“You’ll let them live?”
“Let’s not pretend you’d trust my word. Any pact between us is a pantomime. My servant, first.”
Viv carefully unslung the leather satchel from her shoulder. Her fingers tightened on the strap, and then she extended it toward the necromancer, holding her cold gaze as she did.
“Don’t,” wheezed Gallina, but Viv ignored her.
Varine plucked it from her grasp, and then twitched it open. She sketched a cursory glance over the contents. “I’ll deal with you later, little thrall,” she purred, and Viv’s skin crawled at the curdled avarice in her voice. The necromancer tossed the satchel carelessly onto the chair behind her and stretched out her arm once more.
Slowly, Viv extended the book toward Varine with both hands.
A book containing a thousand pages like mirrors, reflecting nothing but their owner.
Viv almost pitied her in that moment.
Almost.
Varine impatiently lunged forward and snatched it.
Viv’s fingers jerked toward her saber, but she stayed her hand, glancing with concern at Fern and Gallina.
“Ah,” murmured Varine, running her fingertips over the cover. The glyphs inscribed into its surface fluttered alight behind her touch. “I’ve missed you so, my dear one,” she said, her words rich with longing, a greeting for a long-lost lover.
With a twist of her wrist, a cascade of bones slithered from beneath the hem of her robe, piling one atop the other into a grotesque lectern, upon which she placed the grimoire.
She flipped back the cover, and then suddenly frowned, her perfect brow wrinkling in dismay. “What… ?” She turned to a page in the middle.
Varine gazed in annoyance at the dog eared corner, curled over the black void of the page itself, and reached across to fold it back.
In that instant Satchel’s hands burst from the darkness and seized first her wrist and then her forearm… andpulled.
The necromancer shrieked in surprise as her arm was dragged into the shadows, her black eyes wide with fury. She braced her other hand on the open book and hauled with all her might to withdraw her arm from the night-dark page.
Her gaze snapped to Viv even as the orc unlimbered Black-blood, her fangs bared.
“You,” snarled the necromancer, muscling herself upright even as Satchel’s hands climbed higher along her arm, undeterred. She snapped her free hand toward Viv, fingers contorting and flexing. Blue traceries webbed her palm and wound around her fingers like burning thread. In that blue light, Viv saw her death gathering.
She wound up with the greatsword, putting all her weightinto it and praying she’d complete the swing before Varine could bring her awful magic to bear.
But then a hooting squawk rang out, and suddenly Potroast was sailing through the air, catching Varine’s free forearm in his beak and knocking her entirely off balance.
She screamed, a terrible, ragged sound. The gryphet’s beak sank deeper into the bloodless flesh of her arm.
Viv brought her swing up short as Satchel seized the moment, and Varine’s head and neck disappeared into the page. Her cry bubbled into a muffled wail that echoed into nothingness. The skeletal hands grasped and pulled, grasped and pulled, and the gryphet clung tenaciously to her flailing arm, even as her shoulder plunged into the book.
Viv gaped in astonishment as Varine’s body vanished into her grimoire. The physicality of it made no sense, a distortion that hurt Viv’s eyes, as though the woman’s flesh compressed as she passed through the page.
And the gryphet went with her.
“Potroast!” cried Fern as her companion vanished into the darkness, followed by Varine’s hips and then the kicking train of her robe.
Viv flung aside her blade and lunged for the book, plunging her own arm in after.
Her fingers touched fur, but nothing living. The trim of Varine’s robe. Viv stretched deeper, dreading the moment when one of the necromancer’s hands would curl around her wrist like cold iron.
Fur again, but warm, followed by the silky brush of feathers.
She dug her fingers into the ruff of Potroast’s neck and yanked back, dragging him into the light with a sucking noise like a boot from cold mud.
