Mistress of the Art of Death

How vulgar. Contempt and fury engulfed her; she had better things to do than stand here threatened by a mountebank in a homemade headdress.

“You stinking crap-hound,” she told him. “You don’t frighten me.” At that moment, he hardly did.

She’d discomfited him; the eyes in the mask shifted; a hiss came from between the teeth. As he retreated, she saw that the penis had drooped.

But he was feeling behind him with one arm while looking at Adelia. His hand found Sister Veronica’s body, crawled upward until it reached the neck of her habit, and ripped it down to the waist. She screamed.

Still watching Adelia, the thing swaggered for a moment, then turned and bit Veronica on the breast. When it turned back to see Adelia’s reaction, its penis was rampant again.

Adelia began to swear; language was the only missile she had, and she pelted him with it: “You turd-mouthed, stench-sucking lummox, what are you good for? Hurting women and children when they’re tied? Not excited any other way? Dress like a dog’s beef, you son of a pox-ridden sow, under it all you’re no man, just a betty-buttered mother’s boy.”

Who this screaming self was, Adelia didn’t know, didn’t care. It was going to be killed, but it wasn’t going to die in debasement like Veronica; it would go cursing.

Lord Almighty, she’d hit the gold; the thing had lost his erection again. He hissed and, still looking at her, wrenched the nun’s clothes down to the crotch.

Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and Gyltha’s Saxon English, Adelia used them all; filth from unknown gutters came to her aid now.

A jellybag, she called him, a snot-faced, arse-licking, goat-fucking, bum-bellied, farting, turd-breathed apology, Homo insanus.

As she shouted, she watched the thing’s penis; it was a flag, a signal to her victory or his. The act of killing would bring it to emission, she knew, but, in order for it to be in a condition to emit, the Beast needed his victim’s fear. There were creatures…her stepfather had told her…reptiles that dragged humans underwater and stashed them until their flesh was soft enough to make a pleasurable meal. For this one, terror was the tenderizer. “You…you corkindrill,” she yelled at it. Fear nourished Rakshasa; it was his excitement, his soup. Deny it to him and, dear God grant it, he couldn’t kill.

She shrieked at him. He was a farting, pudding-pulling chaser, a maggot-brained hog with a cock like a winkle; she’d seen bigger balls on a raspberry.

No time to be amazed at herself. Survive. Taunt. Keep blood in your veins and out of his. With every word, she jiggled the iron cuffs around her hands-and the bolt in the chalk moved more and more easily.

There was blood on Veronica’s stomach-her fear had gone beyond terror into a state where her body remained flaccid to the thing’s abuse-her head back, eyes closed, her mouth in the rictus of a skull.

Adelia kept swearing.

But now Rakshasa was himself tearing the nun’s manacles out of the wall. He stood back to hit the girl across the mouth and then took her by the scruff of her neck to march her toward the small tunnel where he slammed her to her knees. He removed the grating with one pull. He pointed. “Fetch,” he said.

Adelia’s cursing faltered. He was going to bring the child into this uncleanness and befoul him.

Veronica, on her knees, looked up at her torturer, apparently bewildered. Rakshasa kicked her backside and pointed into the hole, but he was watching Adelia. “Fetch the boy.”

The nun crawled into the tunnel and the clank of the manacles on her hands as she moved became muffled.

Adelia prayed a silent scream: Almighty God, take my soul; I am past what can be borne.

Rakshasa had picked up the body of Safeguard. He threw it on the anvil so that it was on its back. Still watching Adelia, his hand reached for the flint knife and ran its point experimentally down the back of his wrist. He put up his arm to show her the blood.

He needs my fear, she thought. He has it.

The antlers wobbled as, for the first time, he took his gaze off Adelia and looked down. He raised the knife…

She closed her eyes. It was a reenactment, and she would not watch it. He will cut off my eyelids, and I shall not watch it.

But she had to listen to the knife striking into flesh and the squelch and the splinter of bone. On and on.

There was no more swearing in her now, no defiance; her hands were still. If there is a hell, she thought dully, his will be set apart.

The noises stopped. She heard the approaching pad of his feet, smelled his stink. “Watch,” he said.

She shook her head and felt a blow on her left arm that brought her eyes open. He’d stabbed her to get her attention. He was pettish. “Watch.”

“No.”

They both heard it: a scuffling from the little tunnel. Teeth showed beneath the stag’s mask. He looked toward the entrance where Ulf was stumbling out. Adelia looked with him.

God save him, the boy was so small, so plain, too real, too normal against the monstrous stage the creature had set for him; he skewed it so that Adelia was ashamed to be on it in his presence.

He was fully dressed but tottering and semiconscious, his hands tied in front of him. There were blotches round his mouth and nose. Laudanum. Held over his face. To keep him quiet.

His eyes traveled slowly to the shredded mess on the anvil and widened.

She shouted, “Don’t be frightened, Ulf.” It wasn’t an exhortation but a command: don’t show fear; don’t feed him.

She saw him try to concentrate. “I ain’t,” he whispered.

Courage returned to Adelia. And hatred. And ferocity. No pain on earth could stop her from this. Rakshasa had turned half away from her in Ulf’s direction. She jerked her hands and the bolt came out of the wall. In the same movement she brought her arms down so that the chain connecting the manacles to each other should go over Rakshasa’s neck that she might throttle him with it.

She hadn’t achieved enough height, and the chain caught on the antlers. She swung on it so that the headdress tilted ludicrously backward and to one side, its strings dragging tight under Rakshasa’s nose and across his eyes.

For a moment he was blinded, and the assault took him off balance. His foot slid and he went down, Adelia with him-into the segments of dog intestines that made the floor slippery.

There was grunting, hers or Rakshasa’s, and she hung on, she couldn’t do anything else, linked by chain to the antlers, to which he was linked by string; they were joined together, his body crooked under hers, her knees on his outstretched knife arm. Awkwardly placed, he struggled to throw her off so that he could strike backward with it; she struggled so that he shouldn’t displace and kill her. All the time she was shouting: “Get out, Ulf. The ladder. Get out.”

The back beneath her rose; she rose with it and then went down as Rakshasa slipped again. The knife went out of his hand into the slick. Still carrying Adelia, he crawled for it, shoving against Ulf and Veronica in his effort so that they fell into the melee. The four of them rolled back and forth across the mess of the floor in an intricate bundle.

There was a new element somewhere. A sound. It meant nothing; Adelia was blind and deaf. Her hands had found the antlers and were awkwardly twisting them so that a point should go into Rakshasa’s skull. The new noise was nothing, her own agony nothing. Twist. Into the brain. Twist. Mustn’t bump me off. Mustn’t let go. Twist. Kill.

The string on the antlers broke, leaving them in her hands. The body beneath slithered away from her and, turning, crouched to spring.

For a second they were opposite each other, glaring and panting. The noise was loud now; it came from the top of the shaft, a combination of familiar sounds so inappropriate to this struggle that Adelia paid them no mind.

But they meant something to the Beast; its eyes changed; she saw a dulling; the alert joy of the kill went from them. The thing was still a beast with teeth exposed, but its head was up, sniffing, considering; it was scared.

Dear God, she thought, and was afraid to think, that’s what it is; beautiful, oh beautiful, the blow of a horn and the belling of hounds.

The hunt had come for Rakshasa.

Her lips split into a grin as bestial as his. “Now you die,” she said.

A shout came down the shaft. “Halloooo.” Beautiful, oh beautiful. It was Rowley’s voice. And Rowley’s big feet coming down the ladder.

The thing’s eyes were everywhere, looking frantically for the knife. Adelia saw it first. “No.” She fell on it, covering it. You shan’t have it.

Rowley, sword in hand, was nearing the bottom of the ladder, obstructed in getting off it by the bodies of Ulf and Veronica.

From the floor, Adelia reached to grip Rakshasa’s heel as it went past, but her fingers slipped on its grease. Rowley was kicking the nun and boy out of his way. Adelia’s view of Rakshasa’s legs and buttocks as he sprinted for the big tunnel was blocked by Rowley’s sprinting after him. She saw Rowley fall, flailing, as he tripped over the shield; she heard him curse-and then he was gone.

She sat and looked up. The baying of hounds was loud now; she could see snouts and teeth poking round the head of the shaft. The ladder was shaking; somebody else was clambering onto it, ready to come down.

There was nowhere in her body that didn’t hurt. To collapse would be nice, but she dare not do it yet. It wasn’t over-the knife had gone.

And so had Veronica and the child.

Rowley came rushing out of the tunnel, kicking the shield out of the way so that it skidded and hit the anvil. He grabbed a flambeau from the wall and disappeared with it into the tunnel again.

She was in darkness; the other torch was gone. A flicker of light showed her a puff of chalk dust and the hem of a black habit disappearing into the tunnel Ulf had come out of.

Adelia crawled after it. No. No, not now. We’re rescued. Give him to me.

It was a wormhole, an exploratory dig that had not been worked because the flare of Veronica’s torch when it came showed a gnarled, glistening line of flint running along it like a dado. The tunnel turned with the seam, cutting her off from the light ahead, and she was in a blackness so deep she might have gone blind. She went on.

No. Not now. Now we’re rescued.

It was lopsided crawling; her left arm was weakening where Rakshasa had stabbed it. Tired, so tired. Tired of being frightened. No time to be tired, no. Not now. Nodules of chalk crumbled under her right hand as her palm pressed her forward. I shall have him from you. Give him to me.

She came on them in a tiny chamber, huddled together like a couple of rabbits, Ulf limp in the nun’s grasp, his eyes closed. Sister Veronica held the torch high in one hand; the other, around the child, had the knife.

The nun’s lovely eyes were thoughtful. She was reasonable, though dribble emerged from the corner of her mouth. “We must protect him,” she told Adelia. “The Beast shall not have this one.”

“He won’t,” Adelia said, carefully. “He’s gone, Sister. He will be hunted down. Give me the knife now.”

Some rags lay next to an iron post planted deep in the ground with a dog lead trailing from it, the collar just big enough for a child’s neck. They were in Rakshasa’s larder.

Circular walls were turned red by the flickering torchlight. The drawings on them wriggled. Adelia, who daren’t take her eyes away from those of the nun, would not have looked at them in any case; in this obscenity of a womb, the embryos had waited not to be born but to die.

Veronica said, “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck.”

“Yes, Sister,” Adelia said, “it would be.” She crawled forward and took the knife out of the nun’s hand.

Between them, they dragged Ulf through the wormhole. As they came out, they saw Hugh the hunter looking around him like a dazed thing with a lantern in his hand. Rowley emerged from the other tunnel. He was swearing and frantic. “I lost him; there’s dozens of bloody tunnels along there, and my bloody torch went out. The bastard knows his way, I don’t.” He turned on Adelia as if he was furious with her-he was furious with her. “Is there another shaft somewhere?” As an afterthought, he asked, “Are you women hurt? How’s the boy?”

He urged them up the ladder, tucking Ulf under his arm.

For Adelia the climb was interminable, each rung an achievement gained through pain and a faintness that would have toppled her to the bottom again if she’d not had Hugh’s hand supporting her