The Fachan’s eyeball swivelled towards him and the brownie flinched. ‘I would imagine – although I do not know for certain – that this king simply wanted his power to be the greatest. There was a crown, a sword, a chalice, a helmet, an orb and a sceptre, each possessing its own magic. It was said that whoever wore the crown would never lose his head, and whoever wielded the sword would fell armies. Whoever drank from the chalice would control the skies, and whoever wore the helmet would communicate with the natural world. Whoever held the orb would gain riches beyond all comprehension, and whoever wielded the sceptre could defeat all foes.’ Then he added, ‘Be they fiend or otherwise.’
‘I’ve never heard of anything like this,’ I breathed. ‘How could such objects exist and nobody know about them?’
A sad smile curled around the Fachan’s mouth. ‘Hubris. It took many lives to create these objects. Power does not come from nowhere and much blood was spilled in the jewels’ creation. Anyone who understood how they had been created was killed on the king’s orders. He wanted none but himself to wield that sort of power.’
‘What happened?’ Hester asked.
The Fachan gave her a long look. ‘What always happens. The king died.’
‘What happened to the objects? What happened to the sceptre?’
‘Everything was swallowed by the sea only months after they had been created.’
I felt the sting of bitter disappointment. ‘They were on a ship that sank?’ If that were true, we were screwed; we couldn’t scour the oceans, not with any reasonable chance of success.
‘There was no sailing vessel involved,’ the Fachan said somewhat cryptically.
My brow creased. ‘Then wh?—?’
I didn’t come close to completing my sentence before a strange low rumble interrupted me, quietly at first but quickly growing in intensity and volume. The cave floor started to shake with such violence that I was thrown off my feet. Rocks fell from the cave walls, some small ones that bounced towards us, others the size of boulders with black jagged edges that crashed around us.
It was happening: the cave was collapsing and we were going to be buried alive.
I cried out. I couldn’t help myself; the one true terror that I’d always possessed was coming true. Fortunately, Hugo’s presence of mind was far greater than mine and within seconds he’d covered me with his body to shield me from the cascade of falling rocks. He grabbed Hester, pushing her tiny body into anook underneath my shoulder, and motioned to Otis to follow. While the brownie hastily complied, Hugo yelled at the Fachan.
I felt a bubble of magic erupting from Hugo’s fingertips. He conjured up a blast of air that pushed away the worst of the debris as if he were creating an invisible umbrella to protect us.
I struggled to grasp my own tendrils of power, desperately hoping that logic would reassert itself over blind panic and I could join my strength to his, but Hugo squeezed my hand in warning. He was telling me not to draw on my magic, not yet.
With a further lurch of terror, I realised why: he could only maintain the magicked air bubble for so long and I needed to take over from him when he no longer had the energy. But if the cave was collapsing, it was doubtful that we could sustain the magic for long enough to be rescued even with our combined efforts.
I squeezed Hugo’s hand in return to show that I understood, although I was already certain that we wouldn’t get out of this. There was no chance of escape. The strange, detached thought that Smoo Cave was taking back the life that I owed it from my first trip there flashed through my mind, then a dull explosion reverberated around us with such force that I stopped thinking altogether. I simply closed my eyes, tensed my body and prepared for the worst.
Unfortunately, when it happened it was even more disastrous than I’d envisaged.
‘I gave you everything!’ Somehow Athair’s irate voice penetrated the thunderous noise. Smoo Cave wasn’t collapsing as a result of a natural calamity, this was Athair’s doing. He’d followed me here and I was the reason why everyone inside this cave would die. This was all my fault.
I could hear shards of rock breaking off from the walls of the cavern and falling around us but Athair’s voice was louder. ‘Ihave gone to untold effort, all for you! And this!This!Thisis how you repay me?’
I tried to get up but it was difficult to move with Hugo on top of me. I gave his fingers another tight squeeze, indicating that I had to deal with this. He hesitated, then moved so I could get to my feet.
The Fachan didn’t appear to have moved an inch. He was standing in exactly the same place he’d been in when the rumbling had started, although he was now covered in at least an inch of rock dust. His massive yellow eyeball swivelled upwards and I tilted my head to follow his gaze. As more of the dust beyond Hugo’s magicked air bubble cleared, I saw what the Fachan was looking at.
Far above our heads there was a gap in the rock and beyond it I glimpsed a flicker of weak sunshine: it appeared that Athair had punched a hole through the earth itself. My mouth dried. The power imbued in that one magic spell was beyond anything I could ever do.
My fiendish father called down to me; I couldn’t see him but it was definitely his voice. ‘I wouldn’t move if I were you,’ he shouted.
‘Do we try to run?’ Hugo asked in a low voice.
I shook my head. ‘We can’t,’ I said grimly. ‘We have to deal with this.’ I turned to the Fachan. ‘You should get out of here. This is our fight, not yours. You should get away.’
The Fachan didn’t move. Before I could press him to act, a large shape dropped into the hole above: Athair was on his way down. He plummeted towards us at high speed, dislodging another cascade of small rocks, and he only slowed down when he reached Hugo’s air bubble. But where that magic would have prevented stones of any shape and size from getting near us, it did nothing to stop Athair.
He dropped through the bubble and landed with effortless ease and precision less than a metre in front of us.
He was wearing his own face. Although the magic sustaining my little fireballs had been extinguished as soon as I’d felt the first tremors, the glow from the two torches and the faint light seeping in from above was more than enough to illuminate his taut, shimmering golden skin. He was barefoot and bare chested with only a jet-black kilt slung around his hips; perhaps he wanted me to think that he was some sort of Highland hero.
Then I glimpsed the rage in his scarlet eyes and I knew he had finally realised the truth: I would never ever think of him as a hero. The penny had finally dropped.
