sun passed overhead, witness to Chella’s long agony, and at last, in the dark beneath a host of stars, she sat. Her head throbbed with memory. Not a complete mapping of the life she had stepped away from, but enough meat on the skeleton to match with where she stood upon the threshold of death and life. She hugged herself, feeling at once how her ribs stood out, how sunken her belly, how withered her chest. The coldest fact, though – the harshest judgment, came from the sum of all her remembering. No tragedy had driven her along the path she chose. She hadn’t run from any particular horror, no offence too vile to live with, no terror nipping at her heels. Nothing but common greed: greed for power, greed for things, and curiosity, of the everyday cat-killing kind. Such were the needs that had set her walking among the dead, mining depravity, rejecting all humanity. Nothing poetic, dark, or worthy, just the mean little wants of an ordinary little life.
Chella drew a deep breath. She resented having to. Jorg Ancrath had done this to her. She felt her heart thump in her chest. Barely more than a child and he had beaten her twice. Left her lying here more alive than dead. Made her feel!
She picked a leech from her leg, then another, fat with her blood. Her skin itched where mosquitoes had taken their fill. It had been years since she held any interest for such creatures, years since they could even touch her without snuffing out the tiny flickers of life in their soft and fragile bodies.
The marsh stank. It hit her for the first time, though she had spent months in its embrace. It stank, and tasted worse than it smelled. Chella pulled herself up, weak in her legs, trembling. The cool of night on her mud-caked nakedness accounted for some of her shivering, hunger and fatigue for a little more, but most of it was fear. Not of the darkness or the swamp or of the long journey through harsh lands. The Dead King scared her. The thought of his cold regard, of his questions, of standing before him in whatever dead thing he chose to wear, her wrapped in the tatters of her power and speaking of failure.
How had it even come to this? Necromancers had been the masters of death, not its servants. But when the Dead King first rose unbidden amongst the darkest of their workings the necromancers knew fear once more, though they thought it abandoned and forgotten in their path. And not just Chella’s small cabal beneath Mount Honas. She knew that now, though for a year and more she had thought the Dead King a demon woken by her delving into places not meant for men, a creature focused on her alone, then on her brother and the few around them. But the Dead King spoke to all who looked past life. Any who reached through and drew back what could be found beyond the veil to refill the remains of those who had passed. All who reached for such power would find themselves, sooner or later, holding the Dead King’s hand. And he would not ever let them go.
And why had he sent her against this boy? And how had she failed?
‘Damn you, Jorg Ancrath.’ And Chella fell back to her knees and vomited up a dark and sour mess.
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