The Witch Hunter - Battle Brothers Book 1
~ first two chapters ~
“The coven of Brackenforst is no more. I made way there after my crows did not return, and I found the coven’s demise by blade and fire. I believe the foolish women overstepped their means, seeking out the children of the village with little care for proper pace until the townsfolk could do nothing but request the aid of a hunter. Let this be a less’n to all: beware the shadow of the hunter, for it tilts across the earth with dire purpose and its dark reach need no light to find ye. Let it be seen that you moderate your doings, for to the witch hunter death is nothing but a compass.”
A witch’s letter recovered by hunter Richter von Dagentear and translated by guildmaster Carsten Corrow. Archival notes: ‘the ink is tainted with the blood of an infant, suggesting its message bore great import to the coven.’ An additional notation reads below: ‘The coven is no more. Richter von Dagentear has proceeded to the Lowland Reach to handle the Witch of Walddorf and any further unknown witches who may be accessories to her innumerable crimes.’
~~~
Report on hunters in the Lowland Reach, a stretch of discontiguous bogland which provides a border to the desert realms of the Gilded folk who dwell even further below:
Dieter ~ dead, barfight.
Fuchs ~ whereabouts unknown.
Helmut ~ dead, murdered by a hexe’s grieving father.
Konrad ~ taken by the fear.
Lohan ~ missing, contracted leprosy.
Lukas ~ gone, found love.
Oscar ~ dead, alcoholism.
Richter ~ my understanding is you are alive.
Request for more hunters has been denied. Northern guilds are overburdened.
Fuchs may be in the area, but it is likely you are all alone.
Happy hunting, Richter.
Best regards,
Carsten
~~~
The watermill’s front door squalled as the naked man made his exit and it squalled again as it limply closed on its own behind him. He strode toward the riverside carrying a wolf’s head by the mane. Its eyes bled a somber crimson serum which glistened beneath the noon sun. Leakage from the neck dripped and pitter pattered alongside the bearer’s steps. The naked man squatted at the shoreline and he stared in at the minnows which stared back, and he nodded as if to end some unspoken congress and then turned to digging into the mud. He fetched a hidden knife and a twine of rope grass. He carved into the wolf’s head, removing the bottom of its skull, the fur flinching with every strike and drag of the ragged blade, the wicked maw winking the very teeth which failed to protect it from such a demise. With a plate of bone carved out, the man took to running the corded rope through a series of fashioned neckholes until he had himself a mad taxidermist’s knapsack. He tipped the wolven head down with the snout pressed into his belly and he stared into the hollow skull like a seer would gaze upon his darkstones. He hardly moved except to occasionally duck the waterwheel’s shadow as though it might tether him to its authorship and drag him under. Finally, he stood and slung the wolf’s head over his own and pulled the grass rope taut so as to seal it around his neck. And then he danced. He spun wildly and his body swung one way while the wolf’s head jostled another and his hands raised to center the wolven mask and he cackled mutely behind its thick fur and he cartwheeled and cackled again as the wolf’s dried tongue flailed about. He huffed as though on the hunt and prowled along the shore on all fours. Suddenly standing upright, he dug both hands into the wolf’s eyes and tore them out in fistfuls of ragged red and threw them into the waters where the sinews sank like mudded rubrications. Cackling and howling once more, he gripped the emptied sockets and stretched and tore the fleshen obscura as though he meant to birth himself out. And as he stared through these gruesome crenellations it was the witch hunter upon whom he laid his new vision and the hunter’s crossbow which he glimpsed second.
“You think me insane because I dance to the song you cannot hear,” the naked man said. He pointed with a bloodslick finger. “I think I’d like to know you, stranger.”
Richter nodded and lowered his weapon. “Aye. Let’s talk.”
~~~
Richter gestured the man to enter the watermill with the sound of its namesake creaking and clattering as though to bear the interlopers a grand entrance. He went in after and closed the door and then moved across the room, standing at a far stonewall wet with mildew and wedges of moss. Wooden shelves ran along the walls holding nothing but dust and in one corner tilted a wooden oar, itself now little more than a flagstaff for wispy cobwebs. Sitting catercorner, the remains of an old river raft had been turned into a bed, its belly filled with forest litter and hay, a furnishing that suggested the naked wolven actor had been there long enough to seek creature comforts.
The man sank into the bed with a scratching hiss of hay. One leg bounced unwittingly, and he gripped the bedframe’s corner post as though it were an executioner’s lever and he himself the convicted. Across the room the witch hunter moved in quiet certitude before leaning against a mantlepiece. Hearing flies buzzing at his feet, he glanced down into the hearth and spotted the slumped shape of a headless wolf. He nodded but made no mention of the sight as he turned back around. The two men stared at each other, the hunter unfaltering, the hunted darting and uneasy.
Finally, Richter took off his black hat and rested it upon a shelf. He rolled up his sleeve to show the wristed crossbow made of wood and metal fineries, and he showed the bolt which was loaded and drawn and the taut finger-thumb apparatus which would see it fired. He then opened his coat, revealing colored vials bandoliered across his chest, and at his hip he unsheathed a serrated dagger made of pale metal one would not find in this part of the world. The man nodded attentively to each display, then his eyes glazed over as he gazed between Richter’s feet and into the hearth, staring deeply at the wolf’s crumpled corpse, perhaps forgetting how it came to be, then his eyes widened and he suddenly turned back to his interrogator.
“Richter von Dagentear,” he said. “I heard they call you the Wight.”
The witch hunter took a goatskin canteen and threw it toward the man.
“Drink.”
The man caught it almost defensively, as though one would clap a wasp between their palms, and he held it at a distance.
“It’s wine,” Richter said. “If I wanted to kill you, would I see to it in such a manner? A bolt or blade is considerably cheaper than poison.”
“I suppose that’s true,” the man said, and he uncorked it and took a nip. He paused upon this first sip, then threw the canteen back and drank it all. He belched and then held out the canteen. “Well if it is poison it’s a damn sweet way to go.”
“Keep it,” Richter said, opening his coat to draw out a few pages of paper. He looked them over and nodded and then stuffed them back.
The man set the canteen aside. He looked at Richter. “You a witch hunter?”
“You knew my names,” Richter said. “You know exactly who I am.”
The man nodded and said, “So. How’d you find me?”
“Tracked you. Same as I would any man or beast.”
“You got some talent. Thought I’d lose anybody the way I routed them paths. You know I went up the Crest Hill and doubled back through the Deer Path?”
“I looked at the hill,” Richter said. “And took the path.”
“Damn.” The man said, and said it again, “Damn.”
“What’s your name?”
“Don’t it say it on them papers you got?”
“It does,” Richter said. He stared at the man and it was a relentless gaze if there ever was one.
“Thedrick,” the man blurted. “People call me Theo.”
“Thedrick’s a Northern name. How long have you been in the Lowland Reach?”
“Few weeks, I suppose. I’m from Ruhmolt.”
“Miss home?”
“Not particularly fond of the cold up there, so no.”
“You know these forests well for someone who isn’t from around here.”
Theo ran a shaky hand under his nose. “I suppose I’m a fast learner.”
Richter eyed Theo carefully. The man ran his hand under his nose again, exactly as he had the first time, and when he went to put his hand down, he paused and stared at it as if it had done something without his permission. His eyes tracked the room with a similar sense of misplacement.
“Theo,” Richter snapped his fingers as he spoke.
“Yeah?” Theo turned, his attention alert once more. “Yeah?”
“The people of Walddorf are looking for you. That’s why I’m here.”
“Yeah. Yeah, of course.” Theo blinked repeatedly as he relaxed into the bed. “Of course. I suppose there’s a bounty on me and I’ll admit I ain’t ready for you to collect. I won’t go kindly, you know? I’ll make you fight for it.”
“I’m only here to ask you a few questions.”
“Well. How heavy’s that bounty, eh? They must’ve tendered my head after what I did. After what they think I did.”
Richter turned out his hands, showing them empty. “I have only questions.”
“Bullshit. The Kessler brothers, they stole them chickens and they earned a price on that alone! And the Hostler Horror, he got bountied twenty-five crowns for ravishing them old ladies. And I did… what they think I did, with them kids…”
Theo should not have known any of these names. They were Lowland Reach criminals, and the only way he could possibly know them in his time spent in the area was if she had spurred those poor men into doing what they did – just as she spurred Theo himself. Ensorcelled men tended to echo their lives off one another, as though one were to court a woman while the ghosts of every man she ever bedded floated in the peripheral.
Richter held up a hand with all fingers flush. “There’s fifty crowns for your head.”
“Fifty!”
Nodding, Richter briefly held up the other hand in the same manner. “One hundred if you’re alive, but I wager in the end you’ll want them taking that halved reward.”
“They aim to burn me?” Theo said, his voice cracking as if the flame had already started.
“Aye.”
“That ain’t right.”
Richter nodded. “A witch’s crime, a witch’s punishment.”
“I ain’t no witch. I ain’t done no witch’s crime neither.”
The witch hunter ignored such declarations. He continued, “Witnesses spotted another man with you. Where is he?”
“Yeah. You’re talkin’ about Remus.”
“Sure. Where is he?”
“I plugged his head with a king bolt,” the man said bluntly. He crossed a finger down his forehead and augured a knuckle between his eyebrows. “Took that lil’ rod and perched it on his pate like a nail to a board.”
“Alright,” Richter said. He gestured. “Was he awake when you did this?”
“‘Course not. He was sound asleep. I drove it through with a rock cause I thought it’d kill him quick.”
“Did it?”
“No. His legs kicked up like he’d been spooked, and he got to making some awful noises and wriggled around for a few minutes. I put in a few more good ones with the rock and then he quit. I don’t think he understood what’d happened so I think it was good. Good for him, I mean. In the manner of it being the end. No pain. It took him time to die, but he wasn’t feeling the hurt, you know? He was just confused about it that’s all.”
Richter eyed Theo carefully. Proclamations of innocence followed by quick admissions of murder…
Carsten’s training came to mind: Before the ensorcelled the hunter must tread carefully forward, for he is but a thief in a temple of conversation, and the hexed man but her watchdog minding every word and syllable which comes skittering down its halls.
“You got any water?” Theo said, scratching at his throat as his vacant eyes stared out into nothing.
Richter snapped his fingers again and Theo’s eyes glanced back up.
“King bolt,” Richter said loudly, almost weighing the word in his own volume. He asked another question he already knew the answer to: “Are you a merchant?”
Theo laughed. He drew back, holding his gut and shaking his head, exaggerations that seemed unusual, as if he were mimicking someone else’s laughter. “Were I of a traveler’s wealth would I be settin’ here? About the only thing I can afford is to lose weight.”
“Wagon parts like that don’t come cheap. Where’d you get the king bolt?”
“Remus and m’self came upon an abandoned wagon and I took the king bolt out the wreckage. I just fancied it at the time, you know, like sometimes you come across a rock that looks nice so you carry it in your pocket?”
“Sure.”
“Well, anyway, I thought maybe I could sell it, being the particular part that it is. Also considered perhaps she would make it into a charm for me, you know. Like a token. For our being together.”
“I understand,” Richter said. He quickly changed the subject: “Would it be correct to say you had stolen the children by this time?”
“Stolen? We’d retrieved them if that’s what yer asking. Stolen’s a heavy word.”
“Of course.” Richter immediately swerved the conversation back: “So what happened between you and Remus? Why did you need to end his misery?”
“Well. See.” Theo paused, staring at the ground, collecting his thoughts and losing them. He looked up. “Remus got to chit chatting and talkin’ all sore about this and that. So I put the bolt through his face. Buried him a few miles from here. Buried him not far from where I slew him, matter of fact, just a few miles from here like I said.”
“Aye. I understand.”
“Just a few miles from here,” Theo repeated himself again as though he were trying to remember the act of the statement. “Buried him…”
Richter snapped his fingers. “Theo. Thedrick.”
The man went alert once more. “Yeah?”
“Did the woman of the forest tell you to kill Remus?”
“That woman ain’t got nothing to do with this! You’d best not go bothering her or I’ll wring yer farkin’ neck.”
“I understand, but why did you kill Remus?”
“I don’t know!”
“Was Remus your friend? Remus is a Northern name as well. Was he also from Ruhmolt?”
“I-I-I don’t know Remus. I mean I didn’t, until I met that one. The only Remus I ever knew.”
“You sure?”
“No, wait, yeah. Yeah I’m sure.”
“Why did you kill Remus? Did she tell you to? Did she tell you to kill your friend?”
“He ain’t no friend of mine. Never knew Remus aside from… ah, I never knew the man.”
“You killed your friend cause she told you to, is that it? Maybe you were fighting over her? She’s worth fighting for, isn’t she?”
“Leave my woman out of this! I won’t say it again!” Theo spat as he pointed a finger, like a dog barking with froth in its mouth. Dried blood was caked under his fingernails. Perhaps the wolf’s, perhaps his own, perhaps Remus’s. He wiped his mouth, leaving a streak of slobber. He looked away and spoke somberly, repeating the words as though to verbalize the fading echo of a thought, “I won’t say it again. I won’t say it again. I won’t say it…”
Richter turned his palms out. “By my mother’s grave, she will be safe. You have my word.”
Theo nodded. Once. Twice. His shoulders slackened. He nodded a third time and spoke. “Alright. Remus said something. I mean he said a whole heap of things. Got all stroppy about this and that. He always was a bit of a shitmouth, but this time he really said something that scratched.”
Richter saw the man’s arm stiffen, the fingers curling against the palm like a dying spider. He knew it was only a matter of time until this conversation would cease entirely. The witch hunter pressed the matter.
“Tell me what Remus said. Don’t look at me. Don’t look nowhere. Just think about what Remus said. And tell me.”
“I don’t really wanna think about it.”
“You don’t have to think, you just have to say what happened. You said it yourself, what you did, clear as day: you slew Remus. Am I wrong?”
“No.”
“Go on then. Go on and tell me. I’m here to protect you, Theo. You don’t want those villagers finding you, and I can make sure they don’t. You can trust me. What did Remus say that angered you?”
Theo leaned forward, almost curling himself into a ball with one fist over an ear. He stayed there a minute before stretching back out. He didn’t even realize his hand remained a fist nor realized it didn’t extend with the rest of him, and he didn’t seem to notice that his knees locked and stiffened him at the shins like the legs of a chair and his body contorted with the tendons popping as the muscles stretched beyond their bones. So focused in thought by Richter’s prying he failed to notice that his body was mutilating itself with great vigor.
Finally, he spoke. “I think Remus said ‘what are we doing?’”
“And that’s why you killed him?”
Theo, for a moment, seemed to appear a normal man, not the figure unwittingly fighting against the poisonous root the witch had put in his mind.
“Well it ain’t… it ain’t that simple. He said it like. Well. Like alright. ‘What are we doing,’ yes, he said just that, and I know it sounds something simple to get sore over, but it was like this fire was lit in my belly, that Remus didn’t get what we were doing no more and his saying it out loud made it all the more true for him. And then he just kept on spitting nonsense. He started talking about ransoming that royal lass, but that’s not why we fetched the girl, you know? We fetched the girl for her. And he just didn’t get it. He didn’t get our purpose no more.”
Theo’s face tightened, souring from the look of a man defending himself to that of a man in the midst of perpetrating another crime. He began to shake with rage, his stiffened body almost vibrating, scratching the hay he sat on, and wrenching groans from the bedframe’s wood. He screamed:
“And that’s why I killed that bastard! Killed him good! Killed him cause he didn’t know our purpose!”
Our purpose.
Our: not his and his, but his and hers.
Her purpose.
“You’re a spotter,” Richter said. “You have been hexed.”
“What?”
Theo’s body stopped shaking and the hiss of hay ceased and the groaning bedframe quieted. He opened his mouth once and then again but couldn’t find the words. Then came the choking, the tongue protruding, the look of someone who had an intense desire to speak, yet now had no better means than an infant to do so, and instead of words he simply drooled onto himself.
“That wasn’t wine,” Richter said. “But you’ve no need to panic yet.”
Theo’s eyes widened. His tongue moved, jutted, he croaked wildly.
“What you drank was a paralytic to keep you right where you’re sitting. But I wouldn’t be concerned about that. So pay attention. Are you listening? Stop fighting it and pay attention, Theo, this is important: you have been put under the spell of an immensely powerful, immensely dangerous creature. You’d call her a witch, the elder texts refer to them as hexen, a word borrowed from the very spells they put on people such as yourself. When I said she was your lover, you did not deny it. I know what that means. Because you have slept with this monster you have traded blood and she has used that blood to serve herself. Killing you would alert her to my presence, she’d feel it in her own blood. We don’t know how they do that and thankfully very few witches have the expertise to employ it. But that’s what you are for her, a lookout. Quite effective against the uninitiated. Say, a mob or angered father, the offended parties don’t understand the full reality of what is going on and lynch fools such as yourselves. When you die, she’ll know it. Gives a crafty hexe plenty of time to rabbit. Feeling strange, aye? My telling you all this keeps your head spinning, keeps you unsteady, precisely as she wants you, in fact, but now she is on hunted ground. She is on my ground.”
The man groaned. His shoulders jolted, one jerking up and up until the collarbone broke and a tuft of his shirt briefly lifted off the skin and the pain which visited the man could only be coped with in tearful silence.
“It is time we dignify our place here,” Richter said.
The witch hunter grabbed the man’s hand and extended a finger and the knuckles cracked as though he were pushing the bones of a desiccated skeleton. He took the hand and raised it up, feeling a jut and pop in the man’s elbow. He pointed the hand in one direction and then another, each movement buckling a joint, a wrist, an elbow, a shoulder, some pops riding all the way up to the neck which brought deep groans from Theo.
“I know you feel this,” Richter said. “I understand the pain you are in. I understand it very, very well. Now, when I point in the direction of her hut, you blink twice. If you don’t cooperate with me, I’ll pour another dose of this ailment straight down your arse and then I will leave you to the ants. You only think this is suffering, but I will get my answers one way or another. Now. Where is she?”
He jerked the hand and a series of guttural clicks and cracks erupted from under the flesh. He pointed the disjointed finger and then stared at the man. Theo’s eyes were wide as if to fight any blink. Richter pointed the hand another way. And then another. Bones cracked and popped, each one more terse and quiet than the last, like a deck of cards being broken in. Richter only had one cardinal direction left and twisted the hand toward it. A series of breaks murmured from the wrist. The man blinked repeatedly, and tears poured from his eyes. When Richter let go of the hand the whole arm simply swayed upright, shattered and bulbous, like some totem made of mud when the rain had still yet to cease. Satisfied with the answer, he pushed Theo back and the man slowly tilted against the wall where his limbs stalked outwardly like some catatonic gargoyle.
Richter took his hat and looked at its wide brim as he stretched the cloth. He spoke clearly and articulately, “The paralytic will wear off in a few hours. By the time I have killed her the paralysis will have faded and you will find your faculties, though when that happens you will also bear the full brunt of your body’s current stress. You should prepare yourself for that pain. When you can walk, you should leave. If you cannot walk, then crawl. If I come back and you are still here, I’ll take your head off your shoulders. As for them kids you stole for her, they are most certainly dead. You think about that from now ‘til the end, understand?”
Spit ran down Theo’s chin and a tear down a cheek.
The witch hunter put his hat back on and nodded. “Good.”
Richter stopped, and there he observed: fresh footprints indicated in an overturned leaf litter. The morning dew muddied each footfall, framing them with a watery glisten. Each sign was shoeless, tiny divots of toes peppered at the tip of each tread. A woman’s foot pressing a primal path across the pathless forest. He wound his way up the guidance she had provided until he found what was of the highest import: signs of herb gathering in a crop of trees standing and felled.
He crouched and raised a few uncapped mushroom stems. Further up, a clawing tread of human fingers had swept through a rug of moss. Others had been destemmed or ripped out and bundled and taken. But it was the mushrooms he returned to and studied. He knew what they were. Gyromitrin Trumpets. They’d kill a man if eaten, but not before sending him into a dizzying fever dream that could last weeks or months depending how sturdy his constitution. In a witch’s hands it was the speartip of her manipulations, the battering ram to dissolve a man’s mental strength without laying a finger on him. Typically powdered and puffed through the air like a lover’s distant kiss, it was one weapon witch hunters feared more than any other.
Richter got to his feet and took one step and stopped again.
“Ah, by the hells.”
Amongst the shredded shrooms lay a crop of beheaded flora. The green stems could be any number of plants, but a solitary blue petal lay amongst the ruin, its soft side speckled with white orbs, its arboreal originality giving away its harvested potential. He clenched his fists, then let them go. He looked to the skies whose bright blues and wispy whites now bore down on him with seemingly ominous glee.
“Everything you’ve been taught,” Richter said, shaking his head. “Listen to it, you idiot.”
The witch hunter took out the roll of paper again. He read it. He sighed and took off his hat and held it at his side as his eyes stared blankly at the ground. He laughed, took a breath, put the hat back on, put the paper away, cursed himself, and with such proper preparation he went on.
~~~
He paused.
Clearwater in a forest creek. Not a single toad or tadpole in its current. Not a single curl of moss. Not a single polished stone. Nothing but mud beneath the surface and the faint reflection of a man staring down. Along the shore lay the shredded remains of bird nests, and beside them the heads of birds, the skulls bore out and the brains taken and their bodies entirely missing. Further along he spotted the pelt of a squirrel. Judging by the furrows in the fur, she tore the animal apart with her fingernails. He hoped the creature had died before that, but he knew better. She had taken it to her hut, alive and squealing, and made use of it there. In all the surroundings he found more mushrooms missing their caps. And in the mud went along her footprints, the collective evidence brazenly treading homeward without a care in the world as to who might sniff the crime they had traveled to and from. Richter wondered if she intended to be seen in this manner – if she intended to be followed. Ultimately, it mattered not.
He went on.
~~~
The hut pitted into the forest floor as though a great boulder of mold had grown there. Black wood. Black door with black hinges. Blackened windows. Blackened weeds tentacled from the foundations like the spread of some otherworldly contagion. Moss dangled along the eaves. Every corner of the foundation awash with mushrooms and fungi, offering a rainbowed respite of rippling, bulbous color. The structure slanted against a small forest hill where her domicile no doubt lengthened into the earth itself. Not only as her home, but as a balmy receptacle for growing the decrepit matter she used for her potions and elixirs and drugs. A small garden spread along the top of the earthen shelf with rows of carrots and cabbage. Quaint, individualizing, something one might mistake for the food source of a friendly hermit were it the first thing they happened upon. But most curious of all was that the hut sat along a creek. Places of water are where people congregated. A witch might briefly travel to where people lived, but she would never live alongside them in such a manner. To reside remotely within the radius of water… only a particularly powerful witch did this, or a particularly dense and soon to be dead one.
To Richter, they were one and the same.
He squatted down and eyed the path to the hut. She had set a number of traps, some innocuous squirrel snatchers and a rabbit snare amongst them, and she furnished a clever moth catcher using an upside down flybottle with dogbane smeared into the glassy pontil scar. These tools she left in the open for all to see, perhaps so that their meticulous constructions would trick the eyes from seeing the real danger: right along the walkway lay a trough of folded grass topped with leaves, the unmistakable lid of a pitfall trap, its stakes no doubt poison-tipped. Beyond the pitfall, a cord of flax fiber raised a few inches off the ground so rodents would run beneath instead of over it. Braided between the blades of grass this rope encircled the entire estate. Pinched knots tracked more fiber off the mainline and drove toward her hut where they knotted around vials filled with metal coins. It was an elaborate noisemaker, so oddly crafty that its efficacy was not only in its designed purpose, but in that those who spotted it might be so impressed by its genius as to avoid its maker entirely.
But Richter didn’t care about these mechanisms. He continued to stare about the grass until he spotted a crop of flora strange to the landscape: cankered glabra chunks and peabearing false cypress. The former found east of the low swamps, and the latter could only be found far west of where he stood. Neither ingredient came to these parts in a natural manner.
She’s an interloper, Richter thought.
The hut did not belong to her. She took it.
Richter looked to the skies. “By the old gods, may the strong never tire of their strength, may the weak be lifted by the strong. May you be with me now, as one or the other, and myself,” he nodded. “As one or the other.”
A monk in an emptied priory taught him that one. He didn’t believe a word of it, and the monk knew that and said it anyway, repeating it to him as the echoes of their voices bounced around those stonewalls. Every time he thought of that monk he was a little bit older, and by now was probably as old as the monk was then. Surely that accounted for something.
“Aye,” Richter said. “Please be with me now.”
The dagger made a warbling leather scratch as the serrated steel left its sheath. He raised its sharp tip to each nostril and sliced himself, unsettling scars with reiterated ease. As the blood ran free, he uncorked a yellow vial of sublimated sulfur and pyrethrum and a hint of mixture only he knew of. He dabbed a drop on a finger and smeared it into his wounds. Despite having done this many a time, he instinctively tensed. His flesh felt aflame and so sharp and narrow and pointed was the pain that he may as well have struck the concoction there with a whip. The smell proved worse, piercing through his nostrils and burning down into his throat until its lurid odor resided in his belly. There, the elixir had a settling effect, much like how one might grit against the bite of a powerful liquor, only to have the very stupor it provided used as a defense against any further sting.
He wiped his watering eyes and took off his hat and set it down. He tipped the vial again, this time dribbling the yellow elixir all the way around the rim of his hat. The liquid settled, leaving a sticky firmament between the edges of his cap and where his head would be inside it. He put the hat back on and put his legs out. He tucked his pants into his boots and then stood and tucked his shirt into his pants and tightened his belt for extra measure. He twisted his sleeves tightly against the wrists, then took a long cloth and wrapped it around his face as a bandana. Finished, he wiped the sweat from his brow and stuck it under the bandana and made sure not a hint of scent could touch his lungs. He smelled nothing.
Satisfied with his preparation, the witch hunter got to his feet. He stared toward her hut to see green smoke now billowing lightly out of a makeshift chimney. She was busy. She may be killing the children. Maybe she had already done it. Maybe this was just cookery at this point, a pile of chopped limbs being tossed in the pot for a good evening soup. Time was of the essence and yet, in the back of his head —
Never, Carsten’s training repeated in his mind. Never, under any circumstance, enter a witch’s hut. Kill them in the open. If they do not come out, then burn it down, though beware the smarter ones will have means of escape. But never. Ever. Enter their hut. There is no greater danger in this world. You may as well insert your head into a lindwurm’s maw, understand?
“Be with me now,” Richter said again, and he stepped into her yard and took another step and crossed it one foot at a time, and he passed by the moths festering and fluttering against their glassy prison, and he stepped over the pitfall trap and he made sure to gently clear the noisemaker’s trigger, and he went up to the porch and he took one slow step there which made no noise at all and he took another step and he realized that behind him the whole forest had fallen silent, that the world itself seemed to be holding its breath, such is the moment of nature when prey and predator come together, and ever more silent when nature cannot tell which is which, and Richter found himself holding his own breath for deep in his own heart not even he knew to whom this domain truly belonged. So he let the breath go. And he put his hand on the witch’s door and pushed it open.
~~~
In the recesses of the hut’s dark she sat, her chair rocking back and forth, her pallid limbs easing in and out of the light like streaks of fog wimpling over a cold river. Long hands folded over the ends of the armrests, the fingers dangling like wasp legs. Her lips pursed and rolled and when she briefly opened them something went tumbling across her teeth, clacking like a quiet flame in a black fireplace. Before her, a naked man on all fours had his head buried face deep between her knees, his own body as filthy as the deed he’d been committed to. She stared over him through the sway of greased hair, the pits of her yellow eyes fattening like a cat nearing the end of its hunt.
“A hunter,” she said and Richter felt the words crawl down his back.
She lifted a hand and passed it through the gate of hanging hair and hooked a finger deep into her mouth. She fished out her chaw and threw it. A white fingerbone sailed through the dark and bounced across the ground. Grinning, she dropped the hand to the side of the chair and it splashed into a blood-filled bucket and sloshed around and around, foaming bloody froth over its sides. She fished out a toe and popped it into her mouth and crunched on its nail. She lavishly sucked the blood off her own fingers and chewed on the morsels and rolled the fat chunks around like they were caviar.
She pointed at the fingerbone on the floor.
“Divination, the fruition of my knowledge, and the flowering of the world’s pretties and unpretties.” She spat. Blood, bone, and human fat splattered across the floor. “Would you like to know more? I know you do.”
Richter held his ground, getting a good sense of the hut and what it might hold. Whatever traps found in her yard were surely doubled in effort within the hut itself. The witch very well may be the least of his concerns.
“A hunter, but a scared hunter,” she said. “Why don’t you come inside so we can talk?”
The naked man turned around from her loins, his dull face dripping with yellow strings and his mangled beard lively with maggots. He nodded and spoke as calm as a man affirming the weather. “Yeah, stranger, come in from the woods. What’re you gon’ do, stand out there forever? Harrharr.”
When the naked man turned back around, the witch presented to him a stake in one hand and a mallet in the other. He stared at the assembly like a wildman stumbling upon a carpenter.
“What’re them tools for?”
“Get back to the lick,” she said.
“Is that whatcha want?”
“It is.”
The naked man grunted and murmured in delight as he buried his face.
While she feigned pleasure, the witch hunter stood with one foot in the hut and the other on the porch. He leaned in slightly and looked around. Against one wall, a twisted rack which held the hexe’s harvests, mushroom caps, flowers, racks of bones, a dog’s skeleton hanging archly from the ceiling. Near the other wall, a cauldron sat with a fire belching beneath its iron. The rim of the pot had been coated with tanned human flesh and whatever horror boiled in its belly looked like the bloodied mud of a lively battlefield and its stench just as fresh. Richter had prepared himself for the smell, prepared himself by blood and poison, and yet it still permeated into his eyes and nose. A mixture of rot and burnt human hide, and the sightline on what was producing the smell only worked to enhance it. He coughed and slimmed his eyes and looked away from the cookery and his mind fought against Carsten’s warnings to never enter a witch’s hut.
“Ye get used to it,” the witch said, cackling. “Just like you get used t’this.”
Richter watched as the witch put the stake over the top of the man’s skull. Thoughts of intervention were met with those of reluctance, because trying to save him could be what she wanted, and a man so ensorcelled to be fooled in this degenerative manner was too far gone to be saved regardless. But Richter couldn’t let it pass. He raised the wristed crossbow and lined her in the shot.
“Walddorf wants its princess,” the witch said, looking up. “Does it not?”
The witch hunter hesitated.
“Course they do,” the witch said, and she raised the mallet and clapped it against the back of the stake and its point chipped into the man’s skull and the clap of wood on bone bore a hollow sound straight through his head and out his mouth as though he had coughed out an echo.
The man’s fingers clenched into claws and scraped against the floor.
She raised the mallet and slammed it home again.
The man grunted and he dropped a shoulder.
“Ye’ll not quit!” she growled and slammed the stake again.
The man grunted and dropped both shoulders and a knee, but obediently got back up.
She slammed the stake again.
His cheeks billowed as he vomited and blood splattered the floor between her legs.
The mallet swung up, its shadow briefly fat against the wall, and it swung back down.
His feet jolted stiff and pointed back at Richter.
She cackled, and cackled, and cackled, and the rapidity of the strikes increased until the skull splintered apart and red and white splashed over the rim and when she let the stake go it stood out of the back of the man’s head all on its own. She pushed at it with a finger and it gently rolled to a side like a pestle inside a mortar. Grinning, the witch slapped her hands around the stake and tilted it straight up.
The man gargled. “Thith gooth?”
“It is,” she said, and she brought up her legs up and planted her cracked feet on the sides of his head like an insect clinging to a stick.
“It is,” she repeated, and vigorously spun the stake into his brains. She stared at Richter, her breath picking up, her hair puffing out between every gasp, her tallowed eyes winking between the strands, her hands vigorously auguring the wood into his pate like some apostle of the first flame, and the sound of sloshing filled the entire hut and Richter felt the forest abandoning him with its silence and he just about begged for it to make some noise, to remind him of a reality hurriedly fading from memory, to mask the horror, but all he heard was the horror before him, the slap of tissues and muscles and brain, the scratching rattle of a wooden stake caroming around and around in a bowl of bone.
The naked man gargled and she stopped instantly and retrieved the stake and slammed it on a table beside her and kicked the man. He fell to his side and a plump of twisted red plopped out of his uncapped dome, his arms cocked at right angles, his fingers clenching and straightening on every heartbeat as blood roped from his cratered head. She planted a foot into the stirred soup of his brains, her long toes playfully splashing in the new viscera.
“Let us talk.” She tented her hands and mocked a triangular hat over her head. “Weetch huntah.”
Richter had grown used to the look of the hexen, could no longer see them as anything but beasts and the act of killing them no different than slaughtering beeves, but this witch was older. Much older. And, unlike ordinary humans, age to a witch only empowered them, for it was time they needed most to learn all their maleficent ways. Her long limbs and bulbous body made her look like an insect living out its last shell, her neck bending from a ragged gearwheel of a spine, her maw slightly ajar with pits where teeth used to be, her eyes crooked and unfocused, her hair mere threads that not even the finest tailor could fashion into something useful.
They remind us that impermanence is for the best, Richter.
He held his ground. He leaned into the hut just barely, his eyes leering from one end of the room to the other. There were traps in here, he knew it, and maybe one had already been triggered. One which aimed for his sanity.
“A shame ye can’t just kill me,” she said, sneering and laughing, her voice a mimic of how others perceived a hexe. She frowned. “Ye looketh ill.”
“Where is the girl?”
“Do ye fear I have wedded her to a… royal demise? Heeheeehooo…”
Now that she was in front of him wholly unafraid, Richter knew he was exactly where she wanted him to be. The witch never bothered to hide a single track. She had no intention of avoiding her hunter at all. The worst trap was one he hadn’t seen: it was the hunt itself, the very hunt that had brought him here.
“I have something for ye,” the witch said, her toes curling through the dying man’s hair with the sort of tender affection reserved for lovers or worse. She turned away and bent her long arm behind the table and with this one arm at length managed to draw up a small child as though she were picking up a kitten.
A boy. Unconscious, but breathing.
Richter tried not to show any reaction, but he must’ve let something slip through for the witch’s mouth slickly widened.
“Oh,” she said mockingly. She put a finger down and flicked the boy’s parts and said, “Not the one ye were looking for? Then I’ll make ye a deal, hunter.”
“No deals.” He aimed the wristed crossbow, but the witch did not so much as flinch.
The cauldron bubbled and belched, limbs churning and turning in its mire. A froth of the goop spilled over the edge, sizzling the floor and filling the air with a stench like that of an abandoned abattoir.
“I can see the night in yer eyes, hunter, carrying the sort of tired sleep can’t fix. Come on in and rest. Let the body have its time with me and you shall find the fire of life itself. Rejuvenation awaits.” Her voice dispensed of its enticing tone and spoke plainly: “Hunter, I can settle any man’s nerves if you but give me a chance.”
The witch brought the boy to her sagging bosom where she offered a grey breast which he promptly suckled.
She began to rock back and forth. “I’ve no reason to bring you harm. Come. Come on in. You needn’t be nervous, not in this world.”
Richter closed one eye as he stared down his arm and through the sights of the wristed crossbow which rested at its end.
“You wouldn’t,” she said, chuckling as the chair creaked.
Her face sank into the darkness, but the boy’s remained in the light.
Forward in the chair.
Both faces in the light.
Backward.
Hers gone. Only hers.
Forward.
The world blurred around her.
Into the dark. Into the light.
Richter’s aim was simple, but to take the shot required faith.
“You wouldn’t.”
Into the dark. Into the light.
Her face. The boy’s.
Her face.
“You wouldn’t.”
Everything else blurred.
Only her face now.
Her face.
The forest judged him. Predator or prey.
Her face.
The world was at his back, and he was here. Now: predator or prey.
Her face.
Her face.
Her face.
His prey.
“You wouldn’t!”
Richter fired.
The bolt disappeared as though the dark had retrieved it the second it left the knock and the boy fell out of her lap and crumpled to the ground and he thought he had shot the child until the witch wailed and reeled away. Richter jumped forward with his serrated dagger in hand, but as the witch tilted back in her chair she reached out for a rope hanging from the ceiling and yanked it and a line of sand zipped rectangularly across the ceiling and a giant slab of discolored wood suddenly swung down. Richter crossed his arms and it shattered over him and he felt his hat snap off his head and his sleeves blow back off his wrists. Cakes of green and yellow fungi and familiar blue flower petals blew all around, and the air filled with sawdust of powdered grey swirls and he had nicks and cuts all over his hands and the blood ran with poisons and toxins and the forest spiraled away behind him and out of sight and out of mind, no decider in this here hutted quarrel, and the witch’s face sharpened in the dark, the shadows but grindstones at her cheeks, and the boy’s face fell into the black like some conspirator and Richter reached out for him but the world tilted and the witch’s cauldron seemed to shunt across the floor like a seaborne crate, the animal bones hanging from the ceiling rattling diagonally as though to direct the cauldron’s slippery passage, and Richter tried to blink out these malformed sights and he tried to find the boy again but in the boy’s place her face appeared, her body suddenly heaving and wriggling across the floor, long limbs swiveling and swinging like snakes escaping a rolling barrel, some pale slithering undulation, and the witch hunter blinked and put an arm out to catch himself from falling and his fingers pressed into the wall as though it were made of flesh and when he took his hand away he looked down to see she was at his feet, staring up at him behind that black hair, like a viper’s eyes staring out of its pit, and her long hands curved around his waist and the lank fingers rode between the bones of his spine and there she pulled and there he fell into her arms.
~~~
“Boy, get back outside and help your father!”
A mother, but he never knew her. His very arrival in this world killed her.
He stepped forward through the fog.
“My love, shan’t we spend another night together?”
A beautiful lover, but he had never bedded a woman.
Forward. It wasn’t fog. No, that smell… powdered mushrooms.
“Stranger please, do not hurt me!”
A young girl in a spring dress with fear in her eyes. No pausing. Not here. Not for… that.
Despite his denials, these images beckoned him onward. He stepped forward. Stepped into a hut. A hexe’s hut. But he was not walking. There was never a single step. She had long since already pulled him to the ground, her grip tight, bones against bones. No… he had never taken a step. This was the very same hut. He fought to maintain this realization. Fought to—
A baby giggled at him. A plum faced infant, wriggling in a chicken’s nest with a soft smile, rosy cheeks, and little feet pedaling in the air. Here lay the last of the tricks, and in the undoing of the rest revealed that this, too, was but an image of that which could not be. Richter put one hand to the baby’s cheek, and with the other somberly tilted his dagger against the infant’s chest.
Its little hands grabbed the hilt, its fingers suddenly growing the length of the blade itself, twisting up its steel like pink vines. The baby’s eyes glowed a dark red. It laughed a crude cackle as its mouth widened in a sickly smile so large it seemed to split the head in two, and the witch’s mouth protruded from the throat, its tongue flailing around in the absurdity of its own visage.
The fingers suddenly clutched Richter’s shoulders and pulled his ear to its mouth.
“Hunter,” she said, “I can hear the hissing of your sanity.”
Richter screamed and plunged the dagger in, cratering the baby’s chest and its skin and flesh sank into the wound like a sheet through a hole and blood sprayed his face, and the baby shrieked and the room’s walls undulated as though he were in the very vocal chords of that which produced the scream and a young girl cried out in horror and a lover wept and sobbed and a mother howled with betrayal of giving birth to that which robbed her of life and finally the witch herself rippled back into view, bursting out of the molting trick like a watery visage resurfacing to face the one who had drowned it, pale and slick, her bulbous shape retching violently in cascading hexes, her insect like legs wrapped around the hunter, the leathery feet scratching and scraping to get him off, her tallowed teeth biting and breaking on themselves, and the dagger, the dagger sat sheathed deep in her chest and the man responsible crouched over her and tented both hands upon its pommel and drove it through fat and bone and pierced a heart so strong it clenched upon the blade as though to remind its render of a great accomplishment and a moment later the heart let go and the steel sank into her spine and both hunter and hexe collapsed into darkness and, finally, finally… a most comfortable silence.
