Kelewulf obeyed the instructions carefully, knowing even the slightest error would prove fatal to him. A large circle of salt was laid out on the floor. At its centre was a golden cup containing the dark blood of a hen. Alongside this was the thigh bone of a dog and an earthenware bowl containing uncooked pig flesh, the smell of which was making his stomach lurch each time he caught a whiff of it. The final item was the most important of them all. Like the grimoire, it had taken Kelewulf an awfully long time to find. The phylactery was a small, ornate wooden box that did little to suggest the power of the thing it contained.

The grimoire itself, the Book of Roth’gurd, lay open on the small table at his side.

Satisfied everything was in place, he stared down at the elaborately scripted page. Eight words in an ancient tongue. Words which, once uttered, would change his life forever …

What are you waiting for? Are you scared? It was his father’s voice he imagined in this moment, and the harsh, mocking tone – a tone he’d heard all too often during his life – stirred Kelewulf in a way nothing else could.

He approached the edge of the circle, careful not to step too close. His hands were shaking uncontrollably now and he clasped them together. There was, however, nothing he could do to calm his heart, which hammered away almost painfully inside him. Drawing a deep, shuddery breath, he threw his arms open and intoned the words, taking the utmost care with both the pronunciation and the metre of the spell.

The air inside the salt circle seemed to change. It was subtle to begin with, a tiny shift in the quality of the light, as if something had momentarily passed in front of a window. But as he watched, black swirling smoke emanated from the phylactery and filled the space – a slowly churning cylinder of darkness that stretched from floor to ceiling. Slowly it began to coalesce, gathering together and solidifying until it finally formed the terrible thing he’d dreamed of summoning all these years.

With torn and rotted clothing, flesh hanging from a skeletal figure, this spectral corpse, the lich of Yirgan, the last great mage, was nothing short of terrifying. It floated in the air before him, taking in the young human through baleful eyes set into a face that had completely decayed on one side, revealing the skull beneath. More than a hundred and twenty years had passed since the sorcerer had died, and the sight of him now filled Kelewulf with both fascination and revulsion. Except this was not really Yirgan. This was his soul, his spirit, that he’d carefully hidden inside the phylactery after his death, waiting and hoping for a moment like this to come along – when some mage, drunk on the possibility of power, would free him.