Winterveil Page 4

  She would not let Dalliah take that away from her again.

  Kate stepped back into the inn to a spate of grumbles from a man disturbed by the cold from the door. He was about to complain to her directly, but one look at the figure in black was enough to make him think again. The girl standing by the door was not the same as the one who had stepped out of it. She held her head a little higher, her eyes were a little sharper, and one look at them made people feel exposed, as if she could peer into the well of their deepest secrets.

  The man lowered his head and pulled his collar up around his neck, while Kate sensed Dalliah’s presence descending the staircase before the woman stepped into view, no doubt to check upon the girl whose life she was so willing to trade in order to reclaim her own. The remnants of Silas’s influence still clung to the air, and he had left Kate with far more than just his memories. He had stoked the fire of rebellion within her, but she knew enough to take care around the woman. Silas had left her with a warning.

  “What are you doing, Kate?”

  Looking at Dalliah with veil-touched eyes was like looking at a phantom. Her living body was strong, but inside, the little that was left of her spirit was withered and worn, like a tree too often bent and twisted by the wind. Her soul was broken, but that alone should not have been enough to distort her essence in such a violent way. She had caused that damage to herself, during decades of experimentation and desperation. Dalliah’s will to survive had carried her for far longer than her physical body should have been able to endure, even with her connection to the restorative energies of the veil. Kate was surprised by the twisted sight before her, but she did not flinch, focusing instead upon Dalliah’s living form.

  “Someone thought they saw a warden outside,” said Kate. Since Silas had been in the village, there was just enough truth in her words to be convincing.

  “The wardens have no reason to waste their time on a place like this,” said Dalliah. “Do not get dragged into these people’s superstitions. Leave them to their useless lives and sit down.”

  Kate twisted her fingers into fists, but she did as she was told.

  “Something has changed,” said Dalliah, looking out of the window where the crow had been. “The dead are restless.”

  Some of the inn patrons looked at her, and the woman with the baby dared to speak up.

  “What’s that you’re sayin’ about the dead?”

  “Wait a few days,” Dalliah said, glancing coldly at the child. “You will see.”

  She sat down beside Kate, and the people in the room gradually sought comfort in their drinks, their dreams, and the quiet crackling of the fire.

  Kate did not have the luxury of ignorance any longer. Silas and Edgar were gone, and Dalliah Grey was a force beyond anything she had encountered before. Silas’s unspoken warning hung heavily within her thoughts.

  Face Dalliah with care. Overt disobedience will end in death.

  4

  THE GATES

  Silas’s battle horse pounded through the forest, thundering along a maze of overgrown smugglers’ trails and snapping through a wall of never-ending trees. The wilds raced by in a crackle of twigs. A waxing moon illuminated the stony sky, eventually giving way to the rising sun of a new day, and still the horse kept running. Silas rode with one hand on the reins and the other resting against his mount’s powerful neck, channeling the veil’s energy into the running beast. If its muscles tired, Silas’s influence kept them pumping, lending the horse a burst of new life, replenishing its aging bones and returning its old heart to the pounding strength of forgotten youth.

  Edgar gradually became used to the rhythm of the hooves striking the earth and the movement of the horse’s body as it broke out of the forest and into an open patchwork of what had once been ancient fields and hedgerows. Nature was already reclaiming what people had left behind. Neat boundary hedges had long since outgrown their straight lines and now spread outward into webs of evergreen touched with tips of white.

  Whenever they stopped during that second day, it was for only a few minutes at a time, allowing the horse to drink and giving Edgar time to forage for food while walking off the pain in his legs that came from riding for so long. Sluggish clouds blotted out what little sun the winter had to offer during the short day, and rain fell like a constant mist, clinging to their skin.

  Silas did not speak. Any questions Edgar asked were left unanswered, and they rode on, until the sun slipped once again toward the horizon and the high walls of Fume spread like a chain of black pearls in the distance.

  With the fiery sun behind it, the city looked like a dark crown upon the landscape. Its curved walls reached farther than the eye could see. Black towers bristled against the sky, silhouetted by burning clouds as their spires blotted out the light of the setting sun, and a wide river encircled it all like a fiery slick reflecting the orange clouds above.

  The road was exposed enough to be dangerous to anyone daring to ride so close to the ancient city. Watch posts bulged from Fume’s walls at equal intervals, and any gate guards on duty had orders not to let anyone inside without direct permission from the High Council itself. Travelers were almost always turned away, and those who challenged that decision often met their end at the point of a warden’s arrow.

  Once people made their homes in the capital, few ever had reason to leave the safety of its boundary again, yet it appeared that people had done so recently. Silas slowed the horse to a steady walk. He would have expected to see one or two trails, but the road was churned into a mess of hoofprints, wheel tracks, and bootprints, every one of them heading away from Fume. Many of the tracks were fresh. People had been leaving, this time by the hundreds.

  Edgar was dozing lightly behind Silas, staying just alert enough to keep himself from sliding off the horse. The crow had spent the entire journey shadowing them from high overhead, and when Silas stopped, it fluttered down and strutted across the ground, hunting for food in the dirt.

  Silas turned. “Wake up.”

  Edgar sat up, half asleep. “Why have we stopped?”

  “Something has happened in Fume.”

  Silas edged the horse forward a few steps and inspected the walls far ahead. He could not see anyone standing upon the watch posts. It was sundown. The guard should have been changing and the sentry lights should already have been lit. Silas knew every inch of that city: every alleyway, every patrol route, every rhythm. Just weeks ago he had been responsible for the movements of each warden within those walls. To him, any change in routine, no matter how small, was significant.

  “We will walk the rest of the way,” he said. “A horse like this will be noticed out here.”

  Edgar clambered down, remembering the last time he had seen the city from a distance, when he and Kate were being carried away from it against their will. He had seen too much during the past few days. All he wanted was for it to be over.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked as Silas unbuckled the saddle and pulled it loose.

  “We are going to find a way in.”

  Silas slid the bridle from the horse’s head and patted its flank. Remembering its training, the old battle horse took that as a signal to rest and wandered a little way off, into the night.

  The gates of Fume stood as imposing webs of ancient iron that reached even higher than their towering walls. Beyond those gates, the city was a haunting place. The windows of the memorial towers stared down like sunken eyes watching over a maze of stone streets. Gas lamps flickered and flared, illuminating roads that wound in upon one another, twisting between buildings that had been there since the city’s first days and past the newer houses of Albion’s richest families and their servants. The new veined deeply into what was left of the old, but the essence of the city remained just as it had been for centuries. Immovable. Eternal. A city of secrets.

  Fume was a place built for the dead, not for the living. It was the country’s capital, and Silas should have been there, protecting it. The day he turned
away from the High Council, he had been forced to abandon the place he had sworn to protect. Enemies had already spread into the arteries of the city. Dalliah Grey was not far away, and the wardens were making mistakes. It was time to put things right.

  One by one, the watch posts came to life. Guardrooms swelled with light, and silhouettes of wardens moved along pathways on the wall tops. Silas passed Edgar his dagger. “We will infiltrate one of the watch posts,” he said. “Make our way in over the walls.”

  “Over them? It would be easier to go under them.”

  “We do not have time for foolish ideas,” said Silas.

  “Maybe you don’t know as much about Fume as you think you do.”

  Silas regarded Edgar carefully.

  “Trust me. I have a better way in,” said Edgar.

  “Show me.”

  Edgar set off to walk the short distance to the city’s encircling river. As rain clouds lingered overhead, it was dark enough for them to go unnoticed so long as they did not move too quickly.

  Silas might have known how the wardens worked, but Edgar had a few tricks of his own. Every warden posted on the walls carried a light with him at all times. If you could see a lantern, a warden could see you. Edgar kept a close eye upon two fiery lights, waited for one to disappear into the shelter of a watch post, and tracked the second as it moved out of sight behind a raised section of the wall’s battlements. “Follow me.”

  He crouched at the edge of the riverbank and slithered down its steep side. A thin trail of bricks had been sunk into the mud beside the water, and he walked along them with Silas close behind. From what Edgar had heard, there were at least twenty secret tunnels beneath those walls; all he had to do was find one.

  The river was clean and webbed with ice along its shallower edges. The water rushed over layers of submerged rocks and splashed over Edgar’s boots as he picked his way along its slippery course. He was not sure what he was looking for, but as long as the bricks remained underfoot, he was sure he was heading the right way. He held on to the muddy banks for balance, and soon his fingers touched something that was not meant to be there. Pressed flat into the steep bank was a slab of stone caked in a layer of mud, and beside it was a slice of rusted metal.

  “This is it.” Edgar felt a sudden pang of guilt about showing Silas a pathway people had used to hide from him and his wardens. “Er . . . don’t tell anyone I told you about this,” he said.

  Silas’s wide shoulders blotted out the moonlight, and his eyes shone with a faint gray glow. “Your secret is safe,” he said, with the slightest hint of a smile.

  Edgar pulled at the metal door, and a glut of stale air gusted from a passageway on the other side. “The land out here is covered in graves,” he said. “People emptied a few of the larger crypts ages ago, hollowed them out, and cut tunnels into them.”

  “While no doubt casting any bones they found into the river,” Silas said with a hint of disgust. “I thought I had brought down the last of these passageways.”

  “You knew about them?”

  “Not all of them, clearly. I would have found this one, given time.”

  Silas bent down and entered a space that was too low for him to stand in, but high enough for someone to scramble along at speed if he needed to. The passageway was neatly made. The walls were perfectly straight, running directly toward the city, making it easy to navigate without a light. Edgar followed Silas inside, his boots squelching through a layer of mud where moisture had leached in from the land above.

  They kept walking until the soft glow of a street lantern silhouetted Silas’s body up ahead. A small door led out into a narrow alleyway, barely wide enough for two people to stand side by side. The tunnel had cut straight through the foundations of the outer and inner walls and into the very edges of the city.

  Silas had spent most of his adult life within Fume. He had patrolled it as a warden, returned to it as a soldier, and fled through it as a traitor. Despite everything that had happened to him there, he felt as if he were returning home.

  “This entrance is badly hidden,” he said as Edgar joined him in the open air. “The wardens should have found this tunnel.”

  “It’s a good job they didn’t.”

  “My men do not make mistakes.”

  “They’re not your men,” Edgar told him. “This isn’t your problem anymore.”

  Silas walked down the alleyway, whispered something to his crow, and sent it fluttering up above the rooftops before he headed straight out into a lantern-lit street.

  “Wait!” said Edgar. “You can’t go out there.”

  Silas walked into the center of the road and stood there within full sight of anyone who might be looking out of the houses nearby. He was standing in one of the older districts of the city. Memorial towers rose from the ground all around him like fingers clawing their way out of the earth. Their old stones leaned in toward each other, while their upper levels gradually crumbled beneath the weight of time. High up in their farthest reaches, statues and cracked gargoyles looked down over the streets. Silas could tell exactly where he was from the skyline alone. It all appeared exactly as it should have been, except for one detail.

  “Where is everyone?” asked Edgar.

  “There are people here,” said Silas, looking at the buildings around the square. To his right, a curtain moved. A shadow passed across a pale window directly ahead. “They are hiding from something.”

  “Maybe they saw you coming.”

  “Not this time.”

  With the city so quiet, the sound of carriage wheels carried freely through the air. Silas moved instantly and was already at the edge of the square before Edgar even realized he had gone. A warden patrol was due to march through that section of the city, but instead of hiding away from the oncoming vehicle, Silas sought it out. There were no wardens in sight, only a lone taxi carriage searching futilely for a fare.

  Fast footsteps sprinted along an alley to Silas’s left, and Edgar ran out into the light, his face relaxing with relief when he spotted Silas again.

  “Warn me before you do that next time,” he said. “I almost lost you.”

  Silas looked past him, his eyes settling upon the frontage of a theater that should have been filled with people at that time of night. Its doors were closed, its tall windows black, except for a small face peering out from behind the glass.

  “Remain . . . still.”

  “Why?” Edgar froze at once as Silas walked past him.

  The girl’s breath did not steam the pane as her nose pressed against it. She blinked as Silas watched her and her eyes were touched with spirit light. She was, there, as clear as any living creature, but her life had ended long ago.

  Unable to resist any longer, Edgar turned to see what was happening. “There’s someone in there!” he said. “Don’t let her see you.”

  “You can see that girl?”

  “Of course I can.” Edgar noticed the chains locking the doors together. There was no one with the girl as far as he could see. “Do you think she’s all right?”

  “As well as she can be,” said Silas. “She is dead.”

  The girl drifted back into the walls as Silas’s dark presence approached her, until the theater’s glass door was empty once again. Edgar stared, unable to believe what he had just seen.

  “She was . . .”

  “You should not have been able to see her,” said Silas. “This could be why people are fleeing the city and hiding in fear. They are not running from the wardens. They are running from the dead.”

  Edgar glanced back at the theater and saw the little girl’s face, just for a moment, before it dissipated again.

  Silas soon caught up to the idling taxi carriage, which was standing at an empty crossroads. He grabbed the side of the driver’s chair and pulled himself up beside him. The man’s face crumpled with fear.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The man nodded silently. His hands, wrapped within the reins, were quivering.<
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  Silas signaled for Edgar to climb into the back. “You will take us where I tell you. You will not stop unless I instruct you to do so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Silas patted the man hard on the shoulder, making him wince with fright, then stepped down and entered the carriage, sitting with his back to the driver’s seat. He slid open the small hatch between him and driver and gave his orders. “The Museum of History,” he said.

  The driver kept his head down and stirred his horse into action.

  “Why are we going there?” asked Edgar.

  “Preparation, Mr. Rill, is everything.”

  As they rode, the streets they moved through gradually became more populated. Not everyone was ready to give up everything he had earned because stories were being told of the restless dead. Edgar tugged the short curtains closed on his side of the carriage, not wanting to be seen by anyone outside, but Silas kept his open. The people of Fume did not need to see him to know that he was there. His presence oozed from that carriage like oil across water. He had not been inside the city for some time. Now that he was back, it would not take long for word to spread.

  “The wardens are going to find us,” said Edgar, unable to hold his nerve with so many eyes upon the carriage. A cluster of paper notices was pinned to a panel behind his seat. He pulled one down and held up a small wanted poster with drawings of Silas’s and Kate’s faces printed upon it. “People don’t ride straight through Fume when there is a price on their heads.”

  Silas did not look at the poster. “I do,” he said.

  When they arrived at the museum, Edgar stood looking up at the huge old building with its long windows of green glass while Silas spoke to their driver. Edgar was surprised that he and his horse did not just trundle away into the night the moment they stepped out. Whatever Silas had said to him, he waited there quietly while the two of them slipped inside.

  The museum’s main hall was a cracked, dirty shell of what it had once been. Floorboards were torn up and cast against the walls. Bones from old exhibits, tangled in wires that had once suspended them from the ceiling, were strewn across the floor, and in the very center of it all was a listening circle, a carved ring of stone symbols left by the Skilled long before that abandoned place had ever been used as a museum.