Pacze Moj, page 2
Daniel McAlister sucked in air.
As his young siblings watched from their imaginary place of safety, Esmerelda dragged him by the hand towards the hut door. The old woman sobbed. When he put up a last stand against the open doorway, Esmerelda smacked his head against the frame until his knees wobbled and he could no longer stand on his own. She would kill him on the altar as planned, but he needn’t be fully aware while she brought him there.
She shut the door behind them.
They went across the barley fields hand-in-hand, Esmerelda pulling, Daniel following numbly. In the daytime, they might have been mistaken for a mother and son; but tonight’s full moon was deceitful. It gave little light and excellent cover.
Somewhere far away within the darkness Veronica howled and Esmerelda imagined what a scene she must be making. How soon, she wondered, would it end, would the McAlisters and Piersons return to their huts, assess their losses and realize that one of their offspring was missing. Would they pursue? It would make no difference, but Esmerelda was fascinated by commoner psychology. The McAlisters would surely mourn—how much? The Piersons would feel empathy—how sincere? She imagined the burden a commoner would feel in her place, the weight bearing down on her soul while she dragged an innocent boy away from his family and
toward his death.
It was wonderfully theoretical.
Her own soul was light, steps nimble. As she entered into the further security of the forest, she rejoiced at the feel of the wind against her face, filling her cloak.
Her nerves slackened. “Howl,” she instructed the boy trudging behind her, “Howl, Daniel McAlister!” He did. Quietly, as if to himself. And she howled, too. Louder, to the trees and the sky and the moon. They howled together, each in his own way to his own audience, two kindred lunatics escaping from some unseen asylum until one howl pierced another was itself pierced by: three short clear blows of a horn—and, just as suddenly, Esmerelda was flat on the damp ground, knees in the mud, hand across Daniel’s open biting mouth, ears and brain trying desperately to locate the source of the royal horn.
She crawled forward and listened. The blows came again. From the—she swung her face to orient by the stars—west. Were they closer or further than the first time? She settled against an upturned boulder. Daniel’s teeth drew blood. She flinched, withdrew her hand, Daniel yelled “Help,” she felt around for a pine cone and stuffed it into his mouth. The horn sounded for a third time. It was neither nearer nor further. She ripped off a piece of cloak and tied it round Daniel’s head like a gag. They must be travelling parallel, she decided. The altar was to the east, so she still had a clear a line. Another piece of cloak torn off, she rolled Daniel onto his stomach and gathered his hands on his back, keeping him in place with her knee, and tied his wrists together. His screams continued: muffled. The distinct sound of an arquebus echoed through the forest and around her head, followed by more blasts on the horn. Perhaps they were getting closer.
She got to her feet, pulling Daniel up behind her as she pressed east toward the altar. A mile to go—two, at most. But now the boy was dragging his feet, his rawing toes hitting against every root and stone. She should have put shoes on him. She shouldn’t have howled. She’d been unthinking and indiscreet. She was no better than a commoner. She was dragging Daniel like a sack, one hand shielding her face from the whipping branches, the other holding him by the clothes and pulling, willing him on. With the horn a constant companion, a second—three-note—heartbeat.
A flash: a bird passed overhead: a white hawk with golden stripes refracting moonbeams: Crooked Nose’s familiar. Esmerelda felt a measure of relief. It meant she was being protected. She sped up. A branch stung her below the eye. The bird was lighting the way underfoot. Her ankles navigated between the rocky ground, landing soles on softer needles.
Rocks: she was getting closer to the altar-ground.
Another arquebus went off.
They were getting closer, too. Daniel snagged on a branch. She stopped and pulled him loose. The pink whites of his eyes bore into her. Forward, she pushed on. She cursed her luck and spat out the thick saliva building up on the surface of her tongue. How did they find her—the witchhunters? Why were they here? There was no time now for deliberations. Focus, she told herself, focus on the future.
Minute-by-minute the ground grew craggier. Her ankles wavered, slipped. The rocks became wider and wet. Daniel followed more smoothly but her own feet slid on the slick surfaces. Then, without warning and all at once, the light was gone: the hawk shrilled and cut away into the sky; the trees ended, her vision expanded to contain a small clearing, a perfect circle of thirty-three round stones and a granite slab elevated on several freshly-felled trunks.
She burst into the stone circle and fell to her knees.
Seven nights ago, to the hour, she and Veronica and Crooked Nose had found this spot and constructed the sacrificial plot for just this occasion. Now their work was complete and hers was coming to its end.
Daniel had tumbled in with her. He was lying beside her, on his side, pine cone hanging loosely from his mouth, wrists coming unbound. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him onto the altar—head over chest over legs over bloody scraps of feet. The royal horn blared one, two, three, four times. They were closing in. But she still had time. She punched Daniel in the stomach to silence his voice and pulled the stone dagger out from under her belt. Dagger held between her teeth, she tore open his shirt. His glistening chest was hairless and smooth. He was still very much a boy.
The place, the words, the signature, the act. That was the order. She was in the place. Now she started reciting the words: wretched, ugly sounds like those of a woman gargling her own teeth. Daniel stirred. A large bump had grown where Esmerelda had slammed his forehead against the door frame. She stared at it as she spoke the words. Underneath a quivering brow Daniel’s pupils dilated. They rolled back, then forward, then settled on her face like a pair of sharpened magnets. Esmerelda stared back but only noticed, not felt. It was the boy’s last grasp at life, the pathetic coaxing of mercy. She neared the end of her incantation. The royal horn sounded five times. Deep in the woods, a hound barked. “Agenrath,” she finished. To mercy, she was immune.
Human voices joined the barking hounds. Daniel closed his eyes. The signature. Esmerelda picked up the stone dagger and pressed the tip against Daniel’s skin—against his warm belly. The signature: a snaking symbol. She carved it lovely and soft. Blood poured out of the lines and flowed down Daniel’s sides. He had little strength left, but, summoning it all, he bit down on the pine cone until its juices exploded against the sides of his mouth and struck out at the witch, grabbing her by the throat just as she had grabbed him.
Esmerelda gasped.
He squeezed.
The dagger dropped onto his body.
“There!” A man’s voice mixed with the growling of rabid, angry dogs and rebounded between the trees. “Fire!” A volley of arquebus shots exploded against the trees on the other side of the clearing.
Esmerelda snarled. Daniel’s power wavered. She grabbed his hand and undid the long fingers held round her throat. Shadows flickered all around her. She outstretched his arm as another wave of shots thundered across the clearing—some connecting against her body, leaving holes in her clothes, metal melting away at the touch of her skin. Idiot soldiers firing insignificant bullets. There could be no witchhunter among them. Then: she locked Daniel’s elbow and, with one strike of her other palm, broke his arm. The bone cracked. The arm fell. The boy screamed into the pine cone.
“Alive!”
Two royal soldiers erupted onto the clearing.
Esmerelda picked up the stone dagger and raised it over her head.
The act.
The soldiers broke into the stone circle. One lunged; the other inverted his arquebus and, running, swung it back in a swooshing violent arc.
She closed her eyes and brought the dagger down—hard!—into Daniel’s chest.
He spasmed.
The lunging soldier flew through the spray of the boy’s young blood and his shoulder crunched against Esmerelda’s body.
She felt his heaviness descend on top of her.
On the altar, the dagger stuck deep in Daniel McAlister’s dead chest.
The second soldier planted his boot, reversed the arc of his inverted arquebus and brought the butt-end of the rifle cracking into Esmerelda’s martyr’s skull.
Consciousness snapped.
Chapter III
Gremius Orelius paced in full ceremonial battle dress across the High Council room on the seventeeth floor of the Imperial Castle. His spaulders clanked rhythmically against the silver-and-gold of a flawlessly-polished breastplate adorned with the intricately unmistakable insignia of the King’s Witchhunter General: a green spearhead-leafed Demssous tree.
Although pacing here had become a well-worn ritual, an escape from the paperwork and busybodies below, it still sometimes made Gremius pause and reflect. The floor he walked on was the uppermost in all the realm open to mere mortals. Indeed, via a royal decree that he himself had endorsed, no other building or permanent structure in the kingdom could be taller than thirteen floors. Here in the Imperial Castle only High Council members were allowed past the twelfth. As for the three floors above the seventeenth: they were the private quarters of the King. No one had set foot in them in at least a thousand years.
As he paced, Gremius mused that his entire life had been a long climb from the low wooden hut in which he was born up through the ranks of the Royal service and to—well, on this particular day he was fifty-nine, still young for his position, and only three weeks shy of celebrating a decade of loyal and effective service. He had dedicated his entire adult life to the exposure, capture and execution of witches and he was proud of his achievements: thirty-seven witches captured, thirty-seven burned. It was the best rate since the time of Maliphus Prefectus (“King keep his soul close,” he whispered.)
But as Gremius turned on his heel and his boots dug into the crimson carpet before taking him obediently to the window overlooking Capital Square, he couldn’t help but feel that the armor, for all its aesthetic qualities, was uncomfortable. Had the great Maliphus Prefectus worn such armor? Plainly not. He had made a point to study the history. But times and tastes change and people always demand innovation and spectacle. Far below, they were already milling around the burning stake. His first burning, he remembered with some nostalgia, had been conducted at noon. Noon was the traditional time. Now, the sun was already on its descent and final preparations were still ongoing. Today’s burning was to take place at sunset, the first of its kind. The reason: flames, as he’d had it explained to him numerous times, would look more dramatic at night. There was also a new timber (“Or was it an alchemical?” he second-guessed) that would turn the fire blue and purple. Yet the fact remained: change was suspect; change made him uneasy.
He leaned against the windowsill and watched the crowd form. Although his sword dug into his side, he refused to straighten. He wouldn’t let the sword have that satisfaction. Vaunted and much-bejeweled ivory Witchkiller. It was a coarse name, he thought; not to mention that Witchkiller had never touched a witch, let alone put one to death. The only way to kill a witch was by burning. Even schoolchildren knew that. Schoolchildren and most ordinary adults didn’t know that the fire had to be kindled using specific types of wood in careful proportions, or that it was the fumes that actually killed the witch, not the heat; but that knowledge wasn’t necessary for the sword to be pure nonsense. The armor and insignia he could accept—the Demssous tree was the key ingredient to a successful burning, the only one that couldn’t be substituted by another—but he hated the sword. He made a mental note to again bring up the issue with the Council or, if possible, the King himself.
“Any being more than a thousand years old must have some feeling for history and tradition,” he thought wishfully aloud, albeit quietly and out a seventeenth story window.
He straightened.
The sword had won, for now. But he would outlast it. Of that he was certain. Tomorrow morning he would wake up having presided successfully over thirty-eight burnings. After forty he would force his catchet upon the High Council. Yes, he concluded, it was best to wait until after the fortieth. He patted the sword like a rabbit before a skinning. Yet there was an advantage to the sharp but subsisting pain in his side: it cut short his internal ruminations, which were growing more frequent with age. The secret to success, as he’d learned it, was to keep one’s attention always on where it was needed most—the present.
As he strode with renewed purpose across the empty Council chambers, that secret gelled with another: trust breeds incompetence. The sun was edging ever-so closer to the horizon and he still had hadn’t heard from Cudgel Thecker. Distrust compelled him down the long, winding stairs toward the dungeons, where his second-in-command was most likely dotting the proverbial eyes and drinking green tea.
Chapter IV
Cudgel Thecker squinted. His eyes were still adjusting to the dungeon gloom. He was out of breath, but proud of having reached the dungeon from—wait, where exactly did he reach the dungeon from? No matter. He’d done it quickly, maybe in record time. And good, too: that shrew (He couldn’t remember her name: “Matilda, Manila, Manaka? Something with an M.”) had failed to wake him this morning. She promised she’d have him up on his feet by two hours after dawn. He finally awoke at noon with an eyeful of sunlight and head full of groggy panic as he slid into last night’s clothes and rushed out to the castle. If he hadn’t made it in time, Gremius would have demanded his hide. On the other hand, it wasn’t entirely luck. Cudgel Thecker had made a decent career as assistant to the Witchhunter General by doing the bare minimum almost always just in the nick of time. Getting by was a talent, and he had it.
“The old guy would trust me with his own daughter,” Cudgel chuckled while patting down his shirt looking for the little booklet—a fly buzzed by, he swiped at it: unsuccessfully; there was still plenty of time, he just needed the booklet and to assemble the burning ingredients and then go into the catacombs and prepare the prisoner. He patted the pocket again. It was a brown leather-bound book like a prayer book. The fly buzzed around his head. “Little bugger!” he muttered. But the pocket was empty.
He scratched his head.
He checked his pants, then his coat on the floor, then the rest of the floor, a glance at the tables, the chairs: nothing. He must have left it at M-whatever’s apartment. “Not to worry,” he told himself, there was still plenty of time, he just needed to go back, find the book, come back, mix the ingredients and get the prisoner. Easy as pie. He grabbed his coat and threw it over his shoulders.
The fly settled on his eyebrow.
Its little legs tickled.
“Aha!”
And Cudgel smacked himself in the head. Victory? He took his hand from his temples and prepared to look at the black smudge that seconds ago was an annoying winged insect. But there was just his own skin. And buzzing again, which he swore resembled laughter.
He smacked himself in the head a second time—the goal being not to kill a fly, but an idea. There was no going back to any M-whatever’s because he didn’t remember where M-whatever lived. She was probably still snoring, too, the hussy. He cursed at her for sleeping. Then for not waking him up, then for not even reminding him to pass out with his little brown booklet in-hand, ready for a quick escape in the morning. Women truly are heartless, thoughtless—
“Cudgel Thecker.”
He jumped at the sound of Gremius’ voice.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” Gremius said as he followed his own voice into the room. “The man who can reaffirm my confident hope that preparations are going to plan and carefully ahead of schedule. Yes?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, sir. I am nearly done,” Cudgel Thecker lied through his teeth.
“Excellent. It’s such a relief from my countless administrative headaches to know I can always rely on at least one man in this dreadful city,” Gremius lied through his.
Both men smiled.
Was it Apricot lane, Cudgel mused behind his fake smile, or Peach Pit Avenue, or maybe Apricot Pit, or else a vegetable of some sort—it was almost certainly a food: Cucumber Crescent? No, definitely not. It also wasn’t a carrot. No one would name anything after a carrot. Potato? Maybe. The sound was familiar. Tomato? Tomato! He nearly jumped for joy. Big fat red Tomato Heights. How obvious. M-whatever had been a redhead. Still was a redhead. And would be a redhead at least until he showed up and shaved off all her snoring unreliable hair. He was already planning the fastest route to Tomato Heights.
