Phoenix and Ashes

"Take your places," she said, and took her short-sword from the rucksack. It was a genuine Celtic relic, of bronze, and had been the means that ended more than a dozen lives before it had been left in a tomb very like this one. Locke took a candle and stood in the east, Carolyn in the south, and Lauralee in the west. Alison reserved the north, the most important in this ceremony, for herself. When the others were in place, she took the bronze blade in her hands and cut a circle of protection and power around all of them, moving widdershins as she did so. It was a little crowded in the tomb, for the space inside it could not have been more than eight feet across, but when she was done, the light from the candles faded into insignificance as the interior sprang to life, the stones themselves glowing a dull ochre with pent-up power. She took her place in the north, and nodded at Locke to begin.

Locke looked excited; the girls, wide-eyed.

"I guard the East in the name of Loki, the malicious, the betrayer," Locke said, raising his candle to the level of his eyes. "In his name do I call the power of Air."

The candle flared, its flame turning blue, to confirm that Locke had made all the right occult connections. He grinned at Alison, but she was already turning and nodding to Carolyn, who was raising her candle.

"I guard the South in the name of Hecate, the Queen of Witches, the bringer of burning plague, of drought and despair," Carolyn said carefully, her voice sounding higher than usual and a bit strained, her eyes glinting at her mother over the flame of the candle. "In her name do I call the power of Fire."

As Carolyn's candle-flame burned the crimson of blood, Alison was already turning to Lauralee. Other than her own part, this would be the trickiest.

"I guard the West in the name of Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, Mist on the Lake, the eater of hearts," Lauralee said, very carefully, without tripping even a little on the difficult name. "In his name do I call the power of Water."

Alison's triumph tasted sweet as the candle-flame flared green; it had been a risk, using that foreign deity—but she had wanted something uniquely western, and could think of no god more bloodthirsty than one of the ancient Aztecs.

But now it was her turn. "I guard the North and close the circle in the name of the Morrigan, Death and Despair, the Storm-Crow, the Blood-Raven, the goddess of battles and harvester of souls," she said, holding aloft her own candle. "In her name do I call the power Earth!"

The flame of her candle was already yellow—but it flared up like a pitch-soaked torch, until for a moment it licked the stone above their heads before subsiding. She didn't need that sign to know that she had tapped into the power sleeping uneasily here in the stones, however; to her senses the place practically hummed, and as the stones increased their glow, you could have read by the light that they shed.

The four of them bent as one to secure their candles in saucers at the four edges of the altar-cloth, then rose again.

And Alison began her chant.

It predated Christianity, this chant; the stones here recognized it, as did the power within those stones. The stones vibrated in sympathy with it, and the power leapt to serve. It was an old chant designed to serve, protect, and avenge those who were great in power but few in numbers. With this magic, they did not have to muster an army. With this magic, the army would come of its own.

An army of the dead.

Not ghosts or spirits called from some afterlife, but revenants, the emotionally charged remnants of the unquiet dead still bound to earth by their own will, the executed, defeated in battle, murdered. Any whose remains were interred in the earth, whose deaths had not brought peace, but anger and pain, who were not at all ready to move on—

On this night when the doors to the spirit-world were cast open, they came, from every direction they came, from hallowed and unhallowed ground, from unmarked grave, from crossroad-burial, from forgotten forest mound they came. Ancient, merely old, and new, they came, singly, then by dozens. They came on the wings of hate, of anger, and of despair. They pressed in upon the shield of power as the air outside it grew thick with their restless spirits, until the pressure outside the shield threatened to crack it. There were so many that they merged into a circling miasma from which only an occasional glimpse of ghostly-glowing face emerged—here a hairy tribesman, there a close-cropped Roman, here an arrogant Cavalier, there an equally arrogant Roundhead, here a robed Druid, there a tonsured monk—faces old as this island, and as new as yesterday.

And Alison's chant bound them to the torment of her chosen target, and painted that target with words that made him the enemy of each of them.