Treachery, Treason and Deceit: Book One of The Magician's Men Sequence
an excerpt

Outside, everything was chaos. She could hear people screaming and crying and moaning. She could barely see anything, clouds of smoke and ash and dust floated in the street. It was as if the sun had been extinguished, cloaking everything in an unnatural twilight broken only by the flames of burning houses. Two houses further down were nothing but ruins, timbers collapsing inwards and trapping any poor soul who had the misfortune to be inside. Flames licked at the houses around, trying to find purchase. Artoria knew that if they managed to take, the whole block if not the whole district would go up in flames.

She ran to the house, averting her face to keep it from the worst of the flames. The heat was incredible, sucking the very air from her lungs, singeing the hair on her forehead. The fire reached for her, claws of flame that curled and twisted, shrank and danced, trying to grab a hold of her. The flames rose high above her, racing along the shattered beams and devouring them as if they were straw. Crackling and popping, the flames hissed like a cave of snakes.

She threw back the hood of her cloak, the lanky hair she had sown into it falling away as well, revealing a mane of long silver locks that she kept well hidden. Her hands moved as if of their own volition, drawing pictures so quickly in the air that it was impossible to see what she was doing.

As her fingers’ danced, she whispered words of release, muttering continually under her breath. She drew on the magic that had been locked within her as a child, the source that was replenished every night when she slept. She cast spell after spell, working furiously to control the blaze. Little by little, she sensed the fire abating, the flames shrinking back into the ground.

It took her a good five minutes to get the fire under control and it used up more power than she had used for a long time. As the flames faded and the smoke began to drift away, she saw the cremated remains of an arm still burning in the remains of the two buildings. The skin had burnt to a dark crisp, allowing shattered morcels of cracked bone to peer out. Artoria spun round and vomited.

When there was nothing but bile left in her stomach, she managed to get shakily back to her feet. She wiped her mouth with the arm of her cloak and felt a searing heat lance along her arm. Trembling, she lifted the sleeve of her cloak to reveal her bloodmark, a tatoo of a raven and a tower. The mark was glowing, a crimson flame on her arm. Artoria looked at it, fear turning to terror as she realised what it meant.

Out of nowhere, a vision seized her. Everything around her was there and then gone, darkness rushing in to cloak her view. Just as suddenly, she found herself floating above a vast forest, an endless rolling plain covered in trees of all descriptions, packed so close together that not a single mote of earth could be seen. She was rushing headlong down towards that roof of trees, and then she was through in to the calm twilight world beneath.

Here, the trees were masters. Trunks rose around her like columns, bark the colour of rich earth. Moss covered the branches that twisted and turned into semblances of limbs, great joints giving way to smaller and smaller tributaries, like the Thames estuary. Rocks littered the forest floor, barren and devoid of a life that could not survive down here where the sun never shone. The whole was quiet, silent as a graveyard.

Carried forward by a power not her own, Artoria found herself slipping beneath a broken stone arch, work of fae or man she could not tell. Much had returned with the Wyrding Wood, including the buildings of old that had long been abandoned. Beyond the arch, Artoria saw a courtyard, lit by a single shaft of sunlight, piercing the impenetrable. And clustered around that shaft of sunlight like crows around a pile of offal, she saw the Mistrangers.

Sat atop three giant wolves, shaggy heads the colour of broken steel, the Mistrangers were beautiful and terrible. Their faces were the faces of angels, a semblance of perfection in mortal form. They wore cloaks of purest white, and Artoria knew that if she drew closer she would see that the cloaks moved, as if caught by a breeze where none existed. They moved because of the souls trapped in their weaves, imprisoned in states of perpetual torment, jailed by the creatures that had killed them.

As she paused in the archway, the Mistrangers turned as one and looked directly at her. And she knew that they had sensed her use of magic. The bloodmark on her arm had called to them as she knew it would. And now they knew where she was.

The vision faded much more softly than it had come. Still, it took only seconds for the real world to return, the stench of burnt flesh and still burning wood, the eye-watering smoke that stung her senses… All of it. She was still stood in the same place, arm extended as she stared at the bloodmark that was glowing the colour of fresh blood.

Too late, she heard a sound behind her and she dropped the sleeve back into place. She spun round to see Darwood, face bloody and white as a ghost from the plaster that had fallen on him. He was staring at her arm, eyes wide and bloodshot.

Artoria did not wait for him to call the alarm. She spun round and ran, as fast as she possibly could.