Winterveil Page 5

  Edgar had bad memories of that hall. Silas marched straight across it, heading for the winding corridors and the staircase leading to the floors below, while Edgar stayed close to the walls, still wary of the circle that he had once seen open up and reveal its true purpose. It was a dormant gateway into the half-life that, when activated, had allowed him, Kate, and Silas to see deep into the realm of the restless dead.

  Silas’s voice, calling him, echoed around the vast empty building, and Edgar could not shake the feeling that there were eyes watching him from the high galleries above. He hurried after Silas, lit a candle from the wall, and followed the voice down through numerous cellar floors, along into the deep part of the museum that Silas called his home.

  “Get yourself cleaned up.” Silas stepped out of a room up ahead and threw a towel into Edgar’s hand. “There is running water in there. Clean clothes through the door opposite. You have ten minutes.”

  Edgar’s clothes were filthy. The coat was not too bad, but the rest almost had to be peeled off his body, they were so engrained with mud, blood, and sand. He washed quickly and was soon clean and dry. He scuffed his hair dry with the towel and sneaked into the second room.

  The candle wavered in the doorway, and Edgar wasted time just staring at a maze of garments hanging from slim wooden rails. He had the pick of anything from leather-strapped soldiers’ uniforms to robes belonging to past councilmen. Tempting as it was to choose one of the uniforms, Edgar settled on a black vest with deep blue edges that hung down long at the back. The trousers he chose fitted well enough, but he bulked out the vest with two shirts layered on top of one another. It took a while to find boots that fitted, and he topped it all with a dark blue jacket that reached to his knees. When he was ready, he stepped back into the corridor, where Silas was already waiting.

  Gone were Silas’s bloodstained and travel-worn clothes. His dark hair was washed and loose. He wore a bloodred shirt, black trousers, and polished boots and had a short black jacket with silver buttons sweeping from his right shoulder to the scabbard holding his black-bladed sword against his left hip. Edgar might have taken the opportunity to wear clothes fit for Fume’s upper classes, but Silas looked as though he were truly one of them.

  “The driver is waiting,” said Silas, walking straight past him.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To help this city.”

  True enough, the carriage driver was still waiting outside. When Silas appeared at the top of the museum steps, the thin man dropped from his seat and held the door open for them both to climb in. “Sirs,” he said with a nervous nod.

  Edgar smiled awkwardly, but the driver dropped his eyes at once.

  Silas did not have to give an order. The driver already knew where they were going, and the moment they were seated the carriage was on the move again. Edgar began to feel trussed up and uncomfortable in his unfamiliar clothes. The route the carriage followed, however, was all too familiar. As the gargoyle-guarded streets passed swiftly by, a knotted feeling of dread twisted in his stomach. He knew this route. He had traveled this way before.

  “I know where we’re going!” he said suddenly. “We can’t go there. You have to stop the carriage.” He leaned forward and shouted at the driver, “Stop the carriage!”

  “He will not listen to you.”

  “Then you should listen. This isn’t a plan. This is insane!”

  “Sit.”

  At last the carriage stopped at the end of a long, straight street leading to a place that Edgar knew well. The driver knocked open the little hatch behind Silas. “Are you sure about this, sir?”

  “Perfectly.”

  The hatch clicked shut, and the carriage continued on, climbing up a slight hill toward a collection of grand ancient buildings circled by an old iron fence. Edgar sank back in his seat as they stopped in front of a heavily guarded gate. Wardens converged upon the vehicle, and Silas opened the window as a hooded man’s face filled the glass. The warden looked in at the two passengers, and his eyes widened in surprise. For a second Edgar thought he was going to order his men to attack, but instead he bowed slightly in Silas’s direction.

  “Officer. Open the gate,” said Silas.

  The warden stepped back and immediately raised a hand to his men. Two of them pushed the gates aside, opening up a clear path into the most protected part of Fume, the chambers of Albion’s High Council.

  “This has to be a trap,” said Edgar. “They wouldn’t just let us in.”

  The carriage horse walked slowly forward, and Edgar spotted three more wardens standing close by. The carriage rolled past their post, through an archway and across a courtyard, heading directly toward the chambers’ main door.

  “There’s still time to turn back,” said Edgar. “The council will set every warden they have on us the moment they see you.”

  “True loyalty does not die when it becomes inconvenient,” said Silas. “Fume is under threat. This is where we must be.”

  5

  SILVER & DUST

  When Kate and Dalliah arrived at the city on horseback, the disguised Blackwatch officers approached the gates first and spoke with two wardens standing on the other side. Dalliah had ordered Kate to keep her hood up once they were close to Fume, and Kate peered out from behind it as the wardens signaled for the two of them to move forward. One of the men unlocked the great iron gates and pushed them open while the other bowed his head in greeting.

  “Lady Grey,” he said, “welcome to Fume.”

  Kate thought there was something unusual about the man. His accent was softer than the sharp voices that were common across Albion.

  “The city is not as secure as its High Council believes,” said Dalliah.

  The warden smiled. “It never was.” He handed Dalliah a cloth-wrapped package that was small and thin. They talked quietly for a short time, and Dalliah hooked the package onto her saddle.

  The disguised officers stood alongside the wardens, and Kate overheard them giving the gate guards orders. She knew then that the latter were not wardens but Blackwatch agents. Albion’s enemies had infiltrated beyond Fume’s gates.

  “We ride on,” said Dalliah, taking the reins of Kate’s horse and leading it alongside her own.

  The air trembled as the two women crossed the threshold of the city. Shades shifted in the shadows, filtered through the stones, and mingled in the air, making the flames in the wardens’ lanterns shrink and fade back to the tiniest spark. A shiver of fear and expectation ran through every soul and every memory still locked within that place. Kate felt it as a chill colder than any winter wind, as if a door had opened to the coldest part of the world, letting freezing air blast against her skin. Fume’s streets were bare and ghostly. The gray and black buildings stood out sharply against a white sky, and it felt as if the towers themselves were listening.

  The Blackwatch remained with their associates at the gate. The city’s silence was disturbed by the screeching of metal hinges, and Kate looked back to see the huge gates pulled shut. None of the wardens posted nearby had noticed the presence of intruders in their midst.

  Since she had seen Silas, Kate’s memories had burned into clarity like flames spreading through a forest. She could remember everything that had happened in her life: the loss of her home to the wardens’ flames, the experiments conducted upon her by the High Council, and her trial at the hands of the Skilled, who had rejected her even though she had gone to them for help. But worse than all the others, the one that made her wish she could forget everything all over again, was the memory of events that happened just before her journey across the sea.

  She remembered Dalliah’s influence spreading around her, stifling her: Silas Dane, weakened and injured but never broken, and her best friend, Edgar, stabbed by a Blackwatch officer and left to die. Under Dalliah’s influence, Kate had walked away from both of them, leaving them there. She had seen the building they were trapped in burn and blaze, sending thick black smoke into the sky. S
ilas had survived, but she had seen no sign of Edgar in the village. She could not escape the guilt of leaving him behind. No matter what had happened, she would never forgive herself for that.

  Kate’s hatred toward Dalliah seared inside her. She wanted to shout and rage at the woman who had torn Edgar away from her. She wanted to scream at her . . . make her pay for what she had done. But instead she stayed quiet. She had seen Dalliah’s cruelty at work and had already been overwhelmed by her once before. She needed to keep her mind clear. She needed to wait. If her time with Silas had taught her anything, it was patience.

  Dalliah slowed the horses at the base of a memorial tower that looked very different from the dozens of others they had already passed. Its basic structure was much the same—rounded walls of black stone punctuated with small windows—but this tower’s stones looked as if they were veined with silver. Fragments of what could have been metal reflected the moonlight in thin trails across them, but as Kate looked closer, she saw the truth. Ordinary people would never see anything unusual there. Those veins were threads of energy, invisible to all but the most Skilled of eyes. A dull ache of sadness permeated the air, and Kate could feel the watching presence of at least two souls that were bound to that place, unable to leave.

  Dalliah ordered Kate to dismount and stood with her hand against the tower’s solid door. “It has been a long time since I was last here.” The tower reacted immediately to her touch. The silvery glow faded back until it was barely visible at all, retreating from her hand like ripples on a lake.

  She pulled a key from a pouch on her belt and slid it into the lock. The door was stiff, and the air that belched from inside smelled dead and dry. Kate choked in the swirling dust, but Dalliah was unaffected. The two of them stepped into the forgotten building, and then Kate heard the voice.

  “Do not go.”

  Dalliah showed no sign of having heard it, but to Kate the voice was soft and clear.

  “Please.”

  Inside, the tower was unexpectedly bright. Light poured in through slitlike windows pierced into the walls alongside a curling staircase that rose from the vault below and led up to the levels above. Kate covered her nose with her sleeve to allow herself to breathe and spotted something slumped against the wall. It was a broken skeleton, its skull set crooked and empty eyed, its bony fingers hooked around the handle of a rusted blade.

  “Hello, Ravik,” said Dalliah. She kicked the skeleton’s foot as she passed it, sending bones rattling across the floor. “You’ll be wanting this back, no doubt.” She dropped the key between the skeleton’s ribs, and something moved in the air above the steps. Kate looked just in time to see a pale apparition of a young man sinking into the wall.

  “Ignore him,” said Dalliah. “He was useless in life, worthless in death.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A previous student of mine,” said Dalliah. “He did not believe in what we are about to do. He made things difficult. He might have lived a little longer if he had put his intelligence to better use.”

  Dalliah crunched a loose bone beneath her boot as she followed the steps upward. Kate hesitated, concerned that Dalliah had locked the door behind them, and the moment the woman was out of sight she crouched down, slid her fingers between the dead man’s ribs, and hooked out the little key.

  “Do not go.”

  The air chilled beside her, and she spotted something next to the old blade. Something had been scratched within the stone. She moved the dagger to one side and discovered a thread of spiked, thinly cut letters, etched to form a shaky word.

  MIRROR

  Kate’s fingers brushed gently against one of Ravik’s thighbones as she stood up, and she saw the final moments of his life through his own eyes. Standing at a desk. An intruder behind him: heard but not seen. A knife—like fire—plunging into his side. The attacker making his escape. Ravik’s bloodied hands staining the walls as he stumbled down the tower steps. The door . . . locked. Kate heard his weak cries for help as if she were making the sound herself, sharing his pain and desperation as he spent his last scrap of life scratching the message into the floor.

  “Kate.” Dalliah’s voice carried around the curved staircase, and she quickly moved her hand away from the bone. Ravik had not been surprised by the locked door in the memory. He had expected it, only half hoped that his attacker had forgotten to seal it again on the way out. Kate had noticed deep scratches around the lock where someone had tried to prize the door open from the inside. Whatever Ravik was doing in there, he had not been doing it by choice. He had been locked in that tower many years ago. He had been murdered there, and now his spirit could not leave it. Ravik moved through the walls, circling her, but staying out of sight.

  “Don’t let her find it. The message must be passed on.”

  Kate stood up, pocketed the key, and read the scratched word once more. “I’ll try,” she said, still not sure what it meant, and Ravik’s spirit passed invisibly beside her, leading her up the tower steps.

  At the very top stood the room where Ravik had spent his final days. Dalliah was standing to one side, next to an old bed frame, and there were low cupboards running around the rest of the curved wall, each one ravaged by damp that seeped in through narrow windows that looked out to the east and west. Every flat surface was covered with old bowls made of tarnished silver. A box filled with a variety of unusual tools stood propped against the wall, and a collection of knives had been stabbed into the cupboard tops, each one surrounded by deep welts where it had been forced into the wood over and over again.

  “Ravik was a troubled young man,” said Dalliah.

  “People don’t like being locked away,” said Kate.

  “Do not believe everything the dead tell you,” said Dalliah. “Isolation was essential for his work.”

  Kate touched the handle of one of the knives and saw an image of Ravik stabbing it into the cupboard, just for a second. “What was he doing here?” she asked.

  “My ability to supervise work here in Fume was limited while I was on the Continent,” said Dalliah. “In my absence, Ravik’s task was to test a theory of mine. The theory was correct, of course, but Ravik refused to see the procedure through to its natural end. We must complete what he began, and we must do it right the first time, with no hesitation.” Dalliah’s eyes filled with anticipation. “If the spirit in the wheel realizes what we are doing, it will fight back.”

  Dalliah dragged a moldering cloth from the wall and exposed a small stone wheel hidden underneath. It was set deep into the wall and made up of a central circular tile—a few inches wider than an open hand—with smaller tiles arranged in a channel around its edge. Each tile carried a symbol, and the wheel itself held an imprisoned soul that had been trapped inside for centuries. It looked well preserved, apart from one tile whose symbol had been scraped away, leaving a well of deep scratches behind. Kate had seen wheels like that before, and she knew enough to treat it with respect.

  “These wheels are the keystones upon which this city stands,” said Dalliah. “The souls within them act as anchors, binding the half-life to the living world, while also ensuring that the two remain separate. Creating them protected Albion from the terrors of the half-life once. Destroying them will lead this land into a new age.”

  “I thought we were here to prevent the veil from falling,” said Kate.

  “The barrier between life and death cannot be maintained forever,” said Dalliah. “These souls are tired. Many have already lost their potency. When the veil does fall, we are here to make sure it happens in a way that suits me. We will simply be hastening a natural process. You will understand when the time comes.”

  “And what will happen then?”

  “Then my work will be complete,” said Dalliah, “as will yours.”

  Kate did not like the way Dalliah said those final words.

  To the right of the wheel, where one corner of the wall cloth still clung to a rusted pin, Kate spotted a glint of light reflect
ing from something in the wall. Ravik moved behind her, and she felt the shiver of a gentle hand upon her shoulder.

  Dalliah opened her bag and compared the positions of the symbols on the wheel with a diagram sketched in the pages of one of her old books.

  “Each of these symbols represents an old Skilled family, most of whom are now long dead,” she said. “I have heard that people have learned to interpret them and communicate with the spirit trapped within the wheel. That was not why these souls were bound, but I can see why, after five centuries sealed within stone, they may have needed something with which to pass the time.” She placed two fingertips gently upon the scratched-out tile. “My family’s symbol has been defaced, but the wheel should still function.”

  From the moment Dalliah’s hand made contact with the spirit wheel, the room felt colder. More enclosed. Even though there was only a staircase between her and the door to the outside world, Kate felt trapped.

  She looked at the hidden light out of the corner of her eye. A cracked mirror was tucked beneath the cloth, and a shard of glass had been removed from the bottom left corner. Ravik remained close by. In Dalliah’s presence, everything about him seemed slumped and defeated, but his attention was secretly fixed upon the hiding place within the mirror and a thin fold of paper that rested there in the dark.

  “This wheel is one of twenty-four like it across the city,” said Dalliah, pulling a collection of empty glass vials stoppered with wooden corks from her bag. “The most powerful bonemen’s souls were sealed within these wheels to prevent the full energy of the half-life from spreading across Albion. That energy is already bleeding out, which means the weaker spirit wheels have already lost their link with the veil. This wheel holds one of the three most powerful spirits that were bound that day. Fume’s connection will survive so long as those three wheels last. When they fall, the veil will fall.”