There was a brief weightlessness as the ground hinged opened up beneath them. For Mildred, this was a period of panic, but Gregor possessed no such capacity. He was upright with a flash and a crack, and after falling for only an instant, Mildred felt a jolt as Gregor caught her chair. No longer weightless, she began floating up and away from the dank darkness that beckoned below, like the open maw of some eager netherworld, or the wooden jaws of a building with hunger. Neither of these were likely to be far from the truth.

  Around the table, the Damont clan were small in their seats, with eyes wide and mouths agape. The man closest the exit managed to dodge the complex paralysis of surprise and horror to scramble for the door, which earlier had been closed to keep out the wind and snow of night. He found it impossible to shift. He pushed and kicked at the wood, but even unlatched, it held solid and stubborn. The barn had become a gaol.

  The rest of the clan, perhaps a dozen-and-some people, were more subdued in their terror. They knew that a horrible mistake had been made, and that the aristocrat in their company would count it as an irreconcilable sin, but hope is hard to avoid. Irrationally, they imagined that they weren’t definitely doomed beyond doubt, and that their warden might perhaps be the merciful type.

  In the throes of this vain hope, an old man near the head of the table began to plead.

  “They weren’t meant to drop ye’ milord! They weren’t to do it, not to neither of ye’! Never!”

  As if to serve as counterweight against these words, a moist stench was wafting up to the noses of the pair, who now stood, casting glances down into the dark where someone had tried to drop them. It was the decaying odour of a yet-mature charnel pit – a scent strikingly similar to that of the deeptroll warren.

  Horrified and of a mind to be mean, Mildred took a pistol in hand, and was not even a little shy about pointing it toward the cannibal who seemed to be volunteering himself as a target for her ire.

  “This was an accident?” She asked, somewhat incredulous.

  “Yes!”

  “A mistake?” Pressed Gregor.

  “Yes! A mistake! W-we meant nothin’ untoward, I swear.” Mildred advanced toward him, her expression carrying not a single hint of forgiveness. He shrank from the giantess, stammering, “An accident! It was an accident! The man below musn’t’ve been told-”

  “The meat,” she interrupted, “the man you tried to put into our mouths? What about that? Was that also a mistake?”

  “We- I-” The gun was now very close to his head, and he madly flicked his eyes between Mildred and her weapon. “W-we meant to give you our best, milady. It was- it was hospitality. Pure intentions. Not-” He was shaking now, and tears of terror had begun to leak from his eyes. “W-well, we hadn’t any intention… it was just- w-we couldn’t give you less than… it was…” Mildred pressed her gun to his temple, and he trailed off. All thoughts fled as the ring of cold metal kissed him. Utterly pacified, the old man began to quietly sob and shiver. “Not my fault,” he muttered, “wasn’t my fault.”

  To Gregor, things were becoming clear.

  These people had claimed to hunt boars, and though there were no boars, they did indeed hunt. They had in place a practised system for the luring of prey to trap – they met travellers on the road, just as they had met Gregor and Mildred, and offered them exactly the hospitalities a weary wayfarer would want. Then, come time for the meal, the game were seated above a sharp drop to the butchery.

  Their reverence for noble blood and desire to attend the pair with their greatest hospitality might have been genuine, and the leverman might very well have made a mistake, or not ever been informed that the guests this time weren’t prey, but all of that mattered very little, and it left Gregor with a unique question.

  “You sell the meat, yes?” The wizard queried, red eye unblinking and unavoidable. All other eyes were drawn to meet it. “Is it sold as boar? Or do you have customers who know what they are buying?”

  The whole room stared at him, Mildred in deepening horror, and the rest with mortal terror.

  “Respond,” he demanded of the group. With no response forthcoming, he worked his cane to limp over beside Mildred, then stooped to speak to her elderly hostage. “Old man, you must have been here for a while. Surely you know the answer?”

  Gibbering and sputtering, the elderly cannibal managed a weak, “…They weren’t to drop ye’… I had no part. They weren’t to do it,” through his blubbering.

  Mildred, looking down at that face of terror, scrunched and snotty and wet with tears, couldn’t help but to hate. It was an itchy kind of feeling – a pervasive agitation she just couldn’t ignore. It filled her. It urged her. It pushed behind every thought. He was a freak who killed and ate people. He was sustained by them, made from them, practically disgust distilled to purity. And here he sat inconsolable, pleading lenience, though considering the accidental offence of a wizard to be his actual crime, not the people-eating, not really, else that would be the object of his vacant apologies.

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  To her knowledge, she had never felt anything so strong for another person as the revulsion she felt for this man.

  Unexpected recoil almost ripped the gun from her grip, and the man’s brains began to seep from a breach in the opposite side of his head. He slumped, Mildred stood still, and the rest of the clan huddled down, either giving bleats of alarm or whimpering inconsolably.

  The white buzz of the shot lingered in her palm, and all of Mildred’s rage turned to cold terror. Her mouth hung agape as her eyes moved slowly from man to gun to man, then down to her shaking hand, back over again to the corpse, then finally up to Gregor, searching his face for something, for some assurance or comfort or condemnation. He was unfortunately unperturbed. She had no idea what to do. A jerk of the finger, that’s all it had been. An irresponsible pressure in her hand.

  Outwardly frozen and inwardly panicking, Mildred made several false starts at speech, eventually managing a stuttered, “I-I didn’t mean to… I-” She faltered, and nothing more came, except for the worry that she might have meant it. The reasons were there – justification all too easy, she lacked only intent, which Mildred knew to have been shudderingly close to forming during those evil few moments between hate and hurt.

  Twitching very slightly and oozing, the dead old man slumped further down until his forehead came to rest upon the table. As if freed from some spell, the old woman next to him began shrieking tearfully and reached out to clutch him close. She shuddered and sobbed and cooed his name, smearing herself with his vital leakage.

  Wide-eyed and with the pistol now in a cagey grasp at her side, Mildred realised that cannibals are people too.

  At this, a trickle of hate began to seep back into her mind, for if the Damont clan were capable of human compassion, and even had enough of it to care for and to morn the dead, it was all the more evil that they saw little problem in sating their perverse human hunger.

  …Had it really been an accident, or might that just be a convenient little lie for comfort? Horrible as it was, Mildred found herself wondering if it actually mattered at all, and, truly accidental or not, if it was really so bad. These were evil people, after all. Her hate was not baseless.

  She wanted to think none of this, and she wanted desperately to look away from the man she had killed and the widow she had thereby created, but in neither case could she stop.

  Distantly, Mildred registered a tug at her arm, and felt Gregor’s voice in her ear. “We are leaving,” he said, and she felt absurdly grateful for this direction. It was escape – the beginning of something other than her current situation.

  Eyes followed their passage, but heads didn’t turn – something which Gregor knew to be the behaviour of prey in the presence of threatening things whose notice is best avoided, and was something which Mildred didn’t notice at all, which probably meant that it worked.

  The door, previously uncooperative, opened freely in the path of the pair, and out they walked into the welcoming cold, the air blessedly free from the faint aroma of corpseflesh.

  Despite herself and all her distaste for the situation, Mildred halted just past the threshold, choosing to remain just a little longer than she absolutely must. Things simply couldn’t be left as they were.

  She turned to the wizard, who was already looking her way. “Gregor, can you… please make them stop eating people?” Was her hollow request. She was listless, looking out into the hamlet with the warm light of the barn on her back. From a few windows poked the heads of small children, probably very curious that the guests had gone in and come back out. She wondered if anyone had ever escaped – anyone else.

  “There is an easy way.”

  He referred, of course, to the way he typically solved probelms, and Mildred was so incredibly close to saying yes, but… She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Here, in the most extreme of circumstances, Mildred had found the limit of what she could be driven to sanction. “No, do anything else. Curse them, terrify them… torture them, anything, just… get them to stop eating people. I need to… make it right, maybe. I don’t know. I need to do something, and you are my cudgel for beating the world into shape.”

  Mildred was unaware, but those last few words did things to Gregor. They inflamed within him powerful wizardly passions of the kind one might only feel when battling gods and boiling seas – deep and prideful satisfaction very similar to the ecstasy of power. Gregor would be Mildred’s cudgel, and the world might never recover from the beating.

  After standing at her side for moment and considering her intensely, Gregor recovered himself, nodded, then turned to hobble back inside, enthusiastic in his menace. Mildred continued to look outward.

  The clan, whose hopes had begun to grow when the pair looked to be departing, all shrank at Gregor’s reentry. He shuffled up to the foot of the long amalgamation of tables and stood, glaring balefully with his stump tucked behind his back and hand resting before him heavily on his cane. Death had passed them over, but was now giving them a second glance.

  “I am Gregor the Cripple, a murderer,” Gregor announced. “I do it for money and for pleasure, and I am far better at it than any of you.” He paused, because that was the important part of the threat.

  “At several points in the future, I will return. You will not know when, but you will always be afraid of it. If any of you indulge your deviant tastes in the periods interceding, your victims will tell me, and I will give the spirits of the dead agency to feast upon you vile fools, guilty and innocent alike.” Here, Gregor grinned a rare grin, and it only grew as he spoke. “It will be fitting, and I don’t mind telling you that it would’ve already happened had I come here on my own. Be glad that I am accompanied by a lady so civilised. As it is, and under the restrictions of her benevolence, this matter will be allowed to rest until you give me an excuse to resume it.”

  Turning, Gregor began to hobble out into the night where Mildred waited, her back still turned. “I pray that you live enjoyable lives hereafter; it will make the punishment all the worse when some of you eventually find gumption enough to indulge the cardinal vice that you all seem to share. Do strive to police yourselves.” Gregor gave them one last ruby-red glare, “Farewell, but not for long.”