The Messah hesitated, afraid the sacrifice was about to scold his student or hit him again until Jezebel lunged between them. Under the cover of their bickering, he led his friend away from the couple, passed sandstone columns and vaulted arches, through an open door at the northeastern bend. The corridor beyond seemed to go on forever. Adnihilo was glad for it. The beige and blue tiles, dusky glass panes, and stripes of light and shadow from sconces along the walls all helped to distract him. He counted: there were a dozen stripes, six stretches of light and darkness, a side pass to the kitchens, then six more. After that, a single door awaited them. This one was closed, though muffled shouts sounded from inside the chamber.
“This is Father’s cell—his office,” said the pastor’s son. He lifted his knuckles but left them hovering before the wood and whispered, “Maybe we shouldn’t. What if it is just rain and I interrupt him for nothing?” Adam’s hand dropped. “I don’t want to cause another pointless argument. God knows I’ve done enough of that tonight.”
“Twice,” replied Adnihilo.
The pastor’s son spun from the murmuring door and apologized.
“Why? It’s not your fault,” the half-blood spoke. Truly, he did not blame his friend for his mentor’s folly, nor for his own—he’d handled it like a child’s tantrum, forgetting his lesson. Kill the boy. They’d both forgotten, it seemed, under the heat of the moment when one should remember most. A fight is like that, Cain had told him at the very start of their training. That’s why he practiced every day, and even then, he couldn’t always win. And who am I to judge, anyway? He thought once more of his outburst, cut off Adam mid-apology. “You didn’t cause the argument. It was me this time; and you’re right. Let’s not have you make the same mistake bothering your father with this.” Adnihilo glanced over his shoulder down the light-striped hallway. “I’m going to head back.”
“I’ll come with you,” the pastor’s son agreed, but then the muffled shouts grew louder, and they could just make out threats and heavy footfalls seconds before the door nearly ripped from its hinges.
“I’ll burn in Hell before I let that happen!” David bellowed, stomping into the corridor and turning his rage onto his son and the half-blood. “God, Damn it! Adam, what are you—” His anger faded in an instant as he crushed his son in a shameless embrace. “Thank God!”
Adam wheezed out what he could. “I’m sorry. I didn’t. I was going to tell you.”
His father heard none of it, just positioned his son at arms’ length, sinking ghost-white fingers into the young Messah’s tunic. Then the pastor’s ruddy cheeks turned the color of linen. “Listen. I need you to bar the portal. No one can leave.” He looked to Adnihilo. “Tell Cain I need him, too. If he could keep everyone calm while I—” David froze as a second man sauntered from the cell.
Immediately, the half-blood recognized the strange clergyman by his contemptuous expression, and just as quickly, the stranger noticed him as well. He looked nowhere else as he strolled into the corridor and plucked a candle from its sconce. He twiddled the lit wax between thumb and forefinger, his eyes crawling along like iridescent beetles. “How many times do I have to tell you?” His words reeked of wine. “It’s too late to stop it now. Get to the port while you still can. You’re almost out of time.” Then he snuffed the wick with the tips of his fingers and let the skin sizzle till it started to stink. “Every light must be extinguished.”
“Hurry,” the pastor muttered, but Adam sputtered uncertain whether to explain the dust storm until the rage returned to his father’s face, “Now!”
The two bolted back the way they came, blue and beige tiles flying beneath their feet. Stripes of light blurred with stripes of shadow; and outside, through the dusky windows, Adnihilo spotted what seemed like stars scattered along the steppes—gone in an instant as they reentered the nave. Nearly every guest was up now, crowding between the tables, calling to the Messah as he and the half-blood waded through the flood to the parish doors. With great strain, they hauled the cross-bar from its corner, and together, hoisted the fourteen-stone beam and dropped it into place.
“Good Lord,” Adam gasped. Everyone was watching them now, panic spreading like a plague. And they had yet to find the sacrifice. Adnihilo could not imagine how they would. He was breathing heavily, leaning on his knees, trying to tease out how they might spot the couple among the chaos when a hand landed on his shoulder. He whipped around. Cain and Jezebel had found them instead, yet something felt wrong to Adnihilo. All the anger and impatience had vanished from his mentor. His scowl was gone, and his chest rose and fell so slowly that he hardly seemed to breathe. Jezebel was just the opposite, clinging to her lover’s arm, questioning Adam. It was bizarre. He had never known her to show such weakness.
“Where’s your father?” she asked. “What’s going on? Why did you bar the door?”
“The Messah thinks we’ll be safe here,” Cain answered, yet when she asked from what, he peeled her from his arm and marched forward, shoving her and his pupil and the pastor’s son aside before taking the beam from underneath. He bent his knees, and the muscles in his arms and neck tensed thick as tree roots. Then, with singular strength, he lifted the crossbar, hurling it overhead.
The beam rang out as it hit the ground, like the bell that tolls at the end of a sermon, loud enough to silence the anxious lambs and long enough for them to notice the cups and candles trembling on the table tops, the cutlery tumbling to the floor, the moaning gale and rolling thunder growing closer, breaking against the walls as the stamping of boots, the hooves of horses, the cries of war.
Adnihilo froze in fear with the rest of the parish, unsure of his own ears. It seemed too much a dream to him, but when he bit his tongue to wake himself up, the sounds only became more distinct: screaming in the streets, the shattering of windows—close. Their sanctuary was broken. At once, David’s flock stampeded for the portal, and the doors flew open, though not for them. It was a host of men forcing their way in: maille shirts and half-helms, swords and torches, daggers and spears. Their roar was deafening.
Kill the boy, the half-blood mouthed. No sound. His lungs were stone like his legs and his bowels. A dream, he thought again, watching the Messaii soldiers file into rank.
They were two-dozen and they were one—a machine—a beast with teeth of wood and iron, hungry yet lumbering under its own size. Cain searched the line as the jaws encroached. He stood half way between the host and the helpless assembly, his hands empty, his body naked from the waist up.
It was over in a moment. The sacrifice filled his chest and charged for the nearest soldier—a green man looking scared as Adnihilo felt. The soldier panicked, and Cain faded away from a premature thrust. Then the other footmen struck with their weapons—too late. The sacrifice had grabbed the shaft and dragged his victim from the protection of the line, the whole time the green man clinging to his spear. Only after did the fear subside and the soldier think to draw his sword. But by then, the sacrifice was on him, seizing his wrist and twisting. He swept his victim’s feet and slammed him on the floor before following with the stolen weapon, point down, ploughing through maille and cloth and skin and breastbone, through heart and muscle till the tip chipped on the tile below.
Then the line encroached, their formation curling—wood and iron teeth, the beast’s jaws slowly closing around Cain. An envelopment. And Adnihilo was aware of nothing save for his mentor struggling to free the sword from the corpse; and he tore it free, but there were so many of them surrounding him. Cain hardly turned to see the first spear sink deep into his belly. A dream. This has to be a dream. Adnihilo gnawed his lips and cheeks. Wake up! He squeezed his fingers till his palms started to bleed onto his fingernails. Wake up!
“Adnihilo!”
The half-blood broke from his trance to Jezebel dragging him passed broken benches and up-ended tables, straining against separation amongst the stampede of fleeing Impii and Messah in every direction. Adam was a few feet ahead, vanishing and a
ppearing again from behind the waves of terrorized bodies, guiding Jezebel toward the southeastern corridor, toward David. They were nearly half way there when the pastor’s son disappeared in a tide of Impii. The soldiers had them hemmed in by then, and the whole assembly could feel their fangs closing in. A few tried to fight. They died; and their screams and blood covered the armoured men like grisly mountains, like the parish had become some valley of death. And Adnihilo was trapped in its shadow, himself and Adam and Jezebel, and he could no longer tell which way was out.
“Behind you!” Adam’s voice broke through, and the singer spun in time to see a soldier break rank from his brothers. This one was older, shaved and weather worn, gray hair peaking from inside his nostrils. He came at her unarmed, half the size of Cain, yet strong enough to carry her off behind an overturned table, just out of view of the slaughter. He didn’t even seem to notice the half-blood, just left him to stand aside, paralyzed, as he pinned Jezebel on the far side of the barrier.
Adnihilo wanted to run, to cry, to fight, yet his body did nothing but chew his tongue till he coughed on the blood, and even then his knuckles were white and trembling. Dying would have been a mercy then. Instead, he was made to watch as David appeared in his place. The soldier, however, never saw the pastor coming, so fixated was he with mounting his prey. He saw the steel, though. It was impossible to miss the slender point jolting inches into his eye and out again. He winced at the tiny wound, his wrinkles deepening as he sputtered obscenely as David put a boot to his bosom and kicked his body aside.
The half-blood’s fear subsided only after Adam reappeared adjacent his father while the pastor helped Jezebel to her feet. It hurt, his cowardice—like salt in a wound, watching someone else do what he could not. He thought for a moment about the bodies on the floor, glanced toward the portal, and considered going back to look for his mentor. The formation had broken into lone looters and murderers, the assembly into heaps of black and white corpses. Perhaps they passed him over, he wanted to believe. Maybe he’s still alive. Maybe—
The singer called his name and again tore Adnihilo from his fantasy. Ashamed, he turned and waded through trampled food and furniture and over dead parishioners to sneak with the others along the southern wall. He kept his eyes to the floor as they ran toward David’s cell, into the corridor now wholly in shadow, its candles smashed onto the tiles and embedded with fragments of window. And there were more glass shards scattered about a pair of corpses—soldiers by the shape of their silhouettes. Adnihilo looked out the broken windows, saw the shadowy figures of men with spears in hand. It left a dread in his heart—they had the parish surrounded—and he knew then that they would never escape. Jezebel must have thought the same. She started to ask the pastor where they were going, but he hushed her and directed them into the kitchen.
The narrow room was abandoned, empty aside from the bramble of pan and pot handles, cluttered counter tops, rows of ovens, and at the end of the hall, a lonely, black-iron stove. David sheathed his sword and shut the door behind them. It was old wood, warped. The nails had rusted to almost nothing, and the fittings were crumbling. A child could knock it down. Jezebel voiced that very concern, and when the pastor ignored her, Adam gasped something about a wine cellar under the old furnace. Adnihilo peeked beneath the stove: there it was, a trapdoor partially obscured by years of dust and charcoal, and the pile grew larger as David loosened the flue.
Adam and Adnihilo both had to help him drag the stove from over the cellar entrance, and even then, the door was rusted shut. David cursed at the sounds of soldiers from the corridor. Desperate, he stomped on the trapdoor till its pig-iron hinges snapped, and he would have fallen in had Adam not grabbed him.
David pulled himself up holding onto his son, then he mutter to him for what felt like ages. Meanwhile, Adnihilo’s heart was racing. The footfalls were right outside the kitchen now. There was a wail, a moan, a familiar voice complaining about too much noise.
“I, I can’t!” Adam started. “I’m not going without you!”
David forced the sword into his son’s hands, then turned to Jezebel. “It’s pitch dark down there. Keep to the eastern wall, where the columns are close together.”
The singer’s eyes were wide as saucers, her hands clutched against her chest. She nodded.
“I’m not going!” Adam shouted again. The pastor grabbed his son and pulled him into a hug, said that he loved him, and in the next second, shoved him down into the hole. He commanded the others to follow. They obeyed without argument.
Inside the cellar was only darkness and noise, the grinding of iron and dwindling of light as David slid the stove over the entry—then Adnihilo heard the thud of the kitchen door breaking open, then footsteps. After that, he wasn’t sure. He whispered to Adam. The Messah was crying and pleading with God, and soon, Adnihilo started tearing as well. He resisted it for as long as he could, but when he felt Jezebel’s arms wrap around him and her wet cheek rest on his, there was no stopping it. They wept in the dark until their eyes were dry, until the cellar fell cold and the minutes died in silence.
“It’s time,” the singer said once Adnihilo was finished and Adam composed enough to hear her voice. “We need to go. Adam, can you lead us out?”
The pastor’s son sniveled a moment, then he croaked to hold on while he groped about the cellar before calling them over the treacherous dirt floor. More than once, Adnihilo tripped on collapsed wine racks and fist-sized shrew burrows, and Jezebel fared much worse. She twisted her ankle before they’d even reached where Adam was waiting and had to limp the rest of the way leaning on the columns for support. Fortunately, the beams ran closer together as they made their way east, standing an arms breadth apart near the decrepit cellar door. It was old wood, like the one in the kitchen, abandoned for years and bowed under sand—would have long broken open if not boarded shut. But the single plank, too, was warped and failing: it had splintered in several places, and the nails were crumbled rust.
It only took one try for Adam and Adnihilo to pry the boarded door open with just their fingers, though they weren’t prepared for the deluge of sand not for what awaited them after. Coughing and through stinging eyes, they saw Eemah alight in the bitter night air—a fiery glow mingling with smoky sky, faint groans in the distance, hooves clopping the sand. They glanced back toward the parish. The hands of Hell gripped there as well, the roof belching deep red and orange flames, and Adam staring vainly all the while as everything he’d ever known became rubble, cinders, and smoke. Mother, thought Adnihilo, looking to the south, realizing only now that the same was likely true of his home—that his mother would be alone when the soldiers finally found her, that he was hiding like a coward while they—he did not want to imagine. He staggered away from the others in a daze, vaguely listening as the clopping on the sand grew closer. He ignored that too until Jezebel called his name.
Adnihilo turned and faced the rider as he rounded the parish: a man in harness of white enameled plate. He rode a towering, black mount dark as its barding—snarling like the golden lion embroidered at its side. He reined the beast fifty paces out and dismounted, then unlatched his armet and shook free a tail of sun-blonde hair. He was younger the half-blood expected, perhaps younger than Cain, with cocksure grin and eyes like emeralds surer than sin. And his stride—it was almost a skip as he closed the distance, drawing a double-bitted axe from the ring on his hip.
“The Saint’s Cross,” Adam uttered. His legs were trembling, yet he unsheathed his father’s sword and steadied the point toward the stranger’s heart. But the man did not stop. Even as the tip brushed against his breast plate, he kept on marching till Adam’s arms started to shake.
“Drop it,” the stranger ordered, and Jezebel begged Adam to lay the weapon down. But the pastor’s son chose to stand his ground instead. He thrust his blade for the stranger’s face, and the point fell short to a flash of steel—to the wind-thin flats of an axe aside his head. Adam’s legs buckled, his scalp stained p
ink, And the singer screamed, as Adnihilo retrieved the sword. The stranger only stared, almost hopeful.
The half-blood glanced at Adam then at the armoured man. His hands were shaking, his palms slick on the grip of David’s sword. Sweat dripped under his arms and above his eyes. He thought of Cain, of how many times they’d trained for this moment, yet Jezebel was begging him to stop. Then he thought of the shame he felt in the nave and swore he wouldn’t surrender to his fear. Not again. He remembered the way Cain charged the men, the fright on the face of the solider he killed, the quivering sword stuck through maille and gambeson. Adnihilo glanced again at his friend, bleeding and unconscious, then at the stranger.
Kill the boy, he convinced himself, lunging as Adam had for his opponent’s grinning face. A feint. He’d seen how fast the man could move, even in all that armour, saw how he’d countered, advancing and letting the blade hit his cuirass instead. So the half-blood darted sideways, out of range of the axe, slashing low as he passed—useless against the enameled steel plate. Adnihilo’s training betrayed him. He’d never learned to fight a man in armour like this, could only rely on his instincts. So the next two exchanges played precisely the same till they came together a fourth and final time. The stranger’s grin had become a grimace by then. He was out of patience and scowling at the scratches accrued on his cuisses. In response to the half-blood’s thrust, in place of forward, the knight peddled back, dropped his own weapon, and grabbed the pastor’s blade before Adnihilo could withdraw the feint. Wrists twisted, and suddenly the sword was pointed the other way—the man smiling, David’s sword in his possession—the half-blood defeated, angry and ashamed.
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