16
The Thieves’ Way
Kate and Silas
plummeted down through the hole and plunged feet first into deep
black water. Kate’s blood pulsed deafeningly in her ears as she
fought hard to swim up to the surface. Her heavy clothes pulled her
down, but she kicked hard and burst, gasping, out into the
air.
‘Artemis!’ she
sputtered, as the secret door ground back into place above her
head.
Kate struggled
against Silas’s grip as he dragged her up on to a wide point of
stone that jutted out into the calm river, and then the shock of
the cold water hit her, making her shiver as she cried for her
uncle, her only chance to help him lost. ‘We left him behind,’ she
said. ‘I can’t believe we left him behind.’
‘Do not waste your
time crying for a fool.’
Kate glared at Silas,
angrily wiping her tears away.
‘You are out of
Da’ru’s reach,’ he said, looking out across the water. ‘We have the
book. That is all that matters.’
The stone they were
sitting on was all that was left of an old jetty. Most of the
wooden landing stage had rotted away, leaving behind only the
mooring posts where boats had once been tied. The skeletal remains
of a forgotten boat lay mouldering beneath the water, a large oil
lantern spluttering light from the ceiling was dangerously dim and
two more lanterns further along had already gone out. No one had
been to fill them in a long time.
‘I know this place,’
said Silas. ‘It is the Thieves’ Way. A smugglers’
tunnel.’
The light splash of
oars echoed through from the walls and a puddle of light turned
around a distant bend.
Someone was heading
their way.
‘Stay here.’ Silas
slipped silently back into the water, as lithe as a fish, and
disappeared beneath the surface. Kate clambered to her feet, soaked
to the skin, and looked up. Artemis was so close, but the shaft she
had fallen down hung over the water and the ladder that had once
led up to it was long gone. There was no way to reach it, and even
if she could the walls were far too steep for her to
climb.
She looked out over
the river, trying not to think about how far underground she was
and how far she was from home. There was no sign of Silas. He had
not even come up for air and there was only a faint ripple in the
water to mark where he had been.
The sound of oars
splashed closer and the dark shape of a rowing boat paddled into
sight. Kate could see two men on board. One holding a lantern out
over the front, the other rowing steadily behind him. The boat
travelled low in the water, weighed down by sacks overflowing with
bones and old pottery that were slumped around the two
men.
Kate did not like not
knowing where Silas was and she definitely did not like the look on
the lantern carrier’s face when he spotted her standing there
alone, soaked and shivering in the dark.
‘Hey! What do you
make o’ this?’ he said, patting the shoulder of the man behind him.
‘Where do you think this ’un came from?’
Kate stepped back
until her spine was pressed against the wall.
‘Looks like a
runner,’ said the rower, twisting his neck to look around. ‘Serving
girl maybe. Reckon there’s a reward going? Rich folk’ll pay good
money to get their servants back.’
‘The whisperers
haven’t said anything about a missing girl.’
‘Maybe she’s fresh
out. The whisperers mightn’t even know about her yet.’
The lantern carrier
grinned. ‘Turn the boat,’ he said. ‘They’ll name her soon and we’ll
be ready when they do.’
The side of the
little boat scraped against the stones as the rower steered it in
to the bank, and the lantern carrier stepped off on to land before
it came to a full stop.
‘Nice an’ easy,’ he
said, approaching her warily, as if she were a wild animal. ‘Don’t
want no trouble now, do we?’
Kate spotted a short
knife tucked into his ragged belt.
‘That’s right. Nice
and—’ The man’s sharp eyes locked with hers and he stared at her,
fear claiming his face as his hand reached quickly for his
knife.
‘She’s one o’ them!’
he cried. ‘Get out of here, Reg! Row! Row!’
The man turned on his
heel, skidding on the wet ground in his hurry to get back to the
boat. But his friend was already gone. The oar blades lay abandoned
on the water and Silas stood in the centre of the little vessel,
dripping wet, looking wilder and more dangerous than Kate had ever
seen him before. The lantern carrier gave a small cry of fear.
Silas leaped for the bank and with one sharp snap the man’s neck
was broken. His body slumped on to the jetty and one lifeless arm
stretched out and floated upon the water, bobbing gently beside the
boat.
‘Get in,’ Silas said
to Kate. ‘And throw some of these sacks out. They’ll only slow us
down.’
Kate stared at the
dead man. It had been so quick, so sudden.
‘Now!’
Kate climbed into the
boat and pushed the bags out one by one while Silas balanced the
lantern on the bow. He had killed the two boatmen just for being in
his way and seemed to have forgotten about them the moment they had
breathed their last breaths, but Kate could not take her eyes off
the dead lantern carrier. If she leaned out far enough, she could
reach his hand: the same hand that had held his useless knife,
which was now sinking to the bottom of the river.
Silas dipped the tip
of his sword in the water, letting the ripples reveal the current’s
direction, and when he looked away, Kate pushed out one last sack
and reached out to touch the dead man’s hand, hoping it would be
enough.
‘I’m sorry,’ she
whispered, feeling the energy of the veil rushing to her fingers
and leaping out like lightning through her skin. The man had not
been dead for very long and she did not feel the same pull into the
veil as she had felt with Kalen. She was not even completely
certain that anything would happen, and so she jumped when the
man’s neck cracked suddenly back into place and his hand moved
slightly in the water. The lantern carrier’s eyes snapped open, his
pale face caught in sheer surprise as life flooded back into his
body.
‘Sit down,’ ordered
Silas, taking his place at the oars.
Kate looked back as
the little boat headed out into the middle of the river and there,
in the very edges of the lantern light, she saw the man’s chest
heave in a sudden, living breath. He sat up, one hand going
immediately to his neck, watching the stolen boat float
away.
With a few powerful
strokes the boat soon left the lantern carrier behind and Kate sat
on her narrow seat, hugging her knees and resting her head upon
them, wondering if he was going to be all right.
‘That piece of filth
would have sold you to the wardens for a pitiful price,’ said
Silas, looking up at her from beneath his eyebrows, letting her
know he knew exactly what she had done. ‘Your compassion was
undeserved. Do not waste your time on his kind again.’
The Thieves’ Way was
a sluggish river, its current too weak to carry the boat very far.
Silas had to work for every foot they travelled and the boat cut
slowly through the tunnels, the silence broken only by the slap of
the oars and the squeak of rats scuttling away from the light. Kate
wrapped herself in a blanket to keep warm and, if she concentrated
hard upon the sound of the water, it was almost possible to forget
that Silas had just killed two men, that Artemis was still trapped
and Edgar was missing. But when she closed her eyes all she saw was
the fear on the lantern carrier’s face - the same look that Artemis
had given her in the library. The last thing she had done was
betray him. She had left him behind and now she might never see him
again.
‘It will take some
time to find our way out of here,’ said Silas. ‘I know some of
these tunnels, but there are many paths in which to get lost. I
will need to get my bearings and there is no use in you just
sitting there wasting time.’
Silas took
Wintercraft out of his coat. The
leather pouch was damp, but it had protected the book inside from
the worst of the river water.
‘Read it,’ he said.
‘There is a lot in there for you to understand.’
Kate did not want to
read anything. She wanted to throw the book into the river, tear it
or burn it, but she knew Silas would stop her.
‘Greater minds than
yours have hunted for that book for centuries,’ said Silas,
noticing the look of rebellion on her face. ‘Many would kill to
possess it.’
‘Just like you,’ said
Kate coldly.
‘Exactly like me. And you are here to make sure
those people did not die for nothing.’
Kate heard the
darkness in his voice. He was in no mood to be challenged and she
was too cold to argue with him.
‘You should
appreciate this opportunity,’ said Silas, his oars splashing across
the water as they passed beneath the dark shape of a ceiling
lantern that had flickered out. ‘Wintercraft is unique and as a book alone it should
be of interest to you. The people who wrote it had their own ways
of dealing with the veil. They did not see the point in being able
to glimpse one of the greatest mysteries of the world and not do
anything with it. They were Skilled, like you, but they pushed
themselves further and deeper into death, stretching the bond that
linked their spirits to the living world. Many went too far and
died for their work, but that, I believe, was the point. Very
little worth knowing is discovered without risk.’
‘Have you read the
book?’ asked Kate.
‘I know enough to be
sure that it is no use to me without someone who understands the
veil completely,’ said Silas. ‘You are that person. You cannot
doubt that you have a natural ability. This book will help you to
hone that ability even further.’
‘I don’t see how,’
said Kate.
Silas scowled at her,
impatience spreading across his face. ‘You will not find the
writers of Wintercraft mentioned in
your history books,’ he said. ‘Your ancestors, and people like
them, called themselves Walkers. Some lived among the bonemen, but
they had more of an affinity to the veil than most of the people
who worked with the dead. Walkers embraced their higher level of
natural abilities and trained their own spirits to walk fully into
the veil, as you have already done. The Skilled did not agree with
what the Walkers were doing. They preferred to watch the veil, not
enter it, and they continued to study it from a distance, choosing
not to push themselves into the unknown.’
‘So the Walkers knew
how to go into the veil,’ said Kate. ‘That’s what Wintercraft is about?’
‘There is far more to
it than just that,’ said Silas. ‘Every one of the Walkers had one
thing in common that ordinary Skilled did not. Whenever they
entered the veil, frost spread across their skin, just as it
spreads across yours. It is a phenomenon so rare that no one has
even tried to understand why so few people react that way to the
veil and others do not. The Skilled chose to ignore it, seeing it
as something to be prevented rather than explored and, at the time
Wintercraft was written, they turned
their backs on anyone who could enter the veil in that unusual way.
The people they cast out grouped together and so the Walkers were
formed. They decided to examine their “abnormality” and explore it
for themselves and, judging from that book, many of them succeeded.
You should be looking to them for your answers, not to the
Skilled.’
The book felt warm in
Kate’s hands, so warm that the watery cold that had gripped her
fingers slowly began to fade away. There was something very strange
about that book. It felt as if she had owned it for a long time and
the longer she held it, the more she felt as if it belonged to
her.
‘The Skilled would
have driven you out eventually,’ said Silas. ‘They would have lied
to you and stripped your abilities down until you were as limited
and closed-minded as they have always been. No good can come of a
Walker who lives their life in their hands.’
A gentle whisper
echoed around the river walls but Kate ignored it. She had to
think. Anything else was just a distraction.
‘I have no reason to
lie to you,’ said Silas and, despite everything else Kate knew
about the man, she believed him.
She opened the book
reluctantly and, in the light of the boat’s swinging lantern, began
to read.
Wintercraft was divided into seven sections, each
one with a title that would make anyone but the most determined
reader put it down and never open it again. The title of one
section - ‘The Tearing of a Captive Soul’ - made Kate think the
Skilled might have been right to turn the Walkers away, but as she
read on, the book revealed its own strange story.
From the different
coloured inks and styles of handwriting, it seemed at least twenty
people had contributed to the creation of Wintercraft over a long period of time. Most of
them had been obsessed with stretching the essence of a person’s
spirit to breaking point, but as far as Kate could see, they had
only ever experimented upon themselves, leaving what was left of
their notes to be finished off by someone else after their
death.
The others were only
slightly less aggressive in their approach.
The neat handwriting
of one Walker detailed her early experiments into using the veil to
heal the body. She had included a list of complex equations that
Kate did not understand and detailed instructions for a process she
called ‘Focused Reunification’, which could magnify the healing
energy of the veil by focusing it on a specific spot instead of
spreading it across the entire body at once. That one woman had
suffered dozens of deliberate injuries in order to test her
theories, from a cut hand to a broken leg, and had to instruct an
apprentice to apply her healing techniques when she discovered that
no one could channel the veil to heal themselves.
Wintercraft was a complicated text, meant to be
studied slowly, not skipped through in a single night. Kate found
herself leafing through many of the pages, overlooking the more
intimidating subjects such as ‘Compelling the Dead To Speak’ and
‘Wearing the Second Skin’, which - in spite of its gruesome title -
was something Kate had already managed to do when she had seen the
world briefly through Da’ru’s eyes. She turned instead to the
section that looked most useful to her. Named simply ‘Life &
Death’.
The writing there was
small and cramped, and extra pages had been pushed in to
accommodate the extensive research that had been done into the
subject, but the central concept was simple enough. According to
that section, the Walkers saw the worlds of the living and the dead
as exactly that: two separate worlds overlapping one another, which
a person’s consciousness could eventually move between at will. To
help Silas pass into death, all someone had to do was open a tear
in the veil and let his spirit wander through. That was the theory,
but Kate read that section twice and was still none the wiser about
how she should go about it. The book might as well have asked her
to jump from a tower and trust that she could fly.
Silas was guiding the
boat steadily through a junction of seven maze-like passages when
Kate reached a section of the book where the ink was mostly green
instead of black. She tried to concentrate on the words, but she
had been reading for hours and the events of the day were starting
to catch up with her. Her eyes became heavy, the oars broke the
water like a heartbeat and she fell asleep clutching Wintercraft tightly in her hand.
Kate woke suddenly,
not realising she had been asleep, and found herself huddled on the
floor of the boat, leaning against the stern. Shadows hung around
her, thick stifling blackness, and her heart sank. They were still
underground.
She pulled herself up
into her seat. Silas was working the oars at a steady speed, but
the candle in the lantern had burned most of the way down. He must
have been rowing for hours, though he did not look tired. He did,
however, have a rag wrapped over his nose and mouth that hadn’t
been there before. Kate’s nose twitched, instantly becoming aware
of a foul smell lurking in the air. ‘What is that?’ she asked, trying not to
breathe.
She glanced over the
side of the boat. Somewhere along their journey the underground
river had fed into the city’s system of sewer tunnels. The water
was filthy and thick. Kate choked on the stench and dragged her
blanket up to her face, struggling to block it out. She couldn’t be
sure, but she thought Silas’s eyes were smiling. Beneath his mask
he was laughing at her.
Silas steered the
boat down the central tunnel where the river split into three.
Ladders led upwards at regular points along the walls, but he was
in no hurry to use just any of them. Instead, he counted them
carefully and turned the boat in towards the wall at the
fourteenth. ‘This shaft leads into a quiet part of the city,’ he
said, tying the boat to the lowest rung. ‘Climb up and do not draw
attention to yourself.’
Kate scrambled on to
the bank, dropped her blanket and pushed the book into her coat
pocket, needing both hands to climb the ladder. By the time she
reached the top her eyes were watering with the smell. She forced a
circular door open through sheer strength of will, then heaved
herself out between a cluster of short black towers and slithered
on to the cobbles. Silas stepped up smoothly behind her, threw off
his rag-mask and looked around. It was early morning and his eyes
reflected the light of the winter sun as he pulled Kate to her
feet.
‘It is the day before
the Night of Souls,’ he said quietly. ‘This way.’
The snow had melted
and most of the streets were empty except for the most dedicated of
carriagemen trundling round looking for an early fare. Silas
ignored them, preferring to stay on foot, and he kept to the lesser
streets where the towers were built closest together and the paths
were too narrow for the carriages to pass through. Kate followed
behind and was just starting to think that the collections of
towers looked somehow familiar when they stepped out on to a wide
street, right opposite the abandoned museum.
Kate and Silas
climbed the steps to the main door, and there Silas hesitated. The
door hung limp on its lowest hinge, its lock smashed, the way
beyond exposed and black. He drew his sword, wrenched the door the
rest of the way off in one pull and stepped inside.
Someone was in there,
he could smell them.
Whoever it was, they
had not entered quietly. The huge main hall was completely ruined.
Display cases had been smashed, upturned and gutted on to the
floor, an old wooden counter had been crushed in two, and the
skeletons of creatures hanging from the ceiling had their wires
cut, leaving their bones scattered and unrecognisable on the
floor.
Silas stepped further
in, watching for any movement and picking a path through the
debris. He did not care about being quiet. Anyone inside that
building would be dead soon enough. He descended the stairs to the
lower levels like a shadow. The pillar room was a mess: specimen
jars smashed, work tables demolished and the floor covered in slick
shards of wet glass.
Kate followed him
deeper down to the rooms he used as his home, but those rooms were
even worse than the first. Someone had torn their way through them,
leaving Silas’s possessions strewn everywhere. He kept going along
towards the room where he had taken Kate before. The door’s hinges
hung loose, the fire was out, but someone had lit a small lantern
upon the wide stone hearth, and the remains of a meal were left on
the table.
Silas crept in, sword
at the ready, and a deep scratching noise scraped behind the
fireplace making Kate stop in the doorway. Silas heard it too.
Loose soot trickled down the chimney and he advanced upon it,
pressing his ear to the wall. Lightning-fast, he ducked into the
chimney, reached up and grabbed a foot that kicked out in the
darkness, sending soot spilling into the room. He dragged the foot
and twisted it, making the chimney-climber lose his grip and fall
down hard, flailing and fighting as Silas pulled him
out.
‘Let me go! Let me
go!’
Silas pinned him down
with a foot upon his chest and raised his sword with two hands, its
point down ready to strike. The squirming prisoner fought for his
life, trying to push him away. His face was filthy, and
half-covered by the black hood of a warden’s robe, leaving just one
frightened eye visible in the lantern light.
‘Stop!’ shouted Kate, but too late.
The blade flashed as
Silas drove it down.