Wintercraft: Legacy (15 page)

‘Shut up!’ Kate glared at Dalliah. She wanted to look at
Wintercraft
, but she could not remember anything
inside that could be of help and she did not have much time. She turned instead to logic.

Everything connected to the veil had a method behind it. If her blood had done something to the spirit wheel, that meant she was at least partially in control of it. She had seen something similar before, when she had been forced to open a listening circle against her will. She had been able to bring that circle under control, but this was different.

Kate did the only thing she could think of. She placed one hand on the snowflake tile, the other on the small goblet tile that matched the central stone Dalliah had removed. At that moment she did not care about history, family, or anything else. She would not allow another spirit to be stripped away.

Dalliah did not try to stop her. In her mind, she had begun something that was unstoppable, but it interested her to watch Kate try.

The mechanism inside the wheel grated into action, sending disturbed air surging up in strings of tiny bubbles to the surface. The tiles flipped, sank back and switched places, all except for the two that Kate was touching. The snowflake and the goblet drew energy from the other tiles until all movement stopped and the only brightness came from the light bleeding up through Kate’s hands, making her fingertips glow red.

There was no pattern to the final positions, and no order that Kate could see. She felt the room darken, just as the tower had before, but she refused to simply accept the blackness. She concentrated upon the aspect of the
veil that she knew best: the half-life, the upper level where souls still had hope of being delivered into the peace of true death. She shivered as the water stilled around her and crackles of ice began webbing across the surface, creating frosty trails that radiated out from her body.

She could no longer feel the spirit wheel beneath her palms. All she could sense was gentle heat, as if she was standing close to a fire. The tiles no longer felt solid. Something moved beneath them and she felt warm fingertips touching her own. The spirit in the wheel was reaching out.

Kate did not dare open her eyes for fear of losing the connection, but behind her eyelids the physical world peeled away and she sensed the shade’s soft grey form as clearly as a lucid dream. It was a haunting, gentle shift in the darkness that was easy to miss until she stopped focusing upon it and let it linger at the very edges of her consciousness. It did not want to be seen. It moved like a fly in a jar, knowing the boundaries of its prison by memory. Only its eyes appeared human: the dark, penetrating eyes of one of the Skilled. Ancient, but still very strong.

Kate moved her fingers slightly. The stone was still there, but it was like placing her hands against a mirror to touch her reflection. Her world and the spirit’s world were separate, but they were connecting. Kate’s blood was breaking the hold the wheel had upon the soul, letting it fall into darkness. It should have already happened, but the soul was lingering, drawn to Kate’s presence.

‘
Distant child. We are proud of you
.’ The spirit’s voice echoed up as though from deep inside a well and Dalliah began to take serious notice of what was happening. She put one of her own hands on the wheel, but the tiles sank away instantly at her touch.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Stop this. Now!’ Kate did not move. The tiles rattled once again and flipped to reveal their undersides, where letters were carved instead of pictures. They settled into a ragged order and the lights beneath Kate’s hands wandered round the circle, pausing upon letters to spell out five words.

DO NOT TRUST THE WARDEN

The light faded the moment the final letter was revealed. Dalliah looked unimpressed.

‘Not the final words I would have chosen,’ she said.

The spirit’s faded hands clutched tightly around Kate’s and the wheel burst with sudden energy. Instead of blackness, soft light reflected from the thin ice across the water. The stones singed Dalliah’s hand, forcing her to back away, while Kate’s fingers felt as if they had been plunged into the frozen sea. The spirit was rising out of the wheel like a delicate swimmer standing over a mist-covered pond. Kate was drawing it up. Out of its prison, out of the stone and into the air of the city.

Kate wanted to let go. She
needed
to let go, but her conscience would not let her. The connection binding the spirit to the wheel was splintering further the longer she held on. She would not let it fall into the dark.

The skin on her palms blistered against the energy of the deep veil. Physical life did not belong in that place. She was connecting with it for far too long, but she would not sever the link. She was intent upon drawing the spirit away from the black, carrying it to a place of peace and hope: a place where – she hoped – death would eventually come.

The spirit separated from the wheel with the lightest of sounds. A whisper, partway between sadness and relief. Only then did Kate allow herself to let it go. The spirit’s essence unwrapped from her fingers and Dalliah watched powerlessly as the soul dissipated into the veil. It was not free – not yet – but it was in a far better place than that to which Dalliah had intended to deliver it.

The wheel fell still. Kate stumbled back from the stones, her head swamped with dizziness, her hands red and sore. Her body was exhausted by the effort, her muscles would not hold her and she sank beneath the water, letting the flooded lake carry her under. She did not have the energy to fight it. She wanted to sleep, to escape the tiredness, the cold and the pain. It would be easy to let go, let the veil take her and turn away from the madness her world had become. Dalliah stood beside her in the water, looking down, as if she was viewing an experiment that needed to run its course.

Kate heard the echoes of the dead reverberating from the walls of the records house. Their voices were thin and weak, like a conversation captured upon the wind. The water’s touch seared her injured hands and she felt a warm presence close by. The spirit from the wheel had not left
her behind. It reached out to touch her hands and heal the damage its rescue had caused, but Dalliah got there first. Solid fingers grabbed Kate’s arm and dragged her back to the surface. Kate coughed the moment her face reached the air and the spirit retreated, leaving her hunched over the sunken wheel, clutching the stones.

‘Do you
want
to lose your mind?’ demanded Dalliah. ‘Taking risks has gained you nothing, except this.’ She grabbed Kate’s wrists, inspecting her blistered hands. The flesh was raw and every movement felt like knives slicing across the open wounds. ‘The touch of the black is beyond my skill to heal,’ she said. ‘Even if I could do it, I would still leave you with the pain as a lesson against stupidity.’ She let Kate’s hands fall and Kate pulled them protectively to her chest.

‘I don’t care where your soul is, or what you need to do to get it back,’ she said. ‘All of this . . . it’s not worth it.’

‘You are in no state to say what you will or will not do,’ said Dalliah. ‘You should have stayed ignorant.’

She pressed her hand against Kate’s shoulder, making Kate’s hands blaze with pain. Any slight healing that had occurred in those few minutes was picked apart by Dalliah’s influence. Blood seeped from the sores and Kate cried out in pain. Anger flooded her thoughts and the air trembled. The water felt as thick as oil, and when Dalliah raised her arm tendrils of it hung from her sleeves like melting grease.

‘Be careful, Kate.’ Dalliah’s voice was suddenly serious and wary. ‘This is not the place for you to lose control. Not here. Not yet.’

Kate was far from losing control. She could see more clearly than she had in her life. She was turning the connection Dalliah had forged between them back upon Dalliah herself. The water was as it had always been; only their perception of time had shifted, forcing the world around them to slow down. There in that pocket of mutual existence, Kate could see into Dalliah’s memories and share her most secret past. Dalliah tried to resist her, but it was too late.

‘I’m not scared of you,’ said Kate. ‘You left Albion because you were afraid. You hid yourself away because people were hunting you.’

‘Stop this.’

‘You hated what you had become, but you had no real power. The bonemen feared you, the Walkers lost respect for you and you could not manipulate the veil as well with a broken soul. You hated the people who had stolen part of you away. A Winters made you what you are. He was supposed to bring your spirit back, but he never discovered how to do it.’

‘He did not try!’ Dalliah said bitterly. ‘He was arrogant. He collected the knowledge he wanted and moved on to the next “challenge” without a thought for what he had left behind.’

‘You trusted him.’

‘We were rivals. He stole everything that was mine,’ said Dalliah. ‘His family became the strongest bloodline while mine were slaughtered one by one. We all knew that Skill grew more potent with each generation. Families were our strength. Every generation surpassing the abilities
of the last. The book of Wintercraft was meant for all of us. The Winters claimed ownership of its secrets and conspired to destroy all Walker bloodlines except their own so they would maintain control. They murdered Walkers in their beds. They stole children from their parents and abandoned them in distant towns. It was the Winters who tempted the bonemen into destabilising the veil four centuries ago. They are the reason I sealed these souls into the wheels. If they had not already taken my spirit, they would have sealed it in there just as swiftly to cover up their mistake. Do not tell me how I should live. The Skilled may be remembered throughout history as healers and kind fools, but there are darker undercurrents to our society that you have barely begun to recognise.’

Dalliah’s face was hard with anger. She reached for the table and grabbed
Wintercraft
, holding it over the time-slowed water. ‘This is what your family treasured most,’ she said. ‘Beyond friendship, beyond duty and beyond any sense of morality. They studied the veil because they wanted their line to flourish, while others were expected to wither and die. They sacrificed too much for the words in this book. They did it for you and for every other sorry soul that carried their tainted blood. Look where it has led you! Those who fight the will of their ancestors become tormented by the ghosts they left behind. You have seen them. They watch from the windows and wait in the shadows, but they will never help you. All they want is for you to live like them. Those who walk the path of a Winters always carry destruction in their wake. You all deserve to die in fear. Every . . . last . . . one.’

Dalliah dropped the book into the centre of the wheel and its purple cover hit the water with a sharp slap. For one brief moment Kate thought it might float, but instead the thick water clawed over its edges and began seeping into the paper. Guilt crept across her chest. She had not saved it. She had not
tried
to save it. She was just standing there, watching it. She waited for the pages to ruffle open and bleed ink, but instead it stayed firmly shut. No air furled from it and it dropped like a stone, taking Ravik’s note with it, settling against the exposed mechanism inside the dead wheel.

‘The book is no use to your family now,’ said Dalliah. ‘Soon you shall die along with it.’

Nothing Edgar said could convince anyone that killing Kate was not the answer to Fume’s problems. He argued with Greta and Baltin. He even tried to be reasonable, but in the end he was informed that the decision had been made and he was in no position to challenge it. He remembered shouting about the Skilled having developed a taste for murder until he was so appalled by the shift in their approach to life that he could not share the same room with them any longer.

He left Silas and the Skilled in the meeting hall and headed back into the open cavern. He tried not to look at the bodies, abandoned where they had fallen. He did not want to risk finding his brother among them. He needed to believe that Tom really was still out there somewhere with Artemis, protected and safe.

He walked past a row of houses and spotted a fallen
dagger on the ground, still tucked into its sheath. Its unfortunate owner must not have had time to use it before the others turned upon him. Memories of his time in the training room returned at once. He picked the dagger up, unsheathed it, and spun the handle deftly in his hand. His lower back tingled at the point where a faint scar marked his own recent near-death at the point of a Blackwatch blade. Silas had saved him then. He did not understand why Silas would not give Kate that same chance.

Edgar threw the dagger at a closed door and the blade stuck proudly into the wood. No one would listen to him because he was not one of them. They thought he could not understand the importance of protecting the veil just because he could not see it for himself. But he understood enough. He was not the one being blinded by fear. He could see more clearly than any of them.