Page 37 of Tomb of Ancients
“What are you doing!?” Ara leapt up from the fire, upsetting the cauldron and sending stew cascading over the hissing coals. Her robes flowed around her as she ran toward us, still wielding the long wooden cooking spoon. “I told you to be careful.I told you.”
Faraday was right. We were too close to the salt, and the scorpion’s malevolent presence seemed to prove that he had indeed unearthed something monstrous there. I heard him cry out and fall to the ground as the harsh, hot wind whipped through the camp, sending sand, dust, and grit into our eyes as it all but sliced us up. The rumbling began after that, a sound like the earth belching forth the flames of a volcano. The explosion had sounded distant, but that didn’t matter. I could already hear whatever the underworld had birthed moving swiftly toward us, obliterating the sands as it came.
“Abatu!Go! Now! If we are lucky, we can outrun it and lose it in the hills. It will take time for me to summon shadows, but all is not lost!” Ara looped back toward the camp, frantic, scooping up her pack and tossing Henry’s to him. I grabbed Faraday by the arm and hoisted him to his feet, pulling him along whilehe wept and apologized. Bartholomew paced at the ruined fire, and I took him up, too, letting Henry manage both of our packs as the four of us made for the road.
“It doesn’t matter,” I heard Faraday moan. “It’s coming. It’s already here.”
We scrambled up the road, running east. The moon was obscured by heavy clouds, and without any light to see by, it was a blind retreat, but the path cut through two hilly clusters of land, thick with shrubs and trees. Ara ran ahead; even burdened by the book, she overtook us, and we followed her up the pass to the right. At last, Faraday found some strength in his limbs and climbed next to me, whispering nonsense to himself as the great rumbling strides of the creature behind us neared. It sounded like more than one enemy, but my only intent was to climb. We could face our doom when we had the high ground.
The rocks cut into my palms, and the dense shrubs, bushy and sharp with thorns, tore at my tunic. The pain was forgotten, pushed aside by the pounding in my chest. The hilltop was no mountain, but it provided ample places to hide and a vantage. Ara made it first, running only a few steps more before she dropped to her knees and hoisted the Black Elbion out of her bag. It was her turn to whisper, using the ancient language she and Henry and the demon favored. I saw the book shake on the ground as I crested the hill, its pages rustling, the bushes around us suddenly full of secretive sounds, as if the very shadows had come alive.
In fact, they had.
I herded the dog against my stomach and curled around it on the ground. Henry was not at all put off by the noises bubbling up from every direction, and instead he strode to the edge of the cliff, leaning over to watch the thing that had followed.
“It’s hideous,” he hissed. “Ara, darling, we have to hurry now.”
She shushed him, impatient, her hands waving over the book, her voice a low, rasped music that rose and fell. The rocks under us swayed. The creature was ramming itself against the base of the hill, apparently unable to climb. Just above Ara’s song, I heard the creature’s eerie chattering.
“I knew not to speak of it, I knew, I knew...” Faraday hugged himself, rocking back and forth in the dirt beside me.
“Hush,” I told him. “Let her concentrate.”
I had never seen Ara at work, but it was a thing of strange beauty. As her song reached its peak, she produced a knife from inside her robes and slashed at her hand. She made a fist, as if to hold the blood there, and then threw it outward in a fan. The blood never hit the ground, hovering there in the air before the shadows seethed out of the bushes to consume the offering. Her blood gave them form, and soon a dozen or so faces of shifting black stared at her, as if the night itself had come to life to do her bidding.
“Addaniqa—hisnu, hisnu!” she commanded, waving her arms frantically.
I didn’t speak the language perfectly, but I knew what she had asked—protection. Please, protection.
With dragging feet, the shadows rushed by in single file and vanished over the edge of the hill, moving with silent, unnatural speed. I crept to my knees and then stood, joining Henry at the ledge. Ara remained on the ground, holding her wounded hand to her chest and breathing deep.
“They can only be a distraction,” Henry said, somber.
“What is it?” I asked him. “What pursues us?”
His eyes gleamed even in the total darkness as he turned away from the edge. There was a guilty hunch to his shoulders. Perhaps—finally—he had realized the cost of this quest. “I’ve never seen anything like it before, love. We will need all of our courage for what is to come.”
Lee’s upset stomach proved prophetic. After alerting Mr. Morningside and Dalton to the possible presence of Upworlders on the property, we mustered on top of the east tower, in one of the dusty, rarely used bedrooms that had been draped with cloths to keep the moths and dirt at bay. The furniture shrouded, the floors bare of carpets, it felt like a suitably desolate setting for what we found outside.
The tall, mullioned windows faced the fields that, far in the distance, held the shepherd’s house, a modest shack I had oncestumbled upon by accident. Of much more pressing concern, however, was a line of Adjudicators waiting just across the rickety fence separating the two properties. Most of the fence had been knocked down, but a few narrow posts remained here and there. The yard was pocked with deep holes, and I wondered if one of those led to the other end of the tunnel I’d glimpsed through the massive gape in the kitchen floor.
“He’s mad as a bag of ferrets if he thinks I’m going to take that bait,” Mr. Morningside grunted. He stood with crossed arms at the window, all of his employees and visitors beside him—except Mrs. Haylam.
She arrived in a bustle of skirts and muttered complaints, then paused when she caught sight of us all amassed at the windows. Out in the hall behind her lurked two blurry black shapes. Residents. The shadows given life prowled in her wake, drifting by the open doorway but not entering. Mrs. Haylam had abandoned her apron, wearing only a sober, dark frock with a knit muffler around her neck. The spare months between now and when I’d last seen her had aged her significantly. She had previously looked like a proud but gnarled old tree, dark of skin but with a severe kind of beauty. Now she simply seemed weathered, her milky eye so pale it almost glowed in the dimly lit bedroom.
When her good eye fell on Dalton, she drew up short. It was as if someone had dropped a solid block between them, for she would go no farther.
“Him,”she spat.
“Hullo, old girl,” Dalton greeted, turning to face her, though the fabric over his eyes hid much of his expression.
“We are not so desperate that we needyouraid,” she said, sniffing. “And the problem child has returned, too? I might have known. My every bone has ached for hours, an ill omen of the fools darkening our doorstep.”
“We are indeed that desperate,” Mr. Morningside said. “There are Adjudicators across the fence, and the shepherd flushed this lot out of London with fires and dragons and the Pit only knows what else. It would seem he wants us all in one location. Convenient, no?”
I chewed my cheek, ignoring the searing look Mrs. Haylam tossed my way. If I needed her help to rid myself of Father, I would sweeten my tone later, but that was a problem for another moment. In the meantime, I feared Mr. Morningside was right.
“Do you suppose he knows we’re here?” I asked.
