The Wicked Day (18 page)

“In here,” said Declan. “Quick.”

A locked door opened under the point of his knife. Declan shut the door behind them and they crouched in the darkness, listening to the approaching sounds and listening just as intently to the silence of the house around them. The marching bootsteps clattered past them, echoing down the street. After a while, the sound died away.

“Let’s go,” whispered Jute. “Something about this house is making me nervous. Something’s not right.”

They were standing in a gloomy space. It was too dark to see properly. The air was cold and silent. Dust turned to mud under their boots as the snow on their soles melted. Jute had a brief and horrifying vision of stairs that led up and up into the house. Of long hallways where the floorboards creaked at every step. Of a bedroom muffled in molding velvet drapes and an old, withered couple that lay upon the bed, never sleeping but staring motionless with unblinking eyes into the darkness. Eyes that were slowly turning in his direction.

“It’s not just this house,” said the ghost.

“But we’re in this house now.”

“No, not just this house,” said Declan. “The ghost is right. We’re in this city, and that’s the problem. The city. There’s something extremely odd about this city.” He frowned and touched the necklace beneath his shirt. Then his hand drifted up to the sword hilt above his shoulder. It was an absentminded movement, as if his body were checking on things while his mind attended to other matters. “I wish we were far from here, but. . .”

“But there’s your sister.”

“Aye, my sister.”

The city huddled under the snow in silence. Here and there, the stars shone down from rents in the dark clouds drifting below an even darker sky. The shadowhounds. They were back there in the night. Somewhere. Jute knew it. He could feel it in the nervousness of the wind, in the way the wind whispered around his neck and prodded him on with its icy fingers. He did not have to urge Declan on with his fear. It was all he could do to keep up with the older man. They hurried through the streets, flitting from doorway to doorway and avoiding every patch of moonlight. Twice more they were forced to turn aside for a troop of soldiers that marched out of the night. It was not difficult, as they heard the ring of their bootsteps long before the soldiers came into view, echoing off the walls of the houses and the stone streets.

The tug in their minds grew stronger. They rounded one last corner, and there before them in the middle of an enormous cobblestone square stood the tower. The tower was awful and immense, a gaunt finger of black stone pointing up at the sky as if forever accusing. It loomed over the city and it seemed that everything shrank away from it, thankful for the night and the snow, that they might draw those twin blankets over themselves and hide from the tower.

Declan and Jute retreated back around the corner. As bad luck would have it, the clouds had chosen that instant to unravel, and moonlight shone down in unwelcome abundance.

“Excellent visibility,” said the ghost cheerfully. “Clear as day. You’re obviously not going to turn an ankle running across that square. Though it’ll be all the easier for the crossbowmen on the walls to put a bolt through you.”

“Are there crossbowmen?” asked Jute, alarmed at this thought.

“I doubt it,” said Declan, after a moment of peering around the corner. “I don’t see any guards. I don't see anybody at all.”

“Maybe they don’t need guards,” said the ghost. “Maybe there’s something else. Something horrifying.”

“She’s there.”

“Yes,” said Jute. He could feel the pull on his mind even stronger now. Precise and focused and urgent. “Somewhere near the top.”

“This place reminds me of something. An old story my mother used to tell me when I was a child. There was a dark tower on a moor. A tower without a door built by a man without a name. It happened a long time ago in Harlech.”

“What happened?” said Jute.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

They skulked in the shadows until the moon hid again behind the clouds. It was a dreadful wait, as Jute whirled around a dozen times or more, certain that something was standing further down the street, watching them.

“Let’s just go,” he said. “We can chance it.”

“Wait a bit,” said Declan. “The moon’s about to go behind a cloud. I don’t fancy running across that square with all those windows staring down. We need some darkness first.”

There were a great many windows in the tower walls. Not a single one was lit, but they were visible enough, pricked out by the moonlight and looking uncomfortably like empty eye sockets.

“We should go,” said Jute, much more urgently this time. “Hang the moonlight. There’s something down the street, coming this way. It’s no use looking for it. I can feel it. Somewhere on the edge of my mind, and it knows about us. It isn’t the hounds. It’s something else. I’d much rather have a go at the tower then stay here and let it find us.”

Declan didn’t say anything. He glanced back down the street. There was nothing to see except shadows and snowdrifts piled up against walls and the tightly locked houses shivering on their doorsteps. But he nodded, and then nodded again. The walk across the cobblestone square seemed to take forever. Declan whispered that running would attract more attention than walking. And attention they did not want. They walked gingerly across the empty square, with their necks pricking as if eyes gazed from every window. But there was no outburst, no sudden cry, no torches flaring up. They stopped beneath the wall of the tower and crouched in the deep shadow there.

“Careful,” said Jute urgently. "Don't touch the wall."

“What?” said Declan, who had been about to do just that.

“Don’t touch the stone. It’s guarded with just about the worst ward I’ve ever come across.”

“I can’t hear a thing.”

“I know. I can’t either. But I can—I suppose I can hear it through the wind. It’s like the wind is hearing it and then putting the impression into my mind. The thing’s woven out of darkness, mostly. I think." Here, Jute frowned, concentrating and listening intently. He suddenly backed away, looking alarmed. “Shadows above and below. This is a new one. It traps you. The whole wall’s alive. It’s full of people caught by the ward.”

“Not how I’d like to spend the rest of my life,” said Declan, taking a step back as well. “I’m disliking this city more and more with every passing moment. I’ve always despised wards. I'd much rather have to deal with swords and someone trying to cut my head off. Let’s find a door. Something. Anything.”

They crept around the base of the tower, skulking through the darkness and examining the wall as they went. The snow blew and whirled down around them. The cobblestone square stretched away on their side and the city hunched down on its foundations on the edges of the square in frozen and abject silence. The windows of the buildings stared across at the creeping progress of the two interlopers. Above them, the tower loomed up, vanishing into the darkness of the clouds and the falling snow.

“There aren’t any doors,” said Declan after a while. “I’m sure of it. We’ve been around more than once. That’s the street we came from originally over there. How on earth do you get out or in? There aren't any doors.”

His question was answered immediately—so immediately that it almost proved their undoing. The side of the tower a few feet in front of them vanished. A yawning open hole appeared, wide enough for a horse and wagon to ride through. The air rang with bootsteps. Declan yanked Jute to the ground, and they lay motionless in the thin blanket of snow. A column of soldiers marched out of the opening. They moved as one. Each man’s leg stepped out at the precise second as his neighbor. Each chin was held at the same stiff level, each back as straight as a spear. Their eyes stared ahead unblinkingly. Jute lost count of the soldiers. They emerged from the opening in the wall in their perfect files until the column stretched from the tower across the square like an elongated snake, the head disappearing down a street on the far side of the square. The opening in the wall closed up again right behind the last row of soldiers, instantly and silently and solidly. The last of the soldiers marched across the square and vanished.

“Well, now we know,” said Jute, getting up and brushing snow from his clothes.

“Not that it does us much good. We’ll have to climb and find a window suitably high up. I suppose complete silence will be the only way to beat a guardian ward like the one in this wall. Did you ever do such a thing? Fooling wards with absolute silence in your mind?”

“Of course,” said Jute, somewhat irritated that Declan would question his capability. “I only wonder whether you’re able to do that as well. I don’t think I’d be able to help if the ward took you.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Declan’s hand drifted up to the necklace threaded beneath his collar. He spoke somewhat absentmindedly as if he were no longer aware of Jute, or even of where they stood. “The silence beneath the sea is greater than that of stone. Greater even than your sky, I imagine.”

With that, Declan began to climb.

“Poetic,” said the ghost from inside Jute’s knapsack.

“Greater than the sky?" muttered the boy to himself. “Hmmph.”

And Jute filled his mind with the memory of sky, of his dreams of flying with the wind far above the earth in the silence of the endless space there, of the absolute stillness of height and depth and distance. He set his hands to the wall and began to climb.

In one way it was not such a difficult thing to climb that wall. The stones were roughly hewn and of many different sizes so that it was easy to find a handhold here and a convenient toehold there. But in another way, it was the hardest wall Jute had ever tried. The thing was horribly alive. He could sense it swirling restlessly just beneath the stone. Hundreds of different lives were locked within, held captive by the powerful weaving of the spell. He could feel sorrow and desperation and the bitterness brought about by the death of hope. He willed himself to not become aware of them, to not listen and feel, for if he did, then his concentration would be lost. He would be pulled in to become one of them. Imprisoned within the stone and darkness. He climbed on.

The tower was taller than it looked. From the ground, Jute had thought it no taller than the main tower of the old university ruins in Hearne. But surely he had already climbed that far. Glancing down, the rooftops below looked like a child’s patchwork quilt, tiny and mismatched squares jammed together and fading beneath the falling snow. He craned his head back to look up. Above him, the tower stretched up into the night and vanished.

If Jute had looked down again, he might have seen the figure of a dog, deceptively small at such a distance, lope out of a street opening onto the square. The same street that they had come down. The dog headed across the square toward the tower. It stopped at the base of the wall and gazed up. The dog began to fade and after a few seconds the beast resembled nothing more than a shadow. It drifted to the wall and then slowly moved through it like water seeping through dry earth.

Jute came level with Declan. The man had paused climbing and hung motionless, suspended from his fingers and the tips of his boots.

“The windows move,” whispered Declan.

“What?”

“They slide away as soon as we draw near. Even though the ward still sleeps, the tower’s aware of us. Somehow.”

“What we want is much higher up,” said Jute quietly. “We might as well climb to the top. There’s sure to be a door of sorts up there.

“The top? You’re sure about that?”

“After all the houses I’ve robbed? I’m sure. There's always a door at the top.”

They both lapsed into silence, for the stone seemed to tremble as if it were becoming aware of them. A nearly soundless whine trembled in the air. The ward. Coiling on itself like a snake. Ready to wake and strike. Jute closed his eyes and ignored his own exhaustion, the cold, the trembling promise of cramp in his legs. His stomach growled, but he ignored that too. He could not afford any distractions.

Even lovely shiny things
? said the wind in his ear.

Even lovely shiny things.

The ward quieted and they climbed on. Forever, it seemed. The horizon in the east lightened imperceptibly. Jute’s limbs ached and trembled with exhaustion. The chill of the stone and the continuous pressure on his fingers produced a slow, spreading numbness that worked through his hands and wrists. Each successive hold and pull up was beginning to become something akin to torture. He found himself alongside Declan again. The man was staring up the tower, toward the point where the darkness of the stone and the darkness of the sky blended together until there was only night. Sweat trickled down his forehead.

“I don’t think this tower is meant to be climbed,” said Declan quietly. “It isn’t only the windows moving away from us. The tower itself moves. It’s growing above us. We aren’t gaining much ground, if any.”

“Then what do you suggest?” said Jute.

“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask the wind?”

“The wind?”

And Jute asked the wind, wondering why he had not bothered before with this and any other question that had crossed his mind.

Why should I tell you?
said the wind somewhat pettishly.
Don’t want to play, don’t want to knock down the chimney pots and fling roof tiles. Don’t want to come flying with me.