The Necromancer (8 page)

Odara

mangled and didn’t work properly. She fumbled with her buttons and laces. She was scrawny and malnourished now, and her clothes hung loosely on her body when she put them on.

“Move it, wench!” The executioner kicked her hard as she stooped over for her bodice, making her crash face fi rst into the cold, hard fl oor.

She began to cry again.

*****

had purchased in Lincoln. It was a cold, overcast November morning, a few minutes past ten o’clock. He’d been riding since dawn from Hadrian’s Wall where he had spent the night, and now he was fi nally home. It had taken him less than a week to make the journey, and he felt terribly exhausted, but it wasn’t over yet.

He dismounted the horse and ran inside.

“Odara! Odara!” he called.

But the house remained quiet.

He ran from room to room calling Odara’s name, but found nothing.

Then he heard a voice call, “Master Crawford.”

Fergus turned around. It was his servant Caillic.

“Oh, Master Crawford, something dreadful has

happened.”

“Where is Odara?”

“Prison. They came for her more than a fortnight ago.

She has been accused of witchcraft and is to be burned at the stake this very morning.”

“Dear God!”

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“They arrested Colin also, and they are in search of you. You mustn’t stay here. The King has seized the property and his soldiers are here—”

Fergus stormed back out of the house.

As he ran to his horse, two of the King’s soldiers turned the corner of the house and spotted him.

“Hey! You there!” one of them barked, breaking into a run. “Stop! In the name of the King, I command you to stop!”

Fergus ignored the man and leapt up into the saddle as the soldiers closed in on him.

“Stop!” the other soldier ordered, drawing his pistol.

Fergus responded by pulling his sword from its

scabbard and slicing the gun-toting hand off its owner’s arm.

The man cried out, dropped to his knees, and gripped his wrist as blood spouted from it in a thick red geyser. The other soldier, instead of pursuing Fergus, ran to his partner’s aid.

Fergus cracked the reins and rode off to town.

*****

executioner and his guards shoved her through the throng of people who had gathered in the town square to watch the burnings. Her hands were bound behind her back. Her physical appearance was pathetic, but instead of inciting sympathy from the people, it seemed to fuel the mob’s already growing hatred of her.

The four of them made their way through the crowd to a scaffold that stood between two stakes centered on large piles of wood. A heavy plank of wood led from the scaffold to each of the stakes. Colin was already bound to one of the stakes and, having confessed under torture, would be granted a more merciful death. He had been arrested for no other reason 70

Odara

than the fact that he happened to be in the same room as Odara when they came for her, and now he would be executed for practicing an art he knew nothing about and had been too weak to deny.

The executioner climbed a ladder to the scaffold and hauled Odara up the steps while the two guards pushed her.

She shivered.

The executioner shoved her onto the plank and

walked her across to the stake where he bound her. He walked back across to the other stake where Colin was bound and awaited Reverend Marshall, the Privy Council, and their hired commission.

They were coming. As they proceeded toward the

scaffold, the crowd parted and fell silent. To Odara, it almost seemed like Moses parting the Red Sea to lead the Israelites to freedom, but this Moses had malice in his eyes and hatred in his heart.

The men mounted another scaffold opposite the

one between the two tinder-based stakes. Reverend Marshall opened a scroll of parchment and proceeded to read the charges and sentences.

“Colin MacGregor. You stand accused on this, the twenty-eighth day of November, in the year of our Lord, sixteen-hundred and seventy-two, of practicing the damnable art of witchcraft and its incumbent sorceries, and of aiding your mistress, Odara Crawford, in the practice of said sorceries wherewith she did conjure evil spirits and silence the tongue of one Annabel Lawson. Having confessed to these charges and been found guilty, you are sentenced here to death by strangulation, after which your remains shall be burnt to ashes.

May God have mercy on your damned soul.”

Reverend Marshall nodded to the executioner

solemnly. The executioner acknowledged him, positioned 71

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himself behind Colin and the stake he was fastened to, then brought a section of rope around the front of his body.

Colin looked about himself nervously, but said nothing. The executioner coiled the rope around his neck and pulled. Colin’s eyes bulged widely. His legs kicked. His body jerked. His face turned dark-red. One moment he thrashed violently; the next he stood still, every muscle in his body tense and straining.

Thrashing, then still. Thrashing, then still.

His face changed from dark-red to a bluish-gray color.

He bit his lip. Blood and mucous foamed from his mouth. He gurgled and choked and struggled.

Then, he died.

The executioner let go of one end of the rope, revealing the dark bruise it made, and the body slumped down limply against the stake.

Marshall redirected his attention to Odara, who looked like some child’s mistreated doll, made to suffer at the whim of the child’s tantrums. She couldn’t cry anymore. Her eyes and mouth had dried up just before leaving the prison. In her present condition, she felt it would be a miracle if her baby had a chance of survival even if she somehow managed to avoid execution. She was simply too thin and ragged for her womb to be able to sustain life, and she knew that. At this point, death would almost be preferable to the alternative. Odara wanted it to be over.

“Odara Crawford,” Marshall said, reading from a

separate scroll. “You have been charged and found guilty of practicing damned witchcraft and its incumbent sorceries and black arts, and of traffi cking with the Devil and his Infernal Spirits whereby you did steal away the power of speech from one Annabel Lawson. Do you now wish to confess these crimes as I have heretofore described them?”

Odara stared wearily and said nothing.

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“Then it is the judgment of this tribunal on this, the twenty-eighth day of November, in the year of our Lord, sixteen-hundred and seventy-two, that you be burnt at the stake till you are dead, whereafter your soul shall be most surely conveyed straight away to Hell to burn in the Infernal Pit for time everlasting. Amen.”

He nodded to the executioner again, who then jumped down from the scaffold. One of his guards handed him a burning torch.

Someone in the crowd yelled, “Burn her! Burn the witch!” Someone else joined in, and soon the whole crowd was chanting, “Burn the witch! Burn the witch!”

The executioner set Colin’s pyre fi rst. Then, after it caught, he started Odara’s. The wood was treated with pitch and caught fast with blue and yellow fl ames. Soon the fi re was burning up to her feet. She screamed as the fi rst fl ames scorched her fl esh.

“Odara!” Fergus called out as he rode into the throng of spectators. He had fi rst seen her when the executioner was setting Colin’s pyre, but he had failed to recognize her without her long dark hair and the weight she had lost since her imprisonment. Seeing her now, battered and starving, he charged toward her through the hostile crowd, regardless of those his horse was bound to tread over.

“Fergus!” she replied weakly, squirming away from the fl ames.

Marshall turned to see Fergus riding in fast through and over bodies.

“Seize him!” he yelled at no one in particular. “Seize him now!”

Men and women clawed at him from the ground and

grabbed at his horse, almost knocking them both over. His 73

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path to Odara was blocked densely with people converging on him. He had no choice but to retreat, if retreat was possible.

He turned the horse about and galloped away, kicking off the hangers-on. The bodies scattered before him while the people behind continued their pursuit.

He looked back over his shoulder at Odara. The

fl ames had engulfed her, and were at work on her, charring her body alive as she screamed and shrieked.

Fergus rode on, then stopped for a moment when his pursuers were a safer distance away from him.

He looked back at Odara’s fl aming body again,

thrashing frantically in place. The ropes that bound her burned through, and she leapt down the pyre into the crowd, still fl aming. A couple of men holding a horse blanket threw it around her and tossed her back into the fi re. The wood collapsed around her as she fell into it, and she let out one last, terrible scream...then fell silent forever.

“NO!” Fergus cried.

More people rushed toward him. Fergus wasn’t

prepared for the anger that came over him upon witnessing Odara’s execution. His blood fi lled with rage and mourning. A man ran up and grabbed for him. Fergus responded by booting the man hard in the face, bloodying his nose and driving its bone into his brain, killing him instantly.

“DAMN YOU!” Fergus growled. “DAMN YOU

ALL!” he yelled, then reluctantly turned about and fl ed.

*****

Odara was dead, and with her death a part of him died too. In a very real sense, this was true. Odara and Fergus 74

Odara

had been more than friends, lovers, siblings. They were twins, and being such, were so much a part of each other that they experienced an intimacy beyond expression: Love beyond love.

Pleasure beyond pleasure. Pain beyond pain.

Yes. Fergus lost a very real, very substantial part of himself when Odara’s fl aming body was hurled back into that pyre and her life extinguished. Now he was only half the man he once was, but that half was alive and strong and angry.

They had to be punished for what they did to Odara.

They had to suffer. Retribution was in order, and Fergus was damned capable of administering that retribution.

*****

Marshall said in the middle of delivering a sermon to his congregation. “...you who are of wavering faith in the Lord.

Mark well, for the Devil is among us, lying in wait for those souls whose belief in the power and purpose of the Almighty is shaken by these trying times. Let not Satan or his damned legions gain sway in your hearts lest you become his!”

He wiped the beads of sweat from his brow with the cuff of his frock.

“For behold!” he exclaimed, pointing at the young maiden sitting in the fi rst pew. “Behold...a-hem!” He coughed.

“If there be any amongst you who...a-hem...still does not believe that the Devil has come and...a-hem...and set forth his servants upon us to work his mischief, all you need do is look to this poor...a-hem...beset child before me.”

Reverend Marshall coughed again. He began to

feel strange. Everything seemed to take on a peculiar gloom although it was a sunny day and the shafts of light pouring in through the stained glass windows bathed the church in bright colors.

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“Not more than one month ago, Annabel Lawson

was...was...” Marshall coughed, then gagged.

He couldn’t speak. His throat felt as if it were clogged with dung. It was diffi cult to breathe. He felt his belly undulate beneath his frock. His skin was hot. He clutched his throat with both hands.

His face changed color quickly from sallow to red to purple, then he belched forth a host of black leeches, each at least half a foot in length. In their mouths they carried morsels of Marshall’s innards. The parasites gushed out his mouth and nostrils in a manic procession and fl opped and shivered across the fl oor beneath the altar.

A woman screamed.

Blood came up with them now, and they drew his

intestines out through his mouth and dragged them across the fl oor.

Marshall’s eyes infl ated like over-ripe plumbs then burst open, spraying gouts of blood into the air.

People screamed and fl ed, climbing over the pews and each other to escape.

Marshall staggered back and forth as he felt his body get hotter. Blood seeped from his pores and oozed down his face and body. His skin exploded in fl ames. He ran around like a savage, a fl aming savage with his guts dangling heavily out of his mouth.

He turned around to the altar and the crucifi x

mounted on the wall behind it. He lowered his hands from his throat and folded them together as they brushed against his soft, hanging innards. He fell to his knees to pray, but the fl ames overtook him. His body pitched forward and struck the fl oor with a thud, his burning corpse charring to black ash.

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“Odara!” Ambrose screamed as he woke up and

bolted to a sitting position, sweat pouring out

of him.

It had been twenty years since Odara died at the stake and he had fl ed Scotland; twenty years since he had used the name Fergus Crawford; twenty years since he had killed Marshall and cursed the people of Haddington. The executioner and his two attendants were dead, killed in a similar fashion to that of Marshall. The townspeople were stricken with disease and misfortune. Ambrose had shown them as much mercy as they had shown to those they convicted and executed for witchcraft, but only to a degree commensurate with the hatred each harbored in their hearts. He felt it appropriate to merely redirect their own malevolence back at them and allow it to consume them.