The Lost Tohunga Read Online Free Page A

‘wizard’s apprentice’ to the old man. Which was fine, because he liked Jones hugely, whatever Mum thought.
    â€˜Let’s be lookin’ at ye, laddie,’ Jones said, holding him out at arm’s length. ‘You smell like a swamp and you’re wet through. What on earth have you been doing?’
    Mat held up the stone disc. ‘I saw Horomatangi! He gave me this, for you!’
    Jones raised an eyebrow. ‘Well then, best I have a look.’

On the day Puarata died …
    One year ago …
    Parukau
    I n the seconds after Puarata fell at Cape Reinga, a dog on a dirt road near Hawera, far to the south, jerked to its feet and barked furiously. It was a bony, feverish creature with diseased yellow eyes, and belonged, if that was the right word, to Old Mac, a tramp steeped in his own filth. They had been together for seven years, and sometimes the old wanderer puzzled over how the dog still breathed. It smelt like week-dead road kill. Bare patches festered on its hide, it walked like a drunken sailor, and there was nothing healthy about it. Or its appetite — it ate carrion, bugs and whatever it could scavenge.
    â€˜Lil’ bugger won’t last a week,’ Old Mac remembered thinking as he had kicked it away from his pack, all those years ago. But it had hung around, begging scraps, and he had been lonely. He had never even named the vile mutt. But they were well matched. Old Mac was no whitewashed saint. He had gone bush after attacking a nun in Levin back in ’83. By the time the case had gone cold, he had forgotten how to live in the normal world.
    The barking woke Mac, confused and bleary-eyed from the rot-gut he had been swilling. They were beneath a stand of pine, amidst the sheep shit but out of the rain. ‘Shut up, ya mangy bugger!’
    The dog turned and growled. Something flickered in its eye that had never been there before. Before Mac could move, the dog leapt on him, both forepaws on his chest. A weight like a boulder crushed him, emptying his lungs. ‘Get off me! Ya feckin’ … ugh … get off.’ His voice changed from threat to choking plea as the dog’s weight intensified. Its eyes seemed to grow. Mac went rigid with fright as a spiral of unlight poured from the dog’s mouth and coiled like a snake, a serpent made of smoke which poured into his mouth, choking his final words. He couldn’t speak, not even to beg. He tried, though. He writhed and twisted, but the dreadful thing on his chest neither moved nor relented. His heart hammered like an overstressed engine, until the world fell away.
    Â 
    The tramp sat up and stared at the dog lying cold and dead beside him. Although the tramp wasn’t Old Mac any more: he was Parukau. Parukau, first among Puarata’s servants, before the tohunga had imprisoned him in the body of that filthy mutt.
    But I’m free now … Puarata must be dead …
    Puarata dead! He could taste it! He was free! ‘FREE!’ he shouted aloud, his first words in over a century. He shouted for sheer joy, half his outpourings mere barking and gibberish, but he didn’t care.
    An hour later he was hobbling down an eastward road.Puarata’s fortress was in the Ureweras, and there was a very special place there, known to only one other being: himself — Parukau! A secret place they had made together, that they called Te Iho, ‘The Heart’. It was where the true power lay.
    I’ll be damned if I let someone else gain control of it. Quite literally damned.
    Kurangaituku
    When Puarata fell from the bluff at Cape Reinga, birds rose from the trees and streamed south, shrieking the news. Deep in the bush near Hamilton, hundreds of sparrows, pigeons, starlings, magpies, water birds, gulls, all manner of birds, began to swirl madly together, swarming like insects. They spun in tighter and tighter knots, blending in a blur until an observer would have sworn they were trying to