Wintercraft: Blackwatch (13 page)
Baltin stopped a few steps from the spirit wheel and shone his light on to the ground. He had found the fallen skull. Kate looked between two of the tables and saw him slide his fingers into the eye sockets and lift the skull unceremoniously to his face for a closer look. Fragments of bone splinted to the floor from the damage caused by the fall and he kicked them aside as if they were worth less than dust. ‘I told them to clear this place up,’ he muttered quietly. ‘Not that this one will be any good to us now.’ He dropped the skull back on to its table and left it rocking awkwardly on its side. ‘Waste of time.’ He moved on and ran his hand round the exposed part of the halfexcavated spirit wheel.
‘Anything?’ Artemis’s voice carried in from the corridor.
‘Nothing,’ said Baltin, holding his light up to the symbols. ‘No one has been in here.’
Fear climbed into Kate’s throat. Baltin had been in that room before. He had noticed something that was out of place. The symbols were in a different position and from the look on his face he was quickly realising why.
‘She made it work,’ he whispered.
He turned quickly, scowling beneath deep eyebrows as he searched the room for signs of life, holding the lamp out in front of him. Kate and Edgar stayed still as he lifted the corners of the cloths one by one. Any sound was likely to give them away.
‘How did you make it work?’ he whispered. ‘What did you do?’ He kept moving, his light spreading dangerously close. They had to move.
Kate had only the fleeting light of Baltin’s lantern to see by, but it was enough to notice a few seconds’ gap between his lifting one cloth and reaching the next – not enough time for them to slither between tables, but there was another way. Kate pulled Edgar close to her and whispered in his ear. ‘Follow.’
Baltin thrust his light beneath the next table, and before he could drop the cover and step towards theirs Kate crawled as fast as she could out of the back of her tablecloth with Edgar rolling out behind her. Baltin’s lantern shone into the space they had left and the two of them stayed completely still until the light pulled away and he moved on to the next.
They were out in the open, exposed in the wide space between the table and a stone wall. Kate did not want to stay there, and as soon as Baltin was far enough away she tugged Edgar’s arm and began crawling back towards the spirit wheel. Baltin had his back to them and Artemis was still blocking the doorway they had entered. Their only choice was the broken door.
‘Baltin? What are you doing in there?’ said Artemis.
‘Quiet!’ Baltin snapped back.
‘There are other tunnels to search. We should keep moving.’
Artemis was becoming restless and he continued to question Baltin, eager to move on with the search. Kate used the distraction to get to her feet. She could move more quickly and quietly that way. The spirit wheel was right ahead. The symbols were so dark and lifeless it was easy to think she had imagined them glowing with light. She did not realise how close she was to the table beside her until her hand brushed the cloth and a rush of energy rippled against her skin.
She could feel the shape of the skull under her fingertips, but it was too late to pull her hand away. Sudden images flooded her thoughts, confused and garbled, as if the spirit the skull belonged to was trying to share everything it remembered with her at once. Baltin was just on the other side of the cavern, but frost glittered along Kate’s fingers and swept past her wrist. The spirit in the skull was dragging her into the veil, and she had no choice but to let it happen. The images kept coming, faster than thoughts, as the frost reached her eyelashes and she was drawn completely in.
‘The wheels are all we have left. This is the right decision. We have already waited too long.’
Kate was standing in the same oval cavern, only now it was washed with candlelight. Dozens of oozing candles burned in the alcoves cut around the room and the tables were gone, replaced by groups of wooden chairs arranged in four separate circles, their legs roped together, each circle leaving a single space leading into the centre of the room where an ornate spiral had been carved into the floor.
Most of the chairs were empty, except for the three that sat closest to the wall where the spirit wheel should have been. But instead of a circle of ancient carved stone, there was a deep hollow cut into the wall. Three men were hunched over on the chairs, drawing sharpening stones along bright silver blades and talking quietly, not wanting to be overheard. They all wore simple grey robes, each with a belt that had a book hanging from it; tiny books the width of fingers, each one perfectly bound in silver and black.
Kate looked down at the hand that had touched the skull and saw a silver blade grasped between her fingers instead. But they were not her fingers. She was looking down at a woman’s hand some years older than her own, a hand that was well used to digging in the earth, with a bracelet of herbs knotted around the wrist: a talisman Kate recognised as one worn by those often dealing with the dead. The sight of the strange hand shocked Kate. This had happened to her before, but that did not make it any less terrifying. She was inside someone else’s memory, witnessing an event as it had once been seen through that person’s eyes; the eyes of the woman who had once owned the skull.
Kate felt the woman’s heartbeat rise as she walked towards the three men and one of them looked up.
‘Is he prepared?’ he asked.
‘There was some … resistance,’ said the woman, her words vibrating in Kate’s throat as if she were speaking them herself. ‘He has been restrained.’
‘Good. No one wishes to relive last night’s events. It was wise to take action.’
‘Are you sure he is ready?’ asked the woman.
‘We need the wheels,’ said the tallest man. ‘We have already waited too long. The city will fall in the end, but after what we have done … it is our duty to put it right.’
The woman bowed her head curtly, then turned to lead the three men out of the cavern. As they made their way out into the corridor a cry of anguish echoed through the tunnels nearby.
‘Let us hope our friend has been restrained tightly enough,’ said one of the men, and Kate was sure she heard a smile in his voice.
Once she was inside it, Kate saw the corridor as it had been in its prime. A few brass lanterns hung from hooks along the wall, but between them was gathered a collection of far more gruesome artefacts: a human hand, severed at the wrist, that looked as if it had been preserved in yellow wax; a skull with no teeth whose eye sockets had been carefully filled with mud; and a collection of perfect bones – human, Kate guessed – all of them long, stripped and polished, with initials carved neatly into the very centre of their length.
Kate tried not to notice the other dead things, but they were part of the memory and she had no choice but to see the strings of bird skeletons spread wing to wing, and the long sticks of wood pierced with rows of teeth and smeared the dull colour of old blood.
The man’s shouts sounded louder now, and there was a light up ahead, leading off into a room that Kate and Edgar had not seen on their way to the spirit wheel – one that had probably been sealed up long ago in her own time. She tried to pull away from the memory, but she did not know how to break herself out of it. Without someone to help her, she was trapped.
The woman continued to walk steadily towards the room, no matter how much Kate willed her feet to stop. She could hear the voices of the men talking behind her, but she did not know what they were talking about. The woman was as transfixed as Kate was upon the light of that doorway, and her memory did not recall what they were saying. Kate felt her footsteps slowing as they neared the threshold of the room and she dared to hope she would be spared the sight of what lay inside. Then the moment of hesitation passed and the woman stepped into the light.
What Kate saw in that room would stay with her for the rest of her life. She had seen something like it long ago, in a printed picture – she couldn’t remember where – and her mind instantly registered two things: that this was a moment that meant something – one that was set to be a turning point in Albion’s history; and that she knew who these people were. The bonemen. Keepers of the dead. Men and women who had once been trusted to bury and care for Albion’s dead in the vast tombs beneath Fume, people who were generally seen as having done good work – not the kind of people who hung bones on their walls, carried blades and restrained people so they shouted out like that.
The picture Kate remembered was an artist’s view of the bonemen’s last collective deed before they disappeared from history. Their last funeral. The interment of the man thought to be their leader. No one knew his name. In the picture at least sixty bonemen were standing round a coffin in an otherwise empty room, their heads bowed to represent the ending of an age that would die with that man. It was a beautiful picture, drawn in black ink, but Kate now knew that it was a lie.
The bonemen were gathered there, surely enough, but the room was not the plain one the artist had depicted. The floor was alive with energy. Thirteen freshly carved spirit wheels were laid flat on their backs creating a stone mosaic upon the ground and soft light spread from their symbols like a blue mist floating just above the floor. It looked as if thirteen individual listening circles had been opened at once, creating thirteen separate tears between the living world and the veil.
More mud-eyed skulls watched from the walls, and in the centre of it all was not a body in a coffin, but a man who was still very much alive. He had been stripped to the waist and laid on top of one of the spirit wheels with his wrists and feet bound tightly to a plank or wood laid underneath him to keep him still. Two of the bonemen were kneeling on either side of him, painting inky symbols on his chest. His eyes were tar black, but when they moved Kate saw that they had the same sheen of silver as her own. He was a Walker, and a powerful one, just like her.
But none of that could help him there. Kate could feel the combined will of the gathered bonemen dominating the thirteen wheels. Not even a Walker could fight against a force of energy like that, but it did not stop the man from trying. Kate could feel him reaching out to the wheels one by one, his spirit searching for a way to close them but finding none. Then he shouted again, his voice black with anger.
‘Dalliah!’
The bonemen with the ink finished their work, and everyone in the room turned to see a woman entering the room. She was younger than most of the people there. She wore the same grey robes as the others, but her long hair was knotted into ragged plaits and her face was drawn and thin. She did not walk forward, but looked down at the closest spirit wheel as if it were a snake ready to snap at her ankles should she take another step.
The man in the centre considered his words carefully, knowing that he had only one chance to stop what was happening. ‘Dalliah,’ he said, battling to keep his voice calm, ‘Wintercraft caused this mistake. Wintercraft will put it right. This is not the way forward. This is not what we do.’
Dalliah drew her own silver blade and handed it to the boneman beside her. ‘It is now,’ she said.
The boneman crossed the spirit wheels, gripping the blade at his side.
‘The veil is not meant to be used this way,’ said the bound man, watching him approach. ‘There is no guarantee this will even work. We do not know enough. We need more time!’
The boneman with the knife knelt down, placing his hand across the bound man’s mouth, and Kate felt the energy in the room shudder as the silver blade was lifted and the point stabbed down. The man’s death was swift and silent. Kate caught a glimpse of red blood pooling near the boneman’s feet and watched it bleed down into the carvings of the central spirit wheel. The memory flooded with the woman’s emotions: guilt, grief, fear and doubt, all wrestling for Kate’s attention while she looked on in horror. Then the memory turned and focused upon Dalliah, who was watching the man’s death with quiet reverence. There was no guilt or grief on her face. Her grey eyes were empty of any emotion as she began to whisper a short verse – one that Kate had read before.
‘A circle made of blood and stone, to bind the words of soul and bone. A meeting place for those who seek the spirit sleeping underneath.’
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