wood of the front door.
The crowd would not listen. No other house in Margalit had the plague. Just the Brunelle
house. Its doors and windows would not be opened again. The house would never ring with life
and laughter as once it had.
When the girl was dead, they would burn the house, and all the corpses within it. Until
then they would wait.
Eventually Ishbel crept away from the windows and the cold, bolted doors. She could not
bear the flat hostility in the eyes outside.
All she wanted was comfort, and so she crept close to the corpse of her mother and
cuddled up next to it.
Her mother was very cold and smelled very bad, but even so Ishbel garnered some
comfort from the contact with her body.
Until the moment it began to whisper to her.
Ishbel. Ishbel. Listen to us.
Ishbel recoiled, terrified.
Her mother”s corpse twitched, and it whispered again.
Ishbel, Ishbel, listen to us. You must prepare—
Ishbel screamed, over and over, her hands pressed against her ears, her eyes screwed
shut, her body rolled into a tight ball in a corner of the room.
Then the corpses of two of her aunts, which lay a few feet from her mother”s, also
twitched and whispered.
Ishbel, Ishbel, listen to us, our darling. Prepare, prepare, for soon the Lord of Elcho
Falling shall walk again.
A vision accompanied the horrifying whispers.
A man, clothed in black, standing in the snow, his back to her.
Darkness writhed about his shoulders.
He sensed her presence, and turned his head a little, glancing at her from over his
shoulder.
Bleakness and despair, and desolation so extreme it was murderous, overwhelmed
Ishbel”s entire world.
The despair that engulfed her annihilated everything Ishbel had felt until now.
The loss of her family, and her entrapment with their corpses, was as nothing to what this
man dragged at his heels.
Prepare, Ishbel, prepare for the coming of the Lord of Elcho Falling.
After her mother, and her two aunts, every other corpse in the house twitched in the same
mad, cold, macabre dance of death, and whispered until the words echoed about the house.
Prepare, Ishbel, our darling, for the Lord of Elcho Falling shall walk again.
The twitching corpses and the constant whispering drove Ishbel to the brink of insanity.
She didn”t want to live. She had gone mad, here in this cold house of death, watching everyone
she had ever loved putrefy before her eyes.
Listening to their never-ending whispers.
Prepare, our darling…for the Lord of Elcho Falling.
She tried to starve herself, but one day she had weakened, sobbing, stuffing her mouth
with moldy pastries from the kitchen.
Then she found a knife, and drew it across her wrists, but was too weak to carve deeply,
and too cowardly to bear the pain, so the blood just seeped from the thin cuts and Ishbel had not
died.
Finally, frantic, crazy, Ishbel had stuffed her ears full of wadding and crept close enough
to rub the foul effluent from the cadavers of her parents over her body and face. Then she licked
the foulness from her fingers, just to be sure. It made her retch and sob and then scream in
horror, but she did it, because surely, surely, this way the plague would manage to take a grip in
her body and kill her as mercifully fast as it had killed everyone else in her life.
But all that had happened was that the scars on her wrists became infected, and wept a
purulent discharge, and throbbed unbearably.
Ishbel survived.
Whenever she slept, she dreamed of the Lord of Elcho Falling, turning his head ever so
slightly so that he could look at her over his shoulder, and engulfing her in sorrow and pain.
She grew thin, her joints aching with the cold and with malnutrition, but she survived.
Outside the crowds waited.
Every so often Ishbel called out to them, letting them know she still existed within,
because, no matter how greatly Ishbel wanted to die, she did not want to do so within an inferno.
On this day, huddled in the atrium of the house, Ishbel began to dream about death. She
looked at the great staircase that wound its way to the upper floors of the house, and she
wondered why she”d never before thought that all she needed to do was to climb to the top, then
throw herself down.
Very slowly, because she was now extremely weak, Ishbel crawled on her hands and
knees toward the staircase. She was frail, and she would need to take it slowly to get to the top,
but get there she would.
Ishbel felt overwhelmed with a great determination. Her death was but an hour away, at
the most.
But it took her much longer than an hour to climb the stairs. Ishbel was seriously weak,
and she could only crawl up the staircase a few steps at a time before she needed to rest,
collapsing and gasping, on the dusty wooden treads.
By late afternoon she was almost there. Every muscle trembled, aching so greatly that
Ishbel wept with the pain.
But she was almost there…
Then, as she was within three steps of the top, she heard the front door open.
A faint sound, for the door was far below her, but she heard it open.
Ishbel did not know what to do. She lay on the stairs, trembling, weeping, listening to
slow steps ascend the staircase, and wondered if the crowd had sent someone in to murder her.
She was taking far too long to die.
Ishbel closed her eyes, and buried her face in her arms.
“Ishbel?”
A man”s voice, very kind. Ishbel thought she must be dreaming.
“Ishbel.”
Slowly, and crying out softly with the ache of it, Ishbel turned over, opening her eyes.
A man wrapped in a crimson cloak over a similarly colored robe stood a few steps down,
smiling at her. He was a young man, good-looking, with brown hair that flopped over his
forehead, and a long, fine nose.
“Ishbel?” The man held out a hand. “My name is Aziel. Would you like to come live with
me?”
She stared at him, unable to comprehend his presence.
Aziel”s smile became gentler, if that was possible. “I have been traveling for weeks to
reach you, Ishbel. The Great Serpent himself sent me. He appeared to me in a dream and said
that I must hurry to bring you home. He loves you, sweetheart, and so shall I.”
“Are you the Lord of Elcho Falling?” Ishbel whispered, even though she knew he could
not be, for he did not drag loss and sorrow at his heels, and there was no darkness clinging to his
shoulders.
Aziel frowned briefly, then he shook his head. “My name is Aziel, Ishbel. And I am lord
of nothing, only a poor servant of the Great Serpent. Will you come with me?”
“To where?” Ishbel could barely grasp the thought of escape, now.
“To my home,” Aziel said, “and it will be yours. Serpent”s Nest.”
“I do not know of it.”
“Then you shall. Please come with me, Ishbel. Don”t die. You are too precious to die.”
“I don”t need to die?”
Aziel laughed. “Ishbel, you have no idea how greatly we all want you to live, and to live
with us. Will you come? Will you?”
Ishbel swallowed, barely able to get the words out. “Are there whispers in your house?”
“Whispers?”
“Do the dead speak in your house?”
Aziel frowned again. “The dying do, from time to time, when they confess to us the Great
Serpent”s wishes, but once dead they are mute.”
“Good.”
“Ishbel, come with me, please. Forget about what has happened here.
Forget—everything.”
“Yes,” said Ishbel, and stretched out a trembling hand. I will forget, she thought. I will
forget everything.
She did not once wonder why this man should have been able to so easily wander through
the vindictive crowd outside, or why that crowd should have stood back and allowed him to open
the front door without a single murmur.
Two weeks later Aziel brought Ishbel home to Serpent”s Nest. She had spoken little for
the entire journey, and nothing at all for the final five days.
Aziel was worried for her.
The archpriestess of the Coil, who worshipped the Great Serpent, led Aziel, carrying the
little girl, to a room where awaited food and a bed. They washed Ishbel, made her eat something,
then put her to bed, retreating to a far corner of the room to sit watch as she slept.
The archpriestess was an older woman, well into her sixties, called Ional. She looked
speculatively at Aziel, who had not allowed his eyes to stray from the sleeping form of the child.
Aziel was Ional”s partner at Serpent”s Nest, archpriest to her archpriestess, but he was far
younger and as yet inexperienced, for he”d replaced the former archpriest only within the past