Abomination (33 page)

Though Indra’s sword did not lower, Wulfric could see that his words were taking hold. There was more doubt than certainty now, though still enough of the latter to keep her cautious.

“Indra, I have not known you long, but long enough to see how prone you are to anger, how quickly that red mist descends and clouds your judgment. I would guess that it has steered you down the wrong path more often than you would like. Do not make that mistake now. I ask you to look beyond your anger for a moment and ask yourself what you really believe. If I am really your enemy.”

He watched her carefully, hoping that he had not missed his guess about her. He was within striking distance of her blade, and he doubted that he could rely on the same trick to disarm her again. That had been enough of a gambit the first time. The truth was, she was better with those swords than he had admitted—among the best he had ever seen.

Finally, after what seemed like an interminable moment, Indra lowered the point of her sword a fraction—not enough to give up her defensive advantage, but enough to indicate a glimmer of trust. “If you try to deceive me, or trick me in any way . . .”

“I will not. I swear it,” said Wulfric. “In fact, I believe I can help you.”

“Help me? How?”

“You must slay an abomination and return to the Order with its head as proof of the deed, yes? I can help you do that. And I ask only one small favor in return.”

Indra’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, some inner sense clearly telling her that she would not like this bargain, tempting as it sounded. “What kind of favor?”

Wulfric turned and went back to the campfire, which had begun to die. He picked up a gnarled hunk of branch and stoked the embers with it before throwing it onto the fire. He sat back down, cross-legged, and warmed the palms of his hands as the flames rose up around the fresh wood, causing it to crackle and spit. Only then did he look back at her.

“I want you to kill me.”

As the day wore on, Wulfric told Indra his tale, though not all of it. Some details, he discovered in the course of the telling, were too painful to recollect, much less recount, and, he reasoned, were not necessary to convey to the girl what he needed her to know and understand. Indra stood—still not trusting enough to sit—and listened as Wulfric sat by the fire and told her of his time as a young soldier in the service of Alfred the Great—though not how he had once saved his King’s life and gained a knighthood as well as Alfred’s undying gratitude and friendship. Such details, true though they were, seemed boastful, and this was not a story in which to take pride.

He told her that as part of his military service, he had enlisted in a newly founded order charged with hunting down the mad Archbishop Aethelred, and his demonic horde—but not that the King had commissioned him personally to found it and recruit its members; that, too, seemed prideful. He told her of the bitter final battle with Aethelred and of the special, most hateful curse the archbishop had placed upon him as his wizened hand burned the beetle medallion into Wulfric’s flesh, though he took no credit for killing Aethelred and ending his reign of chaos and terror.

And he told her that he had sent himself into exile after realizing what he had then become. He could not bring himself to share the details of how he had first come to realize it. The memory of
that day, so long ago now, that he woke in a barn covered in ash to discover that he had slaughtered every man, woman, and child in his home village, including his own beloved wife and newborn child, was simply too agonizing to revisit.

Indra took in every word, sometimes standing still, other times pacing back and forth, but never once taking her eye off the storyteller—at first because she still did not trust him and was watching like a hawk for any sudden move or sign of deception, but by the end because the tale, incredible and tragic as it was, so commanded her attention. And when the telling was done, she finally sat, slumping to the ground by the fire in a way that Wulfric took as a further indication of trust but was borne more out of exhaustion, the tale having taken as much of a toll on the listener as it had the teller.

For a while the two sat like that, on opposite sides of the fire, in silence. For what was there to be said? Wulfric went back to staring into the dancing flames, and the sorrowful look in his eyes seemed all the greater now that Indra knew the truth behind it. For her part she remained silent, not because she could think of nothing to say but because she had so many questions that she barely knew where to start. Finally, she arrived back at where this had all begun.

“The chain . . .”

Wulfric glanced over at it, the misshapen spool of gray iron taking on a golden hue in the failing light of late afternoon. “The only way I am able to restrain the beast when it emerges,” he said. “Before the end of each day, I must shackle myself so that when the change comes upon me at nightfall, it can harm no one.”

“When you become this beast, you can’t control yourself?”

Wulfric shook his head grimly. “Oh, how I have tried. But I am never strong enough. When the beast wakes, it is as though I am paralyzed within it, aware of its actions but powerless to influence them. And so, the chain is all I have.”

Indra thought on this for a moment. “You speak of the beast as though you and it are not one and the same, but as though it is a separate being, with its own mind, independent of yours.”

Wulfric spat into the fire, waved his hand dismissively. “To describe that thing as having a mind is to give it entirely too much credit. It has its own consciousness, for I can sense it alongside my own, but it does not think or reason as you and I understand those things. It is driven by something lower, lower even than animal instinct. A desire, an urge to inflict suffering and death so profound that while I can feel it, I cannot describe it. I cannot . . .” Wulfric trailed off. Indra watched as he took a moment to compose himself, to push down whatever dark feeling was welling up within him. “In truth, where the beast ends and I begin, I do not know. All I know is that its will is more powerful than my own.”

“So you are conscious, even as it is conscious,” said Indra, realizing as she spoke that she did so now in a tone more hushed than before, as though to speak of the beast too loudly might somehow awaken it. “Everything it experiences . . . you experience?”

“Sometimes more than others,” said Wulfric. “There have been times when I have seen the faces of the people it has killed with perfect clarity, heard every scream, even tasted the blood as the monster feasts. Other times I experience it only as a kind of nightmare, vague images and sensations, a kind of madness I cannot comprehend. Often, before the chain, I would wake with no recollection of the carnage the beast had wrought the night before, only a sickening sensation in my gut and whatever bloody evidence it had left behind.” Wulfric motioned across the clearing to where the remains of the thugs that the beast had slaughtered last night were still splayed across the bloodstained earth, and Indra shuddered.

A quiet moment passed as she thought on how to phrase her next question, one that had been begging to be asked for some time. She leaned closer. “Forgive me, but . . . how exactly does it work? The change, from man to beast, and back again?”

Wulfric shrugged. “Sometime after nightfall I begin to experience convulsions, spasms that contort my body. They grow ever more violent until at last I lose consciousness. Then there is pain and blindness, and then the madness, the nightmare, descends and I am within the beast. I awake sometime after dawn, covered in sulfuric ash—the remnants, I presume, of the transformation back to my human self. What any of this looks like I cannot say, for I have never witnessed it, nor have any others lived to tell the tale.” And with that, he looked up at the sky and stood. “You will be the first.”

Indra leapt to her feet, her defensive instincts not yet fully quieted, though she did not reach for a sword. “What do you mean?”

Wulfric ambled over to where the coil of iron chain sat and began slowly to unwind it. “For a long time, I believed that I could not die. That first year of the curse, I tried. Every way you could imagine. I tied myself to a heavy stone and let myself sink to the bottom of a deep lake, where I drowned. I talked my way into fights with violent men and let them cut my throat. Once, I walked all the way to the sea and threw myself from the tallest cliff, to be dashed against the rocks below. Each time I was reborn within the beast that very night. There was a time, long ago, when some people who had discovered what I was burned me at the stake in their village square. The next morning, I was alive and they were all dead, slaughtered in the night by the beast risen from my ashes. After that, I came to understand that my inability to die, or at least to stay dead, was part of my penance, that I must carry this curse with me for all eternity. But you have shown me otherwise.”

The sinking feeling that had begun to creep up on Indra deepened. “How have I done that?”

Wulfric continued to unravel the chain, inspecting each link as he did so for any sign of a kink or flaw. A daily ritual.

“As a man, I know that I cannot be killed, and for a long time I believed that the beast could not either, for all those who have tried have failed. And there have been many. Skilled men, armed men,
none of whom ever so much as scratched its hide. Until you did this to it.” He set down the chain and turned to face her, opening his cloak to the scar that snaked upward from navel to nipple. “You proved that the beast can be hurt, that it can bleed as any abomination bleeds, and more—that whatever is done to it is done to me. If the beast’s wound is also my wound, then perhaps its death is also my death. Do you understand?”

Indra shook her head. She understood it well enough, but she did not want to accept it. “You cannot be sure that it would work,” she offered meekly.

“Perhaps not,” said Wulfric, returning to the chain. “But it is in both our interests to try. I have no desire to live this cursed existence for even one more day if there is indeed a way to escape from it. And for you—once dead, the beast’s corpse is yours to do with as you wish. Cut off its head and return it to the Order. Claim your prize. Tell them whatever heroic tale you care to. It matters not to me.”

He took the chain and began to drag it toward a nearby tree. “It will be night soon,” he said. “I will chain myself, which I must do whether you agree to this bargain or not. When the beast emerges, it will still be a danger—do not underestimate it even when imprisoned. But its underside is vulnerable, as you have so ably shown, and shackled against the tree, it will be exposed. I believe you are more than equal to the task. Do we have an agreement?”

Indra had dreamed of slaying an abomination her whole life. Not once had she imagined it might be like this. Never anything like this. To have her prey served up to her for the killing like a rat caught in a trap—where was the honor in that?

But then hadn’t she already earned honor enough? Though she said nothing, she was offended by Wulfric’s suggestion that she manufacture some story of false heroism. She knew that she had shown plenty of the real sort when she willingly faced the beast and proved herself against it in mortal combat. She had made it
bleed, shown it that she was not just another helpless, terrified, screaming victim.

Something about that encounter nagged at her, but she set it aside and told herself something else:
This isn’t about honor. It’s about revenge. Take it however you can
.

She gave Wulfric a nod. Satisfied, he began the work of walking the chain around the tree to wrap it in iron. As he did so, Indra looked up at the clouds forming in the darkening sky and asked herself how she could be getting everything she had ever wished for and yet still feel such uncertainty. Such dread.

Indra watched in grim fascination as Wulfric went about his task, observing the care and detail with which he performed it—the mark of a man who knew the importance of a job well-done and who had perfected it through years of practice. He made only one deviation from his normal routine; he did not remove his cloak, partly to spare Indra’s blushes, but mostly because he hoped never to need it again. If she did her job as agreed, Wulfric and the beast would die as one, and he would no longer have any use for earthly possessions.

At first she had watched him closely, from a distance of a few feet, but Wulfric had told her to move farther back and pointed to a large rock several yards away. The beast, he reminded her, might not be able to move while shackled, but it could still lash out with a tongue or an outstretched claw or a gob of lethal saliva. And so she witnessed the last of the ritual from there, her back resting against the smooth rock, knees drawn up to her chest to protect against the cold that the onset of night was ushering in, and Venator perched watchfully over her. She watched as he sat at the base of the tree and brought the chain over his head and around his chest, using both arms to wind it tighter around him. She noticed that he left enough slack to account for the greater size of the beast. As a man,
he might be able to wriggle loose from his own bonds; the beast would find itself bound tightly in iron.