Death's Executioner

by Charlotte E. English

  That might explain a few things.

  The woodland grew thicker, darker and stranger as Konrad followed in Nanda’s wake, and the path more winding. Sometimes it swerved abruptly, left or right, and appeared to double back on itself in a great loop. Black tree-boughs hung and swayed over the path, attended by the occasional, deep toll of a mournful bell. Once, something whisked about his feet, leaving an icy trail and a sensation of wetness behind.

  Twice more, Nanda halted over the remains of some hapless, shredded thing lying by the roadside. If they were the kinds of things that had names, he knew none of them, but he pitied them all. Black blood spilled over pale grass; the meat and bone of fae-things opened wide to the lightning sky; these were the impressions he carried with him as he walked on.

  ‘Who is to avenge these creatures?’ he said at last, struck by the thought.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Nanda, only half-listening.

  ‘These slain fae. They are murdered, just as surely as Matenk at the bridge. Whose task is it to avenge their deaths?’

  ‘I don’t believe that person exists.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Nanda raised a brow. ‘Should they be avenged, in the way that you mean?’

  ‘I… well, yes. If humans deserve such vengeance—’

  ‘Do we, though?’

  He stopped. ‘What?’

  Nanda spoke carefully, without looking at him. ‘Some might say that the Malykant ought not to exist. That it’s a justice too harsh, too unforgiving.’

  ‘Some might say. You mean some do say that.’

  ‘Yes, some do.’

  Struck by a terrible suspicion, Konrad tried — and failed — to get a look at her face. ‘Are you among them?’

  ‘I couldn’t wish you out of existence.’

  ‘If it wasn’t me?’

  ‘In the more abstract sense? Perhaps. But I am of the Shandral, recall. We take a different view of things.’

  ‘And you’ve had your interfering fingers in the Malykant pie for some time.’

  He almost left the words unsaid, afraid that they might offend. But Nanda grinned. ‘You are much improved by our interference, admit it. Ah— now.’ Three quick steps took her off the path, and she plunged headlong into the gnarly trees. No lantern, no guide.

  ‘Nan!’ he called, uselessly, and plunged in after her.

  Lights bloomed among the dark, dank trees, but not the kind anybody would wish for. Pallid things, these, floating at eye-height and above, or inches from the ground; bobbing and twisting, beckoning with ghostly promise. Konrad altered his bearing to follow one, only half aware of what he did; his reward was a faceful of something wet and somehow dusty and foul-smelling, and a sharp drop from which Nanda saved him at the last instant.

  Her scolding words died away, mostly unsaid. ‘Oh,’ she said instead. ‘Very well done, Konrad.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said dubiously, staring down at the abrupt descent that fell away before him. He stood atop something of a cliff, about as high as Konrad was tall, and had almost plummeted over the edge. Below, another path wound away into a steep valley, crowded on either side by trees as bone-white as their fellows above were black. Creatures passed this way, evidenced by the jagged stairs that offered passage down — to those sharp enough to spot them in time.

  Konrad thought he saw, in the near distance, a house huddled beneath the white boughs.

  ‘That looks promising,’ said Nanda, and started down the steps.

  ‘Just what are we doing?’ Konrad called, hurrying after. ‘Are we looking for something in particular?’

  ‘Yes. That house, I imagine.’

  ‘Er?’

  ‘Someone opened a way through Parel’s Bridge. Someone from the spiritlands side, I surmise. That someone had a purpose. It may have been the same person — or thing — that tore up Matenk, but then again it may not.’

  ‘And that someone lives here.’

  ‘The trail leads in this direction. What does your detective brain tell you?’

  ‘That the evidence is circumstantial.’

  ‘True, but that does not mean that it is incorrect.’

  Konrad ceased his protests, keeping a weather eye out instead for creeping things in the ghost-light. But nothing moved, in fact the woods seemed bare of life altogether. An impression Eetapi unwittingly bore out in saying, Master, I sense nothing.

  Nothing relevant, or nothing at all?

  Nothing at all. It is as though everything has fled from these parts.

  Interesting.

  Or… died. Is everything dead?

  Konrad did not dwell on the unseemly relish with which she posed the question. I don’t know. Are you finding a great many dead things?

  Some, Master. Some.

  The house grew more distinct as they approached, and the vague sense Konrad had received that it was made of ice proved to be the literal truth. From a distance, it had shimmered blue-tinged white, as though lit with its own ghost-glow. Up closer, the radiance faded. Konrad beheld a round-walled structure of uneven construction; not built with bricks or stone blocks or anything that might make sense to Konrad, but asymmetrical, listing to one side and haphazard. Quite as though rain or some other fall of water had poured out of the skies and frozen into this shape, thoughtfully forming a ragged-edged window or two as it did so. And a door.

  A deep, bone-aching cold radiated from the wintry house. Konrad felt that to set one’s hand to that ice-frosted door might prove a terrible mistake; the flesh would freeze from his fingers, his bones would crack and break under the intense frigidity, and he would leave half of his arm behind him.

  Nanda, either less fanciful or more experienced than he, simply kicked it open, emerging apparently unscathed from the procedure. ‘Hello?’ she called, upon marching inside, and her voice echoed off the glittering ice walls.

  The house consisted of only one room, and it bore no furniture at all, or nothing that deserved the name. A pallet of woven white branches huddled against one wall, padded high with goose down and rags, and canopied with strands of ice-drops. No firepit or hearth in a house made of ice, of course. Detritus lay piled in heaps here and there, dark and rotting, though the smell these unappealing stacks emitted wasn’t half so malodorous as might appear. Slightly sweet, and herby.

  ‘I’ve heard of spirit-witches living out here,’ said Nanda, when nothing answered, and nothing moved. The place was empty.

  ‘Nothing human could live here,’ Konrad objected.

  ‘That depends. No, you may be right — but not quite all spirit-witches are human.’

  ‘What is a spirit-witch, then? I thought it referred to a human with some rapport with the spirit-fae.’

  ‘That is its most commonly used definition, though not absolutely comprehensive. We shall see. Whatever lived here, though, is gone. And…’ Nanda crouched over something, and brought Konrad’s lantern to bear upon it.

  Expecting another torn-apart fae, Konrad approached with caution. But it was only blood, black blood, albeit in sickening quantity.

  A trail of it ran from the bed to the doorway, and beyond.

  ‘Something was injured,’ said Nanda. ‘And fled.’

  ‘Injured by the same thing we are hunting?’

  ‘Maybe. We—’

  A tearing shriek struck Konrad’s ears with the force of a blow, and a wraithlike shape erupted from the shadows. So fast, too fast; darkness came at him in a blur, engulfing him in shadow, smothering the shout that tore from his throat. Talons raked over Konrad’s arm, splitting apart his coat, leaving stripes of burning fire behind, and bile filled his mouth. He spat, or vomited. Black blood poured in gouts from between his lips.

  He heard Nanda scream, though not an inarticulate sound, not the cry of alarm or terror that he had been trying to make. There were words in it, method to it; white light, lightning-bright, flashed through the house, and Konrad heard the ominous crack of shattering ice.

  Quiet, then, and stillness
. The wraith-thing was gone.

  ‘Nan,’ Konrad muttered, and hauled himself up. He’d fallen onto that ice-hard floor in the tumult, and he slipped now in black blood and bile as he tried to rise. His head spun, his arm burned, and he was colder than he ever remembered being in his life.

  Then Nanda was there, steadying him. Her hands burned with intense heat — a good heat, nice heat, not the searing stuff that went through his arm like acid — and his wracking shivers eased. She looked at him, and he thought maybe her eyes were glowing with an ice-light of their own, but he was probably delirious.

  ‘I did tell you this was a bad idea,’ she said calmly. ‘Inkubal, the arm, please.’

  ‘Wha—’ Konrad’s words dissolved into an inarticulate hiss of pain, for some merciless thing had hold of his arm, and was industriously tearing at it. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘Don’t take it off, it can’t be that bad, I’m going to need it—’

  ‘Inkubal does not perform amputations, as a rule,’ said Nanda. ‘Don’t so insult his capabilities, if you please.’

  ‘What?’ Konrad gasped. Dizziness swamped him, and he shook his head, desperate to ward off a fainting fit. How embarrassing, especially in front of a lady, and with all that mess on the floor to fall into—

  ‘Ouch,’ he croaked, insufficient utterance, to say the least, as his arm went into ice-water up to the shoulder, or something that felt like it, and for a horrid, unbearable second he’d rather have been set on fire.

  Then the pain vanished. All of it.

  ‘Thank you, Ink,’ said Nanda. A suggestion of a bow, sketched upon the bright air in shadow, and then they were alone again in the ravaged ice-house.

  Konrad fought for breath. ‘Was that — one of your —’

  ‘Pacts? Yes. Ink has been assisting me with healing for some years now.’

  Konrad’s brain whirled with conflicting impressions. Somehow it had not occurred to him that Nanda’s spirit-fae — the ones who drained her of life and vitality day by day, and would surely kill her in time — were not merely faceless embodiments of evil, but living creatures, at least of a sort. Capable of good as well as bad. That she’d formed those pacts because they were useful.

  Business relationships, if you will, if paid for in an unusual currency.

  That made them much the same as humans, in essence, and Konrad’s plan to mercilessly tear them all to shreds in Nanda’s name fell into tatters.

  Especially if one of them had now saved his arm.

  He flexed it, experimentally, and found that his fingers worked.

  Marvel.

  ‘You’d have lost that, if Ink and I hadn’t been here,’ said Nanda coolly. ‘And the rest of you shortly after.’

  ‘What was that thing?’ Konrad said, too appalled to bear with merited told-you-so logic.

  ‘A pertinent question. I don’t know.’

  ‘I was vomiting blood.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Black blood.’ Konrad swept out a hand, indicating the gore all over the floor.

  ‘And I think that is the fate that befell whoever lived here.’ Nanda spoke calmly, but her eyes betrayed her: wide and horrified, and she breathed too fast.

  ‘It was not my own blood. It’s as though I was a — a conduit for something else — infected by it—’ Konrad forced himself to breathe, and tried to dismiss from his reeling thoughts the impressions left by the last few minutes. Agony. Death. Merciless evil.

  ‘By nightmare incarnate. I don’t know, Konrad. This goes beyond my knowledge. It— what? What is it?’

  For Konrad had gone very still, eyes wide in horror. For half a minute, he did not breathe. At length he said: ‘When I first became the Malykant, I was told a story. The story of why Assevan must have a Malykant, or specifically what happens if those duties are not tended to. I do not know that I paid it much heed at the time, or have ever thought of it since—’

  ‘Go on,’ said Nan.

  ‘It’s said that deaths The Malykt calls Unclean leave a… residue, behind. A poison, a corrupting influence — a nightmare, if you will. An evil only purged by justice, however harsh. If that doesn’t happen, it — builds. That’s why people used to ward against things creeping through from the spiritlands. It wasn’t ordinary fae they were worried about. It was these… things. Nightmares. Evils. They don’t have a name, or a soul, or anything that might seem— they’re just death incarnate. All they know is blood and bile and decay, and they will kill anything living, indiscriminately.’

  ‘But—’ said Nanda. ‘But there is a Malykant. There has been one for a hundred years — hundreds? I don’t know. Too long to permit of such an abomination to form again, no?’

  ‘Not every murder can be solved, Nan.’ Konrad took in a deep breath, and another. ‘Spirits above, I try. My predecessors tried. We do the best that we can, but some elude us; some escape justice, and it is the cumulative effect of those that now forms the danger. We have not escaped entirely from these corrupted things. But they’ve become so rare that we have forgotten them. The first one in a hundred years, perhaps.’

  Nanda blinked, and breathed, and looked helplessly around at the destroyed winter-house. ‘But what can be done about it? Do you mean to say that it is unstoppable? Out there somewhere right now, killing fae — or in Ekamet, killing people?’

  ‘Probably not the latter,’ said Konrad. ‘At least, not now. Because I rather fear that the thing is following me.’

  Chapter Three

  It made sense, after a macabre fashion. A thing formed of death itself, of killings and hatred and evil, would naturally enough be attracted to the same. And what was Konrad? Death’s tool, formed of its essence, a creature who existed for the sole purpose of dealing it out again.

  In a sense, the Malykant existed so that these other, worse creatures would not. Or, not so often.

  ‘I don’t think I believed the story, quite,’ Konrad said later, restored to the questionable comforts of Bakar House. Questionable, because short-lived. If Konrad was correct, and the creature was drawn to him, he could not stay long among other people. He endangered everyone nearby. ‘In my early days among the Order, I was given such a wealth of information, I doubt I registered half of it. I thought this titbit nothing but a nursery tale, most likely. A pretty piece of mythology to justify the existence of so foul a role.’

  ‘Nursery?’ said Nanda blankly. ‘Not quite a bedtime story, Konrad.’

  Ordinarily by now they would have retired to the parlour, and comfort, and warmth. Or indeed to bed, and the same. But today was different. Konrad, still reeling from the attack, still dizzy, his thoughts in a whirl, could not even think of rest. Nanda, drawn and wan, her exertions having for the present exhausted her, was doubtless sorely in need of slumber; but she, too, was restless. They had proceeded as far as Konrad’s elegant tile-floored hall, and had got no further. Konrad paced back and forth, still clad in his coat, his hat torn off and relinquished absently into Gorev’s care. Nanda stood with her back against the closed door, as though such a posture might ward off anything minded to come through it.

  Futile. Such a thing did not use doors. Not that kind.

  ‘I must go to the enclave,’ said Nanda. ‘Gather some others. The bridge must be warded, the door sealed, a watch posted—’

  ‘Enclave?’ said Konrad, pausing in pacing and ruminations both. ‘What enclave?’

  ‘In the Bones. There’s a hidden village there, an enclave of spirit witches. I went there not long since; it’s where I found Lady Lysak. She bade me come back sometime, if I needed help.’

  ‘I wonder if this is what she meant.’

  ‘No. No one could have foreseen this. But I will need help, Konrad. I cannot keep fending that thing off alone.’

  ‘No, no. You must have help. I’ll go with—’ He broke off. ‘I mustn’t go with you, must I? Not unless we can be certain I don’t endanger you by doing so.’

  ‘I am not sure if you’re right about the nightmare. Is it drawn to you? Why
would it follow you?’

  ‘Like is drawn to like.’

  Nanda’s face darkened. ‘You are nothing like that thing,’ she said, with a vehemence Konrad found comforting.

  ‘In too many ways, I am. Anyway, which is the better alternative? That I should be attacked like that, quite far from the scene of Matenk’s death, is puzzling. Either the creature followed me there, or there are at least two of them. One still at large in Ekamet, and one that we ran into face-first in the spiritlands.’

  ‘Two,’ gasped Nanda, turning paler than ever. ‘Horrid thought.’

  ‘Quite. I cannot decide which horrid thought I prefer.’

  ‘There is another possibility,’ said Nanda.

  Konrad leapt on that idea. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘In which order did those deaths occur? Did the creature originate somewhere at, or near, that ice-house, kill all those fae, and then cross over to kill Matenk? Or was it the other way about?’

  ‘How could such a thing manifest in Ekamet? Surely it must originate from the spiritlands.’

  ‘I would have said so myself, but I cannot be sure. Who can? We have not seen such a thing for a century. Also, it may have made more than one passage. Begun in the spiritlands, passed through into the city, and then retraced its steps.’

  ‘Following me,’ said Konrad.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Konrad sighed, and rubbed at his burning eyes. ‘In short, we can draw no sound conclusions. Yet. If you go to the enclave and recruit assistance, I must go to the Order. If anyone knows more about this nightmare of a thing, it must be they. I’ll see Diana.’ He did not want to see Diana. Hadn’t, ever since she had told him she had asked for his “retirement”. He did not know how to face her after that, or what to say in the wake of what felt like a personal betrayal. But he must. This was more important.

  ‘In the meantime,’ said Nanda, ‘we… hope, that it will not kill again.’

  ‘A faint hope, Nan.’

  ‘Bordering upon non-existent, I should say.’

  News travels fast, Konrad recalled as he arrived at the Temple of The Malykt soon afterwards. Ill news travels faster still, and here was the proof of it, for bursting with tidings as he was, he found that he had been preceded.