The Wicked Day

by Christopher Bunn

  “The gates are shut,” said Jute. “I don’t suppose they’d be opening to a pair of poor travelers in the night.”

  “Even if they did, we wouldn’t want that. I don’t think this is a friendly place to strangers.”

  “No,” said Jute unhappily. He shifted from foot to foot in the snow, wishing he were sitting in front of a warm fireplace with a tankard of ale in one hand and the night safely shut outside. But he could feel the invisible tug within his mind, gently pulling, insistent and insensible to such concerns as fireplaces and hot ale. “We’ll have to climb the blasted wall, won’t we? Besides, we can’t wait here for the shadowhounds.”

  Declan nodded. For a moment, however, he looked just as unhappy as Jute felt.

  “Shall we climb?” said the ghost from somewhere inside Jute’s knapsack. “I love climbing. What are we climbing?”

  “The city wall.”

  They crossed the ice at the foot of the wall. Beneath their feet, the river flowed silent and black below the glassy surface. They clambered up the snowy bank. The city wall stood before them at the top of the rise, tall and dark and foreboding. Declan stopped and looked behind them.

  “What is it?” said Jute, staring at the wall and wondering how they could make it up the ice-covered stone. Impossible. It looked impossible.

  “Hush.”

  Something growled on the riverbank behind them. It was answered by another growl further along the river toward the nearest bridge.

  “Oh,” said the ghost. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ANCALON

  Declan and Jute ran for the wall. Jute’s heart pounded in his chest. He didn’t need to see what was behind them. He knew. He scrabbled up the slope, hard on Declan’s heels. The snow there had hardened into ice, probably due to being in the shadow of the wall throughout the day. He slipped and fell face-first in the snow.

  “Get up!” said the ghost frantically. “Get up! Getupgetupgetup!”

  Jute flung himself at the wall and, trembling, he began to climb. Declan was a shadow slightly above and to one side of him.

  “All right?” called the man down.

  “All right,” said Jute, barely able to manage the words.

  The back of his neck prickled. He was sure at any moment now there would be a howling and baying behind him. That he would be ripped down by fangs. That he would be—

  “Climb! Climb! Climb!” said the ghost.

  “I am!”

  Jute looked down and was relieved to see he was already a good distance above the ground. No hound, magical or not, would be able to leap that high. He reached up and worked his fingers into the next stone fissure and then felt for a foothold. Something slammed into the wall beneath him. Claws scrabbled on stone, right beneath Jute’s feet. He gave out a half-stifled shriek and climbed even faster. There was a muted growling below him. It was a horrible sound. It had more in common with rocks grating together than the growl of a dog.

  “Good gracious me,” said the ghost. “Why, if I weren’t so terrified, I’d say that was fascinating.”

  “What?” gasped Jute.

  “The shadowhound is dematerializing. Astounding.”

  “What does that mean? Dema—demater—?”

  “Dematerializing. It means that the creature’s substance, its flesh, is vanishing.”

  “That sounds like the only good news of the day.”

  “Will you two be quiet?” said Declan from somewhere above them.

  “Good news? No, I don’t think so. You see, my poor young Jute, the shadowhound is dematerializing and moving through the stone of the wall. Doubtless, it intends to meet us on the other side. And that’s bad news.”

  “Be quiet!”

  They reached the top of the wall. Jute caught his breath, gasping. His hands ached with cold. Lights gleamed here and there in solitary windows, and moonlight shone down. It was enough to reveal the rooftops stretching away from them, divided by troughs of darkness that plunged down between buildings to the streets and alleys below.

  “That way,” said Declan, pointing. “I can feel it.” Far off across the rooftops, a tower stood tall above the city. “The duke’s castle. I’d bet my life on it.” There was a terrible starkness in the line of the tower. It had nothing in common with the majestic sprawl of the regent’s castle in Hearne, or the homey manor of the duke of Dolan. The tower looked like a spear plunged into the earth, haft first. The blade pierced the sky and the night was caught upon it.

  “Should we go by rooftop?” said Jute.

  As if in response, a snarl floated up from somewhere in the darkness of the street below.

  “Rooftop it is,” said Declan.

  “Until you’re deeper within the city,” said the ghost. “I recall our friend the hawk mentioning something about a high concentration of lives confusing the trail. The scent gets lost. The footprints muddled. Of course, I knew that already, as I was one of the foremost experts on shadowhounds during my days. I taught a class titled ‘On the Evasion of Magical Beasts.’ It was a favorite with the—”

  “Declan,” said Jute. “Look.”

  Further away on the wall, past where it angled along the curve of the river, torches wavered in the darkness.

  “Guards. Making their rounds.”

  As luck would have it (and they sorely needed some luck that night), the wall loomed above a huddle of buildings standing a scant twenty feet from the wall’s edge. The roof of the nearest building was lower than the top of the wall. It looked a good twenty feet lower to Jute, which did not bode well for a comfortable landing.

  “Can you manage that distance?” said Declan, frowning. “It’d be easy if we had a rope and a grapple. There’s a chimney there that would prove a good hold. Maybe we should try further along and find a shorter jump?”

  “No choice,” said Jute. “Look there. More guards.”

  Further down the wall on the other side of them, another knot of torches flickered in the night. The group was too far away to see Declan and Jute, but they were drawing closer. Luck was a shaky thing that night, for it had begun to snow again, with the first flakes drifting down as Jute spoke. Declan cursed under his breath.

  “Jump for it, then,” he said. “Sooner than later.”

  Retreating to the parapet on the far side of the wall, Declan made a running start and flung himself out into space. For a moment, it looked as if he would fall well short of the rooftop below, but he did not. He landed with a crash of slate shattering and falling away to clatter with even more noise in the street below. Jute winced. The sound was horribly loud in the quiet of the night. Someone was sure to hear it.

  “Was it just me?” asked the ghost, “or did someone just throw a wagonload of pots and pans off the side of the wall? Subtle. I would advise landing lightly.”

  Jute launched himself off the side of the wall. The night rushed past him. The rooftop below looked dreadfully far away. What had they been thinking? He was sure to fall to the street. Where was the wind when he needed it? He landed hard, the breath knocked from his body. Slate snapped beneath him. Somewhere behind him, high up on the wall and still at a distance, there were shouts of alarm. He scrabbled at the tile beneath him. He was slipping amidst the wreckage of shattered slate. A hand grabbed his arm.

  “Come on,” said Declan. “One of those blasted dogs is right below us, staring up with eyes like saucers—and an even bigger mouth, no doubt. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “And, no doubt, you’ve woken the neighbors,” said the ghost.

  Thankfully, Ancalon was similar to Hearne in that most buildings shared common walls or, at the most, were separated by alleys. It was not difficult to cross the rooftops, as long as one did not slip on the ice or step on a loose tile or plunge down into the sudden abysses of the alleys. The snow was falling thickly now. Soft, fat flakes blanketed the roofs. They hurried along, up and over roof after roof, slipping and sliding and clinging with icy hands, the
ir feet numb in their boots.

  “One of us is going to break an ankle,” said Declan.

  “Not me,” said the ghost cheerfully.

  They found a dormer window a few roofs further from where they were. It opened silently under Declan’s hands and they let themselves in.

  “What about the hound?” said Jute.

  “Haven’t heard a sound in the last ten minutes,” said Declan. “I think he’s lost our scent.”

  “For now,” said the ghost.

  The house they found themselves in was exceedingly dark due to the night outside and the fact that all of the windows were covered by drapes. The place smelled sour, as if it had never been aired out, and surely, if one looked, there was mold growing in the walls and mushrooms in the cellar.

  “If I could still smell things,” said the ghost, “I’d be sneezing.” But then he looked startled at his own words. “Wait a minute. Am I smelling things?”

  “Shh,” said Jute, who was himself trying not to sneeze.

  Stairs angled down through the darkness. The floorboards creaked beneath their feet with every step.

  “I’d hate to have to burgle this house,” said Jute.

  “Shh,” said the ghost.

  They let themselves out into a little courtyard, deep in snow and ringed about with icicles that hung from the eaves above like the slender teeth of some peculiar beast. The streets were silent around them. The city, now that they were deep within it, seemed strange and less and less like Hearne the longer they walked the streets. The buildings had been built tall and close together so that it looked like they were about to topple over at any moment. Looking up, there was little sky to be seen. Even the ghost was cowed by the mood of the place, and he vanished into Jute’s knapsack.

  “Have you noticed,” said Declan, “there aren’t many lights showing. It can’t be that late in the evening. Strange. You’d think there’d be folks out and about. Isn’t too late for inns.”

  They made their way along a street. There was little snow on the ground in some places, because of the narrowness of the streets and the height of the walls, and then, in other places, due to a turn and the wind blowing straight down a passage, they found the snow piled high into drifts waist-deep.

  Declan was right. Most of the windows they passed were shuttered and dark. In Hearne there were always lights, a bustle and hustle regardless of the time. Wagonloads of fish hauling in from the docks, dripping seawater and trailing a stream of covetous cats. A merchant and his staff scurrying in and out of their warehouse, shouts and curses ringing out as they unloaded a delivery of silks from Harth, stone from Thule, any number of things from any number of places in Tormay. In short, Hearne was always alive.

  Ancalon was dead.

  But not entirely.

  A sharp command cut through the night somewhere further down the street. Somewhere out of sight. There came the sound of ringing bootsteps marching in quick double time. Bootsteps marching in rhythm. Another command. The sounds were coming closer.

  “In here,” said Declan. “Quick.”

  A locked door opened under the point of his knife. Declan shut the door behind them and they crouched in the darkness, listening to the approaching sounds and listening just as intently to the silence of the house around them. The marching bootsteps clattered past them, echoing down the street. After a while, the sound died away.

  “Let’s go,” whispered Jute. “Something about this house is making me nervous. Something’s not right.”

  They were standing in a gloomy space. It was too dark to see properly. The air was cold and silent. Dust turned to mud under their boots as the snow on their soles melted. Jute had a brief and horrifying vision of stairs that led up and up into the house. Of long hallways where the floorboards creaked at every step. Of a bedroom muffled in molding velvet drapes and an old, withered couple that lay upon the bed, never sleeping but staring motionless with unblinking eyes into the darkness. Eyes that were slowly turning in his direction.

  “It’s not just this house,” said the ghost.

  “But we’re in this house now.”

  “No, not just this house,” said Declan. “The ghost is right. We’re in this city, and that’s the problem. The city. There’s something extremely odd about this city.” He frowned and touched the necklace beneath his shirt. Then his hand drifted up to the sword hilt above his shoulder. It was an absentminded movement, as if his body were checking on things while his mind attended to other matters. “I wish we were far from here, but. . .”

  “But there’s your sister.”

  “Aye, my sister.”

  The city huddled under the snow in silence. Here and there, the stars shone down from rents in the dark clouds drifting below an even darker sky. The shadowhounds. They were back there in the night. Somewhere. Jute knew it. He could feel it in the nervousness of the wind, in the way the wind whispered around his neck and prodded him on with its icy fingers. He did not have to urge Declan on with his fear. It was all he could do to keep up with the older man. They hurried through the streets, flitting from doorway to doorway and avoiding every patch of moonlight. Twice more they were forced to turn aside for a troop of soldiers that marched out of the night. It was not difficult, as they heard the ring of their bootsteps long before the soldiers came into view, echoing off the walls of the houses and the stone streets.

  The tug in their minds grew stronger. They rounded one last corner, and there before them in the middle of an enormous cobblestone square stood the tower. The tower was awful and immense, a gaunt finger of black stone pointing up at the sky as if forever accusing. It loomed over the city and it seemed that everything shrank away from it, thankful for the night and the snow, that they might draw those twin blankets over themselves and hide from the tower.

  Declan and Jute retreated back around the corner. As bad luck would have it, the clouds had chosen that instant to unravel, and moonlight shone down in unwelcome abundance.

  “Excellent visibility,” said the ghost cheerfully. “Clear as day. You’re obviously not going to turn an ankle running across that square. Though it’ll be all the easier for the crossbowmen on the walls to put a bolt through you.”

  “Are there crossbowmen?” asked Jute, alarmed at this thought.

  “I doubt it,” said Declan, after a moment of peering around the corner. “I don’t see any guards. I don't see anybody at all.”

  “Maybe they don’t need guards,” said the ghost. “Maybe there’s something else. Something horrifying.”

  “She’s there.”

  “Yes,” said Jute. He could feel the pull on his mind even stronger now. Precise and focused and urgent. “Somewhere near the top.”

  “This place reminds me of something. An old story my mother used to tell me when I was a child. There was a dark tower on a moor. A tower without a door built by a man without a name. It happened a long time ago in Harlech.”

  “What happened?” said Jute.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  They skulked in the shadows until the moon hid again behind the clouds. It was a dreadful wait, as Jute whirled around a dozen times or more, certain that something was standing further down the street, watching them.

  “Let’s just go,” he said. “We can chance it.”

  “Wait a bit,” said Declan. “The moon’s about to go behind a cloud. I don’t fancy running across that square with all those windows staring down. We need some darkness first.”

  There were a great many windows in the tower walls. Not a single one was lit, but they were visible enough, pricked out by the moonlight and looking uncomfortably like empty eye sockets.

  “We should go,” said Jute, much more urgently this time. “Hang the moonlight. There’s something down the street, coming this way. It’s no use looking for it. I can feel it. Somewhere on the edge of my mind, and it knows about us. It isn’t the hounds. It’s something else. I’d much rather have a go at the tower then stay here and let
it find us.”

  Declan didn’t say anything. He glanced back down the street. There was nothing to see except shadows and snowdrifts piled up against walls and the tightly locked houses shivering on their doorsteps. But he nodded, and then nodded again. The walk across the cobblestone square seemed to take forever. Declan whispered that running would attract more attention than walking. And attention they did not want. They walked gingerly across the empty square, with their necks pricking as if eyes gazed from every window. But there was no outburst, no sudden cry, no torches flaring up. They stopped beneath the wall of the tower and crouched in the deep shadow there.

  “Careful,” said Jute urgently. "Don't touch the wall."

  “What?” said Declan, who had been about to do just that.

  “Don’t touch the stone. It’s guarded with just about the worst ward I’ve ever come across.”

  “I can’t hear a thing.”

  “I know. I can’t either. But I can—I suppose I can hear it through the wind. It’s like the wind is hearing it and then putting the impression into my mind. The thing’s woven out of darkness, mostly. I think." Here, Jute frowned, concentrating and listening intently. He suddenly backed away, looking alarmed. “Shadows above and below. This is a new one. It traps you. The whole wall’s alive. It’s full of people caught by the ward.”

  “Not how I’d like to spend the rest of my life,” said Declan, taking a step back as well. “I’m disliking this city more and more with every passing moment. I’ve always despised wards. I'd much rather have to deal with swords and someone trying to cut my head off. Let’s find a door. Something. Anything.”

  They crept around the base of the tower, skulking through the darkness and examining the wall as they went. The snow blew and whirled down around them. The cobblestone square stretched away on their side and the city hunched down on its foundations on the edges of the square in frozen and abject silence. The windows of the buildings stared across at the creeping progress of the two interlopers. Above them, the tower loomed up, vanishing into the darkness of the clouds and the falling snow.