Arc 1: Execution || Chapter 1: Headsman

Arc 1: Execution || Chapter 1: Headsman

Angels are good at wielding guilt. Devils are sometimes better, but you’d need a priest to explain the difference between the two. As far as I can tell, it’s mostly a matter of aesthetics.

I stood near the back of a crowd gathered in a storm-shadowed square. The cobblestones at my feet were slick with the rain rolling across the steepled roofs of the surrounding buildings. The crowd was silent, their eyes fixed on a raised wooden platform where several figures stood and one knelt. Armored guards with tall poleaxes, their eyes shadowed by the brims of their helms, held the rain-slick blades of their weapons to the throat of a kneeling man.

The town’s earl watched with grim silence, his shoulders draped with a black cloak as though in mourning. At his side stood a thickset man in a crude leather vest, a hood shadowing his face almost in mockery of the elegant helms of the guardsmen, a long-hafted axe in his hands. He stood over the kneeling prisoner, waiting for the order to bring his weapon down.

I don’t know what the kneeling man was condemned for. A beheading was usually the punishment for treason. From the mutters of the crowd I caught beneath the storm, I gathered he had been a knight. He glared up from the block they’d pressed him to, eyes piercing through the haze of rain without even a hint of pleading.

Regardless, I wasn’t there for him.

There was another man on the platform. A priest clad in the crimson robes of the Priory. He called out to the Heir and her Heralds in a brassy orators voice, speaking between rumbling peels of thunder passing high overhead. The rain falling down his cheeks made it seem like he was weeping and, indeed, his speech on behalf of the soul of the man they were about to execute seemed genuinely remorseful.

The storm picked up. I’m not sure if it was that or the impatient expression on the earl’s face that spurred the bishop to end his speech. The nobleman nodded to the headsman, who wasted no more time. The axe came down, its wide blade splitting rain to form a blurring arc of motion so even the untrained eye could follow its path. Some in the crowd gasped. I noted the skill of the swing with a professional eye. The executioner was good. The head came free on the first blow, as surely as if they’d used a guillotine. The sharp crack as the axe split bone and sunk into the wooden block the prisoner’s neck rested on could be heard even over the rain, echoing across the square.

There was no more ceremony once the condemned man’s blood was mixing with rain on the stone beneath the scaffolding. The earl provided no words of his own, but at a signal the crowd began to part. The headless corpse was left where it lay, bleeding over the wooden platform, and the soldiers escorted the nobles back to their fortress. The bishop, and some guards and attendants, moved to the looming cathedral rising up over the surrounding township.

I adjusted the wrapped bundle resting on my shoulder and melted into the alleyways, following the bishop like a distant shadow. He had claimed a life on behalf of the divine today, or so he’d convinced himself.

Little did he know that I would claim his.

******

Leonis Chancer, the Bishop of Vinhithe, always performed a private prayer in the cathedral’s main chapel after executions. It was a cavernous room, ostentatious, with towering pillars carved in exquisite detail and a vaulted ceiling rising overhead like a brooding night sky. The chapel was empty save for the bishop. He knelt beneath a towering statue of the Heir. The God-Queen was represented in Her classical form as a saintly woman with heavily lidded eyes, arms fallen to her sides with palms open and forward facing. She was silent as the clericon murmured his prayers, head bowed and arms crossed to enfold his shoulders. His red robes, still damp from the rain, pooled around him, almost mimicking how the blood had spread from the condemned man’s body.

I waited until near the end to walk out into the central aisle, stopping between the rows of pews where, on another day, the townsfolk would sit to listen to this man preach. I was his only audience now, and I let him reach the final invocation. When he gave those final words, “in faith we wait for the gates to open,” I let my voice mingle with the bishop’s.

Leonis Chancer startled, turning. When he saw me standing in the aisle, his brows knit in confusion. He was young for his position, not yet fifty. Though his hair was hidden by a deep cowl bound close to his skull by a golden band, the hair on his brow was still dark. I wondered if the band helped draw attention away from the lack of gold in his eyes. They were deep blue, almost black in the poor lighting. They studied me without fear, taking in my red-brown cloak, soaked from the rain, and the pointed cowl shadowing my face. I said nothing as his eyes noticed other details; the wrapped bundle resting on my left shoulder, the poor quality of my cloth, the ring set on my left forefinger.

It was that last that his eyes rested on. The ring was a smooth band of ivory set with a black stone. I didn’t bother hiding it.

Leonis Chancer swallowed. “I’m sorry, my son, but the chapel is closed at the moment… I’m certain I can make time for you another day, but I am in private prayer.”

I said nothing, and began to walk forward at an unhurried pace. The sound of my boots striking the floor made soft echoes through the chapel, a space built to make sound carry.

The Bishop rose to his full height. The confusion writ in his regal features was replaced by anger. “The cathedral is closed!” He said, his voice lashing across the room like the crack of a giant’s whip. “Remove yourself or…” he gave up on command then, seeing that my pace wasn’t faltering. “Guards!” He called.

No guard would be coming. I hadn’t killed the men standing watch in the room’s connected passages — they had done me no wrong, and I wasn’t there for them — but they would be indisposed for a while. It was just me and the priest.

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“Who are you?” The Bishop was sweating now. He backed away as I approached the short flight of stairs leading up to the dais. “W-what do you want?”

“It’s not what I want that matters right now,” I said. My voice is hoarse and low, but it carried well enough in that room. “You weave a good sermon, preoster.” I used the traditional title for a ranking clergyman. “Did you cry at Llynspring, too?”

I saw his face go pale as he recognized the name. “Is this revenge, then?” He asked.

I’d never been at Llynspring, but I’d heard the rumors of the witch trials that had flared like a killing flame across the west, ending in the deaths of more than five hundred — either through accusations of apostasy or the accident of inhuman birth. Accused by this man, before he’d become the archclericon of a little earldom far from those regions. Not the worst of the atrocities committed during the war, not by far, and most had forgotten the blood spilled in the rural west thanks to the seas of red washing the east. The Bishop’s expression confirmed the truth of it. “Llynspring, Kilcast, House Wake…” I muttered, just loud enough for him to hear as I continued to approach, ascending the steps. “How do you say your god’s name without your throat bleeding?”

“Guards!” The Bishop cried out for help again, his voice cracking. He’d backed all the way to the towering effigy of the Heir again, and as he felt it at his back he flinched and stopped. I had reached the top of the steps, and I let the cover fall away from the object I held as I loosened the rope binding it. It was an axe. Not so big as the one the executioner out in the square had used, but the design was similar, with a long haft and a broad, hooked blade which glinted a dull, brassy sheen. Hithlenic bronze. Leonis Chancer’s eyes went wide as he saw it. The haft of the weapon was carved from golden alderwood.

If the Bishop hadn’t guessed by the ring, he knew well enough who I was now. “The Headsman,” he breathed, all the color draining from his face. He began to incite a prayer of banishment. I felt a shiver of aura ripple out from the priest, and had to suppress a laugh. He was trying to cant at me. “Sorry, preoster, but I’m not a revenant. Or a demon, before you try that too. We have the same bosses, you and I.”

“But why you!?” The Bishop cried out. He was trying to skirt around me, probably to make for one of the passages behind the altar. I tensed, ready to spring forward if he attempted to escape, but his own desperation for an answer kept him in place. “If they were so displeased, why not smite me down? Why send a… a…”

“Ask them yourself,” I said. I wanted this over.

“I deserve more than that!” The Bishop snarled, stopping in his tracks and taking a sudden step forward, surprising me. “Have I not served them faithfully?” His fingers formed claws as he dragged them down the front of his crimson robes, clutching at the fabric so the smooth material bunched in his hand. “Heresy. Greed. Hate. This land was so full of poison,

and anyone is surprised it burst forth like pus from a wound?” A cold pride entered his voice. “I drew that poison forth and cleansed it. I have served.”

“Is that what you think?” I took another step forward, cautious of him bolting, or trying something else. He’d already demonstrated he could wield aura, and it always paid to be cautious of that. “You think you served Her,” I gestured at the statue with my axe, “by slaughtering innocents while the rest of Urn burned?”

“Innocents!?” The Bishop laughed, a manic edge in his voice. “Necromancers, pagans, cultists, trollkin, escapees from Draubard… apostates all. Urn burned because we turned our back on the teachings of the Onsolain, on the promise of Heaven!”

I glared, silent. There was no getting through to this man. I don’t know why I even bothered trying; I hadn’t been sent to reform him, just to kill him. Even still I spoke, the words coming unbidden to my lips. “Urn burned because men like you turned power mad.”

The Bishop pointed a trembling finger at me. “Devil! Crowfriar! You were sent to test my faith.”

“Afraid not,” I said, and took my axe in both hands. Maybe he was right, I mused. But I wouldn’t be the one to tell him whether he passed that test or not.

The Bishop shook in terror, and then steeled himself and drew a dagger from within his robes. If he thought this was a test of faith, then it seemed he wasn’t willing to leave his fate fully in its hands. I couldn’t blame him. I suppose that the real difference between me and the priest was that he had murdered for faith, and I’d lost mine a long time ago.

The rest happened swiftly. The Bishop didn’t bring any powers to bear, either divine or dark. Instead, he lunged at me with the dagger, a prayer on his lips. Stupid, but I guess he didn’t want to die fleeing for his life. For my part, I tried to make it quick. I sidestepped his strike, but he attacked with a speed and fervor I hadn’t expected. His blade put a shallow cut on the side of my neck. Baring my teeth I smashed a fist into his nose, sending him sprawling down the stairs of the dais. His golden headband came loose and clattered across the floor.

Of all the things he might have done in that moment, he reached for the band. He missed it by inches, his fingers clutching at empty air.

When my shadow fell over him, he closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath. A prayer? An apology? An admonition? I didn’t catch the words. Then he met my eyes and his face set in cold stone.

“Your judgment will come soon enough, traitor.” He bared bloody teeth at me, his face masked with red deeper than his Priory robes. “I know who you are! What your order did.” He spat out a glob of red. “We will see which of us is truly damned when all is said and done.”

I hesitated only a moment. It was brief, perhaps forgivable to an onlooker as the pause one takes to gather their breath or muster a thought. But, in that moment, I didn’t see the monster who’d condemned hundreds to iron and flame on the mosaic floor where Leonis Chancer sprawled. I didn’t see the dangerous zealot who could push the Faith into a dark new age. I knew that creature was there, beneath the mask, but all I saw was a frightened old man who did not wish to die.

He was that monster, though, and had chosen to be it over and over throughout his life. His actions had consequences.

I was that consequence.

I adjusted my stance. “I already know where I’m bound, Preoster. I’m sure we’ll see each other there.”

My swing was a mirror of the earl’s executioner. A long arc, high over my head, before the axe fell in a hiss of parting air.

As the body, now headless, stilled, the winglike folds of the Heir’s stone-carved sleeves seemed to enfold it from above. Red robes darkened further with blood until it seemed a pool of it was all that remained of the priest. The head rolled unbelievably far, and I followed its movement with my eyes. It seemed to keep rolling forever, until its path finally came to an end in the shadows of a pillar.

Where it came to rest near the feet of a young acolyte, who stared at the scene in wide-eyed horror.