Shadowcry (15 page)

She fell down . . . down . . . trying to snatch hold of the ladder in the dark. Silas's lantern blinded her as she passed it, and something tugged hard on her arm. Silas looked down at her, a strong hand clasped around her wrist. Kate reached up to hold on to him with her other hand, and he held her firmly, bringing her back toward the ladder. The moment she was close enough, Kate reached for the ladder and cautiously regained her footing. She clung there for a few moments, not wanting to show any weakness, before gradually continuing her descent.

Kate took each step slowly, until at last her feet touched solid ground. She misjudged the final step and stumbled back to the floor, but she was too relieved to care. She tested her wrist where Silas had grabbed her. A bruise was blossoming around the bone, and it was difficult to move her hand.

“You were lucky,” said Silas, stepping down beside her. “An inch farther and you would have been out of my reach. There are wise ways to enter a tomb cavern. Falling is not one of them.”

He held out his hand to help her up, and Kate saw that he too had not come away unscathed. His wrist joint looked misaligned, and the bones cracked loudly as they straightened themselves again, making him wince with pain.

“I wish mine would do that,” she said.

“You are not badly hurt,” said Silas, pulling her to her feet. “Your body will heal itself just as surely as mine, given time.”

Kate looked around. The cavern was long and narrow at the bottom, shaped like a long wave carved into the earth, but there was no sign of a library, or anything else. It was hard to see past the chunks of stone on the chasm floor and the dust thrown up by their feet as they negotiated a path around the edge. It looked like the grave robbers had thrown anything of low value onto the cavern floor, littering it with broken pottery, pieces of wood, and loose dirt and bones excavated from the tombs.

Silas tested every raised stone in the wall in case it was a handle of some kind, and while the two of them hunted for hidden doors, Kate dared to ask him something.

“If we do find the library down here,” she said, “will you help my uncle?”

“You will be safe for as long as I need you,” said Silas. “The same applies to him.”

“Could you help him escape?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“You were the one who brought him to Fume. What if . . . what if I promise not to try and escape again. If I get you the book, whatever it takes, will you help him then? Will you protect him from the wardens? Help him stay alive?”

“You will find the book simply because I demand it of you,” said Silas. “Your promises mean nothing to me.”

“I'm just asking you to let him live. Please. You'll still have everything you want.”

Silas lowered his scarred hand from the wall and turned to face Kate. “You are not responsible for his life,” he said. “We all live and die alone. You will learn that in time.”

“He is family,” said Kate. “We look after each other.”

Silas turned back to the wall. “That is something I know nothing about,” he said. “Families lie. They leave and they forget. We do not have time for this. As long as you obey me, the bookseller will live. Now do as I say and find this door.”

Kate did not know how Silas expected her to find a door down there. It was pitch black and the spirit wheel's directions had not been very specific. The fire-glow from the grave robbers' swinging oil lamps flickered like stars above them and Silas's lantern light reflected from tiny pieces of rough gemstone embedded in the walls, making them sparkle and move as he hunted for anything that looked out of place.

They had walked more than a thousand steps and searched only a tiny fraction of the cavern when Kate stopped. Everyone who had ever searched that cavern would have done exactly what they were doing now. They were going about it the wrong way.

She stood still, letting Silas wander ahead, and as the light of the lantern moved farther away, she tried to put herself in the place of the people who had built the city below. Kate guessed that the library had to be easy to find if Artemis had found it so quickly. Maybe people with the blood of the bonemen just knew where it was. What if she had not been receptive to the clues?

Kate closed her eyes and concentrated on finding the door. Nothing happened. There was no sudden pull. No sign to point the way. She opened her eyes again and found Silas standing right in front of her.

“This cavern is old, isn't it?” asked Kate.

“One of the oldest.”

“What did it look like before the grave robbers came?”

Silas touched the wall and a fragment of blue gemstone broke off under his hand. “Most of it was lined with lapis before they stripped it away,” he said. “This lowest section is supposed to have been decorated with a mosaic of an ocean, with fish and other useless things set in precious stones across the floor and the walls. I never saw it for myself. It had all been chipped away long before the High Council got here.”

Kate tried to picture it as Silas had described. “What about light?” she asked.

“It is a tomb cavern,” said Silas. “The dead do not need light to see it.”

“But we do. And so would anyone else who came down here.”

“If this is your attempt to waste more time—”

“Why do the grave robbers hang their oil lamps down on ropes?”

“In case they need to escape quickly from a warden patrol,” said Silas. “They can pull everything up and be gone in moments. What is your point?”

“Da'ru and Artemis would have carried their light down here, like us. So would the bonemen.”

Silas looked at the lantern, then at the walls. “I fail to see the relevance of any of this,” he said.

Kate grabbed the lantern and walked back to where the ladder met the floor. A small metal hook was sunk into the wall beside it. She ran her hand across the ruined wall, feeling the deep welts in the stone where the grave robbers stealing the lapis had cut too deep.

“Everyone assumes the bonemen wanted to hide the library,” said Kate. “But what if they didn't? What if it was just an ordinary place in their time? And when they disappeared, people just assumed it was a secret place because no one knew how to get into it.”

“Except for the Skilled,” corrected Silas.

“Maybe. But Artemis is not one of the Skilled. He can't do anything any ordinary person can't do. If he found it, anyone can.”

“Why would the spirit wheels test for the blood of the bonemen if the library was not a secret place?” asked Silas.

“There are places in the council chambers where ordinary people can't go, aren't there? The council don't want people wandering around their private rooms; maybe the bonemen didn't either. People were able to visit Fume back then, to come and pay their respects to the dead. What if the bonemen wanted to keep some areas of the city to themselves? They didn't need wardens to stand guard over everything; all they had to do was restrict information to anyone who asked about it.”

“You are making a lot of assumptions,” said Silas.

“The grave robbers didn't find the library because they weren't looking for it,” said Kate. “And I think the wardens did not find it because they were looking too hard. Here!”

Silas followed her to where another metal hook jutted out of the wall just above her head, exactly like the first. “And?” he said when she pointed to it, clearly unimpressed.

Kate lifted the lantern up onto the hook and let it swing there as she studied the wall more closely. “Why would that lantern hook be there if there wasn't something around here to see?” she said. “If that mosaic was still intact, I bet we'd be able to see the door easily, but with all the damage the grave robbers have done to the walls, no one has noticed it. The bonemen must have made the door blend in with the wall and they wouldn't ruin the look of a mosaic with a big door handle. So if there's no handle, there has to be another way to open it.” Her hand went to a small black stone, too neat and square to have been part of the cavern rock, and she pushed.

Something rumbled gently within the wall, a small door swung slowly back and the smell of old ink and leather wafted from the depths of a shadowed corridor lined with books.

The two of them stood staring into the dark.

“See?” said Kate quietly. “It wasn't so well hidden after all.”

Silas left the lantern on its hook and drew his sword. “Stay close,” he said, walking forward as distant voices carried from within. “And say nothing. Leave everything to me.”

Kate followed him in, hoping that Artemis was still somewhere inside. Then there was only the smell of the books, the sprung feeling of a wood floor beneath her feet and the sound of a lock dropping into place as the door closed quietly behind them.

Chapter 15
The Ancient Library

I
t was hard to see where they were going without the lantern, but Kate could sense that they were entering an immense space. The air was clear and cool, and the sound of voices carried from somewhere nearby. The path opened out a few steps ahead of them, and a silhouette of railings rose up in the dim light, blocking their way.

Silas stopped walking and held her still. “Officers,” he said loudly. “Step forward.”

Kate looked on in horror as two wardens stepped out of the dark. They bowed at once, refusing to raise their heads until he gave the order.

“Very good,” he said firmly. “You have taken a fine ambush position. If I were an intruder I would not have detected your presence.” Silas sheathed his sword and the two wardens bowed again, putting away their daggers.

“Da'ru has sent another girl to aid the search,” he said, pushing Kate toward the two men. “I hear there was a bookseller brought here from the town of Morvane.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put the girl to work alongside him. I have my own business here. I will not be disturbed.”

The wardens bowed together and one of them took hold of Kate's arm, making the cut Silas had made there burn and sting. “Come with me,” he said.

Kate looked back at Silas, who was now holding on to the railings, looking out into the darkness like a captain on the deck of a ship. The railings made up part of a long balcony, and the warden took Kate over to a flight of stairs which curved down into an enormous room. She stopped at the very top and looked out at the view Silas had already seen.

The ancient library was not just a room, it was a vast chamber.

The staircase spiraled down to dozens of towering bookcases lined up in long rows beneath an arched red-brick roof, and there she could see people carrying lanterns and candles that created pools of orange light in the dark. Some were balancing on narrow platforms that ran around the uppermost shelves, and others were wheeling themselves on railed ladders that reached taller than a house, pulling handfuls of books out for inspection, leafing through them and forcing them back in again out of place. They were so far along the shelves that it was hard to believe they had only been searching the library for two days. There had to be thousands of old books down there.
Wintercraft
could be any one of them.

The warden followed Kate down the steps and when she reached the bottom she looked up and saw Silas watching her from the upper balcony. Loose pages littered the floor between the disordered bookshelves, and the warden took her to the row along the easternmost wall, the only place in the chamber that was still relatively neat and tidy.

“You will work here,” he said, pointing along the row. “The others will tell you what to do.”

The warden left her there without a light and Kate could feel the bookcases looming over her like sad sentries witnessing the destruction and disarray. The cavern was so huge that the voices of the other workers did not carry right to the edges, and a strange silence hung around her as she walked down the row, heading toward a candle propped at an angle upon the floor.

“No, no, no. I don't need help. Go back. I'll work faster alone.”

A figure was kneeling just outside the glow of candlelight and he struggled to his feet, leaning on a stick for support as Kate drew closer.

“Row sixteen needs another pair of hands. This one's full of nothing but poetry and fairytales. No point wasting anyone else on it. I'm fine on my own. Go back.” The man gathered up a handful of open books from the floor and quickly pushed them back onto the shelves.

Kate quickened her step. She knew that voice. “Artemis?”

“I'm not moving. I don't care what they say . . . What? How do you know my name?” Artemis picked up the candle and held it high, squinting to see who had spoken. His cheek was bruised and his right eye was swollen, but it was definitely him. He looked tired and nervous as he stood his ground, waiting for her to come into sight. “Oh!” He lowered his candle the moment he saw her face.

“It's all right,” she said. “It's me.”

“Kate? How . . . ? Kate!” Artemis abandoned his stick and limped toward her, reaching out his arms and pulling her into a hug.

“I hoped you would remember the way out . . . but when I saw the fire, I was worried that . . . Kate, I thought you were dead! What are you doing here? Is Edgar with you? Did the wardens get him, too?”

“I think he's all right. He's here in Fume, but we got separated.”

“I'm so sorry,” said Artemis, still clutching her tight. “The fire . . . I couldn't stop them. I couldn't—”

“It's not your fault.”

“I just wanted to keep you safe.”

“We don't have much time,” said Kate, slowly pulling away. “The man who gave the order to burn the shop. He's here.”

“The collector?” Artemis's face hardened at once. “Where is he?”

“He's here in the library, watching from the balcony,” said Kate. “A lot's happened since we left Morvane, but I think I have a way to get you out of here. I just need you to do something for me.”

“Anything,” said Artemis.

Kate chose her words carefully. If Artemis had found the book, he would have hidden it well and there was no way she would be able to find it without him. She needed his cooperation. She had to get this right.

“I know what you're looking for,” she said. “If you know where it is, if you have it, please give it to me.”

Artemis looked along the shelves behind Kate and once he was sure no one else was nearby, he spoke very quietly. “We are looking for
Wintercraft
, a book of old Skilled techniques,” he said. “What makes you think I have it?”

“Because you're the only one down here who knows exactly what you're looking for. You've seen the book before. You knew the Skilled were going to hide it here. I think you might even know where it is.”

“Shhh!” said Artemis.

“The Skilled sent you those messages from the south, didn't they?” said Kate.

“That doesn't mean—”

“I know they put the book here to protect it, but we have to find it. It's the only way to get us out.”

Artemis's face dropped. He limped back to the shelves and picked up his stick. “Do you know how many people have died because of that book?” he said. “I can't believe anyone still wants it. The High Council think that they need it. They think it will give them answers. That it will somehow end the war and make their lives so much easier, but it won't.
Wintercraft
is dangerous, Kate. The book is a lie. It always was.”

“I know what it is.”

“But you have never actually
read
it. Believe me, I have. It is a collection of impossible theories, written by a group of people no one remembers, about something that could never happen.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Shades? Wandering souls? Spirits returning from beyond the veil? It's impossible! How could any of it be real? The dead stay dead! We know that better than anyone.”

“You saw me bring that blackbird back to life,” said Kate.

“The Skilled are healers, that's what they do. They preserve life by healing the body. They do not have any power over the soul. The veil and spirits and everything else, it's a nice idea but there's no real truth in it. You know that.”

“My parents thought it was true.”

“I loved Jonathan and Anna,” said Artemis. “I tried to understand their lives. I did. For years I wanted to believe that it was all true. I wanted to see what they told me they could see, but there is nothing there. It is all a lie. The veil does not exist. And even if it did,
Wintercraft
is all about corrupting its natural balance, allowing people to abuse life and manipulate death. I would not want to live in a world where anyone had that kind of power. Just the idea of it has been enough to drive the whole of Albion into chaos at the hands of the High Council, and it was enough to turn the entire Continent against us. We can't let the council have it, Kate. They're all crazy. They don't have the slightest idea what they're doing.”

“Why not let them have it?” asked Kate. “If it's as harmless as you think, it won't make a difference, will it?”

“Because it doesn't matter what
I
think the book means,” said Artemis, struggling to keep his voice down. “All that matters is what
they
think it means, what
they
think it does. The council are taking it all far too seriously. They will follow its words, step by step, thinking they can command spirits, bind souls, and achieve the impossible. They will keep experimenting on the Skilled, taking the lives of innocent people. Innocent people like you, Kate. They will keep failing and they will try again, and everyone else will pay the price.”

Kate felt frustration welling up inside her, but she fought against it, forcing it back down. “Don't you want to get out of here?” she asked.

“Of course I do!”

“Then help me find the book. We can't leave here without it. All we have to do is hand it over. Then we can go home.”

Artemis shook his head firmly. “No,” he said. “You don't know what happened last time. If you knew what I had done—”

“I know exactly what happened,” said Kate, stepping closer. “I know what happened to my parents. You warned them not to take the book, but they didn't listen. The wardens found them and they died for it.”

Artemis looked up at her in shock. “How could you— ?”

“I know why you ran. You were scared and there was no way you could have helped them. But if you hide the book this time, the same thing that happened to my parents will happen to us. I know you want to keep it safe, but I would trade anything to get you out of here alive. Nothing is more important than that.”

Artemis looked down at her as if she was five years old again. “Listen to me, Kate,” he said. “These people cannot be trusted. Whatever deal you have made with them, they will turn their backs on you the moment you hand over the book. They will promise you anything to get what they want. It was not worth risking your own life to save mine. You should not have come here.”

Artemis turned away from Kate and anger blistered inside her. She grabbed his shoulder, forcing him to face her. “Which is more important?” she demanded. “Staying alive? Or protecting a book that you think is useless anyway?”

“Kate, you're hurting me.”

“I came here because I wanted to help you. I know the veil is real. I know what the Skilled can do and I know how dangerous
Wintercraft
can be, but we have no other choice. No matter where you hide it, they are going to find the book eventually. At least this way we have a chance to get out of here. Why won't you listen to me?”

Artemis said nothing, but when he looked straight into her eyes Kate was sure she saw a look of fear cross over his face. Realizing she had been holding him, she let go. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” said Artemis, rubbing the pain from his shoulder. “I don't know what that collector did to you, Kate, but if you want the book so much, it's the least I can give you to help put things right.” He limped a few steps along the shelves to a waiting rail ladder. “Up there,” he said, rolling the ladder a few steps to the left and holding out the candle for her to take. “Twenty-third shelf up, fourth book to the right. There's a knot-latch. You'll see it.”

“How did you find it all the way up there?” asked Kate. From the look of Artemis's ankle, he would not have been able to manage one rung, never mind however many it would have taken to climb up there.

“I didn't,” he said. “But it's there. When the Skilled hid it here, one of them came to see me again at the shop. She told me that it was our family's right to know where the book was being kept at all times. She even offered to bring you and me here to see this library for ourselves, but I refused. ‘Farthest row on the right. Two hundred paces. Twenty-third shelf up. Fourth book right.' Those directions have stayed in my memory for ten years. I would have needed a guide to find the library if I hadn't used one of those wheels, but once I was in here, I knew exactly where it would be. Half of our family died for that book. I never want to see it again, but if you need it, it is yours. I'll leave it to your conscience to decide what to do with it this time.”

“Thank you,” said Kate. She took the candle and climbed the ladder, taking extra care to test each rung as she went.

The knot latch was an old trick. Not many people knew the trick, but it was simple enough to spot when you knew what you were looking for. Kate found it exactly where Artemis said it would be—a secret spring-button disguised as a knot in the wood—and she pressed it.

Something clicked. Kate balanced the candle on the shelf, pulled a handful of books out, and found a thin flap of wood beneath them. She lifted the flap carefully and put her hand inside, adjusting her hold on the ladder to keep her balance as she wriggled a small leather pouch out of the hidden space. Kate tugged the cords from its drawstring neck and a small book slid out of it onto the shelf. She could smell its age, and she wondered how many other hands had touched it; how many people had died to keep its words a secret. Its cover was exactly as she had seen it within the veil, stretched in old purple leather with ancient silver lettering that still sparkled in the candlelight.

W
INTERCRAFT

The spine creaked and snapped gently as she opened it, sending brown fibers drifting into the air. The old paper was crinkled and cracked, the pages clinging to the spine by the thinnest of threads, but the ink was still dark enough to be readable.

Kate read the only words written on the first page.