The Executioner's Rebellion (The Executioner's Song Book 4)

by D. K. Holmberg

  As he approached one of the shadows here, there was something about it that reminded him of a scarecrow—legs sprawled out, arms splayed, a propped-up body. Something about it seemed off.

  The smell struck Finn the most.

  The shadows began to resolve as he neared, but the farther he went, the more unsettled he felt. Not just any scarecrow, but one made from corpses.

  What reason would Lyle Martin have in something like this?

  “Finn?” Olanth called.

  “You might want to stay there,” Finn said.

  “What is it?”

  Finn shook his head. “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “The smell is awful,” Olanth said. He took a step up over the wall, and when he came down, another section of the stone crumbled, spilling inward the same way it had when Finn stepped over it. “Did old Lyle really leave carcasses lying around here?”

  The bodies of the dead.

  He started forward, holding out the lantern, and knew immediately what he was going to find.

  “Is that—”

  “Don’t,” Finn said, raising his hand toward him.

  Finn swept his gaze along the inside of the wall. There had to be a dozen bodies, all propped up against the stone wall, all angled toward the home.

  Why would Lyle Martin have dug up bodies and brought them back here?

  It had to be witchcraft, but for what purpose?

  Chapter Nine

  They came across thirteen bodies.

  The number suggested something important, but he didn’t know if he’d understand what without going to someone like Esmerelda for answers. Finn didn’t know if he could get word to her quickly enough.

  They stopped at the wall he and Olanth had come across.

  “Did you find everything you need?” Olanth asked. “This has to be enough for you to carry out the sentencing.”

  Finn just stared. Was it though?

  “I need to go into the house.”

  “Inside? After what we found out here? What do you think you’ll find in his home? More like that?”

  Finn just shook his head. Maybe there would be more bodies inside, and if there were, then he definitely needed to see them, even if he didn’t understand why they were there. “You don’t have to come with me. Why don’t you wait out here until I finish looking?”

  Olanth watched Finn for a moment, then he shook his head. “I can’t let you go in there on your own.”

  “You don’t need to do this,” Finn said.

  “I’m just going to stay with you. If there’s anything there…”

  Finn didn’t want to tell him he suspected there would be something inside, even though he didn’t have any idea what it might be, or why Lyle would have brought the bodies out here.

  They needed to be cleansed.

  That was what Lyle had claimed.

  Finn didn’t know what that meant, nor did he know why he would have wanted to do something to cleanse the bodies—or if there was anything he could do to cleanse them. But Finn knew he needed to understand, and he had to go inside to gain that understanding.

  He crossed the lawn leading to the house.

  The air had taken on a bit of a chill—faint, barely more than a slight gusting of the wind—but it left goosebumps on his arms.

  He approached the door to the house slowly. “Did he live with anyone else?” Given what he’d seen, Finn wouldn’t have expected it, but he also didn’t want to be surprised by anything.

  “Old Lyle? Nah. He was alone out here. I used to come here from time to time when I was younger. He always paid us pretty well to run supplies, so most of the kids from the village were happy to take them to him. He could be strange, mind you, but not this kind of strange.”

  “When was the last time you came out here?”

  “Probably when I got my apprenticeship.”

  Finn hadn’t even asked Olanth what kind of work he did. “I’m sorry I never asked about that.”

  “It’s quite all right. I’m the brewer.”

  Finn looked over. “That’s why you wanted me to come share ale with you. It’s your ale.”

  “Best ale you can find. Well, outside of Verendal, that is. I’m sure there are others in the big city that are better, but I’ve studied as many of them as I can. Want to make sure I’m brewing the best.”

  “When we get back, I’ll take you up on your offer.”

  “You’re going to owe me more stories,” Olanth said.

  Finn nodded. “Of course.”

  He pushed the door open, thinking that if there was some sort of witchcraft involved, then he would need to be careful, maybe even use the sword to carve through it, but he didn’t see any symbols suggesting witchcraft. The door had no markings.

  But as the door came open, he realized it was only the door that didn’t have markings. The markings were on the stone around the door. He stared at them for a moment, his hand resting on the door, and frowned. The markings could signify witchcraft, but he suspected they were even more of a sign of Alainsith.

  “What is it?” Olanth asked, looking behind him.

  “Nothing,” Finn said, starting inside.

  He held out the lantern, sweeping it around, and frowned.

  Given what he’d seen in the yard, Finn expected to find more bodies and more of a foul stench, something that would tell him what was going on here. He expected to find some other sign that Lyle had brought bodies into the home, using them in whatever witchcraft he intended, but he found nothing.

  It was clean and tidy, no sign of anything amiss.

  There was a stone fireplace at one end of the single room and a table and chairs, along with a small bookcase filled with books on one wall. Finn approached a row of cabinets next to the table, pulling them open carefully, not sure what he was going to find, but there were only dried meats, jars of canned goods, and some vegetables inside.

  Supplies.

  He closed the cabinets, looking around the inside of the home before his gaze settled back on Olanth.

  “What do you see here?”

  “Nothing that tells me what happened,” Finn said.

  And that was the hardest part of all of this.

  Finn sorted through the books, looking for some answers in what Lyle had been reading about. He wondered if maybe he’d find something on witchcraft, some sort of spellbook that would guide him through the practical use of how to create dark magic, but Finn didn’t find anything like that.

  One had recipes. As he glanced over to the cabinet, the supplies he’d seen, he thought he understood why he had that. Another was a book of maps. Still another looked to be a journal, much like the kind of journal Meyer used. Nothing here would suggest the kind of crimes Lyle had committed, nor would it explain the strangeness in the yard outside.

  Finn continued working his way through the room. Meyer had taught him how to be diligent in his search. As far as he could tell, the person who lived inside this home was a very different person from the one who had set up the bodies stationed outside in the yard.

  Finn paused in front of the hearth.

  It didn’t look as if it had been lit in quite some time. It was clean, no logs there, though Lyle had stacked them up next to the hearth—yet another example of how everything about this home was neat and tidy.

  Finn rested his hand on the hearth.

  The stone started to crumble.

  He jerked his hand back.

  “What was that?” Olanth asked.

  Finn frowned to himself. He held the lantern out and saw the debris piled up in the hearth itself.

  He gently touched the stone again. As before, it crumbled, dropping into the hearth.

  What is going on here?

  “We need to get out of here,” Finn said.

  Olanth watched Finn. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but we don’t want to be here,” Finn said.

  He backed away, careful.

  He looked down, only now realizing
that each stone he stepped upon had started to crumble beneath his boots. He hadn’t noticed it when he had first come in, but now that he was aware of it, he could hear the faint sound of a soft cracking with each step.

  He reached the door.

  The ground started to tremble.

  “Come on,” Finn urged.

  Olanth still stood in the middle of the home and didn’t seem to notice any trembling. “I never really came inside of old Lyle’s home. It was sort of off-limits. He never let us inside when we dropped off his supplies.” He glanced over to Finn. “It’s nice. A little bit outside of the village, but if you can get past that… Maybe when he’s gone, somebody else might take it up.”

  “We need to get going,” Finn urged.

  He was at the door, and the trembling he’d felt before continued to press up through his boots, as if it were radiating through the stone. He looked over to see stone cracking and crumbling, debris starting to spill out from inside of the hearth.

  The whole structure was going to come down.

  Finn darted forward, grabbing Olanth and throwing him toward the door. Finn raced after him, shoving Olanth as he tumbled through the open doorway and out into the yard. The stench struck him immediately, and as Finn rolled back to his feet, he looked over to see the entire structure starting to tremble then collapse. Debris filled the air, dust and dirt mixing together.

  Olanth covered his nose and started coughing.

  Finn held his shirt up over his nose so he didn’t have to breathe it in quite as much either.

  As the dust started to settle, Olanth dusted his hands on his pants, looking over to the remains of the home. “What was that?”

  Finn looked around before his gaze settled on the bodies arranged along the fence.

  Decay.

  It wasn’t just the bodies that had decayed. It was the building.

  What was this about?

  When he got back to Verendal, he’d have to ask Esmerelda. She would need to know what he’d seen. She might have answers.

  “We should get back to Weverth,” Finn said.

  “You don’t even want to explain what just happened there?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Finn said. “The building collapsed. I figured that was obvious.”

  “Does that happen very often to you?” Olanth eyed him. “It seemed like you expected that.”

  “I recognized that something was happening,” Finn said and looked over to the bodies.

  Could that be the purpose of them? Finn could imagine that with the right use of witchcraft, along with the corpses themselves, they could cause the Alainsith stonework to crumble. It would be an unusual use of power, but not so far removed from hegen magic that Finn couldn’t see the connection.

  He made his way over to where one of the bodies rested up against the wall and pressed on the stone.

  It didn’t budge.

  He climbed over and kicked the wall where the body lay, and found, surprisingly, that it remained intact.

  Olanth joined him. “What are you doing?”

  “Testing,” Finn said.

  “By kicking the dead?”

  Finn looked over to him, shaking his head. “I’m not kicking the dead. I’m kicking where they’re lying.”

  It was a subtle difference, but it was enough of one that Finn didn’t feel as if he were somehow betraying the dead.

  He made his way around the wall, testing other sections of it. Strangely, the wall was strong where the dead were positioned, but crumbled a bit where they were not. By the time Finn had made a full circuit around the home, there were sections of wall that were caved in, while the places where the bodies had been propped up remained standing.

  He started off toward the darkened path.

  “Where are you going?” Olanth called after him.

  “I’m going to question Lyle.”

  “At this time of night?”

  Finn swung the lantern back around, looking at him. “I need to make sure I fulfill the obligations to your village,” Finn said.

  They walked in relative silence. Every so often, sounds from the forest would draw Finn’s attention, and he would spin to the side, holding the lantern out, but he didn’t see anything in the darkness. After a while, Finn stopped reacting. There was the buzzing of insects, the occasional sound of movement in the trees, and a sighing breath of wind every so often, but nothing else.

  It seemed to take longer to return to the village than it had to reach Lyle’s home. That might be Finn’s imagination—perhaps tied to everything he’d seen since leaving the home—but he felt as if the forest itself wanted to keep him from traveling with any speed.

  When they finally stepped free of the trees, Olanth looked over, his eyes haunted. “I think I should get back to the tavern. Do you still want to grab a mug of ale?” The tone in his voice suggested he would be just as content if Finn chose to decline his invitation.

  “I still need to visit with Lyle again. I appreciate the offer though.”

  Olanth nodded, then hurried off, leaving Finn at the edge of the village.

  He didn’t rush back to the house where the villagers kept Lyle. He passed by other houses with fires crackling in hearths and smoke drifting from chimneys, leaving Finn wishing he had the warmth of a flame to sit next to as well. Many had candles or lanterns glowing in windows. The air still held the memory of rot, but the smells of smoke and baking food mixed in, taking away some of the awfulness he’d encountered.

  When he returned to where Lyle was kept, he paused at the door and listened. There was no sound inside—no rattle of chains like he’d heard when he’d been here before, nor any of the strange sounds Lyle had made.

  He tested the door, wondering if maybe he’d find it locked, but it wasn’t.

  Finn stepped inside.

  He still had the lantern. With the soft, glowing light, he could make out details in the room that he couldn’t before. It was a simple, empty room. Like he’d seen before, there was a stone hearth at one end, along with a stout table and chairs, though they’d been moved forward and out of the way. Otherwise, the home was empty.

  Lyle looked up at him when he stepped inside. The lantern reflected from his eyes, giving him a terrible look.

  “Lyle Martin,” he said softly.

  Lyle sat up. He’d been keeping his arms and chained wrists curled in toward his body. Having now seen how easily the stone had crumbled in his home, Finn wondered even more if the chains would hold. Could whatever witchcraft he used allow him to tear through them?

  “I visited your home.”

  Lyle jerked forward.

  Finn was ready, bracing himself.

  He figured the chains would hold, but either way, he held out the lantern, daring Lyle to reach him.

  Lyle stopped short, just a few paces away from Finn.

  He stank. That much was obvious from up close. Olanth had said they’d cleaned him, but Finn wouldn’t have known that had Olanth not said it. There were plenty of people who stank in the prisons in Verendal, though typically it came from uncleanliness due to their captivity, not from something fouler. It was almost as if Lyle had wallowed in the graves of the bodies he’d exhumed.

  “Why did you remove the bodies from the graves?”

  Finn didn’t really expect an answer. Given what he’d seen from him so far, he thought Lyle wouldn’t even care to answer. Still, he had to know. If it was witchcraft, the village was in far more danger than he’d known before. Finn wasn’t sure what he would be able to do about it, but maybe the first thing would be sending Esmerelda and the other hegen like her out here to investigate.

  “They were unclean.”

  Lyle’s voice sounded hoarse, as if he’d been screaming.

  “Why did you place them around your fence that way? What did you intend for the bodies?”

  Lyle jerked on the chains again. “You should not have gone.” He took a deep breath, leaning in toward Finn as he did, leaving him with a feeling t
hat Lyle was trying to breathe in Finn’s smell. “You’re unclean.” He jerked on the chains again, rattling them violently as he tried to pull free.

  “Why am I unclean?”

  There weren’t many times when Finn had come to outside villages to investigate and carry out a sentencing that he wished he had a place like Declan to interrogate the accused, but this time he did. It would make it easier for him to feel as if he could get the answers he needed. And he wouldn’t have to worry about what Lyle might do. As strange as it was for Finn to consider, he still worried that Lyle might find a way to pull the chains free from the wall.

  “You are unclean,” Lyle repeated.

  Finn watched him and noticed he was fidgeting, his fingers twitching as he tried to maneuver the chains around his wrist.

  There was a pattern to the way he moved his fingers, and Finn studied it, realizing he had seen a similar pattern before—when he had stopped the witchcraft attack on Verendal. There was no doubt in his mind that this was witchcraft.

  Why now?

  And why here?

  He looked up to Lyle, holding his gaze. “What were you trying to accomplish?”

  Lyle jerked on the chains again. “Unclean,” he said again.

  Finn just breathed out slowly.

  As before, he knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with him—and as he stood there, looking at Lyle, he started to wonder if he needed to get anywhere. At this point, Finn had already seen what he had attempted to do, had seen the effect of him placing the bodies around his home and yard, so he knew that whatever Lyle intended was tied to witchcraft, and it was certainly dangerous enough to warrant sentencing.

  The only question was why.

  There had to be some reason he had placed the bodies up around the fence, so close to what had to have been an Alainsith building.

  “Your home is destroyed,” Finn said. “Whatever witchcraft you were attempting accomplished its goal. The stone crumbled. The building is gone.”

  Lyle tipped his head to the side, and something in his eyes that reflected the lantern light left Finn unsettled again.