Elianor rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “Nathaniel, use joined-up sentences.”
“It’s a code. The door will only open if you know the combination. My books are on Vile genealogy. And look, there’s a missing branch, a space right above our father.”
Elianor remembered the night on the rooftops of the castle, when Lena had given the monks Begw and a book. “If they had the answer, why couldn’t they open the door?”
“I’ve told you more than once, Elianor. Our father is a liar.” He ran his fingers along the clockwork at the outside of the trapdoor. There were circles that would allow someone to hook their finger and rotate the whole outer mechanism.
Then he grabbed his pack and poured the contents out onto the floor. His bedroll fell first, a change of clothes, cooking gear, and various sundries clattering in a pile. A wooden spoon fell into a gutter set to channel whatever charnel fluids had flowed from the tabletops. He scuttled over to the shelves and stuffed the newly emptied bag with labelled bottles. He kept talking as he worked and Elianor made her way around, lighting the lanterns.
“How frustrating for them, to have figured out the puzzle but still have the answer wrong.”
“Nathaniel,” Elianor said.
“Octavian Vile was the previous Lord of Shadowgate. But Arbalest Vile is Wat Watson. The great patriarch is nothing but a peasant.”
“Nathaniel. I’ve found Seren and Begw. And another woman. Sara? Bethelie, maybe?”
The tone in her own voice chilled Elianor. During the first six months of her pupillage, she’d followed Genevieve Grime, investigated murders, and dug through crime scenes. It was the tone of voice people used when they found corpses.
She had walked to the barred section of the chamber as she had lit the lamps. Elianor could see a little way into the cave behind the bars. There were three ragged bundles huddled against the back wall. From beneath one came a woman’s arm, her fingers curled against the stone floor. They weren’t moving. They could be alive, they could be dead, they could be Kindred waiting to spring another trap, for all Elianor knew. There was a locked door in the centre of the bars, but the keyhole was far too large for the brass key.
“How do we get them out? Pick it? Force it?”
“I can open it.” Nathaniel said. He stopped shoving bottles from the shelves in his pack and came over to look around the outside of the cage. “It’s not very secure. Half hinges.”
“You can lift it?” Elianor said, folding her arms.
“A trick Anton showed me.” Under the lamplight, Elianor could see his face had turned grey. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “But we’ve got another problem. These women may still be alive, and this is father’s potion. We could escape now. But will we get another chance at the trapdoor?”
These women may just as well be Kindred, Elianor thought, then resented her own cowardice.
“Can you open the trapdoor?”
“Possibly. I have some ideas. Or we could come back later, with Anton, and Persephone, and as many guards as possible.”
“Persephone will want to bring the Warden.”
And there it was. The Wardens. Occupiers, oppressors, the fist of the true enemy. Elianor took another look at the woman’s arm, the bundles of rags. She’d failed them once before. Must she do so again?
“Open the trapdoor, Nathaniel. I came for truth,” Elianor said, trying not to look back into the cage, or at the instruments, or the operating table stained with old blood. “I won’t stop now.”
Nathaniel paused only for a moment to look at the women in the cage. Then he turned back to the trapdoor.
“The missing name is our grandfather, Arbalest’s father,” he said, flashing her a cocky smile completely untouched by his discovery in the cell. “The monks were trying to get through the door using combinations and derivations of Octavian, for Octavian Vile, the man everyone says is my grandfather. But if Arbalest is a bastard strictly in the figurative sense, and his real name is Wat Watson, then the answer….”
Nathaniel crouched and hooked the clockwork circle: clockwise, clockwise, anti-clockwise, W, A, T. The lock clicked. The trapdoor lifted.
Chapter 65
Elianor dumped her pack onto the floor, checked her satchel was in place, and slung her rifle over her shoulder.
“Ready?” Nathaniel said.
The trapdoor opened into a pit. A ladder hanging from the rim descended straight into a black as profound as a bowl of pitch. Elianor took the tinderbox from Nathaniel and put it in her satchel, adjusted her pistol in the holster, swung her leg over the pit, and followed Nathaniel down the ladder.
“How far underground do you think we are?”
“About fifteen yards? It should be colder.”
Rung after rung, hand over hand, they descended. The ladder, freestanding, unsupported by wall or strut, continued through nothingness. Elianor felt like bait on a hook, dangling over deep water, pikes below the surface watching and waiting as she moved ever farther from the light. The open space amplified the sound, rolling it around invisible walls, and the rattle of her hands on the ladder sang back up to her. Her best guess was that this room was the same shape as the laboratory.
Suddenly the ladder rattled and thumped. Nathaniel had found the floor. Cautiously, he rotated himself around the base of the ladder, one hand gripping on the metal and the other reaching out. The last dregs of light danced on his fingertips. Elianor climbed round him and dropped. She considered taking out the tinderbox, but the flickering flame would blow any chance of their eyes adjusting, a fake illumination just as bad as the real dark.
“Is that a wall?” she said.
“I hope so. Can you see the floor?”
“Not well. Come on.”
She gripped Nathaniel’s shoulder and took a hesitant step forward, then another, trying to orientate herself by the soft light from the laboratory that glowed through the trapdoor far overhead. Her hand slipped to Nathaniel’s elbow, a step farther, his wrist. Nathaniel stepped with her, stretched his arm, so they formed a chain in the darkness. It was useless. Her hand had not reached a wall, had not reached anything but space. The black might well be infinite.
A whisper of wind flitted from the trapdoor and around the chamber. Nathaniel clenched her wrist.
“Do you feel it?”
Fear in the dark. She did not want to say yes.
“The Shaper,” Nathaniel said. “In here. With us.”
He was right. How could she know he was right? A charge in the air stood her hairs on end.
“Can you see?”
“Not a thing,” Nathaniel said.
“Would it help if I turned on a light?”
The voice was like a whisper in the ear, direct and intimate.
“Did you hear that?” Nathaniel whispered.
“Where is it?” she whispered back.
The voice had lilted in strange places, a musical instrument tuned to the wrong key, sometimes too high, sometimes too low, never in quite the right place. The vowels were long and flat, and the r’s didn’t roll. Elianor’s breath quickened. No. Nobody plays games with me.
“Stay here,” Elianor said to Nathaniel. “Where I can see you.”
She let go of his arm and strode forward, arms raised, like a lemming from a cliff or a blind drunk off a bridge. Was she walking straight at it? Was there solid floor between here and the wall, or would the floor fall away, a bottomless pit, an endless fall? Should she have lit the tinderbox after all? She scuffed her boot on the floor and almost stumbled. It was a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, where the dark things only moved when you didn’t look, only spoke when you made too much noise to hear them.
She smacked into the wall, grazing her palm. Her left hand had found cool stone, her right what felt like oil on canvas. The canvas swung away. She lost balance. Her wrist brushed against a carved wooden frame. It was a painting. She needed a lamp.
“A little farther to the left,” the voice said.
&nb
sp; Keep on talking, Elianor thought, long enough to get in reach of my sword. She followed the wall with her fingertips. There, glass. She fumbled to find the dial. She rested her forehead on the cool cover of the lamp and opened her satchel.
“I could shape you to see in the dark. If you want.”
It took two goes to make the tinderbox catch. She unscrewed the cover, twisted the dial, and the oil lamp guttered then flared.
The painting was of Lady Vile. It was the same as the one in the audience chamber of Shadowgate Castle: a young woman, dressed in white, carrying white flowers, looking like every breath rattled her ribs and strained her sternum. This was the woman Arbalest Vile had locked away in the monastery, for her health, bearing his children until it killed her. Lady Vile’s pale eyes stared mockingly past Elianor’s shoulder. You can’t use Truthsense on a painting, they seemed to say. The past is always a lie.
The chamber seemed much smaller in the light. It was another circular room, as if the tower had plunged deep into the earth, a cylinder extended from the high room where Lady Vile had died down to this place deep below the Abbot’s chamber. A wooden table and two chairs sat behind Nathaniel and the ladder, close enough it was hard to believe the darkness had made them invisible just moments before. Beyond them a chest, and by the chest, a plinth on which sat an inkwell, a pen, and a leather-bound book.
On the far side between Nathaniel and Elianor was an antechamber, an open space in the wall separated by bars. Another prison cell, but, unlike the solid metal bars in the room above, this one was decorated with the gilded threads of a bird cage. Behind the bars was a bedroom. The bed was dressed in fine linen, the dresser carried a china vase of recently dead flowers, the shelf held a row of untouched books.
A prisoner stood by the bed.
It was so close to being human that the small differences made it unspeakably alien. The creature was tall, a full head and shoulders taller than Nathaniel, but thinner than Elianor, its concave chest creating a hollow beneath a long white nightgown. Its skin shimmered like fish scales and its teeth were the small and square milk teeth of a child.
“Hello, Nathaniel,” it said. “Hello, Elianor.”
“You’re the Kindred Prince,” Elianor said. “The one Lord Vile was supposed to have killed.”
“You’re a woman.” Nathaniel said.
The Kindred Prince was spellbinding, like heat rising from a fire, a puzzle that promised a solution if you just stared a little longer. Elianor couldn’t see why Nathaniel would think the Prince was either male or female. Its form was flattened and elongated, its features ablated and androgynous. If anything, the arrogance in its voice, the smile as it surveyed armed invaders, was deeply masculine.
“I had a dream,” Nathaniel said. “In my dream, Arbalest Vile was not my real father. My mother had taken a lover, up here in the mountains, and one day she would return to take me away. Was my dream real?”
“Are you asking if I am your mother? I am not. I am what you came looking for.”
“Are you the one I’ve been seeing. The other…the other me?”
What was he talking about?
“Another Nathaniel,” the Kindred Prince said. “That’s…interesting.”
The door to the cage looked so thin, so fragile. The lock was little more than what one would see on a gate to hold a child. Elianor knew the power of the Kindred, had seen them rip through flesh with tentacle and claw.
“How were you imprisoned?” Elianor said. “Why were you kept alive?”
“Kindred blood is restorative. My blood more than most.”
The black spatter from the Kindred she had struck with her sword. The black blood from the Black Dog on her first night on the mountain. The bottle by Arbalest Vile’s sick bed, the bottles on the shelves in the laboratory, the black cream Lena had used on her own wounds. Elianor wanted to be sick.
“Your blood is potent because you are a lord amongst your people,” Nathaniel said. “A Prince.”
The Kindred Prince reached out with a long finger and ran the tip up the nearest of the birdcage bars.
“A Prince? My name is Soronghast, although I don’t expect you will remember. We live so close to one another, your people and mine, but have so few opportunities to really understand one another. You people have such trouble with the concept of memory and time. Time is just another distance, a space between you and I. Perhaps this is the other Nathaniel you saw. Perhaps it is just a memory. If I change your memory so that you remember talking to yourself on a stair, or to each other on a rooftop; if I reach across time and change that memory in the past present; if you remember it, was it real?”
Elianor tried to hold the name in her head, but it was gone before she could stop it.
“We are not an aristocracy,” the Kindred Prince said. “Some people want to be changed. Some people want to change. The things I change, change me. We are Kindred.”
Could it be killed? It didn’t look fearsome, not superficially, all long limbs and hollow chest. Perhaps its real power came from what it could do to others. Perhaps on its own it was weak. But the stories of Demon’s Pass said the Prince had fallen atop a hundred dead Kingdom soldiers. Elianor took hold of the strap of her rifle, widened her stance, and steadied her balance. The stories also said that Arbalest Vile had cut it down with his sword. Elianor had something better than a sword.
“What really happened at Demon’s Pass?”
“Didn’t your Shaper tell you? She really should have, before sending you here.”
My Shaper? Did it mean Genevieve Grime?
“You were defeated but you weren’t killed. The monks brought you here, and used your blood to keep Lord Vile alive,” she said, staying calm, keeping calm, thinking of the Truthsense, the link between her and Nathaniel and the demon. “And they did this in contravention of their oath, their duty, and centuries of defending the kingdom from corruption?”
The Kindred Prince laughed and wrapped its finger around the thin bars of its cage.
“Centuries of obsession, you mean. Why would they watch us for so long if they didn’t love us? The monks fed Arbalest Vile my blood, and when he awoke, he came to speak to me.”
It shifted its regard to Elianor.
“Arbalest knew his world was crumbling: revolution, upheaval, change. We talked, and I showed him the promise of a new world, a way to tear down the old order. Unfortunately for me, he didn’t like it very much.”
As steady as she could, Elianor took her rifle from her shoulder and knelt on the warm stone floor.
“So, instead of accepting my help, Arbalest started to experiment. First, on me. Once he found the courage, on himself. Finally, he had a better idea.”
Elianor charged her rifle. Simple, she thought. Just like a firing squad. A fish in a barrel. A bird in a cage. There would be time enough to reload for a second shot, perhaps. Would it be enough? What if the second shot was needed for Nathaniel?
“He took my blood. And he took his lovely, fragile wife, a true Vile that he’d married to legitimise his forgery. He told her they would birth a new aristocracy, one strong enough to beat the Kindred and defend the realm. Then, once he was sure she was pregnant, he injected her with my blood.”
“What happened to her?”
“None of the mothers survived long after the birth of the children. A few days, normally, a few years, with care. Those left beneath the tower did not receive much care.”
“Mothers?” Nathaniel said.
“Candidates, chosen by and for Arbalest Vile. To begin with. Kidnapped, raped, and injected with my blood. Brought here to give birth.”
“Because the only son actually born to Lady Vile was of no use,” Elianor said. “A Black Dog can’t be the face of a new aristocracy.”
Elianor lifted the rifle and pointed it at the Kindred Prince. She looked at it through the sight, trying to ignore Nathaniel, who looked as if he might vomit. The Kindred Prince looked back at her, completely calm. Its weird, concave little mou
th tilted farther and farther upwards as it spoke.
“How many children survived?” Elianor said.
“From the tower? Four.” The Kindred Prince counted on its fingers. At three, it pointed at Nathaniel.
“Four children, different mothers? Was that why only the first went wrong? Something to do with Lady Vile?”
“Three different mothers. Nathaniel and Persephone are twins, remember.”
And what did it mean by ‘from the tower?’ Elianor had too many questions.
“I’m not Vile,” Nathaniel said.
“Was that why he tattooed the children?” Elianor said. “So he could tell them apart if they became monsters?”
“Lady Vile was fragile and her baby would have been stillborn. I didn’t want him to die, so I sang to him while he was still inside his mother. Given the choice between death and change, he chose change, as any reasonable person does.”
“He chose to become a dog?”
“His mother kept a small dog in the chamber with her. Perhaps that was why he chose the form he did, but who can be sure? The desire of the dying, the desire to live, to do anything to live, those are the strongest desires of all. And, often, the wildest, the most desperate, the least clear.” The Kindred Prince wiped its cheek with the back of its hand. “It is not…ideal to become Kindred at the moment of death. But sentiment overrides reason, even among us, from time to time. When Arbalest saw how his son was born it almost made him give up on the whole project. I had to be more careful.”
Elianor remembered the soldiers on the mountainside, twisted wrecks of tentacle and claw. Did the true nature of the Kindred only show itself when they were dying? Or was it the true nature of people?
“You had to hide because the Magistry – my father – came to investigate?”
“That proved to be an opportunity,” the Kindred Prince said. “Arbalest couldn’t afford to pay off more Magistrates. Not until he met Sebaraton Paine.”
Elianor gripped the rifle harder, striving to keep it sighted on the Kindred Prince, only to feel it slip in her sweating palms. There was something else the Kindred Prince had said, something important, something she had to understand before she could fire.
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