Winterveil

by Jenna Burtenshaw

  “What is that?” asked one of the older boys.

  “A maelstrom of souls,” said Greta. “I never thought I would see one in my lifetime.”

  “What do we do?”

  The boy’s words were snatched away by a screeching rush of air that powered over the city square, and a wall of racing souls rolled over their heads, blotting out the light. The circle protected the Skilled from their influence, but being so close to so many unleashed shades was a truly breathtaking experience.

  “This is not our fight,” said Greta, as the souls surged eastward. “Not anymore.”

  18

  MAELSTROM

  The Continental army had come prepared for a fast, decisive attack upon Albion’s capital. It had been given information confirming that the bulk of Albion’s army was out of practical reach and had expected to take the core consignment of wardens guarding the city by surprise.

  Councilman Gorrett’s information had proved invaluable in planning and executing the attack, but everything depended upon the battle’s reaching a quick resolution with dead wardens, frightened people, and a captured High Council to deliver to the leaders across the sea. The army had aimed to overwhelm Fume’s defenses within a few hours. What it got was a well-trained city defense and wardens who were confident enough to mount coordinated counterattacks, forcing their enemy into a siege.

  Breaching the walls had gone smoothly as planned, but once inside, the Continental soldiers were at an immediate disadvantage. The wardens were working with firsthand knowledge of the streets beyond the gates and were employing deadly strategies that their informant in the council had known nothing about. The attacking army’s leaders were losing more men than they would have liked to ambushes, traps, and concealed bowmen positioned in places not even the sharpest spotter could detect.

  Fume had been an all-or-nothing target, victory or death. No one had expected the odds to tip so drastically against them.

  Runners were ordered to scout the perimeter of the city for concealed entrances, but not one of them came back. There were reports of ghostly figures standing upon the walls, causing bowmen to waste arrows firing at something only to watch their target disappear moments later. Some soldiers reported the earth trembling beneath them, but the army’s leaders put such stories down to fatigue, and to the natural superstitions that any stranger might hold when approaching a city that held the bulk of its country’s dead.

  The people of the Continent knew to respect those who had died before them. Stories of Fume’s restless souls had spread far beyond Albion’s borders and even beyond the Continent itself. It was no surprise that the soldiers thought they were seeing things, but every mistake they made was a mistake too many. Every false story and misplaced arrow had the potential to cost a man’s life, so when one of the spotters turned sickly pale beside him, the lead general thought he was about to have his time wasted once again.

  The spotter did not speak. He did not need to speak. He pointed to the walls of the city, and neither he nor his leader had words for what they could see.

  At first, the general thought they were birds, but birds did not skim rooftops in such a fluid way, washing around the towers like liquid, blackening everything they covered as they surged toward the city gate. They had to be weapons, but they were like nothing he had ever encountered before. The closer it came, the more detail he could see, and, despite his skepticism, he could have sworn that there were eyes within the darkness. Were they animals of some kind?

  “Orders, sir?”

  A voice close beside him reminded him that he had a job to do.

  What orders could he give? There was nothing to fight, and retreat was not an option; but they had come too far to waste their chance now.

  “Maintain positions!”

  As the Continental army pressed on, a cold blue light pierced through the dark to the north of Fume. The Night Train had been recalled from its work in the High North, arriving late but carrying enough wardens to reinforce Fume’s city guards. The huge engine sped along its tracks, pushing its mighty grille ahead of it as the patched metal carriages creaked and shook. The cages and chains slung within them should have been filled with people taken from distant towns, but the order to return had arrived before the wardens had had time to begin their gruesome work.

  The train’s twisted iron skeleton came within sight of the city. The wheels thundered beneath a vast head of steam, traveling at full speed, pushing their way under a row of tall stone arches that marked the engine’s approach into Fume. The city’s burning fires illuminated the night sky in patches beyond them, and the wardens on board prepared their weapons, ready to defend their capital the moment the train pulled into its station.

  That moment did not come.

  The Continental general studied the choking darkness that was spreading over the city. It could have been a trick designed to prey upon the superstitions of the invaders, but inside the walls, Fume’s wardens were taken equally by surprise as a wave of shades plunged through the streets. In fear, men swiped at the shades as they would at human foes, but their blades sliced through nothing but empty air, forcing the wardens to retreat. A host of shades swarmed past their forward ranks and raged against the outer walls, making Fume echo with a sound like thunder as a maelstrom of spirits slammed into stone.

  The impact created a shock wave that punched through the veil and across the living world. Horses fled. Siege weapons splintered. Soldiers outside Fume’s walls were knocked off their feet and left dazed and disoriented. Even far-flung towns and settlements felt the vibration strongly enough to make horses worry in their stables and wake people from their sleep.

  The grizzled driver of the Night Train was the only one on board who witnessed the shades overwhelming Fume’s upper rooftops and smashing into the walls, before two stone arches crumpled across the track ahead of him. Eyes white with terror, he heaved on the brake lever, and when the shock wave struck the mighty engine, the effect was unstoppable and devastating.

  The force of the half-life slammed through the iron frame, forcing the wheels to lock and spark as the great train encountered the veil’s resistance. Carriages jolted and rocked until one near the center of the train lost its grip and jackknifed from the tracks. It crashed straight into one of the arches, sending stones crushing down on top of its open roof, dragging the carriages behind it out to the left, and wrenching the forward engine as it struggled to slow down.

  The engine screamed and smashed into the rubble of the first fallen arch. Stones scattered. Sparks poured from the wheels like liquid fire, and the sharp blue light that had been a source of terror across Albion for so long flickered and died. The furnace scattered coals into the driver’s cab in a haze of hot sparks, illuminating his face for one last time, and the huge wheels tore, screeching, from the track. Momentum carried it some way across uneven ground, dragged the crippled engine onto its side, and sent it scraping forward through the frozen earth.

  Wardens on board who had survived the initial devastation clung to the inside of the carriages as they ripped a scar across the ground, churning the earth until the engine scraped deeply enough to counter its own power, and the Night Train’s final journey came to a slow, twisted, and juddering halt.

  The train lay crooked and buckled within a choking fog of smoke and dirt. Some of the central carriages had collapsed completely into a mangled mass of metal, and steam hissed from the engine’s broken mechanical veins. Bloodied limbs reached from the wreckage as the wardens clambered out to pull injured officers to safety and gather in the shadow of the ruined train. The driver had not survived to tell his story, so the only cause the wardens suspected was enemy sabotage.

  Those officers who were strong enough to walk regrouped to lead their horses from the stable car near the back of the wreckage. The animals’ breaths clouded the cold air. Their eyes were wide, but they all were highly trained battle horses and quick to settle under their handlers’ protection once immediate danger had p
assed.

  With no information about the city’s situation other than the evidence of their eyes, the wardens mounted the horses, abandoned the Night Train and rode hard toward the point of battle, oblivious to the chaos raging within Fume’s walls.

  In the middle of a shattered street, far from the fighting, Edgar breathed in a shuddering breath. He could not sense Kate anymore. The shades that had surrounded him lifted away, drawn up into the mass of souls churning overhead. He stayed perfectly still, but his eyes scrutinized every shadow, every movement, every breeze. The sudden emptiness of his own mind was disorienting. Once he was absolutely certain he was alone, he allowed his fingers to wrap around the cobbles, desperate to feel the solidness of the living world.

  The vibrations of the devastated city echoed through his palms, but he could not hear anything beyond the pulse of his heartbeat in his ears. His skull rang with pressure, and his body felt as if it had been thrown down a flight of stairs. He pulled on the cobbles and sat up, trying to get his bearings. The shades had left him, but they had left parts of their memories behind. Edgar could remember places he had never seen and people he had never known. He tried to stand but soon regretted it and sat back down.

  Silas’s crow swooped closer and stared at him from an extinguished lamppost. If a bird could smile, Edgar was sure that the feathered beast would have a mocking grin on its face, and that made him even more determined to stand. He needed a plan, but so far it was a struggle to think beyond his next breath. He did not want to look at the souls overhead.

  He decided to give the cobbles another try, but something made him stop partway to his knees. A pair of eyes was watching him from inside one of the buildings: deep yellow eyes that were neither shade nor human. Knowing he did not have the strength to run, Edgar stayed still. The eyes moved out into the street together with a long, pointed muzzle, alert ears, and powerful paws that carried a large animal with ease.

  Edgar was crouching only a few feet away from a wolf, a lean, muscular beast that walked out onto the cobbles and stared straight at him. Edgar had heard of wolves being kept by a few people in the City Below, but he had never seen one so close before. It looked away, uninterested in him, before a second wolf followed behind it, tailed closely by a man who was thin and reedy, like a plant left to grow in the dark.

  “All right, boys,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  The building they were emerging from was the same one Edgar and Silas had used to leave the understreets, and where the wolves and their master had stepped out, a trail of people followed. Every one of them immediately looked up at the sky, mesmerized by the shades that had gathered there. Some of them had to be pushed out of the way by others emerging behind them, until at least a hundred people had joined Edgar in the street.

  Edgar spotted a man and a woman he had seen in Feldeep Prison walking with the group nearest him, ready to fight, but they all took their time standing outside the building and breathing open air for the first time in years. It was only when one of the wolves padded close to Edgar, making him scramble weakly backward, that anyone noticed he was there.

  “Looks like an injured one,” said the wolf handler. “Where’d they go, lad? Where’s the enemy?”

  Edgar tried to speak, but his throat felt burned and dry. He pointed instead, raising a finger roughly to the east.

  “Right, then.” The man whistled his wolves to his side and led his group of underground militia in the direction Edgar had indicated.

  For people living on the surface, it was easy to forget the hordes that made their homes in the tunnels beneath the city. Once they had been convinced that their land was under threat, many of them had proved willing to set aside their distrust of the people above and rally around the word of a man whose name had once brought fear. Silas’s call to arms had spread among the people of the City Below, and they were answering. Hundreds of men and women were rising up through hidden passageways all over the city, armed with any weapons they could find, ready to protect their homes.

  Fume’s abandoned streets filled again, its ravaged roads walked by forgotten citizens who had already proved themselves to be fighters and survivors. If the city needed help, they were more than ready to provide it. Where only a few weeks ago rich residents had paraded through the streets in celebration of the Night of Souls, dressed in masks and finery, a very different parade now wound its way east. The people of the understreets had spent their lives close to silence, and they moved through the burning city in the same way, undetected by the enemy. They had lived in the dark for so long that being out in the open made them stick near to one another, missing the encompassing closeness of the tunnel walls.

  Most of the shades were now concentrated around the eastern wall, where the next wave of enemy soldiers was thinking twice before moving in. Any invaders already inside the city were being forced to flee for their lives as shades closed in around them, swamping their minds with memories so terrifying they drove many of them back to the gate.

  Soon only the hardened officers of the Blackwatch remained fighting. Teams of them had infiltrated farther into the city than the ordinary soldiers, and they were moving stealthily behind the main action, picking off wardens one by one. They did not allow the shades to influence their minds. The Blackwatch had helped Dalliah gain entry to the city, and she had been more than willing to share what tactical knowledge she could in return. She had taught the agents how to seal their minds from the shades’ influence, so that when the souls passed by, the Blackwatch were not distracted.

  Each enemy that fell to a Blackwatch blade reduced the barrier between their leaders and success. Gradually the Blackwatch threatened to turn the tide against the wardens, regaining ground that its routed army had lost. Dalliah had prepared those Blackwatch officers for everything—everything except the people of the City Below.

  The first sight the wolf handler had of his enemy was a Blackwatch agent dragging his blade out of a dead warden’s chest. The handler walked along with his wolves prowling beside him, and when the agent looked up, arrows from two hidden archers hit him squarely in the chest. More agents fell the same way, as the tunnel dwellers moved in unpredictable groups, finishing the work the shades had already begun.

  The Continental soldiers were paralyzed by their fear of the unknown. No orders could persuade them to attack walls that were teeming with the souls of the dead, and the residents they had expected to be weak and defenseless were quickly gathering a body count as high as any of the wardens’. The wardens from the Night Train moved in and took the Continent’s right flank by surprise. Most of them were already bloodied and injured from the crash, so it was hard for the enemy to know if they were true men or phantoms riding across the land. The deadliness of their arrows and blades soon dispelled any doubt.

  Fume was not an old relic of a broken civilization that was ripe for capture. It was what many of the Continent’s people feared it to be. A place of secrets. A bastion of power.

  “Pull back!” The general leading the invasion shouted the one order that every one of his men was happy to obey.

  Every man in Continental uniform withdrew from Fume’s walls, following the bolted horses back into the wilds, retreating toward the distant coast and the country the army had failed. They left their dead and their pride behind, and none who had witnessed the events of that day ever wanted to see those walls again.

  The people of the City Below stood side by side with the wardens who had protected the walls, but none of them celebrated their victory. The shades were still present, creeping around them like predators. Every living eye watched the souls warily as the survivors tended their injured and counted their dead, but none of them felt that success was truly theirs. The fallen veil gave the towers a living presence, and every street followed a slightly different course from the one it had had the day before. Fume’s people felt like insects riding on the back of a giant beast that could brush them off at any time with a flick of its tail. They
had repelled one threat, but a greater menace still had to make its intentions known.

  The people of the City Below, already standing under an unfamiliar sky, felt unwelcome in the streets, and the wardens, once masters over every movement and every life within Fume’s walls, felt powerless for the first time. Albion was in the grip of something against which it had no defense. A cloud was still hanging over the stricken capital. The night was far from over.

  19

  FROM THE BLACK

  Kate remained on the spirit wheel in the Winters tower, watching the resurgence of the listening circles through the eyes of the half-life. Fume’s builders had known how to work with the veil. They had raised the city in an age when the body and the spirit were seen as two separate aspects of one whole. It was a time before superstition, before people learned to close their minds to the truth that surrounded them. Fume belonged to the dead. They were what mattered there. All they truly needed was for the living to stay out of their way.

  The shades settled above the city in one vast spiraling mass, but not all the souls there had been trapped against their will. Some truly had been in Fume since long before the first stone had been laid, and they would remain there long after the last stone crumbled to dust. These old souls stood peacefully around the waters of the Sunken Lake, gathered together near the few lanterns still burning in the streets, and congregated in the oldest shallow graveyards, where large patches of earth were still exposed. They were the city’s oldest guardians, overlooked by history and time, whose own stories reached back further than the written word. Silent watchers who were willing to watch history unfold.

  Kate felt the attention of those souls upon her, as well as the potent presence of the Winters spirit that was bound inside the book, waiting for her to finish what she had begun.