Pentimento, Nick Kyme [each kindness read aloud TXT] 📗

Hide your taint.

The cold command froze him, as it had done so often over the years. Whenever he’d reached for his secret strength, that soul-deep imperative had been waiting. It was his only memory of his lost life, which made it both precious and terrible. Time and time again it had forced him to withdraw into meek silence while the dirty tide of abuse washed over him – the insults and the beatings and worse. He’d never once pushed back or tried to reshape the crude clay of the villagers’ spirits into something gentler. Never let himself become more than a ghost.

I’m done with hiding, he decided. Done with them.

‘I’m going,’ he said, twisting free of Padraig’s grip. In the same instant he jabbed out with his mind. Though he only used a sliver of the power sheathed in his soul the thug recoiled with a yelp, as if he’d been struck.

‘You stay, you die,’ the boy warned the others. They couldn’t see what had happened, but he knew they’d felt it. The air had turned frigid, yet there was a bright tang to it, as though it was riddled with invisible energy. Agnieszka, the wizened seamstress, was moaning and he suspected Tivoli, the headman’s scribe, had soiled himself again.

‘Witch,’ Padraig croaked. ‘He’s a witch.’

Yes, the boy agreed, accepting the truth he’d always known. To his surprise he felt no shame, only exhilaration. He wasn’t a ghost any more.

Witch.

‘Yes,’ he confirmed aloud. ‘And I’ve seen what’s coming if you don’t listen to me.’

Dismissing them, he climbed the ladder at the pit’s centre then pressed against the trapdoor overhead, nudging it open a crack to peer outside. Moonlight spilled through, shockingly bright after the gloom, accompanied by the bitter cold of midwinter. While his eyes adjusted he tested the night with his subtler senses, ignoring the shivers coursing through his body. The psychic susurration of the beast continued its brooding, stentorian rhythm. It was still lost in whatever passed for slumber in its jagged soul.

But not for long, the boy gauged. The anger won’t let it be.

Blinking, he realised the cylindrical silo that once covered the pit had been wrenched from its moorings and hurled aside. It lay nearby, its planks splintered. The beast had come very close to their refuge, but something must have drawn it away before it spotted the trapdoor. Next time they wouldn’t be so lucky.

You know we’re hiding, don’t you? You’ve smelled us.

Down below Padraig was still muttering his accusation, but none of the others had taken it up. Once they would have turned on the ghost boy, maybe even tried to burn him alive, but the old order of things was broken. Even Padraig understood something worse than a witch had come among them.

‘Quiet,’ the boy hissed into the pit. He wasn’t surprised when the thug obeyed.

Gently he pushed himself through the trapdoor and crouched low, surveying the area. The grain pit was at the southern edge of the village, beside the looming bulk of the mill. Four sweeping wind-vanes jutted from the conical building’s face, motionless and unlikely ever to resume their rotations. No matter how things turned out, this place was done for.

The boy froze as the scene sank in. He’d known things would be bad, but seeing the horror made it real. Tonight was a triple-moon and the combined radiance of the Night’s Trinity was merciless in its clarity.

Truth is the sharpest knife. He didn’t know where the thought came from, which was often the way with his intuitions, but like all of them, its message was undeniable. There was truth here and it cut deep.

At least a dozen bodies were strewn about the mill’s yard, like blood-filled dolls savaged by a vicious child. Many were missing limbs or heads, while others had been torn into ragged, unrecognisable hunks of flesh. Frost had crept over the corpses, freezing twisted forms and spilt blood into white-dusted abstractions of butchery. One man had been pinned to the mill’s door with a fence post, the makeshift stake rammed through his chest like a giant’s nail. Another was draped over a wind-vane, viscera and crimson icicles dangling from his body in a petrified snarl that hung so low it almost touched the ground.

Yet despite the violence, the moonlit scene had a strange serenity about it. The chill air was perfectly still, as though the world had frozen alongside the dead, holding its breath.

Is this war? the boy wondered, staring at the carnage. The village elders had spoken the word in hushed tones, hinting at battles where thousands died in a single day to hold back the horrors that crawled from between the stars. But surely that couldn’t be true, could it? How could there be enough folk in all the worlds to pay such a price? And how could anything live between the stars, even monsters?

‘Why?’ Agnieszka had asked during their first hours in hiding. ‘Why?’

The old woman had mumbled the question over and over, though nobody had an answer. Things like this didn’t happen in the Hinterwylds. Bad things, yes – ugly, spiteful things were common, as the boy knew all too well – but nothing like this. Not monsters.

Why?

But maybe he had the answer now. Maybe the war had been lost and the God-Emperor’s grand armies had fallen. Maybe that’s why the monsters had found them.

‘No,’ he breathed, breaking the terrible train of thought. The Shining Ones who watched over their world wouldn’t let that happen. Even if the great war had been lost, their protectors would endure. They were eternal, Father Fairfield, the village pastor had promised. The Shining Ones had beaten death.

Maybe they’re tired of us, the boy thought suddenly. Maybe they’ve abandoned us. Then something even worse occurred to him. Maybe they were never there at all.

Nobody alive had actually seen the protector knights or travelled to their fabled fastness in the Fjordlands beyond the valley. All the villagers had to go on were the parables of the Saga Scintillant – wonderful, epic stories to