Death's Executioner

by Charlotte E. English

  He regretted it, overall, because in that case where had the malefic gone, and how were they to find it?

  A clanking noise interrupted him, and a scuffling, and a soft rain of dirt and ice and other detritus from above.

  Then Tasha dropped into the middle of the dank, makeshift room. ‘Still sitting here?’ she said. ‘Some conquering heroes you make.’

  ‘Heroes with any sense do not hare off into battle without either information, a plan or a weapon,’ Nanda informed her.

  ‘Well, I have one of those things sorted. Here.’ Tasha unceremoniously dumped a dully glinting object into Nanda’s hands.

  She held it for a moment, tracing her fingers over the polished blade of a long knife. Where her fingers passed, pale fire briefly blossomed.

  Then she leaned forward, and put it into Konrad’s hands.

  Konrad stared dully down at the implement of his own demise. It had beauty, this weapon, he noted with surprise. That something designed for destruction could exhibit such grace did not strike him as fitting. What use the look of the thing, when all it would ever do was rend apart those at whom it was ? Nonetheless, a smooth curve to the blade; etchings, light and exquisite; and that pale fire, which bloomed in response to his touch just as it had to Nanda’s.

  ‘I suppose I thought you’d have to be Shandral to use this effectively,’ Konrad said.

  ‘Well,’ said Nanda. ‘You more or less do.’

  Konrad looked up. ‘Then I cannot wield this.’

  Nanda just nodded at the blade, still gleaming under Konrad’s touch. ‘The blade thinks otherwise.’

  Konrad frowned down at the thing, his mind flying back to a recent conversation with Nanda. She’d posited that he was no longer entirely The Malykt’s creature; since his resurrection by The Shandrigal he was partly Her creature, too.

  Here was evidence for it, of sorts.

  ‘Good,’ he said briskly. ‘Let it be done soon, then. The thing’s disappearance will be causing all manner of panic at the Temple.’

  He expected a wisecrack from Tasha in response, but she said nothing. She was looking at Konrad, then at Nanda, a frown creasing her forehead.

  Nanda looked steadily back.

  ‘They won’t be pleased,’ Tasha agreed. ‘But they weren’t doing anything with it anyway. Dithering about wasting time, rather like you are doing.’

  The words sounded like her, but Konrad could not shake the feeling that she was distracted — nor that something had passed between her and Nanda just now, a wordless exchange of some profound meaning to them both.

  He didn’t like it. Secrets? Now?

  Useless to enquire, though. Nor had he the right, being fond of secrets himself. He stood up with a sigh, and busied himself with the finding of some safe place to stash the knife among his clothes. Nowhere it would stand out, shining like that, and nowhere it would stab him if he moved unwisely.

  He trusted, by the time he was finished, that Nanda and Tasha had concluded their secret counsels and could now focus on the matter at hand.

  ‘No further word of the malefic, while you were there?’ he asked of Tasha.

  ‘It hasn’t appeared again, that I heard. And I think I’d have heard.’

  Where was it, then? Somewhere about the city, or the spiritlands, tearing apart more hapless victims — or hiding somewhere, biding its time until it chose to strike again.

  ‘You are planning to use it, I suppose?’ said Tasha, and again he felt that the question was not so idle nor so teasing as it seemed. Deadly serious, in fact, judging from the dark gaze she at him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Konrad.

  ‘Whatever the consequences?’

  ‘Yes. Need you ask?’

  ‘Actually, I did need to ask.’ Tasha beamed at him, and then at Nanda, and gave a curiously satisfied sigh. ‘Excellent. On with the show, then.’

  ‘The show?’ said Konrad. ‘The kind no one in their right mind would go to.’

  Tasha’s grin widened, and he was reminded that she could not quite be said to be in her right mind. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘See you later.’ Without further comment, she swung herself up and out of the subterranean hut again, and disappeared into the gathering darkness.

  ‘Where—’ said Konrad, too late. He a puzzled look at Nanda, who shrugged.

  ‘Some errand or other, I daresay,’ said she.

  ‘Errands? Now? We might be needing her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nanda. ‘Exactly.’

  Konrad shook his head, electing not to try to unravel this mystery. He had other things to think about. For example—

  Master! Eetapi’s shivery tones, thrilling through the air. A quantity of fractured ice split apart above and fell with a whump onto the dirt floor, narrowly missing Nanda.

  Konrad straightened. ‘They’re back,’ he told Nanda. ‘Eetapi, have you news?’

  I have something better than news!

  She paused; apparently Konrad had to ask. ‘All right, what is it?’ he snapped.

  A trail, Master. Like before.

  He winced, torn between relief and disgust. They needed a trail to follow, if they were to catch the malefic, but if it was like the last one, a trail made up of dismembered and bloodied corpses…

  All the more reason to hurry, of course.

  ‘The hunt’s on,’ Konrad said to Nanda, and immediately followed Tasha’s path up and out of the cavern. Where does this trail begin?

  Ootapi answered. In the city, Master. In the Darks.

  The Darks. The slums, or the darkest, most miserable part thereof. Curious. Was that coincidence, or among its other attractive qualities did the malefic have a taste for such wretched places? Formed of despair, and drawn to the same…

  Less fanciful musings, he chided himself. The time now was for purpose, and resolve, all those things Nanda was so good at. He was, too, ordinarily, but he spared a moment’s regret — odd, this — that he was not now embarking on the usual kind of hunt, a hunt for an ordinary murderer, one to be expediently dispatched by the usual methods and then home for tea.

  His own words of the previous day came back to him. I was congratulating myself on the prospect of not having to slaughter someone at the end of this. Hah. How life did taunt one, sometimes. He’d got what he’d wished for: he wasn’t going to slaughter a someone at all. How gladly he would trade this new duty for all those old ones, however deeply resented.

  Nanda clambered out behind him, and stood shivering.

  ‘You should wait here,’ Konrad told her. ‘I had better do this alone.’

  ‘Do you want to do it alone?’

  Nanda had a way of asking those unexpected questions, the ones that cut through the nonsense he told himself and exposed all the idiocy of it. ‘No,’ he said, choosing to give her an honest answer. ‘But why endanger you?’

  ‘Then it’s goodbye,’ she said composedly. ‘Right now, in this moment.’

  Konrad hesitated, torn between his better impulses and his unworthy ones. He didn’t want it to be goodbye, not now, not for a long, long time. If he had only a short time left, a few short hours at most, he wanted Nanda by his side. He wanted to savour every last minute with her, and part from her only when he had to.

  But to carry her with him was to put her in grave danger. Would she emerge unscathed from the encounter with the malefic? Doubtful. She had been lucky to do so once; nobody could expect to manage it a second time.

  He wished she might betray some emotion at the prospect of an abrupt, final parting, but this was Nanda. Ever had she walled her tenderer feelings behind solid ice. She would do so now, more than ever.

  Konrad did not have to do the same, however.

  He swept her up in his arms, and held her very close, his cheek against her hair. ‘Irinanda Falenia,’ he whispered, and kissed that soft, smooth hair, savouring her warmth, inhaling the scent of her. ‘Goodbye.’

  Even this was not enough. Before she could answer — before she could devastate him by choosing no
t to — he drew back just enough to take her pale face in his hands, and press one, fervent, long wished-for kiss to her soft, cool lips. He felt her stiffen, hopefully only with surprise and not with distaste, but what did it matter now? He was a dead man.

  He released her with the greatest reluctance — or he tried to. He was pulled back, fiercely kissed, and released just as abruptly. ‘Go,’ she said.

  Konrad paused just one moment more, trying to embed every detail of her face and form upon his memory. Trying, perhaps, to detect even a glimmer of sorrow in her demeanour.

  There was none, only that cold, implacable resolve.

  ‘Bye, Nan,’ he said softly, and somehow he managed to turn away. He lengthened his stride, putting as much distance between himself and her as he could, before he had chance to weaken and change his mind.

  Soon enough, he permitted himself one look back. He could not help it.

  She was gone. Nothing met his eye but unforgiving, bone-pale trees frosted with ice, shrouded in a gathering gloom.

  Chapter Eight

  That was touching, said Eetapi, as he strode on into the chill embrace of the Bone Forest.

  ‘Could you try at all to develop something resembling a heart?’ Konrad retorted.

  We were not made for sentiment, Master.

  Didn’t he know it. Konrad maintained a dark silence as he followed Eetapi’s lead ever on towards the city, ignoring one or two commonplace remarks of hers. He needed his concentration in order to keep moving as fast as he could go; his supernaturally fast Malykant’s stride was useful, but the darkening forest posed many dangers to an unwary Konrad. He ducked and swerved around the trees looming out of the shadows, and arrived at the city gates in one piece.

  He maintained that pace through the streets and on into the Darks, uninterested now in attempts at concealment. What did it matter if someone saw him? Who cared if people guessed who, or what, he was? His time as the Malykant was over. Soon someone else would guard Assevan from the malefic curse, and Konrad would be gone.

  That being the case… Konrad, almost gleefully, threw off every concealment he possessed, and let his true nature blaze through. He’d only ever done so while on the trail of a confirmed murderer, preparing himself to strike, a nightmare to strike terror into the hearts of the guilty.

  Let everyone see him now. They would talk of it, later; those harrowing days when death stalked the streets of Ekamet, and no one was safe. Those days when one nightmare had slain another, and wiped them both from the world.

  Or perhaps they would put his passing down as a fever-dream, a hallucination brought on by fear and darkness.

  There was a relief in showing himself as he was, just this once. No more secrets. No more fumbling attempts to fit in with a society that would recoil from him, if they knew the truth. No more skulking. Konrad would face his death in all his dubious glory, and damn the consequences.

  Here, Master, said Eetapi. Here it begins.

  The serpents had led him deep into the Darks, and the light being almost gone, the narrow streets were living up to their name. He paused at the entrance to a foul-smelling alley, peering doubtfully into the gloom.

  Slick blackness spilled in a dark pool over the filthy ground. There: near one wall, almost indiscernible in the deep gloaming. A shadowed shape, too still. The smells of fresh blood and — disturbingly — seared meat hung strong in the air. Something burned?

  Konrad swallowed rising bile. The regular kind, he hoped, not the foul black filth he’d hoped never to encounter again. ‘There are more, I take it?’ he said softly to the night.

  Many more, said Eetapi, and sailed on.

  Konrad followed.

  Fresh kills, these; the malefic had not long since reappeared. Konrad passed two more pitiful corpses, torn apart, one of them still bleeding. He began to see policemen rushing to each fresh scene of death, and pitied them: helpless as they were, still they must respond to the frightened cries of the citizens of Ekamet, still make some futile attempt at the restoration of order.

  He wondered how Alexander was, and where he was, and what he made of all of this. Pity that he had not had any opportunity of bidding him farewell, too. But he did what he could, in ridding the city of a problem the inspector, with all his diligence, could not solve.

  Serpents. You are sure that we are going the right way down this trail, I suppose? Having gone some half-hour expecting to encounter the malefic at any moment, his nerves thrumming with tension, it had occurred to him at last to wonder whether they were not in fact walking away from the thing.

  Yes, Master, said both the serpents together, and Ootapi added, These deaths are fresher. Newer!

  They would know about such things, of course. Konrad suppressed an urge to duck into a doorway, or cloak himself afresh, in order to avoid the notice of the police who dashed helplessly past, taking a grim pleasure instead in the stares he attracted. Word of this might reach the inspector’s ears yet, and he’d know where Konrad had gone, and why.

  Eetapi came to a stop, and Ootapi with her. It is gone, she said blankly.

  What is gone? The trail?

  Yes, Master.

  Why, then it must be nearby. Konrad prepared himself for a scream, a cry, that fearsome shriek that still, sometimes, shot through his memory, and searched the shadows with a keen gaze, hand ready on the hilt of the knife he carried.

  No, Master. The malefic is gone.

  What? How can you be sure?

  He felt the mental equivalent of a shrug from Ootapi. The taint is gone, said he helpfully, as if that explained anything.

  Gone where?

  Somewhere.

  Somewhere.

  Think, Konrad. Where could it possibly go? If it had vanished from the city so abruptly, it must either have been destroyed — surely impossible, when he had custody of the only blade acknowledged capable of such a feat — or it had gone Elsewhere. Meaning, into the spiritlands.

  Konrad did not hesitate. He ripped the aether apart and strode through, leaving the darkened, panicked streets of Ekamet behind him. The spirit-world blossomed around him with all its jagged edges, blazing lights and fathomless darks. Impatient, he jerked shut the door he’d made behind himself — no sense leaving it open for just anything to wander through, not that the malefic seemed to be short of options there — and stood for a moment, inhaling the silence. Peaceful, in a way, after the shattered mess he’d come through to get here. No palpable sense of fear; no police, no Shandral running here and everywhere, uselessly seeking an enemy no one could kill. Quiet.

  Quiet, but no true peace, for a crawling sense of menace assailed his senses. It’s here, he whispered to his serpents. It has to be.

  No answer came. He felt, shockingly, that they were gone, blended into the aether like a pair of insubstantial shadows. Hiding, in short.

  ‘Come out, then,’ Konrad said, drawing free the Shandrals’ knife from its own hiding place. It lit up like a beacon, taking him by surprise, blinding him in a haze of clear, impossibly bright light. He blinked away the watering of his eyes, straining to see past the absurd thing; it confirmed that the malefic was near but how was this helpful—

  The shriek came, piercing his defences, swamping him with such fear he could neither move nor breathe. Shadows shifted and roiled. A shriek again; a hunting call of its own, he thought, a declaration of imminent attack, Konrad braced himself—

  A sudden flurry of movement to his left, and shadows leapt at him, screaming. He shouted something inarticulate in response, slashed blindly with the blazing blade, hit nothing. Spirits above, how did one fight an insubstantial thing that came out of nowhere, consisted of nothing? He moved, supernaturally fast, Malykant-quick, and still his blade came down upon empty air. Fear faded in the wake of urgent necessity, a grimness settling over Konrad, muting every unhelpful sensation. He would not go without taking the malefic along; not permit himself to be slaughtered like every other of its hapless victims, uselessly, senselessly torn to shreds
, dead and helpless to prevent its ongoing rampage—

  Master. Eetapi manifested before his face, mere inches from his eyeballs; startlement merged with all the suppressed fear within him, and he stumbled back with a shout.

  Sorry, said Eetapi guiltily. Master, it is gone.

  ‘Gone?’ he gasped, and stared blindly about. Darkness gathered about the ground, and an eerie-pale sky. Trees grasped for him with silhouetted fingers, black and menacing, but for all that essentially mundane. No movement, save the drifting shape of Eetapi before him. ‘How can it be gone?’

  Ootapi floated up, following his sister. Master. I do not think the thing is following you.

  ‘You think not? Why?’

  Has it not occurred to you, said Eetapi, that the thing is in fact running away?

  ‘From me?’

  Yes. From the Malykant.

  He pondered that, turning the idea about, fitting it in with everything else that had happened.

  It could be the truth. Had Nanda deflected the malefic, or had it fled of its own accord — finding itself facing the Malykant? Had it sensed something in him that had repelled it?

  ‘But why?’ he said. ‘Why? How? I am no danger to it. Not without the blade.’ And he hadn’t had the knife with him, back there at the house of ice.

  Maybe you are, said Eetapi.

  ‘The Master said it has nothing to do with me.’ But he remembered, as he spoke, the other things The Malykt had said. Things that revealed how much Assevan had changed, apparently outside of the Master’s notice. Was He right about this?

  Harrowing thought, that The Malykt Himself could be wrong.

  You are not the typical Malykant anymore, Eetapi pointed out. Are you?

  No. He was the Malykant, and he was also a shade or two Shandral. A blend of the two things that had any power to threaten a malefic at all: one whose daily efforts erased the existence of most malefics by destroying the very filth from which they formed. And one who, suitably empowered, could tear it out of the world.

  He looked thoughtfully down at the blade, its light ebbing now, and wondered. Did he truly need such a tool? Did anybody?