by M. C. Planck
Looking up from the scroll, he could not help but stare at Saint Krellyan. The man had done this a dozen times, for all manner of thugs and criminals. And those were just the ones Christopher had sent him. Who knew how many other wicked nightmares Krellyan had sat through, trying to bring someone into the light?
“If people knew what you did, they wouldn’t think you were weak,” Christopher said, thinking of how difficult it was going to be for himself.
“My hands have never held a sword. I have slain no monsters, suffered no fangs to bite or claws to rend me. Few in this world think of that as strength.”
Christopher didn’t kill very many monsters, either. His men did, and they suffered the biting and rending—and dying—for him. That fact nipped any sense of superiority in the bud.
“Okay. Let’s get this over with.”
“Are you sure you wish to proceed, Brother?”
“No,” Christopher said quite honestly. “I absolutely do not wish to do this. But my only other choice is letting Cannan die, right?”
The Saint nodded in sad agreement.
Christopher shrugged. “Then let’s go.”
10
ATONEMENT
Christopher hadn’t expected the Cathedral to have a dungeon. It was the nicest possible dungeon—clean, neat, and tastefully appointed in cheap but serviceable furniture, with paneled walls and heavy oaken doors—but it was still a dungeon. A place to store prisoners until they were ready to be dealt with.
Light-stones on the walls tried to keep the place well lit and bright, but they could not overcome the sheer fact of the dungeon’s nature. That such a thing existed at all, underneath the White Cathedral, was a sad and somber fact that would not be dispelled.
That Christopher had sent at least a dozen men here to spend their last days in relative comfort before Captain Steuben draped a noose around their necks and let them fall was another fact that refused to be banished. The thought kept peering out at him from behind every closed door they passed.
When they turned into a room at last, Christopher slipped into the relative gloom with a sense of escape. Only a single flickering light-stone kept the underground room from total darkness.
“It helps a man think,” Torme said. “It’s odd, but in the shadows you can’t focus on anything else but why you’re here.”
Torme had once been in one of these cells.
Steuben blocked the doorway, a mere formality since the only escape led past Saint Krellyan. Krellyan’s magic was far more potent than the Captain’s sword. In this case they had nothing to worry about. The victim, Cannan, sat on a plain wooden chair, his head in his hands, passively waiting to die.
“If you want him chained, I’ll have to send out.” Steuben sounded apologetic.
“No, of course not,” Christopher said automatically. What a hideous idea that was: to bring chains into this building.
“Normally we don’t bother, on account of the Saint’s high rank, and the prisoners being of no account.”
Christopher was only a few ranks higher than Cannan. He might possibly be in danger if the red knight went berserk again. Christopher hoped the furniture was as cheap as it looked. If a chair was going to be smashed over his head at any point, he would prefer it was a shoddily constructed one.
Chains, on the other hand, were simply out of the question.
“No,” Christopher repeated.
“I’ll need your blade, Vicar. I can’t leave it in his reach.”
Steuben was a knight of some rank himself. He didn’t fear Cannan wielding a chair. But everyone with a lick of sense feared the huge man armed with steel.
Silently, Christopher unlooped his baldric and held out the sword. Torme took it gravely.
“We will be right outside, Brother Vicar. You need but call.”
The two other men stepped outside, or, rather, Torme did. Steuben had never really entered the room. Now he swung the heavy wooden door shut, leaving the room in semi-darkness. The solid thunk of the exterior bolt being thrown home settled uncomfortably in Christopher’s stomach.
Cannan did not move, had not moved at all. Christopher sat down on the narrow bed and tried to think of something to say.
Cannan spoke first. “It would be a mercy to let me hang.”
“You can still choose that. But if you do, then Niona will stay dead. Forever.”
“Can you make such a promise, little priest? When not even your Saint will pretend such a thing is in his power, can you promise me there is a way to restore life to ashes?”
Saint Krellyan didn’t have the power to send Christopher home, either. But Christopher knew it was possible. He knew it had to be possible.
“Yes, I can promise you, there are miracles. I don’t know how, or when, or where, but there are miracles in this world. But they only come to people who don’t give up.”
Cannan should have snorted, made a little laugh of derision. He didn’t. He spoke simply, without adornment.
“You do not know of what you speak.”
Christopher watched the shadows dance across Cannan’s dark and craggy face, the valleys of its sunken cheeks, cracked lips, and unmoving mouth. That was the most disconcerting thing. Cannan’s mouth no longer betrayed emotion. He did not snarl or leer. The lips did not curve up in wry smiles, sink down in thunderous frowns, or open in uproarious laughter. Cannan wore the mouth of a corpse.
“Maybe not. But I know that if it were my life in the balance, you would risk yours to save it. Not because you owed me, but simply because you could.”
In the silence that followed, Christopher rolled open the scroll. Below the warning line was a single word of many syllables, written in huge, flowing letters of Celestial. He read the word out loud.
The letters came to life in white flames, burning the parchment with cold, holy fire. Sensations swelled out of the light: the crackling of flames, green wood hissing and spitting as it popped, heat beating on his face, the sting of smoke in his eyes. Christopher stared across a campfire into Cannan’s face. Cannan was now wreathed in an aura of blue, shot through with sparks of green and red, but it was blotched and sickly. Blackness lay over the flickering colors like crude oil on water. Christopher felt himself falling, as if diving from a great height into a pool. But this water was foul and unclean, and he would sink in it like a stone.
“No,” Christopher said. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this.” But it was too late.
“Husband. What have I done to displease you so?”
Niona’s voice had always made Christopher think of bells, bright and moving in the wind. Now her voice grated at his skin like broken glass, sharp and shrill and merciless, a bag of metal jangling in his face, a biting fly that harassed him day and night.
“Leave it be, woman.”
Christopher was startled at the harshness of his words. He glanced across the fire, which was banked low to make little smoke and less light. Niona sat with her arms around her knees and her hair hanging loose, her dark eyes watching him warily. Once he had found that fey look unbearably interesting, like a wild creature that might be tamed with great patience. Now the burden of her vulnerability weighed on him like a stone.
“It is only a mood. It will pass in the morning.” His huge hands idly snapped a twig, and he threw the broken parts in the fire.
“It has been a mood for many days.” She spoke in the druid’s way, careful not to sound reproachful. Merely stating a fact, without bias or judgment. It infuriated him. A constant reminder that his emotions were played out in public, like a child’s tantrum.
With a supreme effort of will, he did not snap back at her.
“I have been dueling for many days. Something about entering the field of death every day makes a man moody. That’s why we left, remember? A break, to soften my mood.”
No, we left because of the ring. She didn’t say it, but he knew she was thinking it.
Deep inside the core of his being, he felt a dizzying flutter. I
t came more and more of late. Always, when he thought of Black Bart coming to get his ring. That was to be expected. Bart was a creature of darkness; his demonic aura created fear in the bravest of men.
But even now, when they were deep in the Wild, untraceable and untrackable by dint of Niona’s druidic lore, the fluttering came again and again. He suspected it was fear. The suspicion unnerved him, because he had never before felt fear. Apprehension, perhaps, or even doubt, but never this sickening, weakening hollowness.
Her silent reproach had brought on this fit, as it did night after night. She no longer mentioned the ring directly, knowing that it would make him angry, but she still thought of it. He could feel her thinking of it, feel her black glances at the tiny band of gold on his finger, stabbing him with hatred, or resentment, or perhaps envy. It did not matter. All that mattered was that the ring was his.
He forced himself to smile.
“You had the right of it. We spent too long in that stinking city. I needed fresh air and open skies. Let me breathe a little longer, wife, and I will be better in the morning.”
It was a lie, a patent, obvious lie. He had never told such a poor lie in all his life. And yet she believed it. She lay down next to their fire, stretched out like a feral cat in front of a stranger’s hearth, and closed her eyes. She believed it because she wanted to, because she could not bear to imagine not believing.
He should have pitied her, but he could not. Her unrelenting need for him was revolting, rendering her a pathetic clinging parasite, like a tick burrowed under the scalp.
A tick whose fangs were in deep. Mere words would never drive her away, no matter how harsh. She had laid claim to his body and soul through the ritual of marriage, and like every brainless woman, she took the words they had exchanged seriously. He could not chase her away.
Nor could he escape her. The cursed woman could follow a mouse over a mountain with her eyes closed. And if by chance he did shake her from his trail, she would just run crying home to her parents. Then he would have druids and rangers stalking him. There would be no end to it.
As he sat by the dwindling fire, listening to her sleep, his hatred blossomed in the growing dark. The depth of her trust was cloying, sickly sweet and foul. It was shameful. He was a warrior, a professional duelist, a freelance killer who survived off the ransoms he won on the field of honor. He was far too dangerous to be treated like a tamed cat. It was disrespectful.
When he acted, it was without conscious thought—a sudden and instantaneous movement. Or so he lied to himself. In truth his first act was as premeditated as it was possible to be. An enraged man might have wrapped his hands around her pretty white throat and squeezed the sweetness out of her, or struck at her smooth neck with the great two-handed sword that never left his side these days. What he did was altogether different, and cruelly aware.
Walking casually, as if he intended nothing more than to cross to where she lay, he felt as solid as ice. No tremble belied him. Had she been awake, she would have known his falseness by the exaggerated calm that gripped his limbs, but she was not awake. She was not pretending sleep. She did not fear him, and he could not stand it.
With one smooth motion he thrust his great sword down, through her belly, deep into the earth, pinning her to the ground. Let her try her druid tricks now. Let her change shape and form as she willed; it would not free her from his iron anchor.
Blood welled out from where the blade disappeared into her flesh. A memory sprang into his mind, unbidden, of the smoothness of the belly under her robe, of the contrast of white oval and black triangle that would now be marred by red. He had loved the sight of her naked. It had driven him mad with desire, robbing him of will and power even more than the fluttering fear. No more.
“Husband,” she cried, opening her eyes in shock and pain. Her tael was too great to let one blow still her, and so she flopped on the end of his sword like a hooked fish, her small hands futilely pawing at the leather-wrapped hilt.
She looked up at him and still did not believe. He knelt by her side, the better for her to look into his eyes and know what he truly was, and still she would not see. In the reflection of her wet, shining eyes, he saw only the weak, foolish thing she wanted him to be.
Revolted beyond reason, he lifted a heavy rock in both hands and brought it down. The dry crunch of bone and wet tearing of skin rushed into his ears, a river of noise that deafened him.
“Husband,” she whispered through her broken mouth, white teeth like pebbles spilling out on a tide of red.
Howling with rage, he brought the stone down again and again, until there was nothing left to remind him of what he had once been, or what she had once been to him. Through the red haze of his vision, he recognized the purple glint of tael mixed in with the gray, white, and red that flecked the ground. The beast inside him took complete control, then, and he fell on the feast of power, shoveling bloody lumps into his mouth until the rage abandoned him. The fire rushed out of him like water from a spilled barrel, leaving him light and fuzzy and hollow in its wake.
Staggering to his feet, unable to tell which way was up and which was down, he stumbled only a few steps before he fell again, this time into merciful blackness.
In the cold light of morning he cut wood, stacking a funeral pyre fit for a king. His hands worked automatically, without conscious effort. His mind was focused on other things, trivial distractions like the song of a robin or the glint of sunlight on dewy leaves. Somehow he picked up the body, wrapping its ruined part in its cloak, without ever really noticing what he was doing. When the fire leapt above the pyre, hiding everything in a blaze of destroying flame, he began to walk in a random direction, leading his great destrier by the halter. He dared not mount it, not while her blood was still fresh on him. The animal would rebel, and he would have to kill it, and he still needed it for a little while yet. Already her mount had fled in the night, having been hobbled only by cloying sentiment instead of strong rope.
At a stream, late in the afternoon, he paused to let the horse drink. Stumbling forward, he immersed himself in the cold water and let it wash him clean.
Only then did he recognize what he had done. Only when it was too late. A part of him marveled that madness could be so pure, so methodical, and so complete. Another part of him called it freedom, escape from the pitiful sham of hypocrisies that mewling sheep called law and goodness. Both parts spoke in his head, each pretending to be unheedful of the other, each pretending it was the whole of him. But only one part could be the whole.
Forcing the horse to stillness, he swung into the saddle. When the animal snorted, flattening its ears in displeasure, he cuffed it with a powerful blow to the side of the head. Then he turned the horse south.
The ring clung to his finger, heavy and burning with cold. Only one part could be the whole. Dull and black inside, he rode, and after a while there was only one part left.
Christopher fell to his knees, sick and disoriented. The hard stone of the floor told him that he was here, in the Cathedral, even while his vision swam with images from someone else’s nightmare.
He put out a hand to steady himself, and Cannan caught it in a powerful grasp undiminished by the stub of a missing finger. The huge man was trapped in the images, too, all the more disorienting because they were from his own past.
“Do you see, priest? It was me. All me.”
Christopher shook his head. “Part of you, Cannan. Most of you, even, but not all you.” He struggled in confusion, still bound to Cannan through the spell. He could hear his own voice in Cannan’s head and feel Cannan’s reaction, like an echo. “The ring took part of your mind. It’s like . . .” A lifetime of casual reading in neuroscience deserted him. This language had no words for the structure of the brain. This culture had no notion of mental illness as a consequence of crossed wires and procedural malfunctions. An image came to him, of a computer screen spewing random characters after a hard crash brought on by the tiniest of errors and the omnipo
tent law of unintended consequences. It was an image he could never hope to explain to Cannan.
“Do not tell me it is like being drunk. I have been drunk to the point of foolishness before and since. Never have I desired evil so fully as I desired it that night.”
Christopher racked his memory for some metaphor that would make sense. The concentration left him reeling, and he would have collapsed on the floor if it weren’t for Cannan’s steadying hand. Inspiration came to him in a flash, sparked by the unthinking strength of Cannan’s grip.
“It’s like herding sheep, Cannan. Have you ever seen a shepherd move his flock? Now have you ever seen one try it without his dogs?”
Obediently the spell created the hallucination for them, a baa-ing giant pillow of fluffy white and brown bumping through a green pasture. A hooded man with a crook strolled behind them, while dogs ran and barked at the fringes. On an invisible cue the dogs silently faded out of existence, and within seconds the organized mass began to disintegrate into tiny bits of fluff that scattered across the field, while the shepherd called and whistled futilely, waving his useless stick in the air.
“They’re still the same sheep. He’s still the same shepherd. But the flock will never make it to market. They took your dogs, Cannan. The sheepdogs of your mind, the part that keeps you on track.”
In the vision, the sheepdogs came slinking back, whining in shame. The shepherd raised his stick in furious anger, and the dogs cowered at his feet, terrified. For a moment Cannan’s white-hot rage burned through all of them, Cannan and Christopher and the hooded man in the vision. Christopher trembled, as afraid as the dogs of what might happen next.
But then the shepherd lowered his staff. With stalwart resignation he whistled commands. The dogs leapt into action, darting out across the field, and the vision faded away.
“Heroism isn’t being too tough to fall. It’s about getting up after you’ve fallen. It’s a choice, Cannan, one you make day after day. And it never gets any easier.”