Wintercraft (12 page)
There was no sign of Silas’s crow inside the station and, as the prisoners continued to be loaded, Edgar spotted some of the horse-drawn carriage drivers walking their horses down the platform ready to be taken aboard.
Horses?
Where there were animals, there was heat. If the train had a horse box …
Edgar set off, skulking along the edges of the carriage roofs, moving parallel to the horses as they made their way to the middle of the train. He moved quickly, concentrating on where he was putting his feet and daring to make the jump between carriages whenever one came to an end. His stomach turned with every leap. He felt exposed, the ground was too far away and he knew he would become nervous and fall if he looked down. Somewhere through the snow he heard Silas’s voice, but the order he was shouting was nothing to do with him and so he kept going, feeling like a fly on a dog’s back, until the smell of hay and animals reached his nose, drawing him on with its promise of warmth.
He knelt on top of the only carriage he had found with a proper roof and looked down through a wooden grille at a collection of tired horses, each one penned in, giving off a welcome heat that drifted up through the bars and into his face. With two strong tugs, the old grille broke off in his hands and he dropped down into an empty stall. The neighbouring horses stamped their hooves, sensing the presence of an intruder, but Edgar was too exhausted to care. He piled the hay up around him, letting his muscles relax for the first time in hours, and squeezed his freezing hands together, trying to warm up his blood.
He sat there like that for what felt like hours, watching the door and getting ready to bury himself in hay just in case a warden stepped inside. Then at last, the wardens’ work was done. Edgar felt the train shudder and strain as its engine gathered power.
The horn sounded. Brakes hissed. Wheels turned.
There was no turning back now.
7
Fume
The Night Train hulked its way sluggishly out of Morvane’s station, puffing heavily through the snow and grunting along a wide curve that took it through a gated arch in the town’s eastern wall and out into the open country. Wandering animals fled before it as the great train gathered speed, dragging itself south with a fresh load of human cargo, slicing its way towards the distant city of Fume.
Kate was the only prisoner in her section of the train, but she was not on her own. Silas spent the entire journey watching her, his grey eyes gleaming almost white in the half-light. Just having him near her made Kate feel colder, and even when she shuffled around so she could not see him, she could still feel him looking at her. Snow blew in through the open roof and she buried herself deeper in the blanket, trying to concentrate on keeping warm.
The train rumbled for hours through the overgrown fields and hills of the wild counties, where wolves howled through black forests and stalked the riverbanks out on their nightly hunt. Towns held their breath as the train smoked through them, and the glow of distant fires flickered around the base of the eastern hills, where the residents of smaller villages kept watch, making sure the train passed them by.
The people of Albion had not always lived this way. The seas dividing the island country from its cousins had once been filled with huge-sailed trading ships carrying goods like wool, fruit and wood to the Continent and bringing fine cheeses, oils, horses and lotions back in return. Trade flourished. Towns grew. The wild counties were veined with roads and walking trails, and journeys between towns were commonplace. Wardens had not worn robes back then and they had not been feared. They had been trusted men - the towns’ defenders - tasked with keeping wolves from the town gates and guarding the people who travelled across the wild counties in between.
The country had been great once. Its vast towns and grand architecture were the envy of every other country on the Continent, but while the fighting of a war had not made life any easier, the rot had begun to sink in long before war had been declared.
For more than a thousand years, Albion had been ruled by the governing High Council. Thirteen members - usually men - who had all shown distinction in many different areas of public service. Being chosen to wear one of the High Council’s robes of office was the ultimate honour, giving them a coveted place of responsibility at the very head of Albion society as lawmakers and defenders of the country’s history and its people. The system ensured that only people who had proved their commitment to bettering Albion were put in charge of the decisions that would shape its history and, at first, it worked, but it took time for ordinary people to recognise its one fatal flaw.
The power attached to being a member of the High Council lasted until death. Only then could a new councilman take an old one’s place - and some people did not like to wait. Those who had learned they were next in line soon began to take chances, often going so far as employing assassins to speed up their ascension to the council’s chambers, and those who were ruthless in their acquisition of power proved no less ruthless in their wielding of it. Under their influence the focus of the High Council gradually began to shift and corruption spread like poison through the halls of the old ruling city.
Council members who resisted the greed of the others had a tendency to disappear, leaving their seat open for new blood more willing to accept changes in how things were done. Soon personal wealth meant more than anything else in the selection of new council members. The welfare of Albion fell secondary to the greed and personal gain of those in charge of its laws and council seats began to be handed down through bloodlines, offered to people who could pay their way into power, or presented only to those whom the existing councilmen knew they could trust. Shaped by such grasping and devious hands, Albion soon began to suffer.
No one really knew when the first change came. There was no single moment, no sudden day when everything was different. Darkness crept slowly over Albion. The High Council became more secretive, the wardens gradually drew back from the wild counties and, without their protection to rely upon, travel between the towns became dangerous. People began to go missing on the roads and many chose to stay within their own walls, letting nature creep in around them rather than setting out to brave the world alone.
Within fifty years of the wardens’ retreat the councilmen had become suspicious of their neighbours and wary of their own people. They were rarely seen outside their chambers. They recruited the wardens as their protectors and enforcers, called back the trading ships and put them to work patrolling Albion’s borders instead. Within a hundred years, the towns had become completely isolated, their people linked by only two things: the High Council’s laws and the night train’s tracks.
At that time, the High Council’s ruling city was a small town that lived within tempting sight of Fume’s impressive towered skyline. The councilmen could no longer stand to see the greatest buildings of past ages being wasted on the dead, so with the help of their wardens, they took Fume for themselves, driving out the bonemen and killing any who dared to challenge the council’s claim. The night train was left to rust in its station. Towns were forced to bury their dead in open spaces that had once been parks or greens or gardens. Life gave way to death all across Albion and nothing was ever the same again.
Within the protective walls of Fume, the councilmen led privileged lives, demanding more obedience from their people whilst offering them less and less in return, and when war came, the people accepted it without question, knowing they could do nothing else. No official reason for the conflict was given. Many speculated that Albion’s broken trade agreements were to blame, but no one really knew for sure and the High Council saw no reason to tell them. People were simply expected to do their duty: to live quiet lives and to fight when they were ordered.
Albion had become a place of suspicion, doubt and lies. The war dragged on, communities were torn apart by the wardens’ harvests, and living beneath the shadow of an unknown war eventually became an accepted way of life. Years passed and soon there was no one left alive to remember that life had been any different.
The people of Albion did not often like to talk about the way things had once been and Kate was just the same. Artemis had raised her to concentrate only upon what was there, right in front of her eyes. There was nothing to be gained from looking back, he always said; nothing except regret. But sitting in that train, listening to the creaking of her cage chains, Kate could not prevent her thoughts from turning to her own past and her memories of the place she was leaving behind.
She remembered the smell of her mother’s oil paints and her father’s laugh as he worked alongside Artemis in the bookshop and she knew that, despite everything that was going on around them, her family had been happy once. Now they were gone, Artemis was missing and their precious bookshop was nothing but a burning shell. Kate hugged her knees up to her chest. There was no doubt that Albion was dying, but it seemed that her little part of it was dying more quickly than the rest.
The clouds slowly changed from night-time grey to patchy indigo, then pale violet and pink as the sun began to rise over the eastern hills. Kate’s body ached with cold and her eyelids were starting to become heavy when she eventually heard the swooshing sound of stone arches passing overhead. The Night Train’s brakes engaged, sending a loud squeal screeching up from the hot wheels, and Kate sat up, knowing that the sound could only mean one thing.
They had arrived.
Fume was Albion’s most fortified city, separated from the rest of the world by high outer walls and a wide river that had been diverted to circle it like a moat. Rows of empty stables stood along those walls, where travellers’ horses had been kept before war with the Continent had been declared, and dozens of wardens stood guard along the city’s perimeter and at the great black gates, ready to question anyone who wanted to pass through. But Kate could not see any of that herself. All she saw were more arches passing above her as the train slowed down, sweeping around a wide curve of track.
‘Hold on to something,’ said Silas, still standing beside her. ‘Now.’
Kate grabbed hold of the bars just before the cage swung hard and the entire carriage tilted forward, descending into a sloping tunnel that carried the train underground. They were gaining speed, darkness swamped the carriage and the horn sounded again, echoing deafeningly from the walls as they swallowed the train down. After that there was only the smell of smoke and choking heat as the lanterns flickered out.
The walls hugged dangerously close to the carriages and the ceiling was just high enough to allow the engine’s chimney to pass through. Kate’s eyes stung in the hot smoke as the train rolled deeper underground, beneath the river, beneath the city walls and down towards the oldest foundations of the city. The screams of the prisoners sounded distant and unearthly. The train shivered so violently it felt like it could fall apart at any moment and still the tunnel continued curling down. Metal ground against metal, the brakes squealed and the train slowed. Then the tunnel widened, soft firelight spread from a red-bricked ceiling hung with lanterns and the mighty engine rumbled along the last few feet before coming to a final bone-juddering stop.
The wardens wasted no time. The sound of sliding doors shook through the train and raised voices carried through the air. But they were not prisoners’ voices Kate could hear. They were loud, confident, and they were all shouting at once. Silas threw open the carriage door and what Kate saw beyond it was as unexpected as it was terrifying.
The train had stopped at a station built into a cavern of earth that looked like it was being held up by buildings from the past. The damp walls were a mass of stone pillars, half ruined walls, statues, doorways and arches positioned in places no one would ever be able to use them. Some jutted out at odd angles halfway up the sides of the cavern, half buried in the mud, and others were squashed on top of each other like layers in a cake. It looked like someone had taken chunks of broken buildings and pushed them into the cavern walls, letting them sink in before the earth had hardened permanently around them.
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