by ‘I’ve found a skeleton,’ I said aloud. The words burst from my lips, quite loud; the product of pure surprise. Of all the things I might have expected to find in here, contorted skeletal remains definitely weren’t it.
The poor soul had not enjoyed a peaceful death. That much seemed clear from the pose: twisted as though in agony, mouth agape. I could tell little else: clothes and flesh alike were long decayed, leaving only bones and dust.
I backed away, returning to the table.
The house was curiously intact, considering the state of its occupant. A pottery plate and cup stood atop the table; nothing valuable in either, but still odd. Possessions tend to be passed on when their owner dies, and considering the antiquity of this cottage and its contents, they most certainly would have found a home elsewhere. Useful objects were in short supply back in the mists of time; you couldn’t just pop down to Tesco to replace a broken glass or a chipped plate. People repaired things. People reused things. So what were these still doing here?
I poked around a bit more, and found various other articles forgotten by time: a hair comb of yellowed bone, an iron pot, a set of copper syrinx pipes.
I wasn’t surprised when I heard Jay calling my name.
‘Let me guess,’ I said, going to the door. ‘You’ve found dead people.’
‘They’re just — lying there.’ He looked disturbed. Agitated. He gestured, sweepingly, towards a couple of houses across the street. ‘Like they lay down in bed and nobody ever came back for them.’
‘They look… pained,’ Indira added, coming up behind Jay. ‘Like they suffered.’
I exited the cottage and took several long steps away from it, as though I could leave the terrible vision of its owner’s last moments behind me. ‘Same story in there. The house is full of stuff. I think you’re right, Jay. No one ever did come back for them.’
I looked around for Zareen, but couldn’t see her.
Em, though. She’d wandered away from her original spot, was coming towards us. Her face was drawn, ashen. I waited, sickened, for her insight.
‘There isn’t much left to find,’ she said when she reached us. ‘But there are traces of big magick.’
‘Big, bad magick,’ I guessed.
She nodded. ‘I’ve come across something like this once before.’ She stopped.
We waited, but she only frowned, troubled.
‘Where?’ I finally prompted.
She sighed. ‘There was a village in the Rhine valley. Lassenthaler. Some kind of feud got out of hand, and… someone worked a hex.’
‘A hex?’ I stared. ‘I didn’t know — is that even possible?’
Her mouth twisted, half wry, half disgusted. ‘They don’t teach it at the Hidden University, Ves. You can see why. This is what a hex does.’ She gestured around at the dead and rotting village of Silvessen, littered with the bones and abandoned possessions of its inhabitants.
Of course, nobody had come back for them. There’d been no one left to come back for them.
‘A hex can be like a curse of misfortune,’ Emellana continued. ‘You can twist somebody until they destroy themselves, they can’t help it. Or it can be like — this. A kind of plague. Far more contagious than any natural plague, because it’s baked into the bricks of every house in the village. It cannot be avoided. And it kills.’
Silence followed Emellana’s revelations. I didn’t know what to say. My mind shied away from the enormity of what somebody had done to Silvessen.
‘Why would somebody do that?’ Indira finally said. Her voice was very quiet, like she felt compelled to ask the question but did not really want to think about the answer.
‘Some people are abominations.’ Emellana’s answer was rather short, almost snapped. She didn’t want to think about it, either.
I physically shook myself. ‘Right. We need to move on.’
‘Ves,’ said Jay. ‘No. We need to do something about this.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We can’t just leave all these poor people here. They should be — buried, or something. Laid to rest. And we will. But we can’t do that in the next hour.’
He sighed, and cast a last, lingering look at the cottage he and Indira had explored. ‘I suppose we’ll never know who did it, or why.’
I wasn’t so sure. My mind had wandered back to the glaistigs at the big house. Their state made a lot more sense, now. They were spirits who hadn’t departed the way they were supposed to — however that worked — because they’d had too much bitterness, too much rage. And they had a right to that rage.
But I wondered. They were some of the victims of this tragedy — weren’t they?
Was the perpetrator lurking up there, too?
‘We should be careful,’ I said.
Jay looked at me like I’d just announced an intention to quit the Society and take up a new life as a legal secretary, or possibly a call centre operative. ‘Careful?’ he repeated. ‘You?’
I scowled. ‘I do caution.’
‘When?’
‘Right now. We’re going back up there and we’ll be all kinds of cautious.’
‘Ves. Going back there is the opposite of cautious. You can see how that works, right?’
Apparently my dark little thought had occurred to Jay, too. ‘We’re going to need their permission to bury these people,’ I pointed out. ‘Some of these remains probably belong to them.’
Jay gave that sigh he does when I’m right, and he’s annoyed about it. ‘Fine. One question to go.’
‘First we need Zar—’
‘Right here,’ came Zareen’s voice. Sort of. It had a hollow quality to it that I didn’t like, and a coarseness. She didn’t speak so much as she rasped, and something about it made my skin prickle.
I turned around with pounding heart.
I take back what I said before. I’m not getting used to the way Zareen looks when she’s deep in the Stranger Arts, and I never, ever will.
‘Where’ve you been,’ I croaked.
She smiled, and I wished she wouldn’t. She looked like she had just crawled out of her own grave, having been down there quite some time: skeletal and bone-pale, her dark hair wreathing her head like black smoke, eyes dark, deeply sunken hollows. Her smile was a death’s head grimace.
‘I’ve been having a chat with the fine people of Silvessen,’ she said in answer.
‘You found them.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ The smile stretched.
I shuddered. ‘Zar, I can’t express how much I respect your work, but you’re scary beyond all reason.’
‘I know.’ She smirked.
‘Em thinks Silvessen was hexed.’
‘She’s right. Nasty stuff.’
‘Okay. So we’ll do something important and respectful about that soon, but for now, we’ve answered question two.’
‘Maybe,’ said Indira.
Everyone looked at her, which made her so uncomfortable she transferred her own gaze to her feet.
‘Maybe?’ I prompted.
‘It’s just that it’s odd phrasing,’ she informed her shoes. ‘A more natural way to phrase the question might have been: “What happened to Silvessen?” Or, “What became of the town?” But she said: “How did Silvessen die?”’
‘True,’ said Jay, frowning. ‘You don’t normally talk about a town’s having died. You say that about a person.’
Indira nodded.
‘So you think it’s a trick question,’ I concluded. ‘She wasn’t talking about the town. She was talking about a person the town was named after.’
‘Somebody important,’ Emellana said. ‘Somebody who would live in the best house.’
‘The biggest one,’ I sighed. ‘The really haunted one.’
‘Social leaders are also spokespeople,’ Jay suggested. ‘They take the lead.’
Zareen grinned. ‘Yeah. I think we’ve met her.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘it’s time to go talk to her again.’
***
‘We’re ready,’ I said, half an hour later.
We’d made it back to the ballroom with mere minutes to spare. The house hadn’t wanted to let us back in; the front door was locked, and no amount of pounding upon it or jiggling the handle had made any difference. Closed.
Just when I’d begun to wonder if we’d been played — that first question hadn’t been a question at all, merely a means of getting us out of the building — Indira found a side door that swung open at a touch. On the other side of it was the ballroom.
My words echoed in the empty air, settling like dust.
The air shimmered, and the glaistig appeared. The ghost of Silvessen?
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘The first question: which door leads outside?’
I pointed at the door through which we’d entered. It still stood open, revealing the dead earth beyond.
She didn’t blink. ‘The second. How did Silvessen die?’
‘She died from a hex,’ I answered.
No reaction to that, either. ‘The third. What am I thinking?’
‘To that question, I have several answers,’ I replied. ‘You’re thinking that we are a cursed nuisance and you would like us to leave, but also that we make a convenient stand-in for whoever worked that hex and you’d like to torture us a bit more, too. You’re thinking that the world and everyone in it owes you something for the injustice of your death, and that of your townspeople. And in all of the above points, you’re right. More or less. There has been a terrible injustice done you, and we have been pretty annoying.’
No response. Silvessen, if it was she, stared at me in silence.
‘Besides that,’ I continued, unfazed. ‘You’re thinking that when I said a contest of physical prowess I meant a fight. With weapons. Possibly to the death. And you liked that idea, because the angry part of you really wants an excuse to hurt somebody.’
Finally: a reaction. Her features tightened, as though a frown or a grimace were suppressed. ‘And was I right in that, as well?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid not.’
She inclined her head, seemingly an admission of defeat. ‘Well, then. In what way am I to be challenged?’
I smiled, removing my thick winter coat, and hurled it at the nearest wall. ‘I challenge you,’ I said, raising my voice, so the syllables echoed off the bare, mouldy walls. ‘To a dance-off.’
