by S. W. Clarke
From time to time they got up, wandered, playing with each other. And it was during one of those lulls I said to Jonet, the girl, “Why is it only you children down here? Aren’t there any adults?”
“Oh no,” she said. “They can’t escape through the crack.”
“The crack?”
Jonet gestured for me to follow, and led me over to the pile of stuffed children’s toys. She pointed at the pile and gave me a single nod. “The crack.”
I held the fire in my palm out to the wall, illuminating it. All I could see was the old wood of the structure, and past the boards, glimpses of the earth. I examined the whole area closely and found nothing.
I came to the slow, sinking realization I would need to dig through the toys. “May I?” I said to Jonet.
She nodded.
When I dropped to my knees, I began setting them aside one at a time—carefully, because these weren’t my toys. They were dusty, the teddy bears’ fur long dampened and flat, and got worse the deeper I went.
When I finally lifted a antique doll from the pile, I froze. I had reached the floor of the old house, and in the space where the doll had lain, the floor glowed with a strange black light.
Jonet pointed. “The crack.”
“Loki,” I whispered.
When he approached, he stopped by my side, tail flowing against me.
“You see that?” I said to him.
“I see it.”
My eyes narrowed in thought. Whatever I was looking at felt so familiar, I knew Umbra would be disappointed in me for not knowing what glowed in the earth like—
I sat back, breathing out. “A leyline runs under here.”
“It used to be prettier,” Jonet said, standing close to us. “A different color.”
“What color?” I said.
She set a finger to her chin, eyes lifting. “Oh, like gold.”
I pressed aside more toys, uncovering more of the leyline. All of it glowed black. Loki and I exchanged a look. We both knew the reason the color had changed. The leyline glowed black because it was corrupted.
Jonet laughed, watching me. “You can’t get through the crack. You’re too big.”
I straightened. “Can you get through it?”
“No.” Her face dropped. “Only my head. Daiud and Elspeth found their way through a long time ago, and no matter how much I called for them, they never returned.”
From the far end of the room, Loki gave a playful meow. He’d already been pulled back into frolicking with three of the other children. It’d been years since I’d seen him like this, not since we were in the foster system and he would sometimes entertain the new, young kids who were uncertain and afraid. But he seemed to get along even better with ghost children than real children.
I wondered if it was because he felt sorrier for them. At least the real kids had a chance of being fostered, adopted, living a life.
These children were stuck in the dark for eternity.
“It’s a trap,” a boy’s voice called. When I turned, I found the cross-armed, militaristic boy staring back at me from across the room. He’d barely moved, only keeping his eye on his crew the whole while. “Those ones above keep us stuck down here in the trap.”
I crossed to him, kneeling. “Are grown people in the trap, too?”
“Aye.” He gestured in a wide circle. “In the vaults they go around and around, confused. Some spots have a real pretty glow to them, what draws them in”—he nodded toward the pile of toys—“and that spot was one before it turned colors. It has a little crack for a few of the wee ones to get out.”
“And what happens when they get out?”
His chin jerked up. “They can rest.”
When I glanced over my shoulder, I didn’t see any spots for the ghosts to move through. But I didn’t doubt he was right; I just couldn’t see what the ghosts could. And while I didn’t understand what the children meant about cracks and traps, I knew one person back at the academy who would stop at nothing to find out.
I smiled at Thom. “Do you protect this group?”
He shrugged, his arms still crossed. “I’ll tell you if you show me the thing you held.”
“The thing I held?”
He pointed at my cloak. “It had a long dangly bit.”
“Oh.” I hesitated, then reached back. Why shouldn’t I show it to him? It wasn’t as though it would make any difference. When I brought it out, his eyes went wide when the chain clinked on the floor. “This,” I said, “is called the Backbiter.”
He crouched, studying it. “I seen it.”
My limbs chilled. “You have?”
“The great witch carried it, rode down the street when she took the city. Except it had a real sharp, curved blade on the end.” His semi-transparent finger went out to the chain.
This boy. This boy had lived before the Battle of the Ages. He had seen the Shade, and apparently she had taken Edinburgh.
His eyes lifted to me, his arms resting on his knees. Suddenly all the rigidness had gone out of him, and he was just a child. A child who was studying my face. Finally, he gave a nod. “You’re worthy.”
“Worthy?” I whispered.
“Do you know how many people have come here in the last five hundred years?” he asked. “Not one ever bothered to play with us. They treated us like dirt. And here you brought a cat.”
“Well I—” I began.
He raised a hand, rocked in his crouch. “We go other places, you know. I’ve been all through the trap, and I seen what you’re looking for. The sharp part. It’s hidden so well you’d never find it if you didn’t know just where to look.”
I was afraid to move, to breathe, to speak. He might blow away in the exhalation.
“The vaults,” he said. “That’s where you’ll find it. But I’ll tell you, lately it’s got a lady who stands over it every night.”
“A lady?” I echoed.
“One hour, every night,” he said. “If anyone or anything goes near the it, she scares ‘em off.”
“What is she like?”
“I don’t really know.” He rubbed his chin. “She wears a piece of cloth on her face all the time. I stay away from her, but sometimes she yells at the others when they get near her. She’s…”
He went on, but my mind had drifted. I knew. I knew at once who guarded the blade.
William Rathmore’s bodyguard.
When the close’s lights turned on in the morning, Loki and I snuck our way out, following the first group of the day as they skidded their way down the cobblestones of the alley itself toward the exit.
He and I hadn’t slept; the children didn’t, so we didn’t, and though I should have felt as hungover as Loki, I was wide-eyed and wired as we returned to the academy.
I knew two things:
First, that Callum Rathmore had never meant for me to find the blade in Mary King’s Close. He had wanted me to find the children, and somehow he’d known that they would tell me where it really was. Maybe he’d sensed I would like them and they would like me, and maybe he’d known that the kids would warn me about what I would face in the vaults. Because after what Thom had told me, I knew I couldn’t walk into those vaults without being ready.
Second, that I would have to fight. Rathmore’s bodyguard waited for me during the witching hour, for the night when I would come to steal the blade. And that night was coming soon.
But what I didn’t know was what kept me awake. What was this trap? Thom had talked about how the ghosts—adults and children alike—would gather at the glowing spots, and those spots were all over the trap. I knew now those must be where the leylines passed through the closes and vaults.
When I got back to the academy grounds, I knelt beside Loki. “You did good last night.”
He blinked bleary eyes at me. “I was a cat.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you were.”
The base of his tail shook. “Don’t go getting sentimental on me now.”
“Never.”
I straightened. “Hate you so much. Now go sleep.”
He hesitated. “You’re going to pester someone, aren’t you? You have that crazy-eyed look.”
“Don’t go getting motherly on me now.”
“You do you, booboo,” he murmured as he wandered back toward the dorm where Eva had probably just woken up.
The grass was still wet with dew when I crossed through the clearing toward the faculty homes. I climbed one set of steps with energy I didn’t know I had, stood on the landing knocking and calling out her name.
She was up. She had to be: if Nance Milonakis wasn’t up at this hour, my whole concept of the world was wrong.
When she opened her door, her bedhead was immense. Her eyes looked half their size without her spectacles on. She squinted. “Clementine Cole.”
She was just barely up.
“Professor,” I said, “I’m a believer.”
Her eyebrows knitted. “In what?”
I set a hand on the doorframe. “Ghosts.”
“Oh.” She opened the door wider, a silent invitation for me to enter, as though that one simple word was all that needed to be said. Her body slumped. “Come in, then.”
Inside, I sat on Milonakis’s floral sofa. It had little give, like it had barely been sat on. Around me, her place felt unexpectedly tight, disorderly, books set in piles, a few dishes left out. Like it had once been clean but she hadn’t been able to bother lately.
On the far wall, a framed set of black-ink calligraphic letters shone behind glass, totally unreadable. I pointed. “What’s that?”
Milonakis had been removing books and blankets from her armchair. She glanced in that direction. “It’s Old Faerish.”
“You know it?”
The look she gave me was scalding. But she only said, “I painted it. Any mage worth her earth knows Old Faerish.” She sat in the armchair across from me, smoothing her robes and adorning her spectacles. “I’d offer you something to drink, but I can tell by the look in your eyes you’re much keener on ghosts. So go on, then.”
I sat forward. “The trap beneath Edinburgh. What do you know about it?”
Uncertainty entered her eyes. “How did you hear of such a thing?”
“There are children. Ghosts who live beneath the city. They’re all stuck down there.”
One hand rose to her chest. “You entered the undercity?”
“If you’d call Mary King’s Close the ‘undercity.’”
“Oh gods. And you only saw children, you say?”
“Should I have seen something else?”
She adjusted her glasses. “I suppose they keep to the touristed spots for safety.”
“Professor,” I said. “What do you know about a trap?”
Her eyes had unfocused, now returned to me. “The formal name is not a ‘trap’ Clementine, because a trap has an entrance. What those children describe has no entrance and no exit. It is, in the truest definition, a labyrinth—inescapable.”
“But the Boundless Labyrinth Umbra sent us into had an entrance and an exit…”
Milonakis waved an irritated hand. “It’s not called the Boundless labyrinth. It’s a common mistranslation I can’t even get Maeve to heed. The two words—”maze” and “labyrinth”—are similar in Old Faerish, but they are distinct. It’s a maze Umbra sends the students into for the third guardian trial.”
I closed my mouth. It was clear if I said less, Milonakis would say more.
“The Shade constructed the ghosts’ labyrinth in the fifteenth century,” she went on, smoothing her robes. “She wanted to consolidate her hold over Edinburgh, and even in her wake, the labyrinth remained.”
“Why would the labyrinth have helped her consolidate power?”
Milonakis craned forward. “For the same reason she drags mages down to Hell, Clementine. A soul possesses power.”
I still didn’t understand. “But how does trapping them give her power?” And then, in the seconds of pointed silence that followed, I sat back. “A few of the ghosts talked about glowing spots. And when I knelt down to one, I saw a leyline. It was corrupted.”
For the first time, Milonakis gave me an approving nod. “Those spots are where two leylines cross. You’re not as dense as I’d long thought.”
“But why can I see the ghosts and not the labyrinth?”
“I spoke too soon about your density.” She plucked a pen from her coffee table. “Paper. Hand it to me.” She gestured for a notebook on the end table.
When I passed it to her, she flipped to the first empty page and began drawing. “The Shade was quite a smart witch, you know, wildly studious and pioneering. She understood that in the moments just after death, a soul still exists in our world. She first tested this concept with will-o-wisps, not long after she left university.”
“Women could go to university then?” I broke in.
Her eyes flicked up to me, annoyed and pitying. “Girl, we created the concept. A shame the world you came from is so obsessed with the supremacy of the penis. But that’s neither here nor there.” She didn’t see my delighted shock as she went on drawing. “When a powerful, treasonous mage was executed, the Shade convinced the Mages’ Council to allow her to cast an enchantment on the body just before the moment of death. She would bring a will-o-wisp to act as a vessel for the soul, and the enchantment would entrap the soul as it left the body.”
Disgust filled me. “And she transferred those souls inside the wisps.” And now I knew: those voices I’d heard from the wisps floating in Umbra’s antechamber were the voices of trapped souls. Trapped mages.
Milonakis hardly noticed; her eyes were on the paper. “Exactly. But it proved quite arduous to entrap each soul individually, so she determined that a permanent enchantment over a large space would effect the same thing, but over time, passively. It was quite brilliant, actually.”
When she lifted the paper to me, she had drawn the labyrinth in broad sketches, including the places where leylines crossed. “You see”—she tapped the paper with her pen—”Edinburgh has the greatest concentration of leylines in the world. They cross a number of times throughout the city, and the trapped souls are naturally drawn to those points.”
An invisible enchantment, a labyrinth beneath the city. It was as genius as it was thoughtlessly evil.
“But”—Milonakis lowered the notebook to her lap—”after her death, the labyrinth went unused for hundreds of years. Forgotten by many. It was only with the formalists’ takeover that things changed.”
“Those pretty spots,” I said. “Those places where the ghosts gather. They’re powerful, aren’t they?”
“Quite.” Her eyes drifted, taking on a faraway light. “If you knew where to stand, your fireball could become an inferno.
Chapter Thirty-Five
I left Milonakis’s home with her drawing in hand. On it was a map of Edinburgh’s soul labyrinth with the leyline crossings and the South Bridge underground vaults, where I would find both the thief’s blade and much more than that, too.
Ghosts. Except these ones wouldn’t be children, and they wouldn’t be gentle.
What had led Milonakis to enter the underground in the first place?
“The labyrinth,” she’d said. “It’s the key to the formalists’ stranglehold on the city. And I suspect it’s where the Shade intends to throne herself when she returns to the world.”
Milonakis had sought a way to destroy the labyrinth. In the process, she’d gone a little nuts. And her eyes had turned white.
When she handed me the map, it was begrudgingly. I’d practically had to force her hand; she didn’t want any student going anywhere near that place, no matter how crucial its destruction was to thwarting the Shade.
She didn’t know about the blade. She didn’t know I had to enter the vaults, which seemed to me like a good primer for Hell, anyway.
“Umbra’s a master of enchantments,” I said as I accepted the paper. “Does she know about the labyrinth?”
“
She was the one who told me about it, years ago.”
I paused. “And she never tried to destroy the thing herself?”
Milonakis leaned close to me, eyes traveling between mine. “Do you really not see it?”
I leaned back a degree. “See what?”
“I would die for Maeve, but she lives under a bubble. She doesn’t leave it except to see her family.”
“Who also live under their own bubble,” I added, beginning to see it now.
Milonakis nodded. “In your world, she’d be called an agoraphobe.”
Agoraphobe. I had learned that term as a teenager, back when I took a psychology class in high school. It tended to happen to people whom the world had hurt. They became afraid, mistrustful.
And why not? William Rathmore—Lucian the prince—had sent creatures to chase us down a train platform. He had his spymaster looking for Umbra. I didn’t know what else had happened to her before that, but I found myself, to my own surprise, justifying the way she lived her life.
“I get it,” I said, folding the map. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Her hand snaked out, fingers wrapping around my wrist. “You need valerian. A bottle of it, or else you’ll lose more than your mind down there.”
According to Milonakis, Neverwink didn’t keep valerian in the infirmary; it was too obscure. But I knew exactly where to find some.
It was the one place Umbra had forbidden me from going.
When I came back to my dorm, Eva had just returned from breakfast and Loki slept sprawled on my bed. She was packing her satchel for class, and she spun when the door opened. Her bright eyes narrowed with concern. “Clem. You didn’t come back last night, and you look—”
“Awful, I know. Eva, I’m leaving tomorrow night for Edinburgh.”
Her mouth opened, then closed as she studied me. She said, “You need my help with something. I can see it written on you.”
I set a hand on her shoulder. “This is why you’re my best friend.”
She folded her arms, fighting down a smile. “The more you try to butter me up, the more I know I’m not going to like it.”