The Road That Ran Past Vedast’s House

21st Day of Autumn

767 Karloman’s Peace

His journey through the streets of Werth was surreal.

The moment they passed through the inner gate, Cnut veered off the main promenade of the market sector and headed for the backroads. He clearly wanted as few people as possible to spot Ekkehard and the Angel. Yet, the Angel was not inconspicuous, and word quickly spread. Gawkers were drawn to the Reubkes' procession by the Angel, and some recognised the brothers walking ahead of it.

One such onlooker, a middle-aged man, spotted Ekkehard and, for reasons unknown, pushed past the guard to gift Ekkehard a winter coat. Despite the item being too thick for the time of year, Ekkehard accepted it and threw it over his ragged robes.

“Your wife was good to me,” the man told Ekkehard. “This city mourns her.”

Ekkehard had no words for the man. He was taken aback; he had never realised, never even noticed, how much his wife had done for the city's impoverished. Her generosity had earned Cnut's loyalty, but it appeared she had helped far more than just the captain. When Cnut had said the city had rioted upon learning what had happened to him and his family, Ekkehard had imagined it was because of Vedast, but now he realised they rioted for his wife.

For a moment, he felt Auriana's comforting presence once more. Before Ekkehard could thank the man, Cnut’s guards pulled him away, and they continued on.

An icy chill pierced Ekkehard’s very being, soaking into his bones and flesh, leaving him numb. Neither the midday sun nor the thick lining of the donated coat was enough to warm his soul after his eyes fell upon the horrifying display erected on the road that ran past Vedast’s house.

Lining the streets was a cruel monument to the whims of Hanib Agilolfing—a taunt for Ekkehard should he ever return and a warning to the people of Werth should they ever think to question the authority of the entitled again. The sight of it offended Ekkehard; it aggrieved him and made him feel heavy with the weight of victimhood. Disgust and despair filled the air as he took in its foulness. Seeing those he had loved and who had loved him used for such a base and terrible purpose made him feel sick. His stomach sank, his throat tightened, and his vision blurred like gelatinous rot running from a festering corpse.

“By the gods,” Ekkehard heard Florentin's trembling voice behind him. Gerwald whimpered. His brothers cast their eyes to the ground, averting their gaze rather than looking any longer upon it.

“No god had a hand in this,” Ekkehard stated. He did not look away. His hand gripped the spine of the Book of Heaven as he stepped further down the road and closer to the revolting scene. Holding it gave him some sense of resilience as if the knowledge within could give meaning to what was before him.

Two rows of wooden stakes raised parallel to one another, each several dozen posts long and jutting from either side of the road, had been anchored. The tips of each stake had been carved into a long sharp point and positioned to lean inwards, forming a grotesque conduit of horror that domed the street. Impaled on almost every stake was a rotting corpse, each having reached revolting stages of decomposition. Some had rotted enough already that their forms had liquefied and slipped free of their wooden bindings, turning into piles of mush.

A single wooden post had been erected in the centre of the road at the end of the macabre passage. That totem was the crown of Hanib’s cruel opus. Something indescribable was bound to the trunk, yet even from a distance, Ekkehard knew what it was. He also knew he would have to face that cruel reality, but he needn’t do so in a hurry.

This grim design had been laid out meticulously, just for him. Every element carried a message, a private insult, a poetic jibe, an ode written by Hanib with love and intended for Ekkehard. He would face every aspect of it and remember it. He would not insult the defiled by rushing its exposure. Ekkehard walked slowly toward the beginning of the tunnel.

“Wait here,” he instructed Cnut and his guards as he began his journey, taking the time to look upon each corpse and committing their visage to memory. Only the Angel and his brothers followed. Cnut, his guards, and the growing crowd of onlookers waited at a distance. No one dared intrude on this private moment of grieving. Ekkehard wondered if it was a sense of respect, or shame, that held the gawkers at bay.

Ekkehard stopped at the first mounted corpse. The man’s slack and degrading form hung a few feet in the air, the wooden spike upon which it had been impaled holding it aloft.

He looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun, at the dead man’s putrefied face. It hardly had one anymore. Most of the mass of its face had drained away, leaving behind the vestiges of a man’s features, now a ghoulish purple. Lesions had burst across it, and various swarming insects feasted on what little tissue remained. An eye socket had become a nesting house for writhing, sandy-coloured maggots. Its teeth had fallen out, and its head lolled forward from its torso. The remains of its skin looked moist, glistening with putrescence, as if it was slowly draining away. The wind and rain of recent storms had done nothing to preserve the humanity this vessel had once contained.

A pungent, wet odour emanated from the thing, a fetid malaise that repulsed. Ekkehard endured its assault on his senses, determined to give the man the honour he had been callously denied.

He wondered who this man had been. Had he known him? He must have been one of Vedast’s men, but did Ekkehard work with him regularly? Had he followed Ekkehard and supported him in collecting debts? Had Audomar trained him to fight? Was he a numbers man reporting to Florentin, or did he work in the cutting rooms? Had Ekkehard even known his name?

He would never know. There wasn’t enough of the man left to recognise. Yet, whoever this man was, he had died defending Ekkehard and his kin. Ekkehard loved the man for that. Shame gripped him as it occurred to him that he had yet to do anything worthy of that sacrifice. “Thank you, my friend,” Ekkehard whispered to the departed, placing a hand on the slick wetness of what remained of the man’s foot.

Ekkehard took the time to look upon every disintegrating face, crossing from one side of the street to the other and back again. Several times, he paused to compose himself, suppressing an urge to vomit and choking on the rankness of the air. Each of the bodies had been stripped, denying even clothing that could identify them. Most had reached such late stages of decomposition that their sex had become lost in the dissolving flesh. Hanib had stripped them of everything, reducing them to nothing but a symbol of his dominance.

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Yet, Ekkehard honoured each and every one of them. He looked at what remained, committing their forms to memory and vowing to be their instrument of vengeance. These men had died trying to save his family. He owed them a reckoning, and although the Book of Heaven had shown him the triviality of that pursuit, it was a debt he would see paid. The divine purpose the tome's pages had whispered to him could wait. His past accounts had to be settled first.

There was an outlier among the bodies, one different from the others. All but one of the wooden stakes had been positioned at an angle, their points directed inward toward the middle of the road. One, however, stood upright, marking its significance. Outside the doorway leading into Vedast’s home, a corpse had been run through by this wooden peg. The body had been nailed and bound to the post to ensure it would remain in place for as long as entropy allowed. The skull had been twisted backwards unnaturally, allowing the stake to jut outward through an open mouth as if it had entered the body through one orifice and left via another.

Although nothing left within the corpse resembled the essence of the man it once was, Ekkehard knew in his heart whose body hung before him. He reached out a trembling hand but pulled away at the last second before it touched the remains of Audomar Reubke. Hanib had given his body this place of prominence, second only to his totem crown.

Ekkehard’s gaze dropped to the floor. He needed a moment to collect himself, to steel his heart and mind before taking in the full image of his despoiled brother.

Memories of the man Audomar had been rushed through Ekkehard’s thoughts. The brave leader of warriors who had led him safely through the Merchant’s Rebellion, the eldest son who had taken on the mantle of their father’s leadership at too young an age, the brother who had always looked out for him. Audomar had a way of making you feel invulnerable—and now he was dead.

He inhaled deeply, immediately regretting it as his lungs rejected the rancid air. He choked and spat out a vile taste that had built in the back of his throat. Then, despite his resisting muscles, he forced himself to look upon the wasting remains of his eldest brother. What had once been an untouchable juggernaut of a warrior was reduced to a festering collection of dissolving meat. As he took in that ghastly image, his hands tightened into fists, and his jaw clenched hard as tears began to build in the corners of his eyes. The cocktail of emotions flooding him was overwhelming. Sadness and grief at the loss of his brother reigned supreme, but there was also anger and self-loathing.

“You’re a bastard,” Ekkehard said to Audomar’s body. “I needed you. I still need you. And you fucking died on me. You fucking bastard.”

Over the last year, his relationship with his brother has been fraught with friction and tumult. Yet, Ekkehard always remembered the brother who had been there for him so many times and longed to stand side by side with that man again. He hated Audomar for leaving him to face the terrible trials to come alone. He loved him for the trials he had already helped Ekkehard overcome.

“I loved you, brother,” he whispered, bowing his head.

Ekkehard heard Gerwald's stifled snivelling behind him. His two remaining brothers had also recognised Audomar. Both were doing their best to remain strong in the face of this horror. I shouldn’t have brought you along for this horrid spectacle, Ekkehard thought. He had chosen to endure it and, in doing so, had brought that fate upon them as well. He regretted that and considered for a moment telling them to return and wait with the guards, sparing them further travesty.

Then he dismissed the idea, his grip tightening into fists. They needed to see this. They needed to know what the evil of this world really was. They needed to understand the pointlessness of it all. He needed it to fuel them, to anger and enrage them. He needed them to hate until the hate burned so brightly within them that it consumed all other emotions. This was to be their rebirth as much as it was his.

Ekkehard squared his back and shoulders, looked at Audomar’s body one final time, and silently bade it farewell. We will never meet again; the words flowed through his mind with such certainty that his brother’s loss felt even heavier. His attention was then drawn to the two corpses hanging on either side of his late brother. One was portly, and the other had a more feminine frame, possibly the first woman he had seen among the dead. Vedast and Svanhildr, he concluded, the man and lady of the house, placed on either side of the entryway, ready to welcome guests into their home.

“You have my most humble apologies,” Ekkehard said to them. “Grace was your death sentence. It was not deserved.”

“What?” Florentin asked, his tone solemnly muted.

“Nothing,” Ekkehard replied. His words hadn’t been for the living.

He continued down the road, examining each body until he reached the centrepiece, the highlight of Hanib’s masterpiece. Leaving the last roadside bodies behind, Ekkehard marched to the centre of the road and turned to face the totem. His head slowly rose, his eyes scanning up the thick wooden trunk until they rested upon the decaying feet of his murdered wife.

His whole body shook and trembled as he stood at the foot of the totem. He knew this was coming. He had seen this focal point of Hanib’s display the moment he arrived and had put off facing it for as long as he could. Ekkehard had hoped that examining the previous bodies would numb him to the terrible truth of this final exhibition. He had been wrong.

Taking a deep breath, he forced his arm to reach out and grabbed his fallen wife’s ankle. The flesh was slick and gungy, his fingers sinking into the concaving mass until they touched the bones beneath, and the last of his wife’s essence ran across his hand. Bracing himself as best he could, he looked up at the horrifying state she had been left in.

His lip quivered. His eyes welled with tears that flooded his cheeks in the space of a heartbeat. An involuntary whine, like the pleading of a pathetic animal, escaped from Ekkehard’s throat. His legs gave way, his balance abandoning him. He released her ankle, sticky black flesh clinging to his hand as he tried to brace himself against the wooden post. He fell to his knees. As he did, his other hand released the Book of Heaven, and his body went cold, his grief flooding him like a breaking dam. Looking up at her, he wailed.

Unlike the other bodies, Auriana had not been left nude to the elements, nor was she wearing the yellow dress from the day she died. She had been garbed in a pink union gown as if on her wedding day. Tight strands of silk were wrapped around her body, with frills and waves of thin translucent material left to blow in the wind. The ensemble was dirtied by blood and decay. She had not been impaled but rather was bound to the post with colourful ribbons as if in celebration. It gave the impression of a wrapped gift.

Her form held up slightly better than the other corpses, perhaps due to the care she had been presented with. Her body was headless, although her head was not missing; it had been relocated. The dress she wore had been opened and peeled back at the midriff to display the majesty of her pregnant womb. Her belly had been cut open by Hanib when he removed their daughter from her dead body. Sewn in the infant’s place, between the folded-back layers of the stomach, rested Auriana's rotting head.

Little of her features had survived. The teeth that once beamed with her smile were gone. The pale blue of her eyes was now sunken away, leaving nothing but pitted black voids. Her sandy blonde hair had mostly fallen out, leaving her nearly bald. What was left was a black and purple mass of slimy skin resting on depleted tissue that vaguely resembled his wife’s face. Maggots and other carrion insects writhed and crawled within her belly, feasting on the little of her essence that remained.

Ekkehard sobbed; flashes of the life they and their murdered children would now never have raced through his mind. He began to scream, hoarse exclamations of grief interrupting his wailing. His brothers were driven back a few steps by the tempest of his anguish. His cries carried down the road that ran past Vedast’s house, terrifying all who heard them. Only the Red Angel, waiting patiently beside Ekkehard’s brothers, seemed unaffected by Ekkehard’s violent lament.