The Executioner and the Innocent

Chapter 1 — The Last Walk

The water in the bowl was ice-cold.

There will be blood.

He scooped it up with both hands and let it run over his nearly shaven head. The cold cut into his skin, yet it did not pierce the dense fog in his mind. The room stank of wet stone, old sweat, and the bare, sour reek of mortal terror that had eaten itself into the seams over the course of decades.

Lord, stand by me. Save me.

His lips formed the words again and again, soundlessly, feverishly. He prayed without cease, stringing the syllables together until they lost their meaning and drew him into a deep, almost painful trance.

Be my protector. Forgive my sins. I have sinned.

Deep in the trance, in the place where the syllables no longer carried meaning, the same image always waited: twilight beneath the trees. Yellow eyes in the undergrowth, three, four pairs of them, patient. A growling that sat in the ground more than in the air. And a boy who held still though everything in him wanted to run — who understood for the first time that fear has a door, and that a man can close it. The image was older than anything else inside him. It held when nothing else did.

His whole body was a steady interplay of torment and control. Every muscle in his arms and his neck drew taut in a cramp, hard as stone, only to loosen again with the next deep, heaving exhalation. A physical echo of the naked fear that hung in the damp walls, so heavy and oppressive that it robbed a man of the air to breathe.

Outside, the city had long since woken. Through the narrow cracks beneath the ceiling came the din of thousands, growing louder with every damned second. The alleys and squares were choked with onlookers, a surging sea of bodies that left no path of escape. He could hear them growl. It was the deep, unceasing snarl of an enormous, greedy monster, waiting impatiently to be fed. For fresh meat. For warm blood.

Light. Golden light, spilling across the dew-wet meadows.

Far beyond the suffocating city walls, where the roar of the crowd was no more than a distant, barely audible rumble that lost itself in the song of the larks, two riders galloped over the hills that very morning. They had played a trick on their companions and bolted away from them — a stolen forenoon, steeped in boundless freedom.

Adelheid lay low over the neck of her mare. The cool morning wind tore the pins from her hair, and she laughed — a bright, pearling sound that rose unburdened into the wide, radiant blue sky. Clara stayed close on her heels, the reins loose in her hands, her face turned to the sun. Out here the world smelled of damp earth and crushed clover. There were no governesses, no stiff rules, no crushing walls. Only the horizon and the rhythmic, weightless thunder of hooves in the soft grass. They flew over the earth, untouchable and eternal.

A few last, deep breaths. In the cell the air was thick enough to cut.

He knew he could delay no longer. In his mind he could already see them: on the raised benches of the tribune, the fine ladies of the city taking their seats in their tight, thrilling gowns. They whispered behind raised fans, eyes glittering with morbid excitement, full of anticipation for the bloody event to come.

A few breaths more. The tension in the dark chamber grew almost unbearable, squeezing the air from his lungs like an iron vise.

I must concentrate.

He wiped the icy water from his face. In that moment the heavy iron door was flung open with a deafening groan. Glaring morning light and the sudden, raw violence of the noise broke unchecked into the darkness of the cell and tore the silence apart.

In the doorframe stood a young man. He did not enter, but stayed on the threshold, his gaze fixed on the floor.

“It is time,” he said. His voice was lowered, the words sounding almost like a silent prayer of his own against the raging madness outside.

The man at the water took two last, deep breaths. Tension. Release. Then he rose out of the shadows.

Only now, as he stood upright and freed the view, did the glaring light fall on the second figure in the cell.

Right beside him, crouched on the damp stones, knelt the true condemned man. The poor sinner. Lothar. He was trembling so violently that his heavy iron chains gave off a constant metallic clinking, yet he too had used the time he had been given. He had followed the counsel Master Jack had offered him at the start of this last, darkest hour: Use these moments. Make peace with your life before the light goes out.

Jack reached for the heavy, dark mask and pulled it over his head until only the grey eyes showed. What remained of Jack vanished beneath it; what was left was the executioner alone.

Nearly six and a half feet tall and carrying well over two hundred pounds of pure muscle, he was a terrifying apparition. A man built like an insurmountable mountain, whose sheer presence seemed to push the scarce air out of the room.

Jack laid a hand on his shoulder. Only for the space of a breath — it was written in no law, yet he did it every time.

He did not do it out of softness. A man who lost his grip to fear died badly — he threw his head about, tore at the chains, tensed his neck at the wrong moment, and then the blade went astray. A judgment became a butchery, and a butchery was the thing that turned a crowd, that tore the executioner himself from his scaffold to rend him to pieces. A calm man died cleanly. The people had come to see a play, and a good play needed good players — including the one who was to die. Jack's gentleness was rehearsed, a precisely calculated device of his craft, as much so as the edge of his blade.

And yet that was not all of it, and Jack knew it. He himself had knelt in the dark too often, pleading for aid to the same Lord Lothar was calling on now. He knew that fear from the inside, night after night, before every execution. Whoever took a man's final hour owed him one thing at least: that in that hour someone still looked at him as a human being. Even if it was, of all men, the one who would kill him.

“Stand up, Lothar,” he said quietly, but with unrelenting firmness. “The walk is short. I will go it with you.”

The apprentice raised the trembling man to his feet and checked the chains one last time. Then they stepped out.

The light struck them like a fist, and with the light came the roaring. The monster had scented its meat; it hurled itself against the wooden barriers, a thousand mouths torn wide, faces twisted into hate-filled grimaces, and their raging rolled through the alleys like a flood of pure madness.

Do not look. Walk.

Jack went ahead — his head no longer lowered now, for now they saw him, the mountain of black, and before the mountain they shrank back even as they howled after him. Behind him the assistants pulled the condemned man along on a thick rope, a helpless bundle of misery. The small procession pushed forward along a narrow corridor that soldiers strained to keep open with crossed pikes.

The people lined the way shoulder to shoulder, children lifted onto arms so they might better see a human being brought to ruin. Some crossed themselves in hypocrisy. Others spat at Lothar, hurled curses and rotting fruit that burst on his shoulders with a sickening slap. He staggered on, more carried than walking, his lips moving in silent prayer. Jack heard the slapping, the howling, the bestial jeers — and walked through it as though it were nothing but cold rain.

At the edge of the square, in the shadow of an old wall, stood the little chapel. Jack pushed open the creaking wooden door, and at a stroke the noise stayed outside. Within, candles burned; it smelled of old incense, and their glow cast a warm flickering over the bare stone. At the altar waited an old, stooped priest, his rosary wound about his gnarled fingers.

They let Lothar sink to his knees.

“Confess,” Jack said quietly. “Cleanse your soul before you step before the Lord.”

Lothar spoke. The words came broken, in bursts, often interrupted by tear-choked gagging, but they came. The priest listened, murmured his prayers, and at the end drew a cross on the condemned man's brow. For a moment, in the still candlelight, Lothar looked almost at peace.

Then the door swung open again, and the noise swallowed them once more.

Out on the fields no noise existed. Only the pure, wild rushing of the wind.

Clara and Adelheid let the horses stretch into full gallop, side by side, until the rushing air drove tears of joy into their eyes.

“Faster!” Adelheid cried in high spirits, threw her head back and laughed from a full throat. Clara bent low over her horse's neck and gave the reins free. For a while they flew on as though they had turned their backs on the whole world and everything of duty, care or sorrow that waited in it. Two young girls, wrapped in the blazing light of the forenoon, drinking life in deep, drunken draughts, wasting not a single thought on the darkness that ruled at that same hour behind the distant walls.

The last walk. Across the square, through the raging lane of bodies, up the rough wooden steps that smelled of doom. Jack went ahead, step by step, up to the scaffold. Behind him the apprentice hauled the condemned man up one last time, a dragging of leather and chains on wood.

Jack felt the wind. It blew in light, irregular gusts from the east across the open scaffold. An unpracticed executioner would ignore the wind — a fatal mistake. With a blade of this breadth and this weight, even a gentle current of air could shift its flight by a hair's breadth. And that tiny difference alone decided between a clean death and an agonizing, screaming massacre.

Beside him Lothar whimpered. As the bailiff's voice swelled at the words “… condemned to death by the sword,” the man's last resistance broke. He slumped so deep into himself that his chin almost touched his chest. He sobbed soundlessly, his whole body one single, pitiable trembling before the void.

High on the tribunes not a single fan moved now. The fine ladies sat like frozen statues of silk and velvet, necks craned greedily forward, lips slightly parted in morbid expectation, eyes glittering with hunger for the final act. Only in the royal box one seat remained empty — the seat of honor of the young princess, which no one had been able to fill that morning. A gap of red velvet in the middle of the greedy anticipation. Jack did not register it as a thought; he registered it as a missing note in the applause that was about to break.