American Craftsmen (6 page)

“Yes, I guessed that. Still, to get permission to come here…”

Zee said, “I didn’t need permission, sir.”

I felt a cold hand reaching for my heart. “How’s that?” A stupid question.

“I’m dead, sir,” said Zee. “I’m sorry, I thought your father would have mentioned it.”

“No,” I croaked. “Must have slipped his mind.” Shit. I easily missed the ghostly about ghosts. I had once spent a whole evening with a friend at a bar before finding out the next day that he had been dead for weeks. “Your death,” I said. “Something to do with our mission?”

“Yes. I remembered it all, over and over again.”

“You killed yourself,” I said.

“Seemed to make sense at the time. I left a note. ‘I’m sorry.’ That was it. I left behind my wife and kids.” Zee’s image flickered as his calm lapsed. “Seemed to make sense at the time.”

“What’s happened to the others?”

“They’re more or less OK. They don’t remember much. They’ve been discharged or placed on light duty. They don’t quite understand why, but their survival instincts told them not to fight it too hard. So why are you fighting it, sir?”

“I tried to resign,” I said. “They won’t let me go.”

The ghost considered. “Then think about this, sir. Was it worth it? Your target was protecting a little shit town that no one cared about—not us or them. He just wanted us to stay away. You show up, and it makes him crazy, makes him sacrifice them all, just to stop you.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“Well, think about this too. I have my last orders. I’m not going to let you feel any better until you’ve stopped, sir.”

“You’d serve a terrorist sorcerer?”

“Oh no, sir. I’ve been watching you, and listening. It’s you who’s going over to the enemy.” Zee grinned, face full of rage and malice. “This is for me.”

I felt it all over again, the man, the woman, the dog, the child, the deaths of a whole town. The scream came to my throat, but I wouldn’t let it out.

Instead, I walked through Zee and went to the doctor on duty. In the measured tones of desperate need, I said, “I need to speak with Colonel Hutchinson.”

*   *   *

“Isn’t it time you got over what happened?” asked Hutchinson.

The steady pulse of death, death, death, still beat in the veins of my skull. “This isn’t about the mission, ma’am. It’s about me needing to resign. This treatment you’ve arranged isn’t working.”

“What about the night terrors?” asked Hutchinson. “You’ve … been causing some difficulties in your sleep. We can’t have that on the outside.”

“I know, ma’am. I have reason to believe my sleep problems will cease to hurt others once I’ve left the military. And if they don’t, the Family House should contain them.”

Hutchinson shook her head. “This is something the target did to you, isn’t it? Why don’t you fight it?”

“If it were just a curse, a craft time bomb, I would, ma’am,” I said. “But it’s beyond that now. When the massacre happened, something in me … wasn’t upset.”

For the first time in my presence, Hutch’s eyes betrayed surprise. “The Left-Hand Mortons are dead and gone,” she whispered.

“And they’re going to stay that way,” I said.

Hutchinson said, “No craft soldier has ever quit in time of war.”

“War? Feh.”

“But what about the Right side of your family? The Morton legacy.”

“What legacy? How are you going to get your baby Mortons if I’m too bugged out to take a girl on a date?”

Hutchinson sighed. “Do we really need more Mortons?” She stopped my objection with a wave. “Our superiors agree that we do. And that’s the one reason we’re agreeing to this.” She opened her briefcase. “We have a special discharge for craft soldiers.”

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 Morton 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.