Page 100 of The Simurgh

The vision slammed into her like a carriage at full pelt. A grave marker. Plain and simple, a slab in the earth with letters worn near to nothing.

The angel must disturb the bones.

Oh Christ…if she hadn’t just pissed herself, it would be a miracle. Thatvoice.

Making her legs jelly, her heart thunder.

Things had been getting pretty darn weird since she’d been overwhelmed by the gut instinct to find the lieutenant, but that had come to her in farts and belches. Nothing like this. Nothing like this voice.

The angel. Disturb the bones. Show them the way.

Tyvain stumbled, deafened, skull rattling. Her brain felt scooched up against the backs of her eyeballs. The visions came again. Piling in like mail to the North Pole at Christmas time. Some were just messy blasts of light that made her bones ache, and they flickered so fast it took a moment to realise that in between there were clearer things to see. A shadowy silhouette, a figure gone again before she realised who she’d seen. Tobias. His slender lines, for certain. And another. A bird. Big as a peacock and just as fancy with all its lengthy streaming tail. Then more, a hangman’s noose. A crowd with torches and pitchforks. And then the same simple gravestone again. This time she made out a name.

Alice.

‘Feck, feck.’ Tyvain clutched at her head. Oh, Jesus wept, her insides were going to melt if she wasn’t left alone.

‘Tyvain, look at me. Open your eyes, Tyvain.’ Sybilla’s stern, rasping tone was a life-preserver bringing her back down to Earth, away from whatever heavens she’d just been dragged to. ‘Now, Tyvain, open your eyes.’

She wasn’t usually one to do as she was told, but she was quick with it now.

The cool air caressed her burning eyeballs. ‘Feck me.’

‘What happened?’ Jane fussed over her. ‘Have they hurt you?’

Tyvain’s brain was too fuzzy at first to realise she meant the teratisms. She shook her head hard. Her brain rattled again behind her eyes. ‘Nah, nah. Not them. It was…’ How did she explain thatvoice? The sense of vastness behind it. Feck. That wasn’t something she could do in a minute, and they didn’t have time for anything else.

‘Syb.’ Tyvain wriggled free of Jane’s fussing. ‘Syb, you probably ain’t gonna like this too much.’

Sybilla drew back her shoulders, some of her lost strength returning. ‘Go on. Hurry now.’

‘There’s a grave ’ere…I think it’s one of the witches from…well, you know, when you last ’ad to be ’ere.’ Sybilla nodded, sombre but with far more clarity in her gaze than before. ‘I’m real sorry, Syb, but you need to dig ‘er up.’

‘What?’ Jane breathed.

‘I had a…feck, I don’t know what it was, but I know I ain’t ignorin’ it. Disturb the bones, show ‘em the way. That’s ‘ow we get our boys back. I’m sure of it. I saw a name on a grave marker. Alice.’

‘Alice Nutter.’ Sybilla didn’t miss a beat. ‘She was one of the true children of Azazel who was put to death.’ She narrowed her eyes, nodding as though hearing an unspoken questions. ‘It’s her I can hear.’

‘Don’t know about that, but them bones are going to ’elp you get the boys ’ome.’ Normally Tyvain would have shrugged then, confused or utterly clueless about her vague premonitions.

But not now. Not this time.

All the weight seemed to lift from the angel. Sybilla raised her chin, her old fortitude back in bucketloads. ‘I understand.’

‘I don’t. What is going on?’ Bess asked from deeper inside the church.

‘Divine magick.’ Sybilla stepped forward and Jane and Tyvain moved aside to let her down the steps. ‘There will be divine magick in Alice’s bones. And if I can wield it, and my magick heeds me, we may have enough to open that entrance. Where is the grave, Tyvain?’

She’d barely twitched a finger, barely parted lips to tell the Valkryie where in the graveyard to go, when the teratisms parted like a foul wave of wretched skin and bone. The hunchback pointed down the narrow corridor created.

Tyvain nodded. ‘Yeah. What ‘e’s tellin ya. Now, let’s ‘ope they are good at diggin’, too.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SILAS SETPitch down for the second time in less than ten minutes. The prince wavered on his feet, his pallor that insipid grey-green, much as it had been when he was ill with the Gu.

‘Sorry, sorry.’ Pitch stepped away. ‘Just need another moment.’ He leaned over and retched.