The Serpent Bride. Sara Douglass

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СКАЧАТЬ had been a bad month. Four weeks ago everyone in the house — save the little girl — had died within a day of the first person falling sick. Thirty-four people — not just the girl’s parents and siblings, but her three aunts, their husbands, their children, her grandmother, and the household’s servants as well — all dead from the plague.

      Just her, left alive.

      Outside gathered a frightened and angry crowd, neighbours as well as sundry other concerned citizens and council members of Margalit. They had blocked off all entrances to the house as soon as they realised plague had struck the household.

      In the initial days after everyone had died, the girl, Ishbel, screamed at the crowd outside for help, begging them to save her. She pressed her face against the glass of the windows and beat her small fists against frames, but the hostile expressions on the faces of the crowd outside did not alter.

      They would not move to aid her.

      Instead, Ishbel heard cries demanding that the house be set alight, and all the corpses and their infection burned.

      She screamed at them again, begging them to allow her freedom.

      She wasn’t ill.

      She didn’t have the plague.

      Her skin was unmarked, her brow unfevered.

      “Please, please, let me out. Everyone is dead. I want to get out. Please … please …”

      The crowd outside had no mercy. They would not let her escape.

      Ishbel begged until she lost her voice and scraped away several of her fingernails on the 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 mouldy 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 towards 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 СКАЧАТЬ