Catherine Weyer stared between Lio and her daughter, a look of terrible realisation dawning on her face. The witch had seen this moment coming.
Lio leaped on the bread knife for the final time. Opal scrambled for the handle, and he tried to yank it free, he tried with all his might to stop the violence, but his chalk was unreachable and his magic spent. Opal shoved the blade toward him, almost across his throat and, as they rolled against the cement together, Lio, who had once loved this woman, pined for her, adored her, ruined his youth for her, shoved the wretched blade away from himself and, sparing his own life at last, drove it right into Opal’s heart.
‘Opal!’ shrieked Cate.
Opal let out a hiss of breath. She jolted forward, shocked and confused, clawing at Lio; in doing so, Opal wedged the knife deeper into her own chest. Blood gushed. Lio withdrew the bread knife and looked down at Opal, her monstrous body, her gaunt face, her eyes wide and scared and girlish. Cate rushed to her daughter’s side.
‘I didn’t want to . . .’ began Lio. It didn’t matter. Cate could not hear him.
She scooped up her daughter.
Cate’s hands pulsed with light but, this time, Agytha was not beside her as she had been in the forest. Moira lay dead. Opal’s body, changed so extremely by the Ancient Spirit’s magic, would not heal – for Catherine Weyer, the final witch of Acanthi, had no talent for healing nor any knowledge of the Ancient Spirits nor anyone to call on, now that she led a coven of one.
On Cate went, Opal’s body pulsing with ineffectual magic.
She babbled as she did so. ‘I Saw this. ISawthis.’
Her daughter bled too quickly.
The witch’s threads were abandoned on the floor beside her.
It was, of course, no use. Finally, she slowed and, at length, collapsed beside her daughter.
‘I loved you,’ Catherine Weyer whispered to her little girl. ‘I’m sorry.’
Opal was dead.
CHAPTERFORTY-THREE
Together, Dot and Theodora hurried down and down the steps, drawing ever deeper beneath the city. Dot’s heart thrummed in the back of her throat.
‘We need to break your contract,’ she said, taking the stack of paper from Theodora.
‘Let’s do it now,’ said the witch, pausing.
‘I’ve only everfoughtthe Ancient Spirit’s magic; I’ve neverusedit.’
‘Your human magic is strong,’ said Theodora. She took Dot’s hand. ‘This city is flooded, and you’re still going.’
‘It’s weakening,’ said Dot. ‘I keep drawing on my anger but it’s not enough anymore, Theo. I don’t know if I can—’
A wind ripped up the staircase and yanked them violently down.
Dot and Theodora crashed and tumbled down each remaining step until they landed, at last, on the wet cement floor of the true laboratory of the daemon, Salamander.
‘You’re early, Tessa.’
The giant room reeked like a zoological enclosure mixed with old magic and burnt chemicals. It was noisy and Dot, after subtly stuffing the contract in the back of her trousers, hidden by her coat, stopped herself from drawing her hands over her ears. The sounds of squawking and babbling and moaning rose all around in an orchestral encirclement. Surrounding them were thousandsof stacked cages, each of them carved in varnished wood just like the King’s menagerie.
Dot paled. There was a spirit the size of an elephant in a cage beside her; she was shaped like a bureau, half broken and splintered. Runes were carved into her side, tubes sticking painfully into her body. The tiniest of the trapped spirits were the size of thimbles, with minute cables wrapped around them. The largest was in the far corner, a gaseous cloud of wax and fire, as big as a Ferris wheel, wheezing, sobbing. To her right was a mountain spirit whose wide, grey body glittered like stone under morning sun. A huge rune had been burned into his chest. He was crumpled and crying like a babe.
‘And hello again to you, Miss Walcott,’ said Salamander. The daemon sat in the middle of the giant room behind a mahogany desk. His fountain pen paused in his grip.
Theodora threw out a hand, but the daemon’s amphibious fingers twitched, and the nearby mountain spirit shone with sudden light. He screamed as his magic was leeched from him through the conduence and shot out at Theodora. Stone bindings sprang around Theodora’s arms and legs, pinning her down. Like a match burned through, the spirit expired and turned to ash.
Dot shrieked and ripped her eyes away from the violence of it. She dropped to Theodora’s side and, with shaking hands, tugged uselessly at the stone bindings.
‘You are lucky that Belchamber was notmyconduit,’ said Salamander, rising. Dot balanced her magic, picturing the rune forunlock, the rune forbreak, the rune forshatter. Every spell she sent at the stone failed. In her panic, she took to Theodora’s bindings with her hands, ignoring the pain of her amputation, fingers scraping the stone, talons scratching at it. ‘I suppose,’ the daemon went on, drawing nearer, ‘Opal Weyer barely used a hair of Belchamber’s magic.’
