Shavi blew on his hands, then quickly pressed two fingers against the man's neck. "No pulse."
"What do you think, Tom?" Church said.
It was only when the Rhymer didn't answer that they realised he wasn't with them. They looked up to see him standing at the top of Ramsay Lane, staring towards the source of the blue light. His expression had grown even more troubled.
As the others ran back to his side they were shocked to see the whole of Ramsay Lane was covered in ice, as if it had been transported to the middle of the Antarctic. At the bottom of the winding street the blue light glowed brightly. It was bobbing gently in their direction and at the heart of it they thought they could make out a dark figure. As it moved, the ice on the surrounding buildings grew noticeably thicker.
"What is it?" Church asked in hushed amazement.
Tom's voice was choked so low Church could barely hear the reply. "The Cailleach Bheur."
"In English," Laura snapped.
He looked at her with eyes shocked and wide. "The Blue Hag, spirit of winter. Quickly, now!" He roughly pushed them until they were moving hurriedly back down the Royal Mile, the way they had come. Tom kept them to the middle of the road and only calmed once they had turned off the High Street on to the broad thoroughfare of the North Bridge. Once they were firmly over Waverley Station he slumped against a wall, one hand on his face.
"What was that?" Church asked forcefully.
It was a moment or two before Tom answered, "One of the most primal forces of this land."
Church couldn't help glancing over his shoulder towards the shadowshrouded Old Town. "Fomorii?"
"No, nor of the Tuatha De Danann. Like the Fabulous Beasts, the Blue Hag and her sisters are a higher power, almost impossible to control. Yet the Fomorii have somehow bent her to their will, like they did with the first Fabulous Beast you encountered. They have her patrolling the Old Town like some guard dog, leaving them free to carry on their business."
"She's some kind of evil witch?" Veitch said hesitantly.
Tom turned a cold gaze on him. "If the deepest, coldest, darkest, harshest winter is evil. The Cailleach Bheur is a force of nature. Nothing can survive her touch."
"You know, hag doesn't sound too frightening when you think about it. It makes you think of bath chairs and whist drives that never end-"
Tom's glare stopped Laura in her tracks. "The Cailleach Bheur controls the fimbulwinter. If she unleashes it the entire planet will freeze and all life will be destroyed."
"That sounds like a tremendous power for the Fomorii to influence," Church said.
"It's a mark of their confidence. Or their arrogance." Tom put his head back and took a deep breath. Some of the strength returned to his face. "It will have taken a tremendous ritual, an appalling sacrifice, for them to control her, and even then it will undoubtedly be for only a short while. They really are playing with fire this time."
"Bad joke, old man." Laura rattled a stone across the road with her boot. "And this thing has sisters?"
"Black Annis, the devourer of children, who makes her home in the Dane Hills of Leicestershire. And Gentle Annie, who controls the storms."
"I think I prefer that last one," she said.
"The name is ironic," Tom said, "and designed to placate her. You wouldn't want to be caught in one of her storms."
Church recalled Black Annis from his university studies. "But the scholars believe the myth of Black Annis grew out of the Celtic worship of Dann or Ann, the Mother of the Danann."
"The same provenance," Tom snapped, "but very different."
The night in the New Town was summery and relaxing, but a blast of wind filled with icy fingers rushed down from the hill, as if to remind them what lay only a short distance away.
"Then to get to the Fomorii, wherever they might be, we have to go past the Blue Hag," Church said.
Tom nodded. "And in the minds of the old people, the Cailleach Bheur was another name for Death."
His voice drifted out on the chill wind that spread out across the city.
Chapter Four
In daylight the Old Town seemed less oppressive, but there was still an uneasy undercurrent which made them keen to move through it quickly. Witch wondered if the authorities had any idea what was happening among the jumbled clutter of ancient buildings; although it hadn't been sealed off, the tourist office was closed and the crowds that moved in the historic sector were even thinner than on the previous day. The body of the frozen man had been removed.
From the Royal Mile they stopped to survey their destination. The extinct volcano of Arthur's Seat presented them with the curve of Salisbury Crags, dark and formidable.
"At least 350 million years since it last erupted," Laura said, consulting the tourist guide she had shoplifted earlier; Church had been forced to return to the bookshop to pay for it. "But with our luck…"
"This is an ancient landscape," Tom mused. "There were people hunting here nine thousand years ago."
"Wow, that's even older than you," Laura Jibed.
He harrumphed under his breath. The others couldn't understand how he always fell for Laura's Jibes. "You know, the Celts recognised the importance of this place," he continued with his back to Laura. "The Castle Rock was a stronghold for the Gododdin tribe, who named it Dunedin, the hill fort. But they weren't here because the high ground was easily defendable. It was that." He pointed to the soaring heights of Arthur's Seat. "The sacred place of power."
With the help of Laura's guide book, they ignored the steepest paths to the top. Hiring a car for quick passage along the winding route of Queen's Drive, they drove up through the increasingly rough countryside towards the 823-foot summit. At the start of their journey they passed an odd grille set into a wall before being drawn by the placid waters of St. Margaret's Loch, overseen by the grim ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel. Not long after they arrived at Dunsapie Loch, where they found a path with a gentle gradient. The summit presented them with an astonishing view across the city and beyond, to the Borders and Fife. When he saw it, Tom grew still as he quietly studied the homeland he had left so many hundreds of years before, and after a moment or two he wandered off to be alone with his thoughts. Veitch and Shavi set off in a different direction to explore the surroundings.
"This is amazing." Church was surprised to hear wonder had driven the cynicism out of Laura's voice. "We're right in the middle of the city!"
"I didn't expect you to be bowled over by lyrical views," Church said.
She glanced at him from behind her sunglasses. "Shows how much you know. Nature is the only thing worth believing in in this shitty life."
She slumped down on a rock in her usual couldn't-care-less manner, but Church knew she wanted him to join her. He sat close, feeling her body slowly come to rest against him. "Nature girl, eh?" He mentioned the unusual desktop wallpaper of interlinking trees he had seen on her portable computer not long after they met. "You nearly took my head off when I asked you about that before, but it was an environmental thing, wasn't it?"
"Oh, you're so sharp. It's an Earth First design."
"What's that?"
"A radical environmental group. I'm a member. We believe in taking action where it's called for, like when some developer is ripping up ancient woodland or some farmer's trying to make a fast buck growing GM foods."
This surprised him. "You're good at keeping secrets, aren't you? I didn't think you believed in anything."
"Everybody has to have something to believe in. And that's mine." She adjusted her sunglasses slightly, then let her fingers stray to her scar tissue. "So do you still think I have something to do with Little Miss…" She caught herself. "… with Ruth disappearing?"