Chapter 68

The Grimoire

It takes me all night to make sure the forest is empty of the abominations, and most of the next day as well. I am well aware that if I miss even one then my labours are for naught. As it is, as soon as I think I am done, another howling fiend comes shuffling out of the darkness. The humans are easy enough to purge but the animals are more problematic, especially those with wings. Fortunately, the creatures are so aggressive that my very presence attracts them.

It is a terrible waste. I cannot even consume their souls so I am just left with piles and piles of stinking dead flesh. More mulch for my gardens I suppose. That is the only positive thing I can say about it all. The sun is setting on the next day before I can be reasonably certain the forest is clean. Of course, Janvier can and most likely will make more.

I return to Dunbarra Keep in a foul temper.

“Roland!” I screech, as I enter the courtyard. “Roland!”

Some of the humans run scurrying for cover.

“Roland!”

“Yes, Mistress?” He appears in a doorway, a gaggle of nosy people behind him.

“Roland. I want you to go immediately to the shepherds on the Greater Downing plains and tell them they need to protect their flocks. At all costs. And please buy me ten sheep. Whatever they ask. I don’t care. And some geese. I miss my geese. Bring them all back here. Immediately.”

“Yes, Mistress,” he says, and rushes off without asking any questions. Old Jennet is right, he is a good lad.

I carry the last screaming, clawing abomination bodily through the castle and shove it in a locked cell. I leave strict instructions for anyone living to keep far away. Naturally, this means everyone comes to look at it. Sometimes I think it is incredible that humanity has lasted as long as it has. The average meat popsicle seems to have the preservation instinct of a drunken cabbage fly. But I am no one’s mother. We all meet the Whisperer eventually, one way or another.

The abomination chews on the bars with the remains of its teeth and waves its single limb toward the watchers.

“A pitiful thing,” booms Timothy from inside his helmet. The void knight is seldom moved to words, which only serves as a reminder of the gravity of the situation.

“All it takes is a wound?” asks Old Jennet.

She bobs up and down over the heads of a gaggle of curious witches. All of them wear identical, thoughtful expressions. “And it spreads to animals as well as humans?”

“Those who are already dead cannot be infected,” I say. “Although the physical dead can still be damaged by their aggression.”

I resist the urge to run my fingers over the fresh stitching holding my arm onto my body.

“There must be a way to counter this,” says one of the alchemists. The humans all mutter agreement.

If there is a way, it is not obvious.

Once everyone has looked and boggled to their heart’s content, I shoo them out of the cellar and hand the key to Timothy. A team of wights is dispatched to retrieve the rest of the bodies with a large wagon. Making abomination mulch is cold comfort but will give me some satisfaction.

Next I spend an hour or so composing letters to the leaders of the various settlements, informing them of this unwelcome development. I am so upset the decoration is minimal and they are sent forth with only wax seal, ribbons and ghost holly. Truly I am losing my touch.

When that is done I wander down to the crafting hall and slam my backside into my chair. The peasants call it a throne room but whatever. Glowering across the newly built hall, I snarl softly under my breath. Jenkins leaps onto my lap and curls up. He settles his chin and purrs but his ears are spiked. I appreciate his efforts but his presence serves only as a pointed reminder of all the things I should be doing.

I cannot allow Janvier to win. He aims to flood the world with his own creatures, with undead loyal to him. It is untenable. Unconscionable. Wasteful. Ug. Ridiculous man-child. Does it not occur to him that if we just consume and consume, turning everything before us to ashes, at some point there will be nothing left? Perhaps he is content to rule over a dried husk.

I want more.

My piece of the world might be dark, but it is full of glorious things - frosted twigs that sparkle in the moonlight, ghost blossoms, moss-lined streams and secret dells. My forest is quiet, but it is beautiful. Most importantly it is mine. I want to do as I please, and I want to do it in a world that sings with life and death, a melody of rot and rebirth that coexist side by side.

If I cannot be the plague then the plague has no right to exist.

Sitting on my throne, I knit dark thoughts into a blanket for all of ten minutes before I am interrupted again.

The people whose counsel I value slowly filter into the hall. Dead and alive, they take their seats at my crafting table and get out their projects. I narrow my eyes. My council is not a council in the traditional sense. I dislike formal structure and commitment. The idea of chairing a meeting makes me shudder. Their attempts to lure me into discussion are not subtle, but the canny ones know I will tolerate it if they have their hands busy.

The Fairhaven witches are murmuring over various knots and plaiting dollies. Gabriella is teaching Saffron and Karine how to crochet. Terence the alchemist is awkwardly holding a piece of embroidery that smells of sulphur. One of the edges is slightly singed. I wonder what the stitches depict. Some kind of alembic jar? Timothy is squinting at a sock he is darning. It would probably go better if he took off his armour but he never does. The ex-paladin’s armour joints constantly ooze a black, sticky ichor. He has his own dedicated chair since no one else wants to sit in his goo.

Thom is doodling designs for new siege weapons on a parchment with a stick of charcoal. I crane my neck to see a bit, but the thought just makes me even more grumpy. I should be building trebuchets instead of pondering Lord Lich’s idiocy.

“You dropped a stitch,” mutters Old Jennet in my ear and I jump, tailbone slamming into stone. Jenkins spits at her. The horrible old ghost floats away cackling. Perhaps I will ask Roland to bury her somewhere very far away. The next kingdom maybe. Or next to Janvier’s bedroom window.

“If Lord Janvier made the plague,” says Terence the alchemist. “Surely it can be unmade?”

My busybody ‘council’ talks round and round in pointless circles. I listen idly, my needles clicking. One of the mage’s ponders the location of Janvier’s phylactery and how it might be destroyed. This is something I have bent my mind to also. Not helpful in the immediate though. They discuss evacuations and curfews, and battle strategies. It is all pointless.

“You could consult the grimoire,” says Timothy, after half an hour of debate.

Silence falls around the table. All of their hot sticky eyes turn to me and my lip twists.

Ah yes, the grimoire.

The magic spell book I inherited on my ascension to lichdom. The grimoire chained in silver in the tower study, the grimoire with the single, bloodshot monster eyeball attached to its cover. The book that exudes power and malevolence so intense you can feel it from the floor below. That grimoire.

When I raised the wraith of Dunbarra Keep, I did not just raise the spirit of the ancient stone castle. I raised the spirits of all those restless souls who dwelled within it. In most instances, this was not a particular problem. A few angry cow spirits manifested from the leather finishings on old chairs. A raging elephant appears from an ivory lamp to rampage through the corridors on moonlit nights. Ghosts of murdered brides and kings, I have aplenty; this is only to be expected and hardly a tipping point into madness. But the grimoire… the grimoire is something else altogether.

The tome was already sentient, or at least partially sentient to begin with. My activities and subsequent adventures in Fairhaven meant I have not had time to study its mysteries. The truth is it makes me uneasy. And now the wrinkled leather binding and single bloody eye are no longer alone. The grimoire has acquired a body. It is surprisingly talkative, although those who hear it speak seldom live to tell the tale.

They are all still staring at me. I sigh, and lay down my needles.

“Perhaps it is worth a try.”

Grumbling, I nudge Jenkins off my lap and exit the crafting hall.

It does not take long to make my way up the many stone stairs to the tower study. I fetch the silver key from a nondescript plant pot and approach the obsidian door. I keep it locked to prevent accidents, rather than to protect the grimoire. It is more than capable of doing that for itself.

My foot crunches on something brittle. I look down and see a snapped thigh bone lying in two dry halves. The door is ajar. Great. Now I look closer, I see bloody fingerprints marring the black stone. Like the previous incidents, these bones are souless, so I can’t even resurrect them and find out what happened. I have an inkling that feeding my grimoire souls might not be the best idea.

Likewise, I cannot remove the book from the castle without removing the chain. Messing with the silver binding seems like an extremely bad idea.

I step over the remains of the hapless fool who thought warnings applied to other people. The air is heavy and stagnant. When I pull open the door, I am assaulted by the smell of a charnel house.

“Maud!” shouts the grimoire in a lilting rasp that rushes through my ears and bounces off the walls. I would call it a childish pipe but for the fact that it rattles the stones of the castle and resonates through my bones like a hurricane.

A dozen limbs the size of tree-trunks tow me into the room. Arms the grimoire has in plenty, more limbs than any creature bigger than a spider has any business owning. Each arm topped with a hand the size of a dinner plate. The skin is pale and unwholesome, apart where it is patched and leathery. The skin changes as I look at it, like a nightmare. In truth it reminds me of one of my constructs. Something stitched together by a monstrous mad god in the darkness. A god with no sense of proportion.

The pages of the book are still present, but not in book form. The spells and incantations move across the limbs like flowing tattoos. The wrinkled leather of the cover binding is visible here and there, a patchwork of muscle, ink, and sinew. Eyes appear in the palms. They blink up at me, wide and excited, while the skin around them folds and cracks.

Half of the eyes transform into mouths. Slits across the palms, the teeth needle sharp.

“Maud!” The palms shout. The remaining eyes open so wide, that the yellowing whites are visible all around the amber pupils that are slit like a cat’s. The many mouths give its voice a strangely layered effect. “Maud, have you come to ask me something? What do you want to know?”

“Greetings,” I say, brightly, moving into the small amount of space unoccupied by fleshy limbs. The grimoire fills the room, its body pressing up against the ceiling and scraping against the walls.

“Your bones are so pretty!”

“Thank you. Um, are you doing well?”

“Yes!” The grimoire tilts the myriad of thumbs up at me in enthusiastic reply. The limbs shift and dance. “What have you got for me today?” it asks. “What have you got?”

“What do you want?” I say, a little taken aback.

We are not losing any time getting to the bargaining, it seems. The grimoire loves to bargain. My personal theory is that it was originally a creature from the Whisperer’s desert, hunted for its flesh, and whatever magical properties it bestowed upon the book. The way it talks of the stars and the sand, coupled with this trait…

“Everything. I want everything!”

“I’m afraid I can’t quite manage… everything,” I say carefully. “Is there anything else you can think of?”

“A puppy! Two puppies! Three puppies!”

“How about… a dandelion?” I produce a single gleaming ghost blossom from the folds of my dress and offer it up for inspection.

“Oh yes!”

A meaty index finger and thumb close over the blossom with delicate precision. The eyes cluster around it for a moment, grim petals of palms. With motion-blurring swiftness the ghost-flower disappears into the mass of limbs. I do not see what happens to it but the next moment the grimoire’s skin is flushing dandelion yellow. The sunshine colour is gone as quickly as it arrives. An ink drawing flutters across the nearest arm that is held close to my face. I think I am supposed to admire it.

“Very nice,” I say.

A maw opens in the closest palm. A cavernous fold with way too many teeth. The fold stretches wide. “I forgot to ask you the question! We have to start again! Oh no! I’m sorry Maud!”

I sigh.

“That’s alright,” I say. “I want to know how to stop an undead plague. Can you help me with that?”

The eyes blink, and for a moment the limbs are absolutely still.

“Yes. Yes, I can help!” The fingers rustle, like leaves on a great tree, flexing in anticipation. Thank goodness. That means a solution exists.

“And what do you want for this information?” I ask.

“Your heart!”

“I’m sorry, but I no longer have a heart to give anyone.”

My flesh might have grown back, translucent and pale, but my organs did not. The dead have no need for such earthy considerations. Whatever flows through my veins, it is not blood.

The mouths pout.

“A burning star!” It shouts. “No, no, the moon! I want the moon!”

“How about…” I hunt in my pockets, and bring out a ball of white yarn. The grimoire inspects it through many narrowed eyes.

“Alright,” it says at last. “The woollen moon is satisfactory, but also, but also, I want a soul! A soul all to myself! Just for me!”

“A soul I could manage. That I can-”

“Not just any soul. The soul of my last owner.”

I consider.

Atticus is not really doing me any favours. The ex-necromancer has proven himself to be a useless teacher as well as an all round terrible human being. I dislike him intensely. The fact that he murdered everyone I knew and loved is not really forgivable. I have his soul conveniently stashed in a chicken’s body, but really what is the point of him? Yes, I can part with him for this.

“Deal,” I say.

“And some cake!” the grimoire announces hurriedly. “It’s not too late, we weren’t finished, I hadn’t said deal yet!”

“Cake?” I repeat.

“Chocolate cake. A whole big one. Made of milk, eggs and flour. The tiny woollen moon, the cake, the soul. And then I will tell you how to stop an undead plague.”