Jack Whyte - The Singing Sword

"I went to him and told him you were out, but I don't think he even heard me. He looked awful, Publius. His hair was standing on end and his eyes were..." She broke off and raised a hand to her mouth as though to stop the words she knew would come out next. "Oh, Publius, I have never seen such eyes — filled with so much pain and rage and grief."

My mouth had gone dry and I could hear my heart beating in time to the dread wings fluttering in my gut.

"Then what? What did he say?"

"Nothing. Or almost nothing. He stopped shouting and looked around, blinking his eyes as though he didn't know where he was. Then he looked at me, and his face — I don't know how to describe it, Publius — it darkened, and he asked me, 'Did you know?' Then he looked around him again, and up at the skylight, and then he ran down the stairs and away, shouting your name."

"And no one followed him? You simply let him go?"

"At first, yes. We were all amazed, and he had a horse outside. I regained my wits as soon as he had gone and sent Paul the groom to follow him, but by then it was too late; Paul could not find him."

"Blood, Luceiia. You said there was blood. How much and where? Was it his own?"

She shook her head in an abrupt negative, as though dismissing my question. "I couldn't tell. He wore a cloak, fastened to the neck, covering him completely. I only saw a glimpse of his tunic, and it looked black. It was not until I saw his legs and feet, as he went out the door into the sunlight, that I saw it for what it was. Publius, his legs were covered in blood."

"Where was Cay during all this? And where is he now?"

Again the headshake. "He's not here. He went out earlier with a man, an old friend of his, who came here about noon. I don't know who he was. I was busy with the children and did not see him. Anyway, the servants said he was a stranger, but Cay knew him well from long ago. The two of them went off somewhere and have not come back."

"Sweet Christ!" I was already limping to the door as quickly as I could move, shouting back over my shoulder, "Call Equus and assemble a mounted party and make sure there's wagons and a medic with them. Tell them to meet me at the Villa Titens as quickly as they can, and you stay here!"

My horse still stood in the yard where I had left him. I flung myself across his back and had him running before I was properly seated. He was a strong animal and ready for another run. Now I whipped him to a gallop and put him to the shortest route towards the home of Dom and his faithless wife.

It took me half an hour, at full speed, to get there, and I was careless now of the poor brute beneath me, abusing him cruelly in my fear. As I went, I fought with my own imagination, telling myself it could not be as bad as I was fearing.

The first sign of tragedy was waiting for me at the villa gate: Carlos, Dom's manservant of many years, lay sprawled and disembowelled across my path. Behind him, some paces distant, lay another corpse, unknown to me. I looked further and saw more, four in all, in the entrance court. It looked like the aftermath of a raid, and I told myself Dom had been unmanned by discovering the scene unexpectedly, but even as my mind formed the thought I knew I was only deluding myself again. Dom, my gentle friend, had done this in the grip of madness.

The last of the corpses, this one a young woman, sprawled stiffly in her dried blood on the steps leading to the portico of the house itself, and I paused there, outside the door, dreading to enter, fearing what I would find. Rather than look too closely at the dead woman by my feet, I looked up at the sky. Night was approaching and heavy clouds had rolled in from the west, gravid with rain. Perfect, I thought. You will need all your rain to wash away the blood here on this ground. I drew my sword, for what reason I knew not, pushed open the doorway and stepped through into Hades itself.

A soldier grows inured to the sight of blood. It is part of his life; the spilling of it part of his occupation; and as he accepts blood and the spilling of it, he accepts as well the effluvia and the ordure that go hand in hand with the abrupt and violent, brutal severance of life. He learns to accept and ignore the stench of voided bowels and bladders; he sees without seeing the liverish, blue-white-purple glisten of entrails, and the sharp, pungent stink of visceral fluids assaults his nostrils only in passing. The soldier is endowed with this detachment in the same way that iron is tempered: by being immersed in fire and then beaten with heavy hammer blows. His tempering is in the fury and the terrors of battle, where nothing may survive in his mind that might distract him from his most sacred, dedicated need: to survive.

Remove the stimulus of dire, frenzied struggle, however, and transport the man, along with all the chaotic slaughter of the battlefield, into the confines of a quiet, spacious, well-lit family home, and you amplify ten-thousandfold all the cumulative horrors he has been able to ignore throughout his life. The result is waking nightmare: horror and loathing beyond description.

I had never really known, in spite of all my experience, just how much blood can spill from human bodies. Every wall in the interior of that house, it seemed to me, was polluted with blood: it was everywhere, smeared and splashed in thick, dark gouts from which grim trickles ran towards the floor, which was completely awash in thick, black, coagulated sheets and puddles of gore. It was a scene from Tartarus, lacking only leering, gibbering demons. I would not have been surprised to see demons. I looked for them, but only their minions were present, the flies. Beelzebub himself, the Lord of the Flies, had been here recently but was now gone, and only his servants remained, their buzzing drone filling the air like the moans of tormented souls.

I stood just inside the open portal, my feet in blood, as though I had frozen to the floor, and my scalp crawled and I found myself fighting to draw breath as the scene seemed to revolve slowly around me. I counted seven bodies, all household servants, all butchered horribly. The broad stairway to the second floor, the stairway where I had first seen Cylla touch herself, was a dried river of blood. I made a mighty effort and succeeded in flexing my fingers, which gripped my sword hilt so tightly that they were in pain, and then I moved toward the stairs, looking down to place my feet carefully, trying to ignore the charnel-house around me.

There was another young woman lying at the top of the stairs. She had been almost completely decapitated and it was her blood that drenched the steps. Cylla's bedchamber lay along the passage to my right, Dom's to my left.

I went to Dom's room first, turning the handle cautiously and pushing the door open with my foot. It swung back slowly, revealing an empty chamber, clean and miraculously free of blood.

It seemed to take me an age to retrace my steps, past the dead girl at the stair head and along to Cylla's room, where I found the door wide open. An open window faced the door directly and I saw the curtains stirring sluggishly, too heavy with dried blood to flap in the strengthening breeze from outside. I stepped inside and vomited immediately, my whole being revolted at the sight that greeted me.

Cylla and someone — I presumed her young deaf-mute — had been destroyed on the bed, hacked and slashed almost beyond recognition, and their dismembered bodies piled together in a heap. In my first glance I saw severed arms and legs, a gutted male torso, and Cylla's head, wide-eyed and screaming, her lustrous hair glued to her skull with blood and her lips drawn back from her bloodied teeth in a rictus of terrified realization of what was happening to her. All of that I saw, and then I threw up, bending over with my hands upon my knees, my sword still gripped bone-tight. Reeling with nausea, and fearing I might fall into the blood, I staggered backward, groping behind me for something to support my weight, and I found Dom. My hand touched his face, warm and alive, and I recoiled with a scream of fright, my sword arm swinging high to strike my assailant down.