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.

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. Tension. Release. 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, boundless 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, brilliant 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 court mistresses, no rigid 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 not put off the time any longer. In his mind he already saw them before him: on the raised benches of the gallery, the fine ladies of the city took their seats in their tight, exciting gowns. They whispered behind raised fans, their eyes glittering with morbid thrill, full of anticipation for the bloody event to come.

A few more breaths. The tension in the dark chamber grew nearly unbearable, pressing 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 doorway stood a young man, the executioner's apprentice. He did not step inside but remained humbly on the threshold, his gaze cast respectfully to the floor.

"It is time, Master," he said. His voice was lowered, reverent, the words sounding almost like a quiet prayer of his own against the raging madness outside.

Jack took two last, deep breaths. Tension. Release. Then he rose from the shadows.

At nearly six foot three and well over two hundred pounds of pure muscle, he was a fearsome apparition. A man built like an insurmountable mountain, whose sheer presence seemed to drive out what little air remained in the room.

Only now, as he stood upright and his gaze came free, did the glaring light fall on the second figure in the cell.

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

Jack laid a hand on his shoulder. Only for the span of a breath — it was not written in the law, but he did it every time.

He did not do it out of softness. A man who lost his composure to fear died badly — he would jerk his head around, wrench at the chains, tense his neck at the wrong moment, and then the blade went astray. The sentence became a butchery, and a butchery was what tipped the crowd, what tore the executioner himself from his scaffold to rend him to pieces. A calm man died cleanly. The people had come to see a spectacle, and a good spectacle needed good performers — including the one who was to die. Jack's gentleness was rehearsed, a precisely calculated grip of his trade, as much as the edge of his blade.

And yet that was not all of it, and Jack knew it. He had too often knelt in the darkness himself and begged the same Lord for aid that Lothar now invoked. He knew this fear from the inside, night after night, before every execution. Whoever took a man's last hour from him owed him at least this one thing: that in this hour someone still looked upon him as a man. Even if it were, of all people, the one who would kill him.

"Stand up, Lothar," he said quietly, but with unrelenting firmness. "The way is short. I will walk 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 blow of the fist, and with the light came the roar. The beast had caught the scent of its meat; it threw itself against the wooden barriers, a thousand mouths torn wide, faces twisted into hate-filled grimaces, and its raging rolled over the alleys like a flood of pure madness.

Don't 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 bellowed at him. Behind him the helpers dragged the condemned man by a thick rope, a helpless bundle of misery. The small procession pushed forward, along a narrow corridor that soldiers kept open with difficulty, their pikes held crosswise.

The people lined the way, shoulder to shoulder, children in their arms to see better how a human being was destroyed. Some crossed themselves hypocritically. Others spat at Lothar, hurled curses and rotting fruit that burst on his shoulders with a revolting smack. He staggered, more carried than walking, his lips in silent prayer. Jack heard the smacking, the bellowing, the bestial cries of abuse — 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 in an instant the noise was left behind outside. Within, candles burned, the air smelled of old incense, and their glow cast a warm flicker over the bare stone. At the altar waited an old, stooped priest, the 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 brittle, in fits and starts, often broken by tear-choked gagging, but they came. The priest listened, murmured his prayers, and at the end traced a cross upon the condemned man's brow. For a moment, in the silent candlelight, Lothar looked almost at peace.

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

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

Clara and Adelheid let the horses stretch out into a gallop, side by side, until the wind of their riding drove tears of joy into their eyes.

"Faster!" Adelheid cried in high spirits, threw back her head, and laughed from the depths of her throat. Clara bent low over the horse's neck and gave the reins their head. For a while they flew along as though they had turned their backs on the whole world and all the duties, cares, or sorrows that awaited them. Two young girls, wrapped in the gleaming light of the forenoon, drinking life in full, intoxicated draughts and sparing not a single thought for the darkness that ruled at that same hour behind the distant walls.

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

Jack felt the wind. It blew in light, irregular gusts from the east across the open scaffold. An unskilled executioner would ignore the wind — a fatal error. With a blade of this breadth and this weight, even a gentle draft could shift its flight by a hair's breadth. And a hair's-breadth difference decided between a clean death and an agonized, screaming massacre.

Jack corrected his stance. Imperceptibly he shifted his right foot back by a few centimeters. His heavy boots pressed into the rough wood of the planks. He needed absolute footing. The force for the stroke must not come from the arms alone; it had to break from the thighs, rotate through the hips, and discharge into the blade.

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 entirely. He sagged so deeply into himself that his chin nearly touched his chest. He sobbed soundlessly, his whole body a single, wretched trembling before the void.

High on the galleries not a single fan moved anymore. The fine ladies sat like frozen statues of silk and velvet, their necks craned forward greedily, their lips slightly parted in morbid expectation, their eyes glittering with hunger for the final act.

"… and so the sentence shall this day be lawfully carried out," the bailiff's voice culminated in the solemn formula. "God have mercy on his poor soul."

The bailiff rolled up the parchment with a dry click. Then he turned his head and looked Jack straight in the eyes. He nodded.

The signal.

A dull groan from many thousands of throats went through the crowd. The monster tensed its muscles. It was ready for the feeding.

Jack lifted his hands from the grip of the sword but left the weapon standing where it was. He stepped up to Lothar. Every spark of the gentleness Jack had just shown was wiped away. His movements were now mechanical, precise, of a terrible, professional coldness.