Paine was Sebaraton’s wife’s name, taken in a dangerous display of fidelity to that old, noble line. After King Lascalles was overthrown, the Republic had promised to make aristocracy extinct. But while others fled, Sebaraton stayed, working in the capital through both revolutions. Through wars won and wars lost, struggling to find clients who could pay and fighting with clients who would not. Through the dark days of the purge, when aristocratic heads were piled in pyramids, when his wife begged him to stay at home or take refuge with the exiles in the North.
It was his good reputation at the bar that had preserved him, he would tell his wife as he sat back, alone, at the head of the table. Elianor understood him better. It was her father’s insipid apoliticalness, his evident ineffectuality in the eyes of his colleagues, and, as she came to understand when she herself qualified as a Magistrate, it was his mediocrity as an advocate that kept him away from the halls of power, and thus kept him alive as better men rose and fell.
Still, on that summer morning, the revolution was over, and the child Queen set for coronation. Sebaraton Paine was at his most exuberant, napkin in his hand like a flag, declaring that the return of the Queen would see him rewarded for his faith. Finally, he vowed, his star would rise. It never did. After the restoration he was suspect in every camp. His family had never had to flee, and his home had never been burned. He had survived the purges without changing his name. Royalists thought he was a secret Republican and Republicans an obvious Royalist. By the time Elianor took pupillage with Senator Carada, her father had shrivelled to the stature of a ghost haunting the lower courts. But somewhere in the back of Elianor’s mind he waited, forever in the summer of 1672, banging his fist on the table.
“Don’t ever imagine you are ordinary, Elianor,” Sebaraton said. “You were born for greater things.”
Bastard.
Elianor plunged into the snowdrift, her weapons clutched tight to her chest. The ice embraced her. She lost sight of the Black Dog, lost sight of anything but the black of the fall and the red of the impact. Still she struggled, strove against the thick cold that swallowed her, searched for ground beneath, reached for purchase she couldn’t find.
“It’s in your blood.”
The beast would not give up. It would not be slowed by the ice. Think. Fight. Elianor took her broken sword and useless pistol together in her left hand then dug, not upwards but sideways, towards the base of the bridge. Each time she slipped, deeper into a bottomless ocean, she slowed her breath, steady, then once again clawed and crawled and climbed and clambered.
Finally, her feet found solid ground. At the base of the bridge, the massive block of stone that linked the east and west side of the chasm, boulders progressively poked higher through snow that shallowed like the sea when it meets the beach. Elianor’s shin caught the rock as she laboured upwards. She pulled herself out of the morass and knelt shivering against the base of the span, halfway between either side of the great trench separating the lower and upper part of the mountain, drenched and frozen, clumps of snow in her clothes and hair.
Elianor replaced her pistol in the holster and what remained of her rapier in the sheath. The blade had sliced fine ribbons through her glove and into the flesh of her left hand. It was too dark to make out how much she had bled into the leather. She brushed her fingers against her bruised face, then checked her satchel to be sure her precious book of law was safe. Alongside it, the dossier that might save her life—and the letter that might get her killed.
“Right,” she muttered, still catching her breath. “Assume that monster is still coming after you. You’re not badly hurt. Your sword is broken, but you’re not going to fence that beast. You have your knife.”
Elianor stood up against the wall. Her eyes adjusted. She saw the shape of the snowdrifts, tundra against the night sky.
“The castle is close, but it’s somewhere up a cliff, and you don’t know if there’s a way up.” She shook her head. Ice showered from her hair. “You haven’t found the way up yet. There’s a watchtower, which means a guard, which means they would probably hear a pistol shot.”
She redrew the pistol and looked along the sights. The trigger mechanism had cracked loose, but if she used both hands, it could fire a single shot. Inaccurate, clumsy; she might hurt herself in the process; something other than the guards might locate her by the sound. And the Black Dog was closer.
The face of the span was not smooth. There were ledges and outcroppings of rock. Climbable if it were light, or if you were a monster that could see in the dark. She edged her way along the firmer ground by the base of the bridge. The pistol was her best defence against the monster. But she would only have one shot. She couldn’t afford to miss.
The howl of the Black Dog screamed through the night air. Was it from above, on the bridge, or below, across the tundra? Elianor didn’t stay still for long, working onwards, looking upwards, trying to find the right spot. There! Just within arm’s reach, a part of the wall where the rock jutted out and then folded in like a failed cave, a hole in the wall with delusions of grandeur. Her boots slipped as she jumped from the frozen rock, and she only just got her chest over the ledge. She pushed, hard, ignoring the pain in her ribs and the way her sword hilt jabbed her belly. Beads of sweat formed and froze on her forehead. When she finally clambered up, she had to kneel on the ledge to recover her breath. Then she straightened her collar and looked out into the darkness.
Nothing. No, there. Was it the Dog, or just her eyes swimming as the blood pumped to her temples? Quick as she could, she slid into the gap in the rock. The cave put a roof over her head and a wall at her back. It was not deep enough that the beast couldn’t cover the ground in one good leap, but it would have to stop on the ledge before it could enter the cave. She took the pistol in both hands, ready to fire the moment she had a clear shot.
She didn’t have to wait long. From below, outside her frame of vision, she heard it growl.
“Come on, come on, come on,” she said.
But it did not come. The cold wet of the snow soaked through her trousers. She shivered. The pistol became heavier. Her hands less steady.
“Come on, you bastard!” she shouted. “Come and eat me!”
A great black form shot up onto the ledge as if the leap were nothing. Clawed hands propelled it forwards. If Elianor had fired in that moment, she would have been lost, fear defeating patience and training. But she saw the truth in the flash of claws. She held the pistol firm. The Black Dog paused, less than a second, then leapt away again, out of her field of vision.
Elianor’s heart was running so fast she wanted to be sick. She felt the strange urge to laugh.
“Think you’re clever, don’t you?”
The Black Dog growled, from somewhere above.
“That’s right!” Elianor called. “My pistol is broken! I’m bluffing!”
The beast dropped onto the ledge in front of her.
“Come on! Can’t you tell I’m bluffing?”
The black shape blocked out the light. It continued to growl, holding still, watching her. She held the pistol up, steady as she could manage. She couldn’t afford to waste the shot. She still couldn’t get a clear look at it.
It leapt.
She fired.
In that frozen tableau of tension, in the brief flash of light from the gunshot, she thought she saw the number 1 tattooed on the bare flesh of its chest.
Then it screamed. For a wild moment she thought she had injured a man, not a monster. Urging aching, frozen muscles into action, she drew her knife and attacked. Arm across her face, she grappled the beast, stabbed upwards, made contact, tumbled together, sweat and hair and flesh. A splash of blood. She came free, pushed as hard and as far forward as she could, and leapt away from the cliff into the open space above the tundra.
She tried to roll, but the impact was too sudden. Snow jammed into her face and she couldn’t breathe. This was it. If she hadn’t killed the Dog, then the Dog would kill her, arse up i
n the snow. Still her hands moved. She crawled forwards, upwards, the snow shallow enough here that she could get to her feet. She wiped her gloved hand across her eyes, a tight grip on the pistol, trying to clear her face.
Sudden light blinded her.
There were guardsmen in the snow, their torches held high. The lead guard raised her greatsword and pointed it at Elianor’s throat.
Chapter 5
Elianor smacked away the guard’s greatsword with her pistol and scrambled to her feet.
“Where is it?” she snarled.
The beast was gone. Elianor had survived. So far. There were five guards, including the woman in charge, spread out to take advantage of the shallow points in the snow. They had their free hands on weapons and their eyes strained against the darkness. They hardly looked at her at all.
“Who are you?” Elianor said.
The lead guard’s greatsword still pointed in her direction, a ridiculous block of steel almost six feet long. The weapon was a relic from the days before gunpowder made that kind of warfare obsolete. Its owner hitched the sword onto her back with languid ease and then removed the hard-nosed helm that covered her face.
“Persephone Vile, Captain of the Guard.”
Persephone had blue eyes, a sharp nose, and blonde hair tied in tight, thin braids to fit beneath her helmet. They might have been mistaken for cousins, except Persephone was the largest woman Elianor had ever seen.
“Some sort of beast attacked me,” Elianor said. “I injured it, but you and your guards may still be in danger.”
The intake of breath was a shared hiss.
“Captain,” called a curly haired young woman with a crossbow, “what do we do?”
“Mouth shut, Begw,” growled her Sergeant, his rank indicated by an insignia on his jacket. “Eyes open.”
“It injured you, by the looks of it. Here, careful.” Persephone hauled Elianor up out of the snow. “You’re lucky, or stronger than you look. The Black Dog rarely leaves survivors.”
“Captain,” the Sergeant said. “We won’t have long before the weather closes in.”
The Sergeant was black bearded, with thick hair on the back of his ungloved hands, dirty fingernails he scratched against his cheek, and sweat streaks on his forehead from his dark, lanky hair. A bear in a uniform. Elianor felt it said something about the organisation of Shadowgate that the two largest soldiers commanded the patrol. A properly run society would breed men like the Sergeant out of existence. But here in the provinces, the nobles played knight-errant and peasants were kept like pigs in filth.
“I take it you’re Lord Carada’s pupil?” Persephone grunted and pulled off her snowshoes, stepping onto the rock at the edge of the cliff and passing them to the Sergeant. “Don’t worry, we’re all good Royalists here. Follow me, my lady, step where I step. Sergeant Rees, lead the way.”
Elianor was too tired to complain about being called ‘my lady,’ and too cautious to ask how they had known she was coming. She watched the Sergeant hand the snowshoes off to a moustachioed guard, who in turned passed them to the one with curly hair. The fifth guard sniggered and said something Elianor heard as “piggy.”
“Get moving, you lot,” Sergeant Rees said, “unless you like fighting monsters in the dark.”
They followed the base of the span toward Shadowgate Castle. The other guards’ snowshoes allowed them to walk across the frozen surface, but Elianor had to follow Persephone’s careful steps from one boulder to another. The light from the torches scattered their shadows up the jagged wall. As the adrenalin of the fight faded, her bruised muscles stiffened. She had to focus on Persephone’s feet to see where to put her own, and the swaying motion was hypnotic.
“I take it you saw the watchtower light from the bridge,” Persephone said. “From the tower you can see all the way up to Demon’s Pass, the lowest point between the mountains and the entrance to Kindred lands. Our entire warning system is just three watchtowers, the one at Demon’s Pass, the one at the castle, and a third atop the church tower in town. It’s about half a day’s ride between each tower, and in good weather you can see each from the other.”
“Is this good weather or bad?” Elianor said.
Sergeant Rees scowled, looked up at the sky, and gestured the others to hurry. Persephone laughed.
“There’s a monastery at the pass. The monks won’t let us put soldiers on their walls. That means, apart from a few guards we keep on rotation at the waystation, the castle is the first real line of defence when the Kindred come. There’s lots of space in between for things to hide. It’s been thirty years since the last major incursion, but that doesn’t mean nothing else has got through.”
“Are you saying the Black Dog is Kindred?”
Elianor regretted asking. The Kindred were a myth. Sure, people lived beyond the mountain, warlike people who mounted raids on the civilised lands of Trist. But monsters, magic, and shapeshifters? All-powerful beasts turned back by solitary heroes and under-manned armies? The stories served a purpose to men who sought to aggrandize themselves. Elianor preferred truth.
“The last battle, the one my father fought, was brutal. It spilled all the way down the mountainside to the walls of Shadowgate Castle. And somehow, after the Kindred Prince was defeated, the Black Dog survived. At least that’s what we think happened.”
“Citizeness Vile.”
“Call me Persephone. Unless you plan to call me Captain!”
“Captain. It was not a dog.”
“We call it the ‘Black Dog’ because it scares people enough to stay out of the mountains at night, but not as much as thinking about what it might really be. Here, take my hand.”
The rocks they climbed had taken an orderly, regular shape. Giant steps carved in the side of the cliff, too big to walk easily. Whoever dreamed up these steps had not considered simple use by normal people, or anyone whose chest had been sat on by a giant black beast. Elianor took Persephone’s hand.
“It only comes out at night and it moves fast on the snow. It never used to attack groups, preferring isolated young women out on their own on an evening.” Persephone somehow met this thought with another laugh. “Women not as well armed as you!”
By the time Elianor reached the last step, she felt as if she had climbed half the mountain. Which, now she thought about it, she had. Persephone allowed her to catch her breath at the top.
“Those who have attempted to hunt it have either failed to find it or failed to come back. But you were safe if you kept off the mountain at night. Then, last year, something changed. First, women missing around town, not just on the mountain. And now one of my patrols.” The good humour was gone from Persephone’s voice. “We were on our way back from searching when we heard your shot.”
Did Captain Persephone have evidence that the Black Dog was responsible? There would be time to ask later. Elianor stood up straight. “I’m glad you did.”
“Well then.” Persephone raised her eyebrows. “Welcome to Shadowgate.”
Chapter 6
Shadowgate Castle loomed above them, stone upon stone, slab after slab, fixed and carved and weathered, a tortoise backed into a cave rather than a castle imposed on a mountainside. It crouched between the sheer cliff face against which it was built and the precipitous drop over which it looked. A narrow path ran its perimeter; the main gate was not aligned to the bridge but rather another dozen metres to the right. This made the castle seem twisted, off-kilter, like a broken music box still rotating to music no-one could hear. Flakes of snow slipped in and out of the torchlight.
Shadowgate might have been ancient, but the portcullis was new. An unseen mechanical device raised it with quiet, oiled clicks and the sound of hissing water. Elianor felt she had discovered a working clock at the back of a bear’s den. She ducked her head as they passed between the gate and the barbican. If an attacking army made it across the bridge, along the narrow perimeter path, and through the portcullis, any survivors would be slaughtered as they exited
the tunnel. A handful of soldiers could hold Shadowgate against a horde.
This made no sense. The castle was back-to-front: the Kindred, if they came, would come down the mountain, not across the bridge. This only seemed to support Elianor’s suspicion that the Kindred tales were myths, exaggerations to aggrandise the victories of petty nobles against a few Western bandits. In which case, the orientation of the castle made perfect sense, designed to face the real threat to the aristocracy: the people in the town below. Elianor kept walking forward. She liked that answer too much. Stay focused on the facts.
“Edern, let the Manor know we’re coming,” Persephone said.
“Aye, Captain,” the moustachioed guard replied. He grinned at Elianor as he passed, showing his teeth as if to lean forward and take a bite.
They stepped out from the tunnel into a courtyard. New buildings choked the open space behind which stone structures were stacked like toys swept into the corners by a delinquent child. As the fortress rose, it became a part of the mountain, until at its highest points, the towers and balconies poked out from the rock itself. Stairs wove in, out, and across walls spotted with gas lamps. Elianor’s head throbbed. The whole place curled in the shape of the whorl in a mollusc shell, a pattern that might appear obvious from above but looked random from within. The specks of light from the occasional window were squatters holding out against the return of Shadowgate’s true owners.
There were three main buildings in the immediate space. The first was a Manor house, pressed up to the left against the inside wall instead of taking pride of place in the centre of the courtyard. If the castle was the shell, then this was the snail, the only building built from wood, three stories of lumber nailed together in a shallow reflection of the stone’s permanence. Hatched onto the tower and smeared around the inside of the fortress, on its roof flew a flag, a dragon draped around a sword. The flagpole itself was a long spear, its tip a blade standing against the heavens.
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