The False Martyr

by H. Nathan Wilcox

  Chapter 60

  The 42 - 46th Day of Summer

  Cary covered his mouth with his hand to keep his pants from giving him away. He was half-way up the ladder to one of the hollowed hills that served as towers in the lodge. It was pitch black, but there was nowhere for him to go if someone came up the ladder behind him. He’d be trapped in a room with a fifty foot drop as his only escape. His mind struggled, trying to understand what had just happened and what he should do about it. He wondered if Noé would stand up for him and if it even mattered if she did. Certainly, she would never go against her husband, so what would she say, the outsider didn’t beat and rape me, I tripped and fell. No one would ever believe it. And even if he weren’t blamed for that terrible crime, his life was forfeit just for being in her room, for using the order passages, for spying. Juhn had told him not to, had told him to stay out. He’d been warned. He just hadn’t listened.

  Juhn, the name echoed through Cary’s mind. He pounded his head against the rung of the ladder, cursing himself silently for being the dupe. It all came down to Juhn. He saw it now, saw exactly how he’d been manipulated. But why? He knew now what had happened. But it didn’t make any sense. And in that moment, he decided that he had to understand. He was already dead. It was only a matter of time before the Morgs found him. If he was going to die, he would at least know why.

  Listening so hard that he thought his ears might be stretching from his head, Cary lowered himself down the ladder and looked down the halls to either side. They were perfectly dark. There was no sound. The search had moved on. Still, he crept out of the nook and kept his back to the wall as he eased himself silently back toward the center of the lodge, to the answers that were now more important than his life.

  #

  “In here, hurry.” A sliver of light opened in the black hall. Cary burst through it, pants falling to wheezes, legs shaking, heart pounding.

  He had been cut off and pursued so many times that he no longer had any idea where he was in the order passages. The search almost had him. They were behind him, in front of him, everywhere. Every passage he took seemed to have men in robes with lamps. Every room, had a warrior in it, watching the wall, waiting for him to emerge. And it would only take one of those order keepers, one of those warriors seeing him, and it would be over. Once they knew where he was, they’d pin him in. They’d cut off all his options, encircle him, and flush him out. It was only a matter of time.

  So he had leapt through an open door without even thinking about what might be waiting on the other side, had heard an offer of help and taken it without considering who it was from. The door closed behind him, and Cary fought against the bright light in the room. He had been in pitch blackness for an hour, and even the single lamp was like staring into the sun. He sprawled on the floor and tried to recover, to understand what was happening, where he was.

  “You’re safe here,” the voice said. “No one would dare search my room.”

  Juhn, Cary realized. Just the man he was looking for. The light was between them. Cary tried to focus, but he could not keep his eyes open against the burning light. Instead, he judged the order master’s location by his voice and leapt. He hit the desk. Pain burst through his head. He felt his hair growing wet, blood dripping over his ears and nose. He was on his stomach but could not tell which way was up. The floor seemed to be turning. It faded from light to black.

  #

  Cary was on a bed. His hand went to his head. It pounded. A bandage bound it. The room was dim. The single lamp on the desk had been turned down so that only the tiniest possible flame rose from the wick. A plate of food and a pitcher sat on the desk beside the lamp. The room was otherwise empty.

  Rising painfully from the bed – stiff, sore, head throbbing – he thought about what had happened. Juhn had saved him from the mob, had saved his life, but not before setting him up to forfeit that life. Now, he was in the order master’s own room, was safe and protected here. The blood and grime had been scrubbed from him. His filthy clothes had been stripped. Replacements waited on a bench near the bed. Why?

  He walked around the room, unsure what he was looking for but certain that there must be something that would explain why he was here, why this had all happened. When the room proved as empty as it appeared, he dressed then approached the door, listening. He heard nothing. There was no way to tell in the windowless room that was accessed only by a windowless hall, but maybe it was late in the night, maybe the Morgs were sleeping, maybe this was his chance to escape. His hand eased toward the knob of the door. A glance down saved him.

  He froze, hand inches from the knob, and stared at the great black spider that covered the handle. A weaver’s warden. They saw them occasionally in the stables, had lost a prized stallion to one. It had almost cost Cary’s father his job. He had no doubt what their poison could do, knew exactly how they hunted, and he had nearly grabbed it. Slowly, carefully, he stepped from the door, allowing his hand to follow only imperceptibly until it was outside the range of the spider’s famous leap. It was only when his rear hit the desk that he finally relaxed. He put down his trembling hand and gasped. By the Order, how had a weaver’s warden gotten onto Juhn’s doorknob?

  Better than any lock, Cary realized in the next thought. The spider was no happenstance. Juhn had put it there to keep him in the room. He was trapped. This was all part of that bastard’s plan. Juhn had lured him into this room, had placed the spider to keep him there. But why? It was a question that Cary was sick of hearing.

  When Juhn returns, he promised himself, I’ll get my answers. If I have to wring his Morg neck, he’ll tell me.

  Stomach rumbling, he picked at the food. His head still spun, which made it hard to eat, but he tried. No doubt, he would need his strength soon enough. The pitcher held the strong, dark ale the Morgs drank. Cary drained a cup then another. Even though he knew that he should keep his wits, he could not decide why. Dead either way, he told himself as he filled the cup for a third time.

  #

  There was no way for Cary to estimate how long he was in the order master’s room. He had slept several times. Sometimes, when he woke there was more food and ale. He had paced the floor until he thought he might wear through the bricks, had filled the pot in the corner with his piss, had tried to remove the spider from the knob, had even struggled through some of the Book of Valatarian on the desk. Still, the hours? Days? Weeks? drug on with only his thoughts to keep him company.

  “Time to go,” a voice roused Cary from a deep, alcohol-assisted sleep. He woke slowly and rubbed at his face, felt the distant throbbing in his head where he had split his scalp. The cut was scabbed over now, the bandage removed, but it still hurt.

  “So what’s this all about?” Cary asked as he sat up on the bed. Juhn was behind the desk, sitting forward. The spider was poised on the corner between them, facing Cary like a silent warning. He looked to the knob to confirm it was the same creature. The door was clear.

  “You can go whenever you like,” Juhn told him, gesturing to the door. “It is Teaching Day. Everyone is in the temple for the weekly lessons. You can sneak out easily enough and be on your way before they ever know.”

  “Shouldn’t you be delivering the lesson?”

  “I was removed as order master. It was my decision that led to your brutal attack on the Mother of Eselhelt. If I hadn’t given you access to the order passages, all this never would have happened. Officially, they’re still deciding what to do with me. It will be death eventually, but no one has ever heard of anything like this so that has given me some time.”

  “So I have been blamed for what happened to Noé?”

  “As you knew you would. It was almost too brutal, really. If anyone had stopped to think about it, there was little chance you could have done it, especially without her screaming sooner, but no one wanted to stop and think about it, and it wouldn’t have matter anyway. You were always going to be guilty.”

  Cary pushed down his spiking anger
. He’d been preparing himself for this, knew that Juhn would come, that he would have to brag, that revenge was pointless. All he wanted now were answers. All he wanted to know was why. “What happened to her?”

  “She lost the baby,” Juhn answered immediately. He tried to keep his voice steady, his gaze indifferent, but Cary caught the waver in both – so he does feel some remorse for what he’s done. “They tended her wounds and removed her from the lodge. She was ruined by an outsider. The first woman in known history to have laid with a guth – even if it wasn’t by choice – one of only a handful of women to be cast from a lodge in the whole of our history.”

  Cary’s teeth clenched. He knew that his anger would do no good but could not help himself. He bounded from the bed and saw the spider twitch just in time to keep himself from drawing its attention. “You’re a bastard,” he snarled. “She’s just a girl. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “It’s not about right and wrong. Her part has been written in the Tapestry from the moment she was born, from the moment my master saved her from exposure. Without doubt it would have been more merciful to let that baby die, for that tortured life to never exist, but that was not the Order’s plan. The pattern dictated that she be in that room, that she be the shell of a person that would allow Zhurn to use her as he did, that you would find her, that you would try to save her.”

  “That’s why I was spying, wasn’t it?” Cary saw it now. That was the piece he had missed. Why would they have ever needed him to spy? It was always pointless. It had always been a trap.

  “Yes.”

  “It had nothing to do with the Thull?”

  “It had everything to do with the Thull. It was the only way to keep them from siding with Liandria. It was the only way to keep our people from joining yours.”

  That set Cary back. He knew that they had been set up, that Juhn had actively sought to destroy them, but he had thought it was just about them, that Noé had scorned Juhn as a child or some such nonsense. He had never considered that it could be about something more than that. “What . . . what do you mean?”

  Juhn laughed. “This isn’t about you. You are nothing more than a string that we could pull to change the pattern.” He leaned forward, growing serious. “An outsider just raped and beat not only a Morg woman, but the Mother of an ancient lodge. He caused her unborn daughter to miscarry. Do you think the punishment for that would stop with you? Zhurn called immediately for revenge on the Liandrin people who allowed such a monster to infiltrate the Fells under the guise of negotiation. The other lodges joined him immediately. Even Nyel turned on you. She had no choice. Even the Lost Sons would not do what you had done.”

  “And the ambassador?”

  “You’ll see what’s left of him and his entourage when you leave.”

  Cary felt his stomach turning. He thought he might throw up. By the Order, he had ruined everything. He had been manipulated, but they had been his decisions. In the end, it had been him thinking with his cock. If he had only stayed in the wall, had only left her alone . . . .

  “It was never your choice,” Juhn said as if reading his mind. “You were positioned every bit as much as Noé. Do you think that your childhood was an accident? An only boy with his four aunts.” Cary retracted at that. He didn’t have any aunts that he knew of. “Your mother slept with many men in that estate,” Juhn clarified, “but almost never with your father. He preferred her daughters, and your real mother was one of them. She died giving birth to you, your father’s only child. And the woman you knew as mother hated him for it, hated her daughters for letting him, hated you because you were never hers to start with. You felt the same way about them, about all of them but one.”

  Allysa, Cary thought. The only one younger than him. Sweet and kind and beautiful. He could almost accept what happened in the mornings when his mother went to work in the kitchens and his father came to get one of his older ‘sisters’ to take her place. They had always hated him for it, were cruel to him as if it were his fault. And Cary had hated them for going. They were nothing but whores. Everyone knew that they gave themselves to any man who asked. Every man in the stables, the kitchens, the whole damn estate had been with one of them. Why shouldn’t their father have a piece as well?

  Then there was Allysa. She was just a girl, a year younger, barely twelve. She was Cary’s best friend. They shared everything, slept next to each other, talked deep into the night, joked and laughed and played. The only time his father ever hit him was when he came to get her in the dark of the morning. Cary had argued, had tried to protect her, had tried to pry her from his father’s hands. A backhand blow had ended the rebellion, a foot to the gut made sure it did not reoccur. And she had gone willingly. She hadn’t screamed or fought or called for help. She had gone with him, leaving Cary retching and gasping and listening to her terrible, muffled crying.

  That night had ruined everything. Allysa was never the same. And neither was Cary. He had not been able to get over the fact that she had wanted to be with their father, that she was a whore just like their sisters. He had barely been able to look at his father, barely been able to work in the stables for seeing him smiling the next day, for knowing what he had done. And he had blamed Allysa, had pushed her away, refused to talk to her, had never again defended her when their father came to get her. Soon there were other boys, just like her sisters. They would brag about what they had done to her and beat Cary bloody when he tried to stop them. Soon enough, he stopped trying. And she just spiraled down until there was no farther to fall.

  Everyone knew what the duke’s youngest son liked to do with the servant girl’s he bedded. Everyone knew where the bruises came from. But he was the son of a duke, ward of the King. There was nothing that any of them could do but warn their daughters away from his smooth talk and sparkling gifts. Allysa knew it too, but that didn’t stop her. Cary found her after. She’d begged him not to tell, had defended her lover – the man who had whipped her until she bled, the man who had tied her to a bed and left her for dead – had told him to leave, to forget her.

  Cary had listened. He ran away and joined the royal couriers that very day. He left her. He escaped, but he never forgot. And the duke son spent the next six months torturing her – the only girl stupid enough to keep coming back. In the end, he killed her. He strangled her and left her body to rot in the cottage where he’d been keeping her. She was sixteen and pregnant.

  “So you see,” Juhn disturbed Cary from the worst memory of his life. “We prepared you just as we did Noé. We knew exactly how you would react when you saw Zhurn beating her. We knew because we made sure you had felt it all before, made sure that the thing you wanted most in their entire world was to save her, to save a girl just like Allysa.”

  “You . . . you . . . how . . .?” Cary could not get the words out. He fell to the bed, head in his hands, eyes stinging, breaths ragged. He could only see Allysa tied to that bed. Tiny and fragile, just a girl, covered with lashes, crying, and begging. “You did it,” he finally managed as Juhn’s words came together. “You killed her, so that I would ruin these negotiations, so that the invaders would win.”

  “Yes,” Juhn whispered, finally seeming to feel the weight of his crime. “My master and the other members of the five started it. I made sure the pattern was completed.”

  Cary forgot about the spider. He leapt from the bed, hand stretched toward the neck the order keeper. Juhn was bigger than him, and Cary could barely see him for the tears standing in his eyes, but he didn’t care. He was going to kill him. If it was the last thing he ever did, Juhn would die.

  The spider wasn’t there. Cary barely noticed as he lunged forward expecting a hairy body the size of his hand to spring toward him. Instead, he saw Juhn raise a knife. Sparkling and distorted through his tears, the blade caught the light of the lamp before Juhn drove it into his own chest. Cary stopped, caught between the shock of what had happened and a desire to grab the knife and stab the bastard again. In the end, h
e just stood, shaking, overwhelmed by memories and horrors, by the knowledge that they had all been planned, that the Order that was supposed to protect them had been used to destroy them.

  “Go,” Juhn sputtered. He coughed blood. It stained his teeth and ran down his chin. “Your part in the Tapestry is not complete. You can still have what you want most. Remember,” he coughed again, “remember that. Maintain the pattern by being the man your sister needed.” The order master fell to the desk, shuttered, and was still. In the distance, bells rang. The weekly lessons were complete. The Morgs would be returning to their lives. Cary didn’t have much time. He wiped his eyes and ran.

  Chapter 61

  The 46th Day of Summer

  Cary eased open the door that led from the order passages to the main halls of the lodge. Pivoting in, it came open just far enough for him to peek out. The bells had stopped ringing almost before he was out of Juhn room. He had sprinted through the dark passages, racking his brain to remember the turns that would bring him to this spot. Still, there had been a missed turn, a moment of backtracking, minutes lost to scrabbling about in the dark. He tried to calculate how long it would take the men to walk from the temple in the center of the lodge to their quarters here on the southern edge, but it didn’t matter in the end. His only chance was to go now.

  The hall to his right was clear. Sanded wooden walls, floor, and ceiling stretched for hundreds of paces with nothing more than the periodic lamps to disturb them. It was almost dizzying to look down that hall, like falling into a hole that never ends. The other side was just as empty, but it ended in the enormous dining hall twenty paces away. Anything could be waiting there, and he’d have to pass it to get to the only exit from the lodge he knew. Now or never, he told himself. He took a deep breath and ran.