COMING OUT OF the palace was like breaching the surface of water after being held under, gasping in air and blinking at the world. The real world; not the swirling shades and ghosts of the underground. Everything seemed too bright, surreal, as if the rocks and the trees couldn’t quite be believed. Will tried not to look as he felt: stupefied.
Arm up! Be ready! The shouts felt distant, as if he’d been wrenched from a dream too early, caught between disorienting wakefulness and the deep pull to go back under.
He had emerged into a slaughter. A dozen shots; a dozen of Sloane’s lead riders fell. Horses screamed and reared up, clustering them like cattle in a pen. Instead of providing reinforcements, they found themselves exposed and outnumbered as bandits thundered down the crevasse towards them.
‘The Devil’s Hand!’ he heard again from the locals. ‘La Mano del Diavolo!’
It didn’t seem possible, their soldiers decimated, the few remaining having already emptied their pistols.
‘Ready yourselves!’ called Captain Howell to the last of his men, preparing for the charge. They were trying to reload their pistols, desperately, in the last tatters of a line.
James strolled forward calmly.
‘You have one chance to leave,’ he said, with breathless audacity, to the armed bandits around him.
‘You’re on our mountain.’ The leader of the bandits was an African woman in men’s riding breeches, white shirt and torn brown waistcoat. Her voice was low in pitch, her Italian accented. ‘Whatever you’ve found belongs to us.’
She lifted a horse pistol in her left hand and pointed it unerringly at James.
La Mano, Will thought. The Hand. It was a nickname with bite: her left hand, which held the pistol, was her only hand. Her right arm ended in a stump four inches below the elbow, and was tied off with leather.
The men with her – it was mostly men – wore the tattered clothing of the region, velveteen short jackets and breeches, and linen shirts open at the neck. Many of them had handkerchiefs fastened to their buttonholes or tucked into their pockets. Round their waists they wore ammunition belts, or leather sheaths for knives, muskets or pistols.
But they weren’t Italians: Kettering was right. Will saw a man with the straight black hair of the far east, another with the red hair and pale freckled skin of the far north, neither common in this region. A ragtag retinue, they had nothing in common but their bloodthirsty smiles at catching a rich prize.
‘Stand aside,’ said the Hand, ‘or we shoot everyone.’
Her easy horsemanship relied on seat and legs, her steady gaze under her short dark hair said that if she shot, it would send a bullet right between James’s eyes.
‘All right,’ said James, casually. ‘Shoot everyone.’
There was enough time for Captain Howell to say, ‘St Clair, you stupid son of a—’ before the Hand, not one to make idle threats, simply shrugged at James and shot him.
The breeze in a long-ago garden, gold hair spilling through his fingers as he looked up and smiled—
No! Will was running forward desperately. His only thought was to get to James, to push him out of the way, or to put himself in front of the shot. But he was too far away, and there were soldiers in his way, that he had to shove past, not fast enough.
The blast was loud; a firework, followed by the smell of acrid smoke. A shot, perfectly aimed. He can heal, Will told himself frantically. Oh God, could James heal a shot to the head? It was impossible, but Will had to hope. He can heal. He’ll survive. He can heal.
But as the smoke cleared, that didn’t seem to be what had happened.
James just stood, his amused, challenging gaze still on the Hand. There was no smoking hole between his eyes. There was no red plume on his clothes. There was no sign that he’d been shot at all.
The Hand’s expression flickered, a slight frown as if she was unused to missing.
‘Fire,’ she said, a little impatiently, and this time the entire band behind her fired, a series of bursting explosions.
Captain Howell flung himself low. All of the remaining soldiers curled in on themselves like armadillos. Except James, who stood straight-backed, gazing at the Hand with no sign of urgency.
And then, in the long space after, Captain Howell’s men started to unfold themselves. Realising they had not been hit, each man was looking up, confused, to see that none of his companions had been hit either.
The air was thick with flies. The flies weren’t moving. Will saw with a chill that they were not flies, but round dark balls of tin and lead, frozen in midair, one of them less than a foot from Will’s face.
‘I believe I’m feeling better,’ said James.
Will felt a surge of satisfaction and pride. Try to take me on the steps of my palace with James by my side.
‘You may be the hand of the Devil,’ said James, ‘but I am the hand of a Master more powerful than any you serve, and this mountain is His land.’
And he gestured with his hand.
The lead spheres hanging in midair flew backward into the throats of the men who had fired them. The closest bandits fell, their bodies riddled with lead, their lives cut short by James’s gesture. Sorcery! Evil! the shouts began, amid plunging horses.
‘I’d run if I were you,’ said James to the Hand. ‘Just a suggestion.’
‘Retreat!’ Will saw the Hand wheeling her horse, both reins in one fist, shouting to her men, ‘Retreat!’ They wheeled and began stampeding, the Hand bringing up the rear.
‘Sinclair’s witch,’ she said to James, ‘your time will come to burn.’
She put her heels into her horse.
The bandits fled into the trees, pushing horses hard over uncertain ground. It was closer to a terrified stampede than a retreat, fuelled by a primal need to get away from a force that they could not fight. Captain Howell’s men looked like they wanted to flee too. Amid scattered corpses and half-a-dozen riderless horses they were left staring at James in varying states of fear, stupefaction and disbelief, too scared to break and run.
Your weapon, James had called himself in the gatekeep. Now Will looked around at a rout James had single-handedly caused. James’s presence in the Hall of the Stewards might have been an insult, but he had just demonstrated unequivocally the full scope of the power Will had brought onto their side.
‘Well done, well done,’ Sloane was babbling from the sidelines. ‘I don’t think they’ll trouble us again in a hurry.’ He looked terrified.
James swung up onto his black thoroughbred, a cold icon ready to lead a force onward.
‘You killed all those men,’ said Cyprian, in a hollow, shocked voice.
‘You’re welcome,’ said James.
‘I want that entrance guarded day and night.’ Sloane gave the order. ‘No one in or out without my personal authorisation.’
Will found himself oddly shivering, as if entering the palace had been a plunge into cold water.
He wanted badly to talk to James, but James had mounted up and ridden past him without a single acknowledgement. Arriving at camp, James was whisked away by Sloane to a dining tent.
So Will drew Grace and Cyprian into his room.
There was reassurance in the stout English four-poster bed with its harrateen hangings, and the long seat that might have decorated any parlour. This was his world, not that underground palace of disturbing dreams. Not those flickering images of the past that seemed to haunt him.
But the shivering returned as Will thought of the mountain. ‘There’s something in that palace.’ He made himself speak through it. ‘The danger under the mountain, the calamity the Elder Steward could not name – it’s inside that palace, and Sinclair is close to finding it. We don’t have much time.’
‘What are you saying?’ said Cyprian.
‘We need to find Ettore,’ Will said. ‘“Only with Ettore can you stop what is to come.” That’s what the Elder Steward told us. We have to find Ettore, and fast.’
‘You mean abandon Violet.’ Cyprian’s jaw was clenched.
‘I mean do what the head of your Order sent you here to do,’ said Will. ‘Nothing is more important than stopping Sinclair. Violet would agree with me.’
Cyprian turned away, and Will could see the twin forces of duty and loyalty warring in him. His hair, loose despite his modern clothes, fell down his back, his spine sword-straight.
‘And if it was James who was captured?’ said Cyprian.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ said Will.
Cyprian didn’t answer. It was Grace who spoke.
‘The Elder Steward warned us that we’d face our deadliest threat here. I believe her. I felt a great darkness under the mountain. Will’s right. We must find the man Ettore. And—’
‘And?’ said Will.
‘The men who rode with us today, they were scared,’ said Grace. ‘Not just of James’s magic. Of the mountain. There is something here. Something that they fear.’
Signs to ward off evil, a fear greater than that of reluctant explorers entering an unknown ruin. She had seen it too. Will remembered the doors, warped and bent.
Something inside trying to get out.
‘So we play along,’ agreed Will. ‘James is our lord and master. As soon as it’s light, you two ride out to find Ettore. I’ll stay here with James, and find out what it is in that palace they’re trying to dig up.’ He gave the order knowing that Cyprian would follow it. Cyprian was the good soldier. He would do as he was told.
Cyprian frowned, and then said, as if the idea truly distressed him, ‘I’m not good at deception.’
‘I know,’ said Will. ‘It’s your best quality. Find the village and find Ettore. Leave the deception to me.’