Arc 1: Execution || Chapter 1: Headsman
Angels are good at wielding guilt. Devils are sometimes better, but you’d need a priest to explain the difference between the two. As far as I can tell, it’s mostly a matter of aesthetics.
I stood near the back of a crowd gathered in a storm-shadowed square. The cobblestones at my feet were slick with the rain rolling across the steepled roofs of the surrounding buildings. The crowd was silent, their eyes fixed on a raised wooden platform where several figures stood and one knelt. Armored guards with tall poleaxes, their eyes shadowed by the brims of their helms, held the rain-slick blades of their weapons to the throat of a kneeling man.
The town’s earl watched with grim silence, his shoulders draped with a black cloak as though in mourning. At his side stood a thickset man in a crude leather vest, a hood shadowing his face almost in mockery of the elegant helms of the guardsmen, a long-hafted axe in his hands. He stood over the kneeling prisoner, waiting for the order to bring his weapon down.
I don’t know what the kneeling man was condemned for. A beheading was usually the punishment for treason. From the mutters of the crowd I caught beneath the storm, I gathered he had been a knight. He glared up from the block they’d pressed him to, eyes piercing through the haze of rain without even a hint of pleading.
Regardless, I wasn’t there for him.
There was another man on the platform. A priest clad in the crimson robes of the Priory. He called out to the Heir and her Heralds in a brassy orators voice, speaking between rumbling peels of thunder passing high overhead. The rain falling down his cheeks made it seem like he was weeping and, indeed, his speech on behalf of the soul of the man they were about to execute seemed genuinely remorseful.
The storm picked up. I’m not sure if it was that or the impatient expression on the earl’s face that spurred the bishop to end his speech. The nobleman nodded to the headsman, who wasted no more time. The axe came down, its wide blade splitting rain to form a blurring arc of motion so even the untrained eye could follow its path. Some in the crowd gasped. I noted the skill of the swing with a professional eye. The executioner was good. The head came free on the first blow, as surely as if they’d used a guillotine. The sharp crack as the axe split bone and sunk into the wooden block the prisoner’s neck rested on could be heard even over the rain, echoing across the square.
There was no more ceremony once the condemned man’s blood was mixing with rain on the stone beneath the scaffolding. The earl provided no words of his own, but at a signal the crowd began to part. The headless corpse was left where it lay, bleeding over the wooden platform, and the soldiers escorted the nobles back to their fortress. The bishop, and some guards and attendants, moved to the looming cathedral rising up over the surrounding township.
I adjusted the wrapped bundle resting on my shoulder and melted into the alleyways, following the bishop like a distant shadow. He had claimed a life on behalf of the divine today, or so he’d convinced himself.
Little did he know that I would claim his.
******