by Adam Golden
“Perhaps you’d like to hear how hard it is to gather and dry the Begi plant in this area. This is weeks of work you’ve spread around my floor!” the woman exclaimed, thrusting up a small double handful of the salvaged dried plant for him to see. “Contaminated. Ruined!” she said, coming to her feet. “At least the brazier is upright and you didn’t burn the place down.” She brushed her palms off over the iron bucket of burning coals, which remained firmly in its place on the table.
“You’re trying my patience, witch!” Arius shouted. “I do not care about your candles or your damned plants. Tell me about the demon you people call Bishop and I will leave you to your sweepings. Anger me further and I will enact my Lord’s word on the subject of witches. You know it?” he asked archly.
“Oh aye, I know it. You men are always on about your right to hurt a woman, and the so-called holy men? Well, you’ve got a divine right now, do ya not? ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live’ is that it?” the witch spat back, though with less of her previous fire.
“Tell me of Nicholas.”
The sorceress slumped for a moment and then straightened. “You can’t imagine the danger.”
“I can—” Arius started.
“You cannot!” the woman Ceres screeched. “You know nothing of this. You see bodies, spilt blood, and think you know of danger and darkness. There are things in this world that would freeze your blood if you even suspected, things that were old before your God mumbled its first bloody mouthed demand for sacrifice. The one you seek knows these things, communes with power even I quake to fathom. He’s a powerful practitioner. Maybe the most powerful alive.”
“More so than you?” Arius asked, waving at the haze of greyish smoke rising off the brazier. “They say that you’re strong.”
“Ha!” the woman barked a bitter mirthless laugh. “Me? Comparing me to him is to compare a candle flame to the sun.” She paused and dropped effortlessly into a cross-legged sitting position on the dirt floor. “Have you ever seen genius, priest? A person so gifted that they put all their contemporaries to shame? An Alexander, a Caesar, an Archimedes?”
Arius didn’t answer, the old priest was slightly unnerved by the way the woman spoke. There was a strange intensity behind the words. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was exactly, but it gave him a chill.
“Nicholas of Myra is such a person,” Mama Ceres went on. “His natural ability for the craft is astounding by anyone’s measure. Now add to that the fact that he’s a voracious student, a consummate and obsessive scholar at whatever he means to learn. He has travelled the world for decades, steeping himself in the oldest and strongest traditions from dozens of cultures. Adapting, melding, and assimilating them to form one of the most powerful collections of magicks I’ve ever heard tale of.” The woman shuddered with a kind of dread, but there was also a heavy inflection of awe in her voice. The appreciation of a craftsman for the work of a master perhaps? Arius wasn’t certain.
Arius coughed and waved irritably at the smoke wreathing his head again. “You seem to know a great deal about this false priest, how is that?”
“False?” the witch asked “Never think it! Nicholas is the most zealously devoted servant of your God you’re likely to meet, priest. He believes wholeheartedly in his vocation, and were you to ask him, he would say that all that he does is done in its service. I wonder, can you say the same?”
Sharp grey eyes pierced into Arius and the old man felt slightly flushed at their intensity. Could he? No. He knew it. His motivations were anything but pure. He coughed again.
“How do you know all of this?” he asked, leaning forward to escape the worst of the smoke, “and how do I stop him?”
The woman laughed again, the same bitter sounding noise as before. “I spent years at that villa. Years slaving in its kitchens, walking its grounds, tending its owners and their secrets.” She gave him a shrewd look, and Arius imagined he saw laughter in those sharp iron grey eyes. “Nicholas was always charming, brave, and dutiful. So smart, and so willing to help. Special, and no one was more convinced than Fulvia, his mother.” The witch’s mouth turned down in a scowl, as though the name tasted sour on her tongue.
Arius almost expected her to spit. For some reason the idea nearly brought a burst of giddy laughter to the priest. He mopped his face with the palms of his hands and took a deep breath. The night’s activities were more exhausting than he’d realized.
“Water?” he asked, and Mama Ceres gestured to a barrel near the door. He waved her over to it and she went readily enough, filling a rough wooden cup from the barrel and crossing the few paces to present it to him. The priest eyed the cup suspiciously.
“Drink,” he ordered.
“Would I poison my own water?” the younger woman asked, exasperation thick in her voice. Arius just stared. After a moment, and an explosive sigh, Mama Ceres tipped the cup to her thin lips, drank, and then handed it to him.
Arius drank deeply and found, to his surprise, the water was crisp and cool, as if freshly drawn from a mountain stream. He drained the cup and realized with a start that the witch was still speaking.
“. . . incredibly harsh punishments,” she was saying. “He went days without food or water, got locked away in a cellar for minor childhood missteps and the usual childish lapses in judgement. She beat him savagely for his own lapses, for not reporting those of others, for imagined slights or impieties, and sometimes for nothing at all. Contritions, that’s what she called them.” She paused, staring daggers at him again, as though he were responsible for the woman’s crimes against her child. Arius swallowed and set his jaw, trying not to think of the tormented child. Trying to focus on the murderous fiend he had become.
“Did the boy’s father have nothing to say about this treatment of his son?” Arius asked, and then he was uncertain why he had. He didn’t care about the family squabbles that made the boy into the killer. He cared only for removing the killer.
“Origen? He was a womanizing drunkard, rarely home, always off seeing to some aspect or another of his merchant empire. It was Fulvia’s blood and fortune that made her husband the man he was, and they both knew it. He resented her for her station and she him for his sex. Fulvia was a power, a woman of vision. Nicholas’ family is old, powerful, and unfathomably rich. She used all of its influence and a great deal of its money buying positions of power for Christians in key areas of the government. Strengthening the role of the church in the Empire. I’ve even heard it said that she spoke to Constantine himself several times before his eventual conversion.”
“A woman of righteous conviction doing the Lord’s work is to be applauded,” Arius said, several of the words slurred. He was tired.
“Conviction?” the witch asked, her face twisted into a sneer. “Fulvia’s only conviction regarded her own power and her right to more. She burned with ambition and seethed with resentment at being limited by her sex from attaining it. All that she did, she did with one aim: to set her son at the pinnacle of the Empire’s strongest church and rule it through him. She bent his every action and every thought to that aim, and she succeeded. Maybe too well. Nicholas learned piety and fear just as his mother wanted, but he also learned about ambition and the acquisition of power.”
Arius’ ears pricked up, this had the sound of scandal and deep buried shame to it. “What do you mean he learned too well?”
Mama Ceres was silent, she’d hunched slightly where she sat on the floor and shot him furtive mulish looks. Arius wrenched the knife from the table with some difficulty and brandished the weapon.
“Speak.” The word was not shouted, but the command was sharp.
“When Nicholas was fourteen, his father’s ship was lost at sea,” the witch said grudgingly. “All hands perished. No trace was ever found. Not three days after the news arrived at the villa, Fulvia herself vanished. Disappeared completely. No servants saw her leave, she took nothing with her, she was simply there one night and gone the next morning.”
&n
bsp; Arius heard the gasp before he realized it was his own, and then he coughed as acrid smoke leaked into his lungs. The fit was long, harsh and painful. His refilled cup was pushed into his hands by the witch and he drank gratefully, sputtering and gasping until slowly he recovered himself.
“He killed her?” the priest croaked.
“No one knows for certain,” she said, nodding. “Some say he banished her, never to return. Others say Nicholas killed her or that she took her own life. Of course, some fools say she haunts these woods still, maintaining her careful watch over her beloved son, even after all these years.” She laughed at that, but it rang hollow to the old man’s ears. She didn’t doubt as much as she pretended. Well, one could expect superstition from a heathen witch, he supposed.
“What no-one knows is, if she died that day, what happened to the body? Of course, very few remember the family cabin, a ruin now, not three miles west of here, and all but entirely reclaimed by the forest. There’s bad energy there. I still see him in the woods sometimes, coming back. I stay clear, it wouldn’t do to remind him of me. No, not at all.”
Arius pounded the table in triumph, and with more strength than he’d managed since before his attack. The monster’s secret! A dumping ground for his kills. If Arius could uncover such a place, people would see. The governor would have to listen! There would be investigations, questions, and the veneer would start to chip. Once he was weakened, his power broken, his lies unraveled, then Nicholas would be easy meat for the priest’s dagger.
“Get up!” Arius demanded as he heaved himself to his feet. Once he’d managed that, he brandished his knife again. “You’re going to show me this cabin.”
“Careful, priest,” the woman said offhandedly as she slid from sitting to standing with a snake-like grace. “You’re tired, overwrought, and you forget to whom you speak. I have tolerated your threats and demands this far . . .”
“Be silent! You’ll have none of your spells and powders now, witch.” As he spoke, he moved across the small room with an ease that surprised even him and took the woman’s arm in a harsh grip. “Test me no further, woman. My man awaits outside, he will accompany us. You will show me the place and I will release you. If not . . .”
“Oh yes, yes!” she exclaimed with bitter wrath, “if not you’ll do as men have always done, vent your spleen on whatever woman is closest. Batter us, rape us, oppress us, burn us! Use us up and forget us! Yes, I know very well what you’ll do, priest.”
If he hadn’t been so consumed by this new hope, Arius might have been taken aback by the wild-eyed spite and bubbling anger that dripped from Mama Ceres as she spoke. As it was, he barely noticed as he bundled the woman out of the hut.
—
The cabin was little more than a few bits of tumbled wall atop a forested hill, thick with young cedar and creeping undergrowth. Thick mist swirled everywhere and the torches Arius and Feris held barely cut through. The forest stood eerily silent around the ruins, as though the creatures of the wood had abandoned this place, the only sound was the rhythmic bite of Brother Feris’ spade as he dug into the root-infested hill.
A gust of wind brushed across the back of Arius’ neck and the old man jumped. He caught a shadow from the corner of his eye and twisted in alarm. The old man felt his heart racing and wasn’t certain why. There was something dark here. He looked back and got another sullen glare from Mama Ceres, where she stood bound to Feris’ cart by her wrists.
“Come on, come on!” Arius snarled under his breath. What was taking the man so long? The ground around the ruins was positively littered with small mounds. Graves, he knew it, but apparently Nicholas buried his victims deeply.
Another breeze shrieked by and slid down the old man’s neck. He jumped and heard a crystalline titter from the cart.
“Something vexes you, priest?” came the woman’s voice. “Perhaps the spirits of this place resent your presence.”
Something moved in the trees to Arius’ left, something fast! He turned. Nothing. A shadow blurred to his right, the old man whirled. Gone.
“Feris, God damn it! Hurry,” Arius shouted.
“You know, I never finished telling you about the Bangi plant. You remember, the one you ruined and dismissed so callously?” the witch called in a light conversational tone.
Arius barely heard, he was watching the tree line anxiously. There was something there, or several somethings, and they were circling. Beads of sweat dripped off his brow, his heart was racing. He didn’t understand why. This place seemed to have unmanned him.
“Marvelous stuff Bangi,” the witch chattered on. “An excellent painkiller, it restores vitality and increases energy. A true miracle cure, though it does have some side effects. Sometimes it causes fevers, blurred vision, and anxiousness. It’s true strength manifests when it burns. When inhaled, dried Bangi allows the uninitiated to see the things of magick.”
The priest flashed to the memory of his prisoner angrily dusting her hands over the brazier in her hut. She’d drugged him!
“Of course, seeing magic has its dangers,” the woman said as he met her eye, his melted face aghast. “You see, when your attention is drawn to magick, its attention is drawn to you.”
Arius shrieked as something far more solid than the wind brushed his leg. He leapt forward and came up short as a figure of pure black took him by the throat, holding him off the ground.
The whatever-it-was that had him looked for all the world like a slim girl formed of woven vines of liquid dark. Arius tried to struggle, tried to call out to Feris, but the demon’s grip was like iron, he could do nothing, and the digging noises had stopped.
Arius tried manfully to reach the dagger at his belt, but he couldn’t find the hilt. His hands wouldn’t obey. Desperate prayers died, half-formed in his mind, as panic overwhelmed his ability to think. As he floundered in the grip of this inhuman thing, a wild-eyed Mama Ceres came into the ring of light made by his torch.
“Dryad, wood nymphs,” she said, caressing the shoulder of the one that held him. “We share some views on your kind. They’ve known the attentions of many a male over the eons. Satyrs, men, even priests, it’s always the same. They always enjoy helping in my work.”
The shadow thing flung him across the hilltop as though he were a straw doll. Arius crashed into the ground and skidded until his torso hung over the edge of the narrow hole that Feris had been digging.
The old man came face to face with the horrified death mask of the gentle monk who’d tried to help him. The kindly face was frozen in a bloody rictus of horror, staring up at Arius. Feris’s head stood between the palms of the monk’s own hands, resting on his stomach after being raggedly torn from his neck.
“I . . . would not have hurt you,” the old man gasped through his battered throat and the tears streaming from his eyes as he looked at the ruin of Feris.
“Oh yes, yes you would have!” the witch spat from behind him, flanked by her creatures. “You would have held me, threatened me, cut me, maybe even burned me as you threatened. All to get what you wanted. Just like all the rest. Hateful, violent, resentful, selfish! You’re all the same! Taking, always taking. You take our bodies, our pride, you take the world for yourselves and leave us nothing but your crumbs and the care of your children. In time, even they betray us, banish and enslave us until we’re forgotten!”
A chill of understanding shot through Arius. The battered, dispirited old man flopped over on his back and started up at the witch. He gasped, horrified but not shocked as he saw the tether. The smoke-like chain wrapped her like spider silk.
“Fulvia,” he croaked.
The woman smiled and inclined her head a touch. “He may have forgotten me,” she said, the wild madness of long captivity now shining on her ghostly face, “may have betrayed me like all the rest, but a mother forgives, and a boy will always need his mother!”
The creatures pounced. Arius opened his mouth to scream and gasped choking as the dryads forced their inky darkness
down his throat. His body jerked and spasmed as they filled him, and then he went still.
The Substance of Justice
“I cannot believe this!” Nicholas raged, slamming his fist down on the cover of one of the heavy volumes on his desk. “That fool Mammarius! Bad enough that I’ve had to wait weeks for him to arrive, now he postpones the trial even further!”
Tulio stood silent and unflappable as ever, arrow straight and attentive as a legionary centurion on review. He and Nicholas had only just returned from the mayor’s villa where Nicholas had dined with the half-sodden city bureaucrat and his august guest, Quintus Mammarius Asianicus, praetorian governor of Lycia.
“And to make that priest his advocate!” Nicholas roared. “The man does not care about Fouettard, this was aimed at me! He’ll have his nose firmly rooted in every crack and under every rock! I want him watched, I want reports of his movements and who he talks to.”
“Of course, Dominus,” Tulio said, inclining his head just a touch. “But, if I might, any surveillance could raise questions you’d prefer not to have asked. Perhaps a less . . . conventional method is in order?” he asked, displaying the unease that tinged his normally taciturn demeanor whenever the subject of his master’s art had to be broached.
“I suppose, I’ll consider it. Damn that old man!” Nicholas barked, striking the desk again. “Damn Mammarius! This farce should be over by now, every moment it’s dragged out is dangerous. Memory spells are not always reliable. What if the hold on the hunter slips? What if a witness recalls seeing Fouettard when he shouldn’t have? The longer this drags on the more distant the shock and anger gets, the more likely a jury is to listen and consider when we need them to dismiss and condemn.”
“Surely, even if Fouettard were exonerated, there’s no danger to you, Dominus.”
