The Necromancer Trilogy - Black Magic

Chapter Eighteen - The Proximity of Death

Midwinter morning. Dew drops frozen to ice. Air near solid with cold. Breath hanging in the air like fog. Leafless trees sketching declamatory fingers against the sky. A world in waiting. Breathless. Expectant.

 The army was moving. It had swollen overnight, the floodwaters bursting from their tight-knit group into an anti-social assortment of miscellaneous allies and friends and those owing debts to be repaid. Favours had been cashed in now. There must have been more than a hundred of them.

 They made no attempt to conceal themselves on the way up the hill to the castle. People in the village turned in fear at the sight. Grey uniforms, black coats, hats pulled down low over eyes, battle-scarred faces…not since the bandit chief had excitement truly come to Arndale. It came now.

 Up on the hillside, nothing was calm. People stood quietly in waiting, shadows, invisible, ready to kill. As the distance between them narrowed, the air was charged with some strange energy that raised the hairs on the back of your neck.

 Ten seconds now.

Nine…

Eight…

Seven…

One of the people climbing the hill vanished. A tremor of confusion crossed through the village as people turned to one another with muffled cries.

“Did he just…?”

“Did you see that?”

“Is it just me or did that boy…?”

Six…

Five…

Four…

The early-morning tourists scurried about the hill with nervous looks towards the advancing crowd. Of course, it might just be a winter stunt. Perhaps it was a re-enactment they hadn’t been warned about? Perhaps these people were being the bandits?

Three…

Two…

One…

Bang!

The air was filled with the crack of lightning and the smell of ozone. The ranks of both armies burst. Fire, light, jets of strange colour split the world apart. The earth trembled and the houses shook. The universe bowed before the will of the people and yielded itself to a magical war.

Blue darted about the hillside, snatching up tourists and delivering them safely to the wide pavement outside the sweetshop. They invariably screamed, some were sick, some tried to beat him off. Blue ignored them all.

“Let go of me! Let go!” a young woman screamed, as he grabbed her from behind and vanished.

“That’s gratitude,” he snapped. “I’m saving your life!”

It was already hard to breathe up on the hill, impossible to turn anywhere without seeing someone about to kill. The rules of secrecy had been abandoned. This was about the world. As long as it kept turning, nothing else mattered.

 Blue reappeared on the hillside, seizing an eight-year-old girl.

“Ow!” she cried.

They materialised outside the sweetshop and she blinked at him.

“How did you do that?” she demanded. “It goes against the laws of physics!”

Blue laughed. “When you get older you’ll learn that people break the law all the time.”

He vanished but not before he had seen her grin as if he had given her the best present in the world.

Sophie kept her head down, gripping David’s hand as if she wanted to break every bone. She kept her mind focused, a wall of magic surrounding them as best she could. It made her deaf and blind to the world around her, but she trusted David not to let her walk off a cliff.