“Hey!” She spun around, tried to catch it—but the creature flew far out of her reach, its little cloud-heart puffing with the effort as it headed back out the trapdoors. Lena tried to follow but Constance caught her arm.

“It’s not important,” she said firmly. “Come on. We have to go.”

They reached the bottom, and Lena’s breath caught in her throat as Constance spelled the big trapdoors shut behind them, and the whole space was lit in the steady purplish light of her cane and Winton’s lantern.

Lena reached for her pocket, but its emptiness set her heart racing. No butterfly.

No butterfly, for the first time in six years.

She felt completely lost.

She stopped, her attention caught by the horror of the scene confronting her. The sarcophagi were open, the great tomb doors of the dukes hanging on their hinges.

Constance swept her cane in a broad, slow arc, and a series of lamps sprang to life on the far walls, ignited by her magic. The ghastly scene was illuminated further. In the flickering firelight, Lena could see the shapes of skeletal bodies in the gloom—not lying in state on their plinths, but strewn around, fallen, and unraveling. A weird tension hung in the air. It was as if they’d interrupted a drunken gathering. As if, moments ago, a revelry of the dead had been raging under the earth and their stillness was nothing more than a party game. Lena could see the eye gemstones scattered across the stone floor, glinting in the lamplight.

She felt choked up with tears and nausea. She was glad Vigo had not lived to experience such a thing.

Constance misinterpreted her expression. “No time for squeamishness—let’s just be grateful they’re not attacking us yet.”

“Why are they attacking people anyway?” Lena asked as Constance led her farther into the chamber, picking a careful route between the bodies on the floor.

“The spell is fed by death, remember? Hence the Pestilence.”

Lena’s eyes widened.

“The Pestilence was linked to the spell?” Winton asked from farther behind.

“Of course,” Constance said—and despite everything, her voice quickened with enthusiasm as she explained. “Like a child growing in the womb, the spell has various stages of development.” And then her voice took on a chanting tone, as if reciting a poem. “‘First year, a vapor, a mist. Second year, a fog, a storm cloud. Then three years in summer, it shall feast on death. In the sixth year, the sickness stops—the quiet before the storm. And then…’” She paused. “Then the contractions start. That’s the stage we’re in now. In a series of increasingly powerful and frequent contractions, the storm cloud is animating the Ancestors and filling them with its hunger for death. What it needs to reach its full potential, to loose itself on the world, is a lot of deaths very quickly.”