Nathaniel walked to the other side of the watchtower and looked back towards Shadowgate.
“The fires are out.”
Pre-dawn showed the faint shapes of Shadowgate Town in the distance. The red haloes they had seen earlier in the night were gone.
“Maybe Anton has surrendered?” Elianor said.
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t have a secret dossier, so what do you want me to show you?”
“Your tattoo.”
Nathaniel bowed his head. Elianor didn’t want to see him like this, rattled, questioning himself; she wanted him like he had been in Nana Haf’s, kicking over tables and not giving a damn. Her dignity, and probably the lives of Seren and Begw, had been sacrificed to seal an agreement that Lord Vile and his youngest son would return to Lutense and vote Republican. She needed Nathaniel ready to fight, ready to destroy the Royalists and help her avenge Genevieve’s death.
“What more is there to see?” Nathaniel said.
“What more do you have to hide?” Elianor said.
In swift, aggressive jerks, Nathaniel pulled away his jacket and opened his shirt. She watched his fingers as they worked button to button. He tossed the shirt back from his shoulders. There, on the top right side of his chest, was the number 3. Nathaniel looked straight ahead. The wind blew in on the morning sunlight, across the high watchtower, moving his hair.
“Persephone should have been 3, really,” Nathaniel said. “She was born first. But, knowing father, it’s remarkable he did her at all.”
“When did he do this to you?”
Nathaniel shook his head.
“Anton says that when I was five years old, my father took me out to the smithy. He heated a set of needles from Lena’s case. Then he put his knee on my chest. I can only assume he did the same with the rest of us.”
“Anton is number 2?” Elianor said.
“Most of that skin burned away when he got hurt,” Nathaniel said. “But the number is there, if you look close.”
Nathaniel pulled on his shirt. Flecks of snow blown in on the wind had settled on his bare shoulders.
“And the Black Dog?” Elianor said.
Nathaniel walked to the other side of the watchtower, the side that faced towards the monastery and the West.
“Today was the first time I’d seen it,” he said.
“Kindred?”
“It attacked the others. If you remembered your studies at the Academy, you would know Kindred don’t do that. They don’t fight one other.”
“You saw the tattoo?”
“Yes,” Nathaniel said. “But I don’t know what it means.”
“You’re educated. Make an educated guess.”
Nathaniel closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wooden frame. The watchtower swayed as the wind picked up. Elianor felt sick. Nathaniel breathed in through his nose, then spoke.
“Did Master Carada write that report?”
“No. Théophile fled the capital with all the other royalists.”
Nathaniel opened one eye. “Who wrote it?”
The sun had finally rolled up, casting light across the open plains of Trist, swimming up the slopes past Shadowgate Town, slipping along the road up the mountainside, illuminating the blue-white snow with a blue-white glow.
“We should go,” Elianor said. But she didn’t move from where she sat. She still needed to ask the question. So, she lied. “The horse is ready. I’m ready.”
“I’m not,” Nathaniel said. “I showed you mine. Who wrote the report?”
“Sebaraton Paine.”
Nathaniel’s other eye opened.
“So that’s why they sent you. Your father was an Investigative Magistrate?”
Something buzzed at the corner of Elianor’s brain. Nathaniel had given something important away, but for the life of her she couldn’t think what.
“Not for very long.”
“Why would the Senate give such a mission to a man like him?”
Weird that no matter how much she hated her father, the merest criticism moved her to defend him. She swallowed the temptation.
“It was a year before I was born. I wasn’t privy to my father’s career choices.”
“What did he say, in his report?”
“He observed that the Republic, like the Kingdom before it, owed Senator Vile a debt of gratitude for fighting the Kindred threat, and that any strange behaviour on his part was as likely due to the circumstances of his duty.”
For some reason it felt strange to call him ‘Senator Vile.’
“Strange behaviour?”
“He continued that Senator Vile was in mourning over the death of his wife. As such, he was unlikely to be of use to the revolutionary council and should continue his duty as the guardian of Demon’s Pass. He expressed hope that the recent birth of his new son would help settle matters.”
“What did he mean by settle matters?”
Elianor put the report in her satchel and got to her feet.
“Three,” she said, and pointed at Nathaniel’s chest.
“Four,” she continued, pointing at Shadowgate Castle and the probable location of Captain Persephone, a woman only interested in being things she could not be and having things she could not have.
“Two,” she pointed down the mountainside towards the silhouette of town, where Anton must be fighting the latest chapter of his battle against his father.
“One,” she pointed over the watchtower barrier, South, to where they had fought the Kindred.
“There’s something out there. Something you call a dog, but which is as large as a man. When it shows up, women go missing. Your father has the whole mountain out looking for it, but it is never found. And it bears the same tattoo on its chest as you and your siblings.”
She had turned her back on him and shifted her hand to rest on her pistol. Had they never wondered? Had they never asked about the tattoos, never wondered who was number 1, never drawn the obvious conclusion that there was an older sibling? Were they so afraid of their father that they had never dared? But there was a more important question, a question that could render all others irrelevant. Behind her, she heard Nathaniel shuffle his feet, heard the wind whistling round the watchtower.
“Are you Kindred?” she said.
She had seen how quickly the Kindred could change. Would she be ripped apart by twisted tooth and transmogrified claw? Would she even have time to draw her pistol? A smile played at the corner of her lips. Turning her back might fool him into feeling safe enough to attack.
“Are you Kindred?” she repeated.
There was a loud creak. Elianor went to draw but, as she turned, she saw Nathaniel climbing down the ladder and out of the Watchtower. He paused and looked back at her.
“I told you,” he said. “Kindred don’t fight one another.”
A long, wet howl floated up the mountainside towards them. The howl of the Black Dog.
“The answers to our questions are at the monastery,” Nathaniel said. “We’re running out of time.”
Chapter 59
They raced up the mountain, and the rising sun chased after. The road grew steep. Thin air scoured the inside of Elianor’s lungs. She let Nathaniel go ahead. To whatever other predators watched and waited, they would be tiny figures on a vast snowscape, dolls on the white, ready to be picked off or hunted down. Let them think she was the straggler. Let someone bring themselves in range of her hands.
Elianor had too many questions: the identity of the Black Dog, Shadowgate’s relationship with its Warden, why the Vile children had not done more to discover the truth. But even without Truthsense, Nathaniel’s anxiety and confusion were palpable. Her mentor Genevieve Grime had always cautioned her not to underestimate the power of the mundane (and where, then, that most obvious mundanity: grief? Why was she not grieving?) The obvious answer can become impossible when you are the one who must confront your own father or confess the truth to your lover: never forget how overwhelmed and confused people are by t
heir own lives. She needed Nathaniel whole and sane, ready to take back to the Senate. She didn’t want to push him too hard, didn’t want to break him with the prospect of battle ahead. What weight was he carrying on his shoulders, and why?
“How long to the monastery?” Elianor said.
“Less than an hour.”
Eventually, the road made a sweeping turn and the full view of the monastery drove the questions from her mind. Demon’s Pass Monastery was old, constructed when Trist was a band of competing Principalities united under a High King best known for burning his enemies at the stake. Like Shadowgate Castle, it was dug part way into the mountainside, and had grown in fits and starts from stone to stone, through grass and snow, up from the earth that wanted to claw it back. Generations of sovereigns and stonemasons had fought this battle, above older, stranger ruins, weaving their prayers atop the memories of all those others who had waited for the West.
The highest part of the monastery was the tall, thick tower of the church, risen from several sloped roofs. A broad outer wall obscured the lower levels, better fit for a fortress than a place of worship. Narrow windows were distributed with no discernible order or pattern. On the south edge, as the mountain fell away, the wall sat flush against the rising cliff. Like the narrow bridge across the span to Shadowgate Castle, this intimated that the defences protected west from east rather than east from west. The wall embraced a higgledy-pig of turrets and towers, platforms, and parapets. Rose stonework coruscated in the morning sun and the whole edifice shone like polished quartz beneath the wide blue sky.
“Why is Demon’s Pass manned by monks and not soldiers?”
“Only a monk would want to live all the way up a mountain. They’re crazy. Obsessed with the Kindred. Plus, Shadowgate has stronger fortifications.”
“But an enemy army could be funnelled here between the mountains. That’s how your father won.”
“It was Dalard Carada who won the battle of Demon’s Pass, and he was crazy. He just jumped on his horse and expected everyone to follow him. Do you feel like fighting a battle after climbing all the way up here?”
There was a portrait of Dalard Carada on the wall of her master’s office. Judging by the red nose and swollen eyes, Théophile Carada’s older brother had not bothered sobering up for the sitting. The artist had placed him on the back of a charging stallion, adding the animal to the portrait long after the subject had staggered back to his cups. Even atop a falsified mount, the drunken knight looked about to fall off.
“How many soldiers did Sir Carada have?”
“Two hundred, plus the garrison. We have two dozen. Had, before we lost Mabyn and his patrol. We could treble that if we enlisted the miners and the more experienced farmhands.”
Elianor tried to imagine three-score warriors defending the pass against the Kindred. It would be a massacre. And the three-score wouldn’t be seasoned soldiers: they would be miners and farmers, whatever was left from whatever disaster was befalling Shadowgate Town. The urgency of Elianor’s mission had never been clearer. She had to get Nathaniel back to Lutense, there had to be a strong government, there had to be someone ready to fight the Kindred.
“Can we cut straight across?” Elianor said, pointing out a shortcut to the walls of the monastery.
“The snow may be deeper than it looks,” Nathaniel said. “Best not to stray from the route.”
The road did not lead to the gate. Instead, the monastery stood to one side of the road, either a gallant with his coat over a puddle or a chaperone glowering at all who dared Demon’s Pass. The road continued onwards and upwards. The twin peaks of the mountain channelled it into a narrow defile. Then the rise stopped, and the road fell, so that any step farther was a step into the sky. Elianor craned her neck, as if an extra few centimetres might make a difference, but it was impossible to see over the rise and into the West. She couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Did the high tower of the monastery allow the monks to see into the Kindred lands? If not, what was the point of this place?
“So, the Abbot holds some kind of cure for a gunshot wound? A restorative?”
“Hopefully Bayard will know what we want,” Nathaniel said. “Their library has one of the most extensive collections of exotic texts in the Kingdom.”
The White Feather, the leader of the student rebellion, stood on a mountainside talking about the ‘Kingdom’ and getting excited about books. Distracted and muttering to himself on the watchtower. She wanted to smack him in the face.
“There’s always hope,” Nathaniel said. “The old man is hard to kill.”
Elianor had expected a watcher on the walls, a signal from the tower, maybe even somebody riding out to meet them. But nobody came. The road split and a path ran up to the entrance through the fortress wall, where the main gate was two large wooden doors in a stone arch, one standing open, one closed. The right half of the gate, the closed half, was at a cocked angle, hanging on only one of its hinges. Elianor raised her hand against the snow-glare, trying to see if there was someone inside waiting.
“I’ll take the horse and go first,” Nathaniel said. “Keep your eyes open.”
Elianor followed through the open half of the gate. There was no sound, no movement, no sign of life. As she passed the threshold, the walls cut away the wind, leaving it howling outside and silent within. The sudden change in the air made her eyes water.
“Hello?” Nathaniel called.
Nothing but echoes and the wind outside the walls. The main gate led into a wide courtyard. The many layers of the fortress walls made the monastery look like a bowl. There were empty stables off to one side, nothing but a few bundles of mangy straw and an old wooden stool within. Nathaniel tied up the horse and drew his longsword. Elianor folded her arms across her chest.
Two buildings dominated the courtyard. To her right was a two-storey cylinder with a domed roof and columns all around the outside. Three broad round steps led the penitent to gilt-plated double doors. It stood apart from the walls, apart from the other buildings, and from the way Nathaniel was staring, she was certain it was the library.
To her left was the church. Unlike the library, the church was woven into the fabric of the monastery. On the warmer southern side was a large quadrangle that must have been a cloister, and an array of other structures: a dormitory, a refectory, and all the other things necessary to the lives of the monks. The building was spread over several levels towards the lowest part of the fortress where a walk up a flight of steps to a grassy mound would allow you to look south-east towards Shadowgate, the town and then east all the way past Durançon to the capital. The long shadows from the still-low sun swept the mark of the main complex towards the library, casting a vast swathe of darkness through the bright morning light but not quite reaching the first of those steps.
“Feels like we’re being watched,” Nathaniel said.
Elianor tried a quick count of the windows, openings, archways, or simple shadowed spaces that could carry watchers, waiters, or Kindred claws. Maybe there was nobody there. But it did feel like they were being watched, by the dark in the window frames, by the snow-lined fortress walls, by the echoes of the generations of footsteps that had worn down the stone slabs.
As they advanced, they found that the lengthening archways led to the church doors. Beneath the arches sat stacks of tombstones, of different shapes and sizes, some marked with symbols and complex carved illustrations, others with writing impossible to read in the shadow. It looked like the back end of someone’s garden, a place to dump tools and waste odds and ends.
“I didn’t see a graveyard,” Elianor said.
Nathaniel had his hands on his hips and was staring at an odd little carbuncle of a building. At first glance it looked like a stone outhouse whose door had been sealed shut.
“You’re looking at it,” Nathaniel said. “That’s Dalard Carada’s tomb.”
“Are those fresh graves next to it?”
“I think so. My mother’s tomb should b
e nearby.”
Nathaniel still stared at the little structure by the tombstones.
“I’d like to check round the back,” he said. “Will you come with me?”
Elianor stood in front of him. His eyes were a little wide and his mouth slightly open. He looked young, younger than she, even though she knew he was a year older.
“I was older than you were, when my mother died,” Elianor said. “I mean, old enough to remember her, although she’d always been ill. Tumours. They ate her up.”
Her mother’s fingers on the piano keys, skipping the dud notes. Her mother’s hands pale as the sheets draped over her, using her last morsels of strength to drag her fingers from her daughter’s grasp. She had died the year before the Academy, and Elianor had always wondered why it had taken so long.
“Nathaniel, I’m sorry, but we have a job to do. We must find the Abbot, or, failing that, find out what has happened here. Before the Kindred catch up with us.”
“I worked a long time to get here,” he said. “This is my chance to find my mother. To read the abbey library. To find out who I really am.”
She took his hand. He looked at her with those deep blue eyes, and her Truthsense sang to her.
“You’re right, of course,” he said, with a small sigh.
But she did not let go of his hand. He had worked a long time to get here.
“You set me up,” she said.
Chapter 60
In the dark room on the ground floor of Nana Haf’s, an ember was the only light. Haf held the incense stick horizontally as it burned ever closer to her fingers. Specks of ash fell on her dress, leaving holes like black eyes. She waited for some insight to arrive, some profound thought on the nature of permanence, or impermanence, or something about sparks and souls and fire. The house-boy was sobbing as he swept up the wreckage in the bar, and it made everything feel distant, distended, damaged. She shifted farther round in the chair. Her leg hurt.
Derec’s body lay before her. It was not an elegant arrangement. Two tables brought from the bar and pushed together with a sheet draped over the top. It would have been bad luck to lay him on a bed. Besides, who would want to hire the room after? Derec wore the same clothes as when they’d hanged him. The same clothes as when the Magistrate had come to arrest him. Haf had insisted he wear his warm jacket. He’d joked that if he was running away to join a southern mercenary band, the last thing he would need was warm clothes. Then young Massen had called that somebody was coming, and that had been the last thing she’d said to her son. Wear your warm jacket. You’ll need it on the road.
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