Chapter 10 #2
‘Oh, yes, all glory to you, Master Martingale: killing women with another man’s rope. That is how you shall be remembered, as a murderer too cowardly to use his own hands.’
‘I am not a murderer.’
‘No? Then what do you call your trials, your accusations?’
‘Righteousness,’ he replied. ‘And it shall be righteousness to hang you, also. You are a witch, Cybil Harding. I am certain of that.’
‘Perchance so, but the crimes you have killed others for are imaginary,’ she told Martingale. ‘You have led innocents to the gallows.’
‘They were not innocent—’
Cybil sneered at him. ‘They were victims of your ambition.’
‘I have no ambition. This is a calling.’
‘Your calling is nothing but a fantasy. God will punish you for it one day.’
His eyes widened with fury. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘You are not cleansing the land, Master Martingale. You are the one corrupting it. You are the witch.’
Martingale, purple with rage, lifted the spade in both hands. Something feral flashed in his eyes; he brought it down towards Cybil’s throat.
And perhaps Cybil ought to have realised sooner: she took after her father more than she had ever wished to accept. They shared the same hubris, after all. He had believed he could save Cybil. And for a brief, foolish moment, Cybil had believed she could save herself.
How wrong they both had been.
Cybil gasped and said, ‘Richter,’ in both a plea and an accusation. Then metal met skin.
Her windpipe collapsed upon itself, with the same inwards groan as the roof of Harding Hall.
As if shocked by his own actions, Martingale stared down, horrified, at the spade in his hands.
With a gurgling, guttural noise, Cybil began to die.
Miriam was standing by the burial site of Christopher Harding’s grimoires. Her stillness was unearthly: such was the absence of movement that a winter moth had taken her for a statue, and it crawled leisurely across her face, one foot stepping on her unblinking eye.
Why had Cybil rejected her once again? Why had she looked at Miriam from within the circle of her arms and told her no, even while her desire was so evident?
Cybil was like a reflection in the glass of a window, a pair of images at once—self superimposed upon self.
Outside, inside, it was impossible to tell which parts of her were real, and which were those Miriam had constructed in her own mind.
But it did not matter. In her frustration, in her cold and ferocious anger, Miriam had half a mind to shatter the glass.
She wanted to make Cybil pay for denying Miriam that day.
Certainly, she would come to regret her fickleness in time, when a noose was looped around her neck, or a hungry fire set burning at her feet; but even before then, there were infinite possibilities for retribution.
Miriam would start, perchance, with the mother that Cybil seemed to hold so dear—
Then Miriam heard Cybil’s voice in her head, saying, Richter.
Breaking the silence of the clearing, Miriam breathed once more. Her sigh caused the moth to flutter away in alarm. Cybil wanted her back. She had not rejected her, after all.
Miriam stepped forward, paying a mote of light to the shadows, and then she was in the garden.
She saw Martingale standing hunched over, with the spade clutched in his hands.
She also saw the prone figure of Cybil lying on the ground, wearing a necklace of bruised and bloody flesh.
In her chest, her soul flickered, a dying light.
Seeing it fade, Miriam felt a shock and a significance of grief so intense, so human, that she trembled at the wrongness of it.
What was more significant, she wondered—the loss of the meal?
The loss of the woman, the first mortal with whom Miriam had felt some sort of kinship, as fleeting as it had been?
That it was even a question felt absurd.
It was rare that Miriam recognised some of herself, some of her isolation and her power, in someone else.
But that rarity seemed not to merit the sadness she now felt.
It seemed a weakness, and an unwelcome one.
Martingale turned around and saw her, jumping slightly in surprise. ‘Who are you?’
Richter stared down at Cybil’s body. ‘You have killed her,’ she said.
‘I did what I had to—’
‘You have killed her,’ Richter snarled. The darkness coalesced behind her, creeping along the soil towards him. Martingale dropped the spade to the ground in shock.
‘I—’ He took a step backwards. ‘Stay back. Get away from me.’
Miriam lurched forward and shoved the man to the ground. He had only a moment to make a noise of protest—an interrupted squeal, like a piglet being squeezed—before she had her foot on his stomach, her hands around his neck. ‘You were supposed to wait,’ she hissed. ‘Why did you not wait?’
‘I—I—do not understand.’
Miriam’s fury was so powerful, it writhed around her, sent the shadows shuddering and twisting like snakes.
She flayed the humanity from her face, leaving only a swarming darkness where her features should have been; she was too angry to remember the arrangement of eyes and skin that comprised a person.
‘Tell me, Master Martingale,’ she said, as he struggled against her hold, ‘how many women have you brought to their deaths?’
Her voice was many voices, each a scream, each a whisper. Martingale whimpered. ‘Please, I—I know not.’
‘You do know. Tell me.’
He tried to shake his head. She tightened her grip, warningly; hissing in pain, he spat, ‘Fifteen.’
‘Including Cybil?’
‘Sixteen.’
‘I see.’ Miriam hummed in thought. ‘It is a shame I cannot give you a death for each of them. I suppose the one shall have to do.’
Martingale began to reply, but he did not finish. Miriam had pulled his skull from his spine as if she were uncorking a bottle of wine.
She tossed his head over her shoulder. It fell into a patch of ice and skidded along the path. Meanwhile, a great gush of blood fountained from the torso’s torn neck, falling in a rainbow across the hedgerows. Miriam kicked away the body and went to Cybil, crouching beside her.
Her eyes were fluttering sightlessly, mouth twisted in a grimace; she was not breathing, and if her heart was beating, it would soon stop.
Death would suit her less than life, although she would make the prettiest corpse Miriam had ever seen.
Miriam brushed some hair out of her face and glanced at her chest. The light there was barely visible now, but the soul was present still, faint yet persistent.
Relieved, Miriam made herself into shadows and slipped within Cybil, reached for that remaining glimmer of existence.
She found it soon enough, ephemeral and fading, falling through her fingers like sand.
Cupping her hands, Miriam said Cybil’s name once more, and allowed the light to engulf her.
There was nothing here, no sky or ground or air to breathe. But there was Miriam Richter, and there was Cybil herself.
Richter was standing in front of her, present and yet absent. When Cybil tried to look down—to perceive herself, to see her own body—her flesh was flickering, light and dark, like a dying candle flame.
Her voice an echo in the void, Cybil said, ‘Where am I?’
Richter replied, ‘Half departed, my dear, much is the pity.’
‘I am dead.’
‘Near enough.’
Cybil’s hands flew to her neck. ‘Oh, God,’ she croaked, voice trembling. ‘I am dead.’
Richter sighed. Her hair floated behind her in an amorphous storm cloud of shadow, making only the faintest impression of materiality. ‘That is hardly a surprise,’ she said. ‘Death is inevitable. Thousands of fools have suffered it, and thousands more will do so.’
Inevitable. Cybil saw, in the awful and infinite clarity of hindsight, every moment of the life that had now ended: the ceaseless days of isolation, the echoing corridors of Harding Hall, the empty eyes of her parents, the slow drag of a finger against a windowpane.
The shallow existence Cybil Harding had lived had hardly been worth the effort of her breathing.
She had never cured her mother. She had never gone to Court.
She had failed to make anything of herself, to do anything with herself, except suffer her curse and resent herself for it.
‘It is a tragedy,’ Richter continued, heedless of Cybil’s distress, a frown stitching new lines into her forehead. ‘You were my favourite, I think, of all those I ever tried to consume. And now I am denied my meal.’
Is this it? Cybil asked herself. Is this really it? Is this all that I am worth?
‘Could I return?’ she demanded. Richter raised an ink-stroke brow. ‘Could I live again?’
‘Anything is possible if you are willing to pay the darkness a price. That is the sole law by which magic is governed.’
‘I want it,’ Cybil said. ‘This cannot be it; this cannot be all I shall ever have, all I shall ever be. I must do it again. Another chance.’
Richter thought on this, and then she smirked. Cybil had a sudden, powerful sense that she had made a mistake.
‘A resurrection,’ Richter mused. ‘Powerful magic indeed. For a new life, nothing less than your entire soul would suffice. Most shadows would not have the patience to wait for such a meal.’
Cybil said, with grim acceptance, ‘But you would?’
‘I would,’ Richter said. ‘If you promise your soul to me—I can assure you, my dear, you will live once more.’
Cybil did not reply. The silence of the void they stood within was all-consuming. The darkness was a living thing, sinking its teeth into the empty space between their words.