The Serpent Bride. Sara Douglass

THE LEGEND OF CHAOS (KANUBAI)

      In the beginning and for an infinity of time there was nothing but the darkness of Chaos, who called himself Kanubai. After a time Kanubai grew weary of his lonely existence and so he invited Light and Water to be his companions. Kanubai and Light and Water co-existed harmoniously, but one day Light and Water merged, just for an instant of time, but in that instant they conceived a child — Life.

      Kanubai was jealous of Life, for it was the child of the union of Light and Water and he had been excluded from that union. He set out to murder Life, to consume it with darkness, but Light and Water came to the defence of their child. Aided by a great mage, Light and Water defeated Kanubai in a terrible battle, and interred his remains in a deep abyss. They stoppered this abyss with a sparkling, life-giving river, which combined the best both of Light and of Water, and they hoped that Kanubai was trapped for all time.

      Trapped, but not extinguished. Every day Life was reminded of Kanubai’s continuing malignant presence by the descent of the night, when for the space of some hours the dark memory of Kanubai blanketed the land.

      Despite this daily sadness, Life prospered, and many creatures came into existence.

      For aeons Kanubai lay trapped, able to do little more than darken each light-filled day with the reminder of his presence.

      But then, one day, something remarkable happened.

      Infinity visited.

1

       MARGALIT, THE OUTLANDS

      The eight-year-old girl crouched by the stone column in the atrium of her parents’ house. Clad only in a stained linen shift, she hugged her thin arms tightly about herself, her eyes wide and darting under her bedraggled and grimy fair hair.

      The house was cold and still, and the girl’s breath frosted as she hyperventilated.

      The foul liquid of rotting cadavers streaked her face and arms. For many days now the girl had crept about the house, seeking out the bodies of her parents (almost unrecognisable, four weeks after their death), rubbing the stinking, viscous liquid that had leaked from their flesh over her body, sucking it from her fingers.

      All she wanted was to die, too.

      It 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