The Witch Hunters, Book 1: The Prophet of Ash

Hildrun led him down the steps. A door loomed before them in the darkness. The Abbess produced a key. It clanked in the unseen lock, and there was a faint clunk as the mechanism within released. A scent Eisengrim had long known lingered about the entrance. When Hildrun dragged the thick door open, it spread out into the hallway with a force that stirred old memories and regrets: deeds done in his youth that he wished he could take back. Again, he followed after Hildrun as she led him into this secret corner of Hell. He closed the door behind them.

The smell of incense down here was powerful, yet it could not mask the stench of death and all the terrible things that came with it. A fire burned in a large iron brazier in the centre of the room, providing all the light and heat for the night. The ceiling was low so they had to stoop as they proceeded. Eisengrim heard coughing, and was barely able to step around Hildrun when she paused several feet in. Empty mattresses were rolled up and piled in a corner. Eisengrim counted them and was relieved to find eleven. They would have to be destroyed. Everything in here would have to be destroyed, once the last lingering unfortunate had succumbed. No trace of the people in here could be allowed to remain once they had died. God, forgive me.

“Their leader died before Volkard came,” Hildrun said to him. She pointed to a ragged, twitching heap hidden under a pile of blankets in one corner. “That was his brother, I think. His name is Vali.”

“Thank you.”

Eisengrim picked his way over to the corner, careful to avoid the corpses and the soon-to-be corpses. He stood at a safe distance away. The dim light cast thick shadows everywhere, but he could just see a bare, scaled arm among the jumbled cloth. He saw the lesions that he knew would cover most of the man’s body by this point. The old bull watched as blood began to well up in one on the forearm. Eisengrim sighed as he looked about the few remaining figures like this one. Everything in here was going to have to be burned. Afterwards, the room itself would have to be sealed off for a year or more. How would Hildrun do that without arousing suspicion?

The male before him stirred, his body shuddering as he began a coughing fit. Eisengrim stared, suddenly aware once more of the reassuring weight of the hammer he carried. Mercy came in many forms. But not yet. For now, there was work to be done.

“Vali. Vali, can you hear me?”

The prone male coughed wretchedly. He began to curl up on his mattress, disrupting the blood welling out of his arm. Eisengrim took a step back despite himself. He cursed under his breath and regained that ground pure animal fear had surrendered. He tapped the butt of his hammer against the stone floor, loud enough for the dying man before him to open his blackening eyes, and regard him pitifully.

“Is it over, yet?” The voice that asked him was weak, barely audible above the fire burning in the centre of the room. Eisengrim descended carefully to his haunches, instinctively scanning the ground for any sign of bloodstains. He did not envy Hildrun’s coming task when the last of these wretches perished.

“Not yet,” the old bull whispered. “If you want, I can end it for you. Suicide’s a sin.”

“So is murder,” Vali coughed, covering his bloody face with a cracked, bloody hand.

Eisengrim shrugged. “What you call murder, many would call mercy. At any rate, I’ve many lives to answer for already.” He missed being young. He had been stupid, then. It had been wonderful.

“I never saw one of your kind until I came here,” the scaled rasped. “Now you’re all I see. I thought this was a human monastery?”

Again, the old bull shrugged. “Nominally. If you had stumbled upon one of the Clan’s territories, your reception would have been little different. Since you bring my kind up, I understand the Abbess and I have not been your only visitors.”

Vali shuddered violently. His eyes closed and he a made noise somewhere between a wretch and a sob.

“I wanted to go with him,” the scaled confessed, voice bitter and angry. “I begged and I begged but he said no!”

“Why did you want to go with him?”

“I wanted to see the sky,” Vali groaned. A tear rolled, thick and red, down his ruined cheek. “I wanted to see the sky one more time. I don’t want to die in this fucking hole!”

Eisengrim sighed. He wore a thick coat, and Vali looked very small to him. Was he even twenty?

“It’s raining outside,” the Hammer said, his voice wistful, and his face hidden in the deep shadow. “It’s getting weaker. You can see the stars in gaps here and there. The moon out is a crescent. It’s not very bright, but it’s still beautiful.”

Eisengrim had laid his hammer down as he spoke, the sound of the heavy steel touching stone drawing the dying man’s attention back to him. He pulled off his travelling coat, began to lay it out on the floor. Vali stared at him, disbelieving.

“Tell me everything, Vali. Everything. I’ll take you to see the stars. We’ll pray, if you like. When you’re ready, it will be over.”

The man looked up at him. There was fear in his features, but hope as well.

“Do you promise?”

Something stirred behind him. Eisengrim heard robes shifting. Hildrun was walking outside. She stifled a sob.

“Yes, Vali,” he swore, hand on his stone of office. “It will be over. I promise.”

*

They left the nunnery. Vali coughed weakly into the coat, but was otherwise silent. He was almost weightless to the old bull, who had carefully wrapped him up in the old, heavy travelling coat. No one was in the halls. Hildrun must have sent everyone to bed.

As they exited the nunnery, they found the rain had eased up, as if to fulfil the bull’s promise to the dying man. Eisengrim covered Vali’s head with a fold of his coat, lest they be spotted by someone. Vali coughed, spitting wads of blood into the old cloth. Eisengrim had worn it for more than a decade. Vali whispered an apology. The old bull didn’t mind, so long as none got on his hide. That was how people caught it.

Hildrun appeared, standing in the gap in the wall where her order’s gate had once been, holding Eisengrim’s horse by its reins. She had stacked a few bails of kindling on his mount, and she carried several tightly-bound bundles of wood over her formidable shoulders. She knew the town and the quickest route up into the hills and would lead them. He followed without argument. No one spoke.

An hour passed. Eisengrim was unsure where they were going, but the Abbess seemed to know. Vali coughed again, disrupting the flap covering his face from the rain. He wouldn’t let the old bull cover him again when this happened.

“You’ll get soaked,” Eisengrim cautioned.

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Vali replied, making a hacking sound that might have been a laugh. “You promised I wasn’t going back in that hole, remember?”

“We’re nearly there,” said Hildrun, as if compelled to join in. “I know a good spot.”

They turned off of the filthy, squelching road and passed into the more solid ground of the woods. This was far away from Siegfried and the others. They had camped on the other side of town, and Eisengrim was grateful for that.

Gaps in the canopy overhead mirrored gaps in the clouds far above. Wane starlight and a sliver of moonlight slipped through to show a little of the way. The leaves kept most of the drizzle off of them as they strode through the trees. Eisengrim had to stoop at points as he carried Vali, careful to make sure no branch disturbed him. The dying man had stopped coughing, his attentions take up by the trees they passed. He reached out as they neared a fir. He did not need to say anything. The old bull brought him nearer and watched emaciated, trembling fingers caress the soft green needles. They proceeded when he was done.

In time the trees parted, revealing a rocky outcrop. It sprang from the ground and rose several feet into the sky like a fist. The ground sloped down and away from it, towards the valley and the town below, concealed in shadow and darkness.

“How did you find this place?” Eisengrim asked the Abbess.

“I knew it in my youth,” said Hildrun simply. She tied his horse to a tree and then began unpacking the wood. “I come here now and then to be alone sometimes. To think and pray.”

“Thank you,” Vali whispered to her. “Thank you for everything.”

Hildrun blessed him, her hands trembling, her voice cracking. Eisengrim took his charge towards the rocks. Climbing them in the rain was tricky with his arms encumbered, but he managed it without slipping more than once. A small plateau of sorts was his reward. It was just big enough for a couple to sit together in secret, he realised. He wanted to know more about Hildrun then with a sudden intensity that was difficult to dispel.

“Beautiful,” Vali croaked.

“Yes,” said Eisengrim. He gently laid the scaled male down, easing him into a sitting position against a rock that must have served as a couch for a thousand lovers over the generations. Vali covered his mouth as he started coughing again. Eisengrim looked away, watching the trees as they moved in the slight breeze at first, and then the sky above. It had stopped raining at last, though the clouds overhead seemed less tattered than before. Only here and there could he find slim gaps in their billowing masses, offering a few smatterings of stars. Sometimes, as the clouds shifted above them, they could see the moon, or at least most of it.

“I’m sorry it’s not better,” he said, genuinely sorry.

“It’s beautiful,” Vali croaked again, once he had coughed up a little more blood. “I can never repay you for this.”

He began to cough again, disturbing the coat and exposing himself to the rain. Eisengrim wrapped him up again to make sure he stayed warm.

“There’s still kindness,” Vali said, looking up him, grateful. Truly grateful. “He said there was none left, but he’s wrong. He’s wrong…”

“What else did he say?” Eisengrim asked as he sat down beside the dying man.

Vali shivered. The old bull wrapped an arm around him without thinking, and would not have let him go then for the world. Vali rested against him, shuddering, covering his mouth as he coughed to protect the old bull from what was killing him.

“He told me he came from a clan in the mountains. They discovered he was different when he was a boy, and chased him away because he was dangerous, like me. Our village elders had us rounded up when they discovered the plague had come. My mother tore at the Dragon’s cloak but he said we couldn’t stay. He had to protect everyone else.”

“Are you angry for that?” Eisengrim asked. He knew before this was over he would be asking for a name, and an address, or at least a general direction. How many distraught parents and frightened, pleading children had he brought terrible intelligences to over his career? “Are you angry at them?”

“I was, but I can’t blame them. Don’t know what else the Dragon could have done. I was angry until I saw what it could do. Did it really come from the Elves?”

“I don’t know,” answered the bull. “Some people blame it on them, but the dead are easy culprits.”

“Volkard doesn’t believe they’re dead,” Vali whispered.

“What does he believe?”

“He said they went away,” the scaled groaned. “He said they had found the path to God, and that they had all gone there. They had not meant to leave us all behind. He said there was a way for us all to follow after them, and live in peace in a new world.”

“A world without sickness, poverty, or death,” Eisengrim said, repeating familiar promises that could lead to such calamity and pain. “Heaven on earth.”

“Heaven on earth,” Vali repeated with a weary nod.

“Did you believe him?”

“I wanted to. He said he was looking for people. Others like him. People who could change things.”

“What led him to you?” asked Eisengrim.

“He said he heard rumours about one of us,” Vali replied, shuddering, struggling to hold back a cough. “That one of us was like him. I figured he meant little Narra. Her mother died laying her egg. All her brothers and sisters died, too, when she hatched. Narra died on the road, near five days before he showed up. There’s no way he could have known about her, but he did. I wish I could tell you how he might have known, but I’ve no idea.”

Eisengrim listened, carefully noting everything in his head for later consideration. “I know where he went next,” the old bull said patiently. “I do not know where he came from, though. Did he mention it to you?”

“He said he came from the Dead Lands.”

Dietrich was right. “Where?”

“The Old City. The really big one. The one the Elves ruled from. We have songs about it, where I come from.”

“Its tapestries we keep,” the old bull said. “I helped my father make one when I was small. It told stories of my family, and how they survived until the Last Day. It warned us to stay away from that place in the Dead Lands.”

“Our songs say much the same,” replied Vali.

The two fell silent for a moment, staring up at a stubbornly un-picturesque night sky. A light breeze played among the branches and needles of the firs that surrounded them. Vali stared up at the few stars visible. Eisengrim watched him piteously as the sound of wood being stacked and ropes being cut reached him.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” asked the old, tired bull.

“People that can change things are the key,” Vali replied, keeping his gaze fixed above. Moonlight broke through the clouds and caressed his cracked, bleeding face. “He said it’s how they did it before. He said there was a time when magic wasn’t broken, when people that could do it were found and taught by the Elves. He said with enough people like him together, they can find the Elves, and turn magic back to the way it was.”

“That cannot ever happen,” Eisengrim said, feeling a little iron enter his voice.

Vali nodded. “I asked him if he could cure me, if he could change things. He told me to ‘be patient’ and wait ’til the world was fixed. Wait. Like I was still going be in that hole a week, or a year later.”

“I’m sorry, Vali. I am so sorry.”

The male shrugged. He looked at the old bull. His eyes were bloody and black.

“I never asked your name, sir.”

“It’s Eisengrim, of the Red Hands.”

“Has he killed people? Is that why you’re looking for him?”

“Yes, Vali. He’s murdered dozens, and I believe he will kill many more if I don’t find him.”

“I won’t keep you longer, then. I can tell you nothing else, and I think the old girl’s nearly finished getting my pyre ready. Thank her again for me. Ask her to remember me and my fellows in her prayers.”

“I’ll do so,” said Eisengrim. He drew Vali closer as his free hand reached for his short sword.

“Thank you, Eisengrim,” the dying man whispered. “God bless you.”

When he’d finished, Eisengrim carried the body, wrapped tightly in his old heavy coat down from the rocks. Hildrun was waiting for him. She had built Vali’s pyre precisely. The rain had dampened the wood slightly, so it took the pair of them a bit of effort to get a fire started. When it finally caught they stepped back, knelt together, and prayed.

When it was over, sometime later, Eisengrim realised that he was holding Hildrun’s hand. He dared not look at her, nor she at him. They stared at the ashes, and weak whiffs of smoke that curled up from the embers to a patchy, reddening sky.

“Do you ever wonder if you made a mistake?” Hildrun asked him. “Choosing the life you did?”

“All the time,” Eisengrim answered.

She squeezed his hand then. He smiled sadly, and squeezed back.

“I’d give anything,” he said then, so quiet she might not have heard, “for a chance to have met you when we were both young. To stand at the top of the mountains of our home, and watch the snow fall and cover the valley below. To see the tree tops sway like a sea when the winds come, for just five minutes…”

They left the ashes, Hildrun riding his horse until they reached her home, and her duties. The sun was burning in the east. Eisengrim took his leave.