The town was to blame. That was it, their heathen ways, their wights in the hills, every knock or scratch accounted for by some new devil. He’d been instructed to leave sugar on the church steps, and to throw the skins that grew over heated milk into the fire to feed the spirits. It was ungodly of them, and worse to inflict such impulses upon a house of the Lord. But that wasn’t what Brother Ehrhart hated the most. No, what he hated the most were the gods.
It seemed no one had ever told the country people here that they lived in a Christian nation, under a Christian king. Never did they consider the second commandment carved into the great tablets of stone. They twisted wheat chaff into little figures and set them ablaze, all the while naming demons. Lady of Beauty. A husk woman, dead leaves plaited into a skirt, curled under the heat. Bringer of Sun. A husk man crackled into smoke. Duke of the Tempest. Wooden pendants and carved charms would pour into the flames like gold into a king’s coffers, all for their beloved devil.
That was the worst one, its very name a confession. What kindness did they seek from a modern Ba’al?
The first month of spring, just after he had left the monastery to attend the parish, he had tried to talk sense. The Good Lord only brought storms as punishment for sin. If they received them after praying to this false idol, it was not a gift, but a warning.
They didn’t care for sense. Nor did they care when he turned his teachings to the fire and brimstone that awaited those who did not follow the One True God. They did follow Him, they insisted. They just believed in more, as well.
Still, the fields lay dead, whipped each night by deep frosts. Men chewed on straw and peered into rivers, feared the sight of famine stones carved beneath the current. Brother Ehrhart was certain that they would see the invitation to repent in that, but they shook their heads. No, the Duke would come.
But what did it was not the bonfire of dried sacrifices over land that should have been peeling up with green shoots. It was not visiting a farmer’s house to find a wooden man grinning at him from the altar, a carved thundercloud brewing in his oak hands. It was not the old women of the village fussing over the height at which buzzards circled, predicting a blessing in their distance.
No, it was the woman who came into the church to request that the Brother announce after next Mass that she was with child. Her stomach was already rounding under her shift, not yet pressing the fabric taut. He agreed, and for a moment he surged with pride at the town’s first request for prayers. He thanked her as such, and she laughed at him. “Isn’t it my duty to let them know the blessing? The Duke does not give a child he intends to starve.”
He was too horrified to chastise her properly. His stomach turned as she left, sending sour bile burning up his throat.
That night came the storm the village had burned for. The tenuous warmth that had kept the frost away that morning disappeared as clouds rolled in like an invading army in silver mail. The townsfolk cheered, then ushered sheep into folds and slammed boards over windows.
The rain drummed not only on the roof, but the walls, until it roared like the vengeful sea against a ship. Brother Ehrhart jabbed his quill back into its cup and picked up a candle. The rush and ebb of the rain forced the air in and out of his lungs, as if its breath was his.
In the candlelight, the assault of rain against the window appeared in flashes of yellow light. He tried to force his heart to slow, to not start at every new lash as if he were a frightened child.
Yet in those assaults of rain, he saw it. A shadow, no more certain than a desert mirage. The body of a man among the clouds, staring at the heavens upon a distant hill, but far, far too large to be a person. It raised its arms with the wind and shrieked its torment. Then, in another gust, it was gone.
Brother Ehrhart did not sleep that night. The wind howled and squealed against the window like trumpets at the battle of Jericho. Thunder crashed in time with surges of rain. It was enough to tell himself he was not truly being thrown into the depths of Hell.
When the squall calmed enough for him to emerge, sunlight that streamed through the blanket of clouds cast the devastation in bold contours, the world turned into an amateur woodcut. Tree branches littered the churchyard. Wooden grave markers from the cemetery had snapped and piled up behind sturdier headstones. Each leaf shone as if cast in copper, the indents where they curved to the sky sparkling with rainwater. An oak had been struck in the barrage of lightning, bark peeling away in a jagged strip.
A song lifted from the valley below. The people, singing praises to the thing that left the graveyard in chaos, carrying a man of straw like pallbearers to a funeral. Song grew from the throats of the men as they beat drums, the high voices of the women floating above it like clouds in the deep blue sky.
And there, at the front, was the woman from the day before, her simple shift exchanged for a dyed dress, a child following behind her. As the others set the straw man onto the ground, she accepted a flint and stone. The drumming slowed, then stopped. For a moment, the only noise was the whistling of birds and the dull chatter of those setting poles through the effigy’s feet. It towered over the tallest man. In the stark relief of the morning light, he could see each delicate warp and weft of yellow-gold straw.
The woman struck the flint. A cheer rose as the first ember died on damp earth. It grew to a roar as the second died the same way. When the third caught a dry swathe and blazed to life, the shouts could have been mistaken for a storm of their own. The straw man crumpled under the flames, gold swallowed by red, then black.
Brother Ehrhart fell to his knees and wept, for no just God would look kindly upon the scene.
He returned to the church once he could, shutting the door behind him to seal out the smoke. He needn’t have bothered. Rain broke from the clouds, dousing the burning man, leaving rivulets of charcoal-brown water running down the hill. The town gave another great cry of triumph before they, like their sheep, returned to drier locales. Like sheep that would not follow their true shepherd until the one who tended them now was gone.
The decision came to him fully formed, with neither fear nor fervor. If Brother Ehrhart could not lead them from the Duke, he would kill it.
He kneeled and prayed to Saint Michael the Archangel, his chants matching the rhythm of the rain.
The next morning’s sun cast the clean yard in golds and pinks. For a moment, he sought the destruction in the pits of the valley, but found none. The branches were gone. The grave markers had been reassigned hastily, some tilting for lack of nails, others having been given up on and stacked by the woodpile. Human hands, then, not divine. He bit back disappointment.
“Hello, Brother!” called a voice from the other side of the yard. A boy, leading a mule, raised his hand in greeting, then nodded toward the empty yard. “You saw what the town did? I’ve got your supplies for the week.”
“The town?” Brother Ehrhart repeated as he accepted the basket out of the mule’s pack. He hefted the unusual weight.
“A couple of gifts, to share the blessing,” the boy explained. “The Duke gives to us, so we give to our neighbors. There’s some honey cake, ale along with the wine, and someone at the edge of town found a Bible. It’ll serve you better.” At the Brother’s aghast silence, he filled in his own assumptions and rushed to say, “Don’t worry, you don’t need to give in return, you only just came here. Next year, perhaps.”
Brother Ehrhart could not manage a response. He fumbled through what he hoped was enough gratitude before going inside.
He spread the contents across the table meant for holy day feasts. There was the usual fare, provided for his services to the parish: bread, milk, a ham cured and salted to last to Rapture and beyond, the like. Then the gifts of the rain. A honey cake, its glaze sticking to fabric. A bottle of ale. Cut flowers, weedy and dull after their journey through the frost-encrusted rocks. And there at the bottom was a book, too thin to be a full Bible, its binding coming apart along the spine. He lifted it, considering the scuffed leather. A single book, perhaps. Proverbs, if the writing was particularly cramped, or Ecclesiastes if it wasn’t. A thoughtful gift, despite the occasion.
ALMANAC, read the first leaf. No transcriber, no location, just the one word. Thumbing rapidly through it, illustrations of clouds floated past rising and setting suns. He startled at the imitation of movement, then smiled. A clever trick.
The contents predicted rain and sun, and whether it would be unseasonably cool or warm. It was the kind of attempt at divination which a farmer might appreciate, though evidently the farmer who’d gifted it could not read enough to understand. He put it aside and set to practicing yet another sermon on false idols.
He began combing through the Bible in earnest the next morning. He found information on demons in spades, little of it practical. The only piece that truly caught his eye was the seal of Solomon. Something as small as a signet ring could be enough to rid the town of evil, if only the Good Lord had passed down the symbol as well as the text.
He had heard tell of societies capable of ensnaring demons and sending them back to Hell with herbs and charms. He’d even seen their shops when he had been sent to fetch supplies in the city for the monastery. They claimed to be priests, but their actions sounded more akin to witchcraft. He would not stoop so low.
He wrote to his monastery requesting any texts on Solomon. As he lay down to fitful rest, images and lines moved before his eyes, twisting together before coming back apart.
The codex that arrived a bare week later was no part of the Bible, though the frontispiece claimed it was from Solomon himself. It told of the seventy-two demons he had once trapped, and how he had been able to use them.
A book of spells. Spells that would capture. Spells that would control. Pages upon pages of spells, the same wards as Solomon himself had used. Brother Ehrhart read every word, even lit candles to extend his work into the night, then strained to read more when they had melted to tallow.
By the time he reached the end, his heart sank. The book was a solution, but not the true Seal. No final door to snap shut. He rubbed eyes turned red by candle smoke. If Solomon could be forgiven his witchcraft, so could Brother Ehrhart. The next Sunday, he told the congregation that he would be gone for a few days and took a willing farmer’s horse down the long, muddy road.
The heat of shame at the sight of the shopfront was cooled by the rain forming puddles on the cobbles. The sign had no text, but he recognized the symbols well enough. Guilt churned his stomach as he tied up the horse and hurried inside. The Lord would forgive.
A woman gave a small laugh as he scurried in. “A man of the cloth. We don’t see those often, here.”
Brother Ehrhart scowled. The shopkeep was older than him, and bags hung heavily under her eyes, but she was far from elderly. Bundles of herbs and carved charms hung on the wall behind her. Her lithe fingers tapped a rhythm on the counter as a smile played on her lips.
“I only came out of desperation,” he argued. He tried to shake the murmuring in the back of his mind that a proper priest would lay down his life before he came to the city’s idea of a hedge witch. “A demon is controlling the weather of my parish,” he confessed. Said aloud, it felt like a personal failing.
She raised an eyebrow. “How do you know it’s a demon?”
That, at least, he could be certain of. “The people worship it. They call for storms, and it brings them. I am seeking to save my people’s souls. A demon, a devil, a false idol, it will lead them to damnation all the same. It must be rid of. To trap a demon—”
“To trap anything,” the witch snapped back. “Not all spirits are demons. Remember that.” She continued as he bit his tongue. “To bait a spirit is to confuse it. To confuse it, you must understand it. You must see as the spirit sees. Spirits may see a man, but they aren’t tempted by them. Their interests are more metaphysical. Shapes, symbols, spirits seek meaning. Lure them with that.”
“How should I know what a demon may want to understand?” Brother Ehrhart protested.
She sighed as if he were a naughty child resisting a lesson. “If you wish to rid yourself of the spirit, you’ll have to. Let me show you.” She took up a scraped bark piece and set it on the counter. With a stick of charcoal, she drew two lines, then intersected them with two more. She pushed the result over to him. “What is this?”
He eyed her, waiting for her flat expression to break. She looked no less irritated for it. “Two sets of intersecting lines,” he said after a time.
“Is it? How are they intersecting?” She traced a finger first down each horizontal, then each vertical. “Like that?” Before he could agree, she began on a horizontal, then, hitting the vertical, followed that instead, as if the line were a bent pipe. “Or perhaps this?” She began again on a horizontal, followed the vertical for a time, and switched to the second horizontal.
He watched as her finger found new paths. They seemed to pulse beneath her guidance. He shook his head, forcing the thoughts to clear. “Four lines are four lines, not a net.”
“Perhaps not for you,” she snorted. “If you seek to catch a spirit, you make sure that it cannot find the end.” She sketched new figures. Pentacles and hexagrams blossomed across the page. Lines like tree branches, breaking again and again into smaller pieces, connected loops and interlocking circles. She didn’t stop until the bark was covered in black.
Brother Ehrhart stared at the result. Not a word connected them, but the spell was stronger than anything the codex could have offered him. His eyes ran a thousand new routes between shapes that never seemed to end. “It may be of use,” he admitted. Even as he looked away, his finger trailed thick marks. “May I keep this?”
She pushed it toward him, and he furled it protectively. “If you’d like. It won’t be enough to harness anything that can change the weather. You’ll need spells as well for that.”
A smile curled his lips as a plan began to form. “I have my own. Thank you.”
He was about to turn to leave, but she held out her hand. “My services aren’t free.”
“Think of it as a service to the people,” he said, grip on the bark tightening.
She retracted her hand, apparently realizing that he had no money bag to draw from, nor anything to offer in exchange. “Then the people will be the ones to pay,” she warned.
“They’re a generous sort,” he called over his shoulder as he pushed through the door and back into the rain.
•••
He spent the first few sunny days back in the village copying spells from the codex and shapes from the witch’s scribblings. In between blurred eyes and cramping hands, he searched for materials. To sequester a demon required something permanent. Etched stone. Wood, only if he could keep it from rotting. He broke apart the markers that had been piled behind the church.
Too soon came the storm. It was the first true storm since that day in early spring. It mocked the patter of rain that the village had sung for. It mocked Brother Ehrhart, waiting behind church doors.
He etched new crosshatches into bark and willed the wind to quiet. He had nothing prepared except a few grave markers that were already giving in to mold.
Thunder clapped, and Brother Ehrhart fantasized about splitting the pews and gouging symbols into them with a knife. He looked longingly at heavy stone crosses and pictured lines filling their backs. The Lord would forgive. Or the famine stones, still buried uselessly in riverbeds.
No, he wouldn’t give in to the itch that seized his hands, nor the voice that whispered that he had practiced enough already.
What he really needed was a codex of his own. Something with enough space for the spells, something that could last in the right hands. He shook his head, trying and failing to clear the thought. He had no vellum, and barely enough parchment for a quire.
The wind wailed against the glass windows, threatening to shatter them.
He turned to his task. He turned away. He couldn’t go on like this. Couldn’t deny the thing clawing at his soul. His gaze skittered over the contents of the church like an insect in search of a meal. All the wood was too small, or if not too small, too important. He had no tools for stone.
Then he saw it, his salvation. The Almanac.
The future lay itself bare before him. He would produce a palimpsest. Clean it of its frivolous words and set in it the snares that would earn him his place in Heaven. Mock the Duke with its own domain.
He lost himself in the flurry of preparations, monastery habits taking the place of conscious thought. Milk, a gift from the heathen townspeople, filled a half-barrel tub. The sour smell turned his stomach, but no matter. How clever he was to save it, even if he’d intended it for cheese. Oat bran, the chaff left from some harvest the Duke had once blessed, but never would again.
He plunged the book into the milk until his hands wrinkled. The top layer of ink swirled out from the book like a demon breathed from a supplicant victim. The milk turned blue as a sky waiting to rain. He lifted the dripping volume from the bath and fanned through the pages. Soiled milk sprayed out in a fine mist, the moving illustrations fading as their ink pulled away.
The chaff scratched his fingers raw. Ribbons of pink turned the milk the color of dusk. By the time he’d scraped each page, though, they were as white as when they were first stretched. The illustrations had dissolved into the barest suggestions, the predictions scratched clean. He dropped the bran back into the bath, and plumes of settled ink and blood turned the surface into a raging storm.
He lay the book out on the line like a freshly washed fleece. Twilight blue milk fell back into the tub underneath.
He prayed for guidance against the steady rhythm of drips. He cleaned off milk spilled from the bath. He prayed again. He wiped the floor with a cloth that left yellowing streaks on the wood. He prayed once more. The book continued to drip. His fingers curled with the desire to be anything but clasped in devotion.
He held his breath before each drop. His skin didn’t fit right, it seemed to be drying with the parchment. He itched to pull the book off the line and carve new letters into the newly blank spaces. Glyphs and sigils unfurled themselves before his eyes. Without ink they would shrivel away, leaving him empty. Milk settled into the cracks between boards until the wood swelled to fill them.
Lightning crashed, and this time the thunder did not wait.
Nor would he. To wait would be to let the Devil tie his hands. He snatched the book off the line and lay it flat. He traced the shapes that he had practiced into catechisms.
He peeled each page apart from the next, and the words flowed out of him and onto the white expanse. His bleeding fingers were nothing but a distraction, his body an illusion. Prayers, incantations, symbols sacred and profane, that was what mattered. Clever things for stupid gods.
The wet parchment tore and tore again as ink and blood ran together. Splotches for which his instructor would have rapped his knuckles dotted the pages where the pen fell through, but now he saw them for what they were. These were not stains. They were a connection between pages, a web between the sheets. They transformed the book from a dead thing of ink and flayed skin to a net strong enough to catch a god. His work would not be done until each page was black with the purpose imbued in it.
The Lord Himself must have carried Brother Ehrhart’s hand. It wasn’t until the final flourish that pain lanced through his wrists, forcing him to drop the ragged quill with a cry. Yet there in front of him was his deliverance, written in his own hand.
Thunder rattled the stone church.
Ink bled from the volume as Brother Ehrhart snapped it closed. He didn’t care. He clutched the leather cover and ran.
The first drops felt like daggers against his skin, sinking in and chilling his bones. Only a distraction. A patch of darkness on one of the hills suggested the true enemy.
“You cannot hide from me any longer!” he shouted, though the wind tore his voice away from him. He forced the book open, letting water turn its ink to streaking tears. Its words didn’t matter, it was what they meant. The rain could not take away meaning. He wouldn’t allow it.
The barest outlines of light on the clouds suggested the form of a man against the swirling dark, its cloud-wrapped head scraping the sky even as its feet spilled fog over the hill. It was a colossus even Rhodes would cower before. When lightning flashed, the distant figure became as stark as the ink that had once been on the Almanac. Pinprick eyes of light stared at the heavens above even as its giant maw widened into a wail in time with the wind. Between lightning strikes, its movements seemed to come in jerks. A leg as solid as a waterspout lifted to stride toward Brother Ehrhart.
Rhodes could cower if it liked. Brother Ehrhart would not.
He hoisted the book above him, its parchment pages battered by the rain. “I command you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit!”
The steps were silent, though so forceful it felt as though the world shook. The rain threatened slice through him and let his blood drain into the pooling mud. The leaves of the book flapped in the wind as the gale rose, and rose, until the ground under Brother Ehrhart’s feet seemed immaterial. He felt himself lift from the ground.
Damn the Father. Damn the Son. Damn the Holy Spirit. They would smile upon him when this was done. He shouted incantations, memorized from days poring over the codex. His throat seemed to tear into ribbons as he raised his voice above the wind.
The Duke turned, mouth gaping as if to swallow him whole. Another step. The wind rushed to rend the flesh from Brother Ehrhart’s bones.
Still Brother Ehrhart chanted. He presented each page, letting each trap spring in turn. The beast did not slow. Brother Ehrhart’s fingers went numb as he struggled to separate page after ineffective page.
He had been forsaken. It became all the clearer as he neared the end of what had once been an Almanac. It was with resignation that he turned the final page.
The Duke screamed, its all-too-human voice seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, as if they were surrounded by countless numbers in pain. It stumbled without a sound, and Brother Ehrhart’s vision was overtaken by clouds so dense the book in his hands seemed to disappear beneath them. All he could see were those lightning strike eyes, staring upwards until the last of the Duke’s body was ripped away.
Black clouds dissolved, first into lacelike veils that allowed through the twinkle of stars, then to nothing at all. The wind slowed until it, too, dissipated to a placid breeze. The stars dotted the sky like ink in reverse, and Brother Ehrhart couldn’t tear his eyes from the constellations.
Eventually, he turned to the codex in his hands. Something about it felt different, though he couldn’t place what. Its weight was the same, and its torn cover no different. It was the type of sense that followed a sense, like the chill after a sudden stab of pain, or the sting that followed the flash of lightning.
Inside, his work was gone. Spirals of spells and gilded symbols had been replaced by neat columns, barely readable in the moonlight. A smiling sun watched from the top corner of the page, guarding tomorrow’s date. “Calm skies,” it assured him.
He blinked, but the image didn’t change. Tides and harvest times cascaded down the grid. He flipped to the next page. The sun’s smile turned ambivalent. “Clear skies,” it suggested. A new table of heat and rainfall took up the rest of the page. On the next page, the sun peered out from behind a stark white cloud. “Some clouds.” The next, “Clouds.” After that, “Some rain.”
The plink of a raindrop hitting an already-full puddle was the first sign that something was wrong. Above him, where only moments earlier the only thing occupying the sky had been the moon and a field of stars, clouds formed a blanket.
“Rain,” the next page warned, and rain it did. Had Brother Ehrhart not already been soaked to his bones, he may have cursed the turn of the weather. Instead, he turned the page. “Downfall.” The rainfall turned into a pounding. Each drop felt like a stone, but still the ink did not run. Few pages were left. He already knew their contents.
He shut the book and ran inside, away from the demon’s influence. Puddles coalesced where he hesitated.
To end the book would bring a storm, even if it didn’t release the thing inside. To break the delicate parchment would split the intricate web within and give it a chance to escape. Perhaps Solomon could be trusted with his seventy-two demons, but what of a town that worshipped them? They would steal the Almanac the first chance they got. They would tear it to pieces, chew and swallow the pages just to howl that they were full. They couldn’t know.
He pried at the floorboards until his fingernails split like dry wood and welled with blood like sap. Finally, a board gave way. Precious little separated the wood from the packed earth below, but it was enough. He clawed away what dirt he could and tucked the Almanac in. It looked so small against the expanse of the floor, so pathetic. He grinned as he nailed the floorboards back into place. Someone may find it, but not until long after his soul was already in Heaven.
The storm was the last rain the town felt that spring. Valley fog left promises of dew before burning away under an unforgiving sun. The town talked. The town prayed. The town assured each other in hushed voices, as if to be heard would doom their requests for relief. The Duke wouldn’t abandon them, they whispered. The woman who had come to the church shook off condolences and offers of what little food the town could give. The Duke wouldn’t give a child he would starve.
Feast days passed with no harvest to bring to the table. The wheat turned to yellow, then to brown in the fields, curling away from the beating sun. Stalks snapped between the rotten teeth of cattle, refusing to soften into cud before disappearing behind protruding ribs. The stones leered out of the river, warning of what was to come, what had already happened.
The town prayed to their dead god, at least for a time. They wept, they sacrificed, they burnt, but it only caught on the dry grass. The fire carried between wooden house to wooden house, thatch rooves curling into black like the straw men before them. Unlike the effigies, though, they did not burn so neatly to ash. The bones of the houses lay with those of their inhabitants.
They came to the church, then, smudged with dirt and soot, hollow-eyed and empty, ready to be filled again. They listened to his sermons, they begged rain from new names. They gripped the belief that he gave them with knotted fingers and withered hands.
Brother Ehrhart drank in the pleasant aroma of stale smoke as he welcomed his flock.
