Bartered

After I rapped my knuckles thrice against the wood, I heard a rusty panel groan open on the other side of the door to give the man a good look at who was wanting admittance into his dreary establishment. I could feel his hidden eye traveling over my person, even if I couldn’t see from my vantage point on the street who was observing me. The slot zipped again, and then there was a moment of silence.

Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.

The locks, I guessed. A hard yank on the weathered oak door revealed a gaping darkness. I lingered for a moment at the entrance, the pit of my stomach like lead, before stepping inside the junk shop. Blinded by coming from the bright out-of-doors, I cautiously moved forward with my hands outstretched, only to bark my shins against something that made a loud clanging sound. Trying to right myself, I stumbled in the opposite direction as the door banged shut behind me.

“Watch it! Priceless, that is.”

The voice was like leather, and I imagined the person to go with it would look the same, if only I could see him. Although my eyes were starting to adjust to the dim light filtering through the parchment windows, there seemed to be no other illumination inside. Out of the gloom, a figure revealed himself before me, hunched nearly double. It took me a moment to make out that he was bent not with age, but because he carried something in his arms—something dark enough to blend into the background dimness, and which he dropped down behind the counter, out of my sight, before I fully registered what it could be.

When the man turned back to me, I asked, “Are you the proprietor?”

A hoarse wheeze that turned out, after a moment, to be laughter. “Nay. And who are you, mister fancy pants?”

I felt inside my pouch, bringing out the bag Illianora had given me. I strode forwards with perhaps more bravado than confidence, wrinkling my nose the closer I approach the dirty little man. Grabbing the filth-encrusted claw before me, I tried not to shudder at the glimpse of blackened fingernails and the seams of his palm outlined in filth. I slapped the bag down into his hand. It was heavy and made a satisfying jingle.

“What I am is a paying customer." I'd let go of his hand as soon as I dropped the burden of my payment into it, and he now bobbed the weight up and down speculatively. Perhaps he could tell by measure alone what I was paying for, perhaps not. In order to clarify, I added, "Get me the necromancer.”

"The necromancer!" he exclaimed. The wheezing laughter came again. "And who do you think I am, to call on the great necromancer?"

I leaned closer. "I have spent days searching you out," I said softly. "I know who you are—or, rather, what master you serve."

The man's eyes were sunken into wrinkled pockets of flesh, but I could see enough of their gleaming blackness to determine that they were speculative, not wary. "Ah, so, then," he said. And he turned without another word and walked away in a lurching stride that was much faster than it seemed. By the time I caught up with him, he had almost disappeared into the labyrinthine turnings of the shop.

Although crammed with all and sundry, the junk shop was much larger inside than it appeared from without. Wedged between a flophouse on one side and a tavern on the other, the shop was oddly quiet with such raucous neighbors, only a dim hum from the street penetrating its dusty gloom. As the man led me on a twisting path, with only the odd admonishment—"Watch out for that, careful around the corner"—it felt as if time had stopped, as if I had always been following the slight figure of this shopkeeper forever, as if I could continue dodging and twisting past things barely seen and horrors barely glimpsed, all the items for sale to the highest bidder.

But, finally, we did make progress—at the very rear of the shop, where I would have anticipated a back door, there was a curtain leading to a private area. Above the doorway to the back was a crudely handwritten sign: "Employes Onlee—Keep Out on Perille of Death!"

The man drew aside the curtain. "Here we go," he said, almost jovially.

I paused. Although my goal was so close, I couldn't help the trepidation running through me. "After you," I said.

The shopkeeper chuckled. "Not on your life. Once was enough for me."

I nodded. No help for it, then. I stepped through the doorway.

When I left the shop a while later, the sun had already gone down, but light lingered at the edges of the sky, illuminating the last gasp of a dying day. After the darkness of the interior, it seemed like I walked from hell into the clearest light of heaven, and I shaded my eyes with my hand in a brief pause before walking slowly out from the doorway. The beggars and itinerants lingering on the street by the tavern glanced at me, but quickly turned away before they caught my eyes.

They saw what shop I came out of. They knew what I carried, even wrapped as it was in dirty grey canvas and slung over my shoulder. I was not the first man to come from that particular place under a strange and formless burden, and I would probably not be the last. Having seen it before, having heard the same whispers on the street that I did, they would know just what I paid.

At my apartment, I put my burden down, uncovering it like unwrapping a shiny new present—slowly and with great anticipation. The familiar face of my sister's husband emerged from the dirty cloth, and I caught my breath at how uncanny the resemblance of this creature was to the man I once called brother. Its eyes were closed, but they opened easily when I spoke his name.

The necromancer was quite clear about the details of our bargain. Most people would never be able to tell the difference—the simulacrum would act, and continue to age, as if human.

But it was not human. The eyes were blank, glossy with an unnamable lack—the spirit, returned to the body, but burned anew in the fire from the other side.

He’s in jail, I told Illianora a week ago, when I had first learned the truth. Money is needed to bribe the warden, unable to meet her gaze—and she gave me the purse of coins without question. The trust in her expression, despite how many times I had failed her in the past, made my choice as clear as a pane of glass.

I knew she rarely went outside of the house anymore, ever since the unrest in the city had bloomed into full-blown conflict, making the streets as unsafe as a jailhouse brawl. She certainly never went as far as the city's gates on the far side of the market, never saw the corpses hanging up on the wall in mute testimony to the underground's struggle for freedom. So she never saw the familiar figure strung up there with the word Traitor carved into the flesh of his forehead.

I had no such restrictions as she. That wall was my daily newspaper—on it, I read the strengths and weaknesses of our struggle. And I had been waiting to see this particular face, hoping against hope that I had been wrong.

Of perhaps anyone in the city, only I knew the truth about my sister's husband. Only I knew he had not committed treason. My brother-in-law partook in shady dealings sometimes—who did not in this day and age, when war tore the food from the mouths of his children? One had to survive, to carry on, even in the midst of this interminable struggle. But he would do his business, keep his head down, and never give in to my pleadings for more. And I—I resented him for it, I admitted that now. Although I did not search out his end, I knew, in those final moments after I had spoken his name, I knew the truth in my heart.

To my everlasting shame, you see, it was my crime they hanged him for. While I was in a seedy tavern haggling over plans to overthrow the tyrant, he was safely ensconced at home, happy with my dear, dear sister. He was safe, that was, until the hounds were on my heels and I needed a scapegoat who knew nothing of my plotting and would reveal no names. He was safe until I let that schism in my heart overcome me.

I didn’t pay just gold in this transaction. I knew the price of animating this figure before I walked through that junk shop door, a price whispered over a scarred tabletop in the gloomy tap room of the bar down the street from the city gates, a bar within sight of the slowly rotting corpse of my brother-in-law.

Now, I rubbed at my chest, as I had been doing since the necromancer placed his hand there and chanted words I had never heard before, but which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck in terror. Then, when I thought I must flee from fear, the necromancer's fingers had sunk below my skin, turning into a grasping claw that seemed ready to tear out my heart in the midst of the darkest magic I had ever heard tell. When he'd withdrawn his palm, there was something clutched in it—something not shining and pure, but something riddled with inky lines of darkness. Something ill-used, but deemed worthy enough for the transaction. Something that had, in the end, been enough.

And when he cast this thing he clutched into the flames and withdrew something shining and white and pure in its stead, I knew, again, that I had done the right thing. My sister would have her husband again, however much the other side had changed him. That difference was caused by death, the necromancer had warned me more than once.

"He will still be dead," said the faceless man who worked such evil on my behalf—faceless behind the deep cowl of his black robe, "a dead person in the world of the living. A ghost, if you will. But he will be here."

I rubbed the skin over my heart, but it didn't fix the hollow feeling there. Nothing would bring back what I had lost today—the one thing needed to animate a golem. The price.

For my crime, I had paid, although not with my life. And to protect my sister—innocent in all of this—for her, I would have done anything.

Even if it meant my soul.