The ground shook. Ivanovo screamed, grabbed the child and ran. Frieda tried to hit him with a spell, but the hex missed him and splattered uselessly against a wall. She cursed as the entire cave network started to collapse, dust and rocks falling from high overhead and slamming to the ground. It was suddenly very hard to breathe. She forced herself forward, to run as fast as she could. Ivanovo had to be stopped.
And she knew, somehow, that she was running out of time.
Chapter 7
He’s going back to the artefact, Frieda thought, as she ran out of the collapsing tunnels into the open air. He has to go back there.
Her mind raced, putting the pieces together. She’d sensed something under the artefact, something sleeping… something on the verge of waking up. She had no idea what it was, not really, but she was certain that it had to be stopped. Granny’s warnings rang in her ears. The village had been built on top of the artefact, and its destruction had kept everyone away, until the ground shifted and revealed something fascinating below the ground. And it had drawn the diggers like moths to the flame. And Ivanovo…
He’s been killing people for months, she thought. Behind her, she felt the ground shake as the last of the caves collapsed into rubble. And he’s been doing something with their life and magic.
She frowned. What had Ivanovo been doing? He was no magician. It was rare for a male magician to remain in the Cairngorms, even if they didn’t have the potential to become full-fledged sorcerers. Granny and her ilk were about the only magicians who stayed in the mountains for their entire lives, and they were permanently on the fringes of society, respected and feared in equal measure. Frieda couldn’t believe Ivanovo had magic. He’d never have shut up about it, if he’d had enough power to light a spark. She’d heard horror stories of magicians who’d turned entire towns and villages into their private kingdoms, with their populations enslaved or enchanted. Ivanovo would have done just that, she was sure, if he’d had the power. And yet, without magic, what could he do with a stone knife? Even necromancers needed a spark of power before they could fan it into a blaze.
He was feeding something, she told herself. The thing she’d sense threatened to fade from her mind, her memories already blurry… she bit her lip as she worked out what was happening. Ivanovo was gathering magic and life energy and channelling it to the artefact… she had no idea why, but it didn’t matter. He has to be stopped.
She forced herself to keep running. The artefact’s brooding presence was growing stronger, poison spilling over the land. She had no idea how Hoban and the others had missed it. She knew they’d decided to make a show of going to bed, in hopes of obscuring the fact Frieda hadn’t gone to her private tent, but surely they could sense something. She couldn’t imagine Ivanovo somehow killing or capturing the diggers. They were experienced sorcerers, and sorcerers weren’t easy to kill, not for a mundane.
Her hand dropped to the pistol at her belt. If Ivanovo had a firearm…
You saw no trace of firearms in the village, she reminded herself. They were rare so far from civilised lands, with the local lords and their followers doing everything in their power to prevent firearms from entering their world. And even if he did have a pistol, it wouldn’t be easy to kill the entire team without being caught and stopped.
She kept running, relying on skills she hadn’t used for years to pick her way down the rocky slope and into the forest. The trees loomed around her, the branches seeming to snap at her face as if they were animated by a remorseless will. She told herself she was imagining it — the artefact seemed to be driving away the wild magic pervading the forest — and kept moving, jumping over streams and hopping over fallen trunks as she picked her way onwards. The artefact was almost drawing her towards it… she hoped, as she darted through the remains of a long-gone village, that it wasn’t literally pulling her to the site. She might run up to the artefact and…
… And what?
Frieda tried to force herself to think. Emily would have come up with a plan by now, a plan certain to work because it was her. She was brilliant as well as knowledgeable, skilled at spotting weak points, insightful enough to see how an enemy might become a friend… Frieda knew, all too well, she couldn’t hope to live up to her saviour’s example. Her mind raced, trying to work out how Ivanovo could be stopped. But she didn’t even know what he was doing. She wasn’t even sure why her instincts insisted he was going back to the artefact.
Don’t be silly, she told herself. Where else can he go?
She clambered up and over a mound, then paused as she sensed a column of darkness — she couldn’t help thinking of it as dark light—streaming from the artefact and reaching up to infinity. It had to be visible for miles around, a darkness so dark it made the night seem like day. She shuddered helplessly, her stomach churning at the sheer wrongness of the sight, then stumbled back into motion. The dig was closer, much closer. She briefly considered trying to find the others — she needed help — but the camp was right on the far side of the burned-out town. If they couldn’t sense the gathering darkness, they had to be enchanted — or dead. She told herself they couldn’t be dead.
The darkness touched her the moment she crossed the boundary line, an oppressive sensation that left her feeling as though she was being violated at a very primal level. Her legs shook as she felt breath on her neck, even though she knew she was imagining it. There was no one behind her and yet… all of a sudden, the old tales of succubi and incubi sneaking into huts, when the doors were left unbarred, and assaulting the helpless inhabitants suddenly seemed very real. She shuddered again, then forced herself to keep going. The artefact looked unchanged and yet… it was huge, as if it was growing into a tower far larger than Whitehall or Alassa’s castle. Her eyes hurt. Her brain found it impossible to process what she was seeing. Again.
She reached out gingerly with her senses as she rounded the artefact, trying to find Ivanovo despite the pain. It was impossible. The artefact was both silent and incredibly loud, its mere presence shaking the world. She thought she sensed mighty engines thrumming, preparing themselves for… for something… but it was hard to be sure. The world was shaking as she stumbled around the artefact. Ivanovo was kneeling beside it, his back pressed against the alien object. He no longer looked human. It was so hard to see it took her a moment to see that he’d removed his shirt, revealing dark things driven into his skin. She remembered all the stories about people who’d been stolen away by the Awful Folk and how they’d been different when they’d finally returned to their village. Ivanovo looked… she couldn’t see him clearly. It was as if he was standing in front of a light so bright he was lost in the shadows.
“Too late,” Ivanovo managed. His voice no longer sounded human either. It sounded as if a hundred voices were blurring together into a single harmonic that tore at her ears. Blood trickled down his jaw and onto the ground as he spoke. “He will rise.”