Prologue
Anne knew she should have shut her mouth the second the words left it.
By then it was too late, and Anne had moved into the recklessness of uncaring.
Anger sometimes makes people do that.
“I tell you we never had the problems we’re having now, before the Church came,” she was saying to the friend who ran the stall next to hers, loudly enough that the two guards, dressed in silver mail, standing in the center of the diamond-shaped town square could hear her.
A few other marketeers, mostly women her age, glanced over at her, but she was beyond feeling the tension from their stares. Her anger wouldn’t be silenced so easily. It seemed to flow up from the ground and through her, venting out like a volcano.
There was an eery breeze blowing over the village that day. Cold and blustery.
Even for a village in eastern New Moon, which was nestled at the bottom of the Balsamic Hills, this was unusual. The Balsamic Hills grew into the dark and lonely Folds of the World at the feet of the Wall of the World.
In wintertime, cold winds blew down from the folds and mingled with the cool, dry air from the west and the balmy weather from the south. The mountain winds usually pushed the warmer climes from the south down to their beaches, but the dry air from the west mingling with those cold winds often meant that the town's winter days were mild with very little snow.
It had been an exceptionally hot summer. The heat had settled over the little hills that marked the start of the Balsamics in a haze and covered the little, flat valleys that were cupped by those hills.
There had been no autumn.
The cold and aggressive mountain winds had come early instead and swirled around the town in fierce torrents. After the third blizzard, Anne’s stall stood empty in the town square.
Rumors swirled like snow in the night that she had been taken through the night to a secret place beneath the church.
The men worked twelve-hour shifts, day and night, turning the streets of the town into a maze of straight lines and intersections, like a series of interconnected crosses. They worked to eradicate the town’s old clay streets and structures.
They worked to turn the tide of evil that seemed to seep up from the hill, drawing demons and cold winds down from the mountains, but it was no use.
Every organic bend in the clay road, every old structure burned to the ground, seemed to only anger the hill.
Anne wanted to warn them of the danger, the uselessness of the workings, but the scold’s bridle they had fitted her with wouldn’t let her.
The bell she wore around her neck, and the old cloak she had been given, warned others away. No one would help.
No one would listen.
Others sensed the power growing beneath them, deep in the hill, awakening. None could see the images she was seeing. Of a tomb that lay buried far beneath the town. A curse. And a creature enshrouded like a mummy.
None could put them into words as she could, and of course, she could not speak.
She had grown thin and tired. The priests that had sentenced her to her fate had condemned her to wear the bridle until she dropped dead of starvation or exhaustion.
Her stomach had long since turned inwards on itself. Her mouth was parched and sore and it rankled. Her feet shuffled with dizziness and her body swayed with weakness.
She turned a corner. It was dark and she could hear shovels scraping against brick and the crumbling of mortar. She saw lanterns bobbing in the distance to her left like large fireflies.
The corner she turned led to one of the dead ends the builders had created, a wall of brick inlaid with grout.
She did not know it would be the last thing she would ever see, but she could feel something bubbling up from the hill far below her feet. A burst of power. It did not seep or creep up as it had in the past, but rather exploded up and all around.
The streets suddenly crawled with dark things. The wind howled. Anne smelled acrid smoke in the air, closing in on even the darkness, choking the streets around her.
Breathing through the scold’s Bridle became more difficult, than impossible.
She collapsed.
Somewhere in a darkened chamber, a whip cracked. It flayed skin, cracking it open to reveal a river of blood that dripped down a man’s back, glistening with sweat, to the floor.
Elsewhere a moan echoed throughout the dark chamber.
The priest had stripped off his cossack and stood naked, the leather nine o tails in one hand. He let it drop to the floor like a long horsetail.
He listened.
The sounds of digging and dirt sifting above had long ceased. Everything above was still. Had they finally abandoned the town above? Time would tell, once Inkar returned with supplies.
He hung the whip on the wall and buttoned his shirt. The blood wound would heal on its own with the light of the holy once he reached his chambers. He went to a door and opened it with a soft kachak. Inside was a low-ceilinged stone chamber. A large desk, carved of dark wood from forests in the Folds of the World, took up most of the space. A small bookcase was in one corner.
He took the cross down from its place on the wall above his desk and waved it like an incense burner over his body. Light particles drifted like dust from the motion, searching for the right spot. When they touched his back, they disappeared.
The priest pulled out his journal, then lifted his dip pen. He opened to a blank page, then waited. Even minutes after using the cross to heal his body, his back still stung as if the wounds there were still fresh, and the burning that usually meant it was healing was razor sharp. It was most unusual.
Inkar soon returned with his wagon laden with supplies. He carried them through the hay room and into the cellars.
“They’ve all gone,” he told the priest. “And it looks as if the whole town has been razed to the ground.”
“Cowards,” the priest snapped. “Listen Inkar, we must not give up here. If the darkness of this hill were to take such root, it could spread elsewhere. We must not let that happen. We will solve the mystery of this hill.”
Days turned to weeks, and weeks felt like years in darkness.
The cross had been corroded. Dark red and black spots covered it like leprosy, and the priest could no longer use its power to heal his wounds after flagellating himself.
Yet he wouldn’t give up.
Every day he found new ways to torture himself if that would make the evil here go away. And not just himself.
He looked down at Inkar, tied to a board on the floor at his feet. A scold’s bridle had been attached to his head. His eyes turned all over, wide with fear.
The priest leaned down and picked up a set of pliers. He opened them and then closed them as if he was clamping down on a nerve.
“You understand why this must be done, don’t you Inkar?”
Inkar cried through the bridle's bit, as the priest lowered the pliers to his groin. He began to pray while Inkar cried and thrashed.
The restless wind blew across the little graveyard, tussling the weeds that grew on the back of the hill, and flattening the grass that grew between the old tombstones. It had a secret to tell, and like a lonely person without a friend for many years, it waited for the right ear to come along.
It had been years since the town above had been abandoned. It had been more than years, but that made no difference to the ageless wind.
It was extra restless today, blowing and whistling through broken stained glass windows and around burnt timber.
Finally, it could sense someone was coming.
