The Executioner's Cane (17 page)

“Who are you?” she asks. “Why are you
crying?”

The old man gives a low gasping moan and
staggers to his feet. Upright, his hair is more matted than the
Lammas Lord first realised and there is madness there also,
something fluid and uncontrollable about his expression.

“No, no,” the old man whispers in a rising
note which pierces through the wind. And then, foolishly, he is
running away, round behind the cow and her calf and heading for the
other side of the wood.

From instinct and without question, Ralph
pursues him, a nagging knife of familiarity stabbing at his
thoughts. Somehow this man is the key to saving Simon. He must not
be allowed to escape.

The capture takes but a matter of moments, no
longer. Ralph reaches the fugitive easily and brings him down, even
before he’s run more than a few paces back into the trees.

“Be gentle,” Annyeke cries out, and he can
hear the rustle and soft thud of her footsteps as she hurries after
them. “Don’t hurt him.”

Ralph curses. “I don’t intend to.”

She frowns and nods, before crouching down
next to the old man. He is shaking like a leaf in an autumn gale.
She lays her hand upon his shoulder and he glances round,
whimpering.

Even before the man speaks, Ralph knows who
he is.

“My name is Bradyn Hartstongue of the White
Lands,” he said. “Tell me, where is my son?”

Chapter Seven:
Despair and Hope

Simon

He tried to move his wrists but the ropes
pinioned his body to the tree. The pain ripped through him and he
groaned aloud. This must be a series of knots the blacksmith knew,
something designed to teach a horse to obey in the slow tightening
of the bond. Now it was being used for an equally slow killing. He
should accept it, he shouldn’t be looking for any relief. If this
punishment was what the villagers had chosen to subject him to, as
they had every right to do, then he should be silent and allow it
to happen. Hadn’t he offered himself up for what he had done?

But at his heart, in the very depths of his
blood, the truth remained: it wasn’t enough. The pain he suffered
here would never be enough for the way he had betrayed these people
and murdered the best of them. All those month-cycles of giving
Ralph what he wanted – the names and thoughts of those the Lammas
Lord feared would rise against him. Every desire for a better life,
every stray notion of future freedom punished by banishment or
death. He and Ralph had been caught up, yes, in the
mind-executioner’s revenge, but that was only an excuse for the
choices they had made. Choices to fear and not to trust, choices to
deny the inevitability of change and stand like the worst kind of
fools against it, choices to kill and not to protect. Oh yes, the
punishment he suffered, both for himself and for Ralph, was even
now – when his every bone cried out for relief and his skin cried
out for water – too light. The atonement he was making was not yet
complete. Tears sprang to his eyes, but he had no more strength to
weep them. He needed to do something more, but what?

As Simon rolled his head, he caught a glimpse
of a small rounded figure beneath him to the right. His vision was
so darkened he could not have recognised her in the flesh but the
remnants of his mind etched her name in stone. Jemelda. It was
right she should be here as she and her fellows had judged him to
the hilt and found him wanting. It was right she should watch his
punishment all the way to death. Odd how he could accept it today,
when before he had fought it and begged for help. He tried to smile
and felt the blood welling up from his cracked lips. He needed her
to come nearer, he needed Jemelda to hear him.

When he tried to speak her name, no sound
came out of his mouth. Not only that but the effort cost him dear
in terms of the tug on his upper body and the almost unbearable
pull on his arms. Darkness jagged in front of his eyes and he
fought to remain awake. Jemelda.

The plea came from the depths of his mind,
but he had little hope she would hear it. Still, a flash of white
he sensed more in his thoughts than in his eyes sprang past him and
he felt the soft passage of the snow-raven’s wing on his hair. Then
the bird was gone and he could have wept again at the loss of it.
Please, please.

“What do you want, Simon the Murderer?”

He blinked in the direction of the cook’s
voice. The ice in her words, the depth of suffering behind them,
brought fresh agonies to his bones. Again, he tried to speak to
answer her but could not. When she asked the question again, this
time more quietly, his head fell backwards and the gnarled angles
of the tree pressed into his hair. He found he was panting. Unable
to catch his breath, it felt like he was being hanged all over
again, but this time without the rope at his neck. How could he
ever tell Jemelda what he needed to bring his suffering to its true
fullness?

Use me.

The shock of the strange voice filling his
head made him gasp and he struggled for comprehension. It was
neither his own, nor anyone or anything he could recognise. He had
once heard the snow-raven’s voice, but that was swift and
fragmented, like the wind, and spoken with images he had needed
time to understand. This new voice was different from any he had
ever heard in his life: it was born from the clouds but also buried
deep within the earth; soft like a playing cat and as hard as the
once-proud mountain; it clung to his mind and shuddered through his
skin. He longed to hear its strangeness again but wondered if it
would destroy him.

You know me already. You have always known
me.

Simon was about to protest the lie of those
words which filled and surrounded him, but in that moment, the
silver and black shapes created by the letters in his thoughts
spoke their own kind of truth.

You are the mind-cane. You … you have never
spoken before. Somehow his own whispered disbelief made its logic
known, in a way his lips could not. The shape of the cane’s
utterances was a hook to hang his mind on and a wall to rest
against.

No matter. Use me.

Simon could not see how. He also could not
see how the cane could communicate with him when he had hidden it
away so as to be all the more open with these people. What he
wanted was a greater pain to purge his wrongdoings. If the
mind-cane wished to do this, then in his weakened state it would
kill him. So be it then, so be it.

Do it, the Lost One said, with the last of
his mind-strength bringing the object he desired to the topmost of
his outer thoughts. Make Jemelda bring this to me.

A burst of silver and terrible heat in his
body, and the mind-cane’s words vanished from his grasp. Jemelda
too was gone. Or at least he could no longer sense her. He could in
fact no longer sense anything. No. He would fight to remain here,
where these people had placed him, for as long as they wished it.
Death was not a door he should walk through until they willed it.
More than anything, he needed to drink deeper of the pain they had
granted him. So much deeper. What remained uncertain was whether he
might stay alive for long enough to feel it.

Simon did not know how much time passed as he
hung there, arms extended from the ropes that tied him to the tree,
legs dangling in the loose bonds that prevented him from gaining
traction to ease the pure agony of it. He could not tell whether it
was day or night. Although it had been after midday when the Lammas
people had tied him here, it could have been hour-cycles or
day-cycles since then. He did not think he would survive for more
than a day here though. Not with the pain and this great thirst
upon him. He wasn’t sure but he thought he might be groaning,
although he didn’t know how he could even produce such a sound.

Something happened then. Something new which
he hadn’t experienced in this solitary prison of necessary pain. He
felt the touch of a hand upon his naked foot. He felt it and
gasped. It seemed a lifetime-cycle since anyone had touched him.
Though it might mean his death, his blood rejoiced in the sensation
of warmth. Even though everywhere on his skin he was hot and cold
at once. Immediately he felt something rough at his side – not
flesh – and a shape at the edge of his vision.

“Drink this.”

The words were Jemelda’s. She might have been
whispering but, to Simon, the sound was as piercing as the noise of
battle in the Gathandrian fields. His thoughts filled up with the
memory of what had happened there: the violent deaths of so many
Gathandrians; the sheer presence and threat of the
mind-executioner; the terror of what might be happening to Ralph;
and most of all his own utter helplessness. The images swept
through his mind with an insistence like that of the boundless
seas. He could not gainsay them.

And, without tears, he was weeping. Gasping
after a forgiveness which would never come and he must live with
the pain of it always, no matter whether he died in the flesh or
not. He had to live with it. When he opened his lips, hands which
were neither harsh nor gentle seized his head and a cold bitter
liquid filled his mouth. His eyes widened, though he could still
see nothing and he swallowed it down, as much as he was given,
recognising the salt taste and rejoicing in the pain it would bring
him. Winter-sour beer. The drink given to the livestock before they
died. It hastened their ends, and would hasten his, but would
deepen the agony he took from it. It was what he had wished for.
The mind-cane, and Jemelda, had understood. Here, on this tree, his
flesh would be divided from his blood, his skin from his bone, his
heart from his mind. He would, once and for all, suffer the kind of
agony he had brought to others. It was right. It was right.

Faster than he had anticipated, the pain set
in. His throat felt as if a hundred needles were piercing his skin
and the warmth of blood flooded his mouth. For a long moment strung
out of time itself, the harsh liquid he had drunk oozed down into
his body. It filled him with icy spikes. As if the drink itself was
cutting outwards through his flesh. He screamed. He didn’t know he
was capable of screaming or even if anyone other than himself could
hear the sound. But his mouth formed the shape of it. He could not
get any air, or not enough to sustain him. Something grasped at his
head and the beaker disappeared from his lips. Simon struggled to
turn, bring the deadly brew back to his mouth but cool fingers held
him back. He felt the scarlet shape of her name engraving itself in
his skin even as the poison inside him plunged outwards to meet
it.

Jemelda.

Then his thoughts vanished to a place he had
never gone. The cruelty of the stars and the burning depths of the
earth. The pain travelled with him. It was part of him, it was him.
But beneath the agony of it dwelt the understanding that he was,
perhaps for the first time willingly, stepping on the path he was
meant to take. So, with the pain, came satisfaction and peace. The
Lost One watched in wonder as lines of crimson scarred his arms and
body, blood weeping from the wounds. With each drop, a name came to
his mind, etched in black and dripping with menace. Some of them he
knew – the shadows of their faces drifting in and out of his memory
– and some of them he did not. But all of them were dead because of
him, all of them he had killed to keep Ralph Tregannon’s good
opinion and to save himself. Every iota of the pain he felt would
be worth it – a sacrifice for what he had done. And if it killed
him in truth, then let the will of the gods and the stars be done.
Because, with each name, the purity of the pain in his flesh
plunged deeper and his mind became ever more splintered.

Soon he would be as nothing. Worse than
nothing. And the only things which would be left were the
snow-raven, the mind-cane, and Ralph. At the thought of the Lammas
Lord he must surely leave behind, he found he could weep at
last.

As the first tear marked him, silver and
white exploded from within the dead names’ darkness, and he found
he was falling, his body racked with pain and his mind empty. When
he stopped falling, he truly understood that then he would die.

Let it come then, let it come, he
breathed.

Ralph

Instinct drives him. At his feet lies Simon’s
father. He had thought the man was dead; had Simon told him this,
or had he merely assumed it? This is not so and the Lammas Lord
will use this knowledge to save the star-forsaken scribe, or may
they all die in the attempt. With one hand he grabs Annyeke and
with the other he flings the emeralds up into the air. As they
flicker and dance on the wind, Ralph seizes the old man and pulls
him closer.

“May the gods and stars take us where we so
much need to be,” he whispers.

A roar of encompassing flame and the three of
them are spun through darkness on an impossible journey. Annyeke’s
colours rampage through him: yellow and green. Meanwhile, the old
man whimpers, but does not struggle.

Ralph has scarcely begun to orientate
himself, if such an act were possible, when the green fire swallows
itself up once more and comes to rest in the jewels clinging to his
fingers, leaving him and his companions exposed to open skies and
wild sound. By the gods, he will never grow used to this method of
travel, which remains neither elegant nor dignified. But oh how
necessary it is.

He is up on his feet before he has time to
take another breath. He knows the shouting before he sees the
people, as he cannot forget the voices of those who were once his
villagers. Jemelda’s voice comes most clearly to him, and that of
the blacksmith too. Above and beyond all these, he sees Simon, his
body wracked with suffering on the tree. The rope pierces his
flesh, and his tongue is lolling sideways as if desperate for water
which will never arrive in time.