“It’s time,” Void said, quietly.
We stood, brushing down our robes and stamping out the fire. The forest seemed different, somehow, as we made our way to the shrine and carried out one final check of our work. The wardstone sat at the centre of a complex network of spell circles, runes and wardlines, all surrounded by four smaller circles for the casters. We wouldn’t be holding hands while casting the spells, something that made it harder to hold the magic in place long enough for the spell to work. We’d have to move in perfect unison… we’d rehearsed twice, going through the motions as best as we could, but there was no way to rehearse everything without casting the spell itself. I felt cold as we crossed the wardlines and took our places. The moon was starting to rise. When the moonlight reached the circle…
“This is it,” Hamilcar said. “If this works, there will be no more limits.”
“Yeah,” Himilco agreed. “This is our last chance to back out.”
“It’s already too late,” Void said. “We have to do or die.”
I nodded. He was right. And yet… I braced myself, taking a long breath as I prepared myself for the coming ordeal. It was never easy to summon a demon, for reasons none of the old books chose to discuss. They rarely came unless they were called by their name and their names were hard, almost impossible, to divine. I had no idea how the ancient DemonMasters had done it, so long ago the history books were more legends than sober facts. We needed a powerful demon, one who hadn’t been summoned before. It was going to be a nightmare to lure him into our snare.
My eyes wandered over the circle, making sure of everything one final time. Void stood on the far side of the spellwork, his eyes meeting mine. His face was calm and composed. I wondered at his thoughts as I waited, wondering what he was really thinking. The whole plan had been his idea… not, I conceded as the moon rose higher, that I’d said no. We’d all agreed. We couldn’t have done it — we couldn’t have started — unless all four of us chose to give our all. Hamilcar and Himilco stood to each side of me, their faces grim and yet resolute. My thoughts ran in circles, repeating the same things over and over again. We had no choice. We’d committed ourselves the moment we stole the wardstone. And yet, we could back off…
No. We couldn’t. We couldn’t keep working for the family, for a prize we knew we’d never be given, nor could we abandon the family and walk away. We’d been pushed too far. It wasn’t enough to be acknowledged, not now. We wanted to make them grovel before us, to acknowledge how poorly they’d treated us… to beg for us to come into the family as equals, to beg for what only we could give. The resentments pulsed around the clearing, a mocking reminder of how little the family cared for us. We wanted to rub their collective nose in how badly they’d treated us.
A shaft of moonlight flowed from high overhead and struck the wardstone. The world seemed to hold its breath. It was time.
Void held up his hand, palm outstretched, and spoke in the oldest of tongues. “I give you my family name,” he said. It should have been meaningless, nothing more than words, but they throbbed with a terrible power. A shiver ran down my spine. It wasn’t that we were abandoning the family name. It was something more. “I give it to you, and ask only that you manifest before us.”
The world seemed to shiver. I felt unseen eyes glancing at us, from a distance, and then looking away, so quickly it was hard to believe I hadn’t just imagined them. There were parts of the forests surrounding Whitehall no one, not even the bravest student, dared go for fear they would never come out again. The creatures that lived there, the Other Folk… I wondered, numbly, if even they were daunted by what we were planning to do. It wouldn’t be a bad thing, if they were. There were powers loose in the world, in the wake of the wars, that couldn’t be corralled, if they chose to lash out at us. If we could stop them, we’d be heroes. They’d remember us long after House Barca vanished into the dust of history.
“I give you my family name,” Hamilcar said. His words held power too. “I give it to you and ask only that you manifest before us.”
My throat felt dry. It was hard, so hard, to speak. I had to wet my lips before I said a single world. “I give you my family name,” I managed. It felt as if I were caught in a storm of magic, except the storm was inside me… part of me. I’d cut myself time and time again, dripping blood into containers for potions and rituals, but this was far — far — worse. I felt as if I was tearing apart my very soul. “I give it to you and ask only that you manifest before us.”
The magic flowed around me, the wardstone starting to glow with an eerie light that bypassed my eyes and stabbed right into my brain. I barely heard Himilco completing his part of the rite by offering up his own name, barely heard Void complete the first set of rituals by channelling power into the wardstone. It was all I could do to stay on my feet. I jammed my eyes shut, but the wardstone’s light kept pulsing into my brain. I heard one of my brothers groan — I couldn’t tell which, not when the light was hurting so badly — and cursed to myself. I didn’t dare say the curse out loud. Who knew who — what — might be listening?
We spoke in unison, evoking the Words of Power that would reach out to the demons waiting in the darkness. The magic spiked, then fell back into nothingness… no, it was flowing into the darkness itself. My eyes hurt, even though they were firmly closed, as my awareness started to expand. I was suddenly very aware of the wild magic rustling through the air, drawn towards us as though our rite was a whirlpool sucking in water. My brothers were shining stars, beacons of light in the darkness. We roared and chanted, balancing the power perfectly. A ritualist team needed a master caster, someone to lead the rite… someone who could easily lose control or exploit the rite for their own purposes. We didn’t. We moved as one.
My throat ached, my hands and feet moving of their own accord. The rite wasn’t precisely a dance, but… it felt as if I had surrendered all control to a dancing master, to someone who was directing the dance. Sheer terror washed through me as I realised we no longer controlled the magic — the magic controlled us — before I pushed it away through force of will. The raging storm pulsing around us was terrifying — no doubt about it — but we knew what we were doing. We’d planned the rite to the very last detail. It might be controlling us now — and it was — but we’d planned how.
The magic rose to a crescendo and stilled. I nearly collapsed and caught myself only just in time. The world hung on a knife edge. Time itself seemed to have stopped. I recalled, suddenly, canoeing down a river only to paddle right over a waterfall, a brief second of realisation holding me spellbound before I fell. Here… the magic hung in the air, a blow about to fall. Our thoughts moved like lightning. Our bodies moved so sluggishly they barely seemed to move at all. We held our breaths…
… And then spoke the words.
Magic flared. Wild magic flowed through the forest, through the wards, and into the wardstone. The light grew brighter — it dawned on me, too late, that the light might be visible from the school — burning through my eyelids and stabbing deep into my brain. I gritted my teeth against the pain as my awareness followed the magic, punching a hole in reality itself and reaching out into the darkness. Power — raw power, so raw it couldn’t even be called magic — lashed out, trying to break into our realm. We blocked it without thinking, our thoughts recoiling from power so intense it could do anything if it could be controlled. And yet, it couldn’t. I wondered, as the magic continued to spiral into the darkness, just how the DemonMasters had done it. We were a perfect team, so perfect we were practically one mind in four bodies, and yet we had to struggle to avert disaster. There’d never been anything else like us. And yet, somehow, the DemonMasters had figured out how to summon demons and bind them. How?