by Unknown
He was not an impressive figure, despite the wooden symbol of Iomedae that bounced on his chest. His eyes bulged, and his nose and mouth drooped downward, accentuating the weakness of his chin. Although he wore an ascetic’s tonsure, he had not kept it clean; stubble flecked his scalp. Blinking at us, he resembled a surprised and irresolute tadpole.
I thought he looked harmless, if foolish. My companions did not. The Mendevians drew back as if confronted by a spitting cobra; the Kellid woman growled.
“What’s wrong?” I asked Adrun.
“He’s one of Hulrun’s,” came the muttered answer. “Look at his symbol.”
It was Iomedae’s radiant sword… but different from the one I’d worn as her champion. Painted flames licked at the blade’s tip, evoking a fresh-lit pyre around a stake.
The village priest’s chasuble was unusual as well. Instead of a golden border about the edges, as most of Iomedae’s faithful preferred, his was trimmed in fiery orange.
He’s a Burner, I thought, so startled that I nearly blurted it aloud. I had heard of the Burners, of course—all Iomedaeans had, usually in tones of stark disapproval—but I had never expected to meet one, even though I knew full well that Kenabres was the center of their heresy.
“The Burners are a heresy, but understandably popular in a land at war with the Abyss itself.”
Following the teachings of Elder Prelate Hulrun, the Burners made it their mission to extirpate any hint of demonic taint, usually by burning the accused at the stake. (Should the victim turn out to actually be a demon, as evidenced by its resistance to flame, additional methods were employed.) I envied their certainty at times, even as I wondered whether such fanaticism could ever truly serve Iomedae’s principles. Rumor had it that they were none too scrupulous about verifying accusations of demon-worship, nor about using torture to wrest the truths they wanted to hear from the mouths of the condemned.
They called themselves Inquisitors. Everyone else knew them as Burners. In Cheliax, they were considered heretics and a disgrace to the Inheritor’s name. Here, however, they held considerable power. It was because of the Burners that Kenabres had no cats and was filled with rat-traps. The people weren’t starving, as I had first assumed. The Burners, claiming demons would spy on them through the eyes of verminous familiars, had killed all the animals they could catch.
They’d kill people just as readily, given provocation.
“What—who are you?” The priest glanced from each of us to the next, rubbing his holy symbol. “What brings you here?”
“My name is Ederras,” I said. “I have come on General Dyre’s orders to investigate your wardstone. We heard it might be failing.”
The priest nodded vigorously. “It is so. The Worldwound’s chaos has crept into Valas’s Gift. Many of our people have already given in to the demons’ lies. They must be purified by flame.”
“Naturally,” Jelani muttered. “It’s always about the burning, isn’t it?” The priest, thankfully, didn’t hear.
“I will pass judgment on them, not you,” I said, drawing on all my Chelish hauteur. If I had still been in Iomedae’s graces, I would have outranked this village priest; as it was, I had no real authority over him. I didn’t know whether General Dyre held rank over Hulrun, either. If not, I had no right to interfere with the Burner’s justice.
But the bluff, and the nine well-armed soldiers behind me, seemed to work. The priest stepped back, clutching at his symbol. “Of course, my lord. I would never stand in the way of the law. Never. But you will see, they are tainted. They have lain with demons and given up their souls, and there is no question what must be done with them. They must go to the flames.”
Chapter Three: Justice
The first of the Burner’s prisoners was a pregnant woman, though I would have thought her long past her childbearing years. She wasn’t a day under fifty, and might easily have been ten years older.
Those years were heavy on her, and the short, dirty shift she wore did nothing to conceal them. Her shoulders were soft and spotted brown; her legs were puffed and lumpy as badly kneaded dough. The weight of a lifetime’s grief dragged down her mouth. I couldn’t imagine her as a young woman, or a smiling one.
She hardly looked like a threat, but that only made me warier. Fiends loved to prey on the vulnerable. Children and dotards were easily deceived, and strong men often hesitated before striking such helpless-seeming foes—a fatal mistake against the possessed.
This woman didn’t seem possessed, but without Iomedae’s magic I couldn’t be sure. The Burner regarded her as if she was, or worse. Naked hatred contorted his face; his lips skinned back in an unconscious snarl.
“A fortnight ago,” he said, “this woman ran from the village. We found her lying by the wardstone, naked and covered in blood. There was a dead boar with her, painted with sigils in ash. She’d rutted with it and cut its throat, sacrificing to the demon lords so they’d give her a child. A fortnight ago she was a barren widow. Now she’s fat with hellspawn. For the sake of us all, you must give her to the flames.”
“Do you have a name?” I asked her.
She looked up slowly. The emptiness in her face receded, and a semblance of life returned—but it was a halting, blasted kind of life. I no longer doubted that she’d seen demons; the question now was why.
“Ledsa,” she croaked.
“Ledsa. Why were you out by the wardstone?”
“Have you children?”
“No.”
“Then you cannot understand.” Pain gave her voice a ragged edge. “Demons took my Yulin. She was six. They took my husbands, too, one by one over the years, but no man’s death ever grieved me like my daughter’s. I was old when I had her, and too old to bear another when she died. Too old to do anything but mourn.
“I prayed to Iomedae for a crusader to bring her back. When that failed I prayed to Pharasma to show me that her soul was at peace. The gods wouldn’t answer. I knew they didn’t care. I knew my daughter was in torment.
“I went to the wardstone.” A flash of defiance crossed her face under the disheveled gray hair. “Yes, I went. I heard the demons singing. They crooned to me. They said they had her soul… but they could give it back. Bear a child for them, they said, and it would be my daughter clothed in new flesh. Yulin, alive again.”
“She admits her guilt!” the Burner said triumphantly. “Put her to the stake.”
“Is that necessary?” Adrun asked. “She has admitted to a grievous wrong, and the fiend-blooded are bent toward evil. But I have known some who rose above their blood, and if this woman acted out of love… might she not be able to guide her own child toward goodness? I’m sure the demons’ promises were lies; if they had the power to rebirth a human soul, which I doubt, it would have been as a twisted and broken thing. Still… that only proves she was blinded by love. Can we not show mercy?”
The Burner bristled at Adrun. “You’re a traitor to your Queen and cause.”
“Speak out of turn again and I’ll have you whipped,” I said. The Burner subsided, and I turned back to Ledsa. “You wanted a child, and you were too old to bear one, that I understand. But why not take in an orphan?” Kenabres had few children, but many of those had lost their parents to the Worldwound’s war. Valas’s Gift likely had orphans too. Even if it didn’t, Kenabres was only a few days away. A woman determined enough to sacrifice to demons could surely have made that journey for a child.
She recoiled as if I’d suggested taking a serpent to her breast. “Why would I want them?”
A short silence fell. Then Adrun sighed. “Why, indeed.”
“Hang her,” I told the soldiers. “Burn the body.”
“I should have known better than to think someone who would risk all Mendev for her grief could be saved,” Adrun murmured after the soldiers had gone. “There was no love left in that woman’s heart. Only poison. I’m sorry I asked.”
“Never be sorry you asked,” I said. “If the gods grant you the luxu
ry of time to make sure, take it. Always take it. The grave is in no hurry.”
Adrun looked at me strangely, but before he could say whatever was on his mind, the soldiers returned with the next prisoner.
He was mad. Every prisoner brought in after that was mad; Ledsa was the only one who still had her wits. The others giggled, or warbled nonsense songs, or shrieked at monsters only they could see. The village headman, a gaunt-cheeked and humorless old man, patted and cooed to our boots as if they were kittens. His wife plucked the hairs from her head one by one, put them to her lips, and puffed them at each of us with a cackle of delight.
They were all peaceful, even merry. That surprised me until the Burner explained that the prisoners we saw were only a fraction of those afflicted. He’d already burned the violent ones.
“They had succumbed to demons,” he said. “It had to be done.”
“There are no easy answers. I know this better than most.”
I would have burned him too for that, but I didn’t know if he was wrong. None of the afflicted souls could tell us what had befallen them. Adrun and Jelani examined them, and I did the same, but we found no answers. Several were feverish, and some trembled with palsy, but others were cool and steady. The only unifying sign was that all were pained by light. They cringed from the smoky torches indoors; the weak daylight outside made them cover their heads and weep in agony.
“It’s the wrong season for accidental poisoning,” Adrun said after the last prisoner had been examined. “In spring people might pick devilweed or mitepurse by accident; the plants can be easy to mistake when they’re young. But never this late in the year. Anyway, if that were the cause, I’d expect to see people struck down after eating from the same pot. These victims came from all across the village. Some were afflicted in houses where other people were spared.”
“I won’t say it wasn’t demons’ work,” Jelani said, “but it isn’t a spell. There’s no enchantment on any of these people.”
The mystery was not to be solved that night. I posted a guard to ensure the prisoners didn’t hurt themselves or each other, then went out to stand first watch. I walked the walls of Valas’s Gift, but other than Jelani, who shared my watch, I saw no one abroad.
The aurora was gone with summer from the Crown of the World, but there was no tranquility in Mendev’s night. Past the wardstones, the sky flickered red; lightning stabbed up from the Worldwound into the clouds, as if it meant to attack the heavens as well as us earthbound mortals.
Perhaps it did. I watched it, thinking about human frailty and human folly, until the midnight bell ended my shift. I found no answers in my thoughts.
In the morning, however, we learned the cause.
“It’s the grain,” Persil told us, red-cheeked from the cold. He’d gone out early to requisition some of the village’s wheat for our porridge, hoping to save our own stores for later. While picking through the grain to get rid of loose stones, he saw that several of the kernels were bloated and split, with purplish fungus inside.
He held them out in a trembling palm. “It’s gone rotten. Same as the ones I brewed up by accident—the ones that killed all those people back home. I’ll never forget it.”
“Did those victims show the same symptoms?” Adrun asked.
Persil shrugged uncomfortably. “Might’ve. I thought they were just silly drunk. Then they started dying, and I got hauled off to the dungeon. Never saw what became of the others.”
“There shouldn’t be any blight here.” Adrun frowned. “Valas’s Gift prevents it.”
“Maybe not, if the wardstone is failing,” I said.
“This village has been blessed since the Second Crusade.”
“Blessed or not, its granary has been blighted. Can you purify the grain?”
“Some,” Adrun admitted. “I’d have to spend a fortnight to do it all. My prayers are limited, and there’s a lot of grain.”
“We can’t spare you that long.” Nor could I leave the granaries to be purified upon our return, since I didn’t know if we would return. If we all died out by the Worldwound, the villagers might decide madness was preferable to starvation and eat the rotten grain—or sell it to unsuspecting travelers and use the money to buy themselves safe food. Men, even good men, could easily do such things rather than watch their families starve.
“What about you?” I asked the Burner.
He cast his eyes down uncomfortably. “I have not the privilege of… of magic.”
I grunted, unsurprised. There had been a true priest in Valas’s Gift, but the other villagers told me that she was among the first victims sent to the Burner’s stake. She’d been violently deranged by the poisoned grain, they all agreed, but I wondered whether the Burner hadn’t also wanted, in some small corner of his soul, to get rid of the only voice that might have countered his fanaticism. Men’s motives were often shaded by such thoughts.
That didn’t answer the problem of the grain, though. If neither Adrun nor the Burner could cleanse it, I saw only one solution.
“Burn it,” I said. “Adrun, cleanse what you can. We’ll fire the rest when we go.”
“My lord, are you sure?”
“Yes,” I lied.
It was an ugly choice. Valas’s Gift was a breadbasket for Kenabres and other settlements, which needed its blessed fertility to make up their own shortfalls. Without it, all those towns would depend entirely on what Queen Galfrey could spare—and, after a hundred years of war with no victory in sight, that wasn’t much.
Burning the grain would force the people of Valas’s Gift to winter as paupers in Kenabres, where they’d likely be resented for causing the hunger they couldn’t help. Still, I saw no better choice. The villagers would have a hard winter, but life by the Worldwound was always hard. They would survive, and in the spring the fields and the blessed font would be waiting for their return.
So I hoped. But I was only human, and fallible. My doubts stayed with me as we marched from the village, a pillar of smoke at our backs.
We traveled without a guide. Past the tree line, northern Mendev was a vast and featureless land, deceptive in its emptiness; a man could easily wander a hundred miles wide of his mark and never realize it until he was dying on the tundra, days from the nearest living person.
But the wardstone of Valas’s Gift was its own landmark, and from the moment we left the taiga we could see it stark on the horizon. It slanted slightly; despite the magics that anchored it and its own considerable weight, the constant wind on the tundra had pushed it to one side. In another hundred years, if the war for the Worldwound still wore on, it might topple on its own.
Ten miles from the wardstone, I sent out scouts. Whatever had damaged the wardstone might have left some clues behind, and I wanted to find them before we stumbled blind into danger. Jelani enspelled the scouts to resist the chill, laughing into her scarf as she did.
“I learned this spell for the desert,” she said. “Never thought to use it in the cold.”
“I don’t think any of us ever thought to be here,” one of the scouts replied. He shouldered a lighter pack, leaving the bulk of his equipment with us, and trotted off to the west. A moment later, the other split east. The rest of us continued toward the wardstone.
We had scarcely gone two miles before the first scout returned. His eyes were wild with terror above his scarf.
“Come,” he said. “I’ve found something.”
Chapter Four: The Stone
“Jelani, Adrun, with me,” I said. “The rest of you, keep going.” Whatever the scout had found had terrified the man, and I didn’t want his panic spreading to the others.
“Found tracks,” the scout said when we were out of the others’ earshot. “Followed them.” He thrust a hand forward, jerkily, as if to hurl the memory away.
I was about to ask how he had spotted tracks on the tundra when I saw them myself: a line of booted prints sunk deep into the ground, as though it were summer’s soggy marshland instead of the ro
ck-hard terrain of late fall. The earth was slimy and discolored in those prints; the very dirt and ice seemed to have rotted at the touch of whoever had passed there.
“Seen that kind of thing around the Worldwound,” the scout said. “Never on this side.”
The bootprints tattooed a dark line back to the wardstone. Nearer us, they went over a low, rocky rise and into a shallow cleft. I followed, uneasy. Adrun and Jelani were watchful at my sides; the scout lagged fearful behind.
In the cleft we found the man who had made those prints. He’d died badly. Deep gouges tore through the back of his sheepskin coat. Green-black rivulets leaked from the wounds; the stench of sickness pervaded the area despite the wind and chill. I could see brown bone under the flapping tatters of the man’s coat; the skin and muscle was rotted away entirely.
He’d survived his poisoned wounds long enough to get this far, though, and I didn’t think they’d killed him. Blisters covered his mouth in a frozen pink froth. His throat had collapsed, eaten away from the inside; its long red track vanished into his sternum. The soft part of his jaw was gone, too, and a shaggy beard of red ice spilled across his chest.
An empty waterskin lay near his hand. It bore the same mark as the ones we’d received in Kenabres.
“Holy water,” Jelani said, reaching the same realization that I had. “He was already dead—or rather, undead. He killed himself by drinking holy water.”
“Maybe he thought it could flush out the poison from whatever got him in the back,” Adrun said. “Maybe it would have, if the poison hadn’t spread.”
I left them to their speculations and rummaged through the dead man’s kit. He didn’t have much. A few blankets, some lamp oil, a good sheepskin hat. Most of it was standard-issue, like ours. He’d been a soldier, or stolen from one—and, like many crusaders, he had a sizable collection of warding amulets. I picked them up as an afterthought. They didn’t take much space, and he might have a sweetheart or an orphan back in Kenabres who’d want them.
We returned to the company in silence. The others watched us apprehensively, aware that something had gone wrong without knowing what. A gloomy mood fell over the camp, and it deepened when the other scout failed to come back. No one mentioned it, but I knew no one expected to see him again.