Songs of the Dying Earth

Liz Williams CAULK THE WITCH-CHASER

British Writer Liz Williams has had work appear in Interzone, Asimov’s, Visionary Tongue, Terra Incognita, The New Jules Verne Adventures, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere, and her stories have been collected in Banquet of the Lords of Night and Other Stories. Her books include the critically acclaimed novels The Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, The Poison Master, Nine Layers of Sky, Snake Agent, The Demon and the City. and Darkland. Her most recent novels are The Shadow Pavillion and Winterstrike. She lives in Brighton, England.

Here she takes us along with a witch-chaser as he leaves Azenomei and heads down the river Scaum to the open sea, away from Almery and toward the bleak shores of Alster — and also toward, for better or worse, a change of professions…

Caulk the witch-chaser came out of Almery on a rising tide, sailing first the brief distance down the Xzan, then the Scaum, towards the coast. Occasionally, he took the strand of hair out of the pouch and studied it: it lay silver in his palm, like the light of the long-lost moon, but he knew that if he looked at it under the sun, it would be the dull scarlet of old blood. Caulk smiled thinly at this thought, opening his coat and adjusting first his thirty nine daggers, then the scalps. The smell of the Scaum rose up, salty and brackish, redolent of unsuccessful poison.

By midnight, he had reached the mouth of the estuary. He anchored the boat for a few minutes, sent down a fluke-loaded line, then brought it back up writhing with glass eels. He cooked them in a mess in a pan, ate absently, and headed for open sea.

This had all come about in Azenomei, a month ago, when Caulk had first met the owl-killer. Normally, he would not have bothered with such a person: Caulk had standards of fastidiousness which the owl-killer unfortunately failed to meet. The man — small, balding, with huge pale eyes — had lurched against him in a tavern, spilling cheap ale over Caulk’s high black boots. Caulk clucked in exasperation and the owl-killer leered at him.

“Bit fussy, aren’t we, for someone who drinks in hovels?”

“I am here on business,” Caulk replied icily, wiping ale off his boots.

“Aren’t we all?” The owl-killer cackled and broke into a small capering dance, the feathery pelts flapping at his waist in a manner that was somehow lewd. Caulk blinked, and the owl-killer was gone. Dismissing the matter, Caulk waited for his own appointment, which failed to materialise. In disgust, for it was now twilight and too late to return from Azenomei, Caulk purchased a bowl of leeks, then arranged a room in the inn above and stalked up the stairs to his new residence: a low room, black beamed, with panels of a russet wood. Caulk deemed it acceptable enough, though the bed was lumpy, and, on investigation, the mattress bore faint stains of a suspicious nature. Caulk wrapped himself in the coarse blanket and fell into an uneasy sleep, punctuated by leek-fuelled dreams.

He woke under attack. A harsh voice assaulted him; something brushed roughly across his face. Throwing the blanket aside, Caulk snatched one of his daggers from beneath the pillow and thrust it in the direction of his assailant. It struck something yielding: there was a startled squawk. An owl dropped dead to the floor, yellow beak gaping. Caulk hissed with annoyance; he was certain he’d left the window closed. On investigation, this proved still to be the case. The owl must have been crouching in the rafters.

Moments later, someone banged on the door.

“Be silent!” Caulk commanded. “Do you wish to wake the whole household?”

“I demand entry!” said a voice that was somehow familiar. “You have trespassed upon my province, I require redress.”

Irritated, Caulk threw open the door, daggers at the ready, but was immediately rendered nerveless by a bolt of jade light. The daggers dropped from his hands and clattered to the floor. Caulk strove to speak but a muttered pervulsion caused the spell to choke in his throat. Caulk stared in outrage at the owl-killer, who ran into the room, gathered up the round, feathery corpse, and stashed it in a bag.

“Now,” the owl-killer said, fixing Caulk with a beady glare. “About redress.”

Caulk, disconcerted by this buffoon’s evident abilities, found himself able to speak. “An accident!”

“Nevertheless.”

“I intended no harm! The thing attacked me!”

“Doubtless you startled it.”

“I was asleep!”

“The authorities in Azenomei take a dim view of folk who trample and stamp over the purlieus of others,” the owl-killer mused. “I know of one such who, only last week, was hoisted onto a gibbet of pettish-wood and lambasted by the populace, before being transported to the midst of the Old Forest and obliged to find his own way home. He has not yet succeeded in this endeavour, that I am aware of.”

“But—”

“It is doubly unfortunate that my brother, Pardua Mott, happens to be the head of the Azenomei Board of Fair Trading. A man of the most upright and correct rectitude, a respectability so pronounced that he had his own daughter exhibited in the Hall of Reproachable Conduct minus her undergarments, after her branding.”

“I—”

“I am, however, a fair man,” the owl-killer Mott went on judiciously. “I am prepared to concede a measure of inadvertency in your actions.”

“That’s very—”

“Rather than have you hauled in irons before my relative, which admits little other than a mild form of personal satisfaction, I shall demand an alternative form of reparation. You see,” the owl-killer said, beadily, “I need a particular owl…”

As he passed the distant humps of the erg-barrows along the upper shore of the estuary, Caulk relived this unfortunate course of events and grew exceedingly sour. White Alster was known to be a dismal place, with little to recommend it, unless one happened to be a connoisseur of remote rocky spars, ruined fortresses, and black sucking bogs. Moreover, Mott had been unreassuringly vague as to the whereabouts of his quarry.

“Besides,” Caulk had protested, still beneath the unnerving dictates of the pervulsion, “I am a witch-chaser, not an owl-finder. Surely that’s your remit.”

The owl-killer gave an avian blink. “Indeed, and I am, of course, aware of your profession. Your high boots, the enfoldments of your hat, the multiple hems of your coat, all speak of your calling. However, lamentable circumstances entail that should I set foot on the shores of White Alster, I will activate a locater spell and a vast shrieking will alert the hags to my presence. Besides, all that you are likely to encounter is largely within your own area of expertise. Sea-hags and tarn-wights are witches, after all, not to mention shape shifters.”

Bitterly, Caulk conceded this to be true.

“I shall give you an aid — a strand of owl-witch hair. Watch it closely. It will twitch you in the required direction.”

Steal a witch’s hair and you stole a piece of her power. Even novices knew that. Caulk looked narrowly at the strand and asked, “And if I refuse?”

He did not care to recall what came next: the indignities of a further pervulsion and the contortions it entailed. Mott’s merry laughter still stung his ears. Now here he was, sailing towards White Alster on a following wind and leaving Almery and its manses far behind. Caulk was aware of a pang, from more than the spell, that prodded him onward.

He sailed for several days, becoming increasingly bored by the dull expanse of choppy sea. Occasionally, bloat-fish rose up from the depths and regarded him with bland white eyes, whereupon Caulk was forced to