Hammer and Bolter 16

by Christian Dunn

  A fortnight later, there was a red-paint warning on Shorea’s door.

  Yriel didn’t knock. Her coins would have to wait, she thought. She left her basket of fresh laundry on the step and returned home.

  She spent much of the following week staring into the mirror. She felt unsettled and she wasn’t sure why, but the princess in the glass offered Yriel reassurance. Perhaps this is just how things were meant to be, the princess said.

  Yes. Yes, I’m sure that’s right, she thought. So, why should I feel guilty?

  At the funeral, this time, she found the courage to step forward and to take Jaresh’s hand. She stammered something about how he shouldn’t be so sad, the Emperor had a plan for everyone and this was simply his plan for Shorea. He clung to her like a drowning man and, even as she shared his tears, Yriel’s heart sang.

  The next morning, outside the temple, she heard Jaresh’s name whispered and looked for him but didn’t find him. She saw that some of his friends were standing in a group, murmuring and shaking their heads in despondence.

  She mouthed her way through the first of the morning’s hymns. Her throat was dry and her head pounded with an anxious prayer. She told herself she was being paranoid, but still she held her breath as the village notices were read out.

  Yriel ran home with tears streaming from her eyes. It was all she could do to hold her scream inside her breast until she was alone inside her cabin.

  Of course, she went straight to the mirror.

  She wanted to know how last night’s tragedy could have happened. Hadn’t she been promised – didn’t she deserve – better? She felt betrayed.

  She kept thinking about Jaresh, as the fishermen must have found him. His broken body dashed on a jagged reef. Brittle fingers still clutching the ring he had bought for his betrothed as the ocean gently licked the rocks clean of his spilled life’s blood.

  It isn’t fair! He was supposed to be mine!

  Yriel looked into the mirror and gasped in horror.

  The face of the withered crone was staring out at her.

  She gaped at it, transfixed. It was the first time the crone had shown herself so boldly, the first time that Yriel had been able to take a proper look at her.

  There was an ugly brown patch on the crone’s left cheek. It was a mole, realised Yriel, spreading out of control. A little tuft of wispy grey hairs sprouted from it.

  Reflexively, she raised a hand to her own left cheek and the crone mirrored the movement. The crone’s thin, dry lips were twitching at their edges.

  She was smirking at Yriel, mocking her pain, and Yriel couldn’t bear it. She felt her horror giving way to a surging, white-hot anger, and at last she wrenched her gaze away from the crone and cast the mirror to the floor with all her strength.

  It refused to break.

  Yriel’s twenty-third year was a bleak one for the village.

  The plague was still spreading, without pattern or reason and despite all precautions. In the year’s third month, it was declared an epidemic and Icthis quarantined.

  Exports were embargoed, which at first delighted Yriel because it depressed the price of fish and left her with coins to spare. She felt no sympathy for the fishermen, because at least they could feed themselves.

  But soon, because the fishermen had so few coins to spend, the traders began to struggle too and their prices – for all goods – rose. At the same time, Yriel was finding fewer and fewer baskets on her step every day. She lost two long-term customers to the plague, four to suicide and the bulk of the rest to penny-pinching.

  It isn’t fair, she complained to the smirking crone in the mirror. Why must I always be the one to suffer most?

  The mirror hung on the wall of Yriel’s cabin now. Why not? she had thought one day, a few months earlier. No one ever visited her, so no one would ever see it.

  She still saw the princess, sometimes, in the glass, but more often – since the outbreak of the plague – she saw the crone.

  She had come to accept this, on the whole. She understood that the crone was better suited than the princess to help her through these difficult days. The crone put food on Yriel’s table every evening, whether she could afford it or not, and not only fish. She never saw where the food came from and chose not to ask.

  Still, Yriel missed the princess and often searched for her in the crone’s shadow. An occasional glimpse was enough to reassure her and give her hope that the princess might yet come back for good.

  On her twenty-third birthday, there was an altercation at the markets when a stallholder accused her of stealing. An indignant Yriel brushed him off and tried to leave, but the other traders barred her way until a constable could be summoned. He snatched Yriel’s bag from her shoulder and searched it brusquely.

  She remembered the necklace. It was pretty and it had drawn her eye. She had dangled it against her chest and fantasised about receiving it as a birthday gift. But then… She hadn’t put the necklace in her bag, she insisted tearfully. It must have been planted by somebody with ill will towards her.

  Yriel spent four hours in the pillory at the village crossroads.

  Everyone was looking at her now, she noted bitterly. Not only looking; they would spit in her face or encourage their children to pelt her with rotten fish. As if she wasn’t already suffering enough in her uncomfortable chains with her rumbling stomach and her cheeks burning with resentment. It could have been any one of them in my place, she told herself, and she swore that she would make them all pay for this cruelty.

  As soon as she was released, she would ask the mirror to tell her how.

  The new priest at temple talked a great deal about daemons.

  He spoke at length about the dream realm in which these malefic creatures lurked. He warned that they were always seeking, searching for an unguarded mind that they could enter and thus gain substance and power in the waking world.

  His words made Yriel shift uncomfortably in her pew.

  The old priest had been fond of euphemisms. His sermons had been heavy with blood and hellfire but light on actual detail, and Yriel had preferred it that way.

  She began to skip temple services.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision to take – or to justify to others if need be – as her health had worsened anyway. Years of hauling laundry baskets and kneeling over the old tin bath had taken their toll on Yriel’s joints. Her chest was weak – she blamed the draughts that sliced through her ramshackle cabin in winter – and her back ached.

  She rarely left the cabin now before the early evening, when she showed up at the markets for the end-of-day scraps. She existed in the shadows, keeping her face hidden. She didn’t want to be looked at. She felt ashamed.

  One day, she glimpsed herself in a mirror – a normal mirror, on a market stall – and caught her breath in horror. Yriel’s skin was pallid and her flaxen hair had faded almost to white. She was sure that she was shorter than she had been in her teens. She hardly recognised the face that was staring at her from the glass.

  It was like she was looking at a ghost. Her own ghost.

  She hurried home with an empty bag. She had been eyeing up a rancid joint on the butcher’s stall, but didn’t want to wait for it. Even up to the moment that she pushed open the cabin door, she didn’t know what she would do once she got inside.

  She surprised herself. She snatched the mirror from the wall. She threw it under her cot, face – faces – down, where it wouldn’t be able to tempt her.

  She buried her own faded face in her pillow and sobbed bitterly.

  The mirror lied to me, thought Yriel. It always lied. There was never a princess!

  The now-familiar voice in her head whispered in reply. But there could have been…

  Time passed, and so too did the memory of Yriel’s humiliation. From the minds of the adults of the village, at least.

  The children, unfortunately, were not so quick to forget.

  Most mornings, she was woken by the sound of taunting chants
outside her door. The first few times this happened, Yriel threw on her cloak and sandals and ran out into the wynd, sometimes with a broomstick in her hand.

  Each time, this had the effect of scattering her young tormentors. They would flee from her, shrieking in terror but with excitement too. The next morning, they’d be back – and often in greater numbers and even bolder than before.

  They would knock on Yriel’s door and run away and sometimes hurl eggs at her shutters. She tried to ignore them, but that didn’t help either; it only made them braver still, and more determined to provoke her into some kind of retaliation.

  She knew how that game was played. When Yriel had been their age, her peers had played it just the same with the keeper of the curio shop. She had even dared knock on the shopkeeper’s door herself one time, although he hadn’t come to answer it and no one at the scholam had believed her when she had told them.

  The children’s taunts grew meaner. At first, they had called Yriel a thief and a spiteful bat – until, one day, in an unguarded moment, she unleashed an angry torrent of curses against them and swiped at one of them with her broom handle.

  They called her something else after that. Something a lot more dangerous.

  You must not let such a rumour go unchecked, the crone insisted.

  The mirror was back in its place on Yriel’s wall. She had no memory of re-hanging it there, but it didn’t surprise her that she had.

  It could bring the witch hunters back to Icthis, said the crone, and that would be a disaster for us both.

  Was the priest right? asked Yriel. He… he said… The priest said…

  The priest told you, said the crone, to put your faith in his Emperor. He promised you that the Emperor loves you – but where is that love?

  The Emperor took your father from you, Yriel, and left you without love. He sends you to sleep each night on cold sheets, an empty stomach and a pillow of tears. So, by what right does He presume to judge you for doing what you must to survive?

  She was right, of course.

  The Emperor’s world is unfair, thought Yriel, so, how can it be a sin to look into a simple mirror and wish that things could be otherwise?

  And how could it be a sin for other… beings to do the same?

  She thought she understood now. Suddenly, it was clear to Yriel that the crone needed her as much as she needed the crone.

  Will you do one favour for me? she asked, hesitantly. Will you let me see…? And the crone’s face softened into an indulgent smile, and she agreed.

  Yriel took down the mirror. She sat down on the edge of her cot with it cradled in her lap and gazed upon her true reflection in the glass, until the sun rose outside and dispelled the night’s shadows and with them its blissful dreams. Then, with a sigh, she forced herself to stand. She hung the mirror back up on its crooked nail in the wall.

  And never once set eyes upon the princess’s face again.

  The final seeds of Icthis’s ruin were sewn with the discovery of a book.

  It had been mixed up with the bric-a-brac on a stall at the market plateau: an unlabelled journal filled with spidery handwriting that, when deciphered, was found to describe the foulest of blasphemies.

  The stallholder – by chance, the same one who had called Yriel a thief – protested his innocence. But his name and the names of his wife and his sons and his closest friends were all recorded in the journal, along with minutes of secret meetings.

  It was enough, in the eyes of most villagers, to convict.

  They demanded that a magistrate be sent for, but the constables demurred.

  There was no dark cult operating in Icthis, said the constables, for certainly they would have known about it. It was likely that the journal was, as the stallholder claimed, a fake. They issued some pointed reminders about the dangers of baseless rumours and, for a time, suspicious tongues were – reluctantly – stilled.

  No one wanted the Inquisition to come back, after all.

  But then, someone said something – not much, just an idle thought voiced, but someone else saw the sense of it and passed it on – and, within days, a new and even more pernicious rumour had taken root in the villagers’ hearts and minds, although no one could remember what had started the rumour in the first place.

  One overcast evening, an inflamed mob fought their way into a constable’s cabin and discovered, in the space beneath his floorboards, exactly what they had expected to find: crude, handcrafted symbols of fealty to the darkest of powers.

  The constable, by chance, was the same one who had arrested Yriel.

  Like his cousin, the stallholder, he affected blamelessness, and friends and family and fellow constables supported him. But the mob, denied its sense of natural justice once, could not be stayed again. Angry words were exchanged, and punctuated by shaken fists. Lynching ropes were swiftly tied and torches lit. In return, lasguns were drawn and warning shots fired. Battle lines had been drawn.

  Yriel played little part in the ensuing events, although she followed them keenly.

  She continued to haunt the markets, where factions formed and plans were made in furtive whispers. She listened from beneath her sheets as each night’s peace was shattered by gunshots and raised voices. She watched through her spy hole as weekly funeral processions wound their ways along the village’s climbing road.

  The children let her be now, finding more deserving targets for their malice. No one ever really looked at Yriel Malechan, which suited her well.

  She felt no sympathy for her neighbours – those who found themselves caught up in an endless spiral of attacks and reprisals, whose lives and livelihoods were under threat – because what sympathy, what love, had they ever shown for her?

  Why shouldn’t they suffer, for once?

  And soon, a new sound was carried to Yriel on the night air, a new acrid smell to her nose and, through her spy hole, she saw lights flickering in the sky and the moon and stars obscured by a drifting haze of smoke.

  Yriel was twenty-nine when Icthis burned.

  It was a Thunder-Day morning when the Inquisition returned to Icthis.

  Yriel heard them coming, as she had the first time, half her life ago. She had been expecting them for days, but still she felt her stomach tightening at the sound of approaching engine-spirits. She didn’t need to look outside this time. She struggled out of her cot. She dressed with trembling hands. She sat and waited.

  It wasn’t long before an armoured fist attacked her door. She levered herself to her feet and shrank against the cabin wall as rusted hinges shattered.

  Yriel flinched, whimpering, from the glare of the morning sunlight. It was immediately eclipsed, however, by an inrush of armoured troops. Red and black.

  She was seized and held as the soldiers tore through her few possessions. They overturned her cot and the tin bath and the mangle. They pulled down shelves and wrenched up worm-eaten floorboards. They found the mirror on the wall. It hadn’t even occurred to Yriel to try to hide it.

  She wondered what the soldiers saw in the glass. Enough, they made it very plain, to confirm the rumours they had been told about her. As if her stooped posture and the hideous growths on her face weren’t proof enough.

  Yriel had the aspect of a woman three times her age. Touched by the Ruinous Powers, the soldiers pronounced. Made a conduit for their evil.

  They dragged her outside and forced her to her aching knees.

  Words of protest spat from Yriel’s tongue, although she knew they were in vain. She had done no wrong, she shrieked, they had no right to treat her this way.

  She blamed the mirror. Couldn’t see they the real witch in the mirror?

  A small crowd had collected in the wynd: dozens when she had imagined hundreds, but then Icthis was hardly more than a ghost village these days. The spectators were quiet, accepting, almost mournful. They had little fear of the witch hunters, this time, because this time it was they who had invited them into their homes.

  Yriel heard booted fo
otsteps ringing ominously off the cobblestones.

  She raised her head, with an effort, to greet the figure that approached her, that now loomed over her. She regarded him with a bloodshot gaze.

  The figure wore the tall hat and dark cloak of a witch hunter. He looked surprisingly young to Yriel, blond hair dancing on his shoulders. But his eyes were indisputably a witch hunter’s eyes, staring into her soul.

  He had the mirror.

  He asked if this was the artefact to which Yriel had referred. He asked her where she had come by it and what she had seen in it. He spoke in a quiet, almost friendly voice, and she tried her best to answer him but was choked by shame because under the inquisitor’s glare she found she couldn’t tell a lie, not even to herself.

  The inquisitor told Yriel that he could see no witch in the mirror.

  He held the mirror out to her, so that she could show it to him.

  And, of course, the witch was there. Of course she was. Her misshapen face. The spreading mole on her cheek. Grey, scraggly hair. Of course the witch was there, because what else would one expect to see in a reflecting glass, after all?

  What else but an image of oneself?

  There was no need for a trial, the witch hunter declared, and no chance of mitigation. It was clear that the accused had surrendered herself to daemon-kind, and therefore sentence could be passed and carried out summarily. He pried the greenish-black gem from the mirror’s frame and ground it under his boot heel. He nodded to one of the red and black soldiers, who unsheathed her sword and ignited its holy fire.

  Yriel was surprised to find herself no longer afraid. Perhaps, she thought, it was because she had always known her fate. She had lived this moment in her dreams so many times that it had slowly lost its power over her. She was almost relieved, in fact, that the moment was real at last, because that meant it would soon be over.

  She faced her death with equanimity, because it was everything she deserved.

  She didn’t even try to struggle as a soldier held her fast, as another pushed her head forwards to fully expose her neck. She heard the crackle of the burning blade as it was poised above its target, and she remembered the first time she had glimpsed the shadow in the glass and how afraid of it she had been. Such a long time ago now. Back before she had come to realise that the shadow was naught to fear.