The Fall of Ossard (3 page)

He’d finish her casting now!

Anton strode across and tipped the barrel on an angle so he could wheel it along on its rim. He began moving it, it rumbling as it rolled over the cobblestones, bringing it closer to the witch and her coming end.

Vilma watched her daughter, the young man holding her tight. The couple were lost in each other as they mouthed her message of binding and love.

A smile split her blistered lips. The Inquisition had set many magical blocks about the pyre to stop any offensive sorcery, but because of her casting’s harmless nature she’d been able to bypass them. It seemed that it had never occurred to the heartless bastards that someone might cast a love spell while being burnt alive.

Finally, it was time to end her own suffering…

Inquisitor Anton growled, “Put this in you!” And he kicked over the barrel, setting free its dark juice to spray onto the bonfire’s edge.

The monks cheered.

The crowd cried out in horror.

And the fire around Vilma erupted into a ball of fury that lifted up to wash over her.

Her work done, she freed her perception and fell away from her mortal form to escape the pain, screams, and roar of her own boiling blood rushing through doomed veins. It was like backing away from two open furnace doors, her eyes, and into a dark cellar. With each moment the heat grew weaker and her view of
that
world diminished as she fell into the cool and soothing blue-tinged darkness of the next - the celestial.

She sensed for the others around her, seeking those also being fed to the flames. She grabbed at their desperate souls, mercifully dragging them and their attention away from their failing bodies, and into the cool of the afterlife.

Vilma would let them rest soon, but not before she used them to stir the emotions of those left behind. They needed to feed the crowd’s anger - just as oil had been used to feed the fire. What she was doing would spare them the agony they’d felt, but also block their mortal forms from dying. The results would not be pretty.

Back in Market Square, the spiritless bodies convulsed and ruptured in a gory display. At the same time the crowd’s anger also bucked to grow wild and ugly.

Anton shifted uncomfortably. He’d sensed the passing of souls, yet their blackened bodies still jiggled, moaned, and burst amidst the flames. It was as if they’d become zombies, the flesh alive, but the bodies without spiritual owners. Worse still, he could sense the shift in the crowd’s mood; from one of horror to a deepening outrage.

In the celestial, her spirit smiled.

Tonight, it wouldn’t be the witches and innocents of Ossard being slaughtered. Not any more. Tonight, it would be the false moralists of the Church of Baimiopia’s hated Inquisition. And as for the Inquisitor who’d personally lit the pyre, the vile man taking power from the pain he inflicted - she’d get her own revenge.

By My Own Hand

A Belated Introduction

I am Juvela Van Leuwin, daughter of Inger Van Leuwin, and granddaughter of a woman burnt at the stake for being a witch. It seems that misfortune and tragedy are as common to my blood as its colour - and I assure you, it
is
red.

By my own hand I write this record using the skills that
they
forbade us to learn. For
them
, the ruling order of Ossard, such things as reading and writing were reserved for the mercantile-noblemen, most especially if they were of Heletian birth. In that, you see, is my failing, for I am both not a man, nor Heletian.

The Inquisition may have been expelled from the city after the riots, but the Church of Baimiopia and its prejudices were not.

My Flet parents taught me, their beloved only daughter, what they thought adequate. They showed me the basics of letters and numbers, but no more, worried if I learnt too much I’d be caught out. Needless to say, I’ve since improved my talents. Today, with the skills
they
forbade me to have, I sit down to tell the tale of how
their
mighty city, the city-state of Ossard, fell.

It all started about six years before my coming of age. The first signs were subtle, hidden amidst unrelated events and missed by most. It was eyes further afield that had spied the beginnings of the corruption. Those same eyes, Lae Velsanan eyes, imparted a warning that would save me. For that, despite their terrible part in the coming catastrophe, I will forever be grateful.

We begin in the late summer of the year 509
Encarnigo Krienta
(seventeen years after
the Burnings
). I had just entered my teens…

Part I

Ossard, City of Merchant Princes

1

A Growing Shadow

My mother loved children. She cried if one suffered hurt and fell into despair at the news of an innocent’s death. It didn’t matter if they were strangers and news of their fate arrived as gossip, or if they stood as family or friends. Sometimes the grief came as a long and unwinding spiral of cold and numb mourning, others carried the explosive rawness of heart-wrenching cries and wails. There were always tears.

I hated it!

Every year that mourning built through Ossard’s icy winter and thawing spring, only to mature into a deepening madness that rose with summer’s heat.

Summer…

Those balmy days brought the fever; Maro Fever. It spread from the docks and through the slums to take the weakest into its burning embrace. It loved the young, for winter had already found the old to claim.

During the summer, instead of my mother hearing of a child killed in some misfortune several times a season she’d hear of fever deaths every other day. We tried to keep such news from her, it trapping her at home, yet the sounds of passing funeral processions marked by the slow beat of mourning drums could not be kept at bay.

Poor Inger, so sensitive and emotional, so busy feeling other peoples’ pain - it almost drove her mad. Then one summer the real problems began…