Wintercraft: Blackwatch (5 page)
Kate found herself squeezing Edgar’s hand even tighter. She held her breath. Maybe this was why people weren’t invited to their own judgements. The waiting… not knowing … it seemed endless. She wanted to shout at Baltin to hurry up, just to get it over with, but Baltin was a careful man. He had a job to do, and he would do it right. An eternity later, he moved on to the black box. Kate tried to read his expression, but all she saw was calm determination.
‘Not long now,’ said Edgar.
At last Baltin straightened and slowly went to stand behind the box. He paused for two breaths until, finally, he opened his mouth to speak.
‘The count is fair,’ he said. ‘You have all honoured yourselves with your honesty. For that, you have my thanks.’ He turned to Artemis, who was staring at him, his eyes filled with silent desperation, but could not meet his gaze. ‘The verdict is given,’ he said. ‘With a count of sixty-eight stones to twenty, Kate Winters, by order of this gathering, has been marked guilty of murder.’
‘What?’ Edgar shouted out, forgetting that he was meant to be hiding, but his yell was drowned out by the cheers that filled the hall. He tried to stand up, but Kate held him back. ‘They can’t do that!’ he said. ‘This isn’t right!’
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Kate tried to calm him down. ‘Leave it. I don’t want you getting into more trouble because of me.’
‘You can forget that.’ Edgar tried to squirm out of her hands, but she held on tight.
‘You’re not going to change their minds.’
‘No! I brought you here. I told you we would be safe. This wasn’t supposed to happen!’
Baltin’s voice cut through the noise of the gathered crowd. ‘The magistrate will now verify the count, and I would like to thank you all for your judgement on this day. Be assured, the prisoner shall be brought to justice swiftly, and in a manner befitting the nature of her terrible crime.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Kate.
‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar, but Kate knew he was lying.
‘Edgar, what does it mean?’
Kate forced him to look at her, and she saw terror in his eyes.
3
Enemies
Silas heaved himself out of the ocean and limped on to the coastal path. Two small firelights illuminated the cliff face as the Blackwatch lit torches and headed down to continue their search, but Silas did not look back. The path led him straight into the heart of Grale and a soaking wet stranger on the streets at night was not going to go unnoticed for long. He moved through the dark, leaving a trail of seawater squelching behind him, and passed underneath a series of narrow arches cut into the long terraced buildings whose dirty walls swallowed the moonlight.
Six such arches passed over his head and at the seventh he saw a man crouching in a doorway. Silas kept walking. The man shifted position, as if to make sure he would be noticed. Silas recognised a Blackwatch tactic when he saw one. That man was a decoy, posted there to make him turn and choose another route, guiding him into an ambush. If the Blackwatch thought he was going to play their games they were very wrong.
In one smooth move, Silas kicked a loose rock up from the ground, caught it, and hurled it at the waiting man, striking him hard on the temple and sending him slumping to the ground. He approached cautiously. The fallen man was unconscious, but still breathing. Then came a signal from the dark – the flash of a tiny lens light from the furthest end of the arches. Another member of the Blackwatch was checking in.
Silas checked the man’s pockets and found the leather pouch that held his lens. An ordinary guard’s lens would have been a small circle made from cut glass with a dull metal frame, but the Blackwatch were not ordinary guards. Their lenses were convex discs of shaved crystal, faceted round the edge and mounted in a thin twist of silver. With no moonlight to reflect back beneath the arches, Silas slid a match from a slot in the lens pouch, lit it and raised the lens to his chest, flickering a signal to the waiting man. He knew a few of the Blackwatch lens codes, but had no way of knowing if the one he had used was still active. There was no reply. The code must have been old. He had given his location away.
Silas dropped the match, pocketed the lens and looked up. He was standing in a narrow space between two rows of back-to-back buildings. The sky was a sharp black slit between them and the gap between the stones was barely three feet wide. He heard footsteps advancing towards him, so he edged further down the pathway, grabbed hold of a stone protruding slightly from the wall and pulled himself up. He clung to the wall like a bat, creeping upwards and pressing his heel against the wall behind him to gain more height wherever the stones were too smooth to climb. Then he stayed still, clinging on by his fingertips and the toes of his boots as a Blackwatch agent approached.
When the officer discovered the injured man, he readied a crossbow and searched the alleyway for any sign of life. His target was gone. Silas watched him take two paces into the darkness. He saw and heard the flare and fizz of a match, then,
flick-flick-flick
, a lens light signal cut through the dark.
flick-flick-flick
, a lens light signal cut through the dark.
Silas smiled. They had lost him.
Four more Blackwatch officers gathered between the arches as Silas continued his climb towards the rooftops. His fingers ached as he clung to the wall. His muscles were tiring. Something had changed. He had to get out of sight.
He reached the neat black tiles, squeezed up between two matching chimneystacks and stepped on to the sloping roof. Once there, he checked his position. Grale was a small town and he was close to its centre. The moon cast long shadows from the forests that wrapped around Grale like a horseshoe on three sides, and the ocean was silvery black. Silas could see the covered dock where the smugglers’ ship would be spending the rest of the night. He turned away from it and followed the rooftops for as long as they lasted, then threw himself at a post holding up one of the lantern strings, grabbed it with both hands and slid silently to the ground. He tried to shift his thoughts into the veil as he ran, using it to sense his pursuers’ presence before they got too close, but the veil was not there. He could not sense anything.
Silas stopped running.
The veil had been a part of his life every day for the past twelve years. For it to suddenly be gone … it was impossible. Unthinkable. He searched for the familiar silhouette of his crow against the sky, but he could not pick the bird out against the background of shifting clouds.
The street opened on to the bank of Grale’s only river, a wide, fast-flowing waterway crossed by three old bridges linking one side of the town to the other. Silas followed the bank to the nearest bridge, a stone-built pathway barely a carriage-width wide. Crossing it would leave him too exposed and he was about to return to the cover of the streets when Blackwatch agents emptied out of the alleyways up ahead. There was no time to reach the buildings so Silas slithered down the bank instead, ducking out of sight beneath the bridge.
The old structure was weak and unstable, with large gaps in its sides where high waters had washed chunks of it away. Years of river debris strangled the stone pillars holding it in place and old tree trunks had been sunk into the river bed to support its weakest points. Silt and soil settled around Silas’s feet as he waited ankle-deep on an underwater ledge, his black coat camouflaging him in the shadows. The Blackwatch signalled to each other, but instead of searching for him along the riverbank they backed away and retreated into the side streets. Silas heard them leave and peered out of his hiding place. A typical Continental welcome, he thought. Nothing had changed.
A scrabbling sound scratched close by, and his crow scuttled through the shadows, head down, like a rat in the dark. He bent down to pick up the bird, which snapped its beak, agitated, as footsteps echoed overhead. Silas stood still, sword at the ready. A wet rope glinted in the moonlight on the river. One end of it was wrapped round a rotting tree trunk, the other trailing across the water. Two men ducked back under the surface when Silas looked their way. How could he have missed them? The Blackwatch had not lost him. They had surrounded him.
The sound of straining horses carried from the riverbank. The rope tightened. Too late, Silas realised what was happening. He tried to run, but the rope was already doing its work. The rotten tree trunk was starting to give, lean and split. The weight of the bridge was not enough to stop the timber from shifting and the first stones began to fall; stones that became an avalanche, collapsing into the river and crashing down on to Silas’s ledge.
The crow launched itself through the destruction as a chunk of rock slammed into Silas’s shoulder, punching him to the ground. He tried to get up, but there was no time. He threw his arm over his head to protect himself as the bridge fell in, burying him beneath a hail of rubble and sealing him in the dark.
Kate looked out into the meeting hall at the people she had once trusted; people who believed she was capable of murder. Many of them were nodding their agreement with Baltin’s words, and some were even applauding the decision, as if some great criminal was about to get the justice she deserved. The sight of so many enemies made Kate feel cold. Artemis had tried to keep her away from the Skilled. He had tried to protect her from their world all her life. Now she knew why.
She looked for her uncle up on the stage. He was just sitting there, silent. ‘I don’t believe this is happening,’ she said.
‘Someone has to do something,’ said Edgar. ‘We need to get you out of here.’ He left the safety of the anteroom and stepped straight out into the meeting hall, drawing angry looks and shouts of surprise from people sitting close by.
‘Wait,’ whispered Kate. ‘What are you doing?’
Edgar hesitated for a moment, not sure what to say, until one of the Skilled spoke out.
‘You are not meant to be in here,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
Baltin spoke loudly from the stage at the front of the hall, ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Edgar has been hiding in here, listening to us,’ said the woman, as the whole hall turned to look at the intruder. ‘He’s not supposed to be here, Baltin.’
‘Why not?’ demanded Edgar. ‘I care about what happens to Kate, and I know that she deserves a lot better than this. Being turned upon by people who should be her friends.’
‘That murderer is no friend of ours,’ said the man sitting at the front. ‘We have no argument with you or your brother, but that girl has brought death to this cavern. She is a threat to us all.’
Edgar walked up to the stage. ‘Artemis, tell them they’re wrong about Kate. Tell them they mustn’t do this.’
Artemis hung his head, tapping his fingertips together nervously. ‘I … I can’t,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t keep her safe any more. Not on my own,’ he said. ‘This place … these people. They understand what Kate is going through. They can help her.’
‘Help her? They think she’s a murderer!’
‘I know that. But up there, on the surface, the wardens are still looking for her. I can’t let the council find her again.’
Artemis handed Edgar a folded piece of paper. Edgar opened it and read it quickly. It was a wanted poster, showing Kate’s face and her name written in thick black letters. Edgar scrunched it up in his fist.
‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he said.
‘You told me we could trust the Skilled,’ said Artemis. ‘You were the one who said to bring Kate here.’
‘We didn’t have any choice!’
‘And I don’t have any choice now,’ said Artemis. ‘Baltin has given me his word that no harm will come to her. I don’t want to do this, Edgar, but it is the only way I can see to keep her safe.’
‘So you’re just going to let them lock her away?’ said Edgar. ‘Just shut her up and forget about her, is that it? Do you really want that to happen?’
‘At least she will be safe,’ said Artemis. ‘That’s all I can hope for her now.’
Baltin pressed a reassuring hand on Artemis’s shoulder. ‘The girl’s guardian has made no objection,’ he said. ‘Kate will be collected and taken to the lockhouse. We will decide her punishment in due course.’
The gathered people all stood up at once and Edgar climbed on to the stage, unable to believe they were all calmly making their way back out into their lives.
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