Will looked at the scum of ash that floated on the brook’s surface. He soon found the reason for it – the water had bubbled across a great heath that had been turned black by fire. When they ventured into the valley the soil was warm underfoot and smoking in places even though there had been rain heavy enough to douse it.
‘Steam,’ Gwydion said, nodding at the wisps. ‘Nothing could have survived here last night.’
As they journeyed to the heart of the devastation, Will found himself gagging at the acrid smell. All the trees nearby had been smashed down, their trunks charred black on one side. Everything was layered in thin ash. In places it had drifted into banks that looked like so many grey snowdrifts. The woods seemed to have been brushed flat by a tremendous wind. Nothing green remained. Nothing stood properly upright. All around was a steamy haze, heaps of roasted dust and twisted rock rubble.
Will gouged at his eyes to clear them as they came to what had been a fish pond. Its bed was still too warm to walk on. It had been dried so suddenly that the fish had been boiled alive and lay simmered on the cracked clay. Will stretched out his hands and felt the remains of ovenlike heat. Now he could see why Gwydion had not striven to get here sooner.
Everything around them was strange and terrifying. He walked into a stinking ruin, staggered on after Gwydion over the hot ground until they came to a rise. A great bank of loose, smouldering earth reared up before them, and beyond stretched a curtain of smoke. Ash and cinders were raw and sharp underfoot. They scraped and crunched under Will’s feet as he climbed, sending up dust and a vile smell. He tried not to breathe but then as he reached the top of the bank he gasped, for beyond was a sight that he had not expected – a huge, smoking crater.
‘What could have done this?’ he whispered, looking across the shimmering waste.
‘Welcome,’ Gwydion said emptily, ‘to the village of Little Slaughter.’
The whole village had been obliterated. But how? Ten thousand lightning strokes would not have been enough to cause such destruction. Nothing was left of cottage, granary, alehouse, mill. Everything had been smashed to powder and the powder scattered for half a league.
‘There was a battlestone here,’ Will said slowly. ‘A battlestone that someone tried to break. Is that it?’
Gwydion looked at him for a moment but said nothing.
Will went as close to the hole as he dared. It was still red hot, and fuming. He could not see how deep it was, but it was so big around that all of Nether Norton could have fitted inside. He felt numbed, drained of all feeling. His mind raced as he tried to understand what could have happened. When he knelt to touch the dust at the crater’s edge he saw there the brightness of what had been molten iron; now it shone like a solidified pool of the Wortmaster’s most precious quicksilver. He could not speak or tear his gaze away for a long time.
Gwydion laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I am sorry you had to see this.’
All around were ashes, but here and there away from the crater they saw small signs that this place had been home to many dozens of folk – a horseshoe, a burned chair, a child’s rag doll.
A fist of fear clutched at Will’s stomach, and he suddenly looked up into the wizard’s face. ‘I remember Preston Mantles and the lad, Waylan, who Maskull mistook for me. This ruin was meant for Nether Norton, wasn’t it?’
‘It might have been.’ Gwydion closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘And it may still happen.’
Will stood up and walked away. He wanted to run, to run from the wizard, to run far away. And when his thoughts touched Willow and Bethe the blood in his heart froze solid. He was scared to open his mind in case too many terrors rushed in on him at once. Instead he wandered wherever his feet might lead him and cried for the people of the lost village, and his tears fell upon the wounded earth.
In return the earth threw up an unlooked-for gift. He bent to look at a reaping hook that was lying on the ground nearby. It was rusted as red as hearth iron and the handle was black, turned wholly to charcoal. It flaked away as he tried to pick it up. But then a blood redness caught at his tear-blurred eyes. Something was down there in the dust at his feet. It was a little figure, carved in some material that was not harmed by fire. When he picked it up it was warm in his hand. It was a stone fish.
He looked around, suspecting sorcery. This little fish was so very like his own in size and shape. But whereas his own had an eye of red set in green, this one had an eye of green set in red. On its side were marks he could not read, but they were just like those on his own talisman, and it bore the same sigil of three triple-sided figures set one within another. Hardly knowing why, he closed his hand over it as Gwydion came to stand beside him. The wizard signalled that they should leave, for there was nothing else to be done here.
Will said, ‘You knew last night that something as terrible as this was happening, didn’t you?’
Gwydion fixed his eyes on Will’s own. ‘As soon as you showed me the light in the sky I knew that a vicious revenge had been taken. I did not know precisely how, but it was clear that we were already too late to stop it.’
‘Then it was a battlestone?’
‘You are wrong.’
‘But what else could have done this?’
‘This was the work of a fireball.’ The wizard took his little knife from its sheath and showed it to Will. ‘I have spoken of this before. It is made from star-iron, the only thing of metal I carry, for it was neither wrested from the earth nor roasted from the rocks by men. This iron came down from above, just like the fireball that destroyed Little Slaughter. Have I not told you about the great, turning dome of the sky? How it is pierced in many places by holes through which we can see the brilliance that lies in the Beyond? Those holes are what we call the stars. It is said that nothing lives on the far side of the dome of the sky. There is only a great furnace that goes on forever, a parched realm of heat, of blinding light and searing fireballs.’
Will nodded, seeing what the wizard was driving at. ‘And sometimes it happens that a fireball falls through a star hole and it’s then what we call a shooting star.’
‘Correct. Mostly these lumps burn away in the upper airs. But sometimes they are big enough to fall to earth as pieces of star-iron. Such iron was once rarer than gold. And in the days before men learned how to burn iron from the bones of the earth the finest magical tools were made from it.’
‘Is that what happened here?’ Will coughed and rubbed at his eyes as he looked around again. ‘A shooting star landed on the village? A lump of star-iron? But it must have been as big as a house to have done this. How could a thing so big fall through something so tiny as a star?’
‘Stars are not tiny. They are far away – nearly seventeen hundred leagues, which is half a world away. Each star is a hole, a great round window like the pupil of your eye. It opens as it rises and closes as it sets. And the biggest stars at their largest are large indeed – as many as twenty paces across when fully open. I know, for I have sailed to the very rim of the Western Deeps and stood upon the cataract at the end of the world. There the stars seem as big as the sun does here, and they move at great speed.’
Will listened as Gwydion spoke. He shook the dust from his scalp as he tried to make sense of what he was being told. Stars that were giant eyes twenty or more paces across. Great holes through which fiery lumps of iron flew down to kill whole villages of people…It made no sense. It made no sense at all.
He said, ‘It’s strange to me that Little Slaughter should have been hit so exactly.’
‘Do not imagine this was a chance misfortune.’
‘Then the fireball was directed here? By…Maskull?’
The wizard nodded. ‘And the purpose of the thunderstorm we watched afterwards was to put out these fires. The storm was whipped up so that folk