Winterveil Page 7

  “What is going on here?” The councilman’s smile twisted into rage.

  Two more wardens joined the first. Then five more, all placing their daggers on the ground at Edgar’s feet.

  “You have already lost control,” said Silas. “You have lost the respect of those who serve you. You have lived in decadence for too long while your own people suffer to keep you in power. You have allowed yourselves to neglect what should have been most important to you. Without the trust of the people, a government is powerless. The greatest threat to our country is inside this very room.”

  “I think we can all recognize the greatest threat in this room, and I’m looking straight at him.”

  “No,” said Silas. “I am.”

  Everyone followed Silas’s eyes and stared at a councilman who had been content to sit quietly at the table and let others do the talking. He was middle-aged, with a neatly trimmed beard and a face that looked open and trustworthy. He was sitting back in his chair, casually making notes on a piece of paper.

  “Gorrett?” said the councilman sitting directly beside him. The entire council smiled, and a few suppressed sniggers of laughter.

  As an infiltrator Edwin Gorrett had been easy to overlook. He was old enough to make himself appear physically weak. His opinions, as far as Silas had ever witnessed, always ran in line with the general consensus, and he had never openly challenged anyone around that table. He wrote his notes, cast his votes, and went about his business with quiet grace. No one had anything bad to say about the man. Silas had always thought of him as a pawn used by the other members to bolster their own opinions, but Gorrett’s reaction to the announcement of Dalliah’s presence in the city had not been one of shock like the others’. Instead his lips had flickered with secret pride. Silas’s arrival had surprised him more than his fellows, but he had been quick to hide it, forcing himself to appear relaxed while the sharp scratch of his pen betrayed his true feelings: not fear, like the rest, but frustration.

  Gorrett’s eyes sharpened, just for a moment, and Silas saw the heart of a soldier simmering beneath the veneer of power. He beamed a politician’s smile, but his fingers tightened around his finely nibbed pen. He kept his head low and looked at Silas, shifting his weight very slightly to his left. In trained hands, that pen could be an effective weapon, and exposed enemy agents rarely allowed themselves to be taken down alone.

  “Councilman Gorrett has never served Albion,” said Silas. “He has been against us from the beginning. He ingratiated himself into the life of the man whose seat he now fills. He earned his trust and now betrays that trust by passing every secret shared in these chambers on to his true masters. Gorrett is a Blackwatch agent.”

  “That is impossible!”

  “He was posted here to undermine this council,” said Silas. “He deceived us all.”

  Exposing a Blackwatch agent in the center of a council meeting was a dangerous move. A lesser warden would not have noticed the flex of a tendon in the back of Gorrett’s hand. They would not have seen the tiny twitch of the upper lip and the furrowing of his brow that betrayed what he was about to do. To have survived undiscovered in the heart of enemy territory for so long, Edwin Gorrett had to be one of the Blackwatch’s best men. His mission had been to destabilize the High Council. Now that he was exposed, there was only one way to continue that mission. He was out for blood.

  Gorrett’s right arm tensed and sent the pen stabbing up toward the throat of the man beside him. In the space of a second, Silas pulled a concealed dagger from his sleeve. The blade cut the air as the metal nib speared toward the artery throbbing beneath the targeted councilman’s skin.

  Silas’s weapon struck first.

  The dagger punctured Gorrett’s chest with a soft, fleshy thud. His arm lost momentum and slumped onto the table as blood blossomed across the front of his robes, sending councilmen fleeing and scattering against the walls.

  “No one leaves!” shouted Silas, sending the wardens to take up positions at the doors. Gorrett was bleeding badly, but the wound was not immediately fatal. Silas was not finished yet. He skirted the table as the infiltrator reached in vain for a blade hidden in his boot. Silas grabbed him by the neck, lifted him from his seat, and slammed him down onto the table.

  Silas reached the blade before Gorrett could and thrust it hard into the tendons of the dying man’s ankle. Whoever Gorrett truly was, he was well trained. He barely made a sound.

  “Officer Dane, stop! You are killing the man.”

  Silas grasped the handle of the dagger still lodged in the man’s chest. “Not quickly enough,” he said.

  Gorrett smiled through bloodstained teeth. “You . . . are too . . . late. I did . . . my duty. Do yours. Kill me.”

  Silas twisted the blade inside Gorrett’s chest. His body buckled with pain, and with one last shuddering breath the life in his eyes died.

  The wardens were uncertain how to react. No one moved. No one dared speak.

  Silas pressed his hand to Gorrett’s forehead. A glut of memories spilled out into the veil as the man’s spirit prepared to leave its physical body behind. Silas saw them all but ignored everything except the details of the Blackwatch plan. He witnessed Gorrett’s secret meetings, the opening of letters carried in by unofficial messenger birds, until finally he found the information he was looking for. He lifted his hand away and spoke to the council. “We have less than a day,” he said. “The armies are here on Albion soil. They are coming now.”

  “How could you know that?”

  Silas dragged his blade out of the dead man’s chest and pressed his palm against the open wound. The veil spread through him like trails of ice, passing into Gorrett’s muscles and flesh, binding them together and dragging his spirit back from the very edges of death. Gorrett’s skin flushed as he breathed in a gasping breath, choking on the blood that had collected in his throat.

  “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 wa
lls, 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

  While 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.