Marbh wrinkled her nose at the stench rising from the witch’s cauldron. Having seen what he threw in, she wasn’t surprised. Rotten offal from only the undead Fomorii knew what beast; eyes, slugs and dung, again from only the undead knew where. Maggots. She hated maggots because they reminded her so much of her cell, where she would preside until eternity ended, watching them devour the dead. Putrid flesh in one end and foul-smelling slime out the other, repeated over and over.

  Her punishment.

  Unless we succeed.

  “Calling the Master needs this stench?” she asked the other disciples, grimacing.

  Plasgorta hesitated, whittling on a femur and hissed his sibilant laughter. From where he crouched beside the corpse of the Tuatha, Archu smiled. Not for the first time, Marbh shook her head at the strange hat he’d taken to wearing. When she asked him how he got it, he smiled and tapped his nose, which caused sparks to fly, tiny embers from his ever-burning face. Like Concaire, Archu was infantile. But unlike Concaire, it wasn’t because of his practical jokes and immature treatment of her but because his secret was not difficult to discern, like a baby covering its eyes so she wouldn’t know where it was. Only the witch, Bachorbladhra, could have brought the hat to him. She often wondered why Dhuosnos created War to represent not the glory of conflict but the rampage and pillage, the razing of steadings, the sack of hillforts, the fire. And all dressed up in the same poor reflection of a man. After all, the Master created Plasgorta with the rag-and-bone decrepitude of famine and pestilence and Concaire with the stern fatherliness of conquest.

  Then there was Marbh herself. Sideways glances from the boy proved what she’d always known. The Master created her with the cold beauty of death. Some would think her pupil-less red eyes ruined that beauty. Not Marbh. She considered them fetching, especially set off by the red ruby glowing from the leather strap around her forehead.

  “When?” Concaire asked. The witch waved a hand and hissed at him but did not reply.

  Again, Marbh was not surprised. Bachorbladhra had always gestured much and said little. Still, he should know his place. Concaire was one of the Four. The witch was nought but a member of The Coven. Fortunately for him, he was someone they could not currently do without. They needed a witch to arc the Void, and after the magic thief, Brenos’s, hunts, he was the only one alive.

  They needed a witch to find the crossing point—him to find the crossing and a Summoner to bridge it. She looked at the boy standing in the pentagram’s centre, wondering if he would learn. He seemed too feeble to act as a Summoner. But he had summoned and then banished the demon, Bábdíbir, so he was able.

  Able but weak.

  The boy should have allowed the demon to kill the witch and the horse warrior. More importantly, at least for the time being, Scamp is the last Summoner, she told herself. She’d been repeating it since she entered the Arena and saw him standing, bemused and not a little frightened.

  The Last Summoner, indeed. Scamp was just a dailtín from North Kingdom, the most remote kingdom of the five.

  She supposed it was the most likely of the domains, even if the least convenient. In North Kingdom, they still held to the old ways and believed in the power of the Summoners. They kept one in each village or at least professed to. This new breed were not summoners but lawgivers, teachers, and herbalists—essentially good people, at least on the surface.

  When she caught the boy sneaking glances at the tops of her thighs, visible through the gossamer weave of her dress, she hissed. Shaking her head she wanted to punish his presumption.

  He is as predictable as all males, she realised.

  A wave of her hand changed the white gossamer to heavy black satin. When the boy next tried a glance, he blushed, and she hissed louder, letting him know he was crossing a lake of thin ice.

  Marbh was stopped from any other actions by the witch calling, “Take your positions.”

  She smiled at the expression on Archu’s face. He didn’t want to leave the body of the traitor crumpled under the wall where he’d strangled him, not until he’d finished his barbaric blood games.

  If the Tuatha could have seen where his ambition would take him, would he have chosen differently?

  She admired Brenos for following his convictions but he should never have thought it possible to topple the Master. True, Dhuosnos was the weakest he’d ever been—they were all weaker than ever—but not that weak. They would never be thatweak.

  The Four took their places around the pentagram. One at each point facing in. Scamp stared at the witch’s back, who was at the top, facing out. The boy had his hands crossed in front, and his head bowed as if standing at a dead relative’s pyre, performing the last rites before the flames came. He kept darting glances at the four of them, and she realised she’d been mistaken when she thought he was stealing peeks at her body. The initial glance had been low because he was bowing his head.

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  He fears us.

  Sighing, Marbh watched Bach raise his arms and begin chanting meaningless words with his head back. Only witches of The Coven understood the words. It was more than knowing them. Fundamental. One essence of Dhuosnos’s existence. Only the witches could recite them, and only a summoner could bridge the Void with a physical span.

  But that was for another time, a time when this feeble-looking boy had learnt his role and Dhuosnos had replenished his power enough to be able to release the demon army.

  But how without The Coven?

  Marbh knew one witch alone would not be enough. That was why Dhuosnos created a coven to begin with, combining their strength to syphon Earth Power. But now they were gone. Hunted by the horse warrior and murdered by the traitor lying crumpled beside the wall, neck broken by árchú’s strength and bloodied by his barbarity.

  And also why Brenos thought he could defeat us, she thought before clearing her mind.

  She was composed when she felt a phantom weight bearing down on her. She closed her eyes, as the others had done and opened her mind to the Master.

  Despite closed eyes, she could see the rubies glowing on the other three foreheads. They were colouring the mists swirling from the pentagram, drawn with the blood of the Tuatha dead. Calling a demon into the world took the blood of a virgin; communing with the Master only required blood.

  She could see the boy with his head bowed and the witch’s back shimmering as if through a heat haze, a mirage on the desert’s horizon. She watched as the shimmering morphed into a monstrous nose with cracks, pits and craters like an ancient, badly tended statue, moss and lichen gathering in the pits. A blood-red eye stared at her from either side of the nose with such malice that she had to squeeze her thighs together to stop from peeing down her legs.

  “Do you have the Summoner?”

  No one spoke the words. They echoed through Marbh’s mind as if her skull were a monstrous cavern. Her eyes were still closed, and yet she saw the others wince. As Death, Marbh had always been the Four’s voice, but even after millennia, it still took all her will to respond to the question.

  “We have, Master.”

  “Good. And my son, the magic thief?”

  “Is no more, Master.”

  “Very good. Bachorbladhra, you will start the boy’s training, but first, Scamp, you must summon Bábdíbir. He is to act as my messenger to Balor.”

  The boy nodded but didn’t speak. His weakness was annoying, and Marbh wondered again whether he had what was necessary.

  Will he baulk when Bach cuts the throat of a virgin?

  “It shall be done, Master, but may I ask, why Balor?”

  Dhuosnos paused before answering. Marbh began to fear she’d overstepped the hidden boundary before more words pressed into her mind.

  “He hates humans almost as much as I do, and he has access to Earth Power. Bach, go into the tower and bring down a virgin. There is no time to waste.”

  “Very good, Master.”

  ***

  “I don’t understand,” Volt said as they rode away up the slope.

  This had become both the strangest and the most challenging day of his life. He felt he’d been used but had no understanding of how or why.

  “What don’t ye understand, Horse Warrior?”

  “How is it they didn’t know you?”

  “Who?”

  “Maga and Fachta. They were Tuatha.”

  “What? Ye know all humans, do ye?”

  Volt frowned at the stars shining above the rise and wondered if she was being intentionally obtuse.

  “That’s different. I’m not at the top of the anthill like you are.”

  “Different anthills, no. Maga and Fachta were Danu’s personal guards. I am oath sworn to Dagda—”

  “But they knew you were meant to deliver the boy,” Volt interrupted.

  “They knew the witch, Upthog, was meant to deliver the boy. They thought I was a survivor of The Coven, but I’m a true witch.”

  “The difference?” Volt asked.

  “When Dagda created this world, he assigned Tuatha to protect each settlement. One witch and one Summoner.”

  Volt listened intently as Upthog explained how humankind drove Dagda to try and cleanse the world and how the original protectors let him down by summoning demons to attack instead of defend. He believed her words without question and then laughed.

  “Something’s funny, Horse Warrior?”

  Shaking his head, he said, “Not so long ago, I didn’t believe any of this. Now you tell me the most outlandish tale, and I believe it without a thought. You’re such a good scélaí, I might almost believe you were there.”

  “But I was there.”

  Volt opened his mouth in disbelief. He wanted to ask her if she was also touched by Rhiannon but thought better of it. He changed the question to, “Why did Maga and Fachta tell me I was destined to be here?”

  “One thing about prophesiers, Horse Warrior, they give clues, never the whole story.”

  Volt scowled at her. “So, when those bodaláin told me they brought me to Bull’s Head Rock because of the prophecy, they were making it up?”

  “I doubt it, Volt. Maga never had that much imagination. Besides, there was no reason to bring ye if not because of the prophecy. Much of what is happening is beyond understanding. Even Dagda can be clueless.”

  “So, what now?”

  “Now we must prepare for the Scourge. We need to force Dhuosnos back into Tech Duinn after Scamp frees him.”

  “Wait. You just helped to start it, and now you’re going to help end it?”

  “That’s my destiny, Horse Warrior,” Upthog said with a laugh.

  Volt shook his head, unsure if he would ever understand the complexity of it. As he thought, something else crossed his mind. “Will there be time? With the boy there, Dhuosnos is already free, surely.”

  “No. They’ve to train the boy. Summoning a little demon and summoning the giant are not the same. Dhuosnos also needs to replenish his magic stores, which is not going to be easy.”

  “With The Coven gone, how can he do it?”

  “There are other magic users in this world he might turn to.”

  “Such as?” Volt asked.

  “Such as Balor and his Fomorii.”