“He sent his servants to search me out, and then to bring me home by force, my… my young wife with me.”
Cesar Barbier paused again in his account—but not, this time, to measure the attitude of his listener. Until now he had been quite calm and very scrupulous in his speech, as befitted a nobleman of Bretonnia, but now his breathing was clotted by emotion, and there were tears in his eyes: tears of anguish, and of rage.
When it seemed that the young noble could not go on, Alpheus Kalispera said, very quietly: “He had her killed?”
“Had her killed?” answered Barbier, as though the words had been forced out of him with a hot iron. “Oh no, he did not have her killed! You do not know what manner of man my father is! He killed her with his own hands, while his servants forced me to watch.
“He destroyed her, and the unborn child she carried within her, without any trace of feeling—not because he hated her, but simply because she stood in the way of his calculations. He felt no guilt, nor any fear of retribution. Had she killed him it would have been a fearful crime, for which she would have been burned alive as a petty traitor, but for him to kill her was merely a matter of business, for her father was his bondsman, and she an item of inconvenient property. I saw her die, Magister Kalispera—I saw her die!”
Kalispera did not know what to say. He could not imagine that Lanfranc Chazal had known what to say, when the poor man had run to him with the same dreadful tale, four or five years earlier.
“I wanted to kill him,” Cesar Barbier said, when he was capable of continuing his tale. “And the folly of it all is that if I had been what he wanted me to be, I would have killed him. With a sword or a cudgel or a poisoned cup I would have snuffed out his vile existence, and sent our title to oblivion by surrendering myself to the law and going gladly to the gallows. If his way had been the right way, I would have taken my revenge, and happily so.
“Perhaps I would have done it, had it not been for Magister Chazal—for he it was who persuaded me that I must not waste my own being in destroying my father’s, on the two accounts that it would be both futile and false to my own true nature. He implored me to find a better way—and in my turn, I implored him to show me one.”
Kalispera drew in his breath, deeply and painfully. It was all too obvious to him what the result of this mutual imploring must have been. Barbier saw that he had guessed.
“Would you tell me that it was unlawful?” said the young man angrily. “Would you tell me that it was lawful and just for my father to murder my wife and unborn child because they did not suit him, and a horrid crime to undo the act, as far it could be undone? Will you tell me that Magister Chazal was evil, and my father’s soul quite stainless? Tell me then, Magister Kalispera. Tell me, in so many words, where the right of it lies.”
Kalispera shook his head. The darkness in the corners of the room seemed to close in around them. “Tell me,” he countered in a steely voice, “what it was that Lanfranc did, and what its consequence has been.”
“I had not dared to bring the body of my wife into the precincts of the university,” Barbier said, “nor even through the gates of Gisoreux. I had taken her instead to the house in Rondeau which I had bought, intending that we should live there when we returned from the Empire—for we did not expect to spend our whole lives in exile from our homeland. Magister Chazal accompanied me there and begun his work.
“He had told me that he could not bring my Siri back to life, for if such a thing could be done at all it was beyond his skill. He could not restore her flesh to me, but her spirit was a different matter; he believed that he had knowledge enough to bring back her ghost from the realm of the dead, and protect it from the dissolution which ordinarily overtakes such beings.
“Spectres, he told me, are often bound to our world in consequence of curses, doomed to haunt the spot where they died. What he intended to do was to summon Siri as a ghost, and ask her whether she would be bound of her own free will, not to the place where she had died but to the place where she had hoped to live. If she consented, he said, then he would try to bind her to the house in Rondeau.
“He was not sure that he had knowledge enough to accomplish more, but he promised that he would try firstly to give her a voice that she might speak to me, and secondly to allow her to take on at intervals a certain frail substance which would allow us to touch. For this latter purpose he required to combine together something of her substance and something of mine, and I allowed him to remove from my left hand that finger upon which I had placed my wedding ring.”
Barbier held up his left hand, and Kalispera saw for the first time that the finger next to the smallest had been neatly cut away.
“He bound that finger to hers before we laid her in a tomb beneath the house,” continued Barbier, his voice hushed. “And he used my blood to write the symbols which he used in his conjuration. When I first saw her ghost I was overtaken by such a terror that I nearly cried out to him to stop, to send her back where she belonged, but I bit my tongue. And when he asked her whether she would rather go to her appointed place, or be bound to this world with me, I felt a tremendous surge of joy which overwhelmed my terror on the instant—for her answer was yes.
“Her answer was yes.
“I could not tell what powers Magister Chazal drew upon in order to complete what he had begun. I know that he sacrificed more than I, for I only lost a finger and a little blood, while he seemed to draw upon his own inner life and strength in such a way as to leave them forever depleted.
“What words he spoke, or what dark daemons may have moved to do his bidding, I cannot begin to understand. But his work was successful, and the ghost of my wife now lives in my house, carrying within her the ghost of my unborn child. And whenever Morrslieb is at its brightest in the night sky, she takes on substance sufficient to allow her to caress me, and receive caresses in return.”
* * *
Alpheus Kalispera bowed his head slightly, and said: “I had thought the change in him was the effect of an affliction which he had in no way invited. I was sure of it.”
“And are you sure now that it was not?” Barbier demanded, with sudden passion. “Are you so certain, now that you know what you had not guessed before, that he was marked by the evil of his deeds? I tell you that he worked no evil, but exercised his knowledge only to help his friend. If it was judgment on his necromancy which engraved the death-mask on his features, then it was a cruel and stupid judgment, for he did not deserve it. If there was a debt to be paid, then I should have paid it, and would have done so willingly!
“Have you no faith in your own beliefs, that you would lose them now because of what I have told you? If that is so, I cry shame on you, Magister Kalispera! The man you saw buried today was a man as good as any in the world, and whatever disfigured him was no fault of his, but an undeserved misfortune.”
Kalispera laid his head back and stared off into infinity, before he finally said: “I do not know what to believe.”
Barbier rose to his feet and looked down at the older man. “You had best make up your mind,” he said harshly. “If you will not understand, you must at least keep silent about what I have told you.”
The magister met his visitor’s gaze then, and felt a slight shock of fear—but then he remembered that this had once been his pupil, and Lanfranc’s friend, and that there was no need to be afraid of him.
“Sit down, my lord,” he said tiredly. “This is no one’s business but our own. I would not denounce you for what you have done, nor would I ever have denounced my friend for helping you. But I cannot say that it was a good thing to do, for it is the most unnatural thing of which I have ever heard.”
Barbier took his seat again, but did not relax. “Oh yes!” he said. “Unnatural, to be sure. When a father is utterly without love or compassion—that is natural! When a father murders his son’s innocent bride—that is natural! But when a son opposes his father’s will and undoes his father’s evil—why, that is surely repulsi
ve in its defiance of the laws which the gods have made!
“Tell me, my white-haired philosopher, is it natural for the fops and philanderers of our good King’s court to parade themselves in silk and velvet? Is it natural that they should live in gaudy luxury while the peasants who work the soil to produce their wealth go hungry? Are their measured dances natural, or the games which they play with quoits and skittles? Are their manners and hypocrisies natural—or are these noblemen natural only when they ache and bleed like common folk?
“Instruct me, magister, I implore you. Tell me, I pray, why men like you and I should respect and revere what is natural, when everything we are and do is artifice? Your own belief is that disease and illness are but natural shocks to which our fragile flesh is heir, not supernatural punishments sent by the gods or inflicted by the ill-wishing of witches. Lanfranc Chazal’s belief was that knowledge of life and death is only knowledge of nature, and that magic is merely control of nature, like other arts and crafts. You could not see a difference between yourself and your lifelong friend this morning—can you really see one now?”
For fully half a minute, Kalispera did not reply. And when he did, it was not with an answer but with a question. “What will happen,” he asked, “when you die in your turn, and go to the realm of the dead?”
Barbier laughed, very briefly. “I cannot tell,” he said. “If I have the power to curse myself to be a spectre, then I will exert that power with my dying breath, and will be all the closer to my love for sharing her insubstantiality whenever Morrslieb is pale in the sky. And if I have not… then I must wait for her release, as she would have waited for mine, had I not found a necromancer to cast off the chains of nature!”
“And what if you fall in love again?” said the magister, in a low whisper. “What if you should one day hope for a better child than the ghost of one unborn?”
Barbier shook his head as though to rule the questions impertinent, but Kalispera could see that the man was not untroubled by them. He was a man, after all, and he knew that love is not always eternal, nor the call of duty entirely impotent.
“What will happen when your father dies?” Kalispera said, speaking now as the High Priest of Verena which he also was. “Will you inherit his title and his estate? And if you do, will you be content to stay in Rondeau, or will you want to show the world how a demesne’s affairs could be managed by a better man than your father was? Ten years have passed since you came here as a student, I think, fully seven of them since you left these cloisters—but what did you truly learn, in the three years or the seven, which makes you sure that you are finished and complete, as changeless as your love-deluded wife? What right did you really have to demand of Lanfranc Chazal that which he did for you?”
Barbier was confused now, and taken aback. Whatever he had expected of the old magister, it was not this. “He was my friend,” he said. “And a far better father to me than my own parent ever was.”
“Aye,” Kalispera said sadly, “no doubt that was what he wanted to be. He was my friend, too, but I did not need him as a father. When you combined your catalogue of challenges, you might have asked whether it is natural for priests and magisters to be celibate, so that the only sons they have are those of other men.”
The younger man said nothing.
“Do you love your ghostly wife?” Kalispera asked abruptly.
“I do,” said Barbier boldly. “With all my heart.”
“And do you think that you can love her forever?”
“I do.”
Alpheus Kalispera shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Let us hope that your boldness will not let you down, and that your heart is as constant as your father’s, after its own very different fashion.”
Barbier bowed his head, and said: “Thank you for that, magister.” Then he looked up again, and said: “I hope that you will not think any worse of your friend, because of what I have told you. I did not mean to injure him in your estimation.”
“You have not done that,” Kalispera assured him. “And I am grateful to know that I am not the only man who will mourn him. If the only epitaph he will have is that which is graven in the memories of other men, I am glad that there are two of us to share the burden of the truth.”
“So am I,” Cesar Barbier said. “So am I.”
Kalispera got up from his seat and went to the window. He unlatched the glazed lattice, and pushed it back to let in the cool night air. It was not so very dark, for Mannslieb was full and Morrslieb, though by no means at its brightest, was shining from another sector of the vault of heaven. The stars, as always, were too many to be counted. The streets of the city were lit by tiny flames which were similarly numberless, for in a city as munificent as Gisoreux even the poor could afford candles to keep the dark at bay.
“Where is his spirit, do you think?” he asked of the younger man.
“Close at hand,” said Barbier softly, “or far away. Does it matter which?”
“It is said that the spirit of a necromancer is bound to its rotting hull,” the magister said. “It is said that such a spirit cannot escape from the hell of that decay, but can sometimes animate the body as a liche with glowing eyes, which spreads terror wherever it goes, and leaves suffering in its train.”
“Do you think that he feared such an end?” Barbier asked, with such faint anxiety that it seemed a mere politeness.
“No man truly knows what he has to fear when he dies,” Kalispera replied. “Even a man like you, who has brought another back from the life beyond life. No man truly knows.”
Alpheus Kalispera looked at his hands, then. They were gnarled and stiff, and the pain in their swollen joints gave him little rest nowadays. Might it reduce his pain, he wondered, to cut off those fingers which he did not really need? Or was the pain a divine punishment after all, and not—as he had always believed—a mere accident of happenstance?
He had, after all, given succour and sustenance to a secret necromancer!
“He was a good man,” Kalispera murmured, not for the first time. “He was a good friend.”
“In truth he was,” Cesar Barbier said.
And though neither man could know the other’s thoughts, both shared at that particular moment in time an identical hope. Each of them was praying, silently and fervently, that whatever god or daemon now had charge of the spirit of Lanfranc Chazal would hear their words, and echo their merciful disposition.
THE HANGING TREE
Jonathan Green
The sturdy oak door of the inn opened with a crash and for just a moment a gust of what the weather outside had to offer—nothing but foul wind and rain—entered the Slaughtered Calf. It seemed hard to believe that it was early spring. It was more like autumn or winter had a hold of these hills.
Grolst, the thickset, greasy-skinned innkeeper, looked up from wiping a grimy, damp cloth around the inside of an a dirty glass. He cast an unwelcoming grimace from beneath beetling brows at the figure standing in the shadows of the doorway, the evening sky darkening behind him. The man ducked beneath the lintel and closed the door behind him. The foul night’s wailing wind and lashing rain became a muffled memory outside the thick stone walls once more. Leaning on a tall, gnarled staff, the figure stepped into the pool of light cast by the cartwheel candelabra.
Grolst surveyed the new arrival suspiciously. The frown on his ruddy face remained. Although swathed in heavy wine-dark robes, the innkeeper could see that beneath them the man was tall and lean, like a hunting dog. His appearance was scruffy and unkempt. He appeared to be into his fifth decade, both his bedraggled black hair, what there was of it on his balding pate, and his long straggly beard greying to white. The skin on his face appeared taught, making his hawkish features even more severe and pronounced.
On closer examination, Grolst could see that in places the grey-bearded man’s robes were scorched black. There was also the glint of metal from objects hung around his neck and from his robes. Grolst thought he even saw a gleaming bird’s skull
, a brass key, hanging from his belt—or maybe it was gold—and the hilt of a sword protruding from beneath a fold in his cloak. The stranger’s staff tapped against the floor as he approached the bar.
The red-robed stranger peered at the various dusty bottles and earthenware containers displayed haphazardly on the crooked shelves behind the innkeeper.
“A glass of that… luska,” the man said grumpily, placing a pair of copper coins on the bar top. “I hate the rain,” he added, addressing no one in particular as he shook water from his cloak.
Grolst uncorked a grime-coated bottle and poured a measure of the clear Ostland spirit into a small tumbler. He blinked as the potent alcoholic vapour reached his nostrils. Luska was a fiery Ostlander distillation, not unlike the vodka spirit so favoured by the Kislevites, and as it coursed down the drinker’s throat it burnt hotter than a salamander’s tongue. It took a certain taste and a fiery temperament in the drinker to even palate the spirit, let alone actually enjoy it.
Perhaps the stranger had some connection to Kislev. From the few words that he had spoken, his accent sounded as though it might come from the sheep-rearing southern provinces of the Empire, but the man wore his moustaches long and drooping, favoured here in the northern realms that bordered the harsh oblast of Kislev, the kingdom of the Tzars. The stranger was well travelled, certainly.
He picked up his drink and took a seat at a table close to the fire blazing in the hearth of the inn’s huge chimney breast. From the man’s dress Grolst thought that he was most likely a scholar of some field of academic study or other. From the way he travelled alone, without the need for a bodyguard, the innkeeper decided that he probably had some other means of defence that he could call upon in an emergency. Grolst looked at the staff again.
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