The Sanity's Edge Saloon (The Sea and the Wasteland Book 1) (46 page)

“Can we just go and wait by the
gates?” Alex said uncomfortably.

“My faith shall not falter again,”
Bartholomew beamed. “Ask anything of me you like. Whatever I can—”

“Brother Bartholomew,” Alex
interrupted, afraid the man would launch another tirade renewed religious
conviction. “Can you tell me what happens in Janus at dawn?”

“The usual, I expect. The markets
open following morning mass. People attend prayer, cope as best they can, go
about their day. Why do you ask?”

“Is there nothing particular to
Janus? A city like this,” he gestured to the massive walls and the looming
towers beyond. “In times like these, it must do something no other city does.”

Bartholomew shrugged as they joined
the wide earthen street leading to the city gates. “Well, they sentence the
witches, but that isn’t really much of a thing anymore. It’s been going on for
years, every day following morning vespers.” Bartholomew halted, realizing that
Alex had come to a stop a few paces behind him. “Is that it? Does it have
something to do with the witches?”

Alex’s mind was racing, trying to
force a connection. It was there, he could feel it … tenuous and filmy and
somehow eluding him. “They sentence
witches
?”

“Certainly.” Then Bartholomew
stopped, hands coming up suddenly as if trying to grasp threads from heaven,
and smiled. “Now I see. You are from beyond the wasteland, one of the gray
warriors, solitary soldiers of light and goodness, ignorant of evil and its
many faces. Yours is an innocence born of God. Where you’re from, they know
nothing of witches or malefica, evil and the exile of criminals. No wonder this
is so confusing for you.”

“Where does this happen? Where do
they try the witches?” Alex asked.
Find the witch! Find the center! Find the
gateway that gives the city its name! Hurry! Before it’s too late!

“The Court of Fathers,” Bartholomew
said. “The Sons of Light bring witches into Janus from across the territories
to receive sentencing by the Elders. The Council is well aware of its
responsibilities in the battle with the Enemy, and its significance to end
times.”

Alex turned to the stone-faced city,
gates already opening to reveal a blackened orifice grimly amused, glowering
over the pilgrims surging upon the roadway, eager to be swallowed up. They were
ants parading about an elephant’s foot, insignificant and beneath notice.

You must change that. Find its heart.
Make it … afraid!

*     *     *

With the morning, Oversight and the
others were bound in a line and brought before the Court of Fathers. Marched
through empty halls of monastic frugality built atop Baroque architecture,
austerity and piety to suit both bureaucratic necessity and religious
insensibility; a church that was once a palace; a monastery once a municipal
hall. Papal excess and repressive authoritarianism mingled the divine and the
corrupt, the spiritual and the actual, everything about it gnawing at her,
peeling back her skin to expose the raw nerves to a searing blade. But she
could do nothing save follow the line, and hope for an opportunity that might
never come.

They were led through a door, words
chiseled over the entryway:
The flesh must suffer that the soul be made pure
,
to an arena turned court, row after row of onlookers descending towards a
central pit while overhead, vaulted ceilings of angels warring against demons,
a savage battle of blood and dismemberment carried out in silent oil pigments.
The room was crowded not with the pious or the hateful or the afraid, but the
indifferent; expressionless and dead, the flat stares of wakened corpses
regarding her and the others as they had every group of chained prisoners
before. She was no different than the last, no different from the next. This
was a drama performed a hundred times, a thousand times, its outcome not in
question, its encore not in doubt.

Oversight felt her feet dragging as
she took in the enormity of it, felt it surrounding her, a sensation like being
trapped at sea, lost in a desert, a wasteland of dead, merciless eyes.

The chain around her neck went taut,
pulled by the rest of the line though her feet would not obey. A guard shoved
her from behind and she nearly fell; his only remark a flat, “No stopping.”

They were marched before a raised
dais, a dozen men impatiently waiting, decked out in black robes and colored
sashes. Some wore powdered wigs; others were shaved bald, foreheads gleaming
like oiled leather. Before them, a mountain of carelessly strewn papers, files
and books spilling across the table and upon the floor, pages loose and lost,
trampled into rubbish and forgotten.

She knew this place for what it was,
read it in the faces, apathetic and bored. Neither church nor court, this was
theater
.
No solemn or lawful event, no justice for the innocent or condemnation for the
wicked, this was an object lesson whose repetition had long ago dulled the
senses of those around her, its meaning disappeared as it dogged on, performed
by rote. Whatever was about to take place, whatever she was being dragged around
by the neck for, beaten and taken captive for, these people did not care.
Events registered like a movie against a white screen—a screen that took
nothing from the experience, as empty when the film was over as when it began.

Why, Jack?

The flesh must suffer that the soul
be made pure
. But
Jack wasn’t like that. She had seen Caretakers and Cast Outs beyond count,
could read most at a glance, and while Jack was many things—much more than
Kreiger gave him credit for—he was not cruel. It might well have been better
for him if he was.

A bailiff approached the seated
judges with a folder, his arrival bringing a hushed order to the crowd. One of
the seated scanned the contents, harrumphed and peered over his spectacles.
Licking at lips both old and chapped, he said, “You will step forward each in
turn and state your given name before this court.” It sounded like an order he
had given many times, once with solemnity, now indifference.

Starting from the far end, each woman
stepped forward and mumbled something that may or may not have been heard, may
or may not have been their given name. Truth was unimportant, the proceeding
devolved long ago into something so routine that both meaning and repercussion
were lost to procedure.

When her turn came, she stepped
forward, opened her mouth …

… and forgot what she was about to
say!

Oversight closed her lips and concentrated on the answer, suddenly
slippery and elusive. A simple question wanting a simple answer. She was
Oversight, but that was not really her name, just a description, a label pasted
on her not by her maker, but his minister at arms, Rebreather, a man whose own
name was similarly invented, a means of self-deception. Her name was not
Oversight, and when she tried to say it, the word slipped from her mind.
If
you are not Oversight, who are you then?

One of the men at the table looked
overtop his spectacles. “Please state your name for the court,” he repeated.

But she could not. She did not know why, but her mind was now blank, even
the label gone on the verge of being spoken.

Another at the table snapped his
fingers towards the bailiff. “Is she mute? Mutes are to have their names noted
upon their shifts before being presented. Why is her name not on her shift?”

The bailiff stepped towards the
table, whispering, “There was no indication she was mute when they brought her
in, Eminence. A clerical error, perhaps—”

He waved away the rest of the excuse.
“Unlikely. You there,” he snapped his fingers at her, pointing sharply. “Tell
the Court your name.”

“Ariel November.”

Ariel November? Why did I say that?

(Because that is your name.)

Glad to have the routine of the
proceedings restored, the judge nodded and carried on. “Having been found
guilty of witchcraft and consorting with evil, you are to be punished, your
sentence to be carried out immediately before the eyes of God and those goodly
citizens whom you have wronged with your wickedness. Those who confess their
crimes freely and repent shall receive …” The man’s voice trailed away
uncertainly as he looked up and saw her, still standing forward and, of all
things, smiling. “The accused may step back.”

Ariel November! I have a name! I am
Ariel November!

The judge flicked an annoyed gesture
to one of the guards who immediately grabbed her collar and pulled her back in
line.

“My name is …
Ariel November
,”
she repeated softly, stunned by its brilliance within her mind, its feel upon
her tongue, upon her brain. It was all so clear now. That was her name; had
always been her name. As far back as she could remember, she had always been
Ariel November. Not an entity sentenced to walk the Wasteland forever; she had
a name, an identity, a real life and an existence. She was not an oversight,
not just some construct, but an actual person. She was Ariel November, the
witch.

“Yes, we heard you the first time,” the judge said, annoyed. “Now if we
can proceed? Those who confess their crimes freely and repent shall receive
mercy. Those who do not, those who insist upon loyalty to the dark forces that
conspire against God’s people, shall end their days in the Wall of Penitence.”

Some of the women began to cry. One
started screaming, loud braying peals that were all the more pitiful for their
ineffectiveness. The crowd only looked on, the drama unfolding the same way it
had the day before, the week before, the month before. One of the judges picked
absently at his nose. The central magistrate looked nonplused. “Who is prepared
to confess and receive absolution?”

One woman: “I confess! Just don’t
send me to the Wall. I confess I…” her voice fell to a whisper, “… I am a
witch.”

The judge nodded to a pair of
bailiffs who stepped forward to unhook the woman from the long chain that bound
them one to the next, escorting her away while gushing an insensible stream of
gratitude.

Emboldened by her success—or fearful
of the alternative—others in the line began confessing, half-whispers and
desperate shouts of ludicrous acts and preposterous details regarding their
culpability in non-existent crimes. Even the ginger-haired woman, silent until
now, cautiously stepped forward. “I confess; I’m a witch.”

“No,” Ariel said.

“I repent my sins,” the ginger-haired
woman persisted. “I confess to my part in the conspiracy to aid the Red Knight
and to help bring about Apocalypse, or Armageddon, or … or whatever. I confess
to everything.”

“Stop!” Ariel said fiercely. “This
won’t help.”

But the magistrate simply nodded, a
bailiff coming to escort the ginger-haired woman away; a woman whose name Ariel
never learned.

What was the Wall? What terrified
everyone so, that they would confess to such lies?

The flesh must suffer that the soul be made pure
.

As the guards detached the ginger-haired woman from the chain of those
that remained—those that did not know what the Wall meant, or were too addled
to understand—she turned quickly to Ariel, her voice low, her eyes desperate.
“Whoever you are, it won’t matter in the Wall. What’s real don’t matter. All
what matters what’s believed, and they believe you’re guilty. Take what mercy
they offer, ‘cause the Wall won’t offer none. Not ever.”

Then she was pulled away and dragged
from the room.

The magistrate looked absently at
her. “Do you wish to confess and repent your wickedness?”

Why, Jack? Why give me a name only to
see it marked with indifference in a papal ledger?
What little she had seen of Janus
suggested that mercy would not come from confession, but after eons in the
Wasteland, was it all to end here like this?

(Child of the Wasteland, things are
different here in this world. As you are different. But you are still who you
are. You are Ariel November now, but you were Oversight once. You have not
forgotten.)

“Well?” the magistrate asked, looking
pointedly at her. “Have you nothing to confess?”

What did he expect her to say? And
why was his question so deliberate when before it was so indifferent?

“Have you not, by your actions,
betrayed your very maker?”

Familiar, but out of place. It did
not belong here. Not here!

(Neither do you, a wolf among the
sheep. Beware the shepherds.)

Her gaze lifted to meet his, saw the
face behind the spectacles—
how he loves his disguises, his little illusions
and deceptions
—saw the glimmer in the magistrate’s eyes; eyes that were two
different colors, one green, one blue.

(
A wolf among the sheep
)

She released herself from the chain
latched to her collar, and lunged across the table. “
Kreiger
!”

Bedlam ensued.

The others scurried out of the way,
fingers scrambling for holy relics and prayer beads as the guards descended
from all sides, the long table collapsing beneath their sheer mass as they
struggled to pull Ariel November from the fallen body of the magistrate, to
force the still-shackled witch to release him before she crushed his throat.