Authors: Bre Faucheux
22
Outside Strasbourg
April 1348
A Few Days later
Madison rode horseback for three days straight. She wanted badly to leave her horse or give it to a local villager, but she knew she was better with it. A woman travelling alone was suspicious enough. A woman wandering without a horse would lead people to other notions. Jayden was only a day in front of her headed for the east.
The woods were darker than she anticipated. The trees towered above her taller than she knew they could grow. The steep hills were beginning to bear down heavily on the horse. She imagined she would come near a mountain range within a day or two. Staying near the large river flowing through the land, she came across several small villages and hamlets, leaving small bits of the rayen wherever possible as people slept. The more she saw, the more she came to see why Lyndon didn’t choose to follow her. The sight of all the dead was enough to make a normal man’s will break. For Lyndon’s blood thirst, it would only be a temptation.
The hills became rockier as she climbed towards the town she hoped was coming near. She dismounted her horse along the side of the woods so he could graze for food. She could locate him again easily when she needed him. She found herself growing affection for horses. Their strength and speed mirrored her own. But she desperately wanted to feel the ground beneath her again as she ran through the heavy woods. A mist drifted over the soil just before dawn. The inability to see where her feet were planting themselves was exhilarating as she travelled faster than the horse could have managed.
The map that Lyndon had drawn for her leading to Ascot’s family was so incredibly plain that she sensed she would have to find the city on her own. But she could smell the rayen. She found the trail that Lyndon had left behind. Having dropped small amounts of blood in the ground every so often as he went, she was able to smell it from a great distance away. The flowers continued to grow where he had plucked the previous petals. This flower was everywhere for her to find. Jayden and her would never be without it. Drying them as she travelled, she made certain that every well, stream, and river had at least a trace of it to be found. If Lyndon was uncertain of which towns he missed, she saw this as absolutely necessary.
It was only a matter of hours after she had abandoned her horse and trailed the mountain ranges for the rayen flowers that she came across the village that met his description, and slightly similar to the location on her map. Lyndon had drawn it on a leather pouch with the only ink he could find, leaving some parts smudged.
She walked on a mound and found a city guarded by a stone wall. It was as Lyndon had described it. A cathedral lay within the center, as if it were there to protect all the villagers below. Its appearance was dark and somewhat unnerving. The stones themselves were not a natural color. The structure exerted a power that she had only felt when looking at the cliff off the bow of her ship months ago. She wondered for a moment if the cathedral had been painted at one point, and then left for ruin. Or perhaps if the structure had been left unfinished after plague had struck.
Outside the walls were poles posted high. Ropes were placed near with hay and sticks gathered around each thick post. She concluded they were meant to tie horses outside the city walls. But no horses were tied nearby.
She could only hear a few people carousing behind the city walls. She lengthened her senses to gain an inkling of what was happening within its tall fortifications. People were beginning to stir slightly as dawn approached, yet darkness still covered the city. The sun had not yet reached over the hills to touch the rooftops. Only a few men walked about to light torches along the alleyways of the city. She imagined this was done for those workers who had to rise early, waiting for dawn to creep upon them. She almost always heard tears of loved ones lost on a given day. But this fortified city had no such sounds. There were no cries of sadness. It appeared calm.
She descended down to the city and observed a stream circling its edge. She gently spread the rayen from her pocket into it and jumped across it with ease. She looked forth to the stone wall before her. Double her height, she leapt to its edge and planted her hands and feet upon its flat surface. Her black cloak covered her face so no one could see her. She observed as much as she could. The town was unique in its structure, almost beautiful in fact. Homes were white with timber wood carving out their edges and sides with great detail. They were taller than buildings she had seen throughout regions nearby. The rooftops varied in shades of red and blue, with crosses and other metals works towering over many of the structures. The green pastures and hills nearby with the river going alongside it made it a perfect area for a quaint city. Even she admired its location and beauty. It was certainly unique amongst the other towns and hamlets she had passed in previous weeks.
To add to its uniqueness, there were no bodies lying within the streets as she had previously seen. Nor were there mass graves being dug near the city’s outskirts. It seemed as though the sickness had not found its way here. Perhaps Lyndon had been wrong. His rayen had reached this city’s heavy walls.
She leapt from the edge of the stone wall and walked to the nearby clay and wooden houses. The name that Lyndon had told her was still prominent in her mind, Ascot. Knowing how the people within smaller towns had grown weary of travelers that could spread disease, she thought it best not to openly search for him by asking where he lived. Her knowledge of the language was not adept enough to ask for much more or understand a response, but she hoped that her senses would guide her, or the scent of the rayen.
Madison allowed herself to listen carefully for everything around her. Within walking distance was an alehouse with a few men making their way back to their homes. They had obviously drunk all night. She continued to walk forward down the stone path along the city center. It was by far the cleanest one she had ever seen. With death everywhere else she had visited, she wasn’t accustomed to not having to pick up her feet every few paces to be certain she did not step in something undesirable. Nor did she need to lift her hem to avoid dragging dirt with her.
Madison had
n’t walked a long distance before she suddenly heard the sound she was looking for, the sound of cries and screams. She stopped to listen closer. These were different from the others. They were not cries of distress or grief. They were cries of fear and pain. She hadn’t known many of the sick to suffer a great deal as the disease killed so quickly and weakened so dramatically. This almost sounded as if the cries were coming from within something.
She lengthened her hearing to within a quarter mile around her. The city itself was only perhaps a half mile long in length, but the sound was still unclear and muffled. Realizing the problem she felt her legs give a little beneath her in realization. The sound was indeed coming from within something. It was inside the cathedral cascading before her. The stone designs gave a macabre feel to the air around her without hearing what lay within it. The sound of screams pierced over every other sound within the region to Madison’s ears. A dungeon lay deep within it.
Suddenly Madison felt yet another emotion she didn’t know herself capable of feeling anymore. She thought herself numb to it since she had awoken to find the monks within the monastery dead all about her. She was frightened, and perhaps even nervous. The large wooden poles outside the city’s walls were not meant for horses. These people meant to burn whoever was in the cathedral. Behind gagged mouths, they were screaming for their lives.
Madison stood for what felt like minutes trying to decide what to do. She risked revealing herself in trying to find them within the cathedral’s thick walls. She didn’t care what they had done or what their crime had been. She only cared that this was no way she could perceive anyone deserving to die. The screams of her village being burned to the ground still rang loud in her memory.
She went from house to house. Not one had the red mark from door to door, revealing which houses had been affected by plague. This city had indeed been left unscathed by the pestilence. The people were scared of it coming through. Without a doubt those in the cathedral had to be offenders thought it bring it with them. Or so she assumed.
She approached the men walking in front of her. They were headed for the cathedral and not their homes. Looking at them closer, they were less like drunken workers and more like guards. Dressed in light armor and draped with cloaks much like hers, she imagined they knew what was taking place. She did her best to discern what they were saying, but her understanding of the language was not what it needed to be.
She suddenly stopped where she stood. There were four more men behind her. She had sensed the few people around, but they all began to approach her at once. One called the few men in front. They spoke a few sentences to each other, and both men then turned to look at Madison. She was still fully cloaked, and determined not to let them see her eyes. She walked forward intending to pass them as if she hadn’t heard them, but they began to close in on her. She thought of running back to the city walls, knowing they wouldn’t be able to catch her. She kept her eyes cast downward so they couldn’t see them. Nothing but her cloak revealed about her, she allowed them no trace of pale skin from under the fabric. Had she thought to look at them, she would have noticed their coloring had a likeness to hers. She pushed her senses through the men just before her to see their intent. If their words made no sense to her as they called out to her, their emotions would no doubt reveal them.
She jerked her head up in astonishment. These were no mere men.
Madison’s feet moved with speed she hadn’t used since running from the Vam-pyr-ei-ak. She sped away to the city wall. Not bothering to leap for its edge this time, she threw her body forward to surpass its height completely. A heavy rock like force met her in the air and hit her back, wrapping its arms around her. She hit the ground beneath her and it gripped her even tighter. She couldn’t move under his weight. Their force left a gaping hole in the earth. She tried desperately to wrench herself from his hold. But others grabbed for her arms and roughly wrestled them to her back, tying them tightly with a spiked metal chain. She felt it dig into her skin so deep that it couldn’t heal. Her skin tried desperately to crawl over her wounds, but it only embedded the sharp edges into her skin. They turned her right side up, causing the metal to dig even deeper into her arms and hands behind her. She cried out in pain. One man took the remaining chain and lodged it into her mouth, cutting the sides of her lips and cheek. When she tried to close her mouth to stop them, the spikes had the same effect. The barbs gripped to her jaws.
The man who tackled her to the ground lifted her up with ease and thrust her on his shoulder.
The more Madison tried to writhe her way off his body, the more the chains dug into her skin. Her cries were loud enough to awaken sleeping people near the city’s edge. The men leapt over the stone wall as easily as she had and began to walk toward the half-built cathedral.
Men, women and children peered from outside windows and opened their doors enough to see what was happening. Madison could feel their eyes gaze on her. The man carrying her said words to them. Something to the effect that one had tried to escape, and to stay in their homes. The man carrying her wasn’t immune to her picking up on his emotions. He wished for them to stay inside until the burnings began.
Madison could clearly sense the mind of this man with her in tow. He and the other men behind him, seven in total, were just like her. They had been turned into the same beastly creature as she.
She tried to lift her head to see where she was being taken, although it was obvious that she would be imprisoned with the others. She couldn’t see the path or the passageway through the cathedral she was being carried through. There were so many steps that she lost count, and the cries of others caged like animals was all that she could decipher in the darkness only lite by a few torches. She heard a metal door being opened by a chain wheel just a few feet from her. She could barely see above the men’s feet, but the dungeon’s doors had the same spikes along the metal. The sharp points were small in shape, but effective. She wouldn’t be able to break through the cell without serious effort, nor without escaping her chains, which lodged deeper into her skin when the man dropped her onto the cold stone floor. She spit out blood from her mouth onto the ground and coughed in an attempt to get out some she had swallowed.
She heard the chained cell door drop behind her as she was left gagging with no one to hear her. But one man stayed behind. He motioned for the others to leave him alone with her, and they did so.
The man kneeled down and gazed at her. Whoever he was, she knew that he had not yet mastered what she and Jayden had. He couldn’t shield his emotions or intentions from her.
He observed her
, and then reached for the ground in front of her. She saw him remove his black glove and gently touch the blood she had spurted out. Covering his fingers with it, he removed his hood and brought it to his mouth, relishing the taste of it.