Pillars of the World

by Anne Bishop

  With cold deliberation, Adolfo locked the feeling of shock behind a prison of self-control. The storm of rage would have a target, but not here, not yet.

  “Where did this happen?” he asked in a voice stripped of emotion. “How did this happen?”

  “It was my fault —” Harro said, tears filling his eyes.

  Yes, and you will pay for it.

  “— but I was his Assistant, and I obeyed his orders.” Harro hesitated. “He was young, Master Adolfo, and … sometimes … too dedicated.”

  In other words, Konrad had indulged himself too much while extracting the last confession. Fool of a boy! How many times had he been told that even an animal that appears defenseless will bite if cornered?

  “What happened?” Adolfo said, keeping his voice soft and his body still.

  “There was only one witch, as we’d been told, but she was stronger than the others we had encountered while doing our great work here in Sylvalan.”

  I know the rhetoric, old man, Adolfo thought impatiently. I created it.

  “She could draw power from earth, fire, and water. So Konrad felt he had to be more persuasive with this one. But … I know pain is the only way to cleanse witches of what they are. With this one, I could see it wasn’t breaking her down as it should have but giving her a kind of mad strength to resist. When I tried to tell Konrad what I saw in her eyes, he became angry. He ordered me to go on to Norville to inform the baron there that he would be arriving in a day or two.” Harro’s eyes pleaded. “I couldn’t disobey.”

  Adolfo just waited.

  “She escaped. I don’t know how, but she got away from him. He gathered men from the village and tenant farms and went after her.”

  At least Konrad had had sense enough not to hunt alone for a witch who probably no longer cared about the creed most of her kind lived by.

  “The men caught up with her in a meadow that bordered the Old Place there,” Harro continued, his voice breaking. “As they attacked her, a woman on a dark horse rode out of the trees.”

  Adolfo frowned. “Another witch?”

  Harro shook his head. “The village men said it was Death’s Mistress. They said it was the Gatherer.”

  The spot in his back that always chilled when fear raised its head turned icy cold. “One of the Fae,” he said in a barely audible voice. “Nothing had been said about Fae frequenting the Old Place.”

  “They come around now and again, but the villagers swore the Fae rarely bothered themselves with human concerns.”

  “This one did,” Adolfo snapped, his control cracking enough to let a little of the rage gush through him.

  Harro wrung his hands. “It was the Gatherer, Master Adolfo.” He closed his eyes. “She killed Konrad, and the other men ran away.”

  Young fool. The Fae were no longer as strong as most people thought, and it was easy enough to thwart one of them if you knew what gift of magic that particular one commanded. But the one who was called the Gatherer had to be avoided because her gift …

  “She killed him because of a witch,” Adolfo said heavily.

  Harro opened his eyes. Tears filled them. “Yes.”

  “And no doubt took his spirit to the horror that awaits men’s souls in the Evil One’s Fiery Pit.”

  Harro shook his head. “I don’t have much of the Inquisitor’s Gift, but even the villagers who have none could see …” His voice trailed away.

  “See what?” Adolfo demanded. That icy spot in his back grew and grew.

  “Konrad’s ghost,” Harro whispered. “She left him there, in the meadow.”

  Adolfo sank back in his chair. The rage inside him pounded against his self-control.

  “The village men came back, intending to retrieve the body and give Konrad a proper mourning and burial. But when they saw the ghost, they were afraid he might be able to follow and haunt the village so they —” It took effort for Harro to swallow. “They buried him in the meadow to bind his ghost there.”

  Adolfo covered his face with his hands.

  “I am sorry, Master Adolfo,” Harro said hoarsely. “Konrad was a fine man and a skilled Inquisitor. He will be missed.”

  As Adolfo lowered his hands and rose from his chair, the power swelled inside him, fed by the rage smashing through his self-control. Fortunately, the means to relieve the pressure inside him — and salvage this disaster — was standing before him.

  Adolfo placed his hands on Harro’s shoulders. The power that flowed through his hands flooded the weaker man so fast Harro barely had time to realize what was happening.

  “You will return to the village,” Adolfo said, his voice soft as his power of persuasion ensnared Harro, leaving the man vulnerable — and obedient — to whatever was said. “You will stay at the inn, not at the baron’s estate. You will tell the villagers that it was not Death’s Mistress but the Evil One in disguise who attacked the men when they attempted to cleanse their village of the witch’s foul influence. It was the Evil One who killed Konrad.”

  “The Evil One,” Harro mumbled.

  “You will tell them you believe that the Evil One is still nearby, waiting to devour other good folk as it devoured Konrad, and you have returned to keep watch until I, the Master Inquisitor, can arrive and free them.”

  Harro’s eyes were blank and glassy now. Perfect.

  “The second night you are at the inn, you will retire immediately after the evening meal, and you will sit before the fire in your room. You will watch the fire carefully. When it has burned down to embers, you will take an ember the size of your thumb from tip to the first joint. You will place this ember on your tongue. You will make no sound, no sound at all. When the ember has burned out, you will spit it out on the hearth and take another, smaller ember. You will swallow this ember. You will make no sound, no sound at all. You will continue to swallow embers until you can swallow no more. Do you understand?”

  “Un … der … stand.”

  “You will remember reporting to me about Konrad’s death. You will remember that you confessed that you had failed him, and that, when you asked my forgiveness, it was freely given. You will remember that we grieved together for the loss of a fine young man. That is all you will remember, but you will follow my instructions exactly as I have told you.”

  “Will … follow.”

  “Good. That is good.”

  Adolfo stepped back, returned to his chair. He carefully released most of the power that now ensnared Harro, leaving just enough to ensure his will would be obeyed but not so much that Harro would notice it.

  He waited until Harro blinked, drew in a deep breath, then looked around as if slightly bewildered.

  “I thank you for bringing me the news yourself, Harro,” Adolfo said quietly. “Please leave me now. I need to be alone with my thoughts — and you must prepare for your journey.”

  “Journey?” Harro appeared to be thinking hard. Then his face cleared. “Yes, the journey. I must return to the villagers and keep watch. Even in grief, the great work must go on.”

  “Yes, it must.”

  Adolfo didn’t move until Harro left the room. Then he rose and stood before the hearth. He stared at the fire for a minute before releasing one little burst of power. The fire roared, the flames leaping twice as high as they had a moment before. After a count of ten, they shrank back to normal size.

  Adolfo still stared at the flames.

  Perhaps it was for the best. Even before they had come to Sylvalan, Konrad had begun showing signs of being a bit too much like his grandmother. The day would have come when Konrad no longer saw him as the uncle who had guided and trained him but as a rival for the title of Master Inquisitor.

  He had been fond of his nephew. After all, the boy was the only close family he had left. But he wouldn’t have tolerated the boy as a rival. He wouldn’t tolerate anyone having command over him ever again. So, perhaps, it was for the best that Konrad had died this way. Still, the villagers had to pay for allowing the Gatherer to kill an
Inquisitor.

  The last of his family. Oh, there were other relatives — after all, his father had had two older brothers — but it had been so long since he had seen them, he no longer thought of them as family. Nor did he consider his wife in that way. She was just a flawed vessel that had never been able to properly grow his seed.

  No, women were not family. They were like the cow that gave milk or the hens that laid eggs. They were a necessary part of a man’s life for his comfort and well being, but they should never be thought of as being more valuable than the cow or the hen. Their purpose was to open their legs for a man’s pleasure and to birth the children who would be his heirs.

  If his father had understood that, the old man might still be alive.

  His father had been a younger son who would inherit no property, his mother a beautiful woman who owned a substantial piece of land. He suspected his father had married as much for the land as to satisfy lust, and must have been cruelly disappointed when he discovered that the land wasn’t signed over to him but remained in his new wife’s control. Still, she had done what she had promised. Whole sections of the forest were cut down and the timber sold. Virgin meadows felt the bite of a plow for the first time, and tenant farmers planted tame crops. The wealth they harvested from the land surpassed what the rest of his family could claim, and he had been well pleased.

  But his father never forgot that she had kept the land in her own name, and he never forgot that his own pleasures were dependent on how well he pleased her.

  Despite that, they had been happy together — until the day when his mother had complained that her bedroom was cold and he, their first-born son and barely six years old, performed the trick he’d just learned and lit the fire for her. He clearly remembered the blank way she had stared at him, and how pale her face had become.

  The vicious arguments had started after that. Accusations and denials. His father had lied to her by omission, had failed to admit that there had been a foul union between Fae and human somewhere in his bloodline. The son must have inherited this perverse magical power from the father because her bloodline was pure.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was wrong.

  You’ll not shame me with these tricks that make your mother doubt me. I’ll not be a penniless younger son again because of the likes of you. If I have to beat this mischief out of you, then that’s what I’ll do.

  Yes, her bloodline had been pure in that she was a witch who was descended from witches as far back as her family could remember. But she had never mentioned that when she’d let that younger son woo and win her. She never mentioned it at all.

  But that was something that Adolfo didn’t realize until much later, after he’d been disinherited in favor of a younger brother who had shown no signs of impurity, after he’d run away and had learned, haltingly, to use the power that had destroyed his childhood.

  That first display of magical power had been the beginning of his mother’s hatred for him, and that hatred had changed a warm, happy home into a pit of horrors for a child who couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong and didn’t have the self-control to deny something inside him that felt so natural.

  He had suffered the beatings, the humiliations. He had learned a great deal from the walking evil his father had become in an effort to placate a wife who hated.

  At fourteen, he ran away and lived from hand to mouth for several months before he found his calling. It was in a village that had experienced several incidents of bad luck. Milk going sour within hours of being taken from the cow. Chickens on several farms producing two-headed chicks. Wagon wheels breaking on the way to market. Fields that would begin to grow, only to wither when it was too late to plant again in time to harvest.

  At first, he sensed the magic as a feeling of something familiar and frightening. After being in the village for a few days, doing whatever work he could to earn a meal, he saw the woman. He saw the easy way she greeted and spoke with the other villagers. He saw the wariness in the eyes of one handsome man. And he saw her eyes when that same man met another young woman outside a shop.

  A couple of days later, when a riding party was taking a cross-country run, the young woman’s horse stumbled for no apparent reason and went down. The fall crippled the young woman in ways that would make a young man look elsewhere for a wife.

  That was when he realized what it was about that woman that had troubled him.

  She had felt like his mother. And there had been that same shuttered look in her eyes that his mother had had whenever someone’s luck had turned bad.

  He went to the young woman’s family and told them he believed that the accident had been caused by the witch living nearby. And he told them he had some small skill in gaining a confession from such creatures.

  They had doubted his professed skill, with good reason, and they had doubted his assurance that the woman they knew was a witch. But they had a crippled daughter, and they were hurting.

  The confrontation had taken place on the village’s main street. It had been a foolish thing to do, and had almost cost him his life. He had stood in the main street and hurled the accusations at her, listing every one of the ills that had beset the villagers. Her only response had been a mocking smile — until he loudly declared that the reason no decent man would have her was because she fornicated with the Evil One and the stench of the vile union clung to her.

  She flung her earth magic at him, opening up the street right under his feet. He threw himself away from the deep pit, landing hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. A moment later, the pit snapped shut. If he’d fallen into it, she would have buried him alive.

  One of the villagers hit her over the head with his walking stick before she could strike again. Then they had looked to him to tell them what to do with this enemy. And he had the answer: Burn her.

  With his help, how those flames did burn.

  He spent two days at the inn there, his food and lodging courtesy of the family whose daughter had been crippled.

  When he was ready to move on, one of the farmers mentioned a cousin who was having a bit of trouble, and if Master Adolfo was heading that way, would he mind having a look to see if he could sense if a witch was causing the trouble.

  Of course he could head that way. And of course he found a witch. It didn’t matter that the troubles had no other cause than nature’s whims, there was a witch living quietly in the village. She, too, burned.

  In each place, there was always someone who knew someone else who was having a bit of trouble that might be caused by magic. And if he arrived at a village where there was no trouble, it wasn’t difficult to create some. He didn’t have any of the earth magics except for a bit of fire, but he had the gift of persuasion, which made him suspect that his mother had had Fae blood in her as well as witch, since the magic to open a door into another mind was something that belonged to the Fae. So it wasn’t difficult to slip around the borders of one of the Old Places and turn the minds of a few of the Small Folk to mischief magic. He would leave and return a month later when the villagers were ripe to have someone pay for their troubles. And there was always someone who could be singled out to pay, whether she was truly a witch or not.

  Over time, his fee increased from food and lodging and the occasional piece of clothing to coins in his pockets. And the first time a Wolfram baron had needed help with a bit of trouble in order to confiscate some land he coveted, the fee was more than a few coins.

  By the time ten years had passed, he was known as the Witch’s Hammer, the Inquisitor from whom witches could not hide. By the time those years had passed, he had visited the handful of universities in Wolfram to talk with the scholars who collected stories about the Fae and the Small Folk. He had puzzled with the other men over the oblique references to something called the House of Gaian that appeared in a few of the oldest stories. Whatever it had been, the House of Gaian disappeared from the stories around the same time that Tir Alainn was first mentioned
, so he dismissed it as something too far in the past to be of use to him.

  By the time those ten years passed, he had started gathering other men and training them to be his Inquisitors. They were all as he had been — young men, outcast because they were descended from a mating with one of the Fae. He called their magic the Inquisitor’s Gift, and taught them how to use that power in order to hunt the witches whose existence thwarted men’s right to rule the land.

  By the time those years had passed, he had reshaped some of the stories traveling storytellers and bards passed from village to village until it became common knowledge that witches were the Evil One’s whores and offered their bodies to decent men in order to trick them into becoming the Evil One’s servants.

  When another five years had passed, he slipped back to his home village. It took little effort now to persuade a weaker mind to believe what he wanted that person to believe. No one who had seen him arrive at the inn recognized him as Adolfo, the disinherited son who had run away.

  It wasn’t difficult to discover that his father made regular visits to a nearby town and had been doing so for years. It wasn’t difficult to whisper in the maid’s ear when she came to clean his room that the main business that was transacted on those visits took place in a mistress’s bed. He planted a few other seeds as well, and then left them to do their work.

  It was a hard year for the family who had turned him away. His mother, upon hearing the whispers about her husband’s infidelities, took a knife to their bed one night and cut out his adulterous heart. She was hanged and then burned.

  A few weeks later, his younger brother, still distraught over his parents’ deaths, put his horse to a jump the animal couldn’t possibly take, and died of his sustained injuries. His pretty wife, swollen with their second child, went mad with grief, threw herself into the small lake on the estate, and drowned.