CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Outside the warehouse, all was quiet. The working week finished, the other units and random buildings were closed up for the weekend.
At the far end of the wharf, two security guards patrolled at a sedate pace, their German Shepard pulling at the lead more through boredom than excitement.
The Begovich warehouse, to the casual observer, looked as empty and unremarkable as most of the others.
What windows it had were in darkness. The car parking area to the front of it was empty.
The doors were locked and the shutters padlocked.
Everything about it was quiet, dull and ordinary.
Inside, however, was quite a different matter.
Gone were the dusty crates and cobwebbed boxes.
Gone were the pallets of plastic-wrapped jars and bottles.
Gone were the cases of plum brandy. All had been cleared away, moved to an adjoining room at the back of the building.
The main warehouse had been completely emptied of everything that served the single purpose of satisfying curious customs officers or over eager police officers.
These items were not needed on that particular night.
The warehouse had changed its reason for being.
It was no longer a place of storage, a holding area for transient goods that were in fact stuck in a limbo of their owner’s making.
Now, the Begovich building was pressed into the service of something altogether more important. Something altogether more terrifying.
Immediately inside the main door a false wooden wall had been erected to guard against anyone seeing inside.
Between the door and the wall stood two of Dragana’s strongest and most vicious protectors.
Woe betide anyone who tried to get in, were they not invited.
Or, indeed, woe betide anyone who tried to get out, if they did not have permission to do so.
Along three of the interior walls, benches had been set in three rows, providing sufficient seating for the two hundred people who were expected to attend.
More than expected; they were required. Dragana was confident none would refuse the invitation, knowing as they all did what was coming.
The shifting had taken hold. They had breached the defences of the Aurora.
Surely there could be no clearer sign that the final battle would soon be at hand, and that they themselves held the stronger position.
At the end of each bench, and in available spaces elsewhere, tall candle sticks held red candles of the finest wax.
Wax that had been both blessed and infused with the dried blood of fallen foes.
There were many candles, hundreds, but each contained traces of a defeated enemy.
At the far end, against the wall beneath the mezzanine office, the sacred shrine had been constructed.
Dragana herself had overseen the preparations, and had been moved by the reverence and care that her people had shown as they built the altar, cloaked it in the red and gold tapestry fabric, positioned more candles, added the chalice and plate, and placed on its golden plinth, set into a glass casing, the precious shard of blue stone.
Each time she saw it she felt anew the excitement of discovering its power.
Each time she held it she experienced the thrill of the generations who had gone before her as they wielded its strength to further their cause.
Now, with the ultimate battle so close, she knew it would fall to her to see that cause brought to its conclusion.
To its pinnacle. She must not fail. She would not fail.
‘Mistress Begovich.’ One of her helpers, an elderly, red cheeked, plump woman whose appearance belied a keen intelligence and an even keener propensity for violence, sought her approval. ‘Is the crucible to your liking?’
Dragana turned to look at the space in the centre of the room.
The floor had been swept and scrubbed and a circle of sand marked out to her specifications.
At the centre of the circle a broad, shallow metal dish made of iron and bronze sat gleaming, the intricate patterns worked into it burnished to reveal their true rich and glorious colours.
She turned her gaze upwards. Above the crucible the chains were in position.
‘Yes, Maria,’ she said. ‘All is as it should be. Have the acolytes sent in.’
‘Yes, Mistress,’ her assistant replied, backing away as she did so.
The old woman snapped her fingers and a lesser aid, a young man, stepped forward.
Maria delivered whispered instructions and the man hurried away to do her bidding.
With the help of two of Dragana’s men, he removed the panel in the floor that at first glance appeared to be merely a piece of ordinary flooring.
Beneath it, however, was a hinged door. The three men needed all their strength to lift it.
It creaked as they pulled it fully open and secured it with chains.
The hole it revealed was at first in darkness but slowly a glimmer of light appeared.
This grew stronger, until it became clear that the first of a string of people were climbing up stairs, each carrying a lantern.
With assistance from eager and deferential helpers, they were brought up from the hidden stairwell and into the warehouse.
As each of the blue-robed and hooded acolytes emerged from the tunnel, Dragana felt a shiver of delight.
A gathering was a rare event, and this one was the most significant that had taken place under her jurisdiction.
She glanced up at the office. The blinds were drawn.
Her father would be kept behind a locked door with his two trusty guards for company until the ceremony was over.
He was too frail, too unstable in mind and body, to attend.
He had only ever held a peripheral position, in any case. His input would not be missed.
The acolytes were draped head to toe in fabric of the exact blue of the shard of stone on the altar.
This was in homage to it, though the stone itself was not what they worshipped, or course.
Dragana had always found its presence problematic, coming as it did from the very heart of their greatest adversaries.
But tradition decreed that, since its acquisition, it should be included in all ceremonies.
Over the centuries, therefore, it had been given a place of importance to serve as a reminder of the strength of their enemies, as well as a display of the truth and scope of their own power.
If they had a piece of something so vital to their most dangerous foes, surely there was nothing they could not gain, nothing they could not overcome, no-one they could not defeat, if they set themselves to it.
For all its symbolism, the stone was not the focus of the gathering, and nor was the shrine upon the altar.
These things were sideshows to the main event, which, as ever, would take place in the crucible.
As a young girl, when Dragana had learned the lore and history of those who belonged to the Shifting, she had been terrified of the metal receptacle.
She was wise to fear it, and all that it stood for.
Over the years, as she had grown up and grown in power and standing among her fellow followers, she had come to feel towards it something closer to love.
It stood for all that she believed in. The necessity of force to further their cause.
The beauty of strength and power over everything else.
The need to wipe out all who would weaken their own kind, taking no prisoners, showing no mercy.
If the Shifting was to reach its climax, to become the unassailable force that would govern without challenge, the crucible showed how its goal must be reached.