The Tuerier patrol on the high street in Tés Aváir is relieved at twelve o'clock at the guard post on Copper Square. The changeover rarely takes more than five minutes. During that time the square is unobserved. It is a known and accepted weakness.
Internal memorandum, Tuerier Office in Tés Aváir
Chapter 13
The Passages
In the second week we fell into a rhythm.
It wasn't something we talked about. It just happened, day by day, like water finding its way down a slope. Breakfast at eight in the dining hall, where Ahra always sat with his face half buried in his plate and one hand under the table scratching Lynx behind the ear, and Retia always sat with her cup of tea held between both hands, elbows on the table, the warmth of the steam against her cheeks. Lessons from half past eight until four, with a break for lunch, when we sat in our usual place by the window. Supper. The First-Year Room. Our room.
Those were the outside things, the things you could see. The inside things were harder to describe.
I began to know Déynáir with my body. Not with the map, not with the names of corridors and staircases, but with my feet and my hands and my nose. The north corridor on the third floor always smelt of old stone and damp, and the floor was uneven under my feet, and there was a spot halfway along where a flagstone was cracked and you tripped if you didn't know. I tripped the first three times. The fourth time I stepped over it. The fifth time I stepped over it without thinking, and that was the moment I understood that I had begun to belong.
The library on the fifth floor smelt of leather and dust and the sweet, heavy smell old books have when they have stood on their shelves for so long that they have begun to smell of themselves. There was a window at the end of the row of books on Dherak theory that always stood open, and the wind that came in through it carried the scent of the river, and of the castle garden, and of the grass that grew up along the old walls. Sometimes I sat there in the afternoons with Alôpex in my lap and a book in my hands and read without understanding half of it, and it was still better than anything the school library at Fjordskolen had ever offered me.
The staircase from the fourth floor to the third had a step that creaked louder than the others, the seventh from the top, and everyone in our year knew it, and every one of them stepped over it with the ease you have when you know a place's secrets. The staircase at Fjordly had creaked too, the third step from the bottom, and I had learnt to step over it when I was eight and wanted to get down to the kitchen at night without Hanne hearing. I stepped over this one too. And every time I did, I felt it: a small thing, a silly thing, but it said that my home had a creaking stair, and that I knew where it was.
Retia and Ahra were with me everywhere. The three of us went to lessons together, ate together, sat in the First-Year Room together. It wasn't a decision we had made. It was just how it was. Retia always walked on my left, and Ahra always on my right, and our steps had found the same rhythm without our ever having talked about it. Retia walked fast and purposefully with long strides, and Ahra walked a bit more slowly with his hands in his pockets and his head turning towards everything he passed, and I walked in the middle and said little and looked a lot.
The other students had started calling us "the three", and I didn't know if it was a compliment or an observation, but it was true.
In the evenings, when the others went to bed, we went hunting.
All three of us.
The stone oath was between Ahra and me, and we hadn't said a word about it to Retia, only that we were looking for passages. But she had insisted from the very first evening. "If you think you can find secret passages without me," she had said, with her arms folded and one eyebrow raised, "you're even stupider than you look."
We weren't stupider than we looked. We took her with us.
We didn't have a map. Retia drew one herself, from memory, in pencil on the back of the week's menu, which she had taken from the dining hall: all the corridors and staircases we knew, so precisely that Ahra stopped teasing her about it after the first evening. It lay unfolded on the floor of the First-Year Room once the last of the others had gone up, and we sat round it with Alôpex, Lynx and Fulmen and planned the evening's route.
We started systematically. Walked along every wall in every corridor, knocked on stones, pressed on flagstones, leant against things that oughtn't to give way.
Most evenings we found nothing. We walked for hours in dark corridors with only torches and our Amícûs' eyes to see by, and we knocked and pressed and listened, and the stones stayed stones. It was cold, and it was damp, and my fingers got sore from pressing on things that didn't respond, and my feet were tired of stone, and still they were my favourite evenings. Because they were the evenings when it was just the three of us in the dark, silent castle, with no sounds but our own footsteps and our own breathing and the occasional growl from Lynx reacting to something we couldn't sense.
The first night I came back to the room after midnight, Nihil was lying with his back to me and his face to the wall. The room was cold, and it smelt of cold stone and of him, winter wind and bare iron. I pulled off my boots and set them down on the floor as quietly as I could, one at a time.
"You're going to be late for something," he said into the wall.
That was all. He didn't say it again, and he never asked what I was up to.
Ahra kept the records. He drew our routes on Retia's map with a stick of red chalk he had found in an empty classroom, and he marked every place we had examined with a small cross, and his system was precise and methodical and impressive for a boy who couldn't butter a piece of toast properly.
Retia went in front. Always. She had the best sense of direction of the three of us, and she moved through the corridors with a certainty that said her body remembered places faster than her head did. She rarely touched the walls. She stood still and looked. And then she said "there" or "not there" and walked on.
And I found the passages.
Not because I was more systematic than Ahra or more intuitive than Retia. But because they had a smell. The passages smelt of old Dherak. A faint, metallic note under the ordinary smell of the stone, invisible to noses that weren't mine, but clear to me. I followed the scent the way Alôpex followed a trail, with my nose and with something deeper than my nose, and my fingers found the places in the stones that were a little warmer than the rest, a little smoother, a little different.
The very first time, it wasn't my nose. It was the ring. The cold ring the stone oath had put round my wrist that first evening went warm, very quietly, like a stone that has lain in the sun, and when I held my hand flat against the wall, it grew warmer. Ahra looked down at his own wrist and then up at me with his mouth open. Afterwards I learnt to smell it before the ring had a chance to say anything.
"You find them with your nose," said Ahra one evening, when I had found the fourth passage that week. We were standing in a narrow corridor behind a wall that had opened when I touched one particular stone. Retia stood looking into the dark with Fulmen on her shoulder, and Fulmen looked too, and both of them were still and watchful.
"Maybe," I said.
"It isn't maybe," said Ahra. "You can smell magic."
Retia looked at me. She said nothing, but her eyes said she had noticed it long before Ahra said it.
We mapped them. Ahra drew them in with the red chalk, and slowly, evening by evening, a pattern began to form. The passages didn't run at random. They followed hidden axes through the castle, and they crossed each other at particular points. And every crossing was marked with something. An engraving. A symbol cut into the stone a long time ago and hidden behind brick and mortar for hundreds of years.
Symbols I recognised. Symbols from my history book. The mark of Section XIII.
Retia was the first to say it out loud. She was sitting with the map spread out in front of her on the floor of the First-Year Room, late, when even Sera had gone up, and pointed at the red marks.
"It's a pattern," she said. "Look. All the crossings lie on a line that runs from the north tower down through the cellars and out towards..." She followed the line with her finger. "Towards the mountain."
Ahra and I looked. She was right. The line pointed north. Towards the forbidden mountain.
"What's on the mountain?" said Retia.
"Something they don't want us to find," I said.
It was a Thursday evening when we found Kalmin.
We were down in a passage under the third-floor corridor, deeper than we usually went, a narrow tunnel with a low ceiling that smelt of damp and old stone and the dense, metallic Dherak smell that always hung in the oldest passages. The air was cold and damp, and it settled on your skin like a thin film of water. Alôpex went ahead of me with her ears forward and her tail low. Lynx walked at Ahra's side with steps more careful than usual. Fulmen sat on Retia's shoulder with its head turned towards the dark.
The tunnel turned and widened. There was light up ahead. Not torchlight. Something else. A faint, bluish glow coming from a room we couldn't see yet.
I stopped and put my hand on Ahra's arm. He stopped. Retia stopped.
Voices. Low, muffled. Two people talking to each other in the kind of whispering tone you use when you don't want to be heard.
We went closer. Slowly. My feet found the silent places on the stone floor. Retia moved without a sound at my side. Alôpex walked without a sound. Lynx followed her example.
The tunnel opened into a room. Not a big one. A back room, an old storeroom perhaps, with shelves along the walls and a single torch in a bracket giving off the bluish light. Two figures stood in the middle of the room.
One was tall, with fair hair and green eyes. The same figure I had seen on the very first evening, when I had got lost in the castle. The man who had vanished when I tried to reach him. His scent reached me across the stone floor: dry oak bark and dark heather honey and ink, like an archive with the window open onto the forest.
The other stood in shadow. Hood pulled up. Face invisible. Hands hidden in the sleeves.
Kalmin was speaking in a low voice. "...can't wait any longer. They're moving faster than we thought, and the boy..."
He stopped. His head turned. His green eyes found us in the dark, all three of us, and his face tightened for a split second before he got it under control again.
Silence.
Ahra stood rigid at my side. His breathing had stopped. His hand, which was resting on Lynx's head, tightened. Retia stood behind us and said nothing, but her body was tense, and Fulmen had spread its wings a centimetre, ready to fly.
"Ahra," said Kalmin. His voice was calm. Too calm. "What are you doing here?"
So that was him. "My elder brother. The eldest. He works for the Council." Ahra had said it on the bathing jetty at Løverodde, as if that explained everything.
"What are you doing here?" said Ahra. His voice didn't shake. But his hands did.
Kalmin looked from his brother to me to Retia and back. The hooded figure behind him didn't move. Said nothing. Just stood there in the shadow and was present without giving anything of itself away. I tried to catch a scent, but there was nothing. Nothing at all. That was the strangest thing of all: everybody has a scent, but that figure smelt of nothing, a hole in the air where a person ought to be.
"I'm delivering a document to the Headmaster," said Kalmin. He said it smoothly and quickly. "From the Council. It's classified."
"In a secret passage under the third floor?" said Ahra.
"There are reasons it's called secret, little brother."
"Who's that you're talking to?" said Retia. Her voice was calm and sharp. She asked the question without fear, just with the matter-of-fact insistence she used when she wanted an answer.
Kalmin looked at her. Then at Ahra. Then at me. And something in his look changed when he looked at me. It was that look again. The look everyone got when they heard my name or looked at my face for too long. Something that said he knew more than he was saying.
The hooded figure behind Kalmin laid a hand on his shoulder. Just that. Just a hand. And Kalmin went quiet. Instantly. Like a door being shut.
"Go back up," said Kalmin. Quietly now. Not arrogant. Almost kind. "You'll have to trust me. There are things going on that you don't understand yet, and it's better for you that you don't know them yet."
Better for us. Protection dressed up as care. I knew that sentence. Hanne had said it to me for thirteen years, just in different words.
Retia looked at me. Ahra looked at me. I nodded.
"Come on," I said.
We left. Up through the passage, up through the dark, up through the cold, damp air, without saying anything. When we came out into the third-floor corridor and the wall slid back into place behind us, we stood still in the ordinary torchlight.
Ahra's face was closed. His jaw was tight, and his eyes were shining in a way that said something inside him was starting to give.
"That was Kalmin," he said.
"Yes," said Retia. "And the other one... he smelt of nothing, Chris. Did you notice?"
I looked at her. "You noticed that I noticed?"
"I always notice what you notice," she said. "Your face changes when you smell something. Your eyes narrow a millimetre."
"My brother works for the Council," said Ahra. His voice was flat. "He's a junior archivist. He sorts out papers." He leant against the wall and closed his eyes. His hand found Lynx's head, and he stood there scratching his lynx behind the ear for a long time without saying anything. Lynx pressed himself against his leg.
"He doesn't belong in secret passages under a school in the middle of the night, talking to people who don't have a scent," said Ahra.
"No," said Retia.
We stood still. The corridor was empty. The torch sputtered faintly.
"I've always trusted my family," said Ahra. His eyes were still closed. "My mum, my dad, my grandmother, my brothers. They're what I stand on." He opened his eyes. "If Kalmin's hiding something, something's wrong. Not just with him. With everything I thought I knew."
I put my hand on his shoulder. Retia put her hand on the other one.
"We'll find out," I said. "All three of us."
He nodded. Slowly.
The next morning in the dining hall we sat close together and talked quietly, our heads bent towards each other over our plates.
I told them about the cave. Everything. The wreath of hawthorn. The fresh footprints. The stone that was warm. Alôpex saying "This place isn't for us. Not yet." And what I had found in the history book: "The seal of Section XIII, used to mark protected places during the time of the War."
Ahra sat still and listened with his hands round his teacup. Retia listened with her head a little on one side, the way she always listened when she was building a map in her head.
"Section XIII," said Ahra, when I had finished. "My grandmother talked about them once. She said they were the bravest people who had ever lived. And that they were all dead."
"Somebody's still using their symbol," I said. "It's on my letter. In my bank vault. In a cave under the test island. In my history book. And the crossings in the passages."
"And the passages point towards the mountain," said Retia. She dipped her finger in a small puddle of water on the table and drew a line. "Kalmin is in the passages at night. The passages point towards the mountain. The mountain is forbidden." She looked up. "What's on the mountain?"
"Something someone's trying to protect," said Ahra.
"Or something someone's trying to find," I said.
We sat still for a moment. The dining hall was noisy around us, the clatter of plates and talk and laughter, and the smell of toast and hot tea and the faint traces of the night's fire smoke in the walls. Ahra's scent was close at my side, warm bark and honey, the safe smell that said my friend was there, and Retia's cup was steaming between her hands, and the steam rose into the golden morning light from the windows. And in the middle of it all the three of us sat carrying something too heavy for breakfast. Alôpex lay under the table with her muzzle on my feet. Lynx lay with his head in Ahra's lap. Fulmen sat on the table by Retia's cup, looking out over the hall with golden eyes that saw everything.
"What do we do?" said Ahra.
"We keep our eyes open," I said. "We find more passages. And we wait."
"I hate waiting," said Retia.
"I know," I said. "But we don't know enough yet."
Retia gave me the look that said she knew I was right, and that she hated that I was right, and that she respected me for saying it anyway. It was a complicated look. Retia had a lot of complicated looks.
"Fine," she said. "We wait. But not for too long."
And she drank her tea. And we went to lessons. And the day went on. But something had changed. The three of us now carried the same secret, and secrets are heavier when they are shared, not lighter, because now there are three people who have to keep a straight face, three people who have to look normal, three people who have to go to lessons and eat supper and chat in the First-Year Room and not say a single word about what they are all thinking about.
That is the price of the truth: you can't forget it, not even in the morning, not even over a cup of tea.