Vardani paused,her teacup hovering before her lips. Across the table, Jereaux, the Duke of Athrienne, sat dressed in spartan steel armor, his sharp features outlined by his angular beard. Next to him, vulture-gaunt and reeking of graveyards and ancient parchment, the Mage Gethric duMarse, twiddled his spidery fingers.

“Yes, your grace” said Vardani, “Margane Malhur of cursed memory was my ancestor. And I know where she lies.” She resisted the urge to spit.

Duke Jereaux nodded. “Excellent.” His teacup remained untouched. “Hundreds of years ago, Margane was... entangled with my own ancestor, Sir Jervain of Osseles. An issue of succession has arisen, and we must question her. Gethric says he has the power to raise her spirit, if only we stand at her grave.”

Vardani only just saved herself from choking on her tea. “She tortured children, drank their blood. Only her low station kept her from harming more...” She thought of asking him to reconsider, but saw no softness in that relentless stare. “I shall lead you to what you seek.” 


An hour later, they stood deep within the marshes of Lugue, before a baleful and scraggly tree. “This has been my family burial site for centuries,” said Vardani.

Gethric stood over the grassy damp pit below the tree like a carrion bird. He fired what looked like a small silver arrow into the ground, and pronounced a spell that sounded like a hacking cough. Before them, a mist gathered over the grave, swirled and rose into a humanoid shape.

The Duke remained perfectly calm. “Do I address Margane Malhur?”

The slim sad shade shook its head and sank into a pool of mist on the ground. The Duke raised an eyebrow at Gethric and Vardani.

“The ground here is soft, your grace,” said Vardani. “We are accustomed to burying our recent dead atop the older ones, as the coffins sink into the earth. You just saw my grandmother; Margane will be a number of corpses below her.”

The Duke turned to Gethric. “Can you not just… seek deeper? All at once?”

“It is troublesome, your grace,” murmured Gethric. “There is the mystic principle of [i]filo[/i] which constrains the operation of my arrow. We must take the bodies as it encounters them.”

The Duke sighed. “Then please proceed as rapidly as you can.”

Gethric grunted and set to work, and as the sun sank behind the hills and the moon rose, he called up shade after shade. Vardani recognized many of her forebears and longed for the chance to speak with them, but was given no time. She shuddered each time the cloud brushed against her ankles.

There came the point where Gethric shivered and croaked, “I believe this is the last one, your grace.” He looked as if each casting had taken a pound of weight from him. He groaned the incantation one more time, and another shade appeared, with nothing monstrous about her, only a slight female form with hair that flowed like grasses.

The Duke, calm as he was at the start, repeated his question.

“I am not her,” replied the shade. “But you are very, very close. Only one sacrifice is needed now, to gain the strength to draw her forth.”

The meaning hit Vardani like a blow and she had only time to see the realization flash across the eyes of the two men, and she saw death written there. As she started to flee, the Duke’s arm swang up and his swordr flashed. Vardani cried out and fell atop the grave at the feet of the spectral figure.

“There’s the sacrifice,” he said. “Now, call Margane forth!”

The shade chucked. “She is here, fool. I [i]am [/i]Margane.”

“I don’t understand, then. Why did you lie? Why did you make me kill her?”

“Lacking hallowed burial, her life force had nowhere to go, save to me. And as to you, my illegitimate descendant, I’d put your body to far better use than you ever will, and now you lack the power to stop me.”

As Gethric struggled to call up a spell of banishment, Margane’s shade flowed like branching lightning and the Duke cried out in a shriek of terror like nothing he had ever screamed in his life, even as a child.

The sword flicked out, cutting Gethric’s spell in half along with his throat.

And then the body of Jereaux, Duke of Athrienne, set out towards home, whistling a tune about infanticide and torture that had been popular hundreds of years ago.