Winterveil (7 page)

“Welcome back,” said Silas, holding his dagger barely a hair's breadth from Gorrett's left eye. “You are a parasite feeding off my country and killing it from the inside. I could tear your soul from your chest and send it into the darkest pit of existence that your nightmares cannot imagine. Do not test me again. You will die when these men have no more use for you. Until then . . .”

Silas dragged Gorrett down from the table and let him fall hard upon the floor. “You saw this man attempt to take a councilman's life,” he said as wardens converged upon the prisoner. “Interrogate him. If he will not speak . . . force the truth from him.”

“Albion will fall!” Gorrett coughed and struggled weakly as his hands were bound behind his back. “This city is ours now.”

One of the wardens bent to pull the blade from Gorrett's useless ankle.

“Leave it,” said Silas, remembering his own treatment during his time as a Blackwatch prisoner. “The Blackwatch enjoy causing pain. Make sure he suffers plenty of it in return.”

“You should not have been here!” Gorrett shouted as he was dragged away. “You were supposed to have been kept away!”

Silas waited for the doors to close, then stabbed the bloodied dagger deep into the table and left it there while the remaining councilmen stared at it, nervously taking their seats. Even the outspoken newcomer sat down, his lips quivering in response to the brutality he had just witnessed.

“Now I have your attention.” Silas tugged his coat sleeves back into place, his fine appearance giving no sign that he had almost killed a man. “We can continue to distrust each other, or we can work together and get things done. Decide quickly.”

The man whose life Silas had saved spoke slowly, rubbing a hand protectively over his throat. “What could you possibly need from us?” he asked.

“I need wardens on guard in every town from the southern coast to the High North. Wherever they are posted, they need to be seen. If we have soldiers nearby, send word that we need more men here in the city. Let the enemy know that challenging us will not be an easy fight. I want every warden to man these walls, scour them for hidden breaches, and make sure every entrance to the Thieves' Way and the City Below is watched at all times. As you have seen, the Blackwatch are already here. The Continental army will not be far behind. Let us give them a fight to remember.”

“And you?” asked the councilman. “You expect us to let you go free, after everything you have done?”

“I am already free,” said Silas. “My loyalty is to Albion, not to you. I came here because you appear incapable of doing your duty. Do not try to prevent me from doing mine.”

The warden who had been the first to stand beside Edgar stepped forward. “I will send word to the towns and recall the Night Train,” he said. “The officers will do as you have ordered.”

“Take the council to a safe place,” said Silas. “They are our enemies' primary target, and it will do the people no good to see their leaders fall.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can't do this!” protested the loud councilman. “
We
make the decisions here, Officer Dane.”

“When you finally make a decision, perhaps someone will listen to it,” said Silas. “Until then, keep quiet and you may stay alive.”

The wardens retrieved their weapons and escorted the High Council out of the room, but before the new member could leave, Silas ordered the warden with him to wait. He walked up to the councilman and stood over him, a full head and shoulders taller than the frightened man.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to throw you out that window and claim you jumped to your death through cowardice and fear,” he said. “I had no argument with you before I stepped into this room. Speak to me the way you did here again, and I will tear out your fingernails and gut you in front of the men you seem so eager to impress.”

The councilman shrank before him. He tried to speak, but fear would not let the words come out.

“A prisoner is about to be interrogated,” Silas said to the warden. “I think a representative of the council should be there to witness his confession and listen to any information he may share.”

The councilman's eyes widened in shock at the thought of being present at an interrogation, and the warden could not quite hide his smile. “I will escort him to the cells at once,” he said.

The man was led roughly out of the room and taken in the opposite direction from the others. The doors fell closed, and Silas and Edgar were left alone.

“I think that went well,” said Edgar.

Silas took his sword from Edgar's hands. “They think I am wrong,” he said. “They will deny there is any threat until the first arrow flies over the walls.”

“Do you think the wardens will follow your orders?”

“Most of these men have known me longer than you have been alive. They will follow my word out of respect. The others would not dare to defy me.” Silas walked to the window and looked out over the eastern half of the city. “Fume is not prepared for an attack. Its people have become complacent.”

From the window, Silas could see memorial towers rising over the moonlit city like giants striding through the streets. Every one of them was different, but one tower in particular caught his attention. Its stones were edged with silver and looked as though the cracks between them were belching smoke. The meeting hall's window began to rattle. Tiny cracks veined through imperfections in the glass, and the air around the distant tower filled with the shadowy forms of the dead.

Whatever was happening inside that tower, the shades of Fume were retreating from it like wolves from a fire. Their hazy forms drifted above the surrounding streets, until something powerful shifted within the veil. The air filled with sudden pressure, and the smoke blasted outward, sending the surrounding souls fleeing in fear.

“Get away from the window,” snapped Silas. “Now!”

Edgar ran for the table and slid under it as the entire pane exploded inward, sending shattered glass spearing across the room. Silas had turned away, but slivers of glass embedded themselves in the side of his neck and bristled down the back of his arm. Shouts carried up from the city, and Silas heard the screams of hundreds of shades, desperate to escape the smoke. To his eyes, the streets blackened as phantom souls washed through them, pouring from the area around the tower and heading toward the edge of the city. There they collided with one another, unable to breach the boundary created by Fume's outer walls, making the stones surge with energy that reverberated through the city as a sickly whisper of terror.

“What was that?” asked Edgar, scrambling out from his hiding place, trying not to cut his palms on the glass.

Silas raised his chin and plucked shards out of his neck, already making his way to the meeting room door. Edgar noticed that his eyes had lost their usual gray and looked instead like ominous puddles of black. He had never seen Silas's eyes do that.

“Is your neck all right? Do you want me to get someone to . . .” Edgar's voice petered out; he was not expecting an answer. He couldn't tell if Silas was angry about being caught by the shattering window or about whatever he had seen happen outside it.

Silas pulled more glass out of his arm and dropped a handful of shards on the floor before rubbing a slick of blood from his neck. The cuts were healing, but his vision blackened until the corridor ahead of him appeared heavy and oppressive. It looked as if the walls were preparing to crumble in upon themselves, ready to crush anyone who passed that way. It was a feeling Silas had experienced before, but it had been years—more than a decade—since he had managed to force it to the back of his mind.

He was seeing that corridor through the eyes of his torn soul, the lost part of his spirit that was trapped within the horrifying depths of the veil. His mind was layering the horror of his soul's prison over what his eyes could see in the physical world. He felt the familiar claws of madness scratching through his thoughts, and it took a huge effort of will to silence the rising anger and terror that spread from a place no human eyes should ever have seen. He felt the creeping touch of lost souls scratching and blistering beneath his skin. The screams that never died. The vast open chill of the black. In that place, madness was the only way out, death was unreachable, and ravaged souls hoped only for oblivion.

Silas knew that place too well. Dalliah's spirit had been torn the same way his had been. If she saw the same horrors when she closed her eyes, he understood her need to bring it to an end: to tear down the veil, reclaim her soul, and hope that death would finally accept her before the black dragged her back down. Silas had endured twelve years of torment. Dalliah had survived centuries. Whatever release she needed, no matter how misguided her methods, he understood her need to escape.

Edgar could tell that something was wrong, but he waited for Silas's eyes to settle back to gray before stepping too close. “The window,” he said quietly. “Was that Dalliah?”

“It is not Dalliah you should be worried about,” said Silas. “This was too much, even for her. The veil is being torn apart. This is Kate Winters's doing.”

7

WHAT LIES BENEATH

W
hile Dalliah collected her belongings in the tower, Kate slipped the discovered note safely between the pages of
Wintercraft
. The two of them descended the steps together, and Dalliah noticed immediately that the key was missing from Ravik's bones.

“Unlock the door,” she said.

Kate pulled out the hidden key, and they stepped outside. The streets were in uproar. People were wandering around. Some were bloodied and confused, others simply angry at the damage caused to their homes as windows stood cracked or smashed within their frames.

“Our work may have attracted some unwanted attention,” said Dalliah. “If I had known you would be so effective, I would not have used so much of your blood.”

“That spirit's life did not have to end that way,” said Kate.

“Its true life was over long ago.”

“What about Ravik's life?”

Dalliah shot Kate a pointed look. “He should not have defied me.”

Dalliah secured her bag alongside the Blackwatch package on her saddle, held Kate's horse still while she climbed up, then mounted her own horse and looped both sets of reins around her wrist.

They rode on toward the center of the city until a disturbance blocked the street ahead, forcing them to slow down. A clutch of private carriages was parked in the center of the road; each was covered with bags and boxes stuffed with expensive items that were strapped onto every piece of available space. Dozens of families were attempting to leave the city, only to find their path blocked by other carriages belonging to people who were still packing.

“Back!” shouted one of the carriage drivers, brandishing his whip and making his horse stamp. “Clear the streets!”

Angry people shouted back, many of them insulted at being told what to do.

“Petty, worthless arguments,” said Dalliah. “They are too caught up in their small lives to understand what is happening around them.”

Kate's horse stayed close to Dalliah's as they moved through the crowds, passing through narrow spaces between buildings where carriages could not reach. When they emerged onto a wide road covered in shattered glass, Kate's horse tugged against Dalliah's grip, and Kate struggled to stay in the saddle as it backed away from a commotion flaring up ahead.

People were staring down an adjoining street, where shouts and fast hoofbeats were echoing loudly from the walls, and a gray horse bolted powerfully out of the shadows, dragging a carriage behind it. The driver was not quite solid enough to pass as one of the living. He was dressed in brown robes, his eyes wild with terror, his mouth open in a scream as he drove the vehicle along its ghostly path. Waves of silver fire poured from the windows on either side of the carriage, but instead of passengers Kate spotted a stack of coffins inside, every one of them crackling with flame.

People fled from the eerie vehicle as it burned down the street, turned a corner in the opposite direction to the curve of the road, and vanished through the front wall of a grand house. For a moment everyone who had witnessed it just stared. Kate had become used to seeing shades, but the coach and driver were clearer than any apparitions she had ever seen.

Once their minds had caught up with the evidence of their own eyes, people burst into action, even more desperate to leave that place behind. Dalliah bullied the two horses along, not caring whom she might trample beneath their hooves as the crowd parted to let her pass, but one man was too busy staring at something behind them to move. When Dalliah's horse knocked into his shoulder, he barely noticed. Kate turned to see what he was looking at and spotted the shade of a black-robed warden standing right in the middle of the road. She knew that face. His teeth were black and twisted, his skin was stained with pale mud.

“I remember
you,
girlie.”
The warden's robes were worn and tattered, and a slit over his heart oozed with dark blood.
“I'm not finished with you yet.”

“Kalen?”

Kate's horse worried and fought against its reins as the man walked toward them. He shuffled forward on rag-wrapped feet, leaving footprints of ghostly blood on the ground behind him.

“Ya'll regret what ya did to me. I'll make ya scream before the end, just like yer daddy did.”

Kate could hear his rasping breathing, even though he was long dead. Dalliah stopped the horses and turned to see Kalen for herself.

“Ya know what's comin',”
said Kalen.
“Ya can feel it.”

“Leave us,” Dalliah said, treating Kalen like some kind of stray animal. “Go.” Kalen looked up at Dalliah as if he had not noticed she was there and stopped walking at once. “Our history can always find us in the veil,” she said to Kate. “Now is not the time for unfinished business.”

“Why can we see him?” asked Kate.

“Souls have long memories,” said Dalliah. “Hate can feed their anger for a very long time.”

“He has no reason to hate me.”

“His hate is not drawing him here. Your hate is doing that,” said Dalliah. “This is what drives many of the Skilled into madness when the veil is weakened. Ordinary people see random souls, but the Skilled attract those whose deaths they have touched. At least you remember him.” Dalliah looked away and snapped the horse's reins. “That is a good sign.”

Kate noticed the sharpness in Dalliah's voice. Kate had said too much, and she knew it.

Kalen's spirit voice echoed around the street. “
Ya won't chase me off!
”

Dalliah and Kate rode on, but Kalen kept moving. Kate saw his essence disappear from the living world and thought he was gone, until cold hands gripped her ankle and Kalen's soul tried to sink beneath her skin.

Kate screamed and kicked out. Her boot connected where Kalen's face should have been, and he twisted away, lost in a burst of writhing mist.

“Unwanted souls can be difficult to deal with,” said Dalliah, stirring the horses to a faster trot. “It takes a strong will to see them off. I am impressed.”

Small clusters of people were crying, staring, holding on to their children, and trying to reassure each other that what they had seen could not possibly have been real. Just a few months ago Kate would have doubted her own eyes as well, but she saw the look of triumph on Dalliah's face as they passed by. Somehow, this was all part of her plan. She wanted chaos. She wanted the people of Albion to be afraid.

The streets surrounding the lake were in a part of Fume that was ill kempt and run down. The small district was a warren of alehouses and shops. The smell of straw and stale alcohol overwhelmed everything, and the people there had locked themselves in their homes and the alehouses to escape the commotion outside. These were the servants' streets. Litter blew through the gutters, and tattered banners hung down from every gable, each cloth roughly painted with a blue eye. The horses shied as the banners snapped in the wind, and Dalliah told Kate to dismount. It would be easier to lead the beasts from now on.

“I see people have not yet let go of their superstitions,” she said. “The dead are not interested in pointless pieces of cloth.”

“It's a tradition,” said Kate, who had often hung banners in memory of her parents during the Night of Souls.

“It is a way for the living to calm their fears and believe they are still in control. The dead are not listening. Either they have moved on to the next life, or they are tormented by their own doubts, fears, and grief. They do not care how many candles are lit in their memory or how many whispers are shared in their name. The dead are lost. They cannot aid us any more than we can help them. It is foolish to believe otherwise.”

The book hidden in Kate's coat felt heavier the farther they walked. The pages trembled gently, as if an insect were thrumming its wings together beneath the fabric. She pressed her hand against it to make it stop and spotted movement in a window as she and Dalliah passed. She saw a figure in the glass, there and gone again in an instant, but there was something very familiar about it.

“Keep moving,” said Dalliah.

They left the horses and walked down a flight of shallow steps squeezed in between two leaning buildings whose rooftops almost touched above their heads. The effects of the veil were much weaker there. Kate could not see anything out of the ordinary, until the steps led down through a low stone arch and opened out onto the edge of one of Fume's most spectacular sights.

The Sunken Lake was a huge expanse of deep, clear water. The dying light gave the appearance of gentle waves shifting upon its surface, and small boats bobbed and scraped against one another around a little dock that was crossed with old chains. The banks were gently curved and lined with gray stone, but the water level was far lower than the land around it, exposing ruined pieces of Fume's history jutting from the mud along the water's edge. The stony arms of broken statues reached out of the earth, and what could have been pieces of railway track glinted in long layers where rain had washed the mud away.

“People are rarely interested in what lies under their feet,” said Dalliah. “In my time, the spirit in the next wheel was so powerful that people suffered nightmares from being too close to it. Its anger leached into sleepers' unconscious minds and tormented them. The wheel was lost centuries ago, but my people found it beneath the waters of the lake and raised it. I have not been able to study it myself. Two men died dragging it out of the water, and three more survived only a day after moving it. The spirit inside is damaged but strong. You will need to be careful. Do not touch the stones until I instruct you to do so.”

“Where is the wheel now?”

“The first two men collapsed dead on the bank as soon as it touched dry land. The others fell sick almost immediately, but they managed to move it. There.” Dalliah pointed to a small square building that seemed to cower in the shadow of the larger buildings nearby. While the others looked occupied, this one had long been left alone. Its small door was stripped bare, and its oval windows were glazed in blue. If Dalliah had not drawn her attention to it, Kate would not have given it a second look.

“Why did they put it there?” she asked.

“That is the records house,” said Dalliah, “where the bonemen recorded the names and details of every dead body and every soul that entered this city. There were trees here once. The records house stood alone upon the bank, and it was a beautiful, peaceful place. Now it is surrounded by people and stone.” She stood quietly, letting her thoughts carry her briefly into memories of a different time. “The spirit wheel used to be inside, until a new owner decided to remove it and throw it into the lake. That was during the early days of the High Council's occupation. But the wheels are not meant to be moved. Each one was placed in a particular location for a reason. My men retrieved it eighty years ago. The wheel is back where it belongs.”

“And now you are going to kill the spirit in it,” said Kate, trying hard to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“I sealed it in there,” said Dalliah. “It is mine to do with as I wish.”

Despite Dalliah's warnings, all Kate felt while walking up to that house was sadness. Movement flickered in windows as she passed, and where there was no glass a shadow that was too large to be her own crossed the empty frames. She could sense eyes watching her as she walked up to the records house, and when she passed in front of one of the blue panes, she saw the presence clearly: a man with silver eyes, too solid to be a shade, too ghostly to be a piece of Fume's history revealing itself to living eyes. The book in her pocket trembled again. She had seen this man before. He was one of her ancestors and one of
Wintercraft
's first book bearers. Whenever Kate walked a path that he had once taken with the book, she sometimes saw him as a memory locked within the pages. Now he was much clearer than she had seen him before.

The lake behind him in the pale reflection was filled right to the edges, and the trees Dalliah had spoken of were planted in copses around the water. Few of the buildings were visible, leaving gravestones and towers stretching as far as she could see. The man glanced slowly at Dalliah, then stepped back, fading out of sight.

Dalliah did not have a key to the records house. She did not need one. The wood swung back freely, and the space beyond looked exactly as it must have looked to the men who had moved the wheel. There were shelves everywhere. Some held long boxes meant for holding maps and scrolls, while others were filled with small cabinets whose keys had been left rusting in the locks. Two thick tables stood against one wall, on either side of a blocked fireplace, and at the very back of the room a circular space had been cut out of the wall and filled with more shelves, which were stacked with the moldering remains of old ledgers so fragile that just attempting to open one would make it crumble at once.

A few feet from the door, a spirit wheel had been laid unceremoniously on the floor. The stone was at least three feet thick, and the circle was almost exactly as wide—much larger than the wheel in Ravik's tower. This wheel had been retrieved from the lake and then abandoned before it could be returned to its proper place within the wall. Kate stood over it. Nothing moved. Not even a flicker of light stirred in the spaces between the tiles.

“This one has been waiting for us,” said Dalliah. “The only people alive who can free it from that stone are here in this room. It will try to tempt you. It will try to trick you. Do not listen to it.”

“Murder.”
The word filled the room, trembled from the walls, and a rush of air ruffled through the pages of the books on the shelves, scattering them into fibers that choked the air.

The wheel remained still, and for the first time Kate saw Dalliah look slightly surprised.