Chapter 38

Katarina was borne aloft by a crowd of angry people. She struggled, but they held her overhead in implacable grips as the tide of people rushed forward. Try as she might, she could not catch sight of those that carried her, she could not break free, and while she couldn't hear them directly, the mutters themselves were indistinct, but she knew that they were furious with her indiscretion.

Katarina struggled to free herself from their grips.

The crowd carried her above their shoulders up to some stone bench, a judgement seat soaring to the sky, and there they held her aloft while some Lady Judge peered down at her.

There was a brilliant light set just behind the woman's head, obscuring her features and eclipsing her face in shadow.

"Lady Katarina." The voice called down imperiously. The angry crowd stilled, but Katarina still couldn't move, despite her furious struggles.

"Justicar Witch Hunter, Inquisitor of the Inquisition of the Golden Lady, Paladin and Lady of the Church. Your titles and accomplishments are as significant as they are admirable." The voice called down.

Katarina struggled again, but she couldn't move an inch.

"Do you know the catechisms?" The woman's voice called down, and Katarina glared back defiantly while struggling.

"Of course I do!" She shouted back hotly.

"'I have created you to feel pain'" The woman began expectantly.

"So that you might find joy!" Katarina replied.

"'Search for'." The lady replied dryly. "It goes, 'I have created you to feel pain, that you might search for joy.'" she quoted down at Katarina.

"So?" Katarina demanded, struggling in the arms of her captors. Their grips were implacable and she couldn't move at all.

"I have created you to know fear". The woman began expectantly.

"-that you may seek shelter." Katarina completed.

"Very good." the Lady Judge replied.

"Are you going to tell me what this is about?" Katarina demanded. "Why am I being held like this? What crime have I committed? Who is my accuser?"

"I have created you to hunger-" The woman began and trailed off expectantly.

"-that you might eat." Katarina finished. "I'm not going to play this game if you're not going to explain-" She started

"You were made broken-" The woman interjected, overriding Katarina's argument.

"Fuck you." Katarina sneered contemptuously.

"You were made broken-" The woman began again, a note of warning in her voice.

Katarina clamped her lips shut and refused to answer.

"You will answer, Katarina." the Judge demanded, her voice hard.

"You were made broken-" The judge repeated again.

"-that you may seek to become one." Katarina finished tightly.

"Very good, Katarina." The judge replied gently. "I have made you for labor-" She began, and Katarina immediately frowned.

"That is not one of the Holy Catechisms." Katarina replied immediately. The woman laughed at this and flung out her hand. Bizarrely, a cascade of lilies showered over her.

"I have made you for labor, that you seek out play." The judge urged gently.

"Play?" Katarina recoiled as if the word was sour in her mouth.

"A person cannot live on duty and obligation Katarina." The judge said gently. "You know this. We need love, compassion, and just as importantly, play." The woman suddenly appeared seated next to Katarina, but she still couldn't see the other woman's face.

"The more complex the labor, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." She explained gently.

A window appeared in the monolithic slab of stone that the judge presided from, and the woman opened it, revealing a scene of Katarina sharing pleasure with the saloon girl. Katarina looked away, ashamed.

"Why do you look away, Katarina?" The woman asked. "You have broken no law, no rule, no precept or catechism. You have done nothing wrong. Why feel guilt or shame?"

Katarina struggled, and the woman eyed her. "You struggle to be free." She observed.

"I don't want to be here." Katarina replied. "I don't even-" She trailed off. "What is this? Where am I?"

The woman laughed and clapped her hands. "You are here because you're on trial." She replied simply. "You are being held and restrained by the idea that you have done something wrong." She explained with a flippant wave. "As soon as you let go, they will let go." She added.

"That doesn't make sense." Katarina snapped. "Let me go!"

"I'm not the one that has you in their grip, Katarina." The woman replied. "Look at your captors."

Katarina turned her head until her neck strained, and her eyes widened in shock. They were all her, stone-faced, imperious, cold, eyes like chips of jade, jaws clenched in furious anger. She turned to look at the Judge.

"Why do you feel as if you did wrong?" The woman asked curiously.

"It was wrong." Katarina replied simply.

"How?" The woman queried.

"There was no love in that act." Katarina replied after a long moment. "All love must bloom under the Golden Lady." She added, but shook her head. "That wasn't love. That was... rutting. It's grotesque. Disgusting." She spat.

The woman shook her head. "Nothing that was done was wrong. And stop thinking about the rules all the time!" She shouted at Katarina, who recoiled at the sudden outburst.

"Who are you?" Katarina asked, and the woman rose to her feet, standing on nothing. The crowd that held Katarina up, that held her hands and arms and legs suddenly released her, causing her to fall.

Katarina bolted upright, and slammed her head smartly on the underside of her cart. She cried out, and rolled out of her bedroll clutching her head. Suddenly, a ripple of nausea washed over her, and Katarina clenched her teeth. "Not again!" She shouted, and then doubled over and vomited anyway. She washed her mouth out, then took a drink of water, only to vomit it back up a second later.

"I thought I was supposed to head into the forest." She complained, and heaved again. She writhed on the ground as some strange seizure came over her, all her muscles seizing and spasming. She couldn't breathe, her heart jittered and clenched in her chest, she couldn't scream, and then suddenly that horrid crawling-insect feeling washed over her, from the tips of her toes to her scalp. She thrashed and flailed, twisted and flopped about.

Awareness gradually came back to her. She was laying on her back, staring up at a sky that indicated midday. Her muscles were at turns taut and tender, and she was sore all over. Whatever was happening to her was getting worse. The visions were troubling by themselves, but they were dreams. The vomiting, and now this- whatever it was- seemed to be an escalation.

She'd caught no sign of the missing men. There was the mage- or the mages- she added, but perhaps they could wait. She tried to roll over, and surprised herself with how easy it was. Whatever was happening to her, the discomfort didn't last long, it seemed.

She tested her stomach with some water from her canteen. When that stayed down, she unpacked some foodstuffs from her cart and cooked herself a meal.

"Goddess, if you're listening, I'm terrified." She murmured in prayer, "I just lost half the day. If this were to happen in a fight, I would be lost. If this happened while I were travelling, I could fall to my death." She began to seriously consider heading to Darnell. She was compromised. Regardless of whether it was magical influence or some natural illness that just happened to coincide with waking in the mornings, she shouldn't realistically be spending any sort of time in the woods alone, by herself. She needed to seek proper assistance from a properly trained priestess.

She let out a shaky breath. "All right. No matter what, no matter the circumstances. If it happens again, I will abandon my hunt and go to Darnell. No excuses." She decided. She cleaned up her campsite, buried her fire, and coaxed her horse into the cart's traces. The mare really, really didn't like pulling the cart.

She had only made it a few miles into the forest when she caught scent of something indescribably foul, something rancid and disgusting. Her face had barely enough time to screw itself up in disgust when her entire cart was flipped over violently.

Something slammed into her cart, knocking it over. Her horse let out a terrified screaming whinney that pierced Katarina's ears.

She rolled, pulling her gun, and fetching up against a tree sharply. She cursed in pain, and pushed herself up.

Her cart was tipped over, the contents scattered. Either the cart was robust, or whatever had hit the cart had flipped it. Her horse thrashed in the traces, unable to right itself. Katarina approached her horse, gun drawn, and then recoiled as something thrashed about on the ground, flinging leaves and twigs about and screeching with a burbling voice.

It was disgusting, a deep purplish red, the color of a bruise, of clotted blood, of raw meat. A seething mass of writhing, slimy tentacles with eyes covering its surface. It seemed to regard her, and surged forward with slippery speed, parrotlike beak-mouth rasping open and closed, tentacles writhing and grasping at everything as it hauled itself along the forest floor to get to her. She prayed to the Goddess and felt her antimagic field spring up. The thing screamed, a high piping noise that went through her skull like an awl. For a moment the thing became translucent. Katarina's eyes widened. Demon!

She fired at the thing, but the bullet passed through it and ricocheted off a rock. She pulled the first trigger on her gun, the one that revolved the barrels, and then the thing solidified, still screaming, and dragged itself towards her, tentacles writhing, reaching. She fired again, and this time the bullet ripped through flesh, blowing the demon back a good seven or eight feet. She advanced, reaching into a pouch, breaking open her gun, pulling the two spent casings and replacing them with fresh. she snapped the gun closed and pocketed the brass, aimed, and fired a third time. The thing flailed and screamed again, but couldn't seem to right itself. it couldn't seem to do anything, in fact, except thrash about weakly.

Katarina nodded. A lesser demon had a tenuous attachment to the world. The antimagic field wasn't strong enough alone to banish it, but it did cut it off from whatever magic fed and sustained it. Her gunshots had likely found a mortal mark. She broke open her gun and extracted the third casing and reloaded.

The thrashing had subsided, but Katarina was still cautious. She fell back to her cart and found her pack, keeping an eye on the demon, until she located her firestick.

A firestick was a simple magical implement, a straight shaft of wood about as big around as her thumb and about a foot and a half long, carved with arcane runes. One simply needed to touch the stick to whatever she wanted to light, recite a simple command, and it would ignite it.

She found a flask of spirits, something she kept on hand for disinfecting her wounds, and splashed it on the demon, which screamed weakly, and flailed about a little. She knelt and touched the stick to one of the tentacles.

"Light for me." She said, and the demon burst into flames. As it burned, it shriveled in on itself. Katarina sat there, watching it until it was nothing more than ash and a few charred bones.

Demons. Katarina shuddered at the prospect as she calmed her horse and righted the small cart. This confirmed it; there was a mage at the heart of this.

Demons were things that existed beyond the world of Aggenmor, in their own realm. There were spells and incantations that one could use to summon a demon and bind it to this world. They did not exist naturally, and so had to either possess something or be sustained with magic. Either way, they had to be first summoned.

"No choice but to go forward." She said, and climbed back into the cart. She pulled out the map and marked where she'd encountered the demon.

One of the ignoble responsibilities of being a Witch Hunter was spending long tracts of time in the wildernesses surrounding the various forts, villages and frontier towns. For the independent witch hunter, this was simply a matter of course. many witch hunters often patrolled specific areas, canvassing smaller towns and the forests between, hunting unsanctioned mages and tracking those that had gone rogue. Since the Church was expanding into this area greedily, there was a high demand for accurate maps of the area, so it wasn't uncommon to see parties of adventurous mercenaries accompanied by clerics, paladins, or the occasional witch hunter.

This part of the forest was thick with aged oak and birch, and the sun filtered through the leaves only sparingly. Katarina moved carefully through the stands of trees and shrubs, avoiding the stinging and itching ivy, eyes up and alert. the forest had gone quiet, so she'd abandoned the horse and cart and advanced forward on foot, trying to pin down the reason for the forests' silence.

They came upon her with almost no noise, nevertheless she spotted one quickly. Three large centaur, two male and one female, charging towards her rapidly. She drew her gun and fired on the lead centaur, an enormous brute with black hair and chestnut fur, catching it in the shoulder. He lurched, staggering, but swung his long, heavy bladed spear in a sweeping arc that missed her by scant inches. As she sidestepped, the second male thrust forward with his own spear, catching her a glancing blow across her belly that stumbled her. She glanced down at herself, the fabrics of her vest were torn but the metal plating seemed to have deflected an otherwise lethal stab. As she caught her feet, the female centaur hurled a heavy net directly at her. Katarina rolled, but the net caught her anyway. She fired again at the lead centaur, catching him in the pelvis. He shouted hoarsely, staggering and flailing about with his spear. As the blade passed scant inches from her face she was able to note in a disconnected way that the blade itself seemed to be hardened and sharpened bone, decorated with feathers and bits of stone. She drew her sword with her other hand and hacked ineffectually at the ropes that covered her, as the second reversed his spear and swung the blunt end at her. She ducked, the butt passing over her head as she again slashed at the ropes, this time freeing herself.

The female centaur raised her hands and chanted a spell; as she chanted Katarina reacted, instinctively reaching out with the hand that held her sword. As she did, she invoked one of the abilities that the Golden Lady had blessed her with; the ability to interrupt any spell being cast. The female centaur was jolted as the spell died on her fingers. her eyes widened, her mouth opened in shock.

Katarina turned and slashed with her saber at the crippled centaur. The blade cut deep, cleaving flesh and bone easily. Blood rushed, splashing her hand as she wrenched the sword free. The centaur collapsed with a groan, clutching his broad chest.

As Katarina pulled her sword free, the other male swung his spear like a club again, catching her a wicked blow against her head. Stars exploded across her vision and she stumbled, feet catching in the remains of the net. As she tripped, she dropped her weapons, and dimly she heard the female chanting another spell as she fell unconscious.

When she awoke, she discovered her hands and feet had been bound and then secured with a rope. The position was awkward and painful, and her face was in the dirt. Her head hurt and it throbbed painfully. She rolled over onto her side, and noticed she was in a small encampment. There was a central bonfire with several leather tents in a loose circle. one of the centaurs was arguing with another in their harsh, growling tongue. she concentrated on listening, and was able to discern a few words, but nothing that she could put to any use.

One of them was the female, the magic user, and she was growling and gesticulating angrily with another, who seemed to be the other male, the one that had clubbed her. He was more of a bay to her golden chestnut, his tail was black, and the hair on his head was a deep brown, where she was more even in her coloring, with dirty blonde locks of hair matching well with her champagne coloring.

The girl seemed to be on the defensive, as her arms were folded across her chest, the man was gesturing assertively. She glanced over at Katarina and their eyes met. She sneered at the witch hunter, and then remarked to the male in the common tongue, "Your prisoner is awake, Rama. Remember what I said. You mount her for your own and I'll strangle you to death with that organ you prize so much."

He snorted and reared a little, pawing the ground. He eyed Katarina, and turned back to the female. "I tire of your jealousy, Mara. I can mount who and what I like." he growled and pranced. She sneered and pawed the ground with her forefoot. "What, you think I'll let you? See if I give you any time at my tent anymore, you goat-blind fool."

Katarina grimaced as she realized what was going on. The male wanted to claim his prize by raping Katarina, and the woman was refusing him. Why? She didn't know anything at all of the cultures of beastmen except that their values differed from human values and that they were inhuman, distrustful things that could befriend you one minute and betray you the next.

Because beastmen couldn't be reasoned with, because they were blighted and twisted monsters that blasphemed against the perfect form of man just by their very existence, they were hunted and exterminated on sight by the churches' Forest Wardens and town militias. Katarina had killed quite a few beastmen herself; oftentimes unsanctioned or rogue mages befriended or enslaved the foul creatures and used them as allies or servants or soldiers.

"What then am I permitted" he invested this word with this scorn and anger, "to do with this girl creature?" he snarled, gesturing towards Katarina.

"Kill her. Eat her, if it pleases you to do so." The female remarked offhand. "You mount her though and you'll never touch me again. They're disgusting, filthy creatures."

Katarina would have smirked at the irony that her people felt the same way towards the beastmen... aside from the eating part. To eat a beastman's tainted flesh would be abhorrent.

He spat. "We shall see." he reared again and strode off, hands clenching into fists, snapping open, and clenching again.

The female looked down at Katarina. She wore a leather vest, intricately decorated with worked bone and beads, arranged in some indecipherable pattern of swirls and geometric angles. The woman glanced off to the side, where the male, Rama had disappeared, and then back to Katarina.

"He will do it, no matter what I say." she muttered under her breath.

She turned to the side, and picked up a bundle of leather. When Katarina focused on it, it seemed to be a bulging parcel that held her knapsack and weapons.

"Rama would take you until you died bleeding or until you sired him a child... in which case you would die anyway." she snarled. "I am chieftain's daughter and what does he do? Ruts with anything he can stick his prong into. A poor choice for a mate." she shook her head with disgust.

She dropped the parcel near to Katarina.

"I will have to kill you to keep him from you." Her thick brows furrowed together and her face twisted. "No, he would still mount you. He likes your hair."

Katarina's brows drew together. "How do you speak the common tongue?" She asked, and the centaur raised a cool eyebrow. "Twas humans who taught me." She replied simply. She pranced nervously a few moments, and then glanced back down at Katarina.

"I will leave, you understand. To do the necessary. When I come back, I will kill you. Prepare yourself." She glanced at the parcel near Katarina significantly and then at Katarina herself. Katarina nodded wearily. the woman trotted off, and Katarina wriggled about to a sitting position. She slipped her bound hands under her hips and tucked her legs through; she reached the bundle and tugged down a corner with her hands and pulled her saber from its sheath. a couple of quick movements and she was free. The parcel was bound up in her leather coat, she swung that about her shoulders as she scooped up her weapon belts. the gun still had one round left, she reloaded quickly, fingers tingling from the return of circulation. She turned and dashed for the edge of the forest, buckling on her gunbelt as she moved. She couldn't stop to retie the thong on her thigh, that flapped and moved uselessly as she swung the swordbelt around her hips.

Behind her she heard an outcry, an angry yell of male fury.

How many beastmen had been in that camp? she couldn't tell. there were perhaps half a dozen tents that she could see, but she had no way of knowing how many to a tent, or how many tents she didn't see. She stopped and put her back against a tree as she retied the thigh strap.

Suddenly, voices nearby. "She couldn't have gotten far." She recognized the voice as the male. "I don't care what that os pa Mara says, I will make the woman scream from my organ." She drew her gun, whispered a prayer to the Golden Lady, stepped around the tree, and took her aim. He didn't notice her as he was turned slightly away from her, growling at another centaur. She rested the barrel of the gun in the crook of her other elbow and sighted down the barrel, and pulled the trigger. The report was loud, a thundercrack in the solemnity of the forest, and the centaur screamed breathlessly as a huge hole appeared in between the heavy ribs of the horse portion of his anatomy. Katarina revolved the barrels, sighted, and fired again, this time catching the creature in his more human chest. He staggered, weaving slowly, and collapsed into the dirt. the other centaur had stood there frozen, staring at her in shock. The other was smaller, seemingly younger than the other male Rama. he dropped his spear and raised his hands over his head and took a couple of steps back. Katarina fired again and the bullet smashed through the youth's face, dropping him to the ground. She turned and ran in a different direction, perpendicular to the direction she'd gone before, reloading her gun. How many more were there?

She extended her antimagic field, just in case the girl, Mara, was nearby. It wouldn't do at all to run and get a spell in the back. She caught another centaur unaware, he was glancing about, arrow nocked on a bow nearly as tall as she was. The arrow itself was thicker than her thumb and was about as long as a small spear.

Katarina drew her sword and in a quick move, rammed the length of the blade deep into the soft, unprotected underbelly of the centaur and tore the blade out in a bloody slash, releasing blood and viscera in a gaudy splash. The centaur folded to the ground with a pained cry, the blade humming in her hands.

A centaur came thundering through the brush at her, she turned and fired, catching the thing through the center of his chest. As his momentum carried him past, she whirled and swung her sword with all her strength, decapitating the beastman as he fell.

An arrow whizzed by her head, tugging her hair, and she rolled behind a tree. She tried to judge where it had come from. She glanced around, and looked up; there was a low-hanging branch. She sheathed her sword and leapt up, catching the branch. She hauled herself up and climbed higher, quickly stepping from branch to branch.

She could spy the centaur below; he dropped his bow and unsheathed a wicked-looking bone sword from his waist. He crept forward towards the tree she was on slowly, sword poised to strike, peering around the trunk of the tree, oblivious to her being above him. She eased the sword in her scabbard, and judged the jump. She could make it. She dropped feet-first onto the back of the centaur, and drove the blade through the beast. He screamed as she twisted the sword and wrenched it free savagely. As she leapt free from the back of the fallen beastman, the female emerged from the brush, face mottled with rage. "I should have let him!" she spat thickly. "I should have let him fuck you and laughed when you screamed as your guts were ripped open!"

She tried to cast a spell, but trapped as she was in Katarina's antimagic field, it fizzled and died. Katarina ran forward and slashed at the female. The blade sheared through the woman's body easily, effortlessly. Blood fountained garishly. She twisted and the woman screamed agonizingly as the blade cut and ripped out of her.

The screams died, and silence returned to the forest. She had single-handedly dispatched an entire camp of beastmen. She examined the female beastman, absentmindedly wiping the blade on the thing's hair. She wore various trinkets and fetishes, but nothing glowed with the aura of magic. Katarina stripped off the woman's leather vest and shrugged it on to see if it would fit. The woman had broader shoulders and her waist was a bit longer than Katarina's, but if she could find her way back to her horse and cart, she could spend some time with her tailoring kit and stitch the vest to her duster. The decorations were attractive.