Wintercraft: Legacy (26 page)

Those officers who were strong enough to walk regrouped to lead their horses from the stable car near the back of the wreckage. The animals’ breath clouded the cold air. Their eyes were wide, but they were all highly trained battlehorses, and quick to settle under their handlers’ protection once immediate danger had passed.

With no information about the city’s situation other than the evidence of their eyes, the wardens mounted the horses, abandoned the Night Train and rode hard towards the point of battle, oblivious to the chaos raging within Fume’s walls.

In the middle of a shattered street, far from the fighting, Edgar breathed in a shuddering breath. He could not sense Kate any more. The shades that had surrounded him lifted away, drawn up into the mass of souls churning overhead. He stayed perfectly still, but his eyes scrutinised every shadow, every movement, every breeze. The sudden emptiness of his own mind was disorienting. Once he was absolutely certain he was alone, he allowed his fingers to wrap around the cobbles, desperate to feel the solidness of the living world.

The vibrations of the devastated city echoed up through his palms, but he could not hear anything beyond the pulse of his heartbeat in his ears. His skull rang with pressure and his body felt as if it had been thrown down a flight of stairs. He pulled on the cobbles and sat up, trying to get his bearings. The shades had left him, but they had left parts of their memories behind. Edgar could remember places he had never seen and people he had never known. He tried to stand up, but soon regretted it and sat back down.

Silas’ crow swooped down and stared at him from an extinguished lamppost. If a bird could smile, Edgar was sure that the feathered beast would have a mocking grin on its face, which only made him more determined to stand. He needed a plan, but so far it was a struggle to even think beyond his next breath. He did not want to look at the souls overhead.

He decided to give the cobbles another try, but something made him stop partway up on to his knees. A pair of eyes was watching him from inside one of the buildings: deep yellow eyes that were neither shade nor human. Edgar stayed still, knowing he did not have the strength to run. The eyes moved out into the street, together with a long pointed muzzle, alert ears and powerful paws that carried a large animal with ease.

Edgar was crouching only a few feet away from a wolf. A lean, muscular beast that walked proudly on to the cobbles and stared straight at him. Edgar had heard of wolves being kept by a few people in the City Below, but he had never seen one so close before. It looked away,
uninterested in him, before a second wolf followed behind it, tailed closely by a man who was thin and reedy, like a plant left to grow in the dark.

‘All right, boys,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’

The building they were emerging from was the same one Edgar and Silas had used to leave the understreets, and where the wolves and their master had stepped out, a trail of people followed. Every one of them immediately looked up at the sky, mesmerised by the shades that had gathered there. Some of them had to be pushed out of the way by more emerging behind them, until at least a hundred people had joined Edgar in the street.

Edgar spotted a man and a woman he had seen in Feldeep Prison walking with the group nearest him, ready to fight, but they all took their time standing outside the building and breathing open air for the first time in years. It was only when one of the wolves padded close to Edgar, making him scramble weakly backwards, that anyone noticed he was there.

‘Looks like an injured one,’ said the wolf handler. ‘Where’d they go, lad? Where’s the enemy?’

Edgar tried to speak, but his throat felt burned and dry. He pointed instead, raising a finger roughly to the east.

‘Right then.’ The man whistled his wolves to his side and led his group of underground militia in the direction Edgar had indicated.

For people living on the surface, it was easy to forget the hordes that made their homes in the tunnels beneath the city. Once they had been convinced that their land was under threat, many of them had proved willing to set
aside their distrust of the people above and rally around the word of a man whose name had once brought fear. Silas’ call to arms had spread through the people of the City Below and they were answering. Hundreds of men and women were rising up through hidden passageways all over the city, armed with any weapons they could find, ready to protect their home.

Fume’s abandoned streets filled again, its ravaged roads walked by forgotten citizens who had already proven themselves to be fighters and survivors. If the city needed help, they were more than ready to provide it. Where only a few weeks ago rich residents had paraded through the streets in celebration of the Night of Souls, dressed in masks and finery, a very different parade now wound its way east. The people of the understreets had spent their lives close to silence, and they moved through the burning city in the same way, undetected by the enemy. They had lived in the dark for so long that being out in the open made them stick closely to one another, missing the encompassing closeness of the tunnel walls.

Most of the shades were now concentrated around the eastern wall, where the next wave of enemy soldiers was thinking twice before moving in. Any invaders already inside the city were being forced to flee for their lives as shades closed in around them, swamping their minds with memories so terrifying they drove many of them back to the gate.

Soon, only the hardened officers of the Blackwatch remained fighting. Teams of them had infiltrated further into the city than the ordinary soldiers, and they were
moving stealthily behind the main action, picking off wardens one by one. They did not allow the shades to influence their minds. The Blackwatch had helped Dalliah gain entry to the city, and she had been more than willing to share what tactical knowledge she could in return. She had taught them how to seal their minds from the shades’ influence, so that when the souls passed by the Blackwatch were not distracted.

Each enemy that fell to a Blackwatch blade was one fewer barrier between their leaders and success. Gradually, the Blackwatch threatened to turn the tide against the wardens, regaining ground that their routed army had lost. Dalliah had prepared those Blackwatch officers for everything, except the people of the City Below.

The first sight the wolf handler had of his enemy was a Blackwatch agent dragging his blade out of a dead warden’s chest. He walked along with his wolves prowling beside him, and when the Blackwatch agent looked up, arrows from two hidden archers hit the enemy squarely in the chest. More agents fell the same way, as the tunnel-dwellers moved in unpredictable groups, finishing the work the shades had already begun.

The Continental army was paralysed by their fear of the unknown. No orders could persuade the soldiers to attack walls that were teeming with the souls of the dead, and the residents they had expected to be weak and defenceless were quickly gathering a body count as high as any of the wardens’. The wardens from the Night Train moved in and took the Continent’s right flank by surprise. Most of them were already bloodied and injured from the
crash, so it was hard for the enemy to know if they were true men or phantoms riding across the land. The dead-liness of their arrows and blades soon dispelled any doubt.

Fume was not an old relic of a broken civilisation that was ripe for capture. It was what many of the Continent’s people feared it to be. A place of secrets. A bastion of power.

‘Pull back!’ The general leading the invasion shouted the one order that every one of his men was happy to obey.

Every man in Continental uniform withdrew from Fume’s walls, following their bolted horses back into the wilds, retreating towards the distant coast and the country they had failed. They left their dead and their pride behind, and none who had witnessed the events of that day ever wanted to see those walls again.

The people of the City Below stood side by side with the wardens who had protected the walls, but none of them celebrated their victory. The shades were still present, creeping around them like wolves. Every living eye watched the souls warily as the survivors tended their injured and counted their dead, but no one felt that success was truly theirs. The fallen veil gave the towers a living presence and every street followed a slightly different course from the one they had the day before. Fume’s people felt like insects riding on the back of a giant beast that could brush them off at any time with a flick of its tail. They had repelled one threat, but a greater menace still had to make its intentions known.

The people of the City Below, already standing under
an unfamiliar sky, felt unwelcome in the streets, and the wardens – once masters over every movement and every life within Fume’s walls – felt powerless for the first time. Albion was in the grip of something against which it had no defence. A cloud was still hanging over the stricken capital. The night was far from over.

Kate remained on the spirit wheel, watching the resurgence of the listening circles through the eyes of the half-life. Fume’s builders had known how to work with the veil. They had raised the city in an age when the body and the spirit were seen as two separate aspects of one whole. It was a time before superstition: before people learned to close their minds to the truth that was all around them. Fume belonged to the dead. They were all that mattered there. All they truly needed was for the living to stay out of their way.

The shades settled above the city in one vast spiralling mass, but not all of the souls there had been trapped against their will. There were some who truly had been in Fume since long before the first stone was laid and would remain there long after the last stone crumbled to dust. These old souls stood peacefully around the waters of the
Sunken Lake, gathered together near the few lanterns still burning in the streets, and congregated in the oldest shallow graveyards, where large patches of earth were still exposed. They were the city’s oldest guardians, overlooked by history and time, whose own stories reached back further than the written word. Silent watchers who were willing to watch history unfold.

Kate felt the attention of those souls upon her, as well as the potent presence of the Winters spirit that was bound inside the book, waiting for her to finish what she had begun.

Silas turned away from the ruined city and looked back at Kate, who met his eyes with a look that was as dangerous as it was dark. She reached out a hand, inviting him to the spirit wheel, but he did not move. He feared that she had become corrupted by the veil. Dalliah’s work had already torn her soul away. There was no way to know how much of Kate was left within the shell that she had left behind.

Kate kept her hand out. Her skin was white with frost and, despite his fears, Silas was sure he could see a glimmer of something familiar in her eyes. The blood connection between them had been drowned out by the turmoil overtaking the veil, but it was still there. Silas had to choose between standing and watching Fume falling to ruins around him, or taking the hand of a powerful young woman whom he had just attempted to kill. His need to take action overrode everything else. He crossed the room in four strides. Kate clasped his hand in hers, their energies became intertwined, and together their slowed hearts beat as one.

Kate could read the lives of every soul around her. She could have shared their stories and recounted their deaths. Such powerful connections had overwhelmed her in the past, but she had learned how to listen to the shades without sacrificing her own mind and – just like Silas and his crow – she found she could communicate with them without words.

Kate called out across the half-life, bringing the shades together in one common purpose. One vital aspect had been missing from the manifestation of the half-life on its way across Albion. It was the one thing that every lost soul sought more than any other, and Kate had the ability to give it to them. She was a student of
Wintercraft
. She had read from the book, learned from it. Now she was putting her knowledge to a dangerous test. Kate called out. The shades echoed her thoughts. And death answered.

A rush of warm air spread around the tower as a glistening shimmer of silver rose from the floor, filling the room and snaking upwards like a creature winding its way up into the light. The current of death formed the same way as a bolt of lightning, pulling energy up from the earth and down from the atmosphere, before enveloping the tower in a glow of energy that could be seen for miles around.

The current flowed up past Kate’s body and trailed out through the ruined roof. She could feel every soul that was attracted to its power, and the joy they all shared as they passed eagerly into its surging tide. Standing within the current was like becoming weightless. The pressure of her physical body faded away, her mind became unburdened
by the troubles of physical life and she wanted more than anything to let go and allow the current to take her.

But death had not come for Kate. It washed straight past her and Silas, unable to claim souls that were anchored so deeply into the black. Kate felt death drift past her rather than accepting her, and she felt forgotten. Thousands of shades funnelled along the current, streaming smoothly around her and Silas as though touching them might poison death against them too.