Winterveil Read online

  “Shouldn’t it make it easier?”

  “Do not make assumptions about things you do not understand. The more active the souls within the city become, the more difficult it is to sense individuals within the crowd. We will find them, but we are going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  Silas turned the carriage down a steep, rattling slope, slowed the horses, and turned them at the very bottom, where the way was blocked by a low iron fence. There he and Edgar abandoned the carriage. They climbed over the fence and followed a narrow path between a mass of tightly packed buildings.

  “Where are we?” asked Edgar. “I feel like I’ve been here before.”

  “Things have changed since then.” Silas walked straight into a narrow house that had a sign nailed to its front wall.

  Dangerous Structure

  Keep Out

  Inside, the first room looked as if someone had ignored the sign long before them. A hammock was slung across the far corner with full sacks spread around it to create a long bunker of belongings. The fire had been lit recently, but whoever was living there was nowhere to be seen.

  “Can’t these filthy parasites read?” Silas walked straight through to the back of the building, where rubble and broken beams were spread across the floor. He pulled open a hidden panel in the wall, and a wide section of bricks swung out into the room. The creak and heavy rattle of its metal wheels were sounds that Edgar could never forget. He knew now exactly what that place was. He froze on the threshold. His breathing became fast and shallow, and it was an effort just to stand his ground, so strong was his instinct to run.

  Silas flicked a switch behind the wall, and a small fuse burned down a sloping corridor, igniting a trail of gas lamps as it went. The smell of the gas focused Edgar’s memories. He had only ever seen that place in darkness, but it was somewhere he had never wanted to visit again.

  “Follow me,” said Silas.

  Anxiety made Edgar’s muscles twitch and his stomach knot. However, if this was the only way to find Kate, he was not going to run away.

  The corridor was simple and straight, and Edgar walked down it like a man on his way to the gallows. He winced when the wall swung closed and concentrated instead upon what lay ahead: Silas, standing beside a plain wooden door.

  “I never thought I’d come here again.” The sound of his own voice gave Edgar confidence, but he was careful not to look too closely at the door. The last time he had seen it he had been eleven years old. He had walked through that door a boy and emerged as something else, something he tried every day to forget.

  Silas pushed the door open and walked inside.

  The cellar space was just below ground level: a wide room with grids in the ceiling that were wide enough to let light through, but small enough to make sure no one could get in or out. It smelled old. The floor was made of stones laid to simulate the city streets, and there were metal clasps set at irregular intervals near the center where wooden training dummies could be bolted into place.

  It was a practice room, built for teaching and testing older children in the “art” of battle. It might have been completely empty now, but Edgar remembered the heat and the sweat, the brutal instructors, and the students who dared not get to know one another in case they were forced to fight. There had been no harmless training weapons in that room. Every blade was live; every arrow, sharp.

  Eight doors leading away from the main room all hung open, with only faint patches of light seeping from those that were lucky enough to have grids of their own looking up to the street above. Edgar remembered the smell of the horses that had walked above those rooms. He remembered rain pouring in, soaking the small bed that had been his for five terrifying months of his life, and the sound of locks thudding into place as the students were sealed in one by one.

  “We are looking for a metal lockbox,” said Silas, his voice echoing around the empty space. “I will take the rooms on the right; you take those on the left.”

  The inside of the door they had entered through was stained with the dark silhouette of a sword pointing to the floor. Edgar touched it gently. Only people who had worked in that room knew what the sword represented. He was ashamed to be one of them. He ignored Silas’s order and stood there looking at the sword until Silas returned, carrying a metal box.

  “Do you still believe you made the right choice?” asked Silas, standing behind him.

  “It wasn’t a choice,” said Edgar. He lowered his hand from the door, remembering the night years ago when he had smeared a streak of his own blood upon it. It had been before he had known Kate. Before everything. “Why is no one here?”

  “The High Council moved the operation soon after Da’ru claimed you. They could not risk an outsider’s knowing about it. You know that.”

  “Then it’s still happening somewhere?”

  “There is no reason to change a system that works,” said Silas.

  “Why did we come here? There’s nothing left.”

  “Nothing I would want anyone else to know about.” Silas smashed the lockbox against the wall, and the lid cracked open, revealing a bunch of keys, each one made from dull iron. “It pays to keep a few hiding places. That is one of the first things we are taught. I’m sure you remember it.”

  Edgar had done his best to forget everything about the time he had spent in that room. It was the first part of Fume he had seen after being taken off the Night Train on the day wardens had harvested people from his hometown. He had never spoken of those months to anyone. Not even Kate.

  “This has nothing to do with me anymore.”

  “Our past makes us who we are,” said Silas. “You had an opportunity here. Some of our finest wardens were trained in these rooms.”

  “We weren’t trained. We were tested. Three students died while I was here. They didn’t deserve to.”

  “They were recruits, and they died because they were not good enough,” said Silas. “When you claimed a life in the name of Albion and smeared your own blood upon that door, you swore an oath, the same oath that I did in a room just like this. You pledged your life to the protection of Albion and to the safety of this city. You swore loyalty to the wardens and therefore to me. Regardless of the turns your life has taken since then, you still owe me that loyalty.”

  “I don’t belong here,” said Edgar. “I shouldn’t have come in.”

  Silas pulled the door closed, and Edgar backed away from him. “You are afraid,” Silas said. “Not of me. Not of what’s out there. You are afraid of yourself and what you became in this room.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think I entered warden service willingly?” asked Silas. “Few people choose this life. You were carried away from your home when you were young. I was sold by a father who needed silver to feed the rest of his family, but we are both the same. We were trained into this life. We were molded into something we never would have been had our lives taken a different path. Once it is done, there is no turning back. We survived when others did not. We were better than them.”

  “I didn’t know what was happening!” said Edgar, his face reddening with anger. “You stole us from our homes. You took us from our families and then made us kill each other!”

  “The recruit who died at the end of your blade died an honorable death. Would you prefer he had killed you instead?”

  “It wasn’t meant to happen.”

  “But it did happen,” said Silas. “If you forget what you were taught in this room, it will have all been for nothing.” He held out the keys. “You escaped the warden life once, but you cannot hide from that part of yourself forever.”

  Edgar took the keys and looked at Silas with suspicion. “Why did you bring me down here?”

  “Before this is over, you may need to fight,” said Silas. “You have been following me around like an injured dog since we left the Continent. I know you are stronger than that. You are not the weakling people see when they look at you. I saw you during your early training. I kno
w what you can do.”

  Edgar breathed in a deep breath. “It wasn’t right,” he said, looking around the room.

  “Life rarely is.” Silas stepped aside, leaving the doorway clear. “You made a choice here once; now I am offering you another. You can renounce the oath you made as a recruit, disappear into the city, and I will never look for you again. Or you can do more than just trail behind me. You can accept your past, remember your training, and reclaim the potential this room sparked within you. I need a fighter, not a servant. This is your last chance to walk away. I will not save your life again.”

  Edgar looked down at the keys. When Da’ru Marr first came to the training room to collect him, his brother, Tom, had already been sold into her service. Da’ru had known that their parents were Skilled. She had murdered them both during her experiments into the veil, and she intended to keep the brothers close by. If they showed signs of the Skill, she would be the first to know about it.

  By council law, recruits could leave active warden training only if the High Council required their services elsewhere, so when Da’ru made her offer, Edgar, forced to choose between two equally unwanted futures, had accepted it. If he had known then that Da’ru had killed his family, he would gladly have shed more blood in that room. He remembered being young and worn down. All he had cared about was protecting his brother. In the end, he had not even been able to do that.

  Without the skills he had learned from the wardens, Edgar would never have escaped from Da’ru’s service. He would not have been able to help the Skilled or survive days traveling through the Wild Counties before infiltrating Kate’s hometown. He would not want to change any of that. It had become easy to forget about his past and pretend that he was afraid, that he was weak. But deep inside, Edgar Rill was very different.

  Edgar held out the bunch of keys. His shoulders were set a little straighter, his back was firm, and his chin was high. “I’m not a coward,” he said, “and I’m not weak.”

  Silas clutched the keys and let the door swing shut. “I was not the one needing to be reminded of that,” he said. “This city is still ours. As long as a single brick of it stands, we will defend it. Dalliah is moving quickly, and an army is on its way. The old rules no longer apply here. It is time to make a few of our own.”

  Edgar had been through only six of the doors in the training room before. Silas headed straight for the seventh. The tiny room inside was completely bare except for a circular stone grate sunk into the floor. Silas crouched on one knee, and a long iron key slid perfectly into a concealed lock at the side of the grate. He swung the heavy lattice of stone open, revealing a narrow staircase spiraling down.

  “The Blackwatch are not the only ones who have used agents to infiltrate the City Below,” said Silas. “Wardens have walked these tunnels secretly for years. If the people down there want to save their city, they are going to have to fight for it.” He disappeared quickly from view down the steps, and Edgar followed, pulling the grate shut behind them.

  The tunnels of the City Below were dank and silent. The gentle flicker of a few rare candles illuminated the way, and the deeper the tunnels sloped, the more distant the sounds of the world above became. Silas knew where he was going, hesitating only twice when he came to junctions that were unfamiliar.

  Deep within the narrow maze of rock and earth they crossed a wooden walkway that hung over a deep tomb cavern, and the ground beneath them gaped like a wound beneath the city, endless and black. Silas slowed his pace when they reached the other side, closing in upon a dark shape lying across the floor of the tunnel up ahead. Edgar picked a candle from the wall and kept walking until the candlelight was close enough to spread over the shape, revealing a lifeless face staring blankly into the dark.

  Edgar stared at the woman, lying on her side with one of her arms outstretched, left where she had fallen. Her eyes were open, their natural color bleached with deathly gray, but there was no mistaking what that color had been.

  “Black irises,” said Silas. “She was one of the Skilled. The deaths have already begun.”

  Edgar’s throat tightened. “I knew her,” he said. “Her name was An’tha. Her family came from the far south. She hadn’t been with the Skilled very long.”

  “So her mind could not cope with the onslaught of the veil,” said Silas. “She will have slipped into madness before the end. It would explain why she died here alone.” He stepped over the body and continued on his way.

  “You’re just going to leave her? Can’t you do something?”

  “She has been dead almost a day,” Silas said, without looking back. “Nothing could bring her back from that. Her spirit is gone. Considering the state of the veil, she will no doubt haunt these tunnels until someone sees fit to guide her fully into death.”

  “Then help her!”

  “This woman is dead,” said Silas. “There will be many more. You should prepare yourself for what may lie ahead.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “We have two Walkers up there who need to be brought under control,” said Silas. “The Skilled are the only people who may have a chance of doing that. Tempting as it would be, we cannot afford to let them die off one by one. We need them to slow Kate and Dalliah’s effect upon the veil as long as they can.”

  “Do you really think they’ll be in any state to help?” asked Edgar, following him through the dark.

  “They won’t have a choice.”

  9

  BETRAYAL

  Edgar walked the rest of the way in silence, carefully checking the shadows of every tunnel that crossed their own. There was no sign of anyone else down here, but he was so busy keeping watch and listening for movement in the passageway behind them that he did not notice when they reached tunnels that he should have recognized.

  Silas stopped at last in front of a long curtain covering a green door that marked the entrance to the only place in Albion the Skilled called their home. He tested the handle. The lock clicked, and the door swung silently open. “I was expecting more resistance,” he said. “Be ready.”

  The cavern was lined with dwellings built partly into the walls. Their windows, normally bright with candlelight, were dark, and only a few lanterns flickered along the spaces between them, illuminating the cavern with scattered patches of weak light. The door had scraped open through a collection of sticks and daggers, the ground at their feet was stained with blood, and the smell of death clung to the air.

  Bodies lay against the fences, upon the paths, and even slumped over windowsills. Some had been killed by weapons; others looked as if they had collapsed where they fell. So many faces. Edgar knew the name of every one.

  “Stop there!” A man’s voice broke the silence before an arrow flew weakly through the air and skidded to a halt next to Silas’s boot. “State your name and your intentions or I will shoot again!” A second arrow followed the first, this time veering wildly off to the left and landing a few feet behind them. “This is your final warning.”

  “Meeting hall,” Edgar whispered, but Silas had already seen the man. Their attacker was standing in the upper window of the meeting hall’s bell tower, the cavern’s tallest building. A bow was raised awkwardly before him, while his aim quivered almost as much as his voice.

  “It’s Baltin,” said Edgar.

  Silas could feel the presence of the dead lingering in the atmosphere of that place. Recent dead, and every one of them had died in fear. That cavern had come under attack, though whether it had started inside or resulted from the actions of an outside aggressor there was no way to know.

  “You seem to have had some trouble here,” said Silas, moving slowly toward the tower.

  “ ‘Trouble’ would be a minor inconvenience. This is not trouble you are looking at. It is horror.” Baltin’s eyes widened as he realized whom he was speaking to, and his clumsy fingers readied another arrow. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Come to finish us off ?”

  “If I were here for
that, it appears someone got here before me,” said Silas. “Sloppy work. But effective.”

  “Murderer!”

  The bowstring snapped, the arrow flew, only this time there was real power behind it. The arrowhead ripped toward Silas, who casually stepped aside. Baltin started to ready another arrow, but his fingers were clumsy and slow. He cursed with frustration; then his shoulders slumped, and he dropped the weapon to the cavern floor. “What’s the point?”

  He disappeared back into the tower. A few moments later the lower door opened, and he stepped out into the open with his hands in the air. “Finish it,” he said. “It’s better to die at your hand than the way some of my people have gone.”

  “There are many dead men who would disagree with you,” said Silas.

  The tiny sound of boots scuffing against the floor carried from inside the meeting hall, and Baltin glanced nervously into Silas’s eyes. “Please,” he said. “We are no threat to the High Council or to you. Leave my people in peace.”

  “You weren’t so keen on peace the last time I was here,” said Edgar. “Last time it was you threatening to kill Kate and me. People like you always get what they deserve in the end.”

  A shadow moved behind Baltin, and a woman stepped out with her nose held proudly high. “Baltin,” she said. “We are ready.”

  Edgar recognized the woman as Greta, the Skilled’s magistrate. She was in charge of enforcing order among the Skilled. Edgar knew her as a hard woman who worked to the letter of every law the Skilled lived by. She had bracelets of dried herbs knotted around her wrists, her pale hair was loose around her ears, her feet were bare, and she was wearing what looked like a brown blanket over her ordinary clothes.

  “What’s going on?” asked Edgar. “What’s happening in there?”

  Silas held on to his shoulder, preventing him from walking forward. “Subtlety is a skill,” he said. “Learn it. Use it now.”

  Edgar seethed inside. Something was very wrong in that place. If the Skilled had been attacked, why would they have left one of their doors to the tunnels outside unlocked? And why had no one made any effort to move the dead bodies?