“Oh, it's no misconception,” said the tithingman. “Everyone knows you're a witchist. It's just a matter of whether you do so as a fool or as a follower of Satan.”

“How can everyone know that I'm a thing which I never heard of until this moment?”

“That's proof of it right there,” said the tithingman. “Witchists are always claiming there's no such thing as witchism.”

Waldo faced his students, who had either turned in their seats to face him, or were standing beside their chairs. “This is today's puzzle,” he said. “If the act of denial can be taken as proof of the crime, how can an innocent man defend himself?”

The tithingmen caught him by the arms. “Come along now, Mr. Emerson, and don't go trying any philosophy on us.”

“Oh, I wouldn't dream of it,” said Waldo. “Philosophy would be wasted against such sturdy-headed men as you.”

“Glad you know it,” said the tithingman proudly. “Wouldn't want you thinking we weren't true Christians.”

They had Alvin in irons, which he thought was excessive. Not that it was uncomfortable– it was a simple matter for Alvin to reshape the iron to conform with his wrists and ankles, and to cause the skin there to form calluses as if they had worn the iron for years. Such work was so long-practiced that he did it almost by reflex. But the necessity to be inactive during the hours when he could be observed made him weary. He had done this before– and without the irons– for long weeks in the jail in Hatrack River. Life was too short for him to waste more hours, let alone days or weeks, growing mold in a prison cell and weighed down by chains, not when he could so easily free himself and get on about his business.

At sundown, he sat on the floor, leaned back against the wooden side wall of the cell, and closed his eyes. He sent out his doodlebug along a familiar path, until he found the dual heartfire of his wife and the unborn daughter that dwelt within her. She was already heading for her writing table, aware through long custom that because Alvin was farther east, sundown came earlier to him. She was always as impatient as he was.

This time there was no interruption from visitors. She commiserated with him about the chains and the cell, but soon got to the matter that concerned her most.

“Calvin's doodlebug has been stolen,” she said. “He had sent it forth to follow the man who collects the names and some part of the souls of Blacks arriving at the dock.” She told him of Calvin's last words to Balzac before all his will seemed to depart from his body. “First, I must know how much of his soul remains with his body. It is different from the slaves, for he seems to hear nothing and has to be led. His bodily functions also are like an infant's, and Balzac and their landlord are equally disgusted at the result, though the slaves clean him without complaint. Is this reversible? Can we communicate with him to learn his whereabouts? I have searched this city all the way up the peninsula, and find no collection of heartfires and no sign of Calvin's. It has been hidden from me; I pray it is not hidden from you.”

Alvin had no need to write or even formulate his answers. He knew that she could find all his ideas in his heartfire moments after he thought of them and they fell into his memory. The kidnapped doodlebug– Alvin had never worried about that. His fears had always been that something awful might happen to his body while he wandered. But in his experience, his body remained alive and alert, and whenever anything in his environment changed– his eyes detecting movement, his ears hearing some unexpected sound– his attention would be drawn back into his body.

His attention, and therefore his doodlebug. That's what the doodlebug was, really– his full attention. That's what was missing from Calvin. Even when things happened around his body, happened to his body, he could not bring his attention back to it. His body was no doubt sending him frantic signals demanding his attention.

The slaves, on the other hand, couldn't possibly have surrendered their attention to the man named Denmark. What they gave up was their passion, their resentment, their will to freedom. And their names.

That was an important conclusion: There was no reason to think that this Denmark fellow had Calvin's name. In fact, what he probably had was a net of hexwork that contained the free portion of separated souls. He might not even be aware that Calvin's doodlebug had got inside. The hexes caught him automatically, like the workings of an engine. The hexwork also served to hide the soulstuff that it contained. Calvin could not see out, and could not be seen inside.

But the hexes could be seen. Margaret could not possibly find them, since she saw only heartfires, and if a man knew how to hide heartfires from her, he could certainly hide his own heartfire so she could not discover the man who knew the secret.

“Is he hiding from me?” she wrote.

He doesn't know you exist. He's hiding from everybody.

“How could Calvin be captured, when he didn't make the little knotted things the slaves made?”

I don't know the workings of Black powers, but my guess is that each slave put his own name and all his fears and hatred into the knotwork. They needed the knots in order to lift this part of their souls out of their bodies. Calvin needed no such tool.

“They had to do a Making?” she wrote.

Yes, he thought, that's what it was. A Making. Whether it was the power of Whites or Reds or Blacks, that's what it came down to: connecting yourself to the world around you by Making. Reds made the connection directly– that connection was their Making, the link they forged between man and animal, man and plant, man and stone. Blacks made artifacts whose only purpose was power– poppets and knotted strings. Whites, however, spent their lives making tools that hammered, cut, tore at nature directly, and only in the one area that they called their knack did they truly make that link. Yet they did make that connection. They were not utterly divorced from the natural world. Though Alvin could imagine such men and women, never feeling that deep, innate connection, never seeing the world change by the sheer action of their will in harmony with that part of nature. How lonely they must be, to be able to shape iron no other way than with hammer and anvil, fire and tongs. To make fire only by striking flint on steel. To see the future only by living day to day and watching it unfold one path at a time. To see the past only by reading what others wrote of it, or hearing their tales, and imagining the rest. Would such people even know that nature was as alive and responsive as it is? That hidden powers move in the world– no, not just in the world, they move the world, they are the world at its foundation? How terrible it would be, to know and yet not touch these powers at any point. Only the bravest and wisest would be able to bear it. The rest would have to deny the hidden powers entirely, pretend they did not exist.

And then he realized: That's what the witchcraft laws are. An attempt to shut off the hidden powers and drive them away from the lives of men.

“At least the witchcraft laws admit that hidden powers exist,” wrote Margaret.

With that, Alvin realized the full import of what Verily was attempting. It would be good to strike down the witchery laws, but only if it led to an open acknowledgment that knacks were good or evil only according to the use made of them.

“Verily's strategy is to make the whole idea of witchcraft look foolish.”

Well, it is foolish, thought Alvin. All the images of the devil that he had heard of were childish. What God had created was a great Making that lived of itself and contained lesser beings whom he tried to turn into friends and fellow Makers. The enemy of that was not some pathetic creature giving a few lonely, isolated people the power to curse and cause misery. The enemy of Making was Unmaking, and the Unmaker wore a thousand different masks, depending on the needs of the person he was attempting to deceive.