The Wicked Day (17 page)

If only I could fly. Or at least lighten my feet.

His thoughts groped for the sensation of weightlessness, of air and emptiness and sky. Sky. The pale, scraped-thin, gossamer nothingness of sky. Caught and held onto nothingness. He felt his body lighten. His boots glided across the snow. The wind pushed him forward. He could breathe easily again. And then the hawk’s voice whispered into his mind.

Stop. You’ll draw unwanted attention.

As quickly as it had appeared, the hawk’s voice was gone. Jute plunged back into the snow. Floundering knee-deep. Gasping. Chagrined. He knew better. Declan glanced back at him, eyebrows raised.

“I’m all right,” panted Jute. “We’ll be there soon enough.”

“Aye.” Declan frowned and shook his head. “Searching for a pebble on the shore. Unless this pull, this thing.” He did not finish the sentence but shook his head again.

But they could both feel it. The delicate tug inside their minds pulled at them ever so gently. It aimed straight across the snowy valley floor, across the frozen black ribbon of river and right at the city walls. And surely once they were within those walls, it would pull them on until they found her. Jute wondered what Ronan’s sister was like. Sometimes she looked like Lena and sometimes she looked like the lady in the regent’s castle. Vines and leaves wove through her hair, rippling around her neck and dangling down to the ground. Her legs grew into the earth, or was it that the earth rose up and became her?

“What’s her name?” said Jute.

“Giverny.” Declan paused and then spoke again, more to himself than to Jute. “I can hardly remember her face. She was a tiny thing when I left. Three years old, if that. Toddling around, always getting under the hooves of the horses, though they never stepped on her. The horses and the hounds, they all loved her. Even the wild animals. Foxes, hares, the squirrels would come eat bread from her hand.” His face twisted, though Jute could not tell if it was in anger or in wonder. “Was her path already laid out for her then? Is it like that for everyone?”

The city grew as they approached. It was difficult to tell in the darkness, but to Jute’s eyes Ancalon seemed as large a city as Hearne. Towers mounted up toward the sky. The massive walls stretched away on either side, bounded by the frozen expanse of the river uncoiled below. Three bridges spanned the river, leading to three gates, each flanked by towers with crenellated battlements.

“The gates are shut,” said Jute. “I don’t suppose they’d be opening to a pair of poor travelers in the night.”

“Even if they did, we wouldn’t want that. I don’t think this is a friendly place to strangers.”

“No,” said Jute unhappily. He shifted from foot to foot in the snow, wishing he were sitting in front of a warm fireplace with a tankard of ale in one hand and the night safely shut outside. But he could feel the invisible tug within his mind, gently pulling, insistent and insensible to such concerns as fireplaces and hot ale. “We’ll have to climb the blasted wall, won’t we? Besides, we can’t wait here for the shadowhounds.”

Declan nodded. For a moment, however, he looked just as unhappy as Jute felt.

“Shall we climb?” said the ghost from somewhere inside Jute’s knapsack. “I love climbing. What are we climbing?”

“The city wall.”

They crossed the ice at the foot of the wall. Beneath their feet, the river flowed silent and black below the glassy surface. They clambered up the snowy bank. The city wall stood before them at the top of the rise, tall and dark and foreboding. Declan stopped and looked behind them.

“What is it?” said Jute, staring at the wall and wondering how they could make it up the ice-covered stone. Impossible. It looked impossible.

“Hush.”

Something growled on the riverbank behind them. It was answered by another growl further along the river toward the nearest bridge.

“Oh,” said the ghost. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANCALON

Declan and Jute ran for the wall. Jute’s heart pounded in his chest. He didn’t need to see what was behind them. He knew. He scrabbled up the slope, hard on Declan’s heels. The snow there had hardened into ice, probably due to being in the shadow of the wall throughout the day. He slipped and fell face-first in the snow.

“Get up!” said the ghost frantically. “Get up! Getupgetupgetup!”

Jute flung himself at the wall and, trembling, he began to climb. Declan was a shadow slightly above and to one side of him.

“All right?” called the man down.

“All right,” said Jute, barely able to manage the words.

The back of his neck prickled. He was sure at any moment now there would be a howling and baying behind him. That he would be ripped down by fangs. That he would be—

“Climb! Climb! Climb!” said the ghost.

“I am!”

Jute looked down and was relieved to see he was already a good distance above the ground. No hound, magical or not, would be able to leap that high. He reached up and worked his fingers into the next stone fissure and then felt for a foothold. Something slammed into the wall beneath him. Claws scrabbled on stone, right beneath Jute’s feet. He gave out a half-stifled shriek and climbed even faster. There was a muted growling below him. It was a horrible sound. It had more in common with rocks grating together than the growl of a dog.

“Good gracious me,” said the ghost. “Why, if I weren’t so terrified, I’d say that was fascinating.”

“What?” gasped Jute.

“The shadowhound is dematerializing. Astounding.”

“What does that mean? Dema—demater—?”

“Dematerializing. It means that the creature’s substance, its flesh, is vanishing.”

“That sounds like the only good news of the day.”

“Will you two be quiet?” said Declan from somewhere above them.

“Good news? No, I don’t think so. You see, my poor young Jute, the shadowhound is dematerializing and moving through the stone of the wall. Doubtless, it intends to meet us on the other side. And that’s bad news.”

“Be quiet!”

They reached the top of the wall. Jute caught his breath, gasping. His hands ached with cold. Lights gleamed here and there in solitary windows, and moonlight shone down. It was enough to reveal the rooftops stretching away from them, divided by troughs of darkness that plunged down between buildings to the streets and alleys below.

“That way,” said Declan, pointing. “I can feel it.” Far off across the rooftops, a tower stood tall above the city. “The duke’s castle. I’d bet my life on it.” There was a terrible starkness in the line of the tower. It had nothing in common with the majestic sprawl of the regent’s castle in Hearne, or the homey manor of the duke of Dolan. The tower looked like a spear plunged into the earth, haft first. The blade pierced the sky and the night was caught upon it.

“Should we go by rooftop?” said Jute.

As if in response, a snarl floated up from somewhere in the darkness of the street below.

“Rooftop it is,” said Declan.

“Until you’re deeper within the city,” said the ghost. “I recall our friend the hawk mentioning something about a high concentration of lives confusing the trail. The scent gets lost. The footprints muddled. Of course, I knew that already, as I was one of the foremost experts on shadowhounds during my days. I taught a class titled ‘On the Evasion of Magical Beasts.’ It was a favorite with the—”

“Declan,” said Jute. “Look.”

Further away on the wall, past where it angled along the curve of the river, torches wavered in the darkness.

“Guards. Making their rounds.”

As luck would have it (and they sorely needed some luck that night), the wall loomed above a huddle of buildings standing a scant twenty feet from the wall’s edge. The roof of the nearest building was lower than the top of the wall. It looked a good twenty feet lower to Jute, which did not bode well for a comfortable landing.

“Can you manage that distance?” said Declan, frowning. “It’d be easy if we had a rope and a grapple. There’s a chimney there that would prove a good hold. Maybe we should try further along and find a shorter jump?”

“No choice,” said Jute. “Look there. More guards.”

Further down the wall on the other side of them, another knot of torches flickered in the night. The group was too far away to see Declan and Jute, but they were drawing closer. Luck was a shaky thing that night, for it had begun to snow again, with the first flakes drifting down as Jute spoke. Declan cursed under his breath.

“Jump for it, then,” he said. “Sooner than later.”

Retreating to the parapet on the far side of the wall, Declan made a running start and flung himself out into space. For a moment, it looked as if he would fall well short of the rooftop below, but he did not. He landed with a crash of slate shattering and falling away to clatter with even more noise in the street below. Jute winced. The sound was horribly loud in the quiet of the night. Someone was sure to hear it.

“Was it just me?” asked the ghost, “or did someone just throw a wagonload of pots and pans off the side of the wall? Subtle. I would advise landing lightly.”

Jute launched himself off the side of the wall. The night rushed past him. The rooftop below looked dreadfully far away. What had they been thinking? He was sure to fall to the street. Where was the wind when he needed it? He landed hard, the breath knocked from his body. Slate snapped beneath him. Somewhere behind him, high up on the wall and still at a distance, there were shouts of alarm. He scrabbled at the tile beneath him. He was slipping amidst the wreckage of shattered slate. A hand grabbed his arm.

“Come on,” said Declan. “One of those blasted dogs is right below us, staring up with eyes like saucers—and an even bigger mouth, no doubt. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“And, no doubt, you’ve woken the neighbors,” said the ghost.

Thankfully, Ancalon was similar to Hearne in that most buildings shared common walls or, at the most, were separated by alleys. It was not difficult to cross the rooftops, as long as one did not slip on the ice or step on a loose tile or plunge down into the sudden abysses of the alleys. The snow was falling thickly now. Soft, fat flakes blanketed the roofs. They hurried along, up and over roof after roof, slipping and sliding and clinging with icy hands, their feet numb in their boots.

“One of us is going to break an ankle,” said Declan.

“Not me,” said the ghost cheerfully.

They found a dormer window a few roofs further from where they were. It opened silently under Declan’s hands and they let themselves in.

“What about the hound?” said Jute.

“Haven’t heard a sound in the last ten minutes,” said Declan. “I think he’s lost our scent.”

“For now,” said the ghost.

The house they found themselves in was exceedingly dark due to the night outside and the fact that all of the windows were covered by drapes. The place smelled sour, as if it had never been aired out, and surely, if one looked, there was mold growing in the walls and mushrooms in the cellar.

“If I could still smell things,” said the ghost, “I’d be sneezing.” But then he looked startled at his own words. “Wait a minute. Am I smelling things?”

“Shh,” said Jute, who was himself trying not to sneeze.

Stairs angled down through the darkness. The floorboards creaked beneath their feet with every step.

“I’d hate to have to burgle this house,” said Jute.

“Shh,” said the ghost.

They let themselves out into a little courtyard, deep in snow and ringed about with icicles that hung from the eaves above like the slender teeth of some peculiar beast. The streets were silent around them. The city, now that they were deep within it, seemed strange and less and less like Hearne the longer they walked the streets. The buildings had been built tall and close together so that it looked like they were about to topple over at any moment. Looking up, there was little sky to be seen. Even the ghost was cowed by the mood of the place, and he vanished into Jute’s knapsack.

“Have you noticed,” said Declan, “there aren’t many lights showing. It can’t be that late in the evening. Strange. You’d think there’d be folks out and about. Isn’t too late for inns.”

They made their way along a street. There was little snow on the ground in some places, because of the narrowness of the streets and the height of the walls, and then, in other places, due to a turn and the wind blowing straight down a passage, they found the snow piled high into drifts waist-deep.

Declan was right. Most of the windows they passed were shuttered and dark. In Hearne there were always lights, a bustle and hustle regardless of the time. Wagonloads of fish hauling in from the docks, dripping seawater and trailing a stream of covetous cats. A merchant and his staff scurrying in and out of their warehouse, shouts and curses ringing out as they unloaded a delivery of silks from Harth, stone from Thule, any number of things from any number of places in Tormay. In short, Hearne was always alive.

Ancalon was dead.

But not entirely.

A sharp command cut through the night somewhere further down the street. Somewhere out of sight. There came the sound of ringing bootsteps marching in quick double time. Bootsteps marching in rhythm. Another command. The sounds were coming closer.