Shadowcry

by Jenna Burtenshaw

  The tiles began to slow. Kate’s hand still would not come away from the wall, and when the tiles stopped, one symbol glowed very gently at the top. It looked as if a tiny flame was flickering behind it, drawing her attention to a tile carved with a single flake of snow.

  “It recognizes you,” said Silas. “That same symbol was found on the coffin where Da’ru first found Wintercraft. It knows you are a Winters. And here,” he pointed to a second symbol illuminated a quarter of the way around the wheel. “A crescent moon. The wheels use their central carvings as reference points. Simply put, it is telling you that a Winters is standing by the wheel marked by the crescent moon. It appears the spirit inside it is still reliable.”

  “How do you know about these wheels?” asked Kate.

  “They are well known to anyone who has lived in Fume for any length of time,” said Silas. “When people first moved into the city, they saw them as wonders and used them almost every day. The technique is very simple. You interpret the symbols in terms of your question. Each tile can have many meanings, but the simplest is usually correct.”

  “So, there is a spirit trapped somewhere inside there,” said Kate. “How does it know my name?”

  “Fume has many secrets, Miss Winters. It is no concern of mine that you are ignorant of most of them. Now, ask it if it knows where to find your uncle.”

  “Artemis? Why?”

  “Da’ru has sent many servants and wardens into the City Below these last few days,” said Silas. “Your uncle was bought at the station and sent down among them. I believe Da’ru has those people working on something and I intend to find out what. Ask.”

  The tiles moved immediately without Kate even thinking about it and one was illuminated near the bottom of the wheel: a single open eye.

  “That means yes,” said Silas. “If the answer had been no, the closed eye would have been chosen. Where is he?”

  Kate hesitated, torn between the danger of leading Silas to Artemis and the need to find him herself. Some of the tiles around the wheel tapped together but did not move, as if sensing her indecision.

  “I will not ask you again.”

  Kate had no choice. Her thoughts cleared and the wheel moved at once. The tiles rattled and scraped for a lot longer this time, and Kate and Silas watched as four bright symbols settled together in a group at the top. The snowflake, a book, a doorway, and a key.

  “What does it mean when they’re together like that?” asked Kate. “Where is Artemis?”

  “Da’ru has opened it,” Silas said quietly.

  “Opened what?” said Kate. “Where is Artemis?”

  Before Silas could answer, something sharp pierced Kate’s palm from inside the wall, and the circle released its hold on her. She snatched her hand away and a bead of blood gathered on the surface of her skin as a tiny glass point sank back into the center of the moon, taking some of her blood with it.

  “What was that?”

  “A spirit wheel tests a person’s blood when they ask about areas open only to the bonemen,” said Silas. “A group of tiles is meant to be read together. The snowflake represents your uncle, the book and doorway indicate a place of books, and the key means a secret or a lock. If this is correct, Da’ru has somehow found her way into the bonemen’s ancient library, one so well hidden that it has proved impossible to find for centuries. It was said that only the bonemen could ask the spirit wheels for its location. Da’ru makes every one of her new servants use one of the wheels, just in case they carry the right blood to be shown the way. I doubt it is a coincidence that she found the library the very day your uncle was sold into her service. And if he carries the blood of the bonemen”—the wheel sprang into action and Silas smiled—“that means you carry it, too.”

  This time it was not only the outer symbols that moved. The central moon sank back as well, turning on its axis to reveal a reverse side carved with a perfect spiral.

  “The blood of the bonemen is the key to more knowledge than you can imagine,” said Silas. “Da’ru has been searching for their library for years. It is no secret that the Skilled already know its location and she believes they have hidden Wintercraft inside. I need that book, Miss Winters. We must find it first. Ask the wheel to show you the way.”

  Kate pushed her hand warily against the stone and the tiles settled into place at once. Silas studied them closely, but Kate already knew what they would say. If she was going to hide something important, there was only one place she would choose. In the deepest place, the darkest place. Four tiles were illuminated: a skull, an ornate number three, a horizontal line, and an arrow pointing down.

  Silas translated them out loud. “Third tomb cavern. Lowest level. This way.”

  The city beneath Fume was even larger than the one above. Hidden beneath the foundations of the upper city’s tall black towers were staircases that curled impossibly far down into the darkness and paths so narrow they were no more than cracks in the earth. As they went deeper, those narrow ways widened into vast chambers linked together by corridors, like beads on a string. More stone bridges hung over dizzying drops and from them Kate caught glimpses of eerie streets and buildings flecked with distant lantern light.

  “The Skilled are not the only people who hide down here,” said Silas. “Keep moving.”

  Silas did not seem to mind the darkness and dankness that closed in around them. He moved like a shadow, with a stolen lantern in one hand and his blue-black sword sheathed at his side; Kate wondered again why a man as strong and ruthless as he was would want to deliberately end his existence.

  Kate’s reflection followed her along the windows of a sunken street and twice she flinched, thinking that the face she could see in the ancient windows was not her own. She began to sense movement everywhere, in every shadow, every window, and she could hear strange sounds whispering on the air. Each time she heard something, it became harder to dismiss it as pure imagination, and when she reached a corner filled with black windows she heard a shade’s voice clearly for the first time.

  “Winters.”

  Kate felt something break, as if a barrier had fallen, and a wave of cold wrapped around her, drowning out everything except the presence of hundreds of spirits that she could not see. She sensed them as they had been in life, their stories flashing through her thoughts.

  “. . . she is listening . . .”

  “. . . traveling with him . . .”

  “. . . Silas . . .”

  Some of the voices seemed to shrink back in fear. Kate stood still, not knowing what to do.

  “. . . find the book . . .”

  “. . . keep it safe . . .”

  “. . . she can release us . . .”

  “. . . prisoners . . .”

  “. . . bound by blood . . .”

  Up ahead, Silas stopped and looked back at her with suspicion. Kate forced herself to catch up, her heart racing as she ran. Ghostly forms gathered in every window she passed, whispering to her, watching her. She dared not look back.

  “. . . guard the book . . .”

  “. . . return for us . . .”

  The voices faded as she left the windows behind, stepping at last into the glow of Silas’s lantern light. “You look pale,” he said.

  “Just tired,” Kate said, trying to disguise her feelings.

  “The dead cannot be trusted,” said Silas. “They will say anything to attract attention from those who can sense them. Ignore them, and stay in the light. This is no place to be lost on your own.”

  After the disembodied voices in the tunnel, Kate found herself wanting to stay close to Silas and became worried every time he walked too far ahead. There was no way to know how long they had been underground. Other than giving her directions on how to negotiate difficult steps and corners, Silas did not speak. The silence was so complete that she could hear her pulse rushing in her ears as she walked.

  “There,” Silas said at last, pointing toward a distant light. “We are close.”

 
Kate’s heart lifted. Artemis was somewhere nearby. She followed Silas to the very edge of the tunnel mouth, overlooking the wide gulf that was the third tomb cavern.

  The tunnel emerged halfway down the side of the cavern, and the cavern itself was so deep that Kate could not see the bottom or the top. A few graverobbers clung to ladders and harnesses on the opposite side, dodging swinging oil lamps and falling rocks as they grabbed on to tiny ledges and scraped their way into the sealed tombs that had been hollowed out of its walls. Each of them looked filthy and wild, and they crept like spiders through cracked openings in the rock, stripping the tombs of everything that had been buried with the dead and sending it up in wire baskets to the top.

  “This is where we climb down,” said Silas, rattling a long ladder that led deep into the bottomless gloom. “You will follow me or I will leave you here and you can try to find your way back alone. I’m sure those thieves will find your bones sooner or later.”

  Silas stepped confidently onto the ladder, hooking the lantern onto his belt as he descended quickly into the dark. Kate looked out over the edge. The ladder seemed old, but given the choice between trusting it and being left there alone, she would take the ladder. Artemis must have come this way. And if he could climb down that ladder, so could she.

  She swung her first foot out onto a rung, then the next. The wood felt firm under her feet, and with both hands gripping white-knuckle tight, she trusted her weight to it and followed Silas down.

  Each step felt like an eternity. Kate had never been afraid of heights, but this place was different. It felt as if the depth of the cavern was making her body twice as heavy, trying to pull her down faster than she wanted to go. If she could have seen the bottom it would not have been nearly so bad. Silas took the ladder two rungs at a time, taking the light farther and farther away until Kate was hunting for rungs in the dark. She tried to catch up, gaining confidence with every step. Then her foot slipped, a rung snapped, and her feet flailed. She screamed as her hands lost their grip, her fingers slid from the wood, and she fell back, plunging straight toward the distant chasm floor.

  She fell down . . . down . . . trying to snatch hold of the ladder in the dark. Silas’s lantern blinded her as she passed it, and something tugged hard on her arm. Silas looked down at her, a strong hand clasped around her wrist. Kate reached up to hold on to him with her other hand, and he held her firmly, bringing her back toward the ladder. The moment she was close enough, Kate reached for the ladder and cautiously regained her footing. She clung there for a few moments, not wanting to show any weakness, before gradually continuing her descent.

  Kate took each step slowly, until at last her feet touched solid ground. She misjudged the final step and stumbled back to the floor, but she was too relieved to care. She tested her wrist where Silas had grabbed her. A bruise was blossoming around the bone, and it was difficult to move her hand.

  “You were lucky,” said Silas, stepping down beside her. “An inch farther and you would have been out of my reach. There are wise ways to enter a tomb cavern. Falling is not one of them.”

  He held out his hand to help her up, and Kate saw that he too had not come away unscathed. His wrist joint looked misaligned, and the bones cracked loudly as they straightened themselves again, making him wince with pain.

  “I wish mine would do that,” she said.

  “You are not badly hurt,” said Silas, pulling her to her feet. “Your body will heal itself just as surely as mine, given time.”

  Kate looked around. The cavern was long and narrow at the bottom, shaped like a long wave carved into the earth, but there was no sign of a library, or anything else. It was hard to see past the chunks of stone on the chasm floor and the dust thrown up by their feet as they negotiated a path around the edge. It looked like the grave robbers had thrown anything of low value onto the cavern floor, littering it with broken pottery, pieces of wood, and loose dirt and bones excavated from the tombs.

  Silas tested every raised stone in the wall in case it was a handle of some kind, and while the two of them hunted for hidden doors, Kate dared to ask him something.

  “If we do find the library down here,” she said, “will you help my uncle?”

  “You will be safe for as long as I need you,” said Silas. “The same applies to him.”

  “Could you help him escape?”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You were the one who brought him to Fume. What if . . . what if I promise not to try and escape again. If I get you the book, whatever it takes, will you help him then? Will you protect him from the wardens? Help him stay alive?”

  “You will find the book simply because I demand it of you,” said Silas. “Your promises mean nothing to me.”

  “I’m just asking you to let him live. Please. You’ll still have everything you want.”

  Silas lowered his scarred hand from the wall and turned to face Kate. “You are not responsible for his life,” he said. “We all live and die alone. You will learn that in time.”

  “He is family,” said Kate. “We look after each other.”

  Silas turned back to the wall. “That is something I know nothing about,” he said. “Families lie. They leave and they forget. We do not have time for this. As long as you obey me, the bookseller will live. Now do as I say and find this door.”

  Kate did not know how Silas expected her to find a door down there. It was pitch black and the spirit wheel’s directions had not been very specific. The fire-glow from the grave robbers’ swinging oil lamps flickered like stars above them and Silas’s lantern light reflected from tiny pieces of rough gemstone embedded in the walls, making them sparkle and move as he hunted for anything that looked out of place.

  They had walked more than a thousand steps and searched only a tiny fraction of the cavern when Kate stopped. Everyone who had ever searched that cavern would have done exactly what they were doing now. They were going about it the wrong way.

  She stood still, letting Silas wander ahead, and as the light of the lantern moved farther away, she tried to put herself in the place of the people who had built the city below. Kate guessed that the library had to be easy to find if Artemis had found it so quickly. Maybe people with the blood of the bonemen just knew where it was. What if she had not been receptive to the clues?

  Kate closed her eyes and concentrated on finding the door. Nothing happened. There was no sudden pull. No sign to point the way. She opened her eyes again and found Silas standing right in front of her.

  “This cavern is old, isn’t it?” asked Kate.

  “One of the oldest.”

  “What did it look like before the grave robbers came?”

  Silas touched the wall and a fragment of blue gemstone broke off under his hand. “Most of it was lined with lapis before they stripped it away,” he said. “This lowest section is supposed to have been decorated with a mosaic of an ocean, with fish and other useless things set in precious stones across the floor and the walls. I never saw it for myself. It had all been chipped away long before the High Council got here.”

  Kate tried to picture it as Silas had described. “What about light?” she asked.

  “It is a tomb cavern,” said Silas. “The dead do not need light to see it.”

  “But we do. And so would anyone else who came down here.”

  “If this is your attempt to waste more time—”

  “Why do the grave robbers hang their oil lamps down on ropes?”

  “In case they need to escape quickly from a warden patrol,” said Silas. “They can pull everything up and be gone in moments. What is your point?”

  “Da’ru and Artemis would have carried their light down here, like us. So would the bonemen.”

  Silas looked at the lantern, then at the walls. “I fail to see the relevance of any of this,” he said.

  Kate grabbed the lantern and walked back to where the ladder met the floor. A small metal hook was sunk into the wall beside it. She ran her
hand across the ruined wall, feeling the deep welts in the stone where the grave robbers stealing the lapis had cut too deep.

  “Everyone assumes the bonemen wanted to hide the library,” said Kate. “But what if they didn’t? What if it was just an ordinary place in their time? And when they disappeared, people just assumed it was a secret place because no one knew how to get into it.”

  “Except for the Skilled,” corrected Silas.

  “Maybe. But Artemis is not one of the Skilled. He can’t do anything any ordinary person can’t do. If he found it, anyone can.”

  “Why would the spirit wheels test for the blood of the bonemen if the library was not a secret place?” asked Silas.

  “There are places in the council chambers where ordinary people can’t go, aren’t there? The council don’t want people wandering around their private rooms; maybe the bonemen didn’t either. People were able to visit Fume back then, to come and pay their respects to the dead. What if the bonemen wanted to keep some areas of the city to themselves? They didn’t need wardens to stand guard over everything; all they had to do was restrict information to anyone who asked about it.”

  “You are making a lot of assumptions,” said Silas.

  “The grave robbers didn’t find the library because they weren’t looking for it,” said Kate. “And I think the wardens did not find it because they were looking too hard. Here!”

  Silas followed her to where another metal hook jutted out of the wall just above her head, exactly like the first. “And?” he said when she pointed to it, clearly unimpressed.

  Kate lifted the lantern up onto the hook and let it swing there as she studied the wall more closely. “Why would that lantern hook be there if there wasn’t something around here to see?” she said. “If that mosaic was still intact, I bet we’d be able to see the door easily, but with all the damage the grave robbers have done to the walls, no one has noticed it. The bonemen must have made the door blend in with the wall and they wouldn’t ruin the look of a mosaic with a big door handle. So if there’s no handle, there has to be another way to open it.” Her hand went to a small black stone, too neat and square to have been part of the cavern rock, and she pushed.