A Witch Alone (The Winter Witch Trilogy #3)
Page 25
I could have conjured some light or some warmth, but I had to let my magic recover. I might need to fight. So instead I sat in the dark and I tried to think what to do.
I should scry: that was my first thought. Scry for Seth, and perhaps for Emmaline and Abe too. I thought of Abe, coming racing to London when I’d seen Caradoc’s body: Emmaline’s terse explanation that he’d heard my screams, felt my panic.
Could Abe feel my fear now? I stared into the blackness, wondering. Could I make contact with him?
For a minute, hope kindled in my chest and a flicker of warmth began to spread through me – but then I realized what would happen next.
If I contacted them, they’d try to rescue me. And it would be a death sentence. What could Abe and Emmaline do alone against this army of witches? The Ealdwitan were in no position to offer help – even if my grandmother was still alive.
The spark of hope died. I put my hand to my forehead, pressing back the tears.
So that was it. I was condemned to die here – or worse, perhaps, not to die here, but to survive in darkness and fear. That thought was bad enough, but worst of all was the realization that I wasn’t just condemning myself. I was condemning Seth. If I couldn’t find a way out for myself, I had to find one for him, even if it meant I was chained here for ever.
I was still running the rats’ maze of possibilities in my head, when I heard steps in the tunnel outside and I sprang upright. My witchlight blazed in the palm of my hand, my heart beat fast in my throat.
It was Tatiana.
‘Where’s Seth?’ I demanded as soon as she entered the room. She bowed her head, hiding something, perhaps a smile.
‘He is well taken care of.’
‘I don’t believe you! Take me to him.’
‘In good time.’
‘Now!’ I cried. Tatiana shook her head, her ink-black eyes glittering in the witchlight.
‘Ah-na, Ah-na – you are in no position to make demands, little one.’
She was right, of course. I gritted my teeth.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said humbly. ‘You’re right. I’m not demanding – I’m begging. Please let me see him.’
‘Perhaps,’ Tatiana said imperturbably. ‘If you help us, perhaps we will help you.’
I slumped and she looked at me, an amused smile at the corner of her lips.
‘What happened … ?’ A lump rose in my throat. Suddenly it was imperative that I knew, that I had one solid fact to hold onto. ‘What really happened to my mother? All that stuff Marcus said in the cave. That was rubbish, wasn’t it?’
Tatiana looked at me for a long moment, seeming to calculate something in her head. Then she relented.
‘I will tell you.’ She squatted on the floor on her heels and patted the rock beside her, gesturing to me to sit down. I sat, awkwardly, uncomfortably, and Tatiana said, ‘Your mother came to us with a bargain: she asked for our help with a charm, in exchange for some information on our enemies. We obliged; we gave her the charm. And, as promised, she returned with information. But she did not give us all the information we wanted.’
‘She gave you some?’
‘Yes,’ Tatiana nodded. ‘Passwords, names, details we had asked her to obtain. But when we had more questions she declined. She said she had given us the information she promised and she refused to go further. But we had not rationed ourselves when we made her that charm; we had acted in faith, we had poured our all, our strength, our best endeavours into our work. It was strong and true – so strong that even we could not break it. In her cunning she had used our own spell to make you safe, even from us. And she did not repay us in the same coin. She gave grudgingly and held back her jewels.’
‘So what did you do?’ I asked, almost unwillingly.
‘We attempted to persuade her. But she was brave.’ Tatiana shrugged. ‘Our persuasions, of one kind and another, did not flower into fruit. We cut her, but she gave us only blood, not words. At last, she had no more blood to give. And no more words.’
I felt a coldness run all over me, from the top of my head down my spine, into my heart and lungs and guts.
And then a huge, bursting dam of love.
All this. All this she had done for me.
All this she had given. Her love. Her blood. Her life.
For me.
I found I was crying and I spoke through sobs and tears, trying to make myself understood.
‘And wh-what happened n-next? Her b-body, p-please tell me? Is she buried? C-can I see where she’s buried?’
‘Nothing was wasted,’ Tatiana said soberly. ‘We do not bury our dead for their blood to feed the earth. Child, your mother died in pain and futility. She saved no one – not you, not herself. Her life and magic was sacrificed to preserve yours. Now, I beg of you, for her sake, do not waste her sacrifice again. Come to the Cathedral. Raise our holy Master. Live yourself to see the wonder of his clean, new world.’
‘If I refuse?’ I whispered, wiping the tears from my face with my sleeve.
Tatiana sighed.
‘Come, child. There is something you should see before you make up your mind. I will show you how we deal with traitors and those who falter on the path.’
She stood and I stood too, unwillingly, but unable to resist the power of her dark eyes.
‘Come,’ she said again and I began to walk. At least if I kept my eyes and ears open I might see something of Seth, find out where he was being held.
But although I stared in at every cave we passed, none of them was the cave with the blankets where we had slept in each other’s arms. And none of them held Seth.
At last we came to a long corridor with a blaze of light at the end of it, a bright surgical light, unlike any I had seen down here. An electric light. It hurt my eyes after the long darkness and I put my hand up, shielding my face as we got closer.
Tatiana opened a door and we entered a square room lit with a dozen bulbs. The light was almost blinding and it took a while for my eyes to adjust. When they did, I looked around blinking, trying to take it in. We were in a large, square chamber, properly roomlike, its walls roughly plastered with concrete. In the middle was a grating, like a drain, and above it something like a cross between a cage, and a throne, and a dentist’s chair. I had never seen anything like it. It looked like a child had created it from debris found around the mine, ornamented with objects scavenged from a museum of medical history. Here was part of an old office chair, the kind displayed in vintage shops selling twentieth-century antiques. There was a complicated web of coiling electrical wire, insulated with fabric and lead and ceramic fuses. There were makeshift shackles, hammered out from pieces of rusting metal. And on one side, on a rickety metal stand, was a huge, glass flagon, like the prototype intravenous drips I’d seen in old films.
There was one other incongruous touch: five or six huge iron rings set into the walls at intervals round the room, sunk deep into the concrete. They looked like the kind of thing you’d use to lock up a motorbike. I had no idea what they could be for.
Then I realized I could hear screams coming from down the corridor, from the opposite direction to the way we’d come.
For a moment I stood frozen, not certain who’d come through the door. The screams sounded completely hysterical: wild and desperate – and it was impossible to tell the identity of the screamer. Then a second pair of doors burst open and a group of people staggered into the room, carrying a struggling witch between them.
My first feeling was relief that it wasn’t Seth. My second feeling was shock because, as they wrestled her into the chair and shackled her limbs, I realized: I had seen her before. It was the witch from the library, the one who had chased us on to the bridge. The mad, beautiful, wild-eyed witch. And one of the people wrestling her into the chair was Marcus.
‘What are you doing to her?’ I cried out, my voice shaking with panic.
No one answered, not even Marcus. I’m not sure they even heard me beneath the screams of the witch. Sh
e was shrieking: a high, inhuman sound, quite mad with fear. No one spoke in answer to her screams; they simply fought her in businesslike silence, subduing her until she was completely bound, shackled to the chair.
‘No!’ The witch found her tongue at last, her eyes darting round the room, speedwell-blue and shot with red. ‘Danya, Tatiana, Yana! Pozhalujsta!’
‘Sister.’ Tatiana spoke comfortingly, soothingly. She walked to the witch’s side and smoothed her hair back from her face with something like love. ‘Irina, you betrayed us. You must pay the price.’
The witch began to gabble out a stream of Russian, her voice ragged with pleading. I didn’t know what she was saying, but it sounded like she was begging for her life.
‘It is too late, Irina,’ Tatiana said sadly. Then she turned to the woman beside the chair, who had strapped the witch into the contraption. ‘Danya, the needle.’
At her words Irina began to fight again, like a demon this time. She thrashed steadily and wildly in the chair, completely heedless of the metal biting into her skin and the blood running down her bare feet from the rusty shackles, flinging out useless spells right and left, spells that scorched and blistered the walls. One hit Marcus on the forehead, leaving a welt on his smooth tanned skin, but he ignored it as if it had been the bite of a midge.
It took all three of them to hold her while the witch called Danya approached with a long rubber tube. She bent over the chair, drew back her arm, and suddenly there was a long, agonized scream from Irina, a scream of complete despair. It went on, and on, a long throbbing sound of hopeless anguish. Danya stepped back and I saw that the thick tube had been stabbed into Irina’s chest, right between her ribs.
Tatiana pressed a switch on the wall and the air filled with the thrum of an engine, a pump. Irina convulsed, suddenly rigid in her shackles. The tubing twisted and undulated gently, like a live thing feeding on her, and then a drop of yellow liquid stained the glass demijohn.
We stood completely still, watching as the machine pumped the golden liquid into the glass flagon. I was frozen with horror – unable to believe my eyes, unable to move. The witches stood in attitudes of resignation, as if this was an unpleasant task, something like slaughtering a family pet, but for the best in the end.
At last I found my voice.
‘No!’ I whispered. ‘Marcus – please, stop this.’
‘I can’t,’ Marcus said shortly. His face was not as resigned as the others. There was a kind of revulsion in his eyes, but he didn’t look away.
‘Tatiana,’ I begged, ‘please, please, what are you doing?’
‘You cannot help her, little one.’ Tatiana spoke kindly but firmly. ‘It is too late. See, the glass is filling already. Irina betrayed her sisters. There must be punishment, in an ordered society. There must be consequences.’
‘What did she do?’ I cried. ‘What could she possibly have done to deserve this?’
It was Marcus who answered, his face pitying.
‘When she came for you, in St Petersburg, she wasn’t trying to kidnap you. She was trying to warn you. But you wouldn’t stop, you wouldn’t listen. So she chased you. When Emmaline attacked her, she fought back – I don’t know why. Perhaps she thought Emmaline was part of the plot.’
‘That was why you fought her,’ I whispered. ‘You weren’t saving us. You were stopping her from warning us.’
‘Yes,’ he said. One word. That was all.
‘Please!’ I cried. I turned to Tatiana – I don’t know why, but it felt as if she had more humanity than Marcus. ‘For God’s sake, no! If you stop now—’
‘If we stop now she would be too weak to survive,’ Tatiana said. ‘Her magic is all but gone, look at her.’
I looked, my eyes full of tears. Irina was grey, all her wild beauty withered, as if she’d been drained of life and love and spirit. She was still breathing – I could see the rise and fall of her thin chest – but only just.
She reminded me – suddenly it came to me with a cold horror – she reminded me of Abe, after he’d given his magic to me.
I looked at the flask, a quarter filled with yellow liquid, like thin pale honey. There was two, maybe three times as much as Abe had given me. Was this what they’d done to him? Had Maya and my grandmother had to hold him down while he screamed with pain?
My legs were suddenly unable to hold me and I groped to the wall and sank, slowly, to the ground, my back against the cold concrete, shivers running through and through me as I watched.
The flow of yellow magic had slowed to a drip and now the drip itself was slowing. Another drop fell. And another. And then a final drop hung, suspended from the top of the flask trembling in the electric light.
There was a click and a sudden silence as Tatiana turned off the engine pump.
Irina gave a last sighing breath and then her thin chest was still. Her beautiful blue eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling, her fingers slowly uncurling as her muscles relaxed. There was a sudden stench of urine and her head slid to one side.
‘It is done,’ Tatiana said soberly. ‘Take the body to the room of blood. Then we gather in the Cathedral for the pereraspredelenie.’
There was a short struggle while the witches yanked at the tubing stuck into Irina’s chest, wrenching it free with a grotesque slurp. They undid the shackles and the flagon of magic was taken off the stand and a metal lid screwed on top. At last Irina’s body was slung on to a sheet and dragged away.
I vomited quietly on to the concrete floor, the bitter bile joining the swill of Irina’s blood and urine, draining slowly into the grate in the floor.
Tatiana did not seem to notice; she only picked up the glass flask and moved to a table, where a syringe and some other instruments were laid out. Then she said something in Russian to Marcus and he moved to her side.
I sat watching them, wiping the sick and spit from my face with my sleeve. My stomach was empty, but my body still heaved, struggling to rid itself of the poisonous memory.
I knew now what my mother had probably suffered. I knew what Abe had gone through to save me. And I knew what awaited me if I didn’t cooperate.
Tatiana was opening the jar of Irina’s magic. It was beautiful, astonishingly beautiful. Even under the glare of the electric light it glowed like a small golden sun. Her bone-white face reflected back the glow, bright with longing.
I stood completely unnoticed with my back to the wall and a thought came to me suddenly; I could make a break for it, run into the tunnels, call out for Seth while they were not expecting it. Could it work?
I took a single hesitant step sideways towards the door.
Tatiana picked up the old-fashioned metal syringe from the table beside the glass jar. She plunged it into the glowing yellow liquid and filled the syringe. Then she held out her arm, white and naked and glowing with the reflection of Irina’s essence.
I took another step.
She plunged the syringe into her arm and pressed the plunger.
Suddenly I understood. I understood the source of their immense strength and I understood, too, their unity and their madness.
I watched, frozen with horror, as Tatiana refilled the syringe and passed it to Marcus. He pulled back his sleeve, rolling it so that it constricted the blood supply to his arm, and crunched his fist a few times until the veins stood out, clear and full. Then he pushed the needle into his vein, injecting himself with a portion of Irina’s strength, absorbing her magic and her powers.
I found my breath was coming fast, in small gasps. And then suddenly, horribly, Tatiana turned, the syringe held out in her white, bony hand.
‘Ah-na,’ she said, ‘will you share Irina’s gift with us? You will be one of us; by one way or another you will be absorbed into our kin. Will you take her strength?’
‘No,’ I managed. My voice shook so much I wasn’t sure if Tatiana could understand me. I could hardly hear it myself.
‘Do not refuse this gift lightly,’ Tatiana said. Her brow was furrowed.
There was a long silence.
‘Very well,’ Tatiana said at length. She called out something in Russian and a girl came into the room and took the full jar and the syringe out into the corridor. I saw its bright golden light glimmering as it headed into the darkness. I guessed she was heading out to share Irina’s magic with the witches in the caves. Nothing is wasted.
Tatiana turned to me and her eyes were very cold.
‘You have refused our gift, Ah-na. Am I to take it this means you do not ally your strength with ours?’
I nodded.
‘Speak,’ Tatiana said, her voice close to a snarl. ‘Will you help us?’
‘I will not,’ I said, very low. ‘I will never help you.’
She said nothing, her breath hissing long through her teeth as she looked at me, considering what to do.
‘I will give you one last chance,’ she said at last. ‘One last chance, do you understand? After this, no more mercy.’
She turned, so quickly I felt the breeze from her movement ruffle my hair, and then she stalked out of the room.
‘Come!’ she snapped at Marcus. He followed, with a backward glance at me. The doors slammed behind them and I was alone.
First I ran to the other doors, the ones they’d brought Irina through. They were locked, physically and magically; I could see the bar across the gap and feel the weight of the charm on the door. Then I ran to the doors Tatiana and Marcus had used. They were locked as well. I wasn’t surprised, but I still felt the sting of frustration.
I was trapped, condemned to wait for whatever last-ditch persuasion method they had in mind.
But it was with a drowning wave of dread that I realized what she’d gone to fetch. Who she’d gone to fetch.
Seth.
Seth would be the last method of persuading me.
I tried a spell against the door first, attempting to smash the charms on the lock, but it was useless. They were six-fold thick across the door and I was so tired my spells barely made the door rattle, let alone burst open.