Chapter 17

Chapter

Seventeen

T here was a moment’s silence before all four of us started peppering the Fachan with questions.

‘What was it?’

‘What did it do?’

‘How is that possible?’

And, of course, ‘Can we find it and use it now?’

The Fachan sighed heavily. ‘You are searching for a truth that can no longer be found.’

I felt a churn of nausea. ‘Please,’ I whispered. ‘Can you elaborate?’

The Fachan stroked the edge of his sword absent-mindedly. ‘Fiendish blood runs in your veins, Daisy Carter. Even if the sceptrum could be found, it might destroy you as well as those who are true fiends.’

That was a risk I was more than willing to take, but Hugo stiffened in alarm. ‘It’s fine,’ I murmured to him and turned back to the Fachan. ‘Tell us more. What is this … sceptrum?’

‘For generations, many of your kind have been concerned about the existence of fiends – and with good reason. One of your kings commissioned the greatest minds of his time to create an object that would banish them from this land forever, together with several other items of vast power. He was a particularly pathetic ruler,’ the Fachan said with a distinct edge of distaste. ‘Your people do not often choose their leaders well.’

My skin was prickling with anticipation despite his dark tone. Finally we were getting somewhere. ‘Which king?’

Something flickered in his single yellow eye. ‘That information will not help you.’

I clasped my hands. ‘Please.’

The Fachan sighed again. ‘I do not know his name, such details are unimportant to me. I am aware that he was violent and he did not treat those weaker than himself with respect. He possessed no honour.’

I glanced at Hugo but he only shrugged. ‘That could have been any number of monarchs in our history,’ he said. Unhelpful.

The Fachan rumbled with amusement. ‘Your boy speaks the truth.’

‘He couldn’t have been that bad if he was trying to destroy all the fiends,’ Otis interjected.

The Fachan’s eyeball swivelled towards him and the brownie flinched. ‘I would imagine – although I do not know for certain – that this king simply wanted his power to be the greatest. There was a crown, a sword, a chalice, a helmet, an orb and a sceptre, each possessing its own magic. It was said that whoever wore the crown would never lose his head, and whoever wielded the sword would fell armies. Whoever drank from the chalice would control the skies, and whoever wore the helmet would communicate with the natural world. Whoever held the orb would gain riches beyond all comprehension, and whoever wielded the sceptre could defeat all foes.’ Then he added, ‘Be they fiend or otherwise.’

‘I’ve never heard of anything like this,’ I breathed. ‘How could such objects exist and nobody know about them?’

A sad smile curled around the Fachan’s mouth. ‘Hubris. It took many lives to create these objects. Power does not come from nowhere and much blood was spilled in the jewels’ creation. Anyone who understood how they had been created was killed on the king’s orders. He wanted none but himself to wield that sort of power.’

‘What happened?’ Hester asked.

The Fachan gave her a long look. ‘What always happens. The king died.’

‘What happened to the objects? What happened to the sceptre?’

‘Everything was swallowed by the sea only months after they had been created.’

I felt the sting of bitter disappointment. ‘They were on a ship that sank?’ If that were true, we were screwed; we couldn’t scour the oceans, not with any reasonable chance of success.

‘There was no sailing vessel involved,’ the Fachan said somewhat cryptically.

My brow creased. ‘Then wh?—?’

I didn’t come close to completing my sentence before a strange low rumble interrupted me, quietly at first but quickly growing in intensity and volume. The cave floor started to shake with such violence that I was thrown off my feet. Rocks fell from the cave walls, some small ones that bounced towards us, others the size of boulders with black jagged edges that crashed around us.

It was happening: the cave was collapsing and we were going to be buried alive.

I cried out. I couldn’t help myself; the one true terror that I’d always possessed was coming true. Fortunately, Hugo’s presence of mind was far greater than mine and within seconds he’d covered me with his body to shield me from the cascade of falling rocks. He grabbed Hester, pushing her tiny body into a nook underneath my shoulder, and motioned to Otis to follow. While the brownie hastily complied, Hugo yelled at the Fachan.

I felt a bubble of magic erupting from Hugo’s fingertips. He conjured up a blast of air that pushed away the worst of the debris as if he were creating an invisible umbrella to protect us.

I struggled to grasp my own tendrils of power, desperately hoping that logic would reassert itself over blind panic and I could join my strength to his, but Hugo squeezed my hand in warning. He was telling me not to draw on my magic, not yet.

With a further lurch of terror, I realised why: he could only maintain the magicked air bubble for so long and I needed to take over from him when he no longer had the energy. But if the cave was collapsing, it was doubtful that we could sustain the magic for long enough to be rescued even with our combined efforts.

I squeezed Hugo’s hand in return to show that I understood, although I was already certain that we wouldn’t get out of this. There was no chance of escape. The strange, detached thought that Smoo Cave was taking back the life that I owed it from my first trip there flashed through my mind, then a dull explosion reverberated around us with such force that I stopped thinking altogether. I simply closed my eyes, tensed my body and prepared for the worst.

Unfortunately, when it happened it was even more disastrous than I’d envisaged.

‘I gave you everything!’ Somehow Athair’s irate voice penetrated the thunderous noise. Smoo Cave wasn’t collapsing as a result of a natural calamity, this was Athair’s doing. He’d followed me here and I was the reason why everyone inside this cave would die. This was all my fault.

I could hear shards of rock breaking off from the walls of the cavern and falling around us but Athair’s voice was louder. ‘I have gone to untold effort, all for you! And this! This! This is how you repay me?’

I tried to get up but it was difficult to move with Hugo on top of me. I gave his fingers another tight squeeze, indicating that I had to deal with this. He hesitated, then moved so I could get to my feet.

The Fachan didn’t appear to have moved an inch. He was standing in exactly the same place he’d been in when the rumbling had started, although he was now covered in at least an inch of rock dust. His massive yellow eyeball swivelled upwards and I tilted my head to follow his gaze. As more of the dust beyond Hugo’s magicked air bubble cleared, I saw what the Fachan was looking at.

Far above our heads there was a gap in the rock and beyond it I glimpsed a flicker of weak sunshine: it appeared that Athair had punched a hole through the earth itself. My mouth dried. The power imbued in that one magic spell was beyond anything I could ever do.

My fiendish father called down to me; I couldn’t see him but it was definitely his voice. ‘I wouldn’t move if I were you,’ he shouted.

‘Do we try to run?’ Hugo asked in a low voice.

I shook my head. ‘We can’t,’ I said grimly. ‘We have to deal with this.’ I turned to the Fachan. ‘You should get out of here. This is our fight, not yours. You should get away.’

The Fachan didn’t move. Before I could press him to act, a large shape dropped into the hole above: Athair was on his way down. He plummeted towards us at high speed, dislodging another cascade of small rocks, and he only slowed down when he reached Hugo’s air bubble. But where that magic would have prevented stones of any shape and size from getting near us, it did nothing to stop Athair.

He dropped through the bubble and landed with effortless ease and precision less than a metre in front of us.

He was wearing his own face. Although the magic sustaining my little fireballs had been extinguished as soon as I’d felt the first tremors, the glow from the two torches and the faint light seeping in from above was more than enough to illuminate his taut, shimmering golden skin. He was barefoot and bare chested with only a jet-black kilt slung around his hips; perhaps he wanted me to think that he was some sort of Highland hero.

Then I glimpsed the rage in his scarlet eyes and I knew he had finally realised the truth: I would never ever think of him as a hero. The penny had finally dropped.

Hugo started forward, raising his hands in preparation for a magical attack, but I thrust my arm out to stop him. Athair smirked. ‘I did wonder if the boy put you up to this,’ he said. ‘It occurred to me that you might be weak enough to let him control your actions but I can see that is not true. You command him, not the other way around.’

Hugo and I worked together. Sometimes Hugo erred on the side of caution, and sometimes it was me, but we were a team and neither of us dominated the other. I doubted Athair could conceive of a relationship that involved such mutual respect, but I wasn’t going to try to persuade him that such equality existed. If he believed that Hugo only did what I told him, it would keep him safer. And I knew that Hugo was too intelligent to let Athair’s words goad him into any futile attack.

‘What’s your problem?’ Hugo asked in a deceptively casual tone that confirmed my thoughts. ‘Why would you care that we’re here?’

Athair’s red eyes flashed. ‘Why would I care?’ he growled. ‘Why would I fucking care ?’ He took a threatening step towards him and my stomach lurched. ‘I have spent thirty years preparing for my daughter. She wanted you, so I let you live. She wanted to be a treasure hunter, so I found treasure for her to hunt.’ He looked at me. ‘And yet all she has done is thrown my hard work in my face.’

Athair’s ego was astonishing, but I was starting to understand what had pre-empted this showdown – and that there might be a way out of this situation.

‘There is no reason for you to be upset,’ I said in a far calmer voice than the situation warranted. ‘We went looking for your treasure – we went to Hammerwich. Our investigations there are ongoing.’ I waved what I hoped looked like an airy hand. ‘This is merely a side venture unrelated to the Staffordshire Hoard.’ Essentially, that was true.

‘Except the remaining Staffordshire treasure has now been found,’ Athair snapped. ‘And not by you.’ His thin golden lips curled. ‘You handed the search over to a teenage girl. A child ! And now she has found the gold that I carefully placed for you!’

Every word vibrated with fury but it was my sudden fear for Amy that made me shiver.

‘You have spat on my gift and thrown it away with no thought or care for my feelings!’

I didn’t give a flying fuck about Athair’s damned hurt feelings.

‘If you’ve hurt Amy,’ Hester shouted, ‘if you’ve done anything to that girl?—’

‘Then what?’ Athair asked. ‘What could you possibly do to me ?’ Unfortunately, he had a point.

‘ Did you hurt her?’ I asked fearfully, trying to draw his attention back to me and away from Hester.

‘Not yet,’ Athair snarled. ‘But be assured she is on my list. Eloise has been watching the events in Staffordshire and she has reported back to me. Once I am done with you all, I shall take care of the girl.’

Hester stiffened and turned to glare at Otis. ‘I told you we couldn’t trust that blonde brownie nincompoop!’

Athair ignored her. ‘Do you think I am stupid, daughter?’

I didn’t say anything but I didn’t look away from his fury-filled gaze; I wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.

‘Did you think I wouldn’t have my creatures tracking your associates in case you tried something like this?’ He waved his hand towards the Fachan with a derisive sneer.

My knees suddenly felt strangely weak. Cumbubbling bollocks. He’d had somebody – or something – watching Gordon. That was how he knew we were here.

‘Do you think,’ he continued, ‘I don’t know why you have come to this place?’

My stomach dropped into my shoes. Oh no. Things were even worse than I’d thought. We’d only just learned of the sceptre’s existence and Athair would do everything he could to stop us finding it. We’d failed before we’d even started.

Athair pointed to Gladys, who was on the cave floor beside my feet, then at the Fachan and the huge sword he was still holding. ‘You thought this troglodyte could teach you the skills necessary to attack me.’

Huh? My mouth dropped open. Athair laughed coldly at my astonishment. ‘You underestimate my intelligence, daughter. You underestimate everything about me.’

Actually, all of a sudden I was starting to think that I’d over estimated him.

He wasn’t finished. ‘He is skilled with a sword, that much is true. But he could never teach you enough to beat me.’ He thumped his chest. ‘I am Athair.’ He yelled the last three words, injecting so much drama that I was surprised not to hear an accompanying clash of cymbals.

To be fair, he’d drawn a logical conclusion. The Fachan was better with a sword than any other creature I’d met and he’d gifted Gladys to me; it made sense that I might have come here to learn from him. But no matter how good the Fachan was, or how impressive a teacher he might be, I agreed with Athair. I’d never learn enough to engage successfully with my father in a sword fight. In fact, it hadn’t even occurred to me to try.

The Fachan, who still hadn’t moved an inch and who had been watching Athair with little more than mild interest, hefted his sword and spun it in the air. ‘I am told,’ he said, directing his words towards the golden-skinned fiend, ‘that the best teaching starts with a demonstration. Let us do battle and prove that.’

I started forward: that was the last thing I wanted. It was a horrific idea.

Athair, however, was already a step in front of me. He bared his teeth and answered the Fachan with grim delight. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’