by Christopher RoweI
in Issue 137, June 2023
Celia rode the broad acres, looking for someone to kill. Not a specific one of the light-eyed strangers who had burned her farmstead and murdered her husband, but any of them. All of them, ideally.
She had no doubt she would find the raiders soon. She needed only to follow the pillars of smoke rising from the other holds dotted across the plain. They were moving slowly, and Celia would have caught them by now if she had not been following them on foot until she found a mare still alive at Clover’s farm. Clover was an old woman. Had been an old woman. That hadn’t stopped the strangers from nailing her against the wall of her barn.
The mare was skittish, but Celia’s time in the calvary—years ago now—had taught her how to handle horses spooked by the scent of blood. Those years had taught her to use the short bow tied unstrung at the back of her saddle. They had taught her to use the sword and the hatchet at her belt.
Daniel hadn’t liked that she had kept the blades. The bow had its uses—“legitimate uses” he had said—but you couldn’t use a sword to scare off a coyote and the hatchet wasn’t weighted properly for any kind of farm work. No, its work was far more deadly. Work it would be doing soon.
She liked to think that Daniel would have understood why she was looking for someone to kill. At least as much as she liked anything anymore.
The mare sidestepped and neighed. Someone was standing on the track just ahead, someone Celia was sure hadn’t been there just a moment before. He was tall and thin and wore a skullcap of etched silver. He held a black mace in both hands and wore an amulet that was hard for Celia to look at for some reason. He had light eyes.
“Mahl said he thought someone was trailing us,” he said, his accent as strange as his appearance. “Useful man, Mahl. He senses things.”
Celia did not reply, but reached back and pulled the knot holding her bow free. She pulled a coil of gut from a leather pocket sewn to her breeches and swiftly strung the bow. Swiftly, but it still took time. Time that the stranger curiously did not take to advance on her.
She didn’t stop to wonder why. She drew, aimed, and loosed. The arrow struck the stranger full in the chest, sinking the width of her hand.
He looked down at it and smiled.
“We don’t bleed, you see,” he said. “That’s why we need your blood. That’s why I will now take yours from you.”
Celia drew, aimed, loosed. This time he swung the mace and knocked the arrow aside. She had never seen anyone move such a heavy weapon so swiftly, even though his motions had seemed casual, even careless. She threw the bow aside, and again, the mare sidestepped. The horse was becoming a liability. Celia unsheathed her sword and hatchet and leapt to the ground.
Then he did advance on her. She barely had time to raise her weapons in a defensive cross before the mace came down. She grunted with the ringing impact, barely blocking the thing. In one of the lucid moments that sometimes came to her in battle, she noticed that the mace’s head was a version of the same twisted shape the man wore suspended from his neck, just below the arrow shaft protruding from his chest.
“You’re a demon worshiper!” she said, shoving him back. She twirled the hatchet in her right hand and took a fighting stance.
The stranger stepped back and shrugged. “We like to think it’s more the other way around, actually.” Then he shifted the mace to one hand and held out the other.
Celia felt something like wind and something like water flow past her. The air filled with a rancid stench. The mare screamed and then Celia could see a flow. Streams of blood impossibly ran from the horse’s nostrils to the man’s mouth, which was open far wider than it should have been.
The horse dropped to the ground and the man closed his mouth with an audible snap.
“Hardly as potent as yours will be,” he said, taking up the mace with both hands again. “But you seem capable enough that I will need to burn a little in taking you.”
Celia darted in and swung her sword low, landing a cut on the man’s thigh. She ducked and rolled away from his answering blow.
He showed no sign that he was bothered by the deep gash in his leg. The sword and the hatchet would not help her here.\
But the sword and the hatchet were not the only weapons Celia had at her disposal. She dropped them.
She took two long steps backward and tore open the collar of her shirt, revealing a thick strand of twine around her neck. She drew forth a polished green stone drilled through at one end where the twine ran through. The stone flashed in the sun.
A pillar of greasy black smoke rose up from the pyre where the men and women under Celia’s command were dragging the corpses of the heretics. They had built the fire a bowshot from the monastery’s walls, so the signs of burning along the great stone edifice were no fault of the cavalry.
The usual practice of the heretics was to set fire to any holy place they found undefended and burn the inhabitants alive.
They had not found the Freesong Monastery undefended.
But neither had they shied from taking action against the two dozen mounted warriors who had been sent from the capital to defend Freesong. They had acted with discipline, loosing flights of arrows that were mostly blocked by the bucklers the riders wore strapped to their forearms, though her sergeant, Lucas, had taken a shaft in the thigh. He hadn’t let that keep him from charging the foe when they dropped their bows and took up polearms. They’d clearly known they would be facing cavalry.
The fighting had been intense, not the one-sided affair Celia had been told to expect. In the capital, the heretics were held to be a rabble of farmers whose only real faith was the faith that they should not have to pay their tenant fees and taxes. Hayforks and scythes were the worst they could present, according to the tavern talk.
According, too, to Celia’s commander.
No rabble, but a well-drilled group of thirty leather-armored soldiers fighting in two units had descended upon them. Between the polearms and their having the high ground, the work of dispatching them had been long, difficult, and bloody.
The monastery was set in a picturesque vale, built either side of a babbling creek. The walls were impressive, but trees grew up next to them and the gate could not be shut. Only Celia’s quick-thinking outriders had thought to look for flankers seeking the interior. The heretics hadn’t made it as far as the chapterhouse, but that part of the action had cost her two riders and three horses.
She sat her saddle, counting her survivors, counting her dead.
“Are you a lieutenant?” The man who had approached from the permanently-open gate was wearing the heavy brown robes of the order holding Freesong, but he was not tonsured, and the holy stars sewn around the hem of his long coat were those worn by the laity.
“I am,” Celia said, and offered the young man her name. “It has always been my understanding that members of the monastic orders were forbidden any contact with outsiders.”
“So as to better maintain endless meditation and constant prayers to the Holy Twelve, yes,” said the man. He had a crooked grin. “But I saw you examining the symbols I wear. You know I am no monk.”
“I do,” said Celia. “But knowing what you’re not isn’t the same as knowing what you are.”
“A student is all,” said the man. “I came here to study the husbandry of cattle. These monks are masters in that art.”
Celia had never heard anyone refer to the breeding of livestock as an art.
“What can I do for you, Brother Cattleman?” she asked.
The charming, crooked smile came again, and he held up a small leather pouch. “A gift from the Abbot,” he said. “I’m told it will aid you in your time of greatest need.”
Celia felt the irregular shape of some kind of stone in the pouch, and absentmindedly tucked it away. “I know the Abbot will not allow me to refuse this gift, but we were only doing our duty. And our duty must now take us elsewhere. An investigation must be undertaken as to who is funding and training these heretics.”
“Of course,” said the young man. “Security of the County, death to all who oppose us, all that.”
This raised Celia’s lips in a curve. “Good luck in your art, Brother Cattleman,” she said, taking up her reigns.
“As has been established, I’m not a Brother,” he said. “And my name is Daniel.”
“Oh,” said the man, taking his own steps back. “An angelstone. That makes this much more interesting. And distressing, I must admit.”
This time, he dropped the mace altogether and raised both of his hands. This time he said a word.
Celia’s feet flew out from beneath her and she lost her breath to something that felt like a solid blow to her stomach. There was a sizzling sound from the angelstone.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” said the man, keeping his left hand extended but now taking the amulet in his right. “How did a farmer come across such a thing, I wonder.”
There was a quaver in his voice when he spoke. His movement were now not so fluid.
Still breathless, still on the ground, Celia rolled over. When she did so, the angelstone struck the hatchet’s blade, which did not sound a metallic ring but a song. She came to her knees and threw the hatchet. It struck the stranger between the eyes. It did not bury itself in his skull. It went clean through. He dropped to the ground, even more lifeless than he had been already.
Celia staggered to her feet. She bent and retrieved her sword, then her hatchet, then her bow. As she unstrung this last, she scanned the horizon for fresh smoke.
Perhaps the others would be as difficult to kill as this one had been.
It didn’t matter.
©June 2023, Christopher Rowe
Christopher Rowe has published a few dozen science fiction and fantasy stories, two collections (with a third forthcoming), and three novels. He has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.