The Edinburgh Dead - Brian Ruckley [95]
Agnes gave the door an exploratory rattle, curling her fingers around its edge where rot had eaten back the wood. Little flakes and splinters fell from it, even beneath such slight assault.
“Should open up all right,” she said, but instead of testing that assumption, she took a step back and groped around in a pouch looped over the waistband of her heavy skirt. She brought forth a finger length of brown wood, unworked and unpolished. Just a section cut from a thin branch, with a hole in one end through which cord was threaded. She fastened that cord about her left arm so that the little piece of wood hung there, a pendant at her wrist.
“Rowan, cut at Samhain,” she told Quire. “A ward against spirits, against evil.”
Quire regarded the crude bracelet with a faint sense of puzzlement. He could still hear the shouts of the workers struggling to raise that huge new bridge over the Cowgate. He was standing in the midst of a city famed throughout Europe for its fostering of rational, secular thought; a city, it was said, that had lately held more learned men in each square foot than any other the country had ever seen. Yet he was looking at a witch’s charm, something out of a folk tale, and believing it might work; a wise precaution, perhaps.
“Have you got another one of them?” he asked Agnes, and she smiled.
“Course I have.” She dropped the second pendant into his outstretched hand. “Can we call you a believer yet, then?”
“Call me what you like,” Quire sniffed. “I stopped knowing what to believe a while back. I’m playing the game by the rules my enemies have set for the next wee while, that’s all.”
He held up his arm, rolling his wrist to set the rowan charm swinging.
Agnes pushed at the door. It shivered, and caught on the uneven ground, came free and scraped open. Cold air flowed gently over them as they stared into a short, dingy passageway with a low roof and undulating, unpaved floor.
For an instant, at the touch of that air, a terrible, lurching dread ran through Quire. His hands trembled suddenly, and he was seized by the urge to flee. He steadied himself.
“You feel something?” Agnes asked.
“Aye.”
“Not without its protections, this place,” she said, but offered no further explanation.
She made to step across the threshold, but Quire barred her way with an outstretched arm.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
“Oh? Well, if it’ll make you happy.”
She sounded faintly amused. Quire found her lack of a caution a little discomfiting. He had not told her of the pistol he had tucked inside his jacket, and did not mean to. Most places he went now, he went armed.
It was colder in there than he had expected, like a cave. That shawl draped around Agnes’ head suddenly did not seem so redundant. The walls, when his fingertips brushed them, were damp to the touch. Hundreds of small webs were tucked into the edges of the ceiling. The floor had a disquieting hint of softness to it, the layers of dirt giving beneath his feet. Not a cave, not quite; a tomb. Quire felt himself to be disturbing a place that had been asleep for a long time.
He advanced a few paces, accompanied in every step by that awful dread; that moaning fear within him, pleading with him to turn about and run. He could feel sweat upon his brow.
Agnes lingered, just inside the doorway. He turned towards her, wondering for a moment whether she was overcome by the same gnawing unease that assailed him.
“See?” she asked, gesturing at the crumbling wall of the passage.
He looked where she pointed. Just barely, he could make out a thin line of some brownish, earthy material, running directly up the wall.
“All the way round,” Agnes said, swinging her arm up and over.
Now that Quire’s eye was tuned to it, he could see clear enough that the line did indeed traverse the ceiling, descend the opposite wall of the passage and run back across the floor to join with its own tail.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A warding. Grave soil, I’d guess. It’s why you’re feeling set to piss yourself, and why you