Chapter 106

A Bargain

Once the potion is ready I dress for the occasion. To meet the Whisperer, my skirts are embroidered ink-black silk on midnight velvet. I am a vision in complementary shades of darkness. The starlight of my hair should be held back by the fine, obsidian tiara that circles my skull, but alas, I am currently as bald as an egg. Despite this sad state of affairs, the black stone does contrast fetchingly with the pale ivory of what little flesh I do have. The outfit gives me sorely needed confidence.

I waver on the doorstep, looking at Jenkins. I assume the Whisperer will want to bargain, that is a given. Does he need to be present? In the end I decide not, leaving him safely in his yarn basket to keep mother company. He will have to meet the Whisperer during the ritual but I will worry about that later.

On my way out of the door, I trip over a sweet nettle nestled inside what looks like a child’s shoe. I suppose I can blame myself for the fact that the tree spirit thinks plants and footwear go together, but all of his gifts do seem to be thriving amongst my other dead plants. I add the nettle to my growing collection of living pot-plants, and shut the cottage door firmly behind me.

Instinct warns me that discussions with the Whisperer should take place in private, and far away from anything breakable or precious. I journey deep into lonely parts of Downing forest. The night is wild, living trees bending and buckling in the wind. The dead ones rise like corpse stumps, scraggly fingers raking the storm clouds that are boiling overhead.

How delightfully auspicious it all is, but I find myself humourless and nervous.

As it is, I am tempted to linger between the blustery trees, watching the new petals sway beneath the gusts, but no. No dallying. Not tonight.

At length, I come to an appropriately secluded glade. Here we are far from any of the new settlements, from the village, or the castle, even far from the tree spirit’s handsome oak. It will do.

The wind drops to a murmur. The shadows gather, clustering thick between the black trunks, as if they know what I am about. Whispers skitter between the branches, twisting in oppressive strings, humming and hissing. I have the spell to summon Him well memorised but I have never before used it. Now is the time.

I open my mouth.

I shut my mouth.

Come on, Maud.

Anxiety pools like sickness inside me. I do not want to use it now, but I must. The irony of the Whisperer unwittingly being a party to his own demise is delicious, I must remember that. I will be strong, for my own future’s sake, and for Jenkins. The Whisperer has no way of knowing the traitorous thoughts in my head, after all. No way of knowing what I plan.

“Vox susurra in tenebris,” I whisper.

An ebony shockwave ripples out from my feet. The fabric of reality undulates in waves of earth, and moss, and brush. A mocking, silibiant echo of my voice bounces around the midnight glade: “Vox susurra in tenebris. Vox susurra in tenebrisssss... Vox susurra… Vox, Vox, Vox…”

A tear rips open before me; a pine high hissing slit, a creeping, insidious violation of the world’s essence.

THRUM

I do not run. I am calm. Everything. Is. Fine.

I will face him.

Calm.

For Jenkins.

Darkness bleeds from the wound in my forest, seeping into the air in swaying fronds, skittering across the ground, inching across the treeline with tar-slick fingers.

“In tenebris…” hisses the wind. Snatching at my clothes, it licks the edges of my hearing. “In tenebrisssssss…Vox susurra in tenebrissss.”

THRUM

I stare at the rip. The absence of light is hypnotising. Within the abscess the darkness is so deep I am almost blinded. It draws me in, tempting me, blotting everything else from my sight. No gentle candle portal, this but a hungry wound that will consume everything in the world, given the chance.

Sand trickles out of the portal. I squash down memories of Castle Rock.

THRUM.

The trickle becomes a flood.

THRUM

An enormous boot steps through the portal, followed by the giant figure of a man.

He steps into the world and straightens to his full height. I sink to my knees in the sand, (when did the ground become sand?) and stare up at the Whisperer, the god to whom my undead existence is inexorably bound. Robed and cowled in shadows, I cannot see his face, a fact for which I am profoundly grateful. Darkness spiders from his back, and over his shoulder is a rusting silver hammer. The same that ended my life the first time we met, all those months ago in the Whisperer’s desert.

His head brushes the swirling clouds.

“Who are you to summon me?” His voice hums through the hollow of my skull, making every bone in my body vibrate.

Somehow I manage to answer.

“I am Maud.”

“And what bargain do you seek, Maud?”

His voice fills my mind. Soft like torrential rain is soft, soft like a river gouging rock from the canyon floor, soft like an ocean current, dragging me under. I am battered from every side. Thinking becomes impossible, my thoughts dragging. I stare into the darkness radiating from him in suffocating waves. The world around us is breathless. His presence has dampened all sound, and not just sound, but colour. Or perhaps he is leeching the light from my forest? I don’t know. The grey seeps outwards, eating, consuming, softly, absorbing leaves and moss. As I watch, helpless, an ancient pine crumbles to dust behind him. I am not helpless, I can speak, as soon as I remember what it is I want to say.

Falling back my foot crunches on the skull of a hare. The sharp bone cuts into the sparsity of my flesh. It is not that painful but the sensation brings me to my senses.

“I seek- I seek to create a lich.”

“You are already a lich.”

“Not for me. For something else. A cat!”

Wings flare at his back, images twisting there. Memories and madness. I tear my eyes away with gravest difficulty staring instead at his silver hammer that is the size of a tree trunk. No, don’t look at it. Don’t remember the sound of your skull cracking, the bones breaking, the scream of death, the crushing insanity of it, the-

Silence.

Crushing, heavy silence.

The Whisperer says nothing. My skull will shatter. Just as I begin to think that this was a terrible mistake, that I will not survive this, that my brain will explode like an overripe melon, the god grins. At least I think it is a grin. A dark slit opens, just visible in the darkness above a basalt chin.

“What price are you willing to pay?”

“Name it,” I whisper, careful not to say I will do anything. There are some prices I am not willing to pay. Please let the price be reasonable.

The god of death and madness bends forward.

It takes all of my strength to keep my back unbowed.

“How about,” he says, his voice gently mocking. “How about we negotiate a deal?”

For a moment I am confused. There is something familiar about his words. I have said them? I think? I said them once, to someone else and now he is saying them to me. Who was it? When? I can almost remember but it is so hard to concentrate.

“Alright,” I say, warily.

The dark god’s face changes instantly. A hard shiny beak protrudes from the cowl, elongating and growing. His wings are no longer those of a dark angel, they are the wings of a gigantic bird. A crow. He is growing, all of him, shoulders shortening and bulging, changing shape. He is monstrous, a monstrous bird with feathers the size of branches. A dreadful corvidae the size of a house. Did he grow or did I get smaller? I cannot tell. I am tiny before him.

Elding and Tora, I spoke those words to Elding and Tora, months ago in the forest before I crushed them for lying to me-

The enormous beak leans towards me, gaping.

I am nothing, I am small, a grub. A tiny, fat grub which writhes before the Whisperer on the ground. There is nothing I can do as I am plucked squealing into the air. His beak squashed my sides, I am going to break, to die, my spine snapped-

He tosses me high, and swallows me whole.

Down his gullet I tumble, screaming and wriggling. I kick and thrash but there is nothing but rushing air, nothing but darkness.

Falling, I will fall forever.

I will scream forever and no one will even hear me, the sound snatched from my throat as I plummet into the void.

“Your existence,” the Whisperer’s voice booms around me, and I scream louder in my tiny grub’s voice, trying to blot out the sound, “is optional. You live through my sufferance. If you do not find this acceptable I will consume your souls, however many there currently are, and then I will turn your body here into mincemeat. Is that understood?”

“Yes!” I shriek, “Yes, I understand.”

“I am always watching. I am always listening.”

Visions flash before me as I tumble. Myself as a lich, enormous and looming over two grubs who squeal and writhe on the forest floor. I remember this! In the northern forest where they hatched the beastie.

The vision flickers.

I run screaming through the snow, my axe dripping scarlet. Completely skeletal, I leave behind myself a trail of violence and destruction. It flickers again. I strike the head from the shoulders of a small Wavewalker girl. The head goes bouncing across the ground, her eyes staring blue, innocent and terrified.

Flicker.

I fight paladins.

A wraith.

Flicker.

I create a parade of horrors.

“I’ve been listening. I am always listening. You will do well to remember this lesson. Do you understand?”

“I do!” I scream. Curling up as small as I can I tense myself for what I know will come next.

Instead of smearing me into a pulp, I land with a thump in the empty glade.

Once again the Whisperer towers above me as an enormous shadow cloaked man.

“Bargain then.”

“Ten souls,” I say, my voice tiny. “For the liching of the cat.”

I must not let him know Jenkin’s worth. I do not even say my cat.

“To transform the cat,” says the Whisperer, slowly, as if he is considering. “Bring me the hearts of ten handsome men, the head of Roland Halifax and a dandelion plucked from the fields of the summer queen.”

My innards tense. “That is a princely sum,” I say, “for a small cat.”

“The bargain is yours to take,” says the Whisperer, his voice soft and dangerous, “or not.”

“Yes, to the hearts, to the dandelion,” I say, hurrendly. “But no to the head. I will offer someone else’s head.”

There is a pause, and I wonder if I have gone too far. But surely bargains are meant to be bargained? It seems I am correct.

“Your head then,” says the Whisperer, “on a platter of roses.”

“Deal,” I say, without hesitation.

“The bargain is struck,” says the Whisperer. “Prepare the phylactery. Bring the offerings. I will meet you here, ten days hence at the stroke of midnight. It will be done.”

“Yes,” I say, inclining my head. “It will be done.”

I feel the weight of the bargain settle into my bones.

The rip in reality closes itself up, and the Whisperer vanishes with it. I am left wilting in the grey forest glade in a pile of dry, lifeless sand.