The Conqueror Worm Read online

  The figure of Otis walked around the rectangular cage, sniffing at the air like an animal, until he faded into the background, merging with the surrounding shadows.

  The priest's wrists had grown raw for his restraints. He no longer pulled against the handcuffs, but instead let the silver bracelets rest against his wounded flesh. The puncture wounds where foreign objects had been put through his skin were still itching and hot, and had been partially filled in with coagulated blood. Even if he could escape, if he didn't get care, soon, he would surely die of sepsis. He licked at the insides of his lips, finding only dryness and the taste of the metal that held them shut. Every breath he took through his nose was scented with old blood.

  Raising his joined, cadaverous hands to the sky, Ossian's eyes stung with the threat of tears. God... my God... my sweet Lord... why have you forsaken me? Send me an angel... send me... send me...

  He couldn't see it, barely possessed the strength to peer down at his own breast, but could feel the itchiness of the heretical brand he now wore. They have defiled my body, Lord. They have marked me like a pig for the slaughter in their symbols of degeneracy. His heart hiccoughed, the beating growing erratic.

  Come morning, he would be put to death. The bishop planned to have him hung and burned, made an example of. In truth, that sweet release of death was much preferable to his current suffering. He was ready to be released from this life, felt it best to die rather than brave anymore debasement. His body was no longer in a state to fight such awful creatures as had him in their clutches, and in this lonesome hour his faith had been shaken.

  Insects entered the cage, their tiny legs searching the open pockets of flesh and partaking of his blood just like the black bishop had done. He felt a fly buzzing near his ear, another landing upon his sole, and could not be bothered to shoo them off.

  Maybe, he thought during a rare moment of lucidity, you'll die in this cage. It would be a great victory to pass on before the morning, to deprive them of their spectacle.

  His teary eyes moved to the silver bracelets he wore, and to the length of chain between them.

  You could put a stop to it now, in fact. Bring the chain to your throat and keep it there till you've pinched the windpipe. Simply float on, end the suffering. Would that be so bad?

  He raised the chain slowly, brought it to rest against his Adam's apple.

  Just a bit of pressure. Lord, grant me the strength...

  Suddenly his heart lurched and he rolled onto his side, eyes wide.

  No... no... I

  Suicide wasn't an option, however attractive it might have been to the alternative.

  You would be damned, he thought, slowly sitting up. His entire body ached, and even the act of sitting brought him considerable pain. Leaning against the bars of his enclosure, the priest winced and imagined what it might be like for that pain to linger on for eternity. Would it be worth an eternity in the lake of fire just to end this mortal suffering? No. No, you must marshal your strength. Don't give in. Now is the time for virtue... bravery...

  Outside his cell he fancied he saw two human faces coming up out of the surrounding shadow. They were small, somehow familiar. Children's faces.

  Shuddering, Ossian recognized them. The very same he saw in his dreams each night. The pair of siblings who had died under his care in Rome, and for whose death he had earned himself years of incarceration. Their faces, unnaturally pale and doughy, contorted in all kinds of strange ways. They looked to be laughing, then wincing, then screaming. He shut his eyes, shook his head, but upon opening them the specters remained.

  The girl opened her mouth and spoke to him in a dreamy, distant voice.“The church will fall to pieces. And soon thereafter, the world will be on its knees. The time of man is over, priest. The sun is rapidly setting, don't you see? A new age, an age of darkness, is soon to rise.”

  That'd been the demon's prophetic speech all those years ago. The prediction had come true.

  The church had since split in two, and the world as he'd known it then had been toppled. The time of man certainly seemed to be ending and a new, terrible age was at its dawn. As he sat there on the cold, hard ground, he felt helpless. The world was changing, was being given over to the Princes of Hell, and there was no one who could stop them. Who might answer the call and force back the tide of darkness that now threatened to engulf the planet?

  It is I. I am the one who was chosen to keep the darkness at bay. I am God's scalpel, sent to carve away the rot that ails this Earth.

  The realization brought his sense back with it.

  The night is long, but hold out for the dawn. There's still time, and so long as you draw breath the crusade will continue.

  Going in and out of a feverish sleep, Ossian watched the emergence of day on the horizon. Slowly, the ruins of the Piazza Maggiore were bathed in the golden glow of a new day and the black skies broke. Grinning inwardly, he gave his heavy head a shake. So, this is your last sunrise, is it? If God wills it... then it has been a beautiful one.

  From somewhere across the Piazza he heard the sound of footsteps coming from more than one set of feet. He tensed, but forced himself to relax so as not to telegraph fear. His jailers had come for him and he would very soon see the noose, but he was determined not to give them the show they so craved. Eyes closed, he began to pray. They've come for me, oh Lord, but I will not fear. I pray that I will be united with you in Heaven―

  "Ossian!" hissed a familiar voice, drawing closer.

  The priest's eyes snapped open and he glimpsed two individuals coming towards him. The first was the boy, Cesare, who called out to him again quietly. "Ossian!" The other, keeping apace with the youth, his hobbling gait giving him away even from a distance, was Elio.

  At the sight of them, Ossian reached up and crossed himself with a shaking hand. Freeze the saints! They have come for me. You have sent me your angels, Lord. Wrestling with a knot of tears in his throat, the priest inhaled as deeply as he could and gradually gained his feet. To stand on them was to send pain shooting through his lower extremities, but his excitement was so immense that he found he could ignore it.

  In Elio's hands were clutched two large items. The first was a long sledge, its tip covered in cement. The other, in its black sheath, was the Grand Inquisitor. His soul soared at glimpsing the weapon and for the first time since the previous day the lion in him stirred. He wished to wrap his fractured hands around the hilt of that blade, to march into the accursed basilica and paint its ancient walls red with the blood of his foes.

  As the pair grew near, they slowed down a great deal. It was Elio, brow furrowed and sweaty, who first spoke. "Jesus Christ, father. What... what have they done to you?" He looked at the paper left hanging on the exterior, a written notice declaring him an enemy of the church, and promptly tore it up, stamping on the pieces.

  Cesare regarded the priest as though he were a monster, backing away from the cage and letting Elio get close. "Ossian, we... we tried to find you. We got here as soon as we could. When we first went looking, we thought it might be easier to break into the basilica. We hoped that they were keeping you inside, but after sneaking around for the better part of the night we couldn't find any trace of you, except for the sword. It was sitting in a little room in the basement. We... we feared the worst, that they'd already killed you."

  Lifting the sledge and focusing on the padlock that secured the door to the cage, Elio added, "We went around the back, didn't want to draw any attention to ourselves by crossing the piazza. I wish we'd stopped here first." With a mighty swing, he smashed the lock and the door fell open. Casting his eyes nervously about the Piazza, he reached out to the priest. "Come, let's get you out of there, father."

  As Ossian emerged, stumbling out of the cage on damaged feet, he did not wince, but rather, laughed. Backing away further, Cesare looked to the priest fearfully, and asked, "What did they do to you?" even though he did not much look as though he wanted the answer.

  With a trembli
ng hand, Ossian reached up, grasped one of the staples in his lips between two fingertips, and yanked it out. He repeated this for each of the staples till finally, for the first time since his capture, he could part his lips. Taking a few moments to catch his breath, the priest replied in a grating whisper, dry as sand. "I will tell you what they have done. They have loosed upon themselves a horror more fearsome and vengeful than any who dwells in the pit." He cast his fiery green eyes on Elio. “The sword.”

  Without argument, Elio handed the priest his blade.

  Drawing the Grand Inquisitor from its black housing, Ossian pulled down the collar of his cassock and pressed the tip of the blade against the brand that'd been left on his chest. With a slow movement, he carved the cross-shaped wound away, leaving a smooth patch of raw, bleeding skin over his breast.

  The others looked at him as though he'd lost his mind, but said nothing.

  Elio motioned across the Piazza. "We must hurry. They'll be looking for you, I'm sure. Even my home will not be safe. There are plenty of places we can hide for shelter, and the boy has brought along your satchel along with whatever we could bring from my house. We need to tend to those wounds and then get out of Bologna."

  Limping forth with the youth's aid, Ossian shook his head fervently. "Not yet. The score will not be settled till the Piazza Maggiore runs red. God did not spare my life so that I might run away from my duties. I was spared because there is still a job to be done."

  18

  The priest's wounds were tended to and he was given food and water, but still his demeanor remained changed. Ossian had become a quieter creature, and even in those moments when he lowered his head in prayer there lurked about his expression a savageness that hadn't been there before.

  The horsemen of Bologna came looking for him. They heard, now and then, the sounds of hooves beating, of raised voices, but the bishop lacked the manpower to comb the entirety of the city and by the end of the second night since Ossian's jailbreak, they seemed to give up entirely.

  The priest had nearly exhausted his store of antiseptic tinctures, pouring copious amounts of stinging liquids into his open wounds and wrapping them with the cleanest cloth he could find. His hands and fingers were wrapped, as were his feet. As for the wounds on the rest of him, those were washed out, dabbed in herbal concoctions and then sutured shut. He looked like an animal who'd met the grill of an eighteen-wheeler, and it wasn't till the third day that his walk became unhindered by a limp.

  "What did they do to you?" Cesare would ask now and then as they sat silently in the abandoned house they'd chosen just outside of town. Its second story gave them a decent vantage point into the distance; more specifically, in the direction of the Piazza Maggiore.

  Ossian, not wanting to relive the horrors himself or to burden the young man's mind with such lurid details, decided each time to deflect. "They are, as I suspected, servants of Hell. The lot of them."

  Elio, having learned that it was indeed Bishop Carnivale who'd been behind the murder of his wife and son, had undergone a change as well. He knew nothing of mirth, and spent long hours steeping in uncommunicative silence. There was a part of him, as exists in all men wronged, who wished to avenge his family. The other part, the part of him that ultimately won out, knew it would be a long and impossible fight against odds that he could never surmount. During a period of uncharacteristic talkativeness, he approached the priest, offering boiled water. "How strong is he?"

  Ossian leaned against a dirty wall, legs crossed, and a thumb pressed to the sole of his battered foot. He massaged his wounds carefully till the tingling in them went away and he could feel something other than numbness. "I have known demons in my day, but Carnivale is a different class altogether. He barely touched me; rather, it was his servants who carried out his work. All of those brutal men carried something of the hellish in them, though the bishop himself is more demon than man, in my estimation. According to him, his brothers have manifested the world over, and are now running things out of Avignon. Traditionally speaking, a demon requires a human body to exist on the Earthly plane. Carnivale, if he has a host at all, has warped it so thoroughly that it has become more devil than anything."

  Elio got right to the point. "So, can we kill it?"

  Ossian nodded, a smile curling his shredded lips. "Oh, there is nothing under this sky that we cannot kill, my friend. And we shall. Though I warn you now, it is going to be a difficult time. We may very well lose our lives in the process."

  Standing, Elio shrugged and limped across the room. He knocked a few twigs out of the hearth to kill the fire. They couldn't allow themselves a full-time fire, lest the smoke give them away, and had to boil their water and gain warmth in short bursts throughout the day. "I don't care about that, father. Truthfully, I don't have anything left to look forward to in this life. Everything I love has been taken from me. If I die trying to kill that thing, then so be it."

  The priest grunted in agreement, picking up his sword and studying the blade. It was untampered with, the cutting edge well-maintained and sharp enough to draw blood from his fingertip with the barest touch. "If anything can kill him, it's this sword," he said, returning it to its sheath. "It belonged once to the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He used it in doling out his sentences, beheaded many a heretic with it. True evil cannot even come into contact with it without suffering."

  "Wish we had some guns, though," said the boy. "A sword doesn't do us much good if they can pick us off from a distance. I used to play Call of Duty; I know a thing or two about guns, and we're at a disadvantage."

  The priest chortled. "Who said that you have any part in this, Cesare? I don't intend for you to come with us, boy. You would only get yourself killed, distract us as we head off on our crusade. You're young and still have your full life ahead of you. It wouldn't do to trot you into the lion's den." Catching a touch of hurt in the youth's eye, he added, "It's nothing personal, lad. I just don't want to see you hurt by that thing. The forces of darkness would love nothing more than to ruin that innocent soul of yours."

  "It's been a few days," continued Elio. "When do we move on them?"

  The priest had been considering this for some time, and raised a question of his own. "There was talk, in that Mass I attended, of a certain feast day. The Feast of the Twisted Nail. Are you familiar with it? Springing our vengeance when they're busying themselves with celebrations may be our best shot. The element of surprise is an advantage we can't afford to squander considering what we're up against."

  "Dunno a thing about that," said Elio, picking up his sledge and weighing it in his hand. "But what if we were to pick off some of the bishop's guys while they're out patrolling, getting water, whatever? Guerrilla-style."

  "It's an option," was the priest's reply. "But it's not without risk. If we should kill some of his men and then remain on the run, they'll be sent out to look for us in force. Hiding will become much more difficult. If only there were some way to strike them while they congregated; to hit the blackened heart of Bologna as a whole."

  "We'll take them as they come," said Elio, hefting the sledge over one shoulder. "Whether it's one or one hundred of the bastards, I don't mind. They'll pay for what they've done.”

  "On that much we agree," said Ossian, standing.

  "Yeah, and what about me? While the two of you are out there doing the Rambo thing, what, am I just supposed to stay here, keep my head down and hope that the bad guys get what's coming to them? Screw that. I want to come along."

  The priest ruffled the boy's hair. "I understand, but the answer's still no. Ours is a mission to gut the forces of evil in the city, and there's no room for you. I'm sorry, but the only way you can help is to stay behind, keep yourself hidden, and not make me worry over your safety."

  Cesare scoffed. "Oh, you're worried? That's sweet. I mean, you're the one who killed my mother, who brought me to this awful city to begin with, but it's real nice to know that you're worried about me. I don't remember co
ming to you, asking you to look after me like some sort of baby, Ossian. You're not my dad, so you don't have that right. I'm coming along whether you like it or not. I promise to stay out of your hair, but there's no way you can get me to stay behind."

  Growing irritated, Ossian took up his sword and nudged the boy away with the tip of its scabbard. "I can think of a few ways to get you to stay behind, lad. Kinder fates than to let you fall into the bishop's clutches, anyhow."

  "That's enough." Elio set the sledge beside the hearth, making the floors rumble. "We'll see about moving out in the morning. If we happen upon any of those guys who're working for the bishop, or any citizens who are sympathetic to his little cult, then I say we take care of them then and there."

  Ossian flexed his hands. They were sore, and the fingers, likely infected, felt hot to him beneath his makeshift bandages. He could move the joints, but they burnt with pain at every bend. "Fair enough. I'm chomping at the bit to repay them for their hospitality."

  "So, does that mean I can come along?" chanced Cesare.

  Neither man gave a reply, which the youth took as implied permission.

  Evening was setting in. The trio sidled up to the hearth to soak up the last of its warmth in the cool evening and Elio and Ossian decided on the night's watch rotation. Ossian was the first to sleep, and laid down using his satchel for a pillow. Elio took a seat in a rough-looking chair near a window and the boy draped an old blanket over his shoulders, swaying as he nodded off.

  The night, for the moment, was quiet.

  When next Ossian awoke, it was not yet time for his shift as watchman. Instead, he was roused by the sounds of crying, and turned to find Elio, in his space near the window, with his face in his ruddy hands, sobbing. Easing himself up, the priest watched for a few moments before starting across the room. At hearing Ossian stir, the large man ceased his crying almost forthwith and put on an obviously forced smile. "Come to relieve me already?"