Chapter 21
Griffin
A freezing fog enveloped the town as we drove a rented cart to the cemetery that night. It coated everything in a thin shell of ice, dampened our clothes, and chilled any inch of exposed skin. The world was reduced to the circle of our lantern light; objects appeared suddenly from the mist, and vanished just as quickly behind.
“Of all the mad things we’ve done, stealing corpses has to be a new low,” Christine opined. She sat beside me on the driver’s seat, her rifle beside her. She’d wrapped it in oilskin to protect it from the damp.
“Really?” Hattie asked, from where she sat in the back of the cart with Whyborne and Iskander. “I would’ve thought you lot would be old hands at this. Or do you usually just buy corpses off resurrection men?”
“I’m not a necromancer,” Whyborne snapped. The expedition had put him in a foul mood already, and Hattie’s endless jabs were wearying, to say the least.
“It’s quite true,” Iskander hastened to reassure Hattie. “Whyborne would never do such a thing.”
Christine’s mouth thinned to a tight line. Iskander seemed to be under the impression he could bring Hattie around, if only he could show her that Whyborne wasn’t the monster she believed.
He was wrong, but I doubted I could convince him of it. Perhaps Christine would have more luck.
The cemetery gates loomed out of the fog. The sheen of ice clung to the weathered black iron, reflecting the light of our lanterns back at us. I urged the unhappy mules down the road running alongside the low stone wall. Even with the fog, entering through the gates seemed to court too much risk of discovery. The last thing Whyborne needed was for the police to catch him robbing the grave of a man he’d been accused of murdering. Not even the cleverest lawyer could keep him out of jail then.
When we reached a place near the river, where some of the stones had tumbled free of the wall, I drew the wagon to a halt. “This seems as good a spot as any,” I said. “Is everyone ready?”
Christine swung down from the seat and tied the mules to the branches of a yew tree, which overhung the cemetery wall. When she was done, I handed the rifle to her, then collected my carpetbag and police lantern. Whyborne took the lantern hanging from the wagon. Iskander and Hattie removed the plank we’d brought to help carry Waite’s body back out of the cemetery.
I held up my police lantern. “Whyborne? Would you be so kind?”
He lit it with a word. Hattie didn’t so much as flinch; no doubt the Endicotts used sorcery on an everyday basis when at home.
We clambered over the low wall. Whyborne managed to snag his trousers on a patch of rough mortar, and muttered imprecations under his breath as we climbed the hill. Headstones appeared through the swirling mist like ghosts, and I had to stop twice to make certain we were still going in the right direction. The fog obscured even the dark bulk of the Draakenwood.
Eventually, we came across the arcane line, burning its way across the landscape. As I followed it up the hill, I murmured to Ival in a low voice, “This line runs into the Draakenwood.”
Though he couldn’t see the line, I knew he could feel its presence. “Yes. Presumably the sorcerers, or the Man in the Woods, draw from, if not this exact one, another which crosses the boundary of the woods.”
The thought unsettled me, for reasons I couldn’t entirely articulate. “Could you prevent them from doing so, somehow?”
He shook his head. His exuberant hair had wilted slightly in the damp fog. “No. If the maelstrom could do that, it wouldn’t need...”
Whyborne trailed off, glancing back over his shoulder to where Hattie trudged behind us.
Wouldn’t need him and Persephone, he meant. The great vortex beneath Widdershins had a sort of inhuman awareness, but its ability to act was limited. It needed eyes and ears, hands and mouths, to work its will on the world.
It collected people by shaping probabilities, or so we thought. It loaded the dice of the universe, so that I looked down at the paper on a whim and picked Widdershins as my destination, rather than having turned the page to a different news story and chosen New York instead.
But that wasn’t enough. So it shaped more probabilities, found the right bloodline to contain it, and split off two fragments to become flesh. One for the land, and one for the sea.
It was up to them to keep it free. But there were only two of them; not enough to keep sorcerers from using its magic like parasites sucking blood, one little prick at a time.
I had the sudden urge to take Whyborne’s hand. But this was neither the time nor the place for such a show of affection.
We half-groped our way through the mausoleums, until we found the one belonging to the Waites. A thin skin of ice coated the marble, thanks to the freezing fog, and cracked off the chain on the door when I touched it.
A heavy padlock guarded the door—but there were other wards as well. A thin line of arcane energy ran around the edge of the door.
“Get on with it, man,” Christine said impatiently. “It’s far too cold to stand about.”
“There’s a spell on the mausoleum door,” I replied.
Hattie and Iskander put aside the plank, and Hattie crouched down to inspect the door. “How can you tell?” she asked.
Damn. I’d grown so used to my shadowsight, I’d forgotten to keep it a secret in front of her. “I can see magic,” I admitted.
“Really?” she frowned at me. “How?”
“It’s a gift.” Which was true in its own way. “Whatever spell the Waites put here to guard their dead, we’ll need to break it before opening the door.”
“I thought they weren’t sorcerers,” Christine said.
“This is probably old magic.” Whyborne laid his hand on the door, perhaps trying to feel the shape of the spell even though he couldn’t see it. “Some curse to prevent anyone from...well, doing what we’re about to do.”
“Shall we use the curse breaking spell?” I asked. It should be a simple enough process, now that we’d turned my sword cane into a wand. “If I can just find the right spot...”
“Too complicated,” Hattie said, drawing one of her knives. “This is quicker.”
She thrust the blade of the knife into the crack between door and jamb, slashing down. The greenish glow dimmed, then vanished altogether. “Did that take care of it?” she asked.
My heartbeat quickened. “You have a witch hunter’s dagger.”
“Two of them.” She cocked her head at me. “What, you think I’d just wander around, with no way of protecting myself from sorcerers who want to put an end to me?”
“I wouldn’t have thought the family would tolerate anything that could be used against its most valued members,” Whyborne said, eyeing the daggers with a new wariness.
She flipped the dagger into the air, caught it expertly, and put it back in its sheath. “Then I guess you don’t know as much as you think.”
I took my lock picks from my carpetbag and knelt in front of the door. “Whyborne, could you remove the ice from the padlock, please?”
He murmured the true name of fire. There came a little sizzle, the metal heating enough to melt the ice from the mechanism.
“Thank you.” I set about working on the lock. The cold made my fingers stiff, but I was soon rewarded with a click. The chain rattled as I pulled it free.
The double doors swung open on squealing hinges, and I winced at the sound. “Christine, it might be wise for you to stay outside as lookout,” I said.
“As though I could see anything in this dratted fog,” she muttered. “Very well.”
“I’ll stay with Christine,” Iskander offered. “Otherwise I fear it will be rather crowded within.”
A large sarcophagus in the center of the floor dominated the interior of the mausoleum. Arcane symbols covered the sides of the limestone box, and the lid bore dates from early in the previous century. The rest of the family dead lay tucked into niches in the walls.
“There,” Whyborne said, indicating a niche near the back. The lantern light gleamed from a mahogany casket, the wood still polished and the golden hardware bright.
I set the lantern on the sarcophagus in the center of the small room. “Help me take it down.”
Hattie added her strength to our effort, and we wrestled the casket from its niche and lowered it to the floor without incident. The pry bar from my kit made short work of the lead seal. As we removed the lid, I found myself grateful for the winter cold, which minimized any foul smells from the corpse.
Waite lay within, his body preserved by the embalmer’s arts, though nothing could restore it to a semblance of life. The lips had drawn back slightly to reveal the teeth, and his cheeks were sunken. He’d been laid out in a fine suit, complete with shriveled marigold tucked into his buttonhole.
“All right,” I said. “Now we just need to shift him onto the plank and get him wrapped, and we can leave.”
“Thank heavens,” Whyborne muttered. “I’ll take his shoulders, if you can get his feet.”
I nodded. He reached to grasp Waite’s upper arms.
Blue light flashed in my shadowsight, surging from the arcane line and into the corpse. Before I could shout a warning, the dead man lifted his hand and seized Whyborne’s wrist.