A seagull was frozen in mid-air, wings pushing downward like the hour hand of a clock, the space around them a solid. Florence’s face was halfway through saying something; her lips were thrust left as if she’d been slapped by an invisible hand and her eyelids were shut, though violet seared through them.
The clouds glowed ice-blue, electricity seeping into the twin protrusions. Jake remembered enough of his GCSE science to know what was happening. The clouds were becoming loaded with negative charges from the ionosphere, which were being pushed to the base of the cloud. When the electric potential hit ten thousand volts per square centimetre, ionization of the air would occur. Then the step leaders would trace their way from sky to earth, fingers of plasma seeking the quickest way down.
He could see it happening.
A purplish tendril snaked towards Waits; Jake knew a step leader took a few thousands of a second to reach the ground, and now he understood why the seagull was frozen in mid-beat. A second step leader began to burn its path towards Florence, superheated ions clearing a way for the negative charge to follow in a bolt of lightning. And here were the positive streamers. A lambent flame tapered from Waits’s head as positive ions strained upward, trying to make a connection; another sprouted from the funnel of Florence’s cap.
It was a race.
But the streamer flapping from the head of Charlie Waits was longer, already it was a metre high, and the step leader reaching for it was way ahead of Florence’s. Waits remained frozen; Jake wondered if knew what was about to happen.
Step leader and positive streamer connected.
The spell was broken. The air exploded. A billion volts of electricity surged through Waits’s body, which became hotter than the surface of the sun. In the resulting detonation his head, arms and most of his upper torso vanished. What remained – two blackened legs, a hunk of cauterized abdomen – wobbled on the spot and capsized. His chinos puffed into flame. Jenny and Davis were slammed into the west battlement by the shockwave and Jake was cast in the other direction, winding himself. Displaced air bypassed Florence like a razor in a wind tunnel; the seagull flew away.
The priestess glanced around the rooftop, seeking another victim, and her gaze settled on Davis.
“You,” she said, in a voice that sounded metallic and distorted. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”
Davis calculated the odds and threw himself off the battlements; the splintering of bone when he landed carried up to the rooftop.
“Suit yourself,” said Florence, turning to face Jake.
Her eyes were matt red.
“You did this to me, Jake,” she said with that same awful slowness. “Thank you.”
He was too petrified to speak.
“Did you have a thing for me once, Jake? You can tell me.”
Jake shook his head.
“Yes, yes you did. It’s ok, plenty of men do. Poor Jake. Poor, unloved Jake.”
She readjusted the cap, raising her arm once more, and Jake listened as for a final time Florence Chung invoked all the dark power of the void.
This time he understood every word.
The placation of dii consentes, the pitiless advisers of Tin. The seduction of dii novensiles, casters of lightning. The appeasement of dii superiores, the most potent of all the numinous powers that surrounded the All-Seeing Eye. And then the most dread incantation of them all: the appeal to Tin himself.
The sky darkened. The cloud above Jake had become an anvil, gathering itself up, ready to smash him. Time ground to a halt. The sense of gravity was overwhelming and the weight of atmosphere crushed the air from his lungs.
It began at the tip of his nose. A purple flame flickering upward like a glow-worm, wiggling out of his body. And here came the step leader, beautiful and bizarre. Negative and positive, yin and yang, just as Dr Nesta had hypothesized. Jake’s world had turned the colour of a photographic negative; he could make out the silhouette of Florence, but it was like staring through peaty water. The fingers of plasma strained to touch a few feet above him and Jake knew this was the ever-anointed date of his end. Foretold by thunder, like all things.
A flicker of movement.
A swipe in the gloom.
A dazzling shock of blonde.
And suddenly it was over.