wound. It rises higher and higher until it towers over us, swelling up like a great black leech, breaking open the circle of the dead.
‘I will not obey the door-doom,’ the dark voice thunders. ‘You have no right to sit in judgment over me. I am living. I am the life that will destroy the living and the dead. I will not be destroyed.’
Isabela is cowering terrified on the floor beside me, the bone still gripped in her hands. I reach down and tear it from her fingers. I raise my arms and feel the power of a falcon’s wings. I know the courage of it in my heart as it plunges down in a stoop. I feel the grip of its talons in my soul, a grip that will not relinquish its hold even after death.
I lift my head and stare into the blackness writhing before me. ‘The door-doom of the dead has spoken. You are of the dead. You will obey. You will return to the body you owned in life. By the power of the white falcons who were our birth and shall be our death, I command you to return.’
I thrust the bone with its iron band straight into the centre of the black shadow. A bitter cold, such as I have never known, envelops my hand. My skin is withering in it. My bone is being eaten away, but still I push against the shadow.
‘No! No!’ he roars.
The cold is so intense that I cannot bear the pain of it. I cannot hold the bone in it any longer. I must let go. But if I do, he will win. He will never go and I will not be able to prevent him entering us again. I will become the darkness.
Just as I think I can bear no more, just as my hand is sliding out of the icy shadow, I feel the bone growing warm in my grasp. They are with me. The dead are still with me. We will defeat him. I throw back my head and a scream erupts from my throat.
‘Krery-krery-krery!’
The darkness shatters into a thousand tiny pieces. A great wind roars through the cave. The black shadow is caught up in it. For a moment or two the fragments are tossed helplessly in the maelstrom and then it is gone, leaving only a whirlpool of white steam swirling around us.
Ricardo
Check – when a falcon leaves the quarry it is supposed to be hunting to pursue some other prey.
A great roar filled the cave and then a high-pitched screech that was so painful it was like a dagger being thrust in each ear. It sounded as if two great beasts were hurling themselves at each other. Terrified, I looked up, and for a moment I thought I saw a crowd of people huddled together in the steam. Men and women I didn’t recognize, children too, all staring down at the sisters, and looking pretty much the worse for wear, I can tell you. Where on earth had they come from? But before I could do anything, the roaring and the screeching stopped abruptly and the people just sort of dissolved. Not that they were ever really there, of course, but it just shows how that damn heat was affecting us.
I suddenly realized I’d lost sight of Isabela and stared around frantically. Finally, I saw her lying behind Eydis. Her eyes were closed, and she was not moving. God in heaven, had Vítor carried out his threat and hit her over the head to knock her out? I crawled across to her and touched her gently on the arm. She sat bolt upright, an expression of alarm and bewilderment on her face, like someone who’s been woken suddenly from a sleep and can’t remember where they are. I knew that feeling only too well, especially on the morning after a good night in the tavern, but if ever there was a time for taking a little nap, this was most definitely not it.
I was so distracted by Isabela that it took me several moments to realize that Ari was shouting at me, gesturing to Valdis. I struggled over and knelt beside him. He had broken through the iron hoop, but his hands were shaking with exhaustion. The heat and moisture were making us as weak as newly hatched nestlings.
Valdis was perfectly still now, lolling away from her sister who was struggling to pull her upright so that Ari could wrench the band