Jerking the man forward Jared positioned him in front of a pillar, using the rope to fasten his hands behind it. The final scene was set.
This miserable reptile was the rankest kind of craven vermin, who’d swaggered through life at the cost of those beneath him and hadn’t the guts to face a situation without the cloak of noble privilege.
‘Wh-who are y-you? What do you want with me?’
Jared said nothing, hefting the seax. It was a long-bladed weapon with a blood guide down its middle and coming to a slender point of exquisite sharpness.
Suddenly he lunged, the point stopping at the throat but bringing the first bright pinprick of blood.
‘No!’ D’Amory gobbled, his eyes hypnotised by the blade. ‘Mercy, I beg!’
Jared relaxed the knife but now it pointed down to the fear-shrunken genitals, causing a contortion, a writhing in an extremity of fear.
‘I … I’ll give you a h-hundred marks – no, a thousand!’ he sobbed.
‘The baron’s cub is only worth a thousand?’
‘Ten! Thirty thousand – whatever you ask!’ There was hope in his voice, a way out by familiar means, anything but the pitiless death he could see in those eyes.
‘You’d go to a hundred thousand?’
‘Yes! Of course! I’ll borrow from my father the baron and my uncle and—’
The knife whipped up again, and leaning close Jared hissed, ‘Not enough. There’s not enough riches in the kingdom to set against what you did!’
‘What did I do?’ D’Amory shrieked, seeing his hopes fade and disappear.
‘I’ll tell you. You defiled a poor dear innocent …’ he gulped, his eyes misting ‘… and cast her in the river …’
The tears were blinding now and the knife trembled in his hand.
‘I couldn’t help it!’ he howled, ‘She bit me!’
It was the wrong thing to say.
In a blaze of unbearable emotion Jared stabbed forward wildly, only at the last split-second thinking to deflect the blade to avoid a killing stroke. It sank deep into the shoulder, bringing an inhuman screech from D’Amory that echoed about the old cellar.
Curiously, it steadied him. In a detached way Jared pondered at how the blow felt just like sinking a knife into a tender cut of beef. The wound gaped and pulsed with blood, the dark-red stringy fibres of muscle tissue working each side of it.
‘For the love of Christ!’ D’Amory screamed from the edge of madness. ‘Mary the mother of God and all the saints, have mercy!’
Still in an unnatural calm Jared lifted the blade and with the utmost deliberation traced a line, drawing beads of blood directly across the hairless chest.
The shrieks were now deafening: he frowned in annoyance.
Another line: this time down to the stomach.
‘Jesus! Sweet Jesus, save me!’
It made him indignant. To call upon one who’d never once raised a hand to a soul on this earth.
This time the line went across, deeper, and when he’d finished the screams were utterly unhinged, for flopping out of the belly were coils of slimy grey-green veined innards.
Jared drew back in distaste, the wretched thrashing about of the body making the rupture worse. The man was now unreachable in his torment – was there any point in going on?
Perhaps not.
Closing his eyes for a brief moment Jared breathed, ‘I do this for you, my best beloved,’ and thrust out hard. The blade impaled the throat entirely through to grate against the backbone, the shrieks cut off in the same instant in a bubbling spray of blood.
He turned the knife once in the wound and stepped back, watching unemotionally as the man’s life departed, leaving only a corpse to twitch spasmodically.
It was over.
A wave of trembling reaction seized him. After a moment it subsided.
The contorted and blood-smeared remains hung down from the pillar and Jared gazed at it for a long time. It didn’t move.
The roaring fire of vengeance that had so consumed him had now left.
Dully, he left the scene for the outer world, now with shadows lengthening in a fine summer evening. He went to the lichen-covered anonymous tomb he’d selected and levered aside the lid. Inside were desiccated bones and fragments of a shroud.
The corpse was heavier than he thought and he was panting fast by the time he dragged it there and tumbled it in, sliding the lid back across.
Gervaise D’Amory no longer had an existence.
In a last, almost cleansing act, Jared scattered earth over the pools of blood, rubbing out the stains. The seax he wiped clean – it would be returned to its place behind the forge door, no one the wiser.
It was done.
There was nothing to connect him to the disappearance of the baron’s son and he made his way home.