle around the Earl of Johnsland. A few of the men wore Johnsland’s purple, but most wore plain wool coats, undyed. The men of the posse were armed with rifles and knives, but they also carried bundles of firewood on their horses, and sacks whose sweet smell suggested they were packed full of cured tobacco.

  Despite what Jacob had been led to think about the earl, he was dressed and mounted, with lucid eyes. He was unshaven, though, with ragged yellow nails, and his long white hair was patchy, with flakes of skin falling from his scalp. He looked as if he’d recently arisen from a long sickbed.

  Or perhaps the grave. But for his eyes, he might have been a Lazar.

  “Aaron, take your men up the Durham Pike.” The earl was in the middle of giving directions. “James, I need you to rouse the constabulary in Raleigh.”

  “And the godar?”

  “Feel free to shoot them if they intervene.”

  “I beg your pardon, My Lord,” Jacob’s guide said, “this man says he has information.”

  “My name is Jacob—” Jacob began.

  “To the hells with your name,” the earl spat. “Where is my son?”

  “He’s in a tobacco-curing barn,” Jacob said. “The barn is on fire. It’s near a four-way crossroad, a double bridge, and a stand of oaks.”

  The earl turned a cold eye on Jacob and frowned. “That is a queer way to describe a place, stranger. As if you’d seen it in a painting, but had no idea where to find the spot.”

  “My queen is a seer,” Jacob said. “This is what she has seen.”

  The earl nodded. “You are Cahokian.”

  Jacob tried to keep surprise from showing on his face. “No. But my queen is.”

  “I know the spot, My Lord,” one of the earl’s men said.

  “So do I, damn you!” the earl snarled, unexpectedly fierce. “Do you think in a century of sorrow I could forget the hills I grew up in, the land of my fathers? We ride!”

  Whoops and hollers bounced off the earl’s manor. The sound brought to Jake’s memory the whoops and hollers of plundering hordes at whose head he’d once marched to war. He took a deep breath.

  “My Lord,” Jacob asked, “may I accompany you?”

  “Take a horse and ride with me.” The earl waited, staring into the darkness, as Jacob climbed painfully into the saddle, his legs shaking and uncooperative. Then they rode.

  “Where are you from?” the earl asked. “You do not look Cahokian, but Dutch. Your voice sounds like a Pennslander. Are you Ohio German?”

  “Nee,” Jacob said, deliberately lapsing into a Hudson River accent. “I’m a Yonkerman.”

  “And well-traveled, as many of your people are.” They rode up the earl’s lane and turned onto the highway. Light from the torches behind them gave the road they traveled an uncertain and watery orange cast. “A merchant, then, who has fallen into the retinue of one of Hannah Penn’s children.”

  Jacob was so astonished he nearly fell out of the saddle. “Yes, though I might have said ‘ascended’ rather than ‘fallen.’” He hesitated. “Tell me how you guess that.”

  “We ride to find my sons,” the earl said. “But also my foster son, who visited me in my grief and untangled the path before my feet. Whose true name is Nathaniel Elytharias Penn, though I hid him behind the foundling name of Chapel. I only tell you, of course, because of the mistress whom you serve.”

  Jacob blew a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad. I was afraid maybe I was tricking you into rescuing Nathaniel, when you thought you were rescuing your own son.”

  The earl laughed, a sound rich with age, knowledge, and loss. “You’re a clever fellow. If your queen ever decides she has no further need of you, you’re welcome in my hall.”

  “Thank you,” Jacob said. “May I ask, My Lord…am I right to think your men are carrying sacks of tobacco?”

  The earl nodded. “Nathaniel told me he was surrounded by walking dead. Draug. He urged me to bring fire, and tobacco.”

  That didn’t answer Jacob’s real question; did it suggest that tobacco repelled the walking dead? But it raised another one. “How did Nathaniel tell you this?” He imagined the earl and Sarah’s brother, hunched over the two halves of a broken writing slate.

  “I do not think it was a dream,” the earl said. “But his coming to me was like a dream, and a pleasant dream that brought me relief, in a time when most of my dreams were nightmares.”

  They continued in silence for a bit.

  The earl turned off the highway, into a steep valley with no visible track. “This way will save us miles. The farmer is my tenant, and won’t begrudge us.”

  “I see no road, My Lord,” Jacob said. “I only see a mountain I’d have hesitated to take even on foot.”

  “Have no care, Republican!” The earl laughed again. “Tonight, you are with men who ride!”

  * * *

  “I’m out!” Chikaak yelled over the smoke and the smell of blood.

  Bang! Bang!

  Cathy fired her last two shots.

  “Chikaak!” Bill roared, loading three of his pistols. “Kindly escort the lady to the rooftop! We’ll make a stand on the stairs!”

  Cathy withdrew to the stairs, not waiting for the coyote-headed beastman to act. She knew where to step and which walls to hug to minimize the chance she could be seen from the outside; given the darkness within the building, the odds of being spotted were already slim.

  Outside, the fire in the west grew.

  And in the east, the first pale gray smudges of dawn had begun to appear.

  Trapped between one growing light and another felt to Cathy like lying on the anvil and watching the slow downward swing of the hammer.

  At the second story, Catherine pressed herself close to a window, in the shadow of a large cabinet full of scrolls. From hiding, she looked down on the mixed force of Imperial rabble and Cahokian Wardens. Behind them, protected by the earth wall of another building, she saw the heavy woman in command. She spoke with a stubble-faced paunchy man leaning on a long rifle like a staff. What was she telling him? What was she thinking? What did she want?

  With Sarah’s people trapped in the building, why didn’t they simply burn it down? Did she want to capture them alive? Did she think Sarah was in the building, and want to capture Sarah alive? But then why not send a messenger with that demand?

  Bang!

  The first of Sir William’s last three shots struck the paunchy man in his temple and dropped him cold.

  Bang!

  The second bullet, close on the heels of the first, tore a chunk of wood from the wall of the building only inches from the heavy woman’s face. She drew back and out of sight, but not before Cathy saw her expression of surprise and fear.

  Bang!

  A buckskinner with a Brown Bess took the final bullet in the jaw and fell straight back.

  On the floor below, Cathy heard Bill’s runn
ing feet. She withdrew from the window and raced up to the rooftop, arriving through a hedge of beastkind with Bill immediately behind her.

  The beastkind circled the stairs, pikes, bayonets, horns, and teeth bloodied and at the ready. From the street below came the shouted command, “attack!” Cathy heard the sound of charging feet.

  Sir William eyed his troops. “In literary traditions, gentlemen, this is the moment in which I deliver a stirring speech about how we must hold out until our queen has had her triumph. I am not a literary man. For those of you who can understand my English, I will say this: defend the stairs.”

  Snuffling and the nodding of many animal heads. Chikaak thumped his breast once in a vaguely gladiatorial salute.

  “For those of you who cannot, I shall say it another way.” Bill raised the Heron King’s hunting horn to his lips and blew three long notes.

  * * *

  Luman raced through his mental inventory. Among the spells of Jean d’Anastasi, the great recorder and transmitter of Mephite magic, he couldn’t recall a single killing spell. Nor a wall, nor an explosion. Love philtres, dog-bite charms, the healing or causing of insomnia, the finding or losing of a path, yes.

  But nothing useful to him now.

  He leaned in the east-facing doorway of the church, watching the beastkind. They shattered sculptures, tore up pews, and defecated on the altar, roaring and hooting the entire time.

  Barrett’s famous grimoire The Magus offered him no possibilities. Perhaps if he’d had it in front of him to peruse, he’d have found something, but in his memory it was all seals for candles, the magical uses of stones, and acrostics. Useful, powerful even, when called for; of no avail when he wished to intervene in the desecration of a church. Perhaps Aggrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the source from which Barrett had infamously cribbed, might contain battle magic, but Luman had never so much as seen a copy of that tome.

  Two of the beastkind, the one with the rabbit’s head and one that looked like an octopus, broke into a storage chamber behind the altar and came out holding gold and silver plate: a pyx, a sacramental chalice, a tray. From a sheer destruction point of view, shattering the pews was more troublesome, but from the perspective of desecration and offensiveness, the theft was grievous.

  Theft. Something itched at Luman’s memory.

  Theft. He knew a spell for thieves.

  He thought it through, silently mouthing all the words to be certain he got it right. It was a braucher incantation—surely, such a spell could only work even better in the confines of a basilica.

  But as he opened his mouth, he was struck by the vivid memory of the bat he’d killed in Parkersburg. Was his heart pure enough, did he have the faith to work effective braucherei?

  He hesitated.

  But his himmelsbriefe worked. And at this point, he had no better option.

  “O Petrus,” he began. The charm invoked St. Peter the fisherman, but Peter Plowshare slipped into Luman’s mind and stayed as he recited. “Nimm vot Gott die Gewalt: Was ich binden werde mit dem Band der Christen-Hand, alle Diebe oder Diebinnen, sie mögen sein groβ oder klein, jung oder alt, Mann oder Tier, so sollen sie von Gott gestellet sein, und keiner keinen Tritt mehr weder vor oder hinter sich gehen, bis ich sie mit meinen Augen sehe, und mit meiner Zunge Urlaub gebe, sie zählen mir den zuvor alle Stein’, die zwischen Himmel und Erde sein, alle die Regentropfen, alle Laub und Gras. Dieses bitt’ ich meinen Feinden zur Buss’.”

  Mann oder Tier, meaning man or beast, was his own addition. It seemed appropriate in the circumstances, in a spell in which the thieves, male or female, old or young, were ensorcelled into motionlessness, by a magician who prayed they would repent.

  Then he said the Lord’s Prayer, crossing himself three times.

  As he finished the third sign of the cross, the animal cacophony abruptly switched tone, becoming a colossal disconcerted wail. The beastkind thrashed their arms about, hurled the chalice and the pyx to the floor, tore at the surroundings—

  but didn’t move.

  Their feet, paws, and hooves, were all rooted to the floor.

  Luman felt like yelling in triumph, but he didn’t. Of all moments, now he needed to be humble.

  Cautiously, he walked from the door into the nave of the church, avoiding treading on the discarded blankets and food left by the refugees, as well as the wrecked pews. As the beastkind shrieked and howled at him, he surveyed the destruction; the structure itself seemed unharmed, but the furniture, the relics, the art, and the windows would require much repair and replacement.

  “You did this.” The accusation came from the bison-headed giant, who stood between the altar and the pews, frozen in the act of smashing the last of the rood screen with an enormous gnarled club.

  “God did this,” Luman said. Humility was essential for the successful practice of braucherei. “But I asked Him to.”

  “God.” Bison Head snorted. “You mean the god who is eaten.”

  The beastkind shrieked and gibbered.

  “Yes,” Luman agreed. “But He isn’t finished with you just yet.”

  The bison-headed beastman seemed unexpectedly upset at these words, snorting and beating his chest. “I could throw this club and smash your head to splinters.”

  Luman ignored the threat as well as the fidgeting and continued. “Here’s one thing that can happen next: I can walk away. And in just a few minutes, the sun will rise. Those doors there face east, and so do those high windows, see up there? With the pictures of the Bridegroom and the Bride?”

  “I see.” Bison Head shook his club as if knocking the sun out of the sky. “The sun will rise and it will shine on me. I don’t fear the sun.”

  “You should, though,” Luman said. “If the sun shines on you this morning before I release you from this spell, it will kill you.”

  “You lie.”

  It wasn’t a lie. Luman had never cast this spell before—he was more in the business of stealing than in the business of catching thieves—but he was repeating the lore about the spell as he’d learned it, and so far, the magic had worked. “If I’d told you before I worked this enchantment that it would stick your feet to the floor, would you have called that a lie as well?”

  Bison Head said nothing.

  Rabbit Head wailed.

  “But the spell says that this is a penance. It prays that you will repent. I want you to repent.”

  “Repent?”

  “Repent,” Luman explained. “Change your mind, and stop being a thief and a rampager and a killer of men. So I can show you mercy.”

  Bison Head stared. “Mercy? Would this mercy be to kill us?” He shook his club again, this time at Luman.

  Luman frowned. “No. I would release you alive. But you must repent.”

  “It’s in my nature to be a rampager and a killer of men. Today it’s the measure of my creation.”

  “It’s also in your nature to die. But if today you can decide not to rampage and kill, then today you can live.”

  Luman in fact didn’t want the beastman to declare himself penitent. He wanted the beastkind to refuse his offer, and fall over dead in the imminent sunrise. But the spell asked for repentance, and he thought if he didn’t make the offer, he’d fail the moral test of braucherei, and the spell would end.

  And then the beastkind would tear him to pieces.

  And he’d never be able to write a potent himmelsbrief again.

  Of course, if they declared themselves chastened, it could be a lie. And then he would release them, and they would tear him to pieces in any case.

  “What sign do you want?” Bison Head asked.

  Luman considered. “Swear. Swear by earth, and by your life, and by this holy city, and by the life of God, that you foreswear violence and theft.”

  “Which god?” Bison Head asked. “The God-Who-Is-Eaten, or the Heron King?”

  “Both,” Luman said.

  “Is that all?”

  “I’ll release the others first,” Lu
man said. “When they’ve reached the foot of this mound, then I’ll release you.”

  “The sun rises very soon,” Bison Head observed.

  “Mercy is ready for you right now.”

  Bison Head roared, a sound that shook Luman’s bones. Then he began to recite: “I swear by the earth, and by my life, and by this holy city, and by the life of both the God-Who-Is-Eaten and the God-Who-Is-His-Own-Son, that I foreswear all violence and theft.”

  The other beastkind followed along in the oathmaking, some saying the words in English, and others apparently rendering them in animal grunts and yips.

  Luman nodded and gulped, trying not to look nervous.

  “You, you, you, and you,” he said, pointing at each of the beastkind in turn other than Bison Head. “In the name of St. Peter, go.”

  The beastkind raised their legs, free from the spell. They looked at each other sheepishly, and then Rabbit Head shrieked.

  Bison Head answered with a bellow of rage that sent the rest of his pack scurrying out the church doors. Luman stepped aside to let them pass, then watched as they went down the hill. The sun disk must be only moments from breaching the eastern horizon, over the Cahokian Bottom.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Kort,” Bison Head said.

  “Kort, in the name of St. Peter, go.”

  Kort stepped forward, freed.

  But he didn’t leave.

  Luman forced himself to breathe calmly. He reached under his shirt and gripped his Homer amulet, just in case.

  “You swore an oath,” Luman reminded him.

  “I know my oath,” Kort said. “I came because I saw the token of the God-Who-Is Eaten and I wished to destroy his home. Instead, that god now sends me away, humbled. Tell me your name.”

  “Luman Walters.”

  “I will keep my oath, Luman Walters,” Kort said. “And also this: as you have shown me mercy, I’ll show mercy to others.”

  Luman nodded. “Go and do so, Kort.”

  Kort lumbered up the nave toward Luman, bending slightly to bow as he passed the magician, and then stepped out between the two stone columns into the first blinding rays of the morning sun.

  * * *