American Craftsmen

by Tom Doyle

  I read the discharge papers.

  Section 2. Conditions. 1.1 After the Discharge Date, any action violating natural laws will constitute an act of treason against the United States.

  “This says I can’t do craft. Ever.”

  Hutchinson nodded. “Same rule for any craftsperson not in government service, only more so. No parlor tricks at a kid’s birthday, no nice weather to watch the baseball game. Nada.”

  “And I can’t even talk to another craftsperson?”

  “Call it paranoid,” said Hutchinson, “but wherever two or more witches or wizards are gathered without his say-so, Uncle Sam’s balls go cold.”

  “If I don’t sign?” I asked.

  “You can’t leave,” said Hutchinson.

  “If I…”

  “Don’t make me answer that question,” said Hutchinson. “You know how this administration feels about craft work. National security only. We won’t risk the general public knowing this. Everything else is Ex-22.” Exodus 22:18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  I signed. The colonel nodded. “Good. That was for them. Now I want your personal word on it.”

  “My word?”

  “I want you to swear by the craft.”

  “What if I can’t control it?”

  “You come back here until you can. Look, don’t get all Sunday-school questions about this. Take the prohibition seriously, and we’ll all be fine. Push things, and we’ll push back.”

  The deal was bullshit—a Morton could no more completely stop practicing craft than completely stop breathing. But I could swear to keep it to a low background, ambient kind of thing. That oath would have real power. My honor was more than an abstraction, it was tied into my being and my practice of the craft. But what about my family’s duty?

  I had no choice. “I swear to you by the craft and my ancestors not to willfully practice magic anymore.”

  That night, as I lay down to a tentative sleep, Sergeant Zee came to me. “Thank you.”

  “Fuck off,” I said. I had found my own solution to the competing voices: a separate war.

  I thought of what I couldn’t tell Hutchinson, but what I had tried to tell them all in the interrogation. I was on that mission for a reason. In magic, there were few accidents. Someone, probably Sphinx, had set me up. There was a mole in the craft, and oath or no, I would kill the traitorous sorcerer. It was what I did best.

  PART II

  SCHEREZADE AND THE OTHER HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES

  You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

  —Mark Twain

  (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

  —Walt Whitman

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  “For craft’s sake, is that really necessary?” I asked, nodding at the blindfold.

  “You aren’t the first mage to be treated here,” said Hutchinson, “and unfortunately, you won’t be the last, so this location will remain classified.” She tied the blindfold over my face. “Good luck. I’ll see you soon.”

  After a car, a plane, and another car, I felt the steady deceleration of a confused driver. “It isn’t here,” said a voice from the front seat.

  “Stop,” said the escort at my right. “This is close enough.”

  The car stopped. A front door opened, then the door next to me opened. Someone tugged me outside and took off my blindfold. My large, black-suited escort asked, “This close enough?”

  In the middle of the road, I blinked at an ancient mansion obscured by craft. “Bull’s-eye.”

  “Shit,” said the suit. My bag was tossed to the pavement. Doors slammed, and the better-than-regulation sedan squealed off. I stood alone in front of the House of Morton.

  I hesitated. I felt eight years old, after a bad day at school. But I’ve got no place else to go. I picked up my bag and strode toward the House.

  The House had the wild asymmetries that could only accrue over centuries. Stables partially converted into a garage extended in an L to the right side. A terraced garden faced the street, rising to a walled courtyard with a Chinese balcony thrust forward above it from the third floor. Trumpet flowers bloomed everywhere. The overall look was that of a Victorian medieval folly, a gothic fortress against the inevitable peasants with torches.

  The core of the old House had seven gables. For the Mortons, this was not an accidental feature. The House had been designed as an occult mirror to the Endicott mansion in Salem, in deep sympathy with the Mortons’ enemies for times when it became necessary to powerfully remind the old foes of their errors.

  I stepped up through the garden into the courtyard. A wave of hot hate rolled out from the House; the heavy wooden door swung open. A stern-faced old man stepped forward, raised a shotgun and pointed it at me. “Freeze, you yellow bastard.”

  I froze. “This isn’t going to solve anything.”

  A voice came from behind me. “He wasn’t talking to you, sir.” I looked back. Sergeant Zee grinned like a feral dog.

  “We had a deal,” I said.

  “Fuck you and your deal, sir,” said Zee, approaching me. “I like it here.”

  The old man waved his gun to the right. “Boy, step aside so I don’t have to shoot through you.”

  Zee spat. “Whatchya going to do, old man, kill me?”

  “Not kill,” said the old man. “Erase.”

  I hit the ground as the old man pulled the trigger. Zee roared as ectoplasmic bullets ripped through him. Then he dissolved into a glowing mist, driven away for now.

  “You going to spend all day kissing the dirt, boy?”

  I pushed myself to my feet. Smoke drifted up from the barrels of the gun. The old man yelled at the empty air. “Goddamnit, I don’t care if the Bavarian Illuminati and Poe’s bird are giving you juice, you better be hitting the highway to heaven.” Then the man looked me right in the eye, and a jagged smile broke the stony face. He threw his arms wide. “Welcome home, boy!”

  I ran up to him, arms wide. “Grandpa.” We came close, but did not touch. Grandpa’s ghost would feel uncomfortably cold; he had been dead a long time. Still, damned good to see him again.

  Remembering Grandpa’s words as I approached the House, I bit hard on my emotion. “I thought…”

  Grandpa shook his head. “What your father did was different. At least according to me.” He nodded toward my bag. “Get your things. Your room’s ready.”

  As I stepped across the threshold, the House embraced me with the warm smells of fresh baked bread and cinnamon. “I missed you too, House.”

  The wood floors creaked in minor complaint. “Nonsense,” I said. “You don’t look a day over three hundred. Still as beautiful as—” A gong interrupted me, marking the hour.

  “Do I have to tell you again?” said Grandpa. “That clock belongs in the subbasement.” He set the gun down and it vanished. “With the other Left-Hand Morton nastiness.” The great clock in the hallway ignored Grandpa and continued to tick through its second century with preternatural accuracy, low like a heartbeat, with each swing of its shiny, steel pendulum. The spade-shaped weight glinted sharply in an otherwise dull-toned antique.

  “Later, Grandpa,” I said. The House was whispering, wanting me to see every thing, each in its place, older, but unchanged.

  To one side of the main hall, the parlor held neoclassical busts of Revolutionary Mortons, whose dead white eyes seemed to follow any guests, despite their lack of pupils. In this otherwise finely furnished room, the sickly yellow wallpaper stood out, interrupted by only two small bookshelves, two uncatalogued Copley paintings, and some Pelagic pottery and Revere silver. Even if the guest avoided looking at the wallpaper, in the corner of one’s eye it seemed to breathe like a tired old woman.

  We moved on to the library and study side of the House. On the library table sat the book I had made from my father’s letters, instructing the young me in the craft “in case I should perish before I can teach it myself.” Such letters were a Morto
n tradition, validated over and over by early death, including Dad’s.

  On this side of the House, shelves of rare books almost completely covered the walls: original editions, manuscripts, and notes of Hawthorne, Poe, Lovecraft, and other friends of the Mortons.

  “Let’s say hi to the Founders.” I bound up the stairs toward the third-floor hallway, Grandpa trailing.

  “Goddamnit,” said Grandpa. “We’re not ancient Chinese or Louisiana creoles. Why do we pay so much attention to our ancestors?”

  I stopped, raised an eyebrow at Grandpa, then trotted on. There was someone I needed to see.

  Portraits of the Mortons going back four hundred years lined the hall. Sounds like insect scurryings voiced disapproval. They always disapproved. But two portraits—each with the same frame, each with the same blackened canvas—were silent. The obliterated images of Roderick and Madeline Morton hung as a paired reminder of their horror. Not what I needed to think about now.

  I was focused on another Morton. “Joshua.”

  “Joshua,” said Grandpa. “The best of the Mortons.”

  “Not very honorable, what he did,” I said. Joshua Morton, the assassin at Chancellorsville, used his craft-propelled voice to tell the Confederates to “pour it into them, boys.” But instead of Union troops, they shot their own General Jackson.

  “Not brave,” said Grandpa, “but necessary. Brave was that summer, in Pennsylvania.”

  “That was just plain crazy,” I said. Joshua had stood alone against the combined craft weight of the South, against his own brother Jeb, and against the stars in their courses on the Union left flank.

  “Crazy,” said Grandpa, “and necessary. My dad said whenever Joshua shook the hand of a former slave, he would flinch at the freedman’s memory of every stroke of the lash. So that day at Gettysburg, Joshua didn’t flinch.”

  I stared for a moment, letting the chills fade. This was why I had served, why I would always serve. I might be out of the army, might have sworn an oath not to practice, might never receive much respect from the other Families, but that all made little difference to a Morton. I had a duty to perform, a very necessary duty. I had a traitor to kill.

  * * *

  The person who had given me my last assignment must have known the probable outcome. Sphinx. I knew her legend, but I needed mortal details. I could only get those from the dead.

  “Grandpa?”

  “Yep, boy.” My grandfather manifested in a blink; one second nothing, the next as solid-looking as life. The glass of bourbon in his hand gave a whole new meaning to “spirits.” “Ready to tell me about the trouble you’re in?”

  It was best to be calm talking with an ancestor. If they saw you angry (or scared), they might get too sympathetically agitated to be of any help. So I asked, as casually as I could, “Grandpa, did you know Sphinx?”

  At Sphinx’s name, Grandfather came unstuck from the floor and didn’t float back down to Earth immediately. “If it’s the same code name, yep, I knew her.”

  “Who is she?”

  Grandpa sat down in his old chair like he used to when he told me long stories of Morton wars. “We found her at Woodstock.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” said Grandpa. “And watch your language. She was prophesying the end of the war in Vietnam.”

  “Hell,” I said, “I could have told you that.”

  “She spoke like a goddamned teletype, giving cold specifics of body counts and operational code names, then painting sweeping vistas of helicopters taking off from the American embassy roof.”

  I whistled. “Still, would have been difficult to find her in all that noise.”

  “Hell yes,” said Grandpa. “We might have lost her in the sixties sea of anarchic craft, but our intel had been checking all purported prophets against the facts.”

  “How did you know her?”

  “I helped bring her in. She was non-Christian, one of ours.”

  Grandpa took a sip of his bourbon. In life, a sip after a bet in poker had been Grandpa’s nervous tell. I said, “That all?”

  Grandpa stared down at his bourbon. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” I lied.

  “I was about twice her age,” said Grandpa, still defensive.

  “Right. Sorry.” Had the old goat slept with Sphinx? That might bias his story, but it wasn’t what I needed to know. “So she joins the Peepshow to foresee the bad news professionally. She ever call in a bad mission?”

  “No, never,” said Grandpa.

  Until me. “That you knew of,” I said.

  “No,” repeated Grandpa. “They gave her the bad ones. They thought she was insubordinate. She would use ancient names for locations rather than military coordinates because they sounded cooler, so they gave her punishment detail. They had her looking years down the road. Anyone else observing that far ahead would mostly generate meaningless noise. But she was too good. She would see the shit long before anyone was ready to understand it.”

  “Oh come on,” I said, deliberately provocative. “Nostradamus quatrains aren’t intel.”

  “How about these verses?” said Grandpa. “Evacuate the embassy in Tehran. Close all the airports in September.”

  “Oh.”

  “Her most famous warnings marked America’s spectacular failures,” said Grandpa. “No wonder that, despite her record, she was as ignored as Cassandra. But they must take her very seriously by now. She must be a director or a DD.”

  “Maybe she didn’t want to be understood,” I said. That was enough tiptoeing around. “If she lied…”

  “She never lied,” said Grandpa.

  “If she’s lied,” I repeated, “if she’s warned the Peepshow against me, that would explain what happened in the desert.” Grandpa stared at his boots, lost in dead thoughts, so I got in the old man’s face. “This is Morton business, Grandpa. This is family survival. Can she see inside this House?”

  Grandpa sighed, “If anyone could, Sphinx could. But no. The Left Hand pulled all kinds of wicked shit in this place, and no one saw. They can’t see everything.”

  “What’s her real name, Grandpa?” With that simple question, I crossed a line. It wasn’t like the fairy tales, where names meant magic vulnerability. Disclosing your real name meant vulnerability in the flesh, in your ordinary home, with your ordinary spouse and kids. Grandpa had brought her in, so he must know her name.

  “It won’t do you any good,” said Grandpa. “Last I knew, she lived alone at Langley. She’s Dare Smith of the Virginia Smiths.”

  Shit, that was an old lineage, going all the way back to Captain John Smith. Grandpa was right: if she kept within Langley, she wasn’t vulnerable in the mundane world. But no one stayed in a secure site forever. I would still track her.

  Grandpa’s image rippled with restlessness. “Now, I’m tired. And I think you’re tracking the wrong cat. Sphinx was many things, but never evil.”

  He vanished. It couldn’t be easy to hear that your grandson planned to kill an old friend. Though the target was still uncertain, that was the direction I was traveling. If the top farsight had gone bad, then America’s existence might be at stake. But even if I decided that Sphinx was a mole, how could I kill someone who could see me coming?

  * * *

  I packed my camping gear, flung myself into my souped-up ’57 T-Bird, and peeled out of the stable-garage. I would drive to northern Virginia to stake out the area around Langley. I wouldn’t fly to DC. They would watch for me, particularly at those airports.

  “You shouldn’t be out.”

  I nearly veered off the road at the sudden voice. My father sat solemnly in the T-Bird’s passenger seat. “Shit, Dad, are you trying to push me to the other side early?”

  “God, I still love this car,” said Dad. “Go home, Dale. Too much bullshit in the air. This is where it all goes wrong.” Then Dad was gone.

  “Dammit, Dad.” Ghosts couldn’t do precog, so I wasn’t stopping.

  I was
close to the freeway ramp when I saw the first surveillance vehicle: a black sedan carrying three agents in stylishly cut black suits. They pulled up close to make sure I knew they were following. Their windows weren’t tinted; they wanted me to know who they were. One man had curly blond hair and the other had no hair at all, while the woman appeared Celtic fair and red-haired. I hadn’t seen them myself before, but knew them by reputation and code name: blond Bumppo, bald Carson, and Sakakawea. The Gideons, the trained trackers who hunted down rogue craftsmen, were on me.

  The T-Bird wasn’t the best car to shake a tail, but I might manage. With a growl from the old motor, I veered away from the ramp and went back into the tight blocks of College Hill. I was pretty certain my tailers weren’t Providence natives. Sure enough, a couple of sudden turns later and I had lost them. I got on the highway.

  Two women in a convertible bopped along to the radio, nice lookers in summer colors that might have gotten a smile from me on another day. Something very wrong about that, about attracting my interest without scrutiny. Despite my oath, I did some craft that nobody else would detect: I checked the women’s sins. Big capital red letters flashed moralities more suited to counterintelligence professionals than party girls. A leapfrog surveillance, with at least two cars devoted to me. Not good.

  I got off the freeway at the next exit. Now I was on my way to the reservoir in fucking Pawtuxet, which they insisted on calling Cranston. Not my territory, and craft stealth wasn’t my strength. Frustration burned.

  You should just kill them.

  And that seemed like a grand idea. I had a pistol in the glove compartment. The two women weren’t craft. I could take them before the Gideons arrived. I could …

  Cease fire! Shit. I spun the wheel violently, and the car squealed painfully to a stop in the parking lot of a strip mall. The tail drove into the lot and past me as if nothing were amiss, parking a few rows down.