The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Nineteen

We stood in a pile of rubble. The remains of a broken civilization scattered across the landscape around us.

"Did something go wrong?" Kieran asked, looking around.

"I'd say something did," Jack said, "buildings don't just fall down for no reason."

"I mean, are we in the right place?"

"We should be," Jack said.

"We are," I bent down and pulled a book out from beneath a piece of rotting wood. "Look familiar?"

"This is the library?" Kieran asked. He turned around, watching the crumbled wood stretch across the horizon. "That's the Great Hall?" He shook his head, like you do when you can't make sense of something and feels like someone's stuffed cotton wool in your head, only you can't shake the feeling away. "What happened?"

"Um..." both men looked down at me. "I have this horrible feeling that I did this," I said.

"Why?" Jack asked.

"How?" Kieran said at the same time.

"I was in the Great Hall," I tried to explain, "and I felt the dead, like inside the walls." I frowned. That sounded wrong. "Like the whole building was leaning on them and they couldn't bear it but they couldn't stop either because they'd been chained to that spot, you know?"

"So you what," Kieran asked, "undid the chains?"

"Well," I said, "what would you do?" I already knew the answer to that. It was the entire reason I was there, then. Kieran was the kind of person who would set them free, if he could. He just didn't have the right tools for it before. He didn't have me.

"We've got to get a move on," Jack said, making his way through the rubble. "Don't know how much time we've got."

"Do you know where you're going?" I asked, following him.

"Yeah," Jack said. He didn't stop walking or turn to look at me when he spoke. "Coronation's only ever in one place. This," he shrugged towards the debris, "doesn't change anything."

I felt like we spent half of eternity walking through the remains of the once great Court of Faerie. I didn't know where we were going so I had no way of measuring the distance we had to travel, or how the landscape should have looked as we passed it on our way to stop the coronation. Likewise, there was no way of knowing how far Zephan would get before we got there. I couldn't shake the feeling that we'd be too late.

Apprehension prickled along my skin, making the tiny hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end. The air felt thick and heavy with the expectant energy of an electrical storm.

We came to the ends of the debris and started down a path that was barely more than a dirt track.

"They've already passed this way," Jack said. He sounded light and unconcerned but I caught a muscle in his jaw twitch with the tension of keeping his voice controlled.

"How can you tell?" I asked. Jack bent down and pressed a finger against the earth.

"Trampled grass around the edges," he said. "And the dirt hasn't quite settled down after the pounding of thousands of feet working their way across the plains."

"There isn't normally a path here," Kieran muttered.

Jack stood up. "Yeah," he said, "that's actually how I know it's fresh."

"Do we really have time to bugger around like this?" I asked.

"Bugger?" Kieran tilted his head.