Wintercraft: Blackwatch (17 page)
‘Keep to the left,’ he said. ‘And watch out for wolves. A few of Creedy’s beasts got out last night. Don’t blame me if you lose a hand in there.’ The man’s laugh echoed around them.
‘Wolves?’ said Kate, as they walked on. ‘Do you think he was being serious?’
Edgar took the lead, following a trail of candles laid down the middle of the floor. ‘Let’s hope we don’t find out,’ he said.
11
The Shadowmarket
The candles led Kate and Edgar into a fenced-off pathway that curled tightly beneath an archway of earth and opened out on to a covered bridge with a steep drop on either side plummeting into endless darkness. Edgar kept his eyes straight forward. He ran his hand along the side, shaking nervously as the wooden bridge sprang under their feet.
‘This bridge has been here for years,’ said Kate, sensing his nerves. ‘It’s not going to collapse now.’
‘That’s what the person standing on it when it
does
collapse will have said.’
does
collapse will have said.’
It was the first time since leaving the Skilled cavern that Kate felt that she and Edgar were completely alone. She could not hear any shades. The air felt dank and empty. If the bridge did fall, no one would know. No one would find them.
Edgar walked tentatively across the bridge while Kate treated it like any other path, striding on past him towards a circular entrance cut into a wall of earth and rock. Edgar ran the last few steps and touched the solid wall with relief.
‘We’re here,’ said Kate, pointing along the tunnel to an arched door just within reach of the lantern light. ‘One Shadowmarket and not a wolf in sight.’
The door was huge, ancient and riddled with woodworm. There was no handle that Kate could see, just two dangling lengths of rope where handles should have been. She and Edgar took hold of one each and pulled the great doors towards them.
The first thing that hit them was the noise. The doors opened out on to a mass of people shouting, talking and arguing with each other. Lanterns made from coloured glass were hung along the walls of a long, narrow cavern that looked like a jagged scar cut out of the earth. Long troughs of fire were slung beneath blackened chimney vents in the high ceiling and the air was thick with the smell of hot metal.
The Shadowmarket certainly earned its name. The moment Kate and Edgar stepped inside they joined a huge bustle of people carrying flickering lanterns, shuffling and chattering between clusters of market stalls that stood in groups like wooden islands across the cavern floor. Waxy candles oozed over the stall fronts, creating islands of light that captured the faces of everyone passing by in a dancing battle between light and dark.
Traders leaned across their counters, trying to attract the attention of potential customers. The busiest stalls were those selling food and clothes, but even from the doorway Kate could see traders selling more unusual goods. One woman was selling talismans cut from ancient bone, whilst another had tame rats for sale. Neither of them was attracting much business.
As Kate and Edgar walked forward, adding their hooded faces to the crowd, a hidden mechanism rattled to life within the walls and the huge doors creaked closed behind them. Kate had not realised just how many people lived in the City Below. There were hundreds in there, all moving between the stalls with bulging bags hanging from their shoulders.
Kate squeezed her way past a stall selling different kinds of clockworks, whose small counter was covered in clicking, whirring creations from children’s toys to clocks that could tell perfect time or even predict the weather, though what use predicting the weather could be underground Kate did not know.
The next stall took up an entire circle all of its own with tables round the outside and a small furnace blazing in the centre. Its sign declared its owner a coinsmith, and a red-cheeked woman stood among the tables chatting to a customer while throwing pieces of metal into hot vats, sizzling them down and pouring them into presses to forge coins marked with a twisting letter S. Young children gathered round to watch steam billowing upwards as she plunged the presses into a sump of murky green water and anxious customers haggled with her over whether a metal jug was worth smelting into four coins or three.
‘What now?’ asked Kate, as she and Edgar were forced to stop.
‘We try to blend in,’ he said.
Neither of them had anything they could turn into new money, but the further they walked the more obvious it became that buying things with coin was not the preferred method of trade within the market. More often people leaned in, pointed to items they wanted and pressed random items of their own into the traders’ hands as payment.
Two groups of stalls down from the coinsmith was a stitchery, where old clothes were snipped, measured, patched and resewn. Next to that was a carpenter whose stall was almost completely hidden beneath a shell of stacked chairs and stools of different heights. The next cluster included a soup seller whose recipes consisted mainly of mushrooms and roots; a bakery selling hot buns almost as fast as its tiny oven could bake them; and a cobbler who prided himself on the quality of his old leather, selling repaired boots decorated with patches of what looked horribly like mouse fur.
From the high ceiling to the wide floor everything about the Shadowmarket was big, and like most things in and beneath the ancient graveyard city, it had once been used as something else. Hundreds of small doors were sunk into its walls in rows that climbed at least twenty doors high. They might have been tombs, but they did not have name stones above them as Kate had seen in other burial caverns. Ladders linked the narrow ledges that ran beneath the doors, but many of them were broken, left without rungs or leaning precariously to one side. No one had any reason to use them any more.
‘If we’re quick, I bet I can grab us a couple of those buns,’ said Edgar, breathing in deeply as the smell of warm bread overtook that of the coinsmith’s fizzing metal.
‘What do you think they are?’ asked Kate.
‘Apple, if we’re lucky.’
‘Not the buns. The doors in the walls.’
‘Old tombs, probably,’ said Edgar.
‘And those?’ Kate pointed up at the ceiling, where the flickering firetroughs were slung on pulleys, casting shaky light across the cavern.
‘Cheaper than candles, I suppose,’ said Edgar. ‘Someone probably dug them up one day and thought they’d be useful.’
Kate was so busy looking upwards that she was not paying attention to where she was going, or to what was coming towards her. Edgar pulled her into a gap between two mushroom sellers, and together they looked out between the customers and spotted two dark-eyed people walking through the crowds.
Kate recognised Baltin at once, fully dressed, with eyes like thunder. The man walking with him was the one who had spoken up against her in the meeting hall, and they were both closely followed by at least six more Skilled, all looking warily at the people surrounding them.
Kate had assumed that the Skilled were well known, even liked, throughout the City Below, even though she had never seen them mix with ordinary people. Now she saw the truth. Most people who recognised them as Skilled turned away from them at once. Others whispered to one another or glared at them, and some even spat at their feet, cursing them under their breaths. Traders stood up behind their counters, their faces stern, making it clear that the Skilled could expect no service from them that day, and parents corralled their children close as if the Skilled might snatch them away.
‘How did they find us so fast?’ Edgar whispered, as the two men looked through the crowd.
‘It must have been the spirit wheel,’ said Kate. ‘Baltin could have asked it where to find us.’
‘All it had to do was send them the wrong way,’ whispered Edgar. ‘Is that too much to ask?’
Kate felt the veil shift a little as the Skilled drew closer. Frost pinched at her fingertips and she pulled them into her sleeves, turning away from the two men. ‘I think we should move,’ she whispered.
‘Why?’
Kate could feel something building close by; a tiny vibration at the very edge of her senses. Then she heard the scream.
The crowd turned as one to look towards the source of the noise. A second scream followed the first and a woman standing next to a glove stall pointed up at the ceiling with terror in her eyes. Kate followed her gaze and saw what she was looking at for herself.
‘She can see them,’ she said.
‘See what?’
A group of shades were moving across the ceiling, tumbling like spiders down into the people below. There were four of them, doing what they had done for many years: reliving the very last moments their tormented spirits could remember, the moment of their deaths. Those who could see them panicked, and those who couldn’t tried to calm the others down. Some people tried to laugh it off, patting the frightened woman on the shoulder and looking at her with pity, and the stallholders were quick to assure their customers that there was nothing to worry about.
‘It’s the sickness,’ someone whispered nearby. ‘It’s spreading again.’
Kate tried not to look at the shades. They might only have been shadows, but the sight of them plummeting to their deaths over and over again was still unsettling to watch. ‘There are shades on the ceiling,’ she explained to Edgar. ‘How can they see them?’
Someone was already leading the woman who had screamed away, and one of the stallholders pointed accusingly at the Skilled.
‘You did this,’ he said. ‘You brought the sickness here.’
Baltin looked down at the stallholder with clear dislike. ‘We have done nothing,’ he said.
‘My customers are seeing creeps and ghouls and who knows what else, while you and your kind hole up safe somewhere, and you’re tellin’ me it’s nothing to do with you?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Why aren’t you helping people like ’er? That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it?’
Someone laughed beside him. ‘They won’t do anything,’ she said. ‘They’re cowards. Leeches. I won’t be takin’ their coin.’
‘We did not offer you any coin,’ said Baltin. ‘We have no interest in any of you. We are looking for someone. Someone I am hoping you might have seen.’
‘And why would we tell you if we had?’
‘Because the girl we are looking for is dangerous, and if we do not find her you will have far more to worry about than a few “creeps and ghouls”.’
‘Is that a threat? He just threatened me!’
Baltin held his hands up in peace. ‘I am sure you have all heard about what happened in the city square on the Night of Souls?’
A whisper of fear ran through the crowd. ‘Those rich types got what they deserved,’ said one. ‘A good scare never harmed anyone. We get worse than that down here every day.’
‘What they saw was more than just a scare,’ said Baltin. ‘It was the beginning of something. Something that has to be stopped. We can prevent a great tragedy from happening within this city, but to do so we need to find this girl.’
The man with him held up a poster with a drawing of Kate’s face and her name in black letters with smaller writing underneath. It was an official poster, stamped by the High Council, one that had to have been taken from the streets of Fume. Kate sank further back into the dark. She should have expected it, but seeing it for herself made it horribly real. She was wanted by the council. A price had been put on her head. Who knew how many people were watching for her in the streets above, and how many collectors were already prowling the tunnels of the City Below, hunting for her in the dark?
‘The wardens are offerin’ the freedom of the city to people who tell them where she is,’ said the stallholder. ‘What are you offerin’?’
‘A promise,’ said Baltin. ‘If this girl escapes, the glimpses of the dead which you see as an inconvenience today will become a way of life before long. You all live and work in the sleeping place of the dead. This city was not meant for us, it was meant for them. The veil is weakening. If it continues to do so, life here will not only be difficult, it will be impossible. Not just here, but right across Albion as well.’
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