Abomination (41 page)

Edgard’s mounted archers nocked fresh arrows as he stepped forward cautiously and nudged Wulfric’s body with his boot. It did not move.

“Bastard!” Indra spat, kicking at Edgard with both feet as his men struggled to restrain her. “You fucking bastard!”

Edgard ignored her, motioning to two more of his men. They lifted up Wulfric’s corpse and hauled him away, his feet dragging along the ground. Indra watched, distraught, as they slung his body over the back of a horse.

“Calm yourself, girl,” said Edgard. “You know as well as I do that he will not be dead for long.” He turned away and walked back to his steed, planting his foot in the stirrup and hoisting himself into the saddle. “Move out!” he commanded as his men helped up their injured. “We make Canterbury before nightfall, or not at all.”

Indra was marched to a horse, all fight gone out of her. When the men were mounted, and the Order rode back into the forest, Cuthbert was the last to go, his head hung low in shame.

They made even better time than on their outward journey, returning to Canterbury as the sun was just beginning to set. Edgard’s men had been well briefed on Wulfric’s condition and what would
happen if night fell before they had him secured within their fortress. This time they did not stop to rest.

Wulfric’s body was brought inside and taken to a dungeon that had been built as part of Edgard’s military renovations. Down flights of stone steps and past girded doors and iron-barred gates, he was carried until he was brought inside a large straw-lined cell and dumped unceremoniously atop the oak table at its center, a table heavily bolstered with iron and bolted to the floor. The six men assigned to this task made hasty work of it; down here in the bowels of the old church, the only light came from the torches flickering on the walls; there were no windows to show how far the sun was from setting, and so no way of knowing how soon this dead man would become something far more dangerous.

They laid out Wulfric’s body and wrapped it in chains that ran through iron rings around the table’s edges. The moment the chains were secured, the men fled from the cell and back along the stone-walled corridor from which they had come. Most were already on the stairs leading back to the surface before the last of them scurried out of the cell and slammed the heavy iron gate behind him. Even among the deep shadows inside the cell, the man could have sworn he saw Wulfric’s body move as he inserted the key with trembling hands and turned it in the lock. Then he, too, was gone, his ring of keys jangling as he pelted along the hallway and disappeared around the bend in the spiral stairs.

Some minutes later, Edgard appeared, carrying with him a straight-backed wooden chair. He placed the chair several feet short of the cell’s iron gate and sat, peering into the gloom beyond the bars. In the dim glow of the torchlight he could see a dark shape, motionless and chained to the reinforced table, but little else.

He sat. And watched. And waited. After fifteen minutes had passed, he started to wonder if something was wrong, but just as he began to fidget, so, too, did Wulfric.

Edgard leaned forward in fascination; he had seen every form of abomination under the sun, had hunted and killed them all, but he had never seen anything like this. And as Wulfric’s body began to jerk against the chains that held him to the table, began to split apart and spill out foul black blood that reeked of sulfur, it dawned on Edgard that he might be able to put this beast to far greater use than simply another trophy.

Cuthbert paced in his study, the light from his lamp turned low. The darkness was doing little to help him think this time. It was not that he lacked an idea; it was the matter of whether the plan would work and, more pertinently, whether he had the courage to carry it out, that he wrestled with.

He had never considered himself a brave man. Part of the reason he had entered the priesthood, in a time of seemingly unending war, had been to avoid conscription into some military profession for which he knew he had not the mettle. God had found a way to test that mettle anyway. His unique understanding of Aethelred’s discoveries and his subsequent forced recruitment into the Order had subjected him to horrors far beyond anything he imagined conventional war could bring. His service had hardened him, to be sure, but still he knew that he had never fully stepped out of the shadow of the callow cleric he had been fifteen years before.

No greater proof of that existed than the fact that he had betrayed his friend. His years under Edgard’s command at Canterbury had been mostly miserable. The knights he served with, all red meat and bravado, saw him as an odd little weakling to be hectored and ridiculed, and Edgard had done nothing to discourage it. Indra was the only one who had ever shown him any kindness or generosity. He had known her since she was a babe in arms, since the day Edgard had brought her back from Wulfric’s
devastated village, cradled in his arm. He had watched her grow and, in time, she had become his only friend.

It was no mystery to him where her skill with a sword, her upstanding character, her quick wits, and her thirst for knowledge came from—all traits so clearly inherited from her natural father, and, swordsmanship aside, so very unlike those of the man she had been raised by. Eventually, Indra’s dogged persistence in pursuit of her own suspicions had wrought the truth from Edgard, but only part of it. The rest, the part that mattered most, had been kept a secret by Cuthbert and Edgard until today, and Cuthbert had never regretted that fact more. Now he had seen with his own eyes how much their years of separation had cost father and daughter both. He could have—should have—done so much more, so much longer ago. But at what cost to his own safety, his own life?
Once a coward, always a coward
.

There was a knock at his door. Cuthbert hoped it would not be Edgard; he had never wanted to see the man less than he did now. As the door swung open, Cuthbert turned up his lamp and saw, in the soft green light of the unburning flame, that it was Indra. He was at first relieved; then he wondered if he might wish to see her even less than Edgard. What was worse, fear or guilt? He managed a cautious smile as Indra let the door close behind her.

“I thought you were confined to your room,” he said.

“That works as well today as it ever did,” said Indra. Cuthbert found himself wondering what she had done to the poor bastard Edgard had assigned to stand guard outside her door.

“Well, as considerable as is my surprise to see you, my joy is far greater,” he said, hoping for some indication that she felt the same. “Almost a year gone, with no word. I admit there were times when I feared the worst.”

Indra looked at him impassively. If there was any indication of warm feeling toward him, it was lost in the shadows and gloom. “Did you think I wouldn’t survive out there?” she asked, her tone giving his hopes equally little to cling to.

“At times,” he admitted. “Then I remembered how good you were with those swords and that damned stick of yours and the feeling passed.” He grinned sheepishly, hoping that his attempt at humor would cajole a favorable response from her. If not, at least he would know for sure where he stood. It was the uncertainty that was so agonizing.

Still nothing, not a flicker. Cuthbert began to feel queasy. “Indra, I—”

“Did you know?”

His shame was so great that he could no longer look her in the eye. He turned away, looked at the floor, at the leather-bound volumes on his shelves. Anywhere but at her. “Yes. I am the reason Edgard knew. When he first brought you here from your father’s village, and could not account for his body among the others found there, I told him of my suspicion.”

“What suspicion?” Indra stepped closer, into a brighter pool of light that only made it more difficult for Cuthbert to look at her. He made his way to his desk and began shuffling papers absentmindedly.

“Before Aethelred was killed, in the cathedral nave above us, he placed upon your father one final curse. The scar on his chest is the proof of it.”

“So it was my father who killed Aethelred,” he heard Indra say behind him. “Not Edgard, as he always claimed.”

Cuthbert had not intended to reveal that; it had just slipped out in the telling. But he was glad of it. It was time for all the truths that had been rotting him away from the inside to come out, every one of them. He nodded.

“After he killed the archbishop, your father burned Aethelred’s last writings, but I had already seen enough to further my study of his work and, in time, come to understand what it was that he had discovered: the means to create a new form of abomination, magick that could turn a man into a beast and back again, over and over, without end. When I learned what happened to your father’s
village, the day after he returned home, I knew what had become of him.

“I told Edgard what I had discovered; I begged him to take his men and search for Wulfric so that we might find some way to help him, but he would have none of it. He knew what I told him was true, but still he hid behind demands for proof, which he knew would be impossible to give. He was determined to raise you as his own, and so he abandoned Wulfric to the cursed life that he has lived.

“And he told me that if I should ever tell you any of this, he would see me tortured to death. So you see, it is my own cowardice as much as Edgard’s deceit that led you to believe your whole life that your true father was dead. God, it seems, found a way to correct my mistake. That makes me no less of a wretch for perpetuating it all these years.”

Finally he turned back to face her, surprised to see her standing closer to him now. He trembled with guilt. “Indra . . . I can never apologize enough. I will understand if you can never forgive me for what I have done, but I hope that you will not hate me for it. In all the world you are my only friend, and that would be more than I could bear.”

Silence so filled the room that all Cuthbert could hear was the sound of Indra’s breathing. Then, at last, she reached out and took his hand in hers. As Cuthbert began to sob, she put her arms around him and held him close to her, as though she knew he might fall if she did not.

“I have few enough friends myself,” she said as his body shook in her arms. “I don’t discard them for telling me the truth, no matter how overdue.” She stepped back as Cuthbert steadied himself against his desk and wiped the sleeve of his robe across his eyes. “That doesn’t mean, however, that you don’t owe me a very, very large favor.”

Cuthbert smiled, the relief still washing over him. “Anything,” he said, his voice shaking.

“Before, in the churchyard, you said that the curse cannot be lifted. Are you absolutely sure?”

“Alas, yes,” said Cuthbert. “I have spent fifteen years searching for a way, but the curse goes deep. The beast is in him down to the marrow, as much a part of him now as is his human half. If there is any way to exorcise it, it is beyond my ability.”

Indra ran her hands through her hair, despondent. “You were my only hope,” she said. “I was sure that you might know of some way . . .”

It tore at Cuthbert’s soul to see her like this.
Enough is enough
, he thought.
Will you let fear rule you your whole life? So what if it doesn’t work? You have to tell her. You have to try. You owe her that and more
.

“I know of no way to separate the man from the beast,” he said. “But there is, perhaps, another way to save him. At least, in part.”

Indra took Cuthbert by the arm, gripping him firmly.

“Tell me.”

Wulfric was not accustomed to waking in darkness, or on his back, though little else was different. The aches, the grogginess, the raging thirst, and the smell of sulfur were all too familiar. The absence of bright sunlight was in some small way a mercy but no less confusing for it. He sat up with a pained groan and noticed that something else was strange: he was naked and coated in ashes, but there were none surrounding him.

As his hands groped in the gloom, he realized he was sitting on a wooden floor. Then he found the edges of it. Not a floor, but some kind of raised platform or table. He looked around blindly, trying to remember how he had come to be in this place, whatever this place was. His memory was a blur, a smear of half-formed images and sensations in nonsensical order. He remembered the pain of arrowheads piercing his flesh, a sudden flush of rage. A face, that he had come to know recently, and one that he had not seen in many years. The new face stilled, slowly becoming recognizable. A girl’s face, young and beautiful, mouthing the same words again and again. Faraway and indistinct at first, her voice became clearer with each repetition.