The Pillars Of The World

were hurting.
    The confrontation had taken place on the village’s main street. It had been a foolish thing to do, and had almost cost him his life. He had stood in the main street and hurled the accusations at her, listing every one of the ills that had beset the villagers. Her only response had been a mocking smile—until he loudly declared that the reason no decent man would have her was because she fornicated with the Evil One and the stench of the vile union clung to her.
    She flung her earth magic at him, opening up the street right under his feet. He threw himself away from the deep pit, landing hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. A moment later, the pit snapped shut. If he’d fallen into it, she would have buried him alive.
    One of the villagers hit her over the head with his walking stick before she could strike again. Then they had looked to him to tell them what to do with this enemy. And he had the answer: Burn her.
    With his help, how those flames did burn.
    He spent two days at the inn there, his food and lodging courtesy of the family whose daughter had been crippled.
    When he was ready to move on, one of the farmers mentioned a cousin who was having a bit of trouble, and if Master Adolfo was heading that way, would he mind having a look to see if he could sense if a witch was causing the trouble.
    Of course he could head that way. And of course he found a witch. It didn’t matter that the troubles had no other cause than nature’s whims, there was a witch living quietly in the village. She, too, burned.
    In each place, there was always someone who knew someone else who was having a bit of trouble that might be caused by magic. And if he arrived at a village where there was no trouble, it wasn’t difficult to create some. He didn’t have any of the earth magics except for a bit of fire, but he had the gift of persuasion, which made him suspect that his mother had had Fae blood in her as well as witch, since the magic to open a door into another mind was something that belonged to the Fae. So it wasn’t difficult to slip around the borders of one of the Old Places and turn the minds of a few of the Small Folk to mischief magic. He would leave and return a month later when the villagers were ripe to have someone pay for their troubles. And there was always someone who could be singled out to pay, whether she was truly a witch or not.
    Over time, his fee increased from food and lodging and the occasional piece of clothing to coins in his pockets. And the first time a Wolfram baron had needed help with a bit of trouble in order to confiscate some land he coveted, the fee was more than a few coins.
    By the time ten years had passed, he was known as the Witch’s Hammer, the Inquisitor from whom witches could not hide. By the time those years had passed, he had visited the handful of universities in Wolfram to talk with the scholars who collected stories about the Fae and the Small Folk. He had puzzled with the other men over the oblique references to something called the House of Gaian that appeared in a few of the oldest stories. Whatever it had been, the House of Gaian disappeared from the stories around the same time that Tir Alainn was first mentioned, so he dismissed it as something too far in the past to be of use to him.
    By the time those ten years passed, he had started gathering other men and training them to be his Inquisitors. They were all as he had been—young men, outcast because they were descended from a mating with one of the Fae. He called their magic the Inquisitor’s Gift, and taught them how to use that power in order to hunt the witches whose existence thwarted men’s right to rule the land.
    By the time those years had passed, he had reshaped some of the stories traveling storytellers and bards passed from village to village until it became common knowledge that witches were the Evil One’s whores and offered their bodies to decent men in order to trick them into becoming the Evil One’s servants.
    When another five years had passed, he slipped back to his home village. It took little effort now to persuade a weaker mind to believe what he wanted that person to believe. No one who had seen him arrive at the inn recognized him as Adolfo, the disinherited son who had run away.
    It wasn’t difficult to discover that his father made regular visits to a nearby town and had been doing so for years. It wasn’t difficult to whisper in the maid’s ear when she came to