The Heretic

“Fuck,” she said as a wave of pain hit her. “Fuck, fuck.”

And then her head fell to the side and she was unconscious, bleeding her life away.

Abel set her down and remounted. The men of the Militia were beginning to catch up with him, and the surviving women were gathering around. When he had a sufficient number in earshot, he called out to them.

“We will follow,” he said. “We will find them. We will stop them. And we will not stop until we take our children back.”

It took only until sunset. The circling kill-flitters showed the way.

They lay in a pile on the side of a defile that led upward toward the Escarpment proper, and at first it had looked to Abel like a pile of dak carcasses, the sort he might see in the butcher’s yard before a feast day.

But these were not daks.

Abel wondered for a moment why here, why he-the one he now thought of as Silver Knife-had chosen this spot. The path did not seem to grow any steeper here. There was no particular landmark. It was only a gravel-filled gulley.

Then Abel turned around and looked back into the Valley.

There was a clear sight of Lilleheim below.

He must have shown them the village before he ordered them slain, Abel thought. One last glimpse of the home they would never see again.

Yes, Center said. That is how it was. He offered no further deductive reasoning beyond this pronouncement.

And they are all here? All these children of Lilleheim?

No, Center answered.

No?

The count is wrong for that. There is one missing.

Which one-

But he already knew the answer.

The Jacobson girl. Silver Knife had kept her. As a taunt.

Yes.

3

Observe:

Mahaut did not die.

There were times she wished she had. The pain was impossible, especially after the shock wore off and her body grasped in its thoughtless but no less living manner the completion of agony, the outrage, that had been perpetrated upon it. For days she lay in all-clenching hurt, half-comatose, half-inflamed suffering. Her eyes were closed, her teeth grinding.

There was the smell as her body rotted for company. Always the moment when any who visited her, even those prepared, those who knew what to expect, flinched at the stench.

Except for the Scout. He had come with her brother to visit and had seemed not disgusted by, or piteous, but-this was the strange thing-angry. Angry that this was happening to her.

It was a feeling she shared.

“I will not let this happen again.” She’d heard his voice in her delirium, wasn’t even sure whom he was speaking to. To her it sounded like a dialog, but with one listener and speaker located in such a way that he was impossible to hear.

I am dreaming, she thought at one point. A fever dream.

But such lucid moments were few and far between.

“There has to be something, thrice-damn it. I can’t let what happened to my mother go on and on in the Land bring needless death to-”

A pause.

“Yes, she does look a bit like her. What of it?”

A pause.

“I do not expect to save every person, or every woman. At least not at first. Just her.”

A pause.

“I am aware she is married.”

A pause.

“Why don’t you just consider it an experiment? You foresee no long-term imbalances, so let me do this with the knowledge you have given me. In exchange, I will see to those breechloaders.

A pause.

Then a laugh. And something else he’d said, something she later couldn’t believe she’d heard, had to believe was blurred by her fever into incomprehensibility. “Anyway, Zentrum is the local enemy. Zentrum works for death, even if he doesn’t know. I want to work for life. I couldn’t save my mother, so let me save her.”

Then curses and orders to servants. The others, the servants, responded to his voice; it was no longer a one-way overheard dialog, but the words she remembered were his.

The Scout is caring for me. He has taken me as his charge.

“I want all of these bandages boiled, do you hear me! Better let me do it, as a matter of fact. I do not want the wound touched without instruments that have not been boiled. Not once, not ever. I will set my Scouts on you if you do it. You know they are one step away from a Redlander. They might boil you alive.

“And I will provide salve for the wound. Take this nightmare sludge away and bury it. Better yet, feed it to the carnadons at the lake. They are getting to be a menace, and it will kill them straight off!

“Yes, I’ll be consulting with her physician, as well. He won’t give you any trouble about following my orders after he and I have a good talk. I’ll tell him about my Scouts, too, and their very large cook pot.”

She rotted. But only to a point. Something was strong within her, something that was not her will, but was a blind urge to overcome, to thrust out the creeping death. She took no credit for it. She often just wanted to die.

And she received the new bandages every day of impossibly clean and white linen-no cloth in the Land had ever been so well-washed, she thought-and the salve the Scout had concocted and brought.

So many others died of much less, and she believed for time that she was undeserving, that being alive, getting better, was punishment. It was punishment for letting him, the one who had shot her-oh, she remembered the squinting eyes, the careful aim, she knew him-take the girl.

Take the girl alive into the Redlands.

I should have shot Loreilei, Mahaut told herself. And if not with the gun, well, then I was close enough to even put an arrow in her eye.

Better her niece were dead than what lay in store for her in the Redlands.

And so Mahaut had taken her own healing as Zentrum’s judgment upon her, as the punishment of the Law for the stupid mistake of believing that the Blaskoye would have any mercy whatsoever. That if he did not release the girl, he would at least have the decency to kill her on his way out.

But he had not done so.

And then the pain of her wound slowly abated from mind-burning to endurable. The smell lessened in pungency. The maggots the Scout lieutenant had so carefully picked from her flesh week after week one day did not return. And the scar tissue began to form its jagged welt of remembrance.

And it was the Scout who told her that the ball was still within her, that he could not extract it without risking her death.

Then the other news: that the ball had likely destroyed her womb. That it would be a miracle if she could have children now.