Merigold woke to the sound of something scrabbling in the earth not far from her. Other than that singular sound, silence reigned. A greenish twilight had descended, and the indigo clouds of earlier had thickened across the flawless skies of Hakarth. Mountains split the heavens all around her, their silhouettes stark and unwelcoming. Twin moons hung as if suspended, pale, bulbous shapes wreathed in violet.

She groaned.

Beneath her aching back, the earth was unyielding and painfully uneven. It dug into her shoulder blades and her bruised spine. She could feel scree under her stinging fingers, one of which hurt so badly she was sure it must be broken. Tears left dusty tracks down the side of her head when she tried to turn it, and felt the throbbing in her skull intensify.

“Gods,” Merigold repeated what Ilf had said in the moments before the sky fell down over their heads. The words carried less weight now, half-whispered by a woman lying on her back in the tumbled gravel of the scree fields, alone. If all she had broken was her finger, she would count herself lucky.

“There will be no gods coming to help you.”

Merigold’s breath caught in her throat. Instinctually, she went very still, even tried to shrink down into the rock. Her entire body protested the motion. Beneath her, gravel shifted, and she heard the hiss of rock sliding away. Turning her head slightly to the right, she realized she had come to rest on a sort of shelf in the mountainside. If she moved too much, she would surely slide with the scree to her doom. IF she had fallen just a little farther, she never would have woken up to begin with.

“I know you can hear me, you idiotic flesh sack. Why do you think I tried to kill you?”

Merigold turned her head slightly to the left, following the source of the voice. It was a nebulous ball of ectoplasm, luminous green, tiny bolts of static electricity spinning in an angry haze not two feet from where she lay.

“Gods,” she moaned again. A few violet sparks appeared in the glowing blob of light.

“You flatter me, or are you still spouting hopeful nonsense?”

There was no doubt in Merigold’s mind that she was staring at one of the erowist. She also appeared to be speaking to it, which was virtually impossible. Only deity-class erowists were capable of human speech. They were the kind that wiped out civilizations. There had only been three in the history of the world…and they did not look like small glowing spheres of crazed ectoplasm.

“That’s not true.” Merigold blinked surprise. “I’m not a deity-class erowist, by your moronic ranking system. I’m a warrior. A soldier. I don’t give a whit about learning your system of vocalizations.”

“You…read my…mind?” Merigold demanded weakly. Her fist clenched reflexively in the cutting gravel, and she sucked in a sharp breath.

“I listened, that’s all. I can’t see your thoughts. You’re the one talking to me.” The glowing ball shrank, pulsed outward, and shrank again. She realized it seemed to be tethered by something, something that it was straining against without affect. Her eyes moved to a hazy trail of ectoplasm that vanished into the rocks.

The very fact that the erowist was talking to her made no sense. What it was saying made less.

“You will soon die, you know. You’re appendages are injured. It will be impossible for you to drag yourself from the scree fields before the sun rises and the heat bakes the water from your flesh. A day or two, and you’ll be no better than the corpses you foul up with your magic.”

Merigold winced, struggling to push herself slowly up onto her left shoulder so she could get a better look around. As the erowist had said, her position seemed hopeless. One wrong move would send her over the edge of a cliff that extended for several yards to her left and right. If not broken, one of her ankles was hopelessly twisted; she could feel the swelling pressing hard against her boots, hot and angry. Blood seeped from her other knee, and the moment she saw it, nausea bubbled up in her stomach and the sky spun.

Screwing up her eyes and resting her pounding head on her left arm, Merigold fought the urge to either vomit or, again, faint. She was sweating by the time she felt reasonably capable of opening them again. The erowist had not moved, if it even could. It bobbed above the scree field, tethered to the earth. She had the sense it was watching her.

“Did you say,” she asked after a moment, fighting for clarity, “that you tried to kill me?”

“Yes, I did.”

Merigold lay there, staring at the glowing blob.

“Why?”

“Are you daft as well as dumb? Because of your magic.”

“I’m a…necromancer,” she said, wincing. In response, the blob pulsed an angry yellow before returning to green. A few licks of electricity forked to the rock, leaving the scent of ozone hanging between the two of them.

“I know very well what you are,” the erowist said.

“You’re stuck,” Merigold confirmed, peering into the rock beneath the erowist. She was beginning to piece together what must have happened. The erowist had caused the rock slide that nearly killed her. In the process, it had gotten caught up in the cascading scree, and the only truly physical part of it – its core – had gotten lodged beneath the rock, leaving it tethered in place. It might be stuck there for months until it became suddenly dislodged, or the rock shifted and finally crushed it from existence.

“A surprisingly astute conclusion. Since you’ll die anyway, you might as well do something of use in your final moments. Dig me out,” the erowist demanded.

Merigold was so surprised by the demand that she snorted before she could stop herself. She could hear the scurrying sound again, growing louder. A few rocks shifted some distance from her, and she saw a tiny, pink nose poke through the rubble. She knew immediately what she was seeing. The rat. Her summon. It wriggled from the earth, limping into the twilight beyond the stone. Merigold directed it towards her, somehow comforted by the way it came to stand at attention, beady eyes blank.

“Disgusting,” the erowist commented unnecessarily.

Again, Merigold lay her head down, giving herself time to think.

When her eyes snapped open again, it was dark. Night had fallen. The mountainside above her was bathed in moonlight, silvery blue. Her head still throbbed, but less than it had, as she pushed up onto her elbow and cast round with her eyes.

Not far from her head, the rat remained at attention, not twitching so much as a whisker. And the erowist…it remained as well, bobbing above the rock. Things felt clearer. Less hazy. Finding her bag still strapped across her body, Merigold tried to reach for it. When the motion sent rock skittering away from her down the cliff, however, she directed the rat to action instead, guiding it to drag her water bottle within reach. Now that she was awake, she was desperately thirsty. When she was done, she fixed her gaze once more on the erowist. Before she could wonder if it had really spoken to her, it did so again.

“I thought you were dead.”

Merigold’s lips formed a thin line, but she said nothing. A thought had occurred to her – a fairly astounding one. If necromancers were able to speak to erowist, it might mean they could also manipulate them. Maybe. The idea was dodgy at best, but it would explain the otherwise unexplained animosity of the erowist that had suggested it wanted to kill not the whole survey party, but just her. The necromancer. It also tracked with some of the theories she had come across in one of her dusty tomes – that necromancers controlled corpses using power drawn from the Astral plane, the very same place from which erowist supposedly spawned.

“I have a suggestion,” Merigold said after a moment, squinting at the erowist. It pulsed expectantly. “Let’s make a deal.”

“Very well,” the erowist said immediately, “so long as this deal involves you freeing me.”

“It does,” Merigold said, directing the rat back to her bag to collect more supplies. “But the thing is, you already said you intended to kill me. What’s to say you wouldn’t do so right after I free you?”

Since the erowist was silent, she had the sense that was its probable plan of action from the start.

“Then we are at an impasse,” the creature said, seeming to again sense her thoughts. Merigold took her brush from the rat, and then the vial of ink. It scurried away again, back to her bag.

“Not quite. I have an idea,” Merigold said. The rat had returned with her notebook, dragging it with slow, jerky tugs across the scree. Merigold patted the little beast’s head when it was done with its task, and it returned to standing at attention nearby. “I want to sign a contract with you, outlining the details of our deal.”

What she was proposing, Merigold knew, was a gamble. She was no Drafter. If she wrote a contract for two parties to follow, there would be nothing binding them to that contract, no terms of forfeiture like the Drafters could usually spell into their works. However…this was not a contract between two parties. It was a contract between a necromancer and something from the Astral plane – a contract no Drafter could write. It was, in effect, merely an expansion of the terms she had included in the circles and runes she painted onto the rat.

Dipping her brush into the ink and turning to her notebook, she began her work. Each rune in the runic alphabet they learned in the Academy had a meaning. Those runes were combined through geometry, partitioned between circles and connected via lines that created planes meant to represent the Astral Plane itself. There were entire Runic Theory classes devoted to the geometric structure of spells, and even classes on three and four-dimensional spell circles. Two dimensions would, for now, have to be enough.

Hours rolled away while she thought, carefully adding or removing runes and lines, expanding her circle, re-thinking her work. What she needed was not complex, but specific. She had to ensure that the erowist would help her to get off the mountain alive, that it could not harm her or anything that tried to help her, and that it could not come after her in the future. Moreover, the terms had to be acceptable to the erowist as well; she had to guarantee that she would free the creature, and that it would go unmolested when its work for her was done.

When she was finally done, Merigold slid the paper in the direction of the erowist. She was confident. Some part of that confidence might come from the dawn, which was slowly gilding the edges of the mountains to the east.

“Can you read runes?” Merigold asked, directing the rat to replace the times she had used in her bag, and fumbling through the scree for a sharp rock.

“Runes draw their power from the Astral Plane, as you seem to call it. I can understand them.”

“Then, will you accept the terms of this deal?” Merigold fervently hoped both that the erowist would agree, and that oral agreement would be good enough, as it was for a Drafter’s contract. Oral agreements were still used by Drafters for contracts on the underground market. They were very illegal, but structurally sound.

The erowist hovered over her work for a long time. The moons sank down beneath the edges of the mountains as it did so. The golden light on the horizon swelled. Slowly, the stars overhead winked out, one by one.

“I take Umbridge at the idea that we have to find every one of your companions. Those that have died and been buried beneath the scree should be left where they are. Even I cannot promise to unearth them.”

“I understand,” Merigold agreed. “Then you’ll help me recover just the ones that are alive.”

“Fine. I accept the terms of this deal,” the erowist agreed.

Merigold smiled thinly. “I also accept the terms of this deal.”

The ink on the paper unexpectedly burst into purple flame as soon as she had spoken. Merigold stared at it, and then at the erowist. For an instant, she thought maybe the creature had done something. But it remained even after the paper began to smolder and curl, and then turn to ash, bobbing patiently above the rock.

“Help me,” she said to the rat, very cautiously forcing herself up and beginning to pick the rocks that had taken hold of the erowist’s core off of the mountainside, one at a time. She piled them with equal caution, trying desperately to avoid another collapse in the scree field, which might well kill them both, contract or no. Her hair, which had come nearly entirely loose in her fall, made things difficult. It tangled around her head, falling into her eyes and sticking to the sweat on her forehead. She wondered if she should cut it as Reese had once done, until it could not possibly do as it was doing in that moment.

With the rat’s help, she soon unearthed the larger rock holding the erowist’s core in place. The entire time she struggled to leverage it upward, her heart was in her throat – gravel hissed away from time and again. The little rat even rolled away with the scree once, returning with its white fur crusted gray and another limb dragging, shattered, behind it. Unlike a living creature, it would not heal. She felt a pang knowing that the rat would have to be discarded, buried like any other corpse.

Finally, they removed enough rock that the erowist was able to pull itself free. It shot from the mountainside in a streak of light, gleaming neon green and blue and occasionally yellow. Then it hurtled back towards the two of them like a bolt of angry lightning.

And slammed into something invisible. Pulsing crimson, it strained, it roared, it spread and was nearly pulled apart. Merigold stared in wonder, knowing there was nothing else she could do. The contract between them seemed to be working. It was binding after all.

Eventually, the erowist returned to its apparently native green color, and sank down to the scree field, apparently exhausted.

“What have you DONE!” it demanded of her.

“We signed a contract,” Merigold said. “We have a deal.”

The ball of ectoplasm buzzed. It shot lightning. Then it transfigured itself, taking on the shape of something like the rat, but larger. It blinked beady, purple eyes at her.

“I will hunt you down,” it threatened.

“Maybe one day, but not one day in the next hundred years,” Merigold stated. “So the contract says.”

“So the contract says,” the erowist agreed with acid reluctance. It sidled up to her, and she was surprised when it presented its back. “I have to take you away from the scree fields and find your companions. Hold on. If you fall, well…that isn’t in the contract.”

Merigold frowned, realizing the erowist was right. She had included only rudimentary clauses about accidental death or injury. She would have to be more careful next time. Either way, the giant, glowing rat was her only way out of the scree fields.

Collecting the real rat in its box, she climbed aboard the erowist and wrapped her arms chokingly around its throat. It did not seem to notice. Immediately, it began to hurtle over the scree fields, sure-footed in the way of the lizards that littered the mountainside.

Unable to do more, Merigold simply hung on for dear life.