And something happened to reveal an ancient structure below the village, she thought. The stories hadn’t made much sense, but apparently that was fairly common. A team of preliminary explorers had been dispatched at once, when word reached the White Council, while Hoban had been ordered to prepare a follow-up expedition. They think it might predate recorded history.
The thought made her smile. She’d never been that interested in history — she’d grown up in a world where nothing ever changed, where her family lived as their ancestors had done for thousands of years — but Emily loved it. Frieda had heard her grumbling about how recorded history wasn’t as recorded as everyone claimed, about inconsistencies in the records and confused dating systems making it impossible to be sure what had happened a few hundred years ago. Hoban agreed, from what he’d said. He’d told her that digging up the past was the only way to find out what had happened for sure. It was a dangerous task — old tombs tended to be cursed, old magical settlements tended to be infused with tainted magic — but he loved it. And Frieda wanted to make Emily proud.
Hoban tensed, one hand dropping to his sword. “Hold,” he said, his voice quiet yet urgent. “Where are they?”
Frieda nodded, reaching for her magic as the rest of the team spread out. The ruined village was completely deserted. There were no visible humans… her eyes narrowed as she realised she couldn’t hear birds, or small animals rustling through the undergrowth. She took a breath and grimaced as she tasted the lingering scent of wet smoke and burnt human flesh. The stench should have vanished long ago, along with the remains of the village. The nearby villages should have salvaged what they could, before nature reoccupied the valley and erased all traces of human settlement. Instead, it felt as if the village was suspended in a single moment of time.
“They should be here,” Garth said. He was a dark-skinned man, with a bearing that suggested he’d been a solider or a mercenary before joining the diggers. “They wouldn’t all have gone to the nearest village.”
“No,” Hoban agreed. “They’d know better.”
Frieda nodded in agreement. The nameless villages weren’t friendly to outsiders. There’d been no inn in her village, when she’d been a child, and she doubted there was one there now. There wasn’t even a proper pub. She doubted the diggers had been able to buy alcohol or find any of the pleasures of Dragon’s Den, not here. The villages were just too small and too tight-knit. Outside money was no good in the mountains.
She kept the thought to herself as they searched the village with practiced ease. The advance party had had tents — they wouldn’t have risked sleeping in the ruined buildings — but there was no sign of them. There was no hint anyone had entered the village, save for a number of trees that had been knocked down by a landslide or chopped down by human hands. Frieda sensed the wild magic growing stronger as she peered through the ruined trees. There was something there, half-hidden below the earth. It was so… alien … she had trouble looking at it.
“Interesting,” Hoban said. “What is it?”
“Dangerous,” Esther said. She was the only other woman on the team, with short red hair, green eyes, and a prickly disposition that suggested she knew she’d paid her dues long ago. “It isn’t a tomb, that’s for sure.”
Frieda swallowed as she tried to place the thing in proper context. It had been buried until the landslide had revealed it… she thought, suddenly, of an iceberg, only the tip visible above the waves. The thought chilled and excited her in equal measure. What was it? She felt her head start to pound as she looked closer, trying to make out details. The… the thing was just too different. Her eyes seemed to skip over it, as if her mind refused to accept its existence. Every time she thought she knew what it looked like, she realised she was wrong. The only thing she could say for sure was that there was a lot more under the ground.
“We need to do more digging,” Hoban said. “Whatever it is, we need to know. Quickly.”
“We need more manpower,” Garth said. “You want to teleport home and ask for help?”
Hoban scowled. “There’s too much wild magic in the air to teleport safely,” he said, after a moment. “And it would take them some time to put together a second team.”
Frieda barely heard him. She was torn, unsure what to do. She wanted to make Emily and Hoban proud, by helping to dig up the… the whatever … and figuring out what it actually was, but — at the same time — her instincts were insisting they should bury the whatever and swear blind they’d never seen it. It felt dangerous. The currents of magic flowing around it were just too eerie. And they really didn’t have the slightest idea what it was.
“Frieda and I will go to the nearest village and recruit help,” Hoban said. “There should be enough young men to help us dig it up, if we pay through the nose. If they refuse… we have authority to conscript labour.”
“Really?” Esther scowled at him. “Aren’t you the slightest bit concerned about what happened to the first team? They should be here, waiting for us!”
“Yes,” Hoban said, sharply. “But we also need to make a start on figuring out what we’ve found before someone else gets wind of it.”
Frieda shuddered. He’d told her, bitterly, of tombs that had been looted decades — perhaps centuries — before the diggers had arrived, of priceless artefacts and records stolen or destroyed by people who didn’t have the slightest idea what they were doing. She understood his thinking. They needed to know what they were dealing with before other parties figured out what was going on and started to interfere…
… And yet, as they started to walk, she couldn’t help feeling they were making a terrible mistake.
Chapter 2
There were students, Frieda had been told, who looked forward to the holidays because it meant a chance to go home. She’d thought they were insane even before she’d been transferred to Whitehall and discovered that, away from the darkened tunnels of Mountaintop, it was possible to actually enjoy one’s holiday. But then, those students — children, really — had good and decent parents, parents who treated them as real people. She remembered laughing at a girl who’d whined that her parents had grounded her for a week after she’d disobeyed them. The silly twit hadn’t known how lucky she was. Frieda’s parents would have beaten her bloody if they’d caught her defying them.
The sense of oppression grew stronger as they made their way down the muddy track, picking their way through woodland paths that were barely visible against the gloom. She felt out of place, as if she’d sneaked into an aristocratic ball and discovered, too late, that she was expected to lead the first dance. She’d once known the forests around her village like the back of her hand — all the best places to find mushrooms, all the best places to hide when her parents and relatives had been in that mood — but now, they felt strange and wrong. She looked down at herself, her head spinning. Her outfit was very simple — she had no intention of becoming a clothes horse — but it was still finer than anything she’d ever owned as a child. It struck her, suddenly, that they might not even recognise her. She looked nothing like the scrawny girl they’d sold into an uncertain fate.