The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  She stepped back out, shrugging, knelt again, and pressed the mechanism that closed the hidden passageway. She didn’t feel much disappointment. “Downward, then. Deeper in the House, the stores are better hidden.”

  • • •

  The Sabirs or the Dragons or both had found most of what the Galweighs had put by, though. After half the day and six more hidden rooms stripped to the walls, she finally led them to a storeroom that had not been touched. It lay well away from the main areas, in a corridor so utterly lightless that the lanterns seemed only to move the darkness around, not dissipate it. The hidden mechanism used two pressure points and a rhythmic pattern—Kait had to try five times before the door would finally open for her. But when it did, she was rewarded by the dark forms of lidded jars and wax-sealed amphorae, huge barrels and smaller casks, crates and bags and boxes and trunks. The air was thick with the scents of pepper and sage and cinnamon and a dozen other spices. Hooks hung empty from the ceiling, and a rack to the right held nothing but shelves of crumpled cloth, but even without whatever was missing, that one storeroom would feed the four of them for a year if necessary.

  “I’d begun to fear you were wrong,” Ry said. He moved up behind her and slid his arm around her waist.

  “So had I. I never thought anyone could have uncovered the room just before this one.”

  “The Dragons created these places.”

  “I thought of that. But I also thought that only the Dragon who had created the place would have been able to find them all—and if that Dragon had come back, surely he would have reclaimed his house and stayed.”

  “It looks as if you were right.”

  Kait studied the stores. “We have enough of what we need to survive on. Still, I’d like to check on the other rooms I know of. It may be that we four will not be the only ones who have to live off the stores. We can eat first, and then you can carry up stores while I go through the rest of the House on my own. Or we can put off the rest of the inventory until tomorrow.”

  Ian had been looking through the contents of the room. “We’d best keep looking,” he said. “This storeroom has no meat in it—I’m sure you’ll want to find some before we quit for the day.”

  Kait was startled. She sniffed the air—she could catch the scents of smoked pig and jerked venison and beef and dried python. But she certainly didn’t see any wrapped hams hanging from hooks, and the jerky bags on the shelves looked awfully flat.

  “We made sure every storeroom had everything needed for survival. There’s even a fresh water source in the back of the room, and plumbing, and a way to lock the door from the inside, in case survivors needed to hide for a while. Some of those smaller trunks will even have gold in them.” She started checking the shelves. But Ian was right. Nothing else had been touched, but every single piece of meat was gone.

  “There will be salted fish in some of those barrels,” she said. “Ry and I will be able to eat that.”

  Ry was frowning. He pointed to the empty hooks, and then to waxed cloth and binding twine that lay in crumpled piles on the floor beneath them. “Why would anyone unwrap all the meat before taking it?” he asked. “It wouldn’t store well without the wrappings, and no one could eat so much at once.”

  Kait didn’t know the answer to that. “Perhaps I ought to check on the fish,” she said.

  She pried the lid off of one fish barrel and looked in. Fish should have been packed clear to the surface of the brine, but the barrel was empty down to the last third. And that third—dark brine—held no sign that it had ever held fish. She couldn’t find a single scale in the water or the tiniest piece of fin stuck on the side. She took one of the gaffing rods from the wall and stabbed it into the liquid. “Nothing,” she said. “Not a single fish. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that there had never been fish in here.”

  “Maybe someone intended to fill it later,” Ry said.

  Kait gave him a long look.

  He shrugged. “I suppose not. We wouldn’t have put anything into our storage rooms that wasn’t ready to use, either. I can’t imagine what happened.”

  “Neither can I. But you and I are going to have to have meat. These other two will do fine without it if they must—”

  “I don’t eat meat,” Ulwe interrupted.

  Kait nodded, but continued, “—but if you and I don’t have meat to fuel us during and just after Shifts, we won’t last long.”

  “To the next storage room, then,” Ian said.

  The next hidden room had been cleaned out. The one following it had supplies intact. Except, again, for the meat. Once again, all the herb-stuffed waxed wrappings were crumpled into piles, and the barrels were sealed. Kait lifted one of the empty wrappings and realized that it was still intact. The wax seal was untouched, the wax-dipped cloth uncut. No one could have removed the meat without cutting the cloth or breaking the seal. Nevertheless, impossible though it seemed, the meat was gone.

  “It isn’t even as if the hams turned to dust,” Kait said, frustrated. “If the meat had spoiled and rotted away, we’d at least have bones in these wrappings. But there’s nothing.”

  Ry dug through the stores, clearly mystified. “What happened to everything?”

  “It doesn’t make sense.” Kait dropped wearily onto a trunk that still contained gold and silver in a wide variety of denominations and mintings. “Who would take only the meat, leaving wines and herbs and spices and fruits and vegetables? For that matter, who would take dried meat and leave the gold that could buy fresh meat a thousand times over?”

  “And how in the hells did they take it?” Ian grumbled. Ulwe crouched in the center of the room, her eyes squeezed tightly closed, her fingertips splayed to the floor. Kait became aware of the child’s odd posture and the air of tense concentration that surrounded her.

  Ry and Ian noticed Kait’s stillness and followed her gaze. Both of them fell silent, too. The three of them watched the child, curious.

  Ulwe began to speak, her eyes still tightly closed and her body rigid. “You’re the first people in this room since before the . . . the evil day. The day of bad magics and bad deaths,” she said softly. “Nothing alive . . . has moved across this floor since that day. No . . . human . . . has taken anything from this room.”

  Kait leaned forward, elbows on knees. “Then what did?” “The dead fed here. The dead were given flesh. . . .” A shudder ran through Ulwe’s body, and she squeezed her eyes closed tighter. “They were given dead flesh as an offering.”

  Her trembling grew more fierce, and her voice changed, dropping and slowing. “The promise made them still echoes in the walls. They still listen to it, and hold it as their due.” In cadenced singsong, she began to recite:

  “By the blood of the living

  And the flesh of the dead,

  I summon the spirits of Family

  Who have gone before.

  Without the walls of this room

  But within the walls of this House

  Enemies have come

  And killed,

  Have plundered

  And pillaged,

  Have conquered

  And claimed.

  Come, spirits of the dead.

  All dead flesh within the walls of Galweigh House

  I offer as your payment

  If you will chase beyond the walls of this House

  All alive beyond the walls of this room.

  Harm none; draw no living blood;

  Inflict no pain.

  I ask not vengeance;

  I ask only relief.

  By my own spirit and my own blood

  I offer myself as price to ensure

  The safety of every living creature,

  Friend and foe,

  Now within the House’s walls

  Until this spell is done.

  So be it.”

  “A spell,” Kait whispered.

  “Yes. Offered by a man both powerful and clever. I feel the echoes of his steps strongly through this pl
ace. He is tied here by his own blood and spirit, though he did not stay here long.”

  “So he summoned the dead.”

  Ulwe opened her eyes and looked up at Kait. “And they came. They watch still. They watch us now. The enemies that were here before came, but they could not live here. The dead are not as strong now as they were when first the spell was cast, but they are strong enough to . . . to do . . . things.” She wrapped her thin arms around herself and Kait saw gooseflesh prickle on her arms. “No one can live in this place who is not your friend, or the friend of your Family. The dead claim all dead flesh within the walls as their payment, and when anything dies within the walls, or anyone brings inside the flesh of any dead creature, the spirits consume it and for a while grow stronger. And when they are strong, they work the will of the one who summoned them.”

  Ian began to laugh.

  Kait looked at him. “What?”

  “No wonder the Sabirs and the Dragons gave this place up. Meat-eating ghosts.”

  “That’s going to make things difficult for us,” Ry noted. “We must have meat to survive.”

  “We can hunt,” Kait said. “And we can eat our meat outside the walls.”

  “I suppose. Yet doing so exposes us to anyone who might be watching.”

  Kait nodded. “There will be some risk. Still, I hunted here for years. I know where to go to keep out of sight of even watchful eyes.”

  Ulwe held up a hand, palm forward. “Kait. There’s something else I found that might be important. Let me walk the road a little wider for you.”

  Kait nodded and waited. The girl closed her eyes again. For long moments she crouched to the floor, so still she barely breathed, eyes closed and lips slightly parted. She brought to Kait’s mind the image of a fawn hiding in the tall grass, hoping to escape detection. The image jarred Kait—the child was in no apparent danger, but Kait’s predator senses would not let her banish the picture or replace it with something more suitable. She wondered what she had learned from watching the girl that she did not yet know she knew.

  At last, Ulwe said, “A mother and her two children took refuge near this room. There is another room . . . like this one. They locked it from the inside. They are eating the stores. They have been hiding since the House fell the second time. . . . But, no. Two of them have been hiding since that day. The third . . . came later.”

  Kait froze. “There are survivors still here?”

  The child nodded. “So the paths tell me. So the road says.”

  The House could hide them. The House could hide an army, if the army could get to the right places and sequester itself within the cunning walls. So many had been unprepared. But someone, somehow, had survived.

  Kait said, “Can you take me to them?”

  Ulwe nodded, wide-eyed. “They’re so afraid, Kait. They’ve expected every day to be caught. I can feel the terror. They don’t know the House is empty.”

  They might live out a full span of years within their hiding place, away from sunlight and fresh air, growing weak and pale and feeble. She had to find them. A mother. Two children.

  She tried not to let herself hope that they were her Family. Dùghall had told her that, as far as he knew, all of her immediate family was dead. But perhaps one of the cousins had survived. She reminded herself that the House had held more people who weren’t Family than who were—the survivors were most likely a terrified serving girl and her two babes.

  She stood. Even if they were, they might still be people she knew. She would take any link to her past that she could get.

  “Shall we go after them, then?” Ry asked.

  “Perhaps I should go alone.” Kait rested a hand on the wall.

  “I have to take you,” Ulwe said. “I can follow the road to them. Their footsteps sing to me.”

  Ry shrugged. “I’m certainly not going to abandon the two of you down here alone.”

  Kait took a slow breath, and let it out even more slowly. “Perhaps we should wait until tomorrow, and come down here when the day is young.” Either great joy or great disappointment waited for her in the hidden room she had not yet reached. The events of her recent past made her wary of pursuing hope; she had become cautious.

  “Perhaps we ought to get it over with,” Ian said. “Before you lose your nerve.”

  Kait winced and nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”

  Ulwe led them out of the storage room and toward the balconies. As they moved progressively through lighter corridors, past chambers with opened doors and fine furnishings, her mood lifted a little. The near-perpetual darkness of the deep heart of the House bothered her more than she could ever explain. She was as much at home in dark as in light—but she wondered still why the original builders of Galweigh House had created so many dark, airless, windowless rooms. Who had lived in them, what had they done in them? And why had anyone needed so much space?

  Ulwe’s path twisted like a serpent; they followed her down a level, then forward again, then down another level. They were very near the balcony rooms; Kait hadn’t known of any storage rooms that were so close to the balconies. And when Ulwe took her finally down a corridor that she recognized—one that dead-ended with two balcony rooms and two little storage rooms—she said as much.

  “You’ve made a wrong turn. I know this part of the House.”

  “This is the right way,” the child said. She kept going. Kait didn’t argue. It would be simple enough to show her that she’d made an error, and if they wasted a little time, well, she would not complain about any delay that held off disappointment.

  To Kait’s left, the two doors that would open into the lovely balcony rooms. To her right, the two storage doors. All four were closed. The child opened the second storage room door and walked between the shelves. She rested a palm on the back wall. “They’re in there.”

  Kait looked at the smooth face of the wall, then at the child. “In there.”

  “Yes.”

  Kait moved close to the wall and sniffed along its edges. She did catch human scents there. They were faint—far too faint for her to identify—but people had been here. She ran her fingers along the corners of the wall, then along the back edges of each shelf. To her amazement, she found the slight seams of a pressure pad on the far corner of the bottom right shelf. She pressed, but the pressure pad didn’t give. Locked, then . . . from the inside.

  Her pulse picked up, and she looked at the child. “You were right. There is a room in there.”

  “I can feel them in it,” Ulwe said. “They’re alive.”

  “Then they can hear me.”

  “Yes.”

  Kait stood and pressed both hands against the back wall, and shouted, “Heya! In the room! It’s me! Kait Galweigh!”

  She pressed an ear against the smooth surface of the stone-of-Ancients, and listened. She heard no movement, no voices, nothing. She waited, then shouted again. “The Sabirs have gone. The three of you can come out. It’s me! It’s Kait! You’re safe now.”

  Again she pressed her ear to the wall and listened. She heard nothing for a long time, then the faintest whisper. “It might be Kait.” A child’s whisper.

  “Kait’s dead. It’s the bad people. Be still and they’ll go away.”

  Then stillness again.

  “It is me!” Kait called. “I can prove it.”

  No sound. No movement. The whispers could have belonged to anyone—but the child had spoken the name Kait with tones of hope. There were other Kaits in the world—there had been other Kaits within the House—but perhaps the people in there had known her. Had, perhaps, cared about her.

  What should she tell them to convince them? Should she start with things the servants might have known, or things Family would have known? Which children had cared about her? Nieces and nephews? Very young cousins? The children of the upstairs servants?

  “I had seven sisters,” she said. “Two living brothers. My older sisters were Alcie and Drusa and Echo. My younger sisters were the twins, Lo
riann and Marciann, and then Luciann and Helena. Kestrell and Ewan were the brothers who died. Willim and Simman are the other brothers—both were younger.”

  No sound. No response.

  Kait continued. “My chambermaid was Danfaith—she came from the village of Hopsett on the north coast, near Radan. My mother’s name was Grace Draclas—she was from the lines of Imus Draclas and Wintermarch Corwyn. My father was Strahan Galweigh. His paternal line came from Ewan Galweigh. We lost track of his maternal line before Brassias Karnee and his mistresses.”

  Nothing. Please, she thought. Please answer me. Please come out. Please let me think of the right thing to say, so that I can convince you I am who I say I am.

  “I had the corner room in the Willow Hall,” she continued. “I kept a seashell in a carved puzzle-box beneath my pillow—I found it while walking by the shore at our country house. The shell was plain—brown on one side and white on the other—but when I held it up to the light, it glowed like pink fire. I had a jay feather in there, too, and a crystal my sister Echo gave me. I used to borrow Alcie’s horse because it was the fastest and was a steady jumper, but it didn’t like me, and she used to get angry with me for riding it.”

  She heard footsteps moving slowly near the wall. Coming closer and closer. Stopping just at the other side. She held her breath, waiting for the wall to move. But it didn’t, and there were no more sounds.

  “Please come out,” she said.

  “Tell me . . . tell me why your brothers died.” Still the whisper. She did not know who stood on the other side of the door. She couldn’t smell the people in there, she couldn’t hear them.

  “They were both killed by Sabir spies. They were infants when they died.”

  “Yes. But why were they killed?”

  Kait’s heartbeat picked up. Only her own family—her parents and sisters and her surviving brothers—had ever known the answer to that question. In truth, only they had known to ask it—and they had kept the truth secret to save their lives. It could still cost her hers.

  She closed her eyes tightly and pressed her cheek to the wall. If she whispered the words, she invited death—but some leaps had to be taken on faith.