heard no sound yet she seemed to be pleading with him, torn between a loathing of such a bargain and the urgency of her need.
‘Can you doubt me?’ he demanded, and the savagery of aeons was in his voice. ‘Do you know who I am? Have you forgotten?’ He got to his feet, circling the desk in one smooth motion, seizing her arm. Struggle was futile: she was propelled towards the glass wall. His grasp was like a vice; her muscles turned to water at his touch. She sensed him behind her as a crowding darkness, too solid for shadow, a faceless potency. ‘Look down,’ he ordered. She saw a thin carpet of cloud, moon-silvered, and then it parted, and far below there were lights—the lights not of one city but of many, distant and dim as the Milky Way, a glistening scatterdust spreading away without boundary or horizon, until it was lost in infinity. ‘Behold! Here are all the nations of the world, all the men of wealth and influence, all the greed, ambition, desperation, all the evil deeds and good intentions—and in the end, it all comes to me. Everything comes to me. This tower is built on their dreams and paid for in their blood. Where they sow, I reap, and so it will always be, until the Pit that can never be filled overflows at the last.’ His tone softened, becoming a whisper that insinuated itself into the very root of her thought. ‘Without me, you will be nothing, mere flotsam swept away on the current of Time. With me—ah, with me, all this will be at your feet.’
Fern felt the sense of defeat lying heavy on her spirit. The vision was taken away; the clouds closed. She was led back to the desk. The red file was open now to reveal some sort of legal document with curling black calligraphy on cream-coloured paper. She did not read it. She knew what it said.
‘Hold out your arm.’
The knife nicked her vein, a tiny V-shaped cut from which the blood ran in a long scarlet trickle.
‘You will keep the scar forever,’ he said. ‘It is my mark. Sign.’
She dipped the quill in her own blood. The nib made a thin scratching noise as she began to write.
Behind her eyes, behind her mind, the other Fern—the Fern who was dreaming—screamed her horror and defiance in the prison of her own head. No! No…
She woke up.
The sweat was pouring off her, as if a moment earlier she had been raging with fever, but now she was cold. Unlike with Gaynor, there was no merciful oblivion. The dream was real and terrible—a witch’s dream, a seeing-beyond-the-world, a chink into the future. Azmordis. Her mouth shaped the name, though no sound came out, and the darkness swallowed it. Azmordis, the Oldest Spirit, her ancient enemy who lusted for her power, the Gift of her kind, and schemed for her destruction. Azmordis who was both god and demon, feeding off men’s worship—and their fears. But she had stood against him, and defeated him, and held to the truth she knew.
Until now.
She got up, shivering, and went into the kitchen, and made herself cocoa with a generous measure of whisky, and a hot water bottle. It seemed a long time till daylight.
At Wrokeby, the house-goblin was no longer playing poltergeist. He lurked in corners and crannies, in the folds of curtains, in the spaces under shadows. The newcomer did not appear to notice him but he sensed that sooner or later she would sweep through every nook and niche, scouring the house of unwanted inmates. He watched her when he dared, peering out of knotholes and plaster-cracks. He was a strange wizened creature, stick-thin and undersized even for a goblin, with skin the colour of ageing newspaper and a long pointed face like a hairless rat. His name when he had last heard it was Dibbuck, though he had forgotten why. The piebald cat which prowled the corridors could see him or scent him, and hunted him like the rodent he resembled, but so far he had been too quick for her. He had known the terrain for centuries; the cat was an invader, on unfamiliar ground. But the presence of Nehemet made him more nervous and furtive than ever. Yet still he crept and spied, half in fascination, half in terror, knowing in the murky recesses of his brain that the house in his care was being misused, its heritage defiled and its atmosphere contaminated for some purpose he could not guess.
The smaller sitting room now had black velvet curtains and no chairs, with signs and sigils painted on the bare floor where once there had been Persian rugs. A pale fire burned sometimes on a hearth long unused, but the goblin would not enter the room then, fearing the cold hiss of its unseen flames and the flickering glow that probed under the door. Instead, he ventured to the cellar, hiding in shadows as old as the house itself. The wine racks had been removed and shelves installed, stacked with bottles of unknown liquids and glass jars whose contents he did not want to examine too closely. One bottle stood on a table by itself, with a circle drawn around it and cabalistic words written in red along the perimeter. It had a crystal stopper sealed in wax, as if the contents were of great value, yet it appeared empty: he could see the wall through it. But there came an evening when he saw it had clouded over, filled with what looked like mist, and in the mist was a shape that writhed against the sides, struggling to get out. He skittered out of the room, and did not return for many days.
On the upper floors he found those Fitzherberts who had stayed this side of Death, their shrunken spirits rooted in age-old patterns of behaviour, clinging to passions and hatreds, the causes of which were long forgotten. They dwelt in the past seeing little of the real world, animate memories endowed with a glimmer of thought, an atom of being. Yet even they had felt an unfamiliar chill spreading through every artery of the house. ‘What is this?’ asked Sir William, in the church tower. ‘Who is she, to come here and disturb us—we who have been here so long? This is all that we have.’
‘I do not know,’ said the goblin, ‘but when she passes, I feel a draught blowing straight from eternity.’
The ghost faded from view and the goblin skulked the passageways, alone with his dread. At last he went back to the cellar, drawn, as are all werefolk, by the imminence of strong magic, mesmerised and repelled.
She wore a green dress which appeared to have no seams, adhering to her body like a living growth, whispering when she moved. There were threads of dull red in the material like the veins in a leaf. Her shadow leaped from wall to wall as she lit the candles, and her hair lifted although the air was stifling and still. The cat followed her, its skin puckered into gooseflesh, arching its back against her legs. There was a smell in the cellar that did not belong there, a smell of plants and earth and uncurling fronds: the goblin was an indoor creature so it took him a while to identify it, although his elongated nose quivered with more-than-human sensitivity. He avoided looking at the woman directly, lest she feel his gaze. Instead he watched her sidelong, catching the flicker of white fingers as she touched flasks and pots, checking their contents, unscrewing the occasional lid, sniffing, replacing. And all the while she talked to her feline companion in a ripple of soft words. ‘These herbs are running low…the slumbertop toadstools are too dry…these worm eggs will hatch if the air reaches them…’ At the end of one shelf he saw a jar he had not noticed before, containing a pair of eyeballs floating in some clear fluid. He could see the brown circle of iris and the black pupil, and broken fragments of blood vessel trailing around them. He knew they could not be alive but they hung against the glass, fixed on her, moving when she moved…
He drew back, covering his face, afraid even to brush her thought with his crooked stare. When he looked again, she was standing by a long table. It was entirely taken up by an irregular object some six feet in length, bundled in cloth. Very carefully she uncovered it, crooning as if to a child, and Dibbuck smelt the odour more strongly—the smell of a hungry forest, where the trees claw at one another in their fight to reach the sun. Her back was turned towards him, screening much of it from his view, but he could make out a few slender branches, a torn tap-root, the
