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Oh, dreadful is the check, intense the agony;
When the ear begins to hear, the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again;
The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!
–Emily Bronte, “The Prisoner”
The place where they brought her stank of evil.
She could not see for the stifling sack over her head, but she could sense the vortex of blighting, blasting, and bloodletting that swirled around this place like corpse gas.
Forming out of the death stench were the masters and mistresses of the place: a predator of a man who took orphans out of the workhouse and brought them here to unspeakable fates. And before that, a sober grey-clad saddler obeying the whispering voices that told him to slaughter his family with his sharp leatherworking knife. And before that, a woman fiendishly murdering a servant girl. And before that, a man preferring the attentions of his maid to those of his wife, and the wife’s head cast into a nearby canal. And before that, when the building that stood here previously was an inn where the ancient laws of hospitality were violated again and again by the innkeeper who robbed and murdered unwary travelers...
And before...and before...and before...back to the time of the bronze-working people of this place, who felt the spirits calling upon them to burn their children in sacrifice and take off the breasts of living women as trophies...
Inside the stifling sack, Annis began to struggle with renewed terror, knowing she was in a place where the veil between the worlds was thin, a place where arcane power pooled and animated. She would be sacrificed in this awful fane that marked a crossroads between This World and an Evil Otherwhere.
Somehow, she got a hand free and raked the face of one of the unseen men who bore her deathward. Then came a stunning blow to the back of her head and she fell into darkness.
****
She awoke to find herself hanging in chains in a candlelit chamber. Her draperies floated about her like the torn wings of a white butterfly fluttering in its last extremity.
And then She came, her gown twisting itself around her in contorted shapes, for everything about her was twisted and perverted.
The Red Queen laughed. Cold, evil, powerful laughter. “I know you now, White Annis. You stand revealed in this place of power, and I have summoned my patrons here to see you for what you are. They and you are destined to meet, I think.”
Annis felt her soul withering within her.
The Red Queen knew it and oozed a deadly contempt for her captured witch. “Fear not, you do not meet my patrons alone. Your man comes after you, of that you may be certain. Watch.”
A new fear beyond the fear of death possessed Annis as she watched the Red Queen’s taloned hands claw her power out of the evil air of this place.
A pedigreed bull for the culling. Come.
A lusty stallion for the gelding. Come.
A fighting cock for the chopping block. Come.
A King Stag for the rending. Come.
Annis felt the power of the Red Queen’s Summoning vibrating through her bones and blood. Yet, she still had hope that Nick would escape it. Though he was surely searching for her, he was no witch man attuned to the ebb and flow of magic. He might not hear the Summoning, and even if he did, she did not think him adept enough to find his way to the source.
She tossed her hope into the face of the Red Queen. “And how shall Lord Ryder find his way here when even I do not know where I am?”
“Love,” said the Red Queen with awful, knowing finality, “will find out the way.”
She swept away, leaving Annis to wrestle with her witchly soul. The part of her that craved to live whispered: He is a mighty warrior who could win you free. The part of her that loved him said: Death lurks for him in every corner of this place. Better to die yourself than to bring him to his death.
And in the end, love won over life.
In the extremity of her last desperate hour, she summoned her wicce as she had never done before, summoned it out of her own self, even though she was a bound prisoner in the heart of almighty darkness. Her head rang with the effort of it.
In her mind’s eye, she pictured the wind. Holding fast to the image of the wind, she attuned her whole being to the surging, airy, elemental essence of it and called it to her. Wind, ever-moving on the bosom of the Goddess, wind from the four cardinal quarters, I call you and command you.
The doors and walls of this place could not keep out the wind. It stirred her torn draperies about her.
Wind, carry this warning to my beloved. Do not come like a bull to the slaughter, my heart. Do not come, do not come...
****
Ryder spurred his warhorse westward on the Afton Road. But he never had such a ride as this.
All the street musicians who played on the corners, all the tinkling music that spilled out of the fine houses, all the snatches of song that floated out of the taverns, all sounded the same notes—the notes of the bugle call to retreat. The wind caught up the sound, familiar to him from so many battlefields, and whirled it round and round him.
He shook off his foreboding and rode on.
He galloped into the village of Afton and went into the first public house he came upon. There he found a group of sturdy yeomen quaffing their ale and listening to a fiddler play old tunes.
Hearts of oak had the yeomanry of Afton and heads to match. He had to knock a few of those heads together before they told him what he wanted to know. They did not like to talk about the last house on Oldborough Way. It was cursed, they said.
Leaving the disordered public house, Ryder heard the fiddler strike up the Dead March, and the music blew after him as he rode into the night.
Ryder came to the monster’s fane, the house at the end of Oldborough Way. The narrow, rutted road ended here, and so, it seemed, did nature itself. The summer meadow grass was nothing but dead tufts in which unnatural, slithering things lurked. No birds roosted in the stunted and diseased trees. Whorls of foul, clammy mists seeped up from the ground.
He tied his skittish mount to a gnarled, scabrous tree branch and spared an instant to reconnoiter: no sign of horses or carriage, stone and timber building, saddlery and stable below, family rooms on top, torches burning inside like eyes looking out.
He drew his pistol and walked to the saddlery door. It was unbarred. He was expected. He smiled mirthlessly and went inside.
Black candles burned in the wall sconces. A narrow staircase ran upward into the dark. A figure stepped out of the dark at the top of the stairs.
Ryder flung himself to one side just as the pistol shot exploded. The bullet came so close he felt the hot breeze of it past his temple. He cried out as if in pain and crouched down on the bottom step.
The man above him took a stealthy step down the stairs. Ryder sprang to his feet and fired upward at the dim figure. The man let forth a cry, a real cry, a death cry, and toppled down the steps. As the last gush of life ran out of him, Ryder knelt down to see if he was carrying another loaded pistol. There was no pistol, but the dead man’s face bore four livid nail marks across one cheek.
Ryder’s smile was grim and knowing as he addressed his late antagonist. I see you have made my darling’s acquaintance previously. Now you have made mine.
He intended to reload his pistol, but footsteps sounded behind him. They belonged to a man dressed in ragged clothes but armed with a fine sword like his own heavy cavalry sword, which had been filed to a point for fighting on foot. Though their two swords were of a length, Ryder was much the bigger man, and he felt a surge of confidence in his seasoned warrior’s heart.
But once they crossed swords, main strength against main strength, Ryder felt the jolt of it in the socket of his arm and the roots of his teeth. Christ, he’s strong. Stronger than he looks. He was in the fight of his life now, and well he knew it.
The ringing of steel on steel filled the stonewalled saddlery. With a flurry of strokes and counterstrokes, their swords ran together and caught, hilts locking, their two faces brought within a foot of each other.
For one infinite instant, Ryder looked into the eyes of his enemy and saw the pupils glittering an uncanny red. The whatever-it-was that he fought smiled at him, showing sharpened bloody teeth—the inhuman smile of a hunting-hound demon come into the world as an outrider of Evil.
You fight a mystery, Ryder told himself as they heaved themselves apart.
The pace of the duel quickened. In another flurry of blows, the red-eyed swordsman drew first blood and gave a sizzling demon’s hiss of triumph at the shallow cut across Ryder’s rib cage.
Ignoring the shards of pain along his bloodied ribs, Ryder kept his sword up. It was not a crippling cut, but still a dark harbinger of how the fight would go if he didn’t throw a spanner into the works of this demonic fighting machine.
And so he took the chance of his life for his life.
Not daring to look into those red gleaming eyes lest they tear his stratagem out of his brain, he fell back until he stood before one of the saddlery’s square wooden support beams. Here, he did no more than to defend himself—and wait for the high thrust his fighting man’s instinct told him would surely come.
When it did—a slashing overhand stroke—he did not parry but instead ducked aside. The demon enemy’s blade clove into the wood where his head had been, the razored steel captured in the oaken beam, leaving the wielder exposed for an instant from head to toe. In that instant, Ryder did him, sending his sword point through his adversary’s guts, tearing him open in a lethal blow that felled him to his knees.
There, hell-spawn gutter rat, sang the victor in his warrior’s soul, now you see what it is to cross swords with Nick Ryder.
He stared down into the eyes of his foe, wanting to see defeat in those red eyes, but what he saw instead was the demon light fading from the man’s puppet eyes as he died a man’s death.
Then, behind him, he heard the chilling whisper of steel coming out of leather. He whirled and found three more of the minions that served this place, their eyes burning at him like torches, their swords drawn.
But they held back, waiting. He did not attack them, for he was waiting too.
She came then, her dress glowing unearthly red, her white-powdered face a death mask. She passed her fallen minion without a glance, joining her three yet-living men, who watched Ryder with their red-reflecting eyes.
“Carve him up slowly,” the Red Queen said. “Then we’ll take him to his witch and see how she likes him.”
It was three to one against Ryder.
He was backed to the wall by Belle Barlow’s men—if men they were. He’d begun to have some soul-sapping doubts about that. But whatever they were, they knew what they were about in fighting him. They made him defend himself in one direction while the second man would come at him from the other and the third man would stand back and rest.
They’d cut him twice more, but so far he had kept his sword arm whole, which he must do at all costs. Nor could he afford to abandon his defensive position in the corner as much as he ached to charge, hacking and slicing at his tormenters, and end it all in one final berserker charge where he would take as many as he could down with him, and put his steel into the Red Queen’s heart though he went to his grave for it.
But in the end, he could not take the chance that he might fail. He could not go to his grave and leave Annis trapped in the Red Queen’s toils. He endured and fought on.
****
In her chains, Annis writhed in an agony of indecision. She had heard the shots and shouts, and she knew Nick had come, blind to the portents, deaf to her wind-borne warnings. For that is what he would do, as she should have known all along.
Every muscle, every nerve, every instinct for survival urged her to scream out, Here I am. Come for me. Yet, she fought the urge, for what if she only lured him deeper into the trap or distracted him as he fought for his life? She bit her lips to silence and tried to sift through the evil auras that floated through this place. She could do nothing to help him, nothing but send out a desperate Plea into the horrible, hopeless darkness that covered this place...
Something lumbered toward her out of the shadowed hall.
Something monster-tall and misshapen, as if it had two heads, something with a dragging, uneven gait. She wanted to close her eyes and look away, but she made herself behold what she had Called.
It was Caperkin the dwarf, riding upon the shoulders of Simpkin the lamed giant. Caperkin’s painted face was level with hers as they came toward her. The giant carried a pistol in one hand. The dwarf carried a ring of keys, and he spoke to her in his light, wizened voice.
“They’ve got him downstairs for the carving up.”
Simpkin brought him close enough to fit the key into the shackles that held her.
“Why?” Annis breathed as the dwarf worked upon the locks. “Why are you helping me?”
“Because,” he answered, his voice filled with bitterness, “in all my stinking dunghill of a life, you were the only one who offered me sanctuary.”
One shackle snapped open, then the second. Her wrists were raw and bleeding, but she was only aware of the merciful release of having her feet on the floor and the weight taken from her tortured arms.
The giant held out the pistol to her.
“It’s loaded,” said Caperkin. “Take it and save yourselves if you can.”
Whate’re you do comes back to you, thought White Annis.
She took the pistol and ran to the stairs, passing by an altar beneath a goat’s head with human skulls arranged there among candles shaped like the phalluses of men—arrant silliness in the face of the great, inexplicable Otherwhere Evil that bided here.
She heard the sound of ringing steel. Pistol in hand, she ran down the stairs, stepping over the sprawled corpse on the bottom step without a second look.