Wintercraft: Blackwatch

by Jenna Burtenshaw

  ‘Path 63,’ he read out loud. ‘TW – E. SM – S. What is that supposed to mean?’ A sound in the tunnel behind him startled him. He swung his lantern round and a face came towards him in the dark. ‘Kate?’

  ‘That light is bright enough to tell everyone where you are,’ said Kate. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Two traders passed by here and read something on the wall,’ said Edgar. ‘I came to have a look. How are you feeling?’

  ‘As good as I’m likely to feel down here,’ said Kate. ‘Sleep helped.’

  ‘Did you bring the backpack?’

  ‘Right here.’ Kate turned so he could see it on her back.

  ‘All right. Give it to me and take a look at this. What do you make of it?’

  ‘It looks like a signpost,’ said Kate, sliding the bag off her shoulders and passing it and his coat back to Edgar. ‘The first two letters must stand for a place, and the last one tells you which direction it is in.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘What else would it be? You said yourself it’s easy to get lost down here. Signposts like this must help the traders find their way around. Maybe we could follow them.’

  ‘That sounds like a good plan to me,’ said Edgar. ‘Are you all right to walk?’

  ‘I told you, I’m fine,’ said Kate. ‘Show me where they went, but keep your voice down.’

  The wall curved round to the left and Edgar led the way. There was no sign of the traders and small paths branched away from the tunnel in so many directions it became impossible to guess which route they had taken.

  ‘Maybe this wasn’t such a great plan,’ said Kate.

  Edgar held his lantern high, checking the walls for more directions. The same letters kept appearing over again: SM – S.

  ‘We’re heading somewhere, at least,’ said Edgar. ‘There must be something down here.’

  The tunnel eventually forked into a wide Y-shaped junction, and sunk into the wall joining the two paths was a large black door. It was made of old wood but it had been rehung on new metal hinges not long ago.

  ‘Where do you think that goes?’ asked Edgar.

  ‘Up, hopefully,’ said Kate. ‘I can’t see anything written on the wall.’

  ‘Do you think someone lives in there?’

  Kate dared to press an ear to the door. ‘I can’t hear anything. The floor is worn away here. Lots of people have walked this way.’

  ‘Then either the person who lives here is very popular, or this is a public place,’ said Edgar. ‘Do we risk it?’

  Kate was about to answer when a loud voice echoed down the tunnel to their left. She grabbed the door handle and swung the door open. ‘It’s our best chance,’ she said.

  The two of them ran inside and closed the door behind them.

  ‘There’s no lock,’ said Kate, searching for a way to seal the door, and when she turned to see where they were her heart sank.

  They were standing on a stone landing at the top of a circular shaft that cut deep down into the earth. A staircase curled down the walls, illuminated dimly by yellow lights far beneath them. There was no guard rail to prevent anyone from stepping over the side and the steps were ancient and uneven. Shadows danced along the staircase and musty air fogged up against their faces as Edgar’s lantern bathed the walls in a flickering glow. Part of the staircase led up to their right, but the only doorway Kate could see up there had long been bricked up.

  ‘It looks like we’re already at the top,’ she said. ‘The only way is down.’

  ‘Good news, as ever,’ said Edgar, looking away from the dizzying drop.

  The staircase was just wide enough for the two of them to run side by side. Edgar stayed close to the wall and took care where he was putting his feet, while Kate took the steps two at a time and was already two levels down when someone opened the door they had just passed through. Kate and Edgar stopped where they were and pressed their backs against the wall as a voice carried down the shaft.

  ‘. . . no reason for them to go down there,’ it said. ‘They’ll be heading for the surface, or hiding somewhere. Let’s keep moving.’ The door squealed shut.

  ‘Who was that?’ asked Kate.

  ‘I didn’t recognise the voice,’ said Edgar. ‘Probably one of Baltin’s men.’

  ‘It’s very quiet down here. We’re lucky they didn’t hear us.’

  ‘Quiet is good,’ said Edgar, slapping his hand nervously against another bricked-up doorway. ‘I like quiet. Doesn’t look like we’re getting off here, though. Let’s try the next level.’

  They followed the staircase deeper and deeper down but any exits they came across were blocked up, locked or, in the case of one particularly ancient door, crossed with a dozen chains with a warning painted on the wall beside it.

  FELDEEP PRISON

  NO ENTRY. NO ESCAPE.

  ‘Nice,’ said Edgar. ‘I vote we leave this one far behind.’

  The stairs spiralled on and Kate was glad when the bottom finally came into sight. There were more lights down there, a welcome sign of life, and she led Edgar towards a small wooden sign that was marked with an arrow and the letters SM. They followed the arrow into a low tunnel, which looked promising enough until a battered gate blocked their way.

  The gate had been welded together using salvaged metal from at least three other gates and it leaned at an awkward angle across their path, with the twisted letters SM bent into its centre. Beside the gate, three long pull chains snaked down the wall.

  ‘What are those for?’ asked Kate.

  Edgar shrugged in the dark and something creaked up ahead. A small wooden shutter was tucked in between two stones and it flapped open, chased out by a thick plume of pipe smoke. A wrinkled face appeared in the space behind it and a thick rasping voice said: ‘Buy, sell or trade?’

  Kate and Edgar looked at each other, neither knowing what to say.

  ‘I don’t have all day,’ said the voice, dissolving into a glut of choking coughs. ‘You want in, or not?’

  ‘In where exactly?’ asked Edgar.

  ‘Stupid kids.’

  The shutter slammed shut, wafting bitter smoke into Kate and Edgar’s faces.

  ‘Wait!’ Kate tried to open the gate, but it was sturdier than it looked. Edgar reached up for one of the chains and pulled one at random, sending a tiny bell ringing inside the wall. The shutter opened again and the face returned.

  ‘Trade then, eh?’ he said, squinting at them with suspicion. ‘Let’s see what ya got.’

  ‘Er . . .’

  ‘No stock, no way in,’ said the man. ‘The Shadowmarket’s no place to be wandering about without good reason. Specially not for young ’uns.’

  Edgar turned his back on the man and whispered to Kate. ‘SM! The Shadowmarket! I should have realised it before.’

  ‘What’s the Shadowmarket?’

  ‘The City Below has four main places where people come to trade with each other,’ said Edgar. ‘The Shadowmarket is the biggest. If we can get in, no one will be able to find us in there.’

  ‘But we don’t have anything to trade,’ said Kate.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Edgar. ‘Or nothing he can see anyway.’ He turned back to the gatekeeper. ‘Whisperers carry their stock in their memories,’ he said proudly. ‘We are here to trade secrets, and unless you are willing to pay for them, we will not be sharing any of our stock with you today.’

  The gatekeeper grumbled and sank back into his little room. ‘Whisperers,’ he mumbled. ‘Should’ve guessed.’

  A shriek of metal sliding against metal sounded from the gate, and a narrow bar slid out of its locks and into the wall beneath the shutter.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Edgar, giving the man a smart nod.

  ‘Just keep to the left. And no wanderin’.’

  With the way clear, Kate and Edgar stepped through the gate and rounded a short curl of steps, where the distant sound of people echoed from the walls.

  ‘Do you really think this
is a good idea?’ said Kate.

  ‘Not really,’ admitted Edgar. ‘But maybe we can find someone down here who knows the way back to the surface.’

  ‘And how are we going to find someone like that?’

  ‘I said it wasn’t a good idea,’ said Edgar. ‘But right now it’s the only one we’ve got.’

  The steps took them into a wider tunnel that doubled back directly beneath the gatekeeper’s room. A voice bellowed down from above them and the gatekeeper’s face glared down through a hatch in the ceiling.

  ‘Keep to the left,’ he said. ‘And watch out for wolves. A few of Creedy’s beasts got out last night. Don’t blame me if you lose a hand in there.’ The man’s laugh echoed around them.

  ‘Wolves?’ said Kate, as they walked on. ‘Do you think he was being serious?’

  Edgar took the lead, following a trail of candles laid down the middle of the floor. ‘Let’s hope we don’t find out,’ he said.

  11

  The Shadowmarket

  The candles led Kate and Edgar into a fenced-off pathway that curled tightly beneath an archway of earth and opened out on to a covered bridge with a steep drop on either side plummeting into endless darkness. Edgar kept his eyes straight forward. He ran his hand along the side, shaking nervously as the wooden bridge sprang under their feet.

  ‘This bridge has been here for years,’ said Kate, sensing his nerves. ‘It’s not going to collapse now.’

  ‘That’s what the person standing on it when it does collapse will have said.’

  It was the first time since leaving the Skilled cavern that Kate felt that she and Edgar were completely alone. She could not hear any shades. The air felt dank and empty. If the bridge did fall, no one would know. No one would find them.

  Edgar walked tentatively across the bridge while Kate treated it like any other path, striding on past him towards a circular entrance cut into a wall of earth and rock. Edgar ran the last few steps and touched the solid wall with relief.

  ‘We’re here,’ said Kate, pointing along the tunnel to an arched door just within reach of the lantern light. ‘One Shadowmarket and not a wolf in sight.’

  The door was huge, ancient and riddled with woodworm. There was no handle that Kate could see, just two dangling lengths of rope where handles should have been. She and Edgar took hold of one each and pulled the great doors towards them.

  The first thing that hit them was the noise. The doors opened out on to a mass of people shouting, talking and arguing with each other. Lanterns made from coloured glass were hung along the walls of a long, narrow cavern that looked like a jagged scar cut out of the earth. Long troughs of fire were slung beneath blackened chimney vents in the high ceiling and the air was thick with the smell of hot metal.

  The Shadowmarket certainly earned its name. The moment Kate and Edgar stepped inside they joined a huge bustle of people carrying flickering lanterns, shuffling and chattering between clusters of market stalls that stood in groups like wooden islands across the cavern floor. Waxy candles oozed over the stall fronts, creating islands of light that captured the faces of everyone passing by in a dancing battle between light and dark.

  Traders leaned across their counters, trying to attract the attention of potential customers. The busiest stalls were those selling food and clothes, but even from the doorway Kate could see traders selling more unusual goods. One woman was selling talismans cut from ancient bone, whilst another had tame rats for sale. Neither of them was attracting much business.

  As Kate and Edgar walked forward, adding their hooded faces to the crowd, a hidden mechanism rattled to life within the walls and the huge doors creaked closed behind them. Kate had not realised just how many people lived in the City Below. There were hundreds in there, all moving between the stalls with bulging bags hanging from their shoulders.

  Kate squeezed her way past a stall selling different kinds of clockworks, whose small counter was covered in clicking, whirring creations from children’s toys to clocks that could tell perfect time or even predict the weather, though what use predicting the weather could be underground Kate did not know.

  The next stall took up an entire circle all of its own with tables round the outside and a small furnace blazing in the centre. Its sign declared its owner a coinsmith, and a red-cheeked woman stood among the tables chatting to a customer while throwing pieces of metal into hot vats, sizzling them down and pouring them into presses to forge coins marked with a twisting letter S. Young children gathered round to watch steam billowing upwards as she plunged the presses into a sump of murky green water and anxious customers haggled with her over whether a metal jug was worth smelting into four coins or three.

  ‘What now?’ asked Kate, as she and Edgar were forced to stop.

  ‘We try to blend in,’ he said.

  Neither of them had anything they could turn into new money, but the further they walked the more obvious it became that buying things with coin was not the preferred method of trade within the market. More often people leaned in, pointed to items they wanted and pressed random items of their own into the traders’ hands as payment.

  Two groups of stalls down from the coinsmith was a stitchery, where old clothes were snipped, measured, patched and resewn. Next to that was a carpenter whose stall was almost completely hidden beneath a shell of stacked chairs and stools of different heights. The next cluster included a soup seller whose recipes consisted mainly of mushrooms and roots; a bakery selling hot buns almost as fast as its tiny oven could bake them; and a cobbler who prided himself on the quality of his old leather, selling repaired boots decorated with patches of what looked horribly like mouse fur.

  From the high ceiling to the wide floor everything about the Shadowmarket was big, and like most things in and beneath the ancient graveyard city, it had once been used as something else. Hundreds of small doors were sunk into its walls in rows that climbed at least twenty doors high. They might have been tombs, but they did not have name stones above them as Kate had seen in other burial caverns. Ladders linked the narrow ledges that ran beneath the doors, but many of them were broken, left without rungs or leaning precariously to one side. No one had any reason to use them any more.

  ‘If we’re quick, I bet I can grab us a couple of those buns,’ said Edgar, breathing in deeply as the smell of warm bread overtook that of the coinsmith’s fizzing metal.

  ‘What do you think they are?’ asked Kate.

  ‘Apple, if we’re lucky.’

  ‘Not the buns. The doors in the walls.’

  ‘Old tombs, probably,’ said Edgar.

  ‘And those?’ Kate pointed up at the ceiling, where the flickering firetroughs were slung on pulleys, casting shaky light across the cavern.

  ‘Cheaper than candles, I suppose,’ said Edgar. ‘Someone probably dug them up one day and thought they’d be useful.’

  Kate was so busy looking upwards that she was not paying attention to where she was going, or to what was coming towards her. Edgar pulled her into a gap between two mushroom sellers, and together they looked out between the customers and spotted two dark-eyed people walking through the crowds.

  Kate recognised Baltin at once, fully dressed, with eyes like thunder. The man walking with him was the one who had spoken up against her in the meeting hall, and they were both closely followed by at least six more Skilled, all looking warily at the people surrounding them.

  Kate had assumed that the Skilled were well known, even liked, throughout the City Below, even though she had never seen them mix with ordinary people. Now she saw the truth. Most people who recognised them as Skilled turned away from them at once. Others whispered to one another or glared at them, and some even spat at their feet, cursing them under their breaths. Traders stood up behind their counters, their faces stern, making it clear that the Skilled could expect no service from them that day, and parents corralled their children close as if the Skilled might snatch them away.

  ‘How did they find us so fast?’ Edgar
whispered, as the two men looked through the crowd.

  ‘It must have been the spirit wheel,’ said Kate. ‘Baltin could have asked it where to find us.’

  ‘All it had to do was send them the wrong way,’ whispered Edgar. ‘Is that too much to ask?’

  Kate felt the veil shift a little as the Skilled drew closer. Frost pinched at her fingertips and she pulled them into her sleeves, turning away from the two men. ‘I think we should move,’ she whispered.