Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  “I suppose you paid this pigeon for his services, too,” Lazarus continued. “I suppose he was agreeable to have the four of you gang up on him in the middle of a filthy tunnel?”

  Ellens and his short companion suddenly broke forward, trying to dodge. Lazarus grabbed Ellens and swung him around, bashing him against the wall. Latimer had broken toward the upper level as well, but Lazarus caught him easily, wrapping an arm around his throat. Their shorter companion fled, screaming, and Lazarus watched him go for a moment, then shrugged. His eyes flicked to Carroll, then to the sword, which lay on the ground.

  “You. Take your steel and leave.”

  Carroll picked up his sword. Latimer, his neck still locked beneath Lazarus’s arm, had begun to wheeze and choke. Every nerve in Carroll’s body told him to go, flee, but he held his ground. He could not flee, for he owed a debt now . . . and though the boy in front of him might be no more than an animal, even animals deserved to have their debts paid.

  “I am Carroll, of the Queen’s Guard. I owe you, sir.”

  “Sir!” The boy lifted his eyebrows, and again Carroll had the sense that he stood before a beast, held from him by the most flimsy of cages. “Well, Carroll of the Queen’s Guard, you’re a polite boy. Far too polite for this place. Get out of here. I have business with this man.”

  “What business?” Latimer demanded, wheezing. “I have never met you!”

  “You have a tattoo on your hand that interests me. We will discuss that first, and then go on to lessons.”

  Latimer’s eyes had gone wide and glassy with fright. But it was Lazarus’s eyes that held Carroll transfixed, for he could see the murder there, flat and lifeless and not choosy in the least.

  “Go now, Queen’s Guard,” Lazarus repeated. “Run, and don’t look back.”

  Carroll’s store of bravery was all used up. He fled past Lazarus, mindless of the darkness now, only wanting to get as far from that deep stretch of tunnel as he could. He ran faster when Lord Latimer began to scream, terrible screams that echoed in Carroll’s ears long after the true sound had ceased. He felt sick and dirty, infected . . . but this was an infection he did not suffer alone.

  They know. The thought pounded wildly through his head with each step. They know. The Queen, the nobles, all of them. They know what’s down here, and they do nothing. He felt himself tottering right on the edge of madness, knowing that these tunnels would be in his head, always, even if he lived to be a hundred. He would not escape, not now and not ever, but still he ran, not even trying to navigate, only caring that he went upward, out of this lightless hell that lay beneath the earth of the quiet home he had always known.

  An unknowable length of time later—minutes or lifetimes, they were all one in the dark—Carroll climbed a ladder and, as though for the first time in his life, saw stars.

  Chapter 9

  THE TABLEAU

  All hurricanes begin in exactly the same way:

  As a breath of calm air on a bright, pleasant day.

  —Songs from the Almont Rebellion, as compiled by Merwinian

  The cottage was dark as Aislinn came up out of the fields, keeping her head down, crawling through the grass. It was past two in the morning, an hour at which even the ultra-industrious Grahams would be home in bed, and Aislinn felt safe enough. She knew the topography of their acres well, and no matter which bailiff Lady Andrews had picked to replace Fallon, he could not be up to speed yet. Only the barest sliver of moon lit the path, but Aislinn had been living without torchlight for two weeks now, and she had grown used to finding her way.

  But her family’s cottage was dark.

  Aislinn crawled out of a tiny tussock, all that remained of the Vines’ winter wheat, and pushed herself up. After a quick glance around to see nothing stirring, she hurried down the lane, past the Vines’ cottage and her family’s cornfield. As she went, she said a silent apology to both the Vines and the Grahams. She had been living on their food for the past two weeks, and though she might comfort herself with the notion that the food really belonged to Lady Andrews, there was not enough to begin with. Soon there would be even less, for more than thirty feet of the Crithe had already dried up. Aislinn might call herself desperate, but the fact remained that she was a thief.

  The door of the cottage stood ajar, a black rectangle against the deeper grey stone. Aislinn considered it for a long moment, then moved forward, slipping the knife from its sheath at her waist. She had stolen the knife from Fallon’s own equipment shed six days before, and it had allowed her to gut two rabbits and a fox . . . almost certainly the same fox that had been stealing chickens from the Wilings in the next acreage. All of the animals she caught had been tough and water-starved, but Aislinn was getting better and better at hunting, and that was the first thing she meant to tell her parents. No one on the acreage had had meat for months.

  Look, she would tell them, we can stay here, living on the edge of starvation, or we can go elsewhere. Anywhere. All the way to New London, or even New Dover. I can get us meat. Not much, maybe, but more of a mouthful than we were getting here.

  But when she stepped through the doorway, she knew immediately that they were gone. No snoring from her father or her brother Jensen, no embers glowing in the grate, and most of all, none of that particular sense of habitation that the cottage always gave off, an inevitable residue of the nine people living there.

  After another quick look up and down the footpath, Aislinn pulled a candle from her pocket. This, too, she had liberated from Fallon’s shed, along with a flint and two empty canteens. Out in the open Almont, water was even harder to find than food, but Aislinn, while tracking the fox, had come upon a tiny pond hidden under thatches of blackberry brambles, their thorns so vicious that no one in his right mind would even touch the berries. After a day’s work and scratches innumerable, her dress torn to ribbons, Aislinn had cleared a path to the pond. It was nearly dry, but there had been enough to fill her two canteens, and now they were hidden back in her tiny camp, along with the rest of the cooked meat. She had not wanted to bring even a single canteen with her on this expedition, for the latches were shifty, not to be trusted. Losing the water would be bad; giving herself away would be worse.

  When she struck the match, she saw them: all eight of them, lined up against the far wall. Their throats had been cut, but that was not even the worst of it; the worst had been visited upon Mum and Lita and Eve and Bailey. Bailey’s scrawny thighs were sticky with blood. Bailey, who was only eleven years old.

  For me, Aislinn thought sickly, watching the way the pooled blood on the floor seemed to change and move in the candlelight. Because they couldn’t find me. Lady Andrews’s face popped into her mind, and Aislinn amended her thought.

  Because she couldn’t.

  Suddenly she realized what she was doing: standing here in front of eight corpses, somehow deluding herself that this wasn’t a trap. There was no smell, not a whiff of decay; the bodies had been fixed and preserved, then posed on the wall for Aislinn to see. They had simply been waiting, waiting for Aislinn to do something stupid like come back. She whirled to look behind her, already knowing that it was too late, that they were standing there, the group of bailiffs, and all of them ready—

  But it was not the bailiffs. It was only Liam Graham. He was not even looking at Aislinn, but at the bodies, his face all eyes and his jaw hanging to his chest. He was seventeen, two years older than Aislinn . . . but in that moment he seemed only a few years old.

  “Liam,” she whispered, and he jerked.

  “You’re not a ghost,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Lady Andrews told us they caught you, took you to the manse. But I knew they were lying.” With some effort, Liam pulled his eyes from the corpses and turned back to Aislinn. “If they’d caught you, they would have hung you out for everyone to see.”

  “They would have,” she agree
d absently, for now she had noticed the pale, rounded discs that sat between the lips of each member of her family. Holy wafer. Father Moran had been here, had seen it all, and laid them to rest afterward.

  “I saw your light,” Liam went on. “I came to see if it was you.”

  “I’m going to put the candle out now. I should never have lit it in the first place.”

  Liam glanced toward the bodies on the wall, then swallowed and nodded. Aislinn doused the candle, but she could still see them in the dark, a tableau of corpses lined against the blue flare in her vision.

  “What of the other families?” she asked.

  “They’re fine. ’Twas only yours got hit. I suppose she doesn’t dare kill off the entire workforce.”

  Aislinn raised her eyebrows. She had always considered Liam Graham to be a bit thick, and when they were young, he had been something of a bully as well. But the bitterness in his voice made her pause. Aislinn’s mother and father had never been angry—or at least had never been able to show it—and so she had assumed that she was the only one. Were there others?

  “Little Willie Pearce is dead, though,” Liam muttered.

  “Dead? How?”

  “His leg. Him being so young and all, his family went to Lady Andrews, asking her to hire a proper surgeon from the city. But she wouldn’t; wouldn’t even give them her horse doctor for a day. So they had to take the leg off themselves. We all heard it. It was—” Liam broke off, then said simply, “Willie bled to death.”

  Aislinn’s throat closed. Little Willie Pearce, who used to toddle around the acreage pulling a tiny cart full of carrots. The violence visited upon her family was terrible, but it had at least been deliberate, done with a twisted sense of purpose. Willie’s death seemed almost worse in that moment, because it was so pointless, so easily avoided.

  “What will you do now?” Liam asked.

  Against her will, Aislinn turned back toward the wall, the unseen tableau that waited there. She could go anywhere, yes, but where could she really go, that she would not see the eight of them, heads crooked and legs spread, wafer drying forever in each mouth?

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I—”

  “Shhh,” Liam said suddenly. “Listen.”

  For a few seconds there was nothing but the unending buzz of locusts in the surrounding fields, and then they both heard it: the crackle of stealthy footsteps coming through dry grass, more than one pair.

  The light, Aislinn realized, cursing herself. They were waiting for me, and they saw the light.

  Liam took her arm, pulling her toward the back of the house. Toward the corpses.

  “The window’s open,” he whispered. “Can you feel the draft?”

  Aislinn could. Lady Andrews’s bailiffs had not even bothered to close the windows before they did their work. Aislinn wondered whether the screaming of her family had been very bad as well, whether the Vines and the rest of their neighbors had heard it all.

  “Here,” Liam said, and offered her a hand, meaning to boost her up.

  If they find him here with me, they will kill him, Aislinn thought, and grabbed his arm.

  “When you get to the ground,” she murmured, “crawl after me, out toward your wheat patch.”

  “Where will you go?” he asked.

  I don’t know, Aislinn meant to reply, and then Lady Andrews’s face popped suddenly into her mind: high cheekbones, cold eyes, cruel mouth.

  Something undone.

  “Nowhere,” she replied. “I’m staying right here.”

  “You’ll need water. Food.”

  “I have both. Help me up.”

  He pushed her up and out, and Aislinn wriggled through the window, dropping as soundlessly as she could to the ground. The bailiffs were coming for the front door; now Aislinn could hear them, muttered voices and the low clinking of metal. Lady Andrews had claimed to already have her in the manse, Aislinn remembered. They would have to keep this little party quiet. Liam boosted himself out the window, and she caught his hands, helping him to the ground. But as they turned, a dark figure emerged around the corner of house.

  Aislinn pressed herself back against the wall, pulling Liam with her. The stone of the cottage was dark enough that the bailiff might not spot them. He ambled along, some five feet from the wall, not hurrying, and Aislinn decided that they had told him to watch the back. She should be afraid, she realized, and yet strangely, she was not. The sight of her family in the cottage had done that much for her, shown her the worst that could happen. She pulled Fallon’s knife from its place in her sleeve and remained as still as stone, trying not to breathe.

  When the man came past, Aislinn reached out and clapped her hand to his mouth. He uttered a muffled sound of astonishment—“Hawp!”—but that was all, for Liam was there as well, clapping his larger hand atop Aislinn’s, adding his leverage to hers as she bore the bailiff to the ground. He struggled, but he was nowhere near Liam’s size, and Liam held him down as Aislinn shoved her knife into his belly. A dim, distant part of her was astonished at this turn of events, all of it—that she should do these things, that Liam should help her—but the astonishment did not penetrate into her muscles, which performed the actions of killing and silencing as though they were the most natural things in the world. The bailiff’s shudders ceased, and Aislinn jerked her knife from him, leaving him to bleed in the grass.

  “Come on,” she whispered. “Into the wheat.”

  They went on their bellies. Dry grass and rocks scratched Aislinn through her thin shirt. Light flared behind her just as she and Liam slipped into the last uncut patch of winter wheat. Belatedly, it occurred to Aislinn that the men in the cottage were almost certainly the ones who had come for her family, who had raped her mother and sisters. She considered going back, but a cold voice spoke up in her mind.

  Today you can only get yourself killed.

  She and Liam huddled in the cover of the wheat, watching the silhouettes of men move back and forth against the windows of the cottage. They had torches, and the light shone out brightly, illuminating the strawberry patch and the cornfield beyond. Voices rose; they were arguing with each other. One shadow exited the building, then another, and they finally congregated at the back of the cottage, staring down at the dead body of their companion.

  “The Blue Horizon came again while you were gone,” Liam murmured. “Talking of the True Queen.”

  Aislinn rolled her eyes.

  “They said that the True Queen will end such things, give justice to all of us, to your family, to Willie Pearce. They brought a little food, and blankets for winter. They were kind. But they don’t understand how it is out here. They can’t.”

  Aislinn turned to him, surprised, but his eyes were fixed not on her but on the cottage. Liam’s mother was dead, Aislinn knew; she had died bringing him into the world. He was his father’s only son.

  He has little to lose, Aislinn realized, and the thought was not sympathetic but calculating. He has little . . . and now I have nothing.

  Without thinking, she turned toward the eastern horizon, where the bulky outline of Lady Andrews’s castle reared over the fields, blocking the starlight.

  “Are you brave, Liam?” she asked.

  “Brave? How would I know?” he replied frankly.

  “By finding out. Follow me.”

  Chapter 10

  BLAMING THE DEALER

  Strange, how often a turn in the wrong direction eventually leads us right. In a universe as perverse as ours, only a fool would believe that he charts his own course.

  —Greive the Madman

  When Christian emerged from the culvert outside Mrs. Evans’s stable, he was pleased to see Crofter on the door again. But as Christian approached, Crofter held up his hand.

  “You can’t come in, lad.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s no
t a good day.”

  Christian stretched to peer around Crofter’s shoulder. Some sort of tumult was going on in the stable; he could hear a woman’s voice raised in anger.

  “Is Maura . . . engaged?”

  “She’s not fucking, no,” Crofter replied, and despite the roughness of the word, Christian sensed a degree of care being taken. He tried to duck beneath Crofter’s arm, found himself pushed back.

  “Don’t go in there, lad. It’s a mess.”

  This time Christian put all his weight behind it, lowering his head and driving Crofter out of the way. The big enforcer fell backward, crashing into a low table that rested beside the doorway, and Christian darted toward the source of the noise, a clear stream of cursing and threats that could only be coming from Mrs. Evans. Compared to her competitors, she was a young woman, only forty or so, but she stood nearly six feet tall, and all Whore’s Alley trembled at the thought of incurring her wrath.

  “I don’t care about fucking misuse! What about the damage to my merchandise, you bastard! Where is my compensation?”

  “She took too much,” the man’s voice replied, utterly cool, in a broad, flat accent that made Christian stiffen. “Almost twice the recommended dosage.”

  “How was she supposed to know about dosage? Little twit couldn’t read her own name, let alone the label on a vial of poppy!”

  Christian pushed through the crowd of onlookers that had gathered in the common room, shoving several girls out of the way. The room was lit with torches, and their bright light showed everything in horribly stark relief.

  A girl lay on one of the sofas, her eyes open but unseeing, limbs flung out every which way. For a terrible moment, Christian thought it was Maura, but it wasn’t; this girl had hair the color of honey, not the bright white-gold of Maura’s locks. The long strands were matted with whitish matter streaked with brown: vomit. Christian didn’t know the dead girl, but she too showed some signs of rough handling: bruises in the shape of fingers on her throat, and a cut on her cheek. One of her outflung arms still sported a syringe.