“Yeah. That one was a hellhound. They’re not that dangerous on the grand scale of things, but it could easily have killed you.”
Jack gulped and looked down, and something caught the moonlight. Threaded around Alex’s neck was a small angular crystal, seven sided and pointed like Jack’s with a different minute symbol engraved on it. “You’ve got one too.” He reached under his school shirt and pulled the crystal from around his neck, holding it out.
Alex’s eyes widened slightly, and he breathed in to speak but suddenly shifted his eyes to look back up the street. Jack followed his gaze, but through the fog he could still see nothing but the tops of buildings, rising like murky willows in a swamp.
Alex raised the gun again. Both of them listened intently. Footsteps could be heard, echoing louder and louder as they came closer. Alex reloaded the gun and motioned Jack to the wall.
A figure emerged from the darkness. Jack squinted at it slightly, then recoiled in surprise. It was wearing a dark hooded cloak that hid its entire body, including the face, just like the ones had been at the train station and in the orchard. It seemed to hover above the mist, floating like some faceless phantom towards them.
Alex had made no attempt to hide. He was standing full on, aiming the gun’s barrel directly into the figure’s hood.
“Impressive,” it said in a deep, rolling voice. “You seem to have disposed of my scout. I commend you. Not many of your kind could face such a beast.”
“On your knees,” Alex said calmly, his voice completely at odds with what he was doing.
“What possible leverage do you think you possess? That archaic weapon is nothing—”
“I killed the hellhound. Just do it.”
The man paused, then raised his arms. “Now, is this really wise? If I do not return, the remaining members of my Chapter will inevitably discover what has become of me. And they will find you. Do you really want to take that risk with your friend here?”
Jack flinched, but Alex did not seem perturbed. He pointed the gun more forcibly.
Slowly, the man sunk to his knees.
Cautiously, Alex stepped over to him and pushed his hood back.
Jack ventured closer and got a good look at him. He appeared about fifty, with short dark hair and a full, grey-brushed beard. He was grinning menacingly, showing one or more teeth to be blackened or missing.
“You are unwise, boy.”
“Shut up.” Alex’s voice was poised with detectable venom, his face contorted into a snarl. “Why is the Cult here?”
The man’s grin faltered. “To absorb this pitifully antique world into the Darkness, of course.”
“No more games. I want the real reason. This town—this planet—is completely defenseless. You could have killed every living being here by now if you’d wanted to. This is easy pickings for your Darkness. No fires, no alchemy, no demons stronger than a hellhound, not even a Dark Eye. What’s going on?”
The man’s grin returned. “Oh, I assure you there will be an Oculatrum of sorts within the next few minutes. And as for stronger demons … you have no idea.”
“Where?” asked Alex fiercely, shoving the gun into the man’s temple. For the first time, Alex seemed a little shaken.
“At the orchard. I would hurry if I were you. The ritual is almost complete.”
“What ritual?”
“You’ll no doubt find out when you get there.” His smile widened and his eyes gleamed. “Not that you’ll be able to prevent it.”
Alex removed the gun from the man’s temple and half-turned to Jack. “Come on.”
“You fool. You actually believe—”
Alex whipped around and batted the man over the head with the gun. He crumpled to the ground, his body disappearing under the screen of fog, just as the hellhound’s had done.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Jack said, taken aback. He crossed over to where Alex was waiting. “Is he … ?”
“No, only knocked out. He’ll come round soon with one hell of a headache.”
“Are we going to the orchard, then?”
Alex considered for a moment. “Yes. We’ll take the bait. Oh, and that.” He pointed to the crystal Jack was holding in his open palm. “Keep it safe. Put it around your neck and don’t let anyone see.”
Jack got a longer look at Alex’s crystal. It was, as he’d thought before, slightly different to his. The symbol on Alex’s was carved in silver, not gold, and the inscription wasn’t the same. “What do these things do?”
“No time to explain,” replied Alex distractedly as they hurried off.
“That’s just what the fox said.”
“What?”
“Nothing, nothing …”
They jogged off down the street. Jack noticed Alex kept the gun out—and ready—all the way. He considered what Alex had said. Under any other circumstances, he would have dismissed “working for an organization” as something like drug dealing, but now he wasn’t so sure. And that wasn’t something Alex would do, anyway.
What about the demon? He had been convinced such things didn’t exist—everyone had—except maybe the extremely religious. But Jack had seen that thing with his own eyes, and somehow he knew that it wasn’t from this world. When it had looked at him, it seemed to emanate some kind of psychic stench, which was enough to make him feel physically sick. And then there was the fox. He was still having trouble accepting that an animal could talk, but again, that had been no normal fox. And Alex had another one of those pendants. What did it all mean?
After an endless series of twists and turns down side streets and alleys, they came onto the main road coming down from the school. They were at the orchard. Across the tarmac and out into the sea of mist, treetops could be seen. Rising above it, silhouetted against the deep purple sky, was Sirona Beacon. Trees clustered up its sides, and right on top individual trunks were picked out against the stricken horizon.
Alex slowed, and Jack came to his pace, breathing a little harder than usual. The freezing air seared his lungs, and he had just realized how cold he was, only in a school blazer. His bag was long gone, abandoned in some alley to keep up the pace.
They crossed onto the grass and followed the path.
Jack looked at Alex, then at the gun in his hand. They hadn’t said a word since the alleyway. “So one of those can kill a demon?”
“Sort of. It’ll delay it long enough for us to get away. It’s only because the bullets are laced with a special chemical. Super corrosive.”
“And those black cloaks?”
“They’re called the Cult of Dionysus, by the way. And it depends.”
“On what?”
“Who surprises who.”
Gradually, light became evident before them. Alex gestured for Jack to stay quiet, and they both crept towards the source. As they got closer, they could see it was being projected in blocks from floodlights, placed in a circle around something. Closer still, and Jack could see the orange tape of the excavation site fluttering in the wind. It had been severed.
Alex moved ahead on soft footfalls, the gun outstretched. He made a circuit of the area and returned to Jack’s side. They moved forward to the remnants of the orange tape.
There definitely had been an excavation here. In a circle of about fifteen feet across and six feet down, the earth had been uprooted and piled next to the hole. The floodlights had been positioned to afford maximum vision into it. They both peered over the edge.
Whatever Jack had been expecting, this was not it. His first thought was the inside of an industrial revolution–era machine—layers and layers of cogs and gears, all piled on top of each other on multiple axes, interlocking and turning slowly. They seemed to have been cast out of some rough, dark metal, and by the soil still clinging in the grooves, the whole construction could not have been exposed to the air for many hundreds of years. That, though, wasn’t the strangest part. A silvery purple glow, more vapor than light, wafted up through the gaps in the intermeshing stru
cture. Under the thick layers of metal crisscrossing each other as far down as Jack could see, there was no discernable source.
“What is it?” Jack whispered.
Alex’s gaze flicked over the gears as if it were a complicated puzzle. “I’m not sure …” Suddenly, he straightened up and hurried round to the opposite side of the pit. He bent down to examine something.
Jack stood and followed Alex’s path around the floodlights. A few feet away, he saw what Alex was looking at. A curved chute, on the same level as the discs, had been dug out of the hillside. It was filled with a number of dense pipes of the same metal as the gears. The faint violet glow around them hinted at more of the vaporous light. Jack followed the path with his gaze, and it soon disappeared into the gloom hanging under the trunks. It continued through the undergrowth, onto the barren top of Sirona Beacon. “I’m guessing if we follow this pipe, we get to the top of the hill?”
“And straight to where the Cult are.”
Jack looked apprehensively at the unfathomable forest and then back at Alex.
Alex stowed the gun in his jacket. “Let’s go.”
They climbed the slope quickly and quietly, following the path of the pipes. It took a while for Jack’s eyes to become accustomed to the almost pitch-black, and then he began getting jumpy. He saw shapes in every gnarled trunk and movements in every shadow. The moon gave no illumination but just hung above, draped in grey clouds. Having seen horror films, he had thought that a full moon in this kind of situation would be an unfrightening cliché. Now he felt as if it were watching him. He forced himself to stare straight ahead.
Alex kept a few feet ahead, ducking behind fallen trunks and stumps every so often. The silence was gravely oppressive; no animal cries could be heard out of the gloom, and every snapped twig or crunched leaf seemed to echo a thousand times louder than it normally would. No sound, either, came from the hill above them. This, Jack hoped, was because there was nothing actually there. Or because whatever was up there was keeping quiet for exactly the same reason as he and Alex were. That was not a comforting thought.
They moved through the last of the trees and reached the edge of the forest. The pipe chute continued on upwards to the very top, blocked from sight from where they were. Alex gestured for Jack to get down, and the two of them began crawling on all fours up the last of the slope. The grass was sparse here, and most of the ground beneath them was painfully hard stone. They reached a jutting-out rock, and both crouched behind it. Alex peered over the top, and Jack followed him.
On the flat top of the beacon, now only a few feet away from them, a group of black-cloaked figures stood. Almost indiscernible against the deep sky, seven were standing with their arms outstretched in a wide circle around what seemed to be a cylindrical altar. The remainders were in a group off to the right.
Alex ducked down behind the rock and pulled the gun out of his jacket pocket, checking the rounds.
Jack continued watching, and one of the black cloaks shifted. He caught a flash of reflective reddish-brown hair and exposed skin. His eyes widened.
Another of the black-cloaks moved backwards, fully revealing the girl.
It was Lucy, still in her netball kit, her arms bound behind her back, mouth gagged, in the grip of one of the larger figures. She looked terrified.
Jack rose slowly, waving frantically at her. She saw him, and her eyes widened in surprise, then relief. Then shock, as one of the nearer black cloaks swivelled and followed her gaze. He looked directly at Jack.
Alex finished loading the gun and saw him standing up. He leapt to his feet, pushing Jack downwards, and faced the figure. He raised the gun, but, with a flick of the black cloak’s hand, it was wrenched from his grip and flung sideways into the dark.
More black cloaks turned and started drifting towards them, phantomlike over the rocky ground. Alex tried to duck, but another clawlike hand motion had him lifted into the air by the throat. Jack was ripped out from behind the rock, unable to move, as the figures closed in.
Chapter VII
the ritual
“Mr. Steele,” said the man. “From all I’ve heard, I really expected more of you.”
Alex was suspended in the air by his torso, his limbs flopping uselessly by his sides. A thin trickle of blood ran down the left side of his mouth and neck and under his top, but he didn’t try and wipe it away. The wind blasted in his eyes, making them sting, but he made no attempt to scratch them. He kept his gaze firmly fixed on the taunting figure before him. The figure was entirely covered in black, just like the others. The only visible skin was his pale mouth under the shadow of the hood. Currently, it was smirking.
“You come back, and yet you allow yourself to be captured instantly. Some heroic attempt to save your friends? What is heroism without strength, but folly?”
Alex scanned the hilltop. By the sparse moonlight, he could make out nine figures dotted around him and the figure in front of him. There were several more on the other side of the pit, though he wasn’t sure how many. He knew that the normal Chapter consisted of thirteen sorcerers, but this was no normal mission. There could be many more lurking beyond sight in the deep shadows of the trees. He looked behind him as far as he could. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Jack and Lucy, their school uniform and sports kit brightly branded against the cloaks. They were held in a similar way to him, with black cloaks standing directly behind their levitating bodies.
“What are you planning?” he snarled.
The man turned his head, as if studying Alex from a different angle. He pondered him for a moment, then seemed to decide. “I don’t see the harm in it. You will, after all, be playing a vital role.” The man turned and walked over to the edge of the pit.
Lifted by some unseen force, Alex floated after him, still unable to operate his muscles. He reached the rim and was lowered to hover next to him.
This pit was at least thirty feet across and larger than the one at the bottom of the hill. Where below, there had been an intricate weave of gears, what had been unearthed here was much simpler. What had appeared to be a circular altar from farther down the hill was in fact the topmost of a series of rough stone discs piled on top of each other in size order to form a cylindrical stepped pyramid. Each level had chutes carved into it at seemingly random intervals and directions, all fitted with the same ancient-looking piping. The pipe chute from the lower pit ran up to the edge and dropped downwards, the end left unconnected to anything.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The man laughed greedily.
Alex couldn’t exactly see what he meant. “What is it?”
“A marker. A gateway, denoting the location of a Door into the Darkness. Its creators and custodians may have faded into extinction and myth, but this is still as fine a piece of invention as it was the day it was created.”
Alex traced the patterns laid out before him, trying to mentally assemble them. There was a small hole at the center of the highest stone slab. A hole just big enough for …
“How did you get here?” Jack whispered to Lucy, trying to turn his head the minimal amount for her to hear.
She continued staring straight ahead at Alex, unblinkingly. It took Jack a moment to realize she was giving muffled whispers through her gag. “They … they picked me up on the way back from netball … They knew where I live … I was walking home, and a group of them were waiting for me … They picked me up without even touching me. How the hell is that possible? And then you show up with Alex. Where? How … ?” She faded into silence.
Jack glanced at her. She was unusually pale. Her clothes were torn and muddy and had leaves and twigs stuck in them, as if she’d fought through bushes trying to escape. He’d never seen her this frightened before. She didn’t look as if she’d noticed the two of them were hovering several inches above the ground in the same way as Alex, and Jack wasn’t about to bring it up.
“It has taken considerable toil and time to locate and unearth this Door,” the man continued,
still looking over the pit. “And that is not to mention the lengths we went to so that you could be here with us tonight. How ironic: that a Door was to be found in the same pitiful world as the bearer of a Shard! The lock and the key placed next to one another!” He turned swiftly and grabbed Alex by the collar, pulling out the chain hanging around his neck. On the end was the crystal shard, engraved with its miniscule symbol. He yanked it down, ripping the chain.
Blinking away the tears of searing pain, Alex saw, to his horror, the man dangling it in front of his face.
“Just out of interest, how did you come into possession of this?”
Alex didn’t answer. He tried frantically to twist his arms out of the invisible lock. He still could not move them and was left wriggling helplessly in midair like a wounded animal.
The man laughed coldly. “I wouldn’t bother. You’ll only tire yourself out.” And he flung the pendant over the pit.
It spun meticulously three times, the pointed end glimmering brightly on each revolution. As it reached the center, it froze, as if caught magnetically. It hung perfectly still for a single, inextricably long second directly over the slot in the stone. Then it plunged, daggerlike, down.
With a high-pitched shriek, silver light rocketed upwards, shooting a column of energy into the darkened sky. It struck clouds and penetrated through them, lost, like a bright searchlight, in the deep purple shadows. The low growl of swift wind swept over the hilltop. Clouds, whipped up by a sudden gale, swept over the bald peak, swirling together to consume the stars and moon. The windstorm descended, blasting over the barren hilltop in a freezing frenzy, crunching the trees in a cacophony of searing whistling. Thunder rumbled from above, and over the surrounding hilltops talons of bright white lightning clawed at the landscape, pulverizing their points of impact in superheated oblivion.
A deep grinding sounded, and Alex looked back down at the pit. The layers of stone were rotating slowly in alternate directions, as if pulled into a predetermined position. They halted with a heavy crunching noise, and with a crack the topmost level sunk into the second, the second into the third, and so on, seven times until they became level. The dull glow around the now connected pipes intensified, and the same vaporous light surged from the external chute through the newly aligned ones. It completed its circuit and fizzled, grinding to a halt. The silver light flickered and faded. The thunder, wind, and lightning remained.
The White Fox Page 6
