3
The Warrens
Thick smoke swirled
around the cellar, creeping along the stairs, up the chimney and
under the door of the little hiding place. It crawled up Kate and
Edgar’s noses like ghostly worms, making them cough and choke as
the air around them was churned into a deadly soup.
‘Here.’ Edgar thrust
the key into Kate’s hand and she wrestled the blanket out from
under her knees, flapping it back to uncover a circular trapdoor
with a sunken handle. Her fingers felt for the keyhole, pushed the
key in and turned it, sending a deep clunk echoing up from under
the floor.
‘Open it. Open
it!’
The rusted hinges
cracked and moaned as Kate lifted the hatch, sending a gush of dead
air swirling up to fill the smoky space. A match flared as Edgar
relit Artemis’s lamp and held it out over the deep narrow shaft.
There was just enough light to make out a passage at the bottom and
a long wooden ladder nailed down the side.
Kate went down first,
leaving Edgar struggling to keep his eyes open, they were so sore
with the smoke.
‘It’s not far,’ she
said, dropping down on to hard earth. ‘Come on.’
Edgar swung himself
down the hole and descended the ladder as fast as he could, closing
the trapdoor as he went. He jumped the last two rungs and looked
back up the shaft, half expecting a warden to come slithering down
behind them. ‘Where are we?’ he asked.
Kate could hear the
worry in his voice and he clung to her wrist, not wanting to let
her wander too far ahead in that unknown place.
They were standing at
the end of a low tunnel built of grey bricks, not far from a
shadowy crossroads where it linked with two wider ones that split
off at sharp angles.
‘I’m going to take a
look up ahead,’ she whispered. ‘You stay here. Watch the
door.’
‘Me? Why? Hey,
wait!’
Kate ignored him and
headed off down the tunnel, taking their only light with
her.
Even with the lamp,
the tunnel felt tight and claustrophobic. The walls were rough and
uneven and narrow enough at some points to rub against her
shoulders unless she turned to the side. The little flame
flickered, burning dangerously low as she drew close to the
junction up ahead. She ran her fingers along the wall and was
trying not to think about the fires tearing through her home above
her, when something crunched under her feet.
Kate stopped and
stepped back, worried that the old floor might collapse into a
tunnel below. She shone her light down by her feet. The ground felt
sturdy enough, but there were tiny brown things scattered over it:
things that crunched and clicked under her boots. And they were
moving.
The little shapes
clambered over one another, writhing across the floor, making it
wriggle and shine as if the entire place was alive. Artemis had
complained for months about hide beetles attacking the
leather-bound books in the cellar; now Kate knew where they had
been coming from. She stepped straight through them, reached the
junction and pressed her back against the wall, summoning the
courage to look out.
The left-hand tunnel
sloped downwards and turned a corner some way down where a fire
torch was burning on a hook in the wall. Maybe someone else had
found their way into the tunnels: a neighbour, perhaps, someone who
might help her save Artemis from the wardens. Then she looked to
the right, where the second tunnel had a torch of its own much
further away, linking sideways on with another branching
path.
Footsteps echoed
slowly in the distance and a third torch moved into sight, carried
by a hunched figure walking with slow shuffling steps. It was a
man, his face lit by the flames while his eyes stared hard at the
ground.
Kate stayed
still.
The man stopped,
straightened his back with great effort and raised his nose to the
air. Then he turned, his bloodshot eyes suddenly looking right into
hers and she ducked out of sight, pulling her coat over the lamp,
her heart pounding in her chest.
‘Hello?’ the man
called down the tunnel, making that one word sound dangerous and
threatening. He definitely was not a neighbour.
‘Who’s there?’ he
shouted again.
‘Kate?’ Edgar called
her name from the ladder and she turned back, gesturing for him to
be quiet. ‘What’s wrong?’ he whispered.
‘Hello?’
Kate squeezed back
down the tunnel as fast as she could and pounced on Edgar, clamping
a hand over his mouth. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed, pulling him down into
a crouch and blowing out the lamp. ‘There’s someone else down
here.’
‘Better come out,’
came the man’s creeping voice. ‘Come on out, now.’ A scratching
sound scraped down the walls: the sound of a blade being dragged
slowly along uneven bricks. ‘Yer trespassin’! You got no business
bein’ in my place. Come on, now. Show yerself and yer sweet young
bones. Let old Kalen pick ’em clean.’
Kate and Edgar waited
as the footsteps drew closer, trying to make themselves as small as
possible in the space next to the ladder. There was nowhere to go
and smoke was seeping down through the trapdoor as the fire made
quick work of the cellar.
‘Where are ya, eh?
Don’t think I didn’t see you up here, girly.’
The man’s torch
swelled the tunnel junction with a wash of light and he shuffled in
after it. He was dressed in the long black robes of a warden, but
he looked much older than any wardens Kate had seen. His robes were
shabby and worn, he had strips of rags wrapped around his feet
instead of boots and every piece of uncovered skin was streaked
with pale mud, making him look grim and skeletal in the
half-light.
He raised his torch,
turned a grimy dagger in his hand and looked down the bookshop’s
tunnel. Kate and Edgar stared back, not knowing what to do. The
man’s light did not stretch all the way down the tunnel. Maybe the
shadows would keep them safe. Kate looked up the shaft. The hatch
was starting to crackle now. The fire had made its way into the
hiding place and the trapdoor was smouldering, sending small sparks
fizzling down through cracks in the wood.
Something snapped
above them and a handful of hot sparks rained down from the
trapdoor into Edgar’s hair. Kate brushed them out before he could
notice, but the edges of the door were glowing and curling in the
heat. A few minutes more and they would be getting more than sparks
dropping down on their heads.
The old man showed no
sign of moving.
More sparks sprinkled
down. The trapdoor began to buckle.
It was time to
go.
Kate grabbed Edgar’s
arm, pulling him awkwardly behind her, and together they ran for
it. The man looked up, spotted Kate’s frightened face heading his
way and grinned.
‘Ha!’ He lifted his
blade, but Kate kept running. She had just one chance. Dozens of
shiny beetlebacks were glistening on the floor and some were
creeping their way steadily up the tunnel walls. As soon as she was
close enough, Kate scraped a handful of squirming beetles from the
stones and threw them into the old man’s face. He yelped with
surprise, trying to scratch them off with his fingernails, and Kate
collided with him, struggling to keep her balance as he fell to the
floor.
‘Keep going!’ shouted
Edgar, holding her steady as they clambered out of reach of his
slashing blade. A fist-sized chunk of burning wood bounced down the
bookshop’s ladder, sending fiery splinters spearing towards them
from the dark and the man cried out, shielding himself from the
sudden burst of flame. Kate and Edgar didn’t wait to see what would
happen next. They were already past him, hurtling as fast as they
could down the right-hand tunnel, hoping to find a way out, but
instead of heading upwards, the tunnel dipped steeply down. Edgar
grabbed the flaming torch from the wall and tried to keep
up.
The tunnel walls
whipped past them in a flicker of bricks and damp slime, widening
slightly the deeper they went. It was like running down a dirty
alleyway closed off from the sky. Rotten food spilled out of paper
bags stacked against the walls, old blankets were piled up high,
wrapped around pieces of rusted metal left leaning against each
other, and there were rats: dozens of brown furry bodies scuttling
through it all, carrying off whatever they could salvage from the
mess.
At last the tunnel
sloped upwards and Kate checked the ceiling as they ran, hunting
for another trapdoor, a ladder, anything that would take them back
up into the world outside before the old man caught up. She could
hear him in the tunnel behind them, shuffling along like a vicious
crab, gaining on them all the time.
‘What’s this?’ said
Edgar, stopping suddenly. ‘Look! A door!’
Kate doubled back and
found him tugging frantically at a curled handle jutting out of the
wall.
‘It won’t open,’ he
said, trying to push it instead. ‘It won’t … Got it!’ With one good
shove the door scraped open through a mess of food spilled over a
hard stone floor. They squeezed in as soon as there was room,
bolted the door and backed away from it, listening for any sign of
their pursuer on the other side. He was definitely faster than he
looked. He reached the door less than a minute after they did. They
could hear him moving in the tunnel, talking to
himself.
A sharp scratching
noise traced the door’s frame, the handle rattled suddenly and Kate
stepped further back. The bolt was only small. One good kick and it
would snap from its screws in a second. ‘We have to get out,’ she
whispered. ‘Where do you think we are?’
The torch shone
around a large underground room lined with shelves, each one
holding rows of different coloured bottles and rough sacks, but for
every bottle and sack lined up along the walls, at least two lay
smashed or torn open on the floor. Dark brown liquid seeped through
islands of bread rolls, fresh meat and squashed vegetables, and the
warm tang of alcohol thickened the air.
‘Smells like ale,’
said Edgar, crunching through a scattering of broken glass. ‘I
think we’re under an inn.’
‘It looks like the
wardens have already been here,’ said Kate. ‘We should be all
right, so long as they’ve gone.’
Kate made her way
over to a wooden staircase at the back of the cellar and listened
for any sound coming from above.
‘Hear anything?’
asked Edgar.
‘No. I think we can
risk it.’
The tunnel door
rattled hard with a loud bang, sending one of the bolt’s screws
bouncing across the floor.
‘You first,’ said
Edgar. ‘Better he gets me than you.’
Kate didn’t have time
to argue. She grabbed the handrail and threw herself up the
staircase, heading for the sunlight that was seeping in under a
door. She flung it open and burst through, emerging in the main
room of the inn behind a long thin bar. Sunlight streamed in
through a row of small arched windows decorated with stained-glass
shooting stars.
‘We’re in the Falling
Star,’ said Edgar, panting up behind her. ‘We’re on the other side
of the market square.’
‘So where is
everyone?’
The inn was deserted.
Most of the tables were crushed or upturned and some of the
spindles were snapped on the staircase leading to the rented rooms
above. They could still hear the thump-thump of the old man
smashing something against the cellar door, but other than that,
the whole place was horribly silent.
‘All right,’ said
Edgar. ‘We’ve got wardens on the loose and a creepy old guy in the
cellar. Now are you ready to run?’
‘I’m not going
anywhere without Artemis.’
‘They think he’s a
Skilled, Kate! They think he was the one who brought that bird to
life. They’re not going to just hand him over. You know what that
means, right?’
Kate didn’t want to
think about what it meant. All she knew was that her uncle was in
trouble because of her. She was not going to leave him
behind.
‘That man we saw back
at the shop, he’s trouble,’ said Edgar. ‘Have you ever heard of
Silas Dane?’
Kate shook her
head.
‘He’s a collector.
One of the best. Whatever the High Council wants, he goes out and
gets it for them. And if he’s got your uncle—’
A shout from outside
cut him off and Kate ran to the window, rubbing grime away from a
blue pane to look out across the square.
The market square was
not a market any longer. Clustered amongst the squat wooden stalls
were dozens of metal cages, each one mounted on wheels with two
horses at the front and big enough for four or five people to be
squeezed inside. There were wardens out there. Kate counted at
least thirty, with more arriving all the time, all pacing around
the square in their black robes, surrounding groups of people like
vultures circling a kill.
The wardens shouted
orders as they walked, dragging people out of the crowd and forcing
them into the cages ready to be sent off to war. Every one of them
was armed, but the town had been taken by surprise and there had
been no resistance strong enough to require bloodshed yet. The town
would be harvested and the wardens would be gone as suddenly as
they had arrived. Everyone knew what to expect. Morvane was beaten
and there was nothing anybody could do.
The sun was shining
brightly now and the air was crisp and cold, tainted by the smell
of smoke. Kate looked across the square to the bookshop. The little
building was completely ablaze. Its windows were smashed, the lower
floor was engulfed in flames and smoke was pouring from the
upstairs rooms, snaking up into the sky, taking everything she had
ever known with it.
‘Look,’ said Edgar.
‘Over there.’
Something was going
on in the north-eastern corner of the square where a tall man was
standing next to the town’s memorial stone. Kate recognised him at
once. The man with grey eyes. Silas Dane.
She pressed her cheek
against the window to get a better view and saw a group of
prisoners standing near him with their hands tied. One of them was
being supported by one of the others, unable to put his weight upon
an injured leg. ‘Artemis,’ said Kate, pushing away from the window
and making a sudden run for the door, all fear of the wardens
forgotten.
‘Kate! Look
out!’
Something sharp and
silver cut through the air, narrowly missing Kate’s arm, and Edgar
ran to her, fleeing from a face that had appeared on the other side
of the bar.
The old man from the
tunnels looked even more terrifying in the sunlight. Everything
about him looked pointed and vicious. His nose was short and sharp,
his cheekbones jutted out and his mouth looked more like a beak,
with a pointed top lip spiking down over a thin scar where the
lower lip used to be. He crept forward and drew a second dagger
from his rat-eaten belt, a smile squirming across his
lips.
‘Gotcha now, girly.’
He raised his hand to throw the blade and the bright glint of metal
flashed again.
Kate ducked. The
dagger flew over her head and thrummed into the door. Then Kalen
was in front of her. He reached out and clamped his cold hands
around her neck, pinning her back hard against the door
handle.
‘Such a pretty girl,’
he grinned, breathing out a cloud of stinking breath. ‘I’ll teach
ya to go pokin’ around in other people’s business.’
Kate kicked out,
stamping hard on the man’s ragged feet.
‘Arrrgh!’ he snarled
and tightened his grip.
Kate stamped again
and scratched his arms with her fingernails, fighting him off so
she could catch a breath.
‘Let go of her!’
Edgar’s voice filled the inn. There was a loud crack. Kalen’s eyes
bulged, his knees buckled and Edgar stood behind him with one of
the bar stools raised high, ready to hit him again.
Kate clutched at her
throat, coughing her lungs back into life as the old man arched an
arm across his face for protection. Only he didn’t look afraid. He
was smiling.
‘J-just leave us
alone!’ said Edgar, switching his gaze nervously between Kate and
the old man, and in that moment, Kate saw something odd in her
friend’s eyes. There was fear there, but there was anger too. Deep
anger that she had never seen in Edgar before. It looked like he
wanted to hurt that man. Really hurt
him. And he was more than ready to do it.
‘Edgar,’ she said
carefully. ‘Don’t.’
The atmosphere in the
inn bristled. Edgar’s fingers clasped tightly around the leg of the
stool and his hands shook a little, betraying the uncertainty
behind his rage. He bit his lip and forced his muscles to
relax.
‘Leave. Us. Alone,’
he said, lowering the stool. ‘We haven’t done anything to
you.’
Kalen glared back at
him and shook his head. ‘What’re ya doin’?’ he bellowed, spraying
globs of brown spittle into the air. ‘You know better than that.
Don’t ya, boy? Never yield to an enemy.
Never give ’em a chance. Do it, why
don’t ya? Finish me off!’
Edgar faltered under
Kalen’s stare and the old man laughed.
‘You won’t last five
heartbeats out there,’ he said. ‘The world is changin’. You know
what’s happenin’. You know what that little wench is. You’ve seen
’er kind before. Nothin’ but trouble. Just hand ’er over an’ maybe
I’ll forget I saw you ’ere, eh? You know what Silas’ll do if ’e
catches up with ya.’
‘Shut up!’ said
Edgar.
‘There’s those who’d
pay fine gold to ’ave this little bird locked up, good and tight.
What’s she worth to a fine young man like yerself? Bet you could do
with a few coins in yer pocket. And ’oo knows? Hand ’er over quick
and the council might even be willin’ to forget a few things. Make
yer life a bit simpler, wouldn’t it?’ Kalen smiled deviously.
‘Every man ’as ’is plan,’ he said. ‘What’s yours, eh? How’s it
goin’ so far? What’s that little voice inside yer ’ead tellin’ ya
to do next?’
‘Edgar? What’s going
on?’ asked Kate.
‘Nothing. The stupid
old guy’s crazy, that’s all.’
‘Not so crazy that I
forget a face, boy. And I’ve seen yours before. If you ’ad any
sense, you’d let me do it. You’d let me snap that girl’s sweet
little neck right ’ere and save Silas the trouble. Or maybe ya want
to do it yerself? Please, be my guest. I won’t stand in yer
way.’
Edgar’s foot kicked
out and slammed hard into Kalen’s chest, sending him sprawling
back. ‘I said, shut up!’
‘That’s better! Ha!
Much better,’ coughed Kalen, wheezing and chuckling on the floor.
‘Makin’ it look real. Wouldn’t want ’er to know what you really
are, now would we? Careful, boy. Think! The life of a traitor’s
’ard enough, but when they catch ya the dyin’s always slow and
cruel. Do ya want to know what hell looks like? Silas’ll show ya
things that’ll make my life ’ere look like a rich man’s blessing.
You mark my words.’
‘Edgar, just leave
him,’ said Kate. ‘We have to get out of here.’
Kalen turned towards
her.
‘It’s too late for
that,’ he said. ‘Silas won’t let ya. You’ve got something he needs.
That spark inside ya. You think he won’t see it? You think he won’t
know what you are? Silas is the kind of man ya don’t ever want to
meet. He’ll walk around inside yer pretty little mind leavin’
footprints that’ll never go away. He’s a devil, see. Just … like …
me.’
Kalen’s hand whipped
down to his belt where the hilt of a third dagger jutted from the
cloth. Edgar was ready. He swung the stool as hard as he could,
smashing it against the man’s skull.
‘Quick!’ he shouted.
‘Run!’
‘You won’t stop ’im!’
roared Kalen, grasping a bleeding nose as Kate threw herself out of
the inn’s front door. ‘You’ll jus’ make ’im angry!’