When We Were Executioners

by J. M. McDermott

  “Abandon this path of sin, before it is too late for your soul, and the city that needs you.”

  “No,” he said. “Does your holy mandate extend to hunting down where I acquired my guardians?”

  We said nothing.

  “I see,” he said. “I should let Ela have her way with you.”

  My husband growled under his breath. I remained silent and still.

  “What do you want, exactly?” he asked. “Why have you come bothering us? We don’t need your kind here. The Church of Imam can deal with this problem of yours.”

  From my robes, I lifted a corncob wrapped in rags with a redyarn smile, and rose-colored cheeks. “It’s for your daughter,” I said.

  “You bring gifts for her, but not for me? How unkind.” He held out his hand for it, and caught his breath before speaking again. He took his time. I did not hand over the doll to him. “Lady Sabachthani’s a little too old for dolls,” he said. “She’ll be lucky to bear my heir at her age.”

  I adjusted the yarn hair. “Not with your illegal magic,” I replied. “You test the magic on yourself to give to her, don’t you?”

  He pulled his hand away. “Throw the doll in the fire,” he said. “That’s what she’ll do when she sees it.”

  I placed the doll on the mantle. “Enemies you make now may not fear your daughter as they fear you. Erin’s church and Imam’s both have longer memories than city courts of law. This doll is a baby girl.”

  “I have no grandchildren, yet. I don’t even have a son-in-law. Is this what you came to me for, Walker? Petty threats?”

  “We came to speak of Lord Joni,” I replied. “I have seen into his mind.”

  “I heard about Lord Joni.”

  “You knew before?”

  He snorted. “I never bothered to check,” he said. He took a deep breath, and then another. “If Ela did, that’s her business, not mine. Lord Joni was a crasher of parties, and nothing more. If it wasn’t for his uniform, we’d never let him in uninvited. Ela said he was useful to her because of it. I’ve already purified the grounds as best I could and encouraged my former guests to drink a little more holy water for a while. I’m not stupid. I know what a demon stain can do to a man. I take serious precautions. I always have.”

  He would have continued talking but for the coughing.

  “We did not come here to persecute you or your daughter, nor influence your interests. That is city business, as long as it stays away from our hunt. I carry Lord Joni’s mind with me now,” I said. “We search for two creatures of demon blood. One that Lord Joni loved, a demon child named Rachel Nolander. She called herself a Senta, and even mastered some of their smaller tricks. We have found no trace of her current location in Jona’s mind, or on these city streets.”

  He smiled at me, with bright white teeth—far too white for a hoary, old man. They looked foreign in his mouth. “My daughter tells me you refuse to search for her.”

  “She is not completely correct. There is another demon child of more urgency.”

  “Ela needs him, for now. He is useful.”

  “What is a petty criminal to you, even a very talented one, when you could gain the support of the Church of Erin when the king dies?”

  “Long live the king.”

  “We are unconcerned about the throne, and have no interest in your illegal activities. We care only for the demon children. Give them to us, all of them, and we will support whomever you wish.”

  “This city worships Imam more than you. What use is your faithful to me?”

  “Is it more useful than a single thief?”

  He laughed. “You learn to negotiate with lords in your forest?”

  “In a wolf pack, the insurrection is always one meal away. Who rules the pack can change in a single swipe of antlers. Every wolf hunts. Every wolf dies.”

  “I never liked wolves. What I would give for your powers, Walker,” he said, “To wear the skins of beasts, and see through the eyes of the dead.”

  I curled my nose at him. “You could never trade, take, or challenge for our path,” I said. “If you desired Her Blessing for power, you would never merge with Erin’s Will.”

  “I will not live long enough to find a way,” he said. “Perhaps my daughter will take that from you. Perhaps the little moppet on the mantle will learn of your powers.”

  “Perhaps we will return for their heads,” I said. “What of this city? You know we will not leave until we have purified this place of the stain of demons.”

  Lord Sabachthani took three long, hard breaths. He coughed. While he spoke he fidgeted with his hands. He had a handkerchief that he used to wipe his fingernails. The handkerchief stank of vinegar so strongly that I smelled it from where I stood.

  “I knew the last real Lord Joni, Jona’s father, during the war,” said Lord Sabachthani. “If Jona got his blood from anyone, it was his mother. Lord Severa Joni was a fine man, for a traitor. His wife was an opportunistic harpy. She ruined a good man with a pretty face.”

  “We will find that out for ourselves. Your daughter wanted to marry Jona.”

  “Nothing surprises me about my daughter. Personally, I was hoping for the commoner, Mishle, but he wasn’t much of a swimmer when they threw him in the bay. Nor was Lord Elitrean’s useless son.”

  “Lord Joni killed both of those men,” I said.

  Sabachthani snorted laughter, then paused, recovering his lungs. “Yes, Ela thought he was useful. Jona must’ve been a fine prospect for the throne. Resourceful, obedient, ruthless, and, he’d know his city streets like a king’s man.” Lord Sabachthani yawned. He scratched his neck. “Too bad he died in your woods.”

  I narrowed my gaze at the man. “If you were wiser, you’d protect your daughter from the children of demons and this city’s throne.”

  “If you were wiser, you’d never come to my city at all,” said Lord Sabachthani. He coughed once, into his vinegar-laced handkerchief. The cough was wet, and probably had bits of blood. Lord Sabachthani waved his handkerchief at my husband. “That man of yours, he hasn’t said a word to me.”

  “Be glad of that,” I said.

  “He spoke to me before, long ago. Before you were born, I suspect.” The Lord smirked like a sinner. He turned his fake, brilliant smile upon my husband. “How is my valley doing, Walker?”

  My husband moved across the room fast and fluid. He slapped Sabachthani, hard. The white teeth banged loose from the glue in the Lord’s gums.

  “Be glad I do not wear the wolf skin when I swipe at you, fiend,” he growled, “Your lands and your laws cannot protect you from Erin when you are dead.” A red welt rose on the Lord’s white cheek.

  Lord Sabachthani did not touch his teeth. He spoke through them. His words were muffled, but we understood them, fine.

  “I’m not dead, yet, Walker,” he said. Tears welled up in his eyes. He choked them down. We are the only two creatures on earth that would dare raise a hand against him. I imagine he’d never been struck in his life. His lip curled. He fixed his teeth with just his tongue. He clamped his jaw shut to hold them down. We waited for him to finish re-attaching his teeth. We let him speak again, correctly.

  “Be careful lest I hand the whole forest over to the street rats. Farms for everyone, free of charge, to honor a dying king’s dream of public prosperity.”

  I pulled the wolf skin across my back, but I did not wear it full. I let my eyes and spine remain human. I was mostly wolf, but tall and proud and terrible. I leaned over him like kissing a lover, so I could shove my maw into his face and let him smell the death in my hot breath. I growled at him. Send the dogs to their death if you must, but it is on dogs that you have built your daughter’s throne. When all the dogs are dead, nothing will stand between your family’s throats and my teeth.

  He smiled at us. He nodded his head, respectfully, as if he understood me. He might have. “I think we have threatened each other enough. A pleasure, children of Erin. May you find everyone and everything you seek, a
nd leave Dogsland forever,” he said. “My daughter will be informed to stay out of your affairs. I advise you stay out of hers as well, but I will not stop you.”

  Sabachthani snapped his fingers. The hall servant, seashell in hand, opened the door behind us. The candles flicked on again, in a burst of light. The fireplace smoldered down to steamy wisps of smoke.

  My husband and I left.

  In my husband’s pocket, he had collected loose paper while the Lord stared into my teeth. We took that paper and gave it to our church, that we may gain advantages against our enemies here.

  He had made a deal with wolves. He would be true to his word.

  Wolves do not honor agreements with men like him. When we are ready to strike against him, we will.

  By evening twilight, I prowled the streets with my husband. I still saw the faded paint in the Pens District. Three crowns in a row brushed in ragged ink hid in alleys and broken crates and ruined stone walls.

  I touched the ink. Dog, Djoss, and Turco had painted these signs before his mind died. This was one of their abandoned demon weed dens.

  * * *

  My husband and I spent weeks wandering the streets in day and night—the wolfskin pulled over us in the dark—sniffing out the stain of the demons. We had to find them, if they were still in the city. I carried the mind of Jona Lord Joni, found dead in the woods, inside my own. We carried his skull in blessed wicker wrapped in leather and paper and cloth to keep all hands away from accidental contact with the demon stain.

  I needed his scent, from his skull, to sift his world of his memories and see through them, into his world as if into my own. I needed to be close enough to smell the bones to feed my studies of the demon child’s consciousness inside of my own mind, where the blessings of Erin have opened the mysteries of his life and death to me, with his mind’s memories.

  My husband says that the woods will need us soon, and we must hurry. But, there is nothing to hurry. A demon stain is more dangerous than a blighted tree or an animal spreading diseases for a while, or even a farmer casting sins upon his land. The care of the souls of farmers, who are mostly good men without our aid, was trivial to this.

  That is what I tell my husband. He tells me the moon fattens and fades while we stumble through darkness, howling into the corners of the sewers of the city after the stain of Elishta. When we woke up at last, we left in the dark and returned in the dark, and scoured the sewers in the dark. We slept without bothering to return to our human skins. We didn’t sleep in the bed.

  * * *

  The main temple of Erin was far from the Pens. We sent runners ahead so we would not have to wait for our supplies. Holy water, fireseeds, kerosene, candles, quills, ink and coins waited for us. Sometimes we requested dandelion wine, or matches, or pieces of the woods to soothe our restless wolf soul: a slip of moss, the lost bark of trees, anything to remind us of home.

  We take to the temples these papers that I write, and give them to the temple druids. Scribes spread these words to you, that we may find Rachel and Djoss before they escape beyond our eyes.

  We did not take paper from the temple. We bought paper to get close to the ragmen of the Pens, unchallenged.

  * * *

  My husband and I bought paper from a ragman that tugged on his beard and muttered under his breath in a foreign tongue. He refused to speak to us at all.

  His alley was contaminated with Jona’s stain.

  I don’t remember what had happened here.

  A stain smothered the mossy brick walls and tracked through

  the mud and washed with the rain into the sewer grates, into the bay where people caught fish at the grates to pickle with dill. The fish was sold cheap to the ragpickers that couldn’t afford better, and they ate more of this awful stain. The boys came back to the ragman and the stained alley, a little queasy from Elishta’s touch, and the boys puked on the stained walls, and the pollution rose like flood water in the alley.

  My husband and I came here to pour holy water on the walls and the ground. We brought temple fruit to bless and purify the boys.

  These boys wore old sacks more than clothes. They looked like tree roots with legs. When they smiled their teeth were brown stones. They huddled in the angled places—the shadows, the empty stairwells and empty doorways. They observed us two strange outsiders pouring water on the walls like cats watching wolves.

  An older boy sneered at us with his broken teeth. “Why you doing that?” he said. “You washing that wall or something?”

  “We are,” I said.

  He smacked at the boy next to him. “You know we’re peeing on that wall soon as you leave, right?” The two boys smiled like thieves.

  I smiled back at him. “We do what we must,” I said. I pulled a blessed apple from my belt. I held it up so the boy could see it. “Tell me, Mudskipper, did you know a fellow that couldn’t speak and everybody called him ‘Dog’?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I won’t tell you nothing, though.”

  “I guess I’ll have to eat this apple myself. I was going to give it to Dog’s friend, Djoss.”

  The boy started to laugh, but a cough cut him short. “Djoss is dead,” he said. “What do I gotta do for that apple?”

  “Tell me something I don’t already know about someone who is dead.”

  My husband walked the perimeter while I spoke with the boys. He glared off anything that looked like trouble.

  And this is how my husband and I learned of the Three Kings of Dogsland. I didn’t have enough apples for everyone, but I told these boys that I’d return for more paper, and I’d have more apples, and I’d want to know all I could about these men who are all dead, anyway.

  I smelled Jona slithering under their rotten breath. Erin only knows exactly how many illnesses his demon-stain had caused. Most weren’t fatal. Sometimes another illness struck with strength while the body was weak from the stain of Elishta.

  The ragpickers told me a few stories about boys that had died horribly out of nowhere, like Corporal Tripoli.

  Everyone’s fine and fine for weeks. Then, one morning, some threshold breaks inside of one body, and death pours through them like cholera, or worse.

  But, we’ll speak to that later. I say this so you may know this: we approached the knowledge of the Three Kings of Dogsland from the mouths of the ragpickers. With Jona, later on, I sought them from the other side.

  * * *

  When the summer rains fell, Rachel came to Dogsland with her brother, Djoss. They were Nolanders, with nothing to their name.

  Corporal Jona Lord Joni, a King’s man and a killer, lived for months in the same city streets, unknown to his beloved Rachel. When Rachel and Jona finally met and knew each other for what they were, they spun together like threads beneath a weaver’s thumb.

  Beasts always seek to merge into tribes from instincts more primal than sublime.

  Sometimes this becomes love.

  * * *

  Rachel was watching from a window. She looked down at him, unable to sleep. She saw the children of the neighborhood part. She ducked back inside the shadows of her window before he could see her. She waited a few minutes. She didn’t know what she was afraid of, but she didn’t want him to see her. When she thought she was being stupid, she went back to the window, and he hadn’t even looked up to her building. He probably didn’t know where she lived, yet.

  Jona walked the rounds with a dangerous-looking hooked halberd. When he found a dead body, he dragged it on the hook to the nearest large sewer grate. He hooked the grate open. Jona tugged the body into the grate, and closed it shut. The bodies piled up inside the sewers. In other neighborhoods, a body might be checked for identifying things—jewelry or papers—and perhaps the family would be contacted. In the Pens district—and the Warehouses and anywhere else the working poor might call home—bodies were pulled into the sewers before anyone got sick with the diseases of the poor.

  This time of year, only light drizzle poured in off the bay. Wi
thout the powerful spring rains, the stench of the streets and the sickness never washed away.

  When the bodies stank strong enough to reach a lamper high on his stilts, the lamper poured some of his noxious whale oil and kerosene into the sewer. He tossed a match behind the liquid, and let the oil stink melt away the body stink.

  Bodies burned, shit burned, and discarded pieces of rotting meat burned, but no paper, no wood, and no clothes ever burned.

  Ragpickers found their way into the underground, before any fires came. They plucked anything fibrous for the ragmen making paper by the river.

  The fires stank. But, the fires burned down the worst of the stink. Fires never burned down enough stink.

  Rachel, at her window, was used to the smell, by now. She watched Jona’s back. He was cheerfully moving through the streets, sweeping away the dead, as if they were never there. Any violence that claimed a man in the street was his own problem if a king’s man didn’t see it. It was at once comforting to Rachel, and frightening when she thought about it that way. Still, she was glad she was friends with a king’s man, if they were friends.

  She was sure they were friends.

  CHAPTER XX

  What do you want to do?

  I want to go to bed. I’m tired. I’m so tired. I worked all night.

  Do you think your brother will be there?

  No. I haven’t seen him for two days. He’s running with gangers now, you know. I don’t think he bounces anymore.

  Everyone’s in with the gangers these days but you and me. Nothing to do. Maybe he’ll turn around on his own.

  Maybe. We need some lemons. We’re out of lemons. Go buy some lemons.

  * * *

  The lazy sun, falling slowly through the sky while clouds rushed past, reached one sleepy finger through the window and onto the bed. Rachel curled closer to Jona to escape the hot sun. Jona stared at the ceiling. They had made love. They had talked. Rachel had fallen asleep. Rachel had woken up when Jona tried to move to escape. Rachel pressed into him. Her warm scales funneled Jona’s sweat into her mattress like tile roofs guiding rain to eaves. The scales nipped at his damp skin when she moved. If she pressed hard enough she might scrape him.