The Wicked Day (27 page)

Botrell sidled away before Gor had a chance to respond. He ducked behind a pillar. Not that he wasn’t brave enough to investigate the far side of the court—he was convinced that something was there—it was the fact that Gor was his chief steward, and in such capacity, it was proper for him to behave as the regent’s emissary.

He peeked around the pillar. Gor was no longer in sight. He thought he heard a shuffling footstep. Somewhere on the other side of the court. Obviously, poor old Gor scuffling around. The regent shivered. Partly in unease, partly in pleasure. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing that wretched thin-faced fellow again, if he was still alive. At the same time, if he could get the Guild back into the fellow’s good graces, perhaps there’d be more jobs down the road. More of that gold. Lovely gold. Beautiful, gorgeous, ravishing gold.

“Nimman Botrell.”

The regent shouted in alarm and jumped back. Which wasn’t far, as the pillar stopped him cold. His heart leapt in his chest and hammered down, hard and gasping for blood. Something shifted in the shadows.

“Who’s there?” he quavered.

“Nimman Botrell.”

The voice was husky and creaky, as if it had not been used for a while.

“How do you know my name?” said Botrell wildly. He could see nothing except shadows. Shadows and stone and the cold blue light of the torches. But he could smell something. A rotten, damp stench.

“How do I. . .?” The voice trailed off in amused perplexity. “Ah, you’re warded. You think it guards you. But what is a ward? Just another skin to be peeled back, scraped off. Gnawed away.”

Something moved again in the shadows. A slow, shuffling footstep. A figure emerged from the darkness. The figure of a man. But then Botrell felt his skin begin to prickle and crawl. There was something dreadfully wrong with the man. The arms hung down, slack and inert. The head lay hunched down in the shoulders as if he lacked the energy to hold it erect. Water dripped from his fingers, and Botrell realized with a shudder that this dripping was what he had heard before. The smell grew stronger. The man took another slow step forward and Botrell saw something else. The man’s flesh faded away into nothingness here and there, into shadow. Into wet shadow. As if he were made of some terrible mix of flesh and water and shadow.

“Darkness,” said the man, smiling a bit. His teeth seemed overly long. “I’m woven of flesh, water, and darkness. It’s an uneasy mix and it makes me hungry. It’s been a while since I have eaten.”

“How can you read my mind?” Botrell gasped. “Who are you?”

“I read your mind? I didn’t realize. I’m full of spells, and I breathe them in and out like air. There’s no telling what might happen.” The man paused here and tilted his head to one side as if listening. Water ran off the edge of his jaw and spattered on the floor. “Nimman Botrell, regent, Silentman. I think you have my master’s gold. Yes, that’s it. That's what he's thinking. Sometimes I can't tell. Sometimes, I think, he's forgotten me. What do you have for him? Speak.”

The man shuffled a step closer. And then another. Much too close.

“The boy!” gabbled Botrell. “He’s here!”

“The boy?”

The man leaned forward, as if to peer more fully into Botrell’s face. He gazed for a moment. His eyes caught the regent’s frantic stare, and Botrell found that he could not look away. It felt as if he were being pulled forward, like being caught in the steady suck of quicksand. Wet and strangling and choking. Inescapable. Surely he would be pulled down. He would drown.

The man sighed and released him. It was a soft, hungry sigh.

“And the man!” said Botrell. “Declan Farrow. He’s here too. Both in the castle. They arrived just this night.”

“Ah. Both of them.” The man nodded. He smiled slightly. His head tilted to one side as if he was listening to something. Water dripped from his fingertips. From the end of his nose.

“My lord,” said Gor, hurrying around the pillar. He froze at the sight of the man standing before them. The man’s gaze slid to Gor and then back to the regent.

He nodded, more water dripping. “You were wise to come down here. My master is pleased.”

“I have a question about the gold,” said Botrell. But then he shut his mouth, because the man took another shuffling step forward.

“You’ll take me to them,” he said. “Now.”

Jute woke up with a start. He sat up in bed, not sure where he was for a moment. Then he remembered. Moonlight slanted in through the window. The night was silent. But something had jarred him awake. Perhaps a dream. His mind felt thick and slow with sleep. The room lay around him in perfect repose: the columns of the bed, the table bearing its mug and pitcher of water, the wardrobe in the corner. But something was different.

Something.

The smell.

A stench of wet, decaying things. For an instant he was back in the cellar. So long ago. Back in the cellar, on his knees and staring down the hole in the floor. Darkness and water and the cold touch of the wihht.

The wihht.

Jute jumped out of bed. He tripped over his knapsack and grabbed his boots. The hawk came awake on his perch above the wardrobe.

What. . .?

The wihht!
Jute shouted in his mind. Not caring what was listening.
The wihht! Somewhere close! And getting closer fast!

The hawk was motionless for one second.
Get out! Get out now!
His voice hammered in Jute’s mind. The bird hurled himself off the wardrobe and through the half-open windows with one beat of his wings. Out into the darkness before the dawn. Jute stumbled after him. But the windows were closing. Swinging shut. Slammed shut with a bang.

“Help! Oh, preserve us!” The ghost appeared in a glimmer of light.

“Hush,” whispered Jute. “Go wake Declan. Immediately.”

“First you tell me to hush. Then you tell me to go wake up Declan, which will undoubtedly involve noise. I don’t—”

“The wihht’s here.”

“Mercy!” The ghost vanished.

Jute crept out into the common room. He touched the handle on the door leading to the hallway. Turned it gently. It was locked. The door to Declan’s room swung open.

“The wihht?” said the man.

“Yes. And the door’s locked. And the windows.”

Get out! Get out now!

We’re trying,
said Jute furiously in his mind
. Easy for you to say!

“Glass can break,” said Declan. “It’ll make a tremendous sound, but that doesn’t matter now.”

“No.” Jute eyed the painting over the fireplace. It was barely visible in the weak morning light, but it seemed as if the old man had a much nastier smile on his face than before.

In one swift movement, Declan drew his sword and slammed the hilt against the window. The noise was appalling. It resounded in the room like a stone giant clapping his hands. But the window did not break. Declan spun away from it, wincing and almost dropping his sword.

“It’s warded,” he said. “A binding ward. There’s no way I could break that.”

Get out!

What do you suggest? The door’s locked and warded. The windows are locked and warded!

There was a moment of silence, and then the hawk answered.

The fireplace.

Jute dove for the fireplace like a rat bolting for its hole, with Declan hard on his heels. The coals in the grate were still hot. The insides of the fireplace were thick with soot. But the interior of the chimney was wide. Thankfully wide. Jute reached up, scrabbling for a hold where the chimney narrowed. It was too high. Just beyond his fingertips.

“I need a leg up,” said Jute.

Behind them, in the room, they heard the creak of a handle turning.

“Climb!” screamed the ghost from somewhere above them, his voice echoing in the chimney. Jute stood on Declan’s knee, jammed his elbows against the sooty bricks, and hoisted himself up. He reached down and Declan grabbed onto his hand. Hauled up, his joints popping, he felt skin scrape off against brick, and then they were both wedged in the chimney. Jute began to climb. Quickly. As fast as he had ever climbed. Up through the choking darkness. Up through the soot flaking off under his boots, his hands, his elbows. He could scarcely breathe, gagging on the stink of old burnt feathers and soot. He could hear Declan several feet below him.

What if it’s too narrow at the top? said a voice inside his mind.

Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up!

He almost screamed it out loud, but stopped himself, clenching his teeth. Trying not to think of the chimney narrowing. Shrinking. Strangling. Closing in like a tomb. Far below them, down in the darkness of the room, Jute heard a footstep in the coals of the grate. The coals crunching into powder. He knew there were eyes down there looking up. He heard a trickling sound as if water was pooling in some place. Filling up. Rising higher. Lapping against the bricks. Rising up the chimney.

Soot fell away on either side of him. His fingers slipped on greasy brick, scrabbling to find holds in the cracks. His arms ached.

“Faster,” said Declan from below, his voice tight and brittle. “There’s something coming up the chimney after us.”

Jute didn’t bother responding. He didn’t trust himself to speak. He knew he’d probably end up screaming or crying or gibbering like a lunatic. He tried to remember what floor their rooms were on. How many floors did the castle have? How far did they have to climb?

They climbed in complete darkness, clinging to the fact that up meant freedom and that any slackening in their speed brought the wihht closer. The air became colder as the seconds flitted by, and it no longer smelled of soot but stank of damp, rotting things. It smelled of the wihht. He was down there. Climbing, or somehow rising with the water or the darkness that welled from his body as if from some dark and dreadful spring.

“Jute.”

The voice was horribly familiar. It wavered up from below. “Falling down chimneys again. Down into the Dark. You stole my knife. It belonged to me. It belonged to the Dark. But it’s no good now. You took the death in it and made it your life. But we’ll take your life and make it death. You aren’t the anbeorun yet, boy. You never will be. The wind hasn’t woken in you. I’ll have your blood and your eyes before that happens. Your eyes in my hand. I’ll have you blind in the dark.”

Jute whimpered and climbed faster, desperate for air, the sky, the wind on his face. Desperate to get away from the voice and what must assuredly be darkness and water rising higher and higher in the chimney beneath him.

“Darkness is a place, boy. A nightmare. A word. Darkness was a star falling from the house of dreams. Darkness is the taste in a dead man’s mouth. Darkness is the watcher in the dark.”

Unbidden, the hawk’s words rose in Jute’s memory.

Deep within the darkness,

Further e’en the void,

Nokhoron Nozhan built himself a fortress of night.

But then the darkness was not so dark anymore, and there was a cleaner taste to the air. Something stirred against Jute’s face. A slight touch. The breeze. He looked up and, half-crying, almost laughing in astonishment, he saw a small square of dark blue speckled with tiny shards of light more beautiful than diamonds. Stars. He burst out into the fresh air, into the cold touch of the wind, out into the last hour of night before the morning. He tumbled over the side of the chimney and slid down to the roof a few feet below. Declan jumped down after him in a shower of soot and then they ran. Away from the chimney. Away from the darkness creeping up toward the top. They stumbled along the ridge of the roof. Past other chimneys and the stone walls of towers and turrets rising here and there from the long, squat body of the castle. Behind them, they heard a hissing snarl. Jute glanced over his shoulder as he ran and saw an inky darkness billowing up out of the chimney. Tendrils unfurled from it, wavering into the sky. It looked like a hideous, giant hand, and in its palm as it reached for them, two eyes stared.

“Run!” screamed Jute.

“Extraordinary,” said the ghost, appearing. “The view up here is extraor—” It turned and saw the hand of darkness stretching out of the chimney, groping along the top of the ridge toward them at a terrible speed. “Runrunrun you fools!” screamed the ghost.

Tiles snapped and clattered beneath their feet. The walls fell away on either side, down three stories to the castle gardens below. Several guards trudging along a path beside the wall looked up with astonished faces.

“We’re out of roof,” said Declan.

And there was the end, an end to the ridge, to the tiles, and instead of more roof to sprint along, panting and gasping, the cream-colored stone walls descended to what looked like a rose garden planted around a fountain.

“There’s ivy growing up the wall,” said the ghost. It was floating several feet out from the edge of the roof and was able to see from this vantage. Declan flung himself on his stomach and peered down.

“So there is. Thank you, ghost.”

Declan went first, lowering himself from the eaves until he could grab hold of the thick vines of the ivy. He swarmed down, with Jute right after him. The boy craned his head back, sure the enormous hand was about to curl its fingers over the eaves and come walking down the wall toward them. A crow exploded out of the ivy beside him, cawing and complaining. Jute clambered down, grabbing for new holds on the ivy without looking. Fumbling through the vines. Sweat ran cold on his body.