The Enterprise of Death by Jesse Bullington

Author:Jesse Bullington
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Magic, Historical, Renaissance, Fantasy fiction, Black humor (Literature), General, Fantasy, Visionary & Metaphysical, Historical fiction, Alchemists, Fiction
ISBN: 9780316087346
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2011-03-23T10:00:00+00:00

XXIII

The Rise of the Hammer

It was not easy, being a bastard, but Ashton Kahlert managed to pull it off. Had his father acknowledged his birth and given him the love and affection he so craved he might have turned out conceited and proud, with unrealistic expectations about the world. Worst of all, he might not have appreciated how brilliant his father truly was—most of his peers took their fathers for granted, ignoring greatness if it sprung from their patriarch as though their own abilities were in danger of being overshadowed by the very existence of the men who gave them life. Ashton had no such pride, no such conceit, and so he saw, albeit from a distance, just how important his father was.

His mother was, well, his mother, and the best that could be said for her was her candor in disclosing the identity of Ashton’s father. If the boy’s grandfather had not taken his fallen daughter back into his home life might have proven much harder for Ashton, but as it stood the lad grew up inside a decent enough house in Salzburg instead of on its streets. The streets were still there, of course, and rare was the day that he could avoid them and the bullyboys who beat and mocked him for having a whore of a mother, but at least he had a bed and four walls and a roof to return to, red-eyed and bloody-nosed. He was almost old enough to seek an apprenticeship when he found out the identity of his father, although his mother, being his mother, tried to make herself the martyr in the rendition she told.

“Heinrich Kramer,” she had told him as they cleaned up after dinner one winter night, keeping her voice low so her father could not hear them from his chair by the hearth in the only other room. She had promised him she would not tell the boy what had happened but the fantasy father her son had invented for himself was so wrongheaded, so misplaced, that she had to set him straight, even though it would hurt him. “ The Heinrich Kramer, Inquisitor of our fair little saltheap, and of all Tyrol besides.”

Seeing her son’s jaw drop, she went on before he could get carried away with his fancies. “He’s a cruel man, Ash, a very cruel man. Do you think I’m a witch?”

“What?” Ashton smiled. “Of course not. If you were you’d not be so miserable all the time.”

“Thank you for that,” she said. “He didn’t think I was, either, but that didn’t stop him from making a veiled accusation or two. He’d come into the bakery I was working at, when I’d gone to Tyrol, and he took a fancy to me, and that was that. So in he comes and tells me he’ll put me on trial for putting the blood of babes in my bread if I don’t do as he says. I’m not kidding, Ash.”

Yet Ashton could not stop smiling. His father was a great man, just like he had always insisted to the bullies who worked him over.

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