Page 105 of The Fulbourn: Pitch & Sickle

Let it stay tightly locked.

He turned his attention back to the lost souls.Here,they were saying. The rare evident word he could decipher from the buzz of voices.

He looked to the monopteros anew. On impulse Silas tilted his head side to side, watching the shift of the light against the columns.

He cursed under his breath.

Sigils covered every inch of the stonework, great swathes of design etched into the columns only evident if they caught the chill-blue light of cobalt strains just so.

It was a cage of maleficium.

There, right before him, was the prison of the lost souls.

As though sensing he now understood, the souls roared, and their desperation flooded him. Silas nearly buckled with it.

Took a lot to make themselves heard,George shouted, clearly hearing the wretchedness too.Can you save them?

Their despair leaked from between the pillars, their manic clamour for escape now deafening. They were bordering on deranged in their calls now, barely clinging to the sense that had enabled them to reach him. It had taken them, he suspected, their sanity, to find him. There was no hint of the clear, directive voice that had drowned out the siren’s call of the Blight as it tried to lure a prodigal son home.

The lost souls had not only guided him, they had saved him too.

Silas riled with indignation.

These werehisdead.

The necromancer should never have touched them. She would regret it. He stepped up onto the platform and moved close to a column.

The dim light from the cobalt veins struck at the shallow engravings of the sigils, catching in the curls and lines. They covered the stone entirely, seeming woven into one another. Intricate knots and patterns, as delicate as any lacework.

‘A seal,’ Silas whispered, as the lost souls cried for him. ‘Shit…’

Pitch had said it himself. Azazel was a master of seals. The Morrigan had already shown themselves quick learners of the art, with the greensward and its stone circle. Silas had only escaped because of the daemon’s intervention. It wasPitchwho had been formidable enough to destroy the barrier that stood between him and Silas.

And Pitch was not here.

Will you use your scythe now? To break the soul trap?

Silas snapped a look over his shoulder. ‘Soul trap?’

There are souls, and they are trapped, what better name for it?

True, but he’d heard such a term used before. Silas struggled to recall, and the memory wriggled from a dark recess to find him. Phillipa, the Lady Howard’s ghostly lover, had spoken of there being a soul trap in the Lady’s carriage. A means of storing souls as they were abducted from the Devon countryside, before they were carted off to wherever the Morrigan intended.

Before they were carted offhere.

Silas stared at the raging angel.

This Sanctuary was Macha’s foul laboratory.

A new tremor struck, a stupendous affair, a rolling wave that had Silas staggering. He covered his head against a rain of debris, cowering against the pillars. A prickling sensation ran down his body where it was closest to the stone. And the sense of wrongness he’d felt at the greensward returned in a punishing wave. The maleficium hummed with dread and sullen things. The barrier unseen by the eye but felt all too well by all the other senses.

You need to hurry.George huddled at the base of the platform.It’s gettin’ worse. Feels like the Sanctuary is dying.

Silas blinked through dust as the tremor eased, and his thoughts were in a race, towards a place that gave him hope.

The prince had destroyed the bluecaps’ mine.

What if Pitch could do the same to this Sanctuary?