Fury

a few people moving about the complex. I see flashes of colour, feel shifts in energy eddying around me, but nothing I can really put my finger on. Just a pervading sense of menace.

‘Where to now?’ Ryan wheezes.

Uriel scans the area uneasily. ‘Everywhere. We walk every inch of this place until we feel something, see something. He’s still here, I know he is. They haven’t moved him.’

‘That doesn’t strike you as weird?’ I ask quietly.

He shakes his head. ‘I was always supposed to return, Mercy. It was always a trap. In the end, there will be no hiding what we are. All we’ve done by coming here on foot is to buy ourselves a little more time, some slight advantage. The “gringo” was wiser than I gave him credit for.’

Behind Uri’s back, Ryan raises his eyebrows and I have to smile.

‘Luc’s forces will have to work out who we are before they can deal with us,’ Uriel murmurs. ‘They have to find us first. And while they’re looking, we need to locate Gabriel.’

‘It’s a pretty big place,’ Ryan says.

Uri sighs as he considers the elevated structures to the west of us, then below us to the east. ‘There’s no scientific way to do this. We take as long as it takes to find him.’

His eyes fall on Mateo, still standing there, listening to us talk.

‘Go with our thanks, Mateo,’ Uriel says quietly but commandingly. ‘Find your compatriots, tell them to get their charges back down to the buses. It is no longer safe for you here.’

Mateo nods and starts to walk away, before turning and saying hesitantly, ‘The children made me promise to ask what it was that brought “Ayar Awqa” to Machu Picchu. What should I tell them, senor?’

Uriel and I exchange glances, before Uriel replies softly, ‘Tell the children that he came to seek his brother, upon the mountain.’

Mateo’s eyes widen in surprise. ‘Lost?’ he exclaims. ‘Here?’

‘If someone were to be held here, against his will,’ I say, because it has to be worth a shot, ‘where would he be?’

‘How could he know?’ Uriel says exasperatedly. ‘Let us waste no more time, Mercy. What slight advantage we have is slipping away.’

‘Held how?’ Mateo asks.

‘Bound in some way,’ I reply. ‘Tied up.’

Mateo’s face clears immediately. ‘But that is easy. It is like a riddle, a puzzle, yes? Like you, like him.’ He indicates Uriel. ‘I will take you there, follow me.’

The three of us look at each other, scarcely daring to hope.

Mateo descends quickly through street after street of ruins, until we find ourselves loosely ringed around a strangely configured stone that’s been roped off to prevent people touching it. It’s irregular in shape, with a diameter wider than a man is tall; a broad, stepped area, almost like a bench, cut out of one side; a protuberance of rock — like a blunt finger — pointing up out of it towards the sky. The stone stands above a frightening precipice, framed by cloud.

Uriel says suspiciously, ‘What is this?’

‘Its name is Intiwatana,’ Mateo answers eagerly. ‘You understand our language, senor, so its meaning will be clear to you.’

‘But not to me,’ Ryan says apologetically, taking a drink from the bottled water in his pack.

‘It means, literally, “sun-tying-place”,’ Uriel murmurs, walking around the curious stone. ‘The instrument to which you tie up, or hitch, the sun.’

‘How can you be sure this is the place?’ I ask Mateo, feeling nothing more than that general sense of unease.

‘This stone has magical properties,’ he replies. ‘It was built so that on certain days of the year, when the sun stands directly above the stone, it casts no shadow at all. If your brother is like you, then this is the place.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ Ryan says. ‘There’s nothing here but this rock.’

Mateo points at the ground at my feet, at Uriel’s, and I see Ryan’s face change as he works out what Mateo’s trying to tell us.

Since we left Milan, the sun has barely touched my skin, or has touched it so fleetingly that I never felt its warmth. But here, upon this windswept plateau, its light finally struggles through the cloud. And as its rays move across the face of the stone called Intiwatana, across all of us standing here, I see what Mateo saw before any of us did. There are four people present, but only two cast shadows upon the ground.

Uriel and I glance at each other sharply.

‘The Inca believed this stone held the sun in the sky. If he is your brother,’ Mateo insists, ‘then he, too, is a creature of the sun, bound to this place.’

‘Superstition,’ Uriel scoffs, saying out loud exactly what I’m thinking. ‘How could he be here? I don’t feel anything —’

But then, as if in reply, the earth begins to roar, it begins to tremble, and I hear distant screams, the sound of buckling stone, of thousands of roof tiles falling and shattering in the streets. I hear Mateo’s cries, Ryan’s, as they struggle to remain on their feet in a shifting, rending world.

There’s something else, too: like the sound of steel on steel, something fleeting, but so discordant and sharp that it resonates painfully within me, makes me want to claw at my head in agony.

Uriel gasps aloud, similarly afflicted, as the brief sound recurs, then recurs again, and again. Something’s coming, something fast. A whole bunch of somethings, erupting from everywhere, but nowhere, all at once.

‘Ryan!’ I yell through the roar of the physical world being torn apart, through the searing pain in my head. ‘Mateo! Lead your people to safety! Find them, get them out.’

Mateo nods, already turning, but Ryan hesitates, crippled by his loyalty to me.

‘Every one of them could be your sister, your mother, your father!’ I cry. ‘Don’t just let the bad stuff happen, Ryan. It’s penalty time. Every action counts. We have to do what we can with the abilities we’ve got, don’t you see?’

And I see that he gets in an instant what has taken me lifetimes to figure out.

As Ryan and Mateo stumble back up the stairs, a heavy white fog rolls towards the lip of the plateau that Uriel and I occupy. Even as we watch, it begins to ascend up the terraces of Machu Picchu, blanketing everything in its path, turning the air an unnatural white that has a tinge of grey, like contagion, at its heart.

Demonsign. Uriel’s voice is like a breath of fire in my mind.

Then, without warning, out of that fog sweeps a wraith. It leaps onto the plateau, ghostly braids streaming about its skull-like face, a star-shaped stone axe raised high, mouth stretched in an undying scream. I can see the outline of the man it once was, but the face and form are indistinct, shredding and re-forming like the fog that surrounds us.

Uriel and I are between the wraith and the stone. I see the thing’s head questing from side to side as if it’s deciding which of us to take first with its ghostly axe.

Uriel puts his arm around me and pulls me close, as if he’s Gerry McEntee from Johannesburg, South Africa, and I’m Estelle Jablonski of Mississauga, Canada, and we’re lost together in the fog.

Hold your nerve, he roars in my head. Do not shift.

The creature throws itself at us, through us — like shards of glass, or a handful of nails — and is gone, subsumed forever by our peculiar energy. Daemonium of this kind are no match for us. The ones that wear faces are the ones we fear.

And then an army of wraiths comes boiling over the edge of the plateau, a legion of the violent, mindless dead. Surrounding us, momentarily, like a milling herd of shredded, shredding energy. Those that touch Uriel or me vanish like ether, but hundreds remain. Each one distinct, each one once a man.

Suddenly, as if startled, they flow away, as one, into the trembling streets of the city that once was theirs when they yet lived, mouths stretched wide in silent, ravening screams, taking the unnatural fog with them.

When Uriel releases me from his hold, the roped-off stone lies exposed beneath weak sunlight, and the earth is no longer shaking.