Abomination (35 page)

“How am I alive?” he asked. He spoke hoarsely, his throat dry as a bone, as he always woke not only starved but parched as well.

“I’m making breakfast,” she said. She held the dead animal up by its hind legs and yanked its skin down over its head to expose its flesh. “Could you make a fire?”

Wulfric marched closer to her, his footing steadier now. “Do not toy with me! I am supposed to be dead!”

“All evidence to the contrary,” she said as she set down the animal and wiped her hands on a rag.

The sky above her darkened, and she looked up to see that Wulfric had moved closer still, his shadow falling over her as he looked down upon her, his look of puzzlement now turning into something bordering on anger. She wondered for a moment if she
might have to reach for a sword, but saw that Wulfric was trying to calm himself.

“We had an agreement,” he said in a more measured tone. “You agreed to—”

“I know very well what I agreed to!” she said, jumping suddenly to her feet, her own composure slipping away. “But it was easier said than done.”

Wulfric turned away, shaking his head in vexation. “I could not have made it easier for you. I offered up the beast to you shackled and helpless, told you how and where to strike . . . Tell me, what more should I have done?”

Indra thought quietly on this for a moment as Wulfric paced bearishly up and down the clearing. Finally, “You should not have thanked me.”

He stopped, looked at her. “What?”

“You thanked me. That was the last thing you did before you . . . before you became that thing. Perhaps if you hadn’t, it would have been easier for me to forget that even after the beast emerged, there was still a good and decent man trapped somewhere deep within it.”

Wulfric looked at her in dismay. “I thanked you not out of any goodness or decency but out of relief! Because I believed that you might finally be able to grant me the release I have longed for. What a fool I was.”

“I’m sorry,” said Indra. “I came out here to kill an abomination, but not like this. I could not take its life if it meant also taking the life of an innocent man.”

Wulfric snorted disdainfully. “If you knew me better, you would not think me so innocent.”

“It’s not for me to judge you,” said Indra.

“Quite right! It is not!” spat Wulfric, stabbing a finger at her accusingly. “Then who are you to judge me innocent, or decent, or good? What do you know of me? Nothing! You know nothing!”

“I know that nothing you might have done could possibly warrant such a punishment as this, even if that is what you believe it is.” She hesitated to ask the question, but her curiosity would not let it rest. “What did you mean when you said that this curse was part of your penance? Penance for what?”

Wulfric shifted awkwardly and turned away from her. “What does it matter to you? You have already decided that you will not help me.”

“You’re wrong,” she said. “I want to help you. But I have to believe there is a better way. Some way other than death.”

“Death is all that I deserve,” he said, his back still turned to her.

“I don’t believe that either,” she said. “No man is beyond redemption, beyond forgiveness.”

He faced her, and Indra saw there were tears welling in his eyes.

“Even if that were true, I am not just a man. Am I?”

“You’re not just a monster either,” she said, and she tried to reach out and place a hand on Wulfric’s arm in reassurance, but he shifted a half step away from her.

“When those men came here two nights ago, more were slain by my own hand than by the beast,” he told her. “In my life as a man, I willingly, knowingly killed more than that mindless creature ever has. And it has killed many. And so I ask you, which of us is the real monster?”

There was a moment of silence before Indra spoke. “These men you killed . . . that was as a soldier, in war, yes?”

Wulfric waved a dismissive hand at her. “Many men have used that excuse to justify what they enjoyed doing.”

“Perhaps so,” said Indra, scrutinizing him. “But not you. I don’t think you enjoyed it at all. I’ve known men like that, and I can tell that you are not one of them. If I am wrong, tell me.”

Wulfric grimaced and gave an awkward shrug, again signaling his reluctance to talk more on the subject. He shuffled back and forth for a moment, indecisive. Then he wheeled around and
looked at Indra intently. “I ask you one more time. Will you help me or not? If not, be gone and leave me be.”

Indra drew back her shoulders and stood tall before him, uncowed. “If you mean will I slaughter the beast, and you with it, the answer is, and will always be, no. Nor will I be gone. I am sworn to protect mankind from the scourge Aethelred set upon this land, and you are as much its victim as any other. I believe it was no accident that we found one another. I believe I was sent here to help you.”

Wulfric looked at Indra strangely, then startled her as he flung his hands into the air and looked skyward. “Lord!” he cried out in exasperation. “Am I not cursed enough that now you afflict me with this? This stubborn carbuncle?”

Indra folded her arms across her chest, unamused. “You mock me.”

Wulfric looked down from the sky. “I do not mock your intentions; they are honorable enough. Only your naiveté. Tell me! Tell me how you can possibly hope to help me.”

“Perhaps we should start small,” she said as she unhooked a small skin of water from her belt and offered it to Wulfric. “You look thirsty.”

Wulfric regarded the water skin gingerly. He was loath to accept any offer of assistance or friendship from the girl, lest it encourage her. But then, she seemed to need little encouragement anyway. And he was so thirsty. After a moment’s hesitation, he snatched it from her, threw it back, and gulped it dry. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and as he offered the empty skin back to Indra, he saw a hint of a satisfied smile on her face.

“This means nothing,” he said.

She took the empty skin from him. “If you will not accept my help, at least for now accept my companionship. You’re welcome to join me for breakfast. Unless, of course, you have more pressing things to do today.”

Wulfric frowned at her. “Now you mock me.”

“No more than you deserve,” Indra said before walking back to her campsite, where she sat, took up the skinned animal, drew a small knife, and slit it open along its belly to clean it. Wulfric watched her as she went about her work, efficient and skilled, and tried to gather his thoughts, which the girl had done such a good job of scrambling. He wanted so much to take his chain and be on his way, to leave the girl far behind him. No good could come of keeping her near. Why, then, were his feet carrying him toward her, rather than away?

He knelt opposite her and began gathering nearby tinder for a fire. Still he did not understand why he was doing this, why he was even still here with her. He had walked with kings, fought the fiercest barbarians from across the sea, and slain monsters unimaginable. So why did this upstart girl, barely half his size and a fraction of his age, confound him so? Had she been like so many others he had met on his travels, had she beaten him or tried to kill him or run him off, he would have known precisely how to react. He would—

It was then that he realized. The girl seemed so strange, so confusing to him, because she spoke a language he had all but forgotten. Sympathy. Tolerance. Compassion. He was in territory so long unexplored that it felt wholly unfamiliar, yet the compulsion to rediscover it was like some ancient, bone-deep ache, something more powerful than every instinct that was telling him to flee.

He sparked a flint and got a fire going, then adjusted his cloak so that he might sit properly on the ground. Indra did not acknowledge the gesture, but continued quietly about her work. And so Wulfric continued about his, throwing more wood onto the fire to help it grow. He was so consumed with his own muddled thoughts that he did not think to ask the girl where her hawk was, nor even notice that it was gone.

Venator arrived at his destination before Wulfric had even woken, having flown through the night. It was a long journey, but so much faster as the bird flies, and Venator was fast indeed, by both breeding and training.

What had once been Canterbury Cathedral had changed much in the years since it was last the seat of an archbishop. Aethelred’s foul experiments there and its subsequent infestation had led King Alfred to declare it no longer a holy place, no longer fit for its original purpose. Instead he had given it over to the newly established Order to use as it set about its task of hunting down the hundreds of abominations that had scattered across England, a danger to men, women, and children everywhere. Befitting its new role as a military garrison, the cathedral had been heavily modified, with ramparts and other fortifications erected alongside the church’s ancient spires.

Venator alighted atop one of the cathedral-fortress’s towering bulwarks and strutted back and forth along the parapet, screeching and flapping his wings. Eventually the hawk’s loud, persistent squawking roused a guardsman from his bed in a nearby barrack. He emerged from an arched door onto the rooftop walkway, still only half-awake and struggling to fasten his breeches, but when he saw that this was no troublesome crow, he became fully alert in a
snap. As the hawk continued to strut and flap, he approached the parapet to get a closer look.

There could be no mistaking this bird’s plumage or the piercing look in its amber eyes. The Order kept many birds of prey, but no other like this one.

Venator
.

A second guardsman emerged, naked save for a rough woolen blanket thrown around his shoulders. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he fumbled drowsily with a crossbow. “Fucking crow,” he mumbled. “I’ll have it for breakfast!”

“That’s no crow,” the first man said, and when the second looked up he let the arrow slip from his hand and clatter onto the stone flags. “Bloody hell,” he said, suddenly wide awake.

“Go and fetch the lord marshal,” said the first man.

“The sun’s barely up. He’ll still be asleep.”

The first man snapped around to face the other. Perhaps this fool had forgotten the standing orders given to every man by Lord Edgard when his daughter had left nigh on a year ago, but he had not. “Then wake him up. Now!”

Edgard sat up in bed groggily, stirred from sleep by the urgent hammering at his door. One of his men, shouting between bouts of thumping his fist against the door, voice muffled through the stout oak. He had been having an excellent dream, and to be snatched away from it brought him back to the waking world in a foul mood. When he saw that it was barely even dawn, he swung his feet out of bed onto the cold stone floor and rose, stretching as the hammering outside the door continued, and contemplating various ways in which to make the life of whoever was doing it thoroughly miserable.

“Enter!”

The door flew open and a guardsman rushed in. Edgard looked him up and down curiously. In his haste, the man had not thought to dress and was still naked save for a blanket wrapped around him, an unloaded crossbow in his hand. Edgard paused for a moment to take in the full absurdity of it before he spoke.

“All I can say is, this had better be very,
very
good.”

The man did not hesitate. “Venator has returned.”

Every muscle in Edgard’s body tensed, and he felt hot blood surge through him. “When? Where?”

“Just now, up on the west rampart.”

Edgard dressed faster than he ever had, throwing a cloak around him as he made for the door.

“Show me.”

The guardsman led Edgard through the fortress’s halls, while gathering up the blanket that dragged around his bare feet so he would not trip. It was a comical sight, and on another day Edgard might have taken some amusement in it, but he could think of nothing now but the hawk’s arrival and what it might mean.

On the one hand, there was cause for relief, as it meant that his daughter was surely still alive—a prospect that, after ten long months, had begun to feel depressingly grim. By the sixth month, with still no word—though he had expressly told her to send back the hawk with regular news, even if just of her continued well-being—he had begun to fear the worst. He had considered sending parties out after her. But he was certain that if he did such a thing, and they were to find her alive, she would never speak to him again.

It would not take much, he knew, to push her to that. She was too damn stubborn and proud—some, himself included, might say arrogant—to accept assistance, and she would be mortally insulted by the suggestion that he might think her in need of rescue.

That, and she hated him well enough already. In a strange way, that had come as some solace to Edgard during Indra’s months
away; he knew that the lack of communication was more likely due to her being unwilling than being unable.

On the other hand, her pride and her obstinacy meant also that she would not write unless she were truly in dire need, perhaps in fear for her life, and it would be a grave situation indeed that Indra would admit was too much for her to cope with alone. Oh, she could handle herself more than ably; there was no shortage of initiates, full paladins even, who would reluctantly testify to that after trying to bring her down a peg in the sparring circle. Some of them still bore the bruises. Still, sooner or later, out in the wide world, she was bound to get herself into a fight beyond even her abilities.