Chapter 95

Janvier

Desert sand shifted beneath Janvier’s feet. The darkness of the void stretched above him, lifeless cold pressing down like a physical weight. It pushed against his skeletal frame, making the very act of standing challenging. Looking into that space, he knew a moment of brief terror. Had Maud found his phylactery? Would this be his final visit to the Whisperer?

No, of course not.

His soul was hidden, it was safe. Even if she had travelled to his home there was no way she would have found its location. Maud might have this small victory, but it was ultimately meaningless. She would soon discover what happened to those who crossed him. After all, Janvier had given her every opportunity to choose correctly.

Here in the Whisper’s desert, he had nothing to fear. It was familiar. So many times he had travelled these sands, that the deathly chill of that starless void held only promise rather than fear. He needed his wits about him, that was all. It was a setback. Just a setback.

“A ssssssssetback,” whispered the wind.

Gathering his pride around him like a shield, Janvier set off in search of his god.

As usual, the desert was utterly lifeless. The wind, and the hissing dunes gave an illusion of breath; but it was a dry, rasping death rattle of sandpaper across bone. Whispers curled around his limbs like fitful serpents. The sand trickled in riverlets as he stepped.

His body was a tiny speck against the vastness of the great plain as he walked. Occasionally whispers crossed the dunes in a swirl of darkness. Occasionally a lost spirit, but nothing from outside lasted long. Not here. The Whisperer made sure of that.

He picked a direction at random and walked. His god liked to let people wander. It seemed to amuse him. Not once had Janvier found him directly, it was always hours, or days, or minutes, of roaming before he was granted an audience. Janvier ground his teeth.

He did not want to ruminate. He did not want to think, to dwell on the mistakes that had led to his latest death. He wanted it back, as soon as possible. His kingdom, his pride, his throne. All of it.

He forced down his impatience. This was a small price to pay for immortality. Just a set back.

“Jussst a sssssssssssset back,” whispered the sand.

Biting down his annoyance, Janvier strode across a desolate valley. Beyond it, more desert. This was his second humiliation. The first, he had allowed. It was his own lapse in judgement, his own failure, his surprise and fascination at the very idea of another lich, and a female at that, had disarmed him.

This last time… he ground his teeth, molar on molar, anger threatening to overwhelm him. He had miscalculated. Perhaps. He turned the events over in his mind. Where had he failed? How could he have foreseen the chaos the witch had unleashed on the battlefield? She fought like a lowly peasant, which wasn’t surprising, without honour, or sense, with the depraved beastial aggression of the common folk. The same tricks. The same underhanded tricks.

Something half buried in the shifting sand caught his foot, and he fell.

Janvier landed in the sand with an ignoble thump and a curse. What had he tripped over? Something with a hard, cruel edge. A rock? No, it was smooth and black. Crawling over he prodded it with a finger. There was nothing in this desert that was meaningless. What was it? Crouching on his knees he started to dig.

The whispers caressed his bones, muttering jeering comments at the edge of his hearing. But still he dug, curiosity biting at him. It was a crown. An ink-black, obsidian crown fit for an emperor. He dug around the outside, admiring the skillfully applied runes carved into the spikes. What was it doing here? Scooping aside more of the sand, Janver grasped it with two hands, and pulled. It did not move.

Eagerly he dug some more, bony fingers scrabbling to keep the sand from falling back into the hole he had already made. It was larger than he had first realised. Or… was it attached to something. He couldn’t wrench it free, try as he might. Maybe it wasn’t a crown at all? But a decoration, atop… something. He kept digging, sure now, that there was something else buried in the sand.

His finger struck something hard, a different consistency from the rock hard obsidian. A bone, a long ivory thigh bone. He tugged it out, threw it aside and kept digging. If only he had something to use as a tool, but he only had his hands. Another bone. Another. So many bones in the sand, femurs, skulls, fingerbones, hard knobbly things grasping at him through the drifts of sand, trying to stop him reaching his goal. He tossed them away, one after the other, but they crowded him, always more. He pushed them aside, focusing on the sand. The crown was indeed attached to something. A smooth, sloping pyramid?

Now he was at the bottom of a sizable hole, the pyramid rising above him, with the crown adorning the spire. He had to throw the great handfuls of sand a long way, or trudge up the slops and risk a sandslide. Concentrating his efforts at the deep of the pyramid he kept digging. His finger hit something moist, and soft. He cleaned away the grains to reveal his mother’s face leering up at him, her flesh rotten and bloated, her eyes hanging on strings, just as he’d found her, that day in her boudoir…

He flung the head away. It wasn’t real, none of this is real.

“Not real,” whispered the wind. “Why do you think it is real?”

There was a soft giggle behind him.

Janvier whirled, and dodged the dagger his sister tried to plunge into his chest. He grabbed her wrist and she disappeared like smoke in the wind, her mocking smile the last thing to vanish.

“Stop it!” he cried.

“Stop it,” whispered the whispers. “Sssssssstop.”

Resolute, Janvier kept digging.

The crown was atop a roof, the roof was atop a tower. How deep was it buried? Was there a castle buried deep in the sand? A pyramid? The desert was devoid of life, and as far as Janvier could tell, devoid of structures. Once, on his first visit, he had seen desolate ruins far on the horizon. A pyramid of black stone rising like a hideous monument to blot out the sky. Except there was no sky. There was no pyramid. It was all illusion, everything was in his mind.

“All in your mind,” hissed the wind, tickling the bones of his face like the waspish tongue of a viper.

Janvier kept digging. Digging was better than thinking. He was making progress. He was accomplishing something. He would make his father proud, and his father’s father. His fingers broke through a hole, plunging into freezing cold, empty space. A window on the side of the tower? Tall and narrow, just large enough to slip through?

Gingerly he leaned through to look. Beyond the window, pitch darkness, more sand, and something else buried within. With great care, Janvier squeezed his skeletal frame through the window.

He set one foot down onto the heap of sand piled within. The ground shook, the grains of sand vibrating in a shuddering wave.

It gave way, rushing down, carrying Janvier with it in a tidal wave of movement. Down, he plummeted, down, down, down, he tumbled, end over end, the waterfall of coarse sand obscuring everything from view.

He fell for a long time.

Too long.

Long enough to scream.

Long enough to think.

Long enough to regret.

Janvier landed with a thump, in front of a dark throne.

The sand fell around him like a bone-scouring rain. When it finished falling, Janvier raised his head. He was in a colossal tomb. The ceiling was too far away to perceive, the walls vast, columned, and ravaged with the passage of time. Statues stared blankly from domed alcoves, the stones pitted with the scars of age.

At the centre of it all was the throne. The figure within stirred.

Robed in night, and cowled in darkness, the Whisperer watched him from eyes like dark lanterns. Patterns flared at his back, a hint of ragged wings, memories and nightmares woven together in a tapestry of madness. It was an effort to pull his eyes away, but Janvier managed to stumble to his feet and make the appropriate obsequence.

He kept his head bowed, waiting.

“She bested you then,” came the dry whisper.

Janvier straightened, wincing as his eyes met those of the god of death and madness, his head pounding. It felt like his brain might burst. Whispers crawled over the god’s form, like swarms of insects, thickening the air around him into whorls and flairs of deep dark. It was hypnotic.

Janvier’s thoughts slowed to a crawl, until he dragged his eyes away. The Whisperer had spoken, he needed to reply.

“So it would seem.”

“I expected more from you. Begone, little man.”

The Whisperer stood.

Janvier gaped at him, as the dark god’s tarnished hammer descended, crushing him with a single blow.

The pain was excruciating.

Janvier’s bones turned to ash, and blew away in the wind. He felt the whispers carry him away, felt himself disintegrate into a thousand fragments, each one tumbling after the other, knowing he was a disappointment. For a while there was nothing but pain.

Then, to his intense relief he awoke in a new body.

Relief rippled through him. Hunger gnawed at the place where his gut should be. There was always the hunger on waking. He needed to feed, as quickly as possible. It had been a long time since he had last been a skeleton. The bones were always a trial. A harking back to the confusion and powerlessness of his beginning. But he would rebuild. He would consume, he would come back, and then he would destroy everything that the female lich held dear. He had all the time in the world. It was just a setback.

The darkness cleared.

Janvier looked up, into Maud’s beaming face.

Into Maud’s gaunt, noseless face. The woman was wearing his phylactery on her head, the crown at a jaunty angle. It was… it was threaded through with little yellow flowers, knotted together to make a daisy chain.

“Hello, dear,” she said.

She grabbed his skeletal jaw with an iron grip and forced it open.

“Wha-”

Maud tipped the contents of an iron bucket between his teeth. Metal. Molten metal thick and heavy, cooling with every second. Janvier gurgled, trying to scream, trying to speak, flailing his limbs, his eyes flaring blue but the molten silver in his mouth welded his jaw shut. Already it was hardening, and Maud held him fast in a vice-like grip. She was too strong. In his new born state he was weaker than her. He tried to shout, to whisper, to swear. He couldn’t.

Teeth stuck, unmoving, his mouth was locked in a permanent silver grin.

“Lovely,” she muttered under her breath.

Unable to utter anything more coherent than grunts of rage, he fought as she bent his body this way and that, applying liberal amounts of molten silver, to his joints. In a matter of minutes he was laying sideways, bound and trussed like a hog for market as the crazed woman hummed and harred and rearranged his bones as if he was a pile of dough she was pummelling into a loaf. He tried to scream, using every ounce of his strength to escape the bonds, but he was permanently locked into place with imobile pieces of silver.

It took some time.

At length she seemed satisfied. Janvier rocked and mumbled, trying desperately to open his jaw but he could not. He realised with cold despair that without the use of his words, he had no way out of this. He could not consume a soul, could not call for aid. What was she going to do with him?

Singing softly, Maud fastened stout ropes over him, knotting them carefully. She dribbled hot wax onto his bones, and affixed tapering, beeswax candles to him, which she lit.

“Very fetching,” she said, stepping back and considering. “I know just the thing to finish it off.” She looped some ribbons from his elbows and knees, tying them in bows, but leaving the lengths dangling free.

Then she hauled on the ropes and hoisted him into the air.

From this height he could see… what was it? Her throne room? It looked more like a womans’ lounging room. A peasant woman’s lounging room. There was clutter everywhere, heaps of material and mismatched comfortable looking chairs in front of a fire. Drapes hung from long windows. There was a vase of flowers on the table next to her throne.

“I always knew you’d make a satisfactory chandelier,” she said, smiling up at him.

Janvier rocked and growled angrily, succeeding in making his body sway slightly. He could do no more. A glob of wax dripped into one eye socket. Rocking in silent rage, he strained and pulled but he was welded into place.

She watched him carefully for a while, and then grinned.

“Perfect,” she said, and sat down on a throne, crossing her ankles neatly and arranging her skirts. “Now. Where were we?”

“Why not destroy the phylactery?” someone asked. There were dozens of people looking up at him, gawping at him, like he was some kind of curiosity.

“I’ve taken a leaf out of the late king’s book,” said Maud, smugly. “I think I will create a maze with his phylactery at the end.” She touched a hand to the crown on her head. “If any over enthusiastic do-gooders come looking for my soul, well, now they have something to find. And if they destroy it, perhaps Janvier will die. I will consider him an early warning system.”

She looked up at him, and grinned, blue eye sparkling. She was still wearing that ridiculous eye patch. “But now,” she said. “I feel like knitting. Really it's been a very long day. I need to recover. Gabriella, will you read to me? Something romantic and sappy. Yes, I’m sure Janvier will enjoy that just as much as me.”

High above her, the sentient chandelier shuddered in silent rage.