Page 10 of The Simurgh

‘The Sluagh…don’t let…me.’

The rattling was truly awful.

‘The Sluagh?’ He frowned. ‘What is that?’

‘Goddess…don’t let me join…’ The kitsune’s eyes rolled, the whites bloodshot.

‘The goddess?’ Silas took Weatherby’s face between his hands. The kitsune’s skin was clammy with his fear. ‘What is the Sluagh, Ernest?’

Spittle flew, bubbling at the corners of Weatherby’s mouth. The kitsune was beyond words.

Silas drove the blade in, sending it neatly between ribs, aiming its sharpened tip to where it would bring the swiftest, surest end.

Ernest Weatherby collapsed forward, and Silas cradled the man in his arms as death moved in to play the last note of his song.

A sublime sigh came from the kitsune, the shedding of a great weight. He lessened in Silas’s arms, shrugged off the burdens that a lord of death should have freed him from far earlier.

‘Find your peace,’ he whispered to the corpse in his arms.

For there was peace to be found in the ending of things.

He lifted Weatherby from the chair and laid him out upon the floor, settling him into the silence that now filled the chamber.

I told him. I told him of the eye.

Silas raised his head sharply, searching. And it was an easy hunt.

Ernest Weatherby stood beside the chair he had died in, not a few steps from where Silas cradled his body. His soul was faded…fading…barely a form to be recognised.

‘The eye?’

Yes.

An exhale, nothing more.

On the new church tower.

Pieces of the kitsune’s soul peeled away, like shreds of wallpaper in an abandoned house.

‘Where? What church tower?’ There were thousands all across the isles. Silas needed far more. Damn Lucifer and his lies.

The soul’s face shifted, moving with ripples of confusion.I have to go. I want to go.

‘And you will.’ Silas set down his body and stood up, took the two steps needed to reach the soul’s side. ‘But please…help me. Tell me exactly what you said to Lucifer.’

The new church has an eye. There is the way in.A shudder ran through the apparition.I want to go.He raised a phantom hand, all but two of the fingers now vanished.Free them, ankou. You will hear them. There are too many not to hear.His raised arm grew fainter, almost impossible to see.And they will see you. You are so bright.

The apparition grew so faint that he could barely discern it. ‘Ernest, please, no, not yet. Where is that church?’

Too late Silas shaped the scythe into a hook, not unlike that which he’d used to secure Sybilla in this world. But death was not going to grant him another reprieve here.

The tip of the hook cut through empty air. The kitsune was gone.

As was the King of Daemonkind with his secrets.

Silas ran from the room, leaving the kitsune’s body cooling where it lay.

CHAPTER FOUR