The Testimony of Hegath Kulitti

Yes, I have met the Tax Collector. It has always been in the course of my work. I am a palatine of the Church of Amsherrat, stationed in Amsherrat, name of Hegath Kulitti, second-anointed. My service is the patrol of the streets during True Night, as it is written in Czeresh: Let the anointed bladesman stand guard. I am such an anointed bladesman and I am such a guard.

My nights are uneventful. It is a blessing they are. If they are not uneventful, the situation will escalate beyond what my meagre powers can address. For the second anointing makes none a Bishop. I cannot pray with their efficacy, to tap into miracles as they do. I am a man with a sword who is favoured with protection, to give some aid, and alert superiors, as an intermediary and a watchman. That is all.

My typical work is to stand sentinel at civic square’s fountain from 1600 to True Night, then patrol until 2400. On that day, in the daylight hours, I did witness the Tax Collector trotting among the crowds.

Such is not peculiar. We of the Church have negotiated a law for his presence in Amsherrat. Under sunlight, he may visit the city in the form of a man to survey the streets for his prey. Under moonlight, he may wander as he wishes in whichever form he wishes, for as a spirit of the night that is his entitlement. He has diligently obeyed this binding. I, as a watchman, do notice him, but he draws no attention at day.

I will describe to you his demeanours. During the daytime, he wears a hooded cloak of varying colour, but typically green, embroidered richly in winding patterns of gold. If I should speak with him more casually, I would ask where to purchase these cloaks. They boast of such artful quality that I would gift one to my dearest friend, although, exactly that artfulness suggests them too precious for my pocketbook to bear. It is repulsive, the implication that he inhabits a strata so rich as to wear these, and most onlookers slide their focus away.

The cloaks conceal his bloodless pallor and hide his detestable witch-eye. These contingencies are not bindings imposed by the Church, but his own initiative toward the virtue of Manners. I have always professionally favoured him for his courtesy, as it indeed makes my days uneventful.

I expect he also prefers his own days to stay uneventful.

He changes at night. The artful cloaks become abominable shrouds laced with golden coins that drip a foul slime. This slime dissolves into vapour upon contact with the ground, but it is always dripping. The coins are engraved with the faces and names of those souls he has consumed. Those he detests the most are nearer the bottom, where they are more tarnished by the sludge. It is both a ghastly and a sentimental habit, and a thing he divulged to me awkwardly.

My powerlessness was impressed to me by a particular brush with the Tax Collector. The streets were empty for the night. Sunset had dipped into purple eventide. I stood yet at civic square’s fountain, about to engage my patrol, when the Tax Collector passed by.

His hood was off and his bestial aspects were bared, in hoofed legs, clawed hands, and a tail. A discomfited air pervaded him, once he knew himself even passively witnessed, in this impolite and yet sincere state. His hair was, as typical, badly matted, and his sallow face would have been handsome if he removed the pits beneath his eyes. I do not understand why he doesn’t.

He flinched at my attention and glanced to the houses terraced above us. I paused my departure to examine him more. To me, his timid manner echoed an attitude I saw commonly in the unjailed penitent: that of paralytic shame for existing within the sphere of an officer, as though I’d eyes to uncover blazing anew even old sins, long of repented.

This paranoia of conscience is a working of Shien, and I am goaded too at the scent of it. I do squint and I do sniff for fresh impieties hidden at obscure angles. We bristle in that moment like beasts; the criminal is a mongrel who whines before a regal wolf.

Then, we remember ourselves, and our places, and laugh at the roles that we become so easily.

Nonetheless, the Tax Collector’s open guilt compelled this instinct strongly. I felt and still do feel a need to impress upon him the seriousness of the Church’s authority. Though not a flattering epithet, he is often called our Cur, and, because of his witchcraft, it is paramount that he does remain subservient to our Law as much as does a dog to its master.

I stared at him harshly.

He curled and froze, under that stare. He shifted from hoof to hoof and his tail swept anxiously—he is most expressive in his inhuman aspects. My brow lifted slightly. That he had not moved along was peculiar.

Rather, his gaze flicked incessantly between me and the houses, and his mouth opened and shut as though he were debating to speak. His form shifted abruptly like a smearing of paint, that his ears, now something between those of a fox and a rabbit’s, pinned back in ashamed guilt. I am not sure he realises how often his form changes. His body expresses itself for him quite openly.

I gripped my spear’s shaft and pursed my lips.

To converse would break our protocol. Plainly, though, he desired it. It is not an enforced Law, but a convention between us of the Church and our Cur that he reserves official communications to our offices, whereby we have agreed upon such tenets as: he shall not hunt offenders already inside the penitentiary, (a rule which heartily has filled the penitentiary), and he may borrow only five light-grenades a month in attempts to kill himself (which he must use or return within 24 hours). I lack the authority to, of my own accord, finalise such agreements, so it was odd that he—

A grisly screech shattered the night as bricks burst from a house and pattered upon the square. I had barely the mind to yelp and brace against the hail of rock, when the Tax Collector leapt over me and caught in his mouth the boulder that would have flattened my skull.

He landed upon the terraces and spat out the rock. Also upon the terrace was a monstrous creature—a ghoul over fifteen feet in height—with elongated limbs like the blades of a windmill, the fangs and face of a bat, and extremities that ended in claws like butcher knives. Its hideous mouth gawped down as if prolapsed and its muzzle, beneath those baleful coal-black eyes, scrunched up in hatred at me.

Panic surged that I readied my spear to fight the monster. I had no plan, simply fear and adrenaline. The ghoul scurried down the houses like a spider, blazingly fast, when the Tax Collector shot like a hawk onto the back of the creature’s neck.

He ravaged the ghoul. Strokes of his hands stripped the ghoul’s flesh as though skinning through soft rabbit hide. Giblets of black meat spattered about the square. He lunged deeper, to bite the back of its skull, and all the while, the monster kicked and bucked but was pinned beneath a weight that seemed so impossible for a creature that much smaller than it to impress.

Howls and inhuman shrieks reverberated over the square. The ghoul glared fixedly yet at me, and its ferocious claws carved grooves into the pavement in its attempt to crawl closer. Because the Tax Collector is partially inhuman, ghouls ignore him even to their own detriment. This one was dying and would not address him.

I still held my spear poised to defend myself, not lucid yet that the fight was already done. The Tax Collector reamed through the creature’s head and burst out of its brow. This grotesque wound would shortly be fatal, but by sheer enmity the ghoul in its final acts glowered at me and exhaled from its prolapsed mouth a surging jet of black smoke.

The Tax Collector shot out his arm. Crystalline flecks glimmered as the smoke cloud froze into ice—the pale blue light of a spell glowed around the Tax Collector’s hand. He clicked his fingers and the ice-block melted into clear water that flowed away.

Upon the lower terraces, potted flowers caught for a moment in the black mist sagged necrotic and dead.

I shuddered because those flowers could have been me, had the Tax Collector not intervened so effectively. It defies truth that he foreknew the ghoul could spit that dangerous gas. He simply reacted with wisdom and speed.

In doing that, and in being present at all, he had saved my life.

Bones of the ghoul crunched beneath his hooves as he stepped over to me. The ghoul itself was slumped dead, and spears made of bone pierced out of its body in some final, yet noncommital, attack of the Tax Collector’s.

“Are you alright?” he asked. The gore upon him had cleared and he appeared to me spotless. I am unsure when or how this happened.

I finally breathed and loosened my grip on my spear. I massaged my temple and nodded.

Only as my adrenaline ebbed did I feel, for all my discipline, how severely my heart throbbed in my neck. I could not speak, or think, through the knot.

“I’m sorry. I, should’ve told you that was, uh, coming, earlier...”

What breed of blasphemous madman apologizes for their virtues? That backwardness is the sorcerous arete of the Tax Collector, I instructed myself.

“Did you know of that one rotting?”

“Oh—no, she, that one wasn’t, sorry, I don’t really know, but I think that was female... um, she wasn’t a sinner. I had no clue that was there until, uh... until the rot was, quite, deep. Like, like, less than half an hour ago...” then he blurted. “I actually smell ghouls. It’s kind of different. Sorry, it’s weird.”

So he lacked much warning also. It was by his own perfectly damnable conscience that he expressed so much guilt.

I again breathed relief. My smouldering chest was reordered. We both looked to the corpse of the ghoul, smeared upon the tile, hideously disruptive to the beauty of the arches and fountainwork of the square.

The beast was a tragedy. Someone must have died undetected in one of those houses for days. Next of kin must be contacted, the dead must be identified, examinations for aftereffects upon the area must be organised, purifications conducted... my superiors needed to know.

“The family won’t mind if I take that, right?” the Tax Collector said more than asked. He stared at the corpse with a hypnotized gaze, and his throat bobbed slightly, as he licked his teeth, which dripped thick saliva.

I snorted a sigh. “I don’t technically have the credentials to grant it, but it is your kill, and these bodies are hard to dispose. It’s more a service than a menace to the Bishops for you to remove it.”

The Tax Collector grinned. His tail and ears perked up happily, in a happiness so quickly smothered as though truthfully, mentally strangled by an invisible pair of hands. A sober frown reclaimed his face.

“But then, i-if you don’t have credentials, this could get you in trouble.”

“Again, they are hard to dispose.”

His tail flicked as he stuffed the monster’s mutilated head into its chest cavity, as though packaging it. He sighed. Did that flash of joy yet simmer under this bog of sombre lassitude? So close to his stormy aura of mental turbulence, I was beginning to wonder such thoughts.

“Thank you. I must say. You saved my life tonight, Tax Collector.”

“...I guess. I can’t say, that it wasn’t anything big, since uh, it kind of was, but it’s not really anything that deserves that much, ah, adulation because, I, I...” He glared and pointed at the corpse of the ghoul. “I care more about hunting that than helping you. Okay? Sorry. Um, um, I don’t hate you or—anything, I’m just...”

Unbalanced?

“...kind of, hungry, so... there’s still a bit of, soul in that body but, the consciousness is gone. So, so, that’s a guilt-free, ah... I wouldn’t let anyone rot to Shien if I knew earlier, though.”

“Czeresh does say to sever the souls.”

“It’s not really about Czeresh...” he trotted to me and spread his palms. The sewage dripping from his cloak thickened to run over the pavement, between the borders of the tilework, and absorbed the viscera shed by the ghoul. His fingers twitched wider. A glow of green magic cloaked his hands, and the wilted flowers erected themselves fresh and healthy again.

That ability stunned me. “You can restore the dead?”

“...If, if I did that to you, you’d be soulless or you’d be bitten by Shien. It’s not a real—are, are you really that interested in me? Or what I can do?”

“I am coming to understand why they call you fourth-anointed.” His miracles, rather, his witchcraft, evoked results on par with the prayers of the Bishops.

“It’s just me being exploitative. I guess. Good—good luck? I, don’t know if we’ll ever talk again.” He bent and hooked his claws into the ghoul’s shoulders to drag it away.

“Why should we not? My patrol is regular, and you frequent my routes.”

“I’d just rather not.” He juddered at himself, hand raised in surprise. “Woah—woah, I turned someone down. Like, like, straightforwardly. Huh...”

He smiled a smile of more subtle delight: that of a pauper fed for the first time good food. No hands strangled this more tempered joy, rather it bloomed ever brighter. He again hooked the ghoul’s corpse in his claws. He leapt into the sky and wings burst from his back, until he was a dot lost beneath the starlight, though I saw he did not fly so much as soar on his own momentum.

Czjeir’s blessings come in many forms. This encounter edified me to that lesson. As much as to me he was a mercy that night, I think to him that I was a mercy. It is with strange sincerity I praise, that this disturbed man never did lose his madness in life, and never did go to Nine Columbines.

For if he had been healed, and not healing, I doubt I would have lived.

And if he had been healed, and not healing, I would not have been a cog of God’s virtue to mend him.