The Executioner's Cane

by Anne Brooke

  A howl from beyond the trees proved her words more than false. Jemelda swung round, holding on to Thomas, and caught the flash of yellow eyes from the shadowy undergrowth. A wolf, and one primed for hunting, if she was not mistaken. By the gods she prayed it was alone.

  “Run!” she yelled at the rest of them. “Stay close together, but run!”

  She hadn’t needed to tell them to stay together as the dense trees would do that work, alongside their own sense, if they kept it. She grabbed the nearest man, one of the poorer farmers, as he fought his way past her and gave Thomas up to his care.

  “Look after him,” she ordered. “It is not his time, understand?”

  He nodded but his eyes did not rest on her. As the rest of the group surged past her away from the howling of the wolf, she hoped it would be enough. She would make it be enough, and so she let the man, and Thomas, go. The blacksmith was more alert now, able to stand for himself. One less difficulty to cause her grief and she was glad of it.

  The wolf howled again, its rising song making her heart beat faster and her hands clench. The rustling of grass and bracken told her it was on the move. For a heartbeat only, she turned to run in the direction her people had taken. If she kept close to them as a group then they might be safe. But they might not. The wolf was no doubt desperate for food as they all were. Above all, she must save the people – she would have need of them and soon.

  She swung round and headed off at an angle from where the last of the group, Thomas and the farmer, had disappeared. She could hear the wild crashing noise they made and knew she had to make the wolf follow her, not them. Surely she was now strong enough to defeat it – she and … and … Iffenia. The name came to her in a flood of realisation and acceptance and she almost laughed aloud with the fierce joy it brought. So she opened her mouth and yelled. This time she didn’t care about the words, it was the noise she needed. At the same time, she crashed her way through the brambles and trees in front of her, drawing blood from her arms and face where thorns pierced her skin. The smell of her blood would draw the wolf to herself.

  “Follow me, follow me!” she cried out, and began to run as best as she was able.

  The wolf howled for a third time and she sensed the fierce intent of its pursuit of her, all but feeling the heat of its breath at her back. Better her than the people however, and the madness inside her thrilled at the realisation of the chase. Was this what she had wanted all along? But she couldn’t die. There was too much at stake. She and the power she carried with her would fight until the last drop of blood was gone if she had to.

  A passing branch struck her on the shoulder, the shock of it making her scream. She grasped it and, with a mighty wrench, tugged it free. She hadn’t thought she’d have the strength to do it but it surely must have been loose. Swinging round, she thrust it in the direction of the wolf and had the satisfaction of hearing the animal howl, this time in pain and not in pursuit. By the stars, it was nearer than she had anticipated. Blood from the wolf spattered against her skin, warm and acrid, and she thrust the branch forward again. She was rewarded with another howl, but did not try a third time. Letting the branch go, she plunged her way through towards what she hoped was the edge of the wood. How this journey was proving more than she could bear, she did not even know if she would survive it, her wild anger of before being suddenly and unaccountably gone.

  Then, the welcome glimmer of sunlight. She could scarcely believe it. Somehow she could sense the outer border of the woods. The trees were thinning and her path became easier. But, although the path was more passable for her, it was so too for the wounded wolf.

  Savage teeth grasped her leg and she screamed and fell. When she turned round she could see the wolf’s visage. One of its eyes was torn out, leaving streaks of blood and yellow jelly in its place. It must have been the branch but she knew her attack had not been a lucky one, as it only enraged the beast more. As it tore at her ankle, the pain flooded through her, and with it that anger again. By the stars how she had missed it. With a wild cry, she somehow staggered upwards and launched herself at the wolf. The animal would not expect it and perhaps she might have a chance to survive. She drove her fist into its missing eye, and prayed it might be enough.

  Simon

  Ralph had gone to hunt for Jemelda with a few of his most trusted people, such as they were. Simon had felt Ralph’s impatience with the new vision and meaning Annyeke had brought to them, and all the more so as Lord Tregannon was a soldier not a man for stories. So Simon was left here with Annyeke, his father and Frankel. There was one other though: Ralph’s steward whom he had ordered to stay. The boy’s leg was maimed, it was true but the shaft of additional concern Ralph felt towards him had flowed over Simon also. He couldn’t have missed it.

  He gestured to the boy and sensed his name even before the lad came running: Apolyon. It meant something in Ralph’s old language, but as he wasn’t here, Simon couldn’t tell what it might be.

  “Apolyon,” he said as the boy stopped and gazed up at him with an unaccountable expression of trust. And how that brought back memories of the other boy who had died earlier on their great journey together. “Apolyon, is there somewhere quiet in the village we can go?”

  The boy nodded, but Annyeke stepped forward.

  “Surely you can find the stories you need to tell more easily here, Lost One?”

  Simon knew, from the openness of her mind, that Annyeke did not believe there would be time to journey to the village, bearing in mind the frailty of both young and old. But, with all his thought, he understood they needed to travel there in order to begin. The white shimmer of the raven and the heat of the mind-cane told him that.

  “No,” he said as gently as possible. “Stories do not come from the rich but the poor. Why would the rich have need of them? If I am going to try to find a fresh legend, then it must be at the village, First Elder, where everything began for me. And it will involve us all. Stories of any kind do not in the end come from nothing, but from the people and things around us.”

  After a flicker of hesitation, she nodded. “Then we had better start out.”

  Simon took the lead, knowing how in the recent past before he had encountered the mind-cane and before he had died he would never have assumed such a thing. He would have freely given the honour to Annyeke. Now it seemed natural. He hoped he wouldn’t get too used to it, however. One day, if they and the land survived what they needs must face, he hoped for a normal life again, whatever that might be.

  So he set the pace to the village, with Apolyon at his right and his father leaning on his arm on the left. Behind him followed Annyeke and Frankel, whilst overhead the snow-raven flapped a slow path across the nearer sky. Odd how the ice beneath his feet seemed to be softer, melting in what must surely be a false harbinger of spring. It was too soon for a thaw, but something in the air had changed since Annyeke’s return, since his own acceptance of the new role she brought him. It would not be denied. In any case, they were, by any measure, no kind of an army, and if Ralph were here he would have laughed to see them.

  But we are not an army, Lost One. We are not here to fight battles but to build a peace.

  He blinked at the sudden influx of Annyeke’s words directly to his mind. Sometimes, peace too needs an army, he replied and, when she did not respond, left it at that.

  As they walked through the water and onto the path leading to the village, the boy tugging at his hand in eagerness in spite of his limp, Simon felt a frisson of excitement spark through him. It sprang from the mind-cane and also from himself, as if his deepest thought was rejoicing at the cane’s secret knowledge. Something was about to begin.

  “Look!” Frankel said from behind him. “Look.”

  Simon turned round, steadying his father so he didn’t fall. The old castle servant was staring up into the trees and pointing at something Simon couldn’t see.

  “What is it?” he said, feeling Annyeke’s impatience sweeping over him like a wintry g
ust of wind. “What can you see?”

  Frankel didn’t reply directly, but merely carried on pointing, glancing first at Simon and then at whatever he’d seen in the trees. Simon followed the direction of his gaze. Heart pounding with the need to reach the village, he nonetheless forced himself to be still. Whatever the old man had seen might turn out to be important. In these time-cycles you never knew.

  At first he saw nothing. Then, when he blinked, he realised the topmost branches of the trees were white. He had imagined it was snow but it was not. It was … nothing.

  Next to him, Annyeke gasped, but he had already understood the meaning. The sudden cry of the snow-raven and the lurch of the mind-cane in his grasp told him what he already knew.

  “They are vanishing,” he whispered. “The trees are vanishing.”

  Annyeke’s hand on his arm gave him courage. “Yes, it is the power of the Book of Blood which makes everything disappear and begin again, but for good or ill depends on us. It is just as I saw in my dream. Simon, Lost One, by all the gods and stars, I know you are the only one who can help us. Please, we must hurry.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Let us go. We must get to the village.”

  He quickened their pace as far as he was able to, but was determined not to leave behind those he’d sworn to bring with him. Around them other sections of trees and undergrowth were vanishing too, the bleak whiteness swallowing them up. He wondered if that same blankness could take people also, but did not want to answer the question. Next to him his father began to mumble words which made no sense, and the grating sound of them pierced him and made him tremble. He could not push aside the fear the old man understood something he could not convey, in the way the very mad or the very young often do.

  They must reach the village.

  Finally, after what seemed to be the length of several winter-season stories, Simon caught sight of the first ruined houses, no more than huts. When he glanced upwards, he could see the terrible whiteness flowing steadily through the treetops. He tightened his grip on his father’s arm and tried to quicken the pace further until the old man cried out. That sound too pierced him, took him back to the day of his mother’s death when his father had driven him away. So much to be considered, still, and no time for it.

  He couldn’t make the group travel any faster, so he must think of something else. Letting his father go, but not before ensuring he could stand, Simon lifted his eyes to search for the snow-raven. The bird came at once, a blessing he hadn’t fully expected. The raven swooped in upon him, but Simon did not flinch, although he stepped forward in order to shield Annyeke from his arrival. When the bird landed, his bright wings settling against his back like mist melting into a deeper haze, Simon raised the mind-cane and brushed it lightly across the raven’s great beak. It was the only way he could think to communicate his purpose, although the bird had always understood him well enough before.

  The safety of the nest is to be found here on the earth. So I will fly and perch as you command.

  Yes, he thought that might be as good a way of putting it as any.

  “Annyeke,” he said, swinging round to face her directly. “Take the people to the village as quickly as you can. Find somewhere to hide and I will come to you.”

  “What will you do, Lost One?”

  “I will stay here, with the mind-cane. I will try to fight the white emptiness to give you time to find safety. You will have the snow-raven. He will protect you.”

  The look on her face told him what she thought about that particular plan, but there was no time for argument.

  “Go, First Elder,” he said, giving her a gentle push in the right direction. “I give these people to your command.”

  It was enough. She nodded, turned and began to hurry along their small group towards the huts. The snow-raven sang one long musical note in a key which reminded Simon of all that was golden and warm in the land and then launched himself up into the air, tracking Annyeke in his flight.

  By the gods and stars, Simon prayed, let them be safe. Then he gripped the mind-cane more firmly and looked for the whiteness again.

  Strange how he could not focus on it for long. It was only in the edge of his vision where he thought he could sense it more clearly, because it was not purely a physical entity, he knew. When he glimpsed the whiteness, his mind too echoed with the same emptiness, bringing him at once to a place in himself he had not realised existed.

  In death and what is not, you can discover life and what is.

  “What?” The exclamation tumbled from Simon’s lips before he could realise the foolishness of it. No-one was here but the mind-cane, and it was therefore the mind-cane whose words had reached right into his soul and pierced him.

  What do you mean? he asked it, sending the words in all the colours he could imagine through his thought and flesh.

  You will know, when it is right. That is why I am here.

  That was all very well, Simon thought, but not entirely helpful. He scanned the trees and sky, then the lower branches and bracken for the whiteness. He was meant to be protecting them, allowing them time to reach safety, but he couldn’t even track his enemy for more than a few moments without losing him.

  What would Ralph say at such laxness?

  He would fight, Simon told himself. Ralph would fight.

  “Come then!” he shouted, stretching his arms wide and brandishing the mind-cane like a sword. “I am here. Why don’t you try me, whatever you are?”

  The noise of his own words astonished him and he almost missed the shimmer of echo in the trees on the right, where no echo should be. He whirled towards the sight and caught a glimpse of the white emptiness which had eluded him. Still shouting but not in any way that made sense, he ran towards it, the cane dancing and humming wildly in his hand. Sparks of silver flew from its carving and landed deep within the heart of the whiteness ahead which, this time, had not shifted away from him. A flash of snowy fire from the first of the sparks and then it vanished. Simon kept on running.

  The next heartbeat, he was within the emptiness, within the silent pages of the Book of Blood. Though it was not within him, but he was within it. It felt like purity but also the deepest of terrors, and its colours were nothing and nowhere, sliding away from his mind like ice. Then he too was nothing, more fully even than he had been in death, and he had no markers to know himself or any other thing. The only object he recognised was the shape of the mind-cane in his hand and its song in his thought.

  This is the story, live it.

  He could not tell if the words came from him or the cane but it didn’t matter because at that moment they were one and the same. And the song was both the snow-raven and himself. It was then the words rose up within him. No they were him.

  I am the Lost One, he said in his mind, knowing he’d said the same before but now he meant it. The words are mine.

  Annyeke

  She didn’t glance back. There was no time. She cursed herself that her small efforts to contain the power the Chair Maker had released had been worse than useless – the danger was already amongst them. All her instincts told her to run, but she had the Lost One’s people, the Lammassers, to protect and so she would not do that. It would not be the action of a First Elder, and certainly not of the kind of woman she believed herself to be. So she gathered Frankel, the boy and the Lost One’s father close to her and began to walk as swiftly as the old man allowed towards the village.

  “Follow me,” she gave the command with a confidence she couldn’t find in herself to the rest of the group, and knew in any case they would have no other option.

  A loud cry behind her but she didn’t turn round. Something told her not to.

  “Don’t look,” she whispered fiercely, making the words resonate from her thought as well as from her mouth. She no longer cared whether her mind-skills would terrify the villagers or not. They had moved beyond such small fears. She hurried her troop towards the hoped-for safety of the village as best she could.
All the time she prayed the Lost One would be safe.

  It seemed to take the length of more stories than she could remember to reach the village and Annyeke couldn’t help but be aware of the emptiness at their heels. In the trees and in the air she sensed it, though it did not touch them. Whatever Simon had done or was still doing, the white terror had not attacked them. It was an advantage she could work with, her only one.

  When the ruined houses appeared, Annyeke blinked. Even though she’d known Lammas had been severely damaged by the mind-wars in Gathandria, she hadn’t seen the results for herself. Piles of broken stone and tile lay scattered across the snowy path, and the small remnants of houses which remained were barely holding together. Though at her next glance she couldn’t really tell how solid or well-constructed they had been in the first place. Lord Tregannon obviously did not set great store on the concept of providing for all reasonably, whether rich or poor. Typical man, she couldn’t help thinking, and then brought herself up short. No matter whose individual fault it was, it was up to the Gathandrian city to oversee the welfare of these lands. They had not done so here, so the blame must be shared.

  Putting aside her thoughts of future judgement, the First Elder of Gathandria turned and scanned the path along which they had hurried as the people huddled in behind her. The whiteness hovered in the trees though she thought it might be less intense. She couldn’t see any sign of Simon and cursed quietly under her breath. She needed the Lost One with her. More importantly, she wished with all her blood and bone Johan was with her, but it was impossible.

  “What shall we do?” the question came from the boy at her side, still clutching her hand. “Where’s my master’s scribe?”

  Another question she had no answer to, but as the woman in charge she had to make a decision.

  “I don’t know where the Scribe is right now,” she said, “but he will be with us soon. Until then we need to reach shelter. Tell me, which is the safest house in the village?”