Mark of the witch, p.1
Mark of the Witch, page 1
Mark of the Witch
By Sebastian Priest
Copyright © 2023 Sebastian Priest
All rights reserved.
To the dark sun under the boiling ocean of blood.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
That green stuff between my toes that I haven't been able to get rid of yet. It keeps me humble.
Cousin Morgan, for not boxing me.
The voices in my head for being very supportive.
Contents
Chapter One: The Short Drop
Chapter Two: The Coffeehouse
Chapter Three: The Aftermath
Chapter Four: The Book of Three
Chapter Five: The Darker Depths
Chapter Six: The Hidden Hand
Chapter Seven: The Grimmel Bank
Chapter Eight: The Hobgoblin
Chapter Nine: The Man in the Blue Ascot
Chapter Ten: The Lord
Chapter Eleven: The Old Hands
Chapter Twelve: The Seven Cats
Chapter Thirteen: The Midnight Moon
Chapter Fourteen: The Stone Dream
Chapter Fifteen: The Followed Fountain
Chapter Sixteen: The Underneath
Chapter Seventeen: The Banquet
Chapter Eighteen: The Man of Mettle
Chapter Nineteen: The Man of Magic
Chapter Twenty: The Witch
Chapter Twenty-One: The Bitter Taste of Victory
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Violinist of the Streets
Chapter One: The Short Drop
The barrel came out from under the feet of the last condemned man after a firm kick, and gravity did the rest of Viktor's job for him.
Just like the three before him, the condemned man dropped a few centimetres before there was a sick moment where his momentum ceased. His eyes went as wide as dinner plates and he started gargling and choking as the noose around his neck became the only thing holding him in place.
His struggles—vain and instinctual as they were—succeeded only in making him sway a little from side to side. He kicked his legs around furiously, trying to find something, anything, to put his weight onto.
Viktor didn't blame the man when tears started falling from his eyes ten or so seconds in. One of the others had been crying all the way to the gallows and another had kept vomiting. For his part, there was nothing he could really do but stand in place with his hands clasped in front of him and his head lowered a little.
To the crowd milling around the temporary hanging gallows in Blue Street in the Middle, it might have seemed that he was making the gesture out of respect, something which was a requirement of his job.
The truth was related more to the fact that he could neither look the ex-watchman in the face, nor could he trust himself to not do something stupid with his hands if he didn't keep them in one spot.
More than anything else, he wanted to keep his eyes away from the horse-drawn cart that had been propped up next to the platform. It was filled with the dead bodies of all the previous men hanged that day. Three in total, if you didn't count the one busy dying right now.
The man sobbed and gurgled, rubbing his skin raw around the noose and the smaller length of rope Viktor had bound his hands with.
It was strange, in a way. How objects could kill. You wouldn't think that a rope would be capable of hurting someone, not if you just found a bit of it lying around somewhere. Twine was, logically, no murderer.
If you heard the word "killer", maybe you imagined someone with a knife or a bludgeoning weapon. Or maybe you imagined a person's head being held underwater by a pair of meaty hands until they drowned. Maybe you thought of poison clandestinely slipped into a drink.
The disgusting reality was that as long as humans had existed, they had been dreaming up configurations to use to end one another. Everything was a weapon. The instrument of murder in this case was just a tragic combination of a thick piece of string and the tendency of objects to fall downward.
The rope binding his hands was a secondary weapon. It was used purely to make the man's passing slightly more dignified and reduce the amount of struggling he could put up. The scene would be more brutal with him hopelessly clawing at his own neck, trying to remove the cord tying him to the wooden beam above.
Realistically, given the thickness of the rope and the amount of time you didn't have to get it off your neck, very few people could claw a noose off their throats before they asphyxiated.
Viktor supposed that keeping the man's hands tied also restricted his ability to hurt him in his mad thrashing—intentionally or not. People's bodies went into lunacy when they were in the process of dying, and hysterical strength wasn't a joke. Women could lift weighted and loaded carts off the ground for a few seconds and men could tear limbs off. Still, it felt unfair to think that in all of this, the wrist bindings were for his own sake. Selfish.
Viktor had tried to press Nikolas to let him perform a beheading. He was good and accurate with his axe. Even if he somehow botched it, the pain from that was better than this.
He'd been denied.
Then he'd pressed for the long drop. It was a much cleaner death; the actual kill was achieved by a snapped neck rather than strangulation. He’d been denied again.
Even Nikolas had orders he couldn't go against if he didn't want to be the next man hanging from something.
The Baron had wanted the short drop, so death via strangulation it was.
The final man had been resistant to the end. But everyone died, and after a minute or so of suspension from the gallows, he finally lacked the air to stay awake. A stray bit of spittle ran down the man's lips and he let out a final, desperate gasp as his body finally went limp.
From there it would be anywhere from two to six minutes of unconsciousness before death took him irreversibly.
Death would soon become a mercy anyway. After a certain point, a finished strangulation was less heartless than a half-done choke. Brain damage from deprivation of air was a terrible thing. Stopping now would be cruelty.
Viktor felt like the Stone God hadn't taken kindly to him having that last thought, as almost immediately a rotten tomato impacted him in the chest.
He stumbled back, more from surprise than anything else. He hadn't been looking at the crowd—poor form to do so rather than conspicuously focusing on your work—but he could guess what was going to happen next and ducked just in time to avoid the stray rock that had been flung at his head.
'Murderer!' A boy shouted. He was not much younger than Heun and was dressed in a fine green jerkin with gold embroidery down the shoulders. He had a mop of wild brown hair tucked under his equally expensive-looking feathered cap, though right now Viktor was more concerned with the ornate dagger he was pulling out of a pocket at his side.
'Murderer!' The boy shouted the accusation again. Viktor felt it reverberate on the inside of his skull like someone had rung a bell in his head. 'He's killed my uncle!'
The crowd—Viktor felt like he was realising they were there for the first time—shouted and murmured in agreement. They were almost all Middlemen, a mix of Skillets and Moneybags, and they were angry.
Another rock flew past his head, then another. The last one hit his arm as he held it in front of his face protectively. Two more impacted his legs and he took a few steps back without thinking.
That proved to be a mistake, as the show of hesitance only encouraged the crowd's instinct to kill. Humans were more rabid than dogs and less intelligent than monkeys when the mob mentality set in.
One moment they were an unhappy conglomeration of bereaved and angry family members mixed in with some bystanders who had been drawn out of the shops by the commotion and the spectacle. The next, a shout went up and almost fifty people decided to fall into a riot.
Then it all went to shit.
When he'd began to set up that morning, Blue Street had been a rather nice little market corner of the city.
In contrast to the dirty buildings in the Lowers that had often been constructed with or hastily repaired using cheap, dark wood, the buildings here were built of polished white stone and the roads were cleanly and neatly cobbled.
Instead of boarded up windows and clotheslines hung with threadbare brown and black clothes in various states of damage, people here left their flowered windowsills open to let the air in, and colourful banners hung from the streetlamps.
Smithies. Bakeries. Tailors. Bookshops. Alchemist's stores. You could even find the occasional coffeehouse, and the Middlemen were extremely proud of the various public libraries the craftsmen guilds funded.
Spice shops. Restaurants. A post office. A shop selling gear for the rare explorers that were stupid enough to brave the forests down the mountain, looking for caves to delve and rare alchemical ingredients to harvest.
This might've been the most normal part of the city, away from the serpentine intrigue of the Uppers and the crippling poverty and desperate violence of the Lowers.
That was the illusion, anyway. One that was shattered the moment the first glass vodka bottle with a flaming bit of string tied to its cork stopper smashed into one of the wooden beams holding the hanging gallows up, spraying liquid and sharp bits of debris everywhere.
The flaming string reacted with the alcohol almost immediately. A fire broke out, eating at the wood and charring one of the banners that had been hung from either side of the gallows platform.
People shouted abuse at him and one another, and more than a few small fistfights broke out in the confusion. A ha
Too late for that. They were predictably either knocked aside, unwillingly absorbed into the mass of furious people, or—in the case of a few unlucky people—simply treated as part of the street.
A woman—really more of a girl—that had been selling baked goods out of a basket screamed as she was knocked off her feet by the mob, scattering bread everywhere.
The rioters paid her no heed. Viktor stared in what he mutely recognised was passive disgust at both himself and the world at large as the rioters trampled over the girl and several other people that had fallen over in their haste to get either at him or away from the brawl.
Another bottle made impact, this time hitting the wooden floor a few metres in front of him and setting it ablaze. More rocks were thrown.
Nikolas might have left some of the watchmen loitering around in case this sort of thing happened, but this part of the Middle was one of the sectors the Merchant Guard was responsible for policing.
No on-duty watchmen were normally allowed on this street; an exception had to be made to even get Rosh and Maxwell allowed to help Viktor put the gallows together.
They'd mostly spent the time nailing planks together and setting the beams up exactly as he'd specified, but apparently orders had come from on high that they also make the square 'presentable'.
Hence why the platform was ringed by a dozen smaller wooden poles, from each of which hung the fluttering banner of the Fourth Baron. Both men had seemed uncomfortable in their armour as they'd hung the three gold crows on the red field around the street.
Then they'd had to fuck off. He envied them. Maxwell had been paling the entire time he'd been painfully handing Viktor planks, simply from the knowledge of what they'd be used for.
Lucky him that he wasn't the one that had to stay and actually perform the execution.
Idly, it dawned on Viktor that he was probably foolish for sticking around and watching the Middlemen turn their own street into a warzone in their anger. But somehow, it was both so pathetic and so understandably tragic that he couldn't look away, nor could he find it in himself to pick his axes up from where they were leaned against one of the flaming beams and fuck off.
The crowd went through a few more motions of uncertainty, cycling between that and rage, riling themselves up and feeding off one another's frenzy.
It was fascinating. He had been able to pinpoint almost the exact moment they had gone from screaming abuse to all deciding to throw things at him, and then the exact point that attacking from a distance ceased to be emotionally cathartic enough for them and they started to approach the platform.
A third flaming bottle was flung at him. This one came from far enough away that he had time to almost lazily watch it careen towards him before moving out of the way by a quarter of a metre.
The bottle flew past him and shattered. Viktor realised too late that the angle had been the most unfortunate one it could have been.
The smell of raw pork being burnt struck his nostrils almost immediately, and the widening eyes of the crowd said all they had to.
Very slowly, several men in the crowd turned to a smaller figure: the well-dressed boy from earlier. Hand still outstretched from the motion of the thrown bottle, eyes wide and face pale with dawning horror.
Viktor felt a lump form in his throat. The smell got worse and a little bit more smoke made its way into his peripheral vision. Slowly—so slowly he felt he could hear his own bones creak—Viktor turned halfway on his heels and craned his neck to his left.
The ex-watchman was shaking, evidently still alive enough that his unconscious mind could recognise he was on fire from the waist up. It automatically responded with the last bit of panic his body could muster. Or maybe those were just the death throes, his muscles kicking out violently as the fire caused them to spasm and cook, to expand and retract even without a living brain to provide impetus.
He didn't scream; there was no air for that.
The shaking was minute, but the shivering was there as the flames licked at the wet patches of booze. The old, patchy material of his tunic and trousers quickly became makeshift kindling. His flesh turned red and sizzled as fire took it. The flames even spread to the ropes around his wrists.
The alcohol must have been very high proof, because the fire slowly spread over the entirety of the condemned man's upper torso. It burned so hot and so violently that the hair soon burnt and flaked off his head. The lower parts of his face started to char and blacken.
Oh. Shit...
Slowly, even more so than before, Viktor turned back towards the crowd of Middlemen.
They all seethed at him, a sea of emotional faces. Some red with anger, some stained with tears, some screaming, some crying. The ones that had come out from shops clutched tools tightly in their hands. A butcher's knife, a blacksmith's hammer, one man even clutched a letter opener between blood-pale fingers.
And now Viktor could plainly see they didn't just want violence, they wanted blood.
Of course, the stupid boy throwing the flaming cocktail wasn't to blame. That would make too much sense. That would be too easy. Naturally, it was Viktor's fault for being nearby when something went wrong.
Before, it had been a haphazard jog while a few walked and stragglers milled about uncertainly. Before, a few people had sensed what was about to happen and had left. Now there was no uncertainty and there was no hesitance.
A final blood-curdling shout went up, and the crowd stormed towards him..
A cart that had been carrying panes of glass was overturned; the resulting shatter had several people screaming when the shards pulled into their hands. Others fell to the ground screaming as glass shards embedded in their faces.
More bottles of flaming vodka were thrown. Viktor idly noted that a liquor store further down the alley had been smashed open and looted so that the Middlemen could get access to the flammable booze within. He hadn't seen it initially, being too focused on his work, but no doubt whoever had done that had been the first fool to throw a bottle.
Some idiot threw a bottle that went astray. It careened through the window of a cobbler's shop, no doubt setting something inside on fire. A moment later, flames spewed out along with a half dozen panicked patrons.
A wagon carrying straw was set on fire and tipped over, scorching three men and a woman as the crowd surged around it.
'I'll kill you!' the boy from before shouted as he neared the platform with his knife. He scrambled up the side, using the small blade to scratch some purchase for himself.
Viktor sighed to himself, finally finding the irritation to pick his nicer axe up from where it rested. He held the weapon in both hands for a few moments, angling it so that he could see his own reflection in the blade.
It was amazing the way the hood shadowed his eyes. You really couldn't see anything of him when he was wearing it. He was just a dark mass of grey and black mixed with the brown of his eyes. Even then, almost no one ever came close enough to see
It was often said the eyes were the window to the soul. He idly wondered if that had been half of the point of stuffing the hoods over the executioners—to make them seem soulless.
'Is today your death day, boy?' He pointed the axe at the whelp with one hand, stopping the boy a few metres away with the gesture.
The boy froze, holding his own dagger so tightly in his hand that his fingers turned white. He breathed heavily, eyes wide with shock and maybe some measure of mad distress.
'That's a nice knife you've got there. Do you know how to use it properly?'
'What?' the boy breathed, confused.
Viktor took some deliberately looming steps towards the boy. His feet fell onto the wood with such force that the loud thuds against the platform floor echoed out through the entire square.
The crowd slowed a little, uncertain if they were now about to watch the boy lose his head.
'The knife.' Viktor gestured at him with his free hand. 'It. Is. Nice. Do you know how to use it?'
'O-Of course!' the boy sputtered.
'You sound unsure. How many?'
'What?'
