Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 33

When the Adjudicator himself turned to stone, his spell shattered and dissipated throughout the town.

No longer petrified, Nicci slowly straightened and let out a long breath, half expecting to see an exhalation of dust from her lungs. Her blond hair and the skin of her neck became supple again, the fabric of her black dress flowed. She lifted her arms, looked at her hands.

Through her own determination, she had broken the fossilization spell that ran throughout herself, but Nathan had defeated the farther-reaching stranglehold of the twisted Adjudicator. Now, the old wizard flexed his arms and stamped his legs to restore his circulation. He shook his head, bewildered.

Nearby, the statue of Bannon, his expression locked in guilty despair, slowly suffused with color. His pink skin, rusty freckles, and ginger hair were restored. Instead of being amazed to find himself alive again, though, Bannon dropped to his knees in the town square and let out a keening wail. His shoulders shook, and he bowed his head, sobbing.

Nathan tried to comfort the distraught young man, patting him on the shoulder, although he did not speak. Stepping close to Bannon, Nicci softened her voice. “We are safe now. Whatever you experienced was your past. It is who you were, not who you are. You need have no guilt about who you are.” She guessed that he continued to suffer over losing his friend Ian to the slavers.

But, why had he uttered the word “kittens” as he turned to stone?

In the streets and square around them, a low crackle slowly grew to a rumble accompanied by a stirring of breezes that sounded like astonished whispers. Nicci turned around and saw the villagers trapped in stone by the Adjudicator’s brutal justice: one by one, they began to move.

As the gathered, tortured sculptures were restored to flesh, they remained overwhelmed by the nightmarish memories they had endured for so long. Then the sobbing and wailing began, rising to a cacophony of the damned. These people were too caught up in their own ordeal to look around and realize they had been released from the terrible spell.

Bannon finally climbed back to his feet, his eyes red and puffy, his face streaked with tears. “We’re safe now,” he said, as if he could comfort the villagers. “It’ll be all right.”

Some of the people of Lockridge heard him, but most were too stunned to understand. Husbands and wives found each other and embraced, clinging in desperate hugs. Wailing children ran to their parents to be swept into the warm comfort of a stable family again.

The disoriented villagers finally became aware of the three strangers among them. One man introduced himself as Lockridge mayor Raymond Barre. “I speak for the people of this town.” He looked from Nicci, to Nathan, to Bannon. “Are you the ones who saved us?”

“We are,” Nathan said. “We were just travelers looking for directions and a warm meal.”

With growing anger, the townspeople noticed the grotesque, horror-struck statue of the Adjudicator. Nicci indicated the stone figure of the corrupted man. “A civilization must have laws, but there cannot be justice when a man with no conscience metes out sentences without compassion or mercy.”

Bannon said, “If each one of us carries that guilt, then we are living our sentences every day. How can I ever forget…?”

“None of us will forget,” said Mayor Barre. “And none of us will forget you, strangers. You saved us.”

Other townspeople came forward. An innkeeper wore an apron stained from a meal he had served an unknown number of years before. Farmers and grocers stared at the ramshackle appearance of the village, at their broken-down vendor stalls, the remnants of rotted fruits and vegetables, the dilapidated shutters around the windows of the inn, the collapsed roof on the livery, the hay in the barn turned gray with age.

“How long has it been?” asked a woman whose dark brown hair had fallen out of its unruly bun. She wiped her hands on her skirts. “Last I remember, it was spring. Now it seems to be summer.”

“But summer of which year?” asked the blacksmith. He gestured toward the hinges on the nearby door of a dilapidated barn. “Look at the rust.”

Nathan told them the year, by D’Haran reckoning, but these villagers so far south in the wilderness of the Old World still followed the calendar of an ancient emperor, so the date meant nothing to them. They didn’t even remember Jagang or the march of the Imperial Order.

Although he was as overwhelmed as the rest of his people, Mayor Barre called everyone into the town square, where Nicci and Nathan helped explain what had happened. Each victim remembered his or her own experience with the Adjudicator, and most recalled earlier times when the traveling magistrate had come to judge their petty criminals and impose reasonable sentences—before the magic had engulfed him, before the amulet and his gift had turned him into a monster.

One mother holding the hands of a small son and daughter walked up to the petrified statue of the evil man. She stood silent for a moment, her expression roiling with hate, before she spat on the white marble. Others came up and did the same.

Then the innkeeper suggested they use the blacksmith’s steel hammers and chisels to smash the Adjudicator’s statue into fragments of stone. Nicci gave them a solemn nod. “I will not stop you from doing so.”

It was like a grim, furious mob as the Lockridge villagers battered and smashed the hated statue until the Adjudicator was nothing but rock shards and crumbling dust. When all that remained was a pile of rubble, the people were drained, though not satisfied.

Mayor Barre said, “We must go back to our homes and rebuild our lives. Clean up our houses, tend our gardens. Find all of that man’s other victims and explain what happened.”

Nathan said, “Magic has changed, and the world has changed. Even the night sky is shifted. After night falls, you will discover that the constellations are different from those you remember. We don’t yet know all the ways the world has been altered.”

Nicci also spoke up. “In the D’Haran Empire, Lord Rahl has defeated the emperors who oppressed both the Old World and the New. We came here to see his new territory and to tell you all that the world can be free and at peace. We found this town, we freed you, we destroyed the Adjudicator.” She looked down at the unrecognizable rubble, saw a smooth curved chunk that might have been an ear. “This man is exactly the sort of monster that Lord Rahl stands against.” She squared her shoulders. “And we did stand against him.”

As the people muttered, absorbing the knowledge, Nathan kept shaking his head, troubled. He said to Nicci, “I studied magic for many centuries, and I recall stories of how the ancient wizards of Ildakar had a way of turning human beings into stone. Some of them even called themselves sculptors. They did not merely use convicted criminals, but also warriors defeated in their great game arena. Such statues were used for decoration.”

He drew his thumb and forefinger down his smooth chin. “This kind of magic did more than transmute flesh into marble, like an alchemical reaction. No, this spell was another form of magic that allowed the slowing and stopping of time, petrifying flesh as if thousands of centuries had passed. I need to consider this further.”

For the rest of that day, Nicci and her companions learned that there were many other towns in the mountains connected by a network of roads, and many of those villages had been served by the same traveling magistrate. Nicci feared that the Adjudicator had petrified other people as well, but with the spell now broken those populations would also be reviving.

Perhaps this entire part of the Old World had just reawakened.…

“Saving the world, just as the witch woman predicted, Sorceress,” Nathan mused.

“You had as much to do with that as I did,” she said.

He merely shrugged. “A good deed is still a good deed, wherever the credit lies. I left the People’s Palace to go help people, and I am happy to do so.”

Nicci could not disagree.

The unsettled townspeople drifted apart to explore their abandoned homes and find their lives again. Nicci, Nathan, and Bannon joined the innkeeper and his wife for a meal of thin oat porridge made from a small sack of grain that had remarkably not gone bad.

Bannon remained extremely distraught, though, and he struggled in vain to find his contentment and peace again. He was short-tempered, skittish, brooding, and finally when they were alone in one of the inn’s dusty side rooms, Nicci asked him, “I can tell you are still suffering from the ordeal. What did you see when you were trapped in stone? The spell is broken now.”

“I’ll be fine,” Bannon said in a husky voice.

She pressed him, though. “The expression of guilt on your face looked worse than when you told us about Ian and the slavers.”

“Yes, it was worse.”

Nicci waited for him, encouraging him with her silence until he blurted out, “It was the kittens! I remember a man from my island. He drowned a sack of kittens.” Bannon looked away from her before continuing. “I tried to stop him, but he threw the kittens into a stream, and they drowned. I wanted to save them but I couldn’t. They mewed and cried out.”

Nicci thought of all the terrible things she’d endured, the guilt that she had lifted and cast away, the blood she had shed, the lives she had destroyed. “That is the greatest guilt you feel?” She didn’t believe him. A greater halo of pain than what had happened with Ian?

His hazel eyes flashed with anger as he spun to her. “Who are you now, the Adjudicator? It’s not up to you to measure my guilt! You don’t know how much it broke my heart, how bad I felt.” He stalked away to find one of the unoccupied rooms where he could bed down for the night. “Leave me alone. I never want to think about it again.” He closed the door against her continuing questions.

Nicci looked at his retreating form, trying to measure the truth of what he had said, but there was something wrong about Bannon’s eyes, about his expression. He was hiding the real answer, but she decided not to press him for now, although she would need to know sooner or later.

Everyone here in Lockridge had been through their own ordeal. Weary, she went to find her own bed. She hoped that they would all have a quiet sleep, untroubled by nightmares.