Winterveil (13 page)

 

“Ravik Marr?” Tom suddenly looked even more interested. “Da'ru used to talk about him. He was her grandfather or great-grandfather. A powerful Skilled in his day.”

“I don't think he lived very long after writing this,” said Artemis, continuing to read.

 

My work in the Fourth Tower has come to an end. Dalliah knows I have turned against her. I have refused her final orders and found no way to escape. It is only a matter of time before her agents come for me.

During my imprisonment, I have spoken with the spirit sealed within the wheel. It has offered glimpses of a future that shall occur less than one century from my death. If the visions are correct, a book bearer will find this note when the bonds upon the veil begin to fall. I only hope it is not too late to share what I have discovered.

 

Wintercraft
was already an uncomfortable weight in Artemis's hands. Now it felt like a stone.

 

You cannot prevent what is happening. If I am right, the lake will have risen, the old city will begin shaking off the stones of the new, and the souls within the walls shall awaken. The old families placed safeguards within the city to help balance the chaos of what is to come. You, book bearer, are one of those safeguards.

 

Artemis's hands were shaking a little, but he read on, keeping the next lines to himself. The final section had been written much more carefully, its letters formed with great precision.

 

You must carry the book with you. It cannot be left behind. The soul within it must be returned to its resting place. The Winters tower is where the past must be put to rest.

 

Tom waited to hear more. “What does the rest of it say?” he asked.

Artemis let the note fall closed. “It says I have to follow Kate.” He tucked the note back into the book and closed it gently, not wanting to let the spirits in the room see Ravik Marr's final words. Artemis's idea of what was and was not possible had shifted greatly in recent months. He had worked with books all his life, and the idea of a soul's being locked inside the pages he was holding, while certainly disturbing, did not seem as unlikely as it once might have.

The surface of the water rippled with tiny waves, and Artemis made for the door, carrying
Wintercraft
with him. “It's too cold to stay in here,” he said. “We need to go.”

“
Artemis
. . .”

The voice chilled him. He did not have to look down to know that the silver eyes were still close by.

Tom dropped down into the water and beat him to the door. A drift of warm air passed across their faces, and the lake receded slowly, its waters dragging at their legs until they were walking on relatively dry ground.

“I've never seen water do that before,” said Tom.

“Nor have I,” Artemis said warily.

The shifting water had exposed part of the upper lake edge, allowing them to climb safely back to the streets. The shades were still standing around the water, but Artemis made a point of not looking at them as the lake surged in to fill the path behind them.

“What do we do when we find Kate?” asked Tom.

“We find out what is happening and we get her out of it.
I'll
get her out of it. You will be hidden somewhere so that I know you are safe.”

“Like out here, you mean? With them?” Tom raised his eyebrows, unimpressed by that plan.

The lakeside was certainly not a place anyone would want to be alone in the dark. There was something disturbing about the way the shades watched them walk by. They were distant but alert, and their forms faded smoothly into the water whenever Artemis limped close to them.

The Winters tower loomed up ahead, easily dwarfing the other towers around it, even in its broken state. His parents had told stories about it when he was young. They had talked about the pride of the Winters family and the secrets they had hidden away, not only in the book of Wintercraft, which had been missing for many years in his parents' time but in other places, like that tower, where his father believed time lost all meaning to those of Winters blood.

Artemis had never taken those stories as anything more than fables, but believing in them was what had eventually led his brother to his death. Now, standing within sight of the tower itself, Artemis wished he had paid more attention to his parents' words.

When the two of them reached the point where Kate and Dalliah had headed into the streets, the sky in the east glowed with soft orange light. Artemis ignored it, believing it to be the first light of sunrise. When the sky faded unexpectedly back to black, he glanced at the rooftops, where another fiery glow soon followed the first. This one was higher up, like an orange star that rose straight up before sinking back down into the city. A faint sound echoed from the towers: a heavy sound that reverberated like a beaten drum.

Artemis kept walking, not knowing what he had just witnessed.

The walls of Fume were under attack. The battle for the city had begun.

13

MESSENGERS OF WAR

I
n the east, a street was licked by fire. The air filled with the smell of foul smoke, and a fiery mass smoldered where it had become embedded in the side of a tower. Plumes of smoke rose like fingers from the city's surrounding walls. The narrow walkways within them flickered with firelight, and flames spread along them like sparks along a fuse wire, forcing night servants and slaves to run down the spiral staircases into the city, fleeing for their lives.

Distant screams carried across the city, and wardens moved through the streets in packs, their black robes sweeping back to expose the leather armor beneath. Every one of them was heavily armed as they forced their way up onto the burning walls, passing the servants streaming down.

Beyond the walls, organized ranks of Continental soldiers had gathered out of arrow shot. The network of watchmen stationed along Albion's coast had failed. No birds had carried messages of an incoming enemy attack, and the Wild Counties were vast enough for any number of soldiers to pass through unseen. The High Council would never have expected more than a thousand men to appear at the gates within the space of a day. Silas was the only one who had ever planned for such a direct assault. Now he had been proved right.

The black-clothed enemy had reached the city before the wall guards could raise the alarm. The wardens were vastly outnumbered, but the officers listened to Silas's warning as word of it carried through their ranks. The order to prepare for battle had spread quickly through the city, calling every warden into his defensive position. During his time as warden leader, Silas had ordered the wardens to train for a city attack twice a year, and that training sharpened every officer's mind now that the enemy truly was at the gates. Even though Silas was not there in person, the wardens followed his orders as diligently as if he were shouting them from a tower top:

 

Five men to a battle group.

Secure the section of wall under greatest threat.

Send teams to the gate farthest from the attack, and defend in case of possible infiltration.

Execute, imprison, and contain.

 

Runners lit beacon fires at strategic positions on rooftops across the eastern city and scattered copper filings upon them whenever an enemy was spotted within their lines of sight. The copper-tainted flames burned green, allowing lookouts to identify the section of the wall most under threat.

As the wardens advanced, the city's remaining residents fled through the besieged streets, leaving their protectors to fight for their homes. Not one of them chose to pick up a weapon and defend himself. They were used to having people serve them. Now they expected wardens to die for them, as well.

The yellow moon moved behind a bank of heavy cloud as Continental soldiers converged upon the walls, bombarding the buildings beyond them from horse-drawn siege weapons loaded with fiery ammunition designed to tear into buildings and scatter destruction across the ground below.

Hot streaks cut through the air as arrows speared over the walls. The wardens took cover, and warden bowmen posted on the battlements soon returned fire. A handful of men fell, but most officers were practiced enough to hold their positions until the flurry of arrows gradually lessened and a loud thud announced the arrival of a battering ram at the eastern gate.

That sound was every Fume resident's nightmare. The gate shuddered, sending shivers through the mighty walls. The noise carried through the streets and was heard as far away as the central city square.

Thud.

Thud.

The gate groaned upon its hinges and resisted. It had been built to repel anything that was hurled against it, but this was its first true test. One sharp-eyed warden took up a position along the gate's approach, drew back his bow, and shot arrows cleanly between the bars, taking down three of the six soldiers operating the ram, while more wardens closed in upon the gate to help defend it.

The once-quiet city was alive with the sounds of battle. Spilled blood stained the ground and trickled in rivulets between the cobbles as more wardens fell. The sky became a hailstorm of arrows. Using their sheer numbers to their advantage, infantrymen used ropes to scale the walls and swarmed over the warden bowmen. Blades flashed along the battlements as the enemy killed their way along them, and buildings were cracked and torn by pitch-slicked boulders, lacing the streets with flames.

Worried that Silas's warning had come too late, lookouts stationed high above the action could not help glancing toward the northern horizon whenever they had the chance. The Night Train and its promise of reinforcements was still out there somewhere, but as the battle raged on, its bright light did not cut through the darkness. There was no sign of the engine, no sign of any assistance.

The wardens were alone.

 

In the deeper levels of the City Below, Silas felt the veil tremble as souls were delivered into it one by one. Death had spread across the streets above, but those whose lives were ending were not accepted easily into the peaceful unknown of the next world. The instability of the veil pulled them into the half-life instead.

Silas's connection to the veil allowed him to feel the final moments of every man slain above him. The more the veil weakened, the more the half-life shifted to overlap the living world—and the longer Kate and Dalliah were left to roam unchecked within the city, the worse it would become. Silas tried to close his mind to that part of his awareness and concentrated upon the task ahead of him.

The wardens of Feldeep were glad to have any reason to return to the surface, and when Silas told them of the impending attack, many of them had looked relieved. He had expected more of them to challenge his plan, but the current guards had been stationed there for months without relief. They were tired of the dark and more than ready to return to the city. Prisoner or guard, Silas knew what it was like to spend too long in that place. Officers were not meant to spend longer than a month at a time belowground, but these men had clearly been neglected by the council. Silas could understand their eagerness to be relieved of their posts.

After seeing the body of the dead warden, the remaining officers listened to Silas's orders without question. Although most were reluctant to allow the prisoners out of their cells, they still retrieved the keys when Silas demanded them, and a sense of anticipation moved through the prisoners sealed around the edges of that mighty chamber.

The siege had already begun. If there was to be any chance for the city, and for Albion, Silas had to move quickly. These people had been incarcerated for a long time. They wanted to breathe cool air and see the open sky. He had to convince at least some of them to do the very opposite of that. He hoped they would become fighters, but first they would be messengers.

The young warden handed Silas five iron rings, each hung with twenty keys. The other wardens stepped back and stood between Silas and the nearest cells as he walked around the chamber, surveying the men and women imprisoned there. They were quiet, but they were strong. When Silas spoke, he did not need to raise his voice. Everyone in the place was silent, attentive, and cautiously hopeful, listening for what he was about to say.

“You are one of Fume's greatest secrets,” he said. “Every one of you has been locked away by order of the High Council because they needed to keep you under control. There are trespassers among you, whisperers and thieves. But I am not interested in your stories. I do not care what your lives were before this day. Some of you know me as the officer who brought you to justice. Others will know of the cell hidden on a deeper level beneath us where I spent two years of my life ‘serving' the High Council with my blood and my bones.”

Edgar saw some hands shrink back from the bars as their owners remembered the days when Silas, too, was a prisoner: the echoes of torment and pain that filled the endless nights, the smell of seared flesh, and the terror of long months spent wondering if they would be next. Stories of Silas's time in that place were among the first shared with new prisoners. The denizens of Feldeep Prison could not fail to respect him for what he had endured.

“The High Council sent you here to forget who you are,” Silas continued. “Even when they planned to let you go, there would have been no escape. They promised you freedom when your sentence ended, but no one who leaves these walls ever returns to the life he left behind. The council would take every one of you and send you off to war rather than let you back into society. I have seen the hopes of ‘free' men and women fade when they are sent from the city to die upon an embattled shore. You are not waiting for freedom. You are waiting for death. I can offer you something different.”

Silas threw one of the key rings to the floor, and the sound echoed around the prison walls. “The High Council wants you to forget who you are. Now I want you to forget what you have done. Many of you have families within the city. Remember them now. The Continental army is here. Enemy soldiers are threatening our city, and I want you to help me stand against them. If Fume dies, everything you have lived for will die with it. I want you to fight. Not for the High Council. Not for the country that let you suffer in the dark. You must fight for yourselves, for the lives of the people you left behind, and for the streets you once called your home.”

A small voice seeped from one of the rear cells. “What about the army?” it asked. “And the wardens?”

“The army is not coming,” said Silas. “The wardens will fight to their last man, but it will not be enough.”

“And the people on the surface?” said a woman's voice. “Will they fight?”

“Many have already fled from the city,” said Silas. “They did not know about the attack. They were driven out by visions of the dead. I doubt those who are left behind have either the strength or the inclination to protect what is at stake.”

“Why come down here to us?” asked the woman. “Why should we fight if they won't?”

“Shut up!” a prisoner shouted a few cells away from Edgar. “Do you want him to change his mind?”

“I want him to be honest with us.”

“I need you to spread a message,” said Silas. “The people of the City Below can help us in this fight. They do not know what is happening above us. I need messengers to bring the people of the understreets to the surface. We need numbers. We need strength. The residents of the City Below will not listen to me. Your voices will carry far farther than mine alone.”

“And what happens after all this?” asked the woman. “The wardens got me once. How do I know they won't come after me again?”

Silas walked up to the woman's cell and looked in through the bars, forcing her to step back, any confidence she had shrinking away.

“You don't know that,” said Silas. “I am not here to pardon you for what you have done. I am here to recruit you. If you do what I ask, you have my word that no warden or collector will hunt you down until this crisis has passed. Beyond that, your life is your own responsibility. You will earn a short reprieve. I am not offering you protection. I am allowing you the chance to take responsibility for your own lives beyond this prison. Some of you will find your way back here, but others who embrace this opportunity will continue your lives in freedom. If Fume survives, you will live on knowing that you have earned every breath of clear air you breathe. If you continue to respect your country, the wardens will have no reason to come for you.” Silas found the ring with the woman's cell key on it and separated it from the rest. “Or you can turn down my offer, and I can remove your key from the ring along with that of anyone else who chooses to stay. Your cell will remain closed, and you will regret this night for the rest of your life. If the Blackwatch find you down here, I doubt you will have many hours left.”

The prison fell silent. No one moved. No one spoke. The wardens stood quietly, and Edgar saw the prisoners' nervous eyes wandering along the corridor. They had learned to be suspicious. None of them had any reason to trust anyone outside the boundaries of their own cells. The silence allowed the cries of the dying to creep back into Silas's mind. His fingers tensed, but only Edgar noticed the tiny glimmer of distraction in his eyes.

At last one voice spoke up as a prisoner pressed his face to the bars and asked the question Silas had been waiting to hear: “What do you want us to do?”

“These officers will unlock your cells,” said Silas. “Those who are strong enough will make their way out of here and head to the City Below. Once there, you will spread the word. Warn everyone you see that Fume is under threat. Call them into action. Tell them it is only a matter of time before the enemy reaches their home. They will not stop at the surface. They will seal off the tunnels and leave every soul down here to die. You will rally the people of the understreets to fight, and then you will join them. Lead them to the surface. Tell them to protect this city with every ounce of energy they have. This is no time for enmity between ourselves. We must fight as one, or we shall die as one. Tell them the wardens will stand with them. Fume needs us now. We will not let her down.”

For a short time no one spoke, and Silas felt the creeping fingers of the black spreading into his mind. His eyes darkened in the shadows as the veil edged closer to the living world, letting him see through the part of himself that was sealed away. Horrors bled into his mind like poison, but only Edgar noticed the change in him. When Silas's eyes became dark, Edgar knew something was happening, and he stepped forward. He took the keys from Silas's hand as if he had been ordered to do it and handed them out to the nearest wardens.

“You heard Officer Dane,” said Edgar. “Those who are with us, stand at the front of your cells or sit and raise your hand. Anyone who wants to stay here, turn away when an officer approaches. Take your positions now!”