Wintercraft: Blackwatch

by Jenna Burtenshaw

  ‘This must reach Kate,’ he said. ‘Do you remember her?’ The crow squawked once. ‘Look for her in the streets beneath Fume and stay with her until I find you again. I will come for you. Go!’

  The crow took flight, cutting through the driving rain and heading out towards the sea. Another streak of lightning lit up the sky and Silas saw something standing on the other side of the street. A woman, watching him through the rain.

  ‘You have arrived,’ she said.

  Silas started to cross the street towards her, but when he looked up again she was gone. He stood on the cobbles where she had been and could feel the bristle of the veil within the air. He looked along the houses but there was no sign of her anywhere.

  ‘I told Bandermain he would not be able to keep you against your will.’ The woman’s voice came from a doorway behind him. Silas turned and she held out a piece of paper for him to take. ‘If you want answers, meet me there,’ she said. ‘I will wait for you. There are things you need to know before we begin.’

  Her grey coat was hooded, but the eyes beneath it were pale and lifeless. When Silas looked into them he saw nothing. No spark of life, no glint of a soul lying behind their glassy sheen. It was like looking at his own reflection; dead and cold.

  ‘You are Dalliah Grey,’ he said.

  The woman pushed the paper into his hand. Her skin was stained with old soil and her fingernails were worn back to the quick. ‘The veil is falling,’ she said. ‘We may already be too late.’

  She tried to walk away but Silas took hold of her wrist and would not let her go. Her skin was icy cool and he felt the familiar thrum of the veil playing around her like a haze of wild energy, dangerous and fascinating at the same time.

  ‘I will answer all your questions, Silas,’ she said. ‘The Blackwatch do not have to be your enemy today, and neither do I.’

  ‘What do you have to do with the Blackwatch?’

  ‘Less than they think. The balance of power is shifting. If you trust me, you will regain everything you have lost. Read the note. Meet me there.’ Dalliah’s hand twisted in Silas’s grip. Her thumb joint cracked and her fingers slithered free. ‘I walked your path centuries ago,’ she said, snapping her bone effortlessly back into place. ‘You are still young, Silas. You have not yet seen the world that I know. You should be thanking me, not doubting me. The only reason you are still alive is because of me.’

  ‘It would take more than the Blackwatch to finish me,’ said Silas.

  ‘Today, yes,’ said Dalliah. ‘But twelve years ago, things were very different. You were a different man.’

  ‘What do you know about that?’

  Dalliah backed away. ‘Answers will come,’ she said. ‘For now, you should go.’ She pointed past Silas along the darkened street. ‘The Blackwatch are here.’

  Silas turned and saw the silhouette of a horse walking across the end of the road. He slipped into the shadows, out of sight of the Blackwatch patrol, and when he looked back Dalliah was gone. He was about to set off after her when the echo of hoofbeats sounded behind the houses and a lithe grey horse raced out into the street carrying the hooded woman on its back. She snapped the reins once and headed off in the direction of the Blackwatch.

  Silas unfolded the paper she had left behind and discovered a map of Grale with a route marked out, leading into the southern forest and ending at a circle marked in black ink. He had not come all this way to have the person he was looking for slip away so easily, and her worries about the veil were too interesting to ignore. It would take too long to travel her route on foot. He needed a horse.

  Horses and boats were the only viable means of transport between Grale and the other towns along the Continental coast, so the western edge of Grale contained more than its share of stables. Silas moved through the streets, across a river bridge and along to the largest of the stable blocks, where a group of agitated horses were grunting and stamping, spooked by the storm. He opened the stable doors and walked between the stalls, inspecting the beasts inside. Only one of them was calmly cropping its hay, completely uninterested in what was happening outside; a brown mare with white patches between its ears and down its left flank. Silas unbolted the stall and rubbed his palm along the horse’s nose. Its eyes were healthy, its ears straight and alert. ‘A beast without fear,’ he said. ‘You will do.’

  He did not waste time saddling up, but pulled off its night blanket and led it out into the open. It walked evenly and its hooves were well shod. It flicked its ears against the rain as Silas climbed on to its bare back, knotting his hands into its mane. Once up, he kicked firmly and the horse responded at once. Silas turned it towards the gate, raced it to a gallop and cleared the obstacle in one powerful jump, thumping down into the cobbled street.

  The horse carried him over the river, towards the tree line that marked the southern border of the town. The flicker of a lens light shone to Silas’s right up ahead, and another answered it to his left. He had been seen.

  He drove the horse harder, sending it charging along the cobbles and on to a wide dirt track. He kept his eyes on the road ahead as he plunged into the mouth of the forest and hurtled between the trees. He remembered the markings on the map and shifted his weight, guiding the horse down a small side track, abandoning the course the woman had set for him and finding his own way instead. He had no reason to trust a stranger on foreign soil and could not rule out the possibility that he was being led into a trap.

  Low branches whipped past his ears as he leaned in to the horse’s neck, ignoring the thunderclouds overhead. The horse ploughed through the undergrowth, slowing down as Silas took it off the track. It scrambled up the side of a muddy hill and he led it back on to an overgrown track where it stamped restlessly in a circle, unsure where to go. Silas let his instincts lead the way. He tugged the horse’s mane, brought it up on its hind legs and forced it to turn. The horse whinnied, slammed its front hooves back down into the earth and kept going, head down, muscles pumping, eyes wide with the thrill of adventure. Silas looked back – there was no sign of the Blackwatch behind him – and decided to follow the track as far as it would go.

  The horse ran on until its body became laced with sweat, then a glint of light caught Silas’s attention in the trees. He was about to turn away from it when he realised that it was too high up to be the flicker of a Blackwatch lens light. Something was glowing at the end of a track up ahead, beyond a turning marked by a pair of old dead trees. Silas led the horse between them. The ground was scarred deeply by carriage wheels, which had left behind long frozen cuts within the earth. Those cuts ran like tiny rivers, flooded with icy rainwater, and the horse picked its way among them until it reached a clearing where a high stone wall held a pair of blue glass lanterns on either side of an open gate.

  Silas brought the horse to a stop between them. It stamped and worried, not wanting to go any further, and whatever it was sensing, he could feel it too. It was like standing on the edge of an abyss, not knowing when the ground was going to fall away, yet being certain that a deadly drop lay just ahead. There was danger in that place. It had known death. The wind swirled through the trees, throwing sharp rain into Silas’s face. He dismounted and left the horse loose at the gate before stepping on to the land alone.

  A neatly pebbled pathway cut across a courtyard patched with ovals of frosty earth that were barely visible in the darkness. Silas followed the path, and at its end a great black building came into sight. Moonlight sparkled from the few glass windows the huge house had left; the rest were boarded, with long tendrils of old plants creeping unchecked up its walls.

  The building was immense. Its central point was marked by two circular-walled towers pressed side by side and topped with spires of slate that reached up towards the sky. Everything about the building was old, worn down and yet strangely familiar. The gargoyles set high among the roof eaves were exact copies of those found upon buildings that Silas remembered in Fume. The towers were the same height and shape as some
of the memorial towers in that city, and the long windows were made of the same green glass that was set within its oldest buildings. It looked as if an ancient part of Fume had been lifted up and placed there in the middle of a Continental forest.

  The house was in darkness except for one firelit window on the ground floor. Silas heard the sound of horses gathering behind him. He turned and saw eight Blackwatch agents on horseback lined up at the gate. He could not see Bandermain among them and they did not draw their weapons; they seemed unwilling to step on to the land. Silas felt the welcome weight of the stolen dagger at his belt, but they all sat there, watching, as he walked steadily over the pebbles and stopped in front of the building’s main door.

  The woman from the town was already standing there, waiting for him. She raised a hand and the Blackwatch sank back into the forest, retreating at her command. Two of them climbed down from their horses and pulled the gates shut, closing them against the dark trees as the rain pelted down.

  ‘As you can see, I do not like visitors,’ said the woman. ‘The Blackwatch know not to set foot on my land without an invitation. I asked them to follow you and make sure you arrived safely. The forest is a treacherous place.’

  Silas stood tall, his loose hair slicked down by the rain. ‘I do not require your protection.’

  ‘I disagree,’ said the woman. ‘You need protecting from yourself and your own ignorance. You may look younger than your years, but you have still barely begun to live upon this world. It would be foolish of you to ignore me. You cannot afford to let your suspicions cloud your judgement. Especially now.’

  ‘Then you are Dalliah Grey?’ asked Silas.

  The woman placed her right hand to her chest and bowed slightly in greeting. It was an old gesture, one that had not been common on the Continent for over two hundred years. ‘I have had many names,’ she said. ‘That is one of the oldest. It is rare for me to hear it spoken out loud.’

  ‘That is what happens when you live like a ghost,’ said Silas. ‘People forget.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dalliah. ‘But if they had forgotten, you would not be here. My name still carries weight back home in Albion. That is good to know.’ Anyone standing close to Dalliah would sense that there was something different about her; something powerful and barely restrained living beneath the face of a woman who appeared to be only just reaching the brink of old age.

  If she truly had known centuries of life, those years did not show upon her face. She looked strong and fit, and her hair was short and perfectly black. But her eyes were haunting, her chest did not rise and fall with regular breaths, and the air around her was thick with threat. It was the same feeling people experienced whenever they were near Silas. He had never sensed it for himself before. It was the aura of a predator.

  ‘Please,’ said Dalliah. ‘Join me inside. Weather like this is no place for a conversation and I am sure you have questions.’

  ‘Only one, for now,’ said Silas, standing his ground. ‘Why did you invite me here?’

  Dalliah studied his face and stared into his eyes as if she could read the memories written behind them. ‘Perhaps you should ask yourself why you accepted my invitation,’ she said. ‘I believe you are here for the same reason that I asked you to come. You can feel that something has changed. You try to deny it, but you cannot ignore what you have sensed forever.’

  ‘And what is that?’ asked Silas.

  ‘The girl whose blood runs within your own. The girl who commands the veil more powerfully than any of her ancestors before her. You know she is in danger. You have felt her within you, even here in these empty lands.’

  It was true that Kate Winters’s blood had become bonded with his upon the Night of Souls, but Silas had not sensed anything of her within the veil since he had left Fume weeks before. Then he remembered the pain in his chest when he had awoken within the crypt. He had not considered that the pain could somehow have been connected to her. Now he was not so certain. ‘I have felt nothing,’ he lied. No matter who Dalliah was, he was not ready to trust her with talk about Kate.

  ‘You know the truth, even if you cannot accept it,’ said Dalliah. ‘Together we can put right what you have broken. Kate Winters is no ordinary young woman, but she persists in entering the veil with her mind unprotected. She is endangering herself because she is ignorant, and she is feared by those who should be helping her. No good will come of this, Silas. The girl’s life is in danger, and it is all because of you.’

  10

  The Gatekeeper

  Whatever had happened in the room of skulls had tired Kate out. She lay curled up asleep on the floor of their tiny refuge and Edgar sat beside her, gently stroking her hair.

  He waited for his eyes to get used to the blackness. There was no hint of light anywhere along the tunnel that ran alongside their hiding place, and any sounds made in the distance carried impossibly far, making everything sound much closer than it was. He heard what could have been footsteps, scuttlings, and whispers of wind that were like voices hissing beside him, and he shivered. He did not like the dark. It was just another place for things to go wrong. Anything could creep up on someone in the dark.

  A scratching sound skittered close by and Edgar sent one of his few remaining matches flaring into life. ‘Just a rat,’ he whispered, as a black rodent scuttled brazenly across the floor. Edgar liked rats and was happy to leave it to its business until he spotted a second one nibbling at the corner of his backpack.

  ‘Hey!’ He snatched the bag out of reach and slapped his hand on the ground. ‘Go on. Get out!’ The rats just stood there watching him, so he opened his bag, broke a small piece of bread from a loaf he had hidden there and threw it towards them. The rats set upon it at once and scuttled away before Edgar’s match burned out and he lit another.

  He put the bag down and opened it carefully in case there was anything lurking inside. Apart from the bread everything looked untouched; there was a knife, a few apples, a length of thin rope, a chunk of cheese wrapped in cloth, a glass bottle filled with water, a bundle of spare candles and a couple of pies that were at least three days old. It wasn’t much, but it had been all he could find and it was going to have to last them until they could find some more food. With the Skilled out there looking for them, that was not going to be easy.

  At least he recognised a good hiding place when he found one. They were in the front room of a cavelike house that had been dug out centuries before for use by the bonemen when they had worked this far underground. There wasn’t much left of it – the rest of the house was already buried – but it was enough to keep them safe. The doorway had been crushed beneath an earth fall years ago and the only way to get in or out was by slithering through the glassless window.

  Edgar had left the window exposed so he could see any light spread by people searching for them. Kate lay asleep beneath it, her skin sickly and clammy to the touch. Edgar had only seen her like this once before, in the first week after they had gone to the Skilled for help. She had gone too far into the veil too fast and had trouble separating herself from it again. He should never have suggested using that stupid spirit wheel. Things like that always caused more trouble than they were worth. Whatever Kate wanted to do next, he was going to help her.

  Kate was scowling in her sleep, and when he felt her forehead he found it even colder than it had been before. He shrugged off his coat and laid it over her, shivering despite his layered jumpers, which were all holey and threadbare. We are going to get out of here, he told himself. We can do this. Just keep heading up. If a tunnel heads up, it heads out. That’s all we have to—

  A wash of light spread suddenly along the wall outside. Edgar stepped over Kate and leaned out of the window.

  Two lamps swung in the darkness, carried by two women wearing brown dresses with hoods over their heads. They were talking to each other and had large packs slung on their backs, but they did not seem to be in any hurry to get where they were going. Their voices carried softly al
ong the tunnel.

  ‘Which way now?’

  The lights stopped moving, and both women held their lanterns up to the wall.

  ‘Left.’

  The two women headed off round a narrow turning and the light from their lanterns disappeared.

  ‘Traders,’ whispered Edgar. ‘What are they doing here?’

  Making sure that Kate was still asleep, he lit a fresh candle in his lantern, stepped over her and clambered out of the little window. He crept forward, and when he reached the point where the women had been standing he looked up at the same patch of wall. There was nothing there. ‘What were you looking at?’ he murmured. Then he found it. Just before the turning the two women had taken, a collection of deep scratches had been cut into the wall a few inches below the ceiling.