Page 93 of The Song Rising

“Stay there. Don’t move a muscle.”

Silence descended as they retreated. The utter lack of light was disorienting. Like a tomb.

Well, I wasn’t just going to sit here, whatever Nick said. I rose with caution, navigating with my hands.

From what I could tell by touch, I was in a tunnel about five feet wide. A short distance from where I had fallen through, what felt like wooden barrels formed a line along one wall. I might be able to scramble back up the slope, but it was steep and damp, and the darkness deep enough to drown in.

As I searched blindly for another way out, my sixth sense demanded my attention. I felt the voyants’ dreamscapes before I heard their footsteps. There was just enough time for me to conceal my features with my scarf before they came into the tunnel.

The walls ran wild with tongues of firelight, deepening the shadows. When the torch swung toward my face, I shielded my eyes against the heat.

“Dè tha sibh a’ dèanamh an seo?” Finding myself at knifepoint, I stood and raised my hands. The man was a vile augur, skinny and bare-faced. There must be little need to hide your identity down here. I listened carefully to what he said next: “A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh?”

I lowered my hands slightly. The language sounded very much like Irish, but the words weren’t quite what they should be. I thought he was asking me what I was doing here, and whether or not I spoke . . . wait, of course—it was Gàidhlig, the old language of Scotland, long since banned by Scion. It had the same roots as Irish, but that didn’t make me fluent.

“Táim anseo chun teacht ar dhuine éigin,” I said, speaking slowly.I’m here to find someone.

The knife lowered by degrees. “Spaewife,” the man called, “we’ve found a brogue. Think she might be wanting to join us.”

Spaewife—Tom had mentioned that title. The leader of Edinburgh’s voyant community.

At the other end of the passageway, five hooded voyants stood in silence, each carrying an iron lantern. The woman at the front, who was wrapped in a twilled shawl, had the aura of a cartomancer. Her salted black hair was hewn into a bob, and her dark, close-set eyes were narrowed.

“How did you get in here?” she said to me in English. “Who told you about the false wall?”

“No one. I just . . . found it.”

She eyed the shattered planks. “A painful discovery, no doubt.”

“I need to speak to the leader of the Edinburgh voyants,” I said. “Are you the Spaewife?”

She looked me up and down without comment, then spoke softly to one of her companions and walked into the gloom. Two other voyants grasped my arms and escorted me through the passageways.

When a hand came to the back of my head and pressed, I ducked under another archway. Oil lamps sputtered in every nook and cranny in the small chamber beyond. A group of vile augurs sat, hand-in-hand, around a rough triangle of bone; spirits danced between them. Other voyants were sitting or lying in deep alcoves—laid with minimal bedding—or eating from cans. Most of them were deep in conversation, their voices raised to fever pitch. I caught the name “Attard” and stopped dead.

“What’s that about Attard?”

The nearest voyants stopped talking. The Spaewife placed a hand on my back.

“We’ve just had news from Manchester,” she said. “I suppose you haven’t heard.”

“Roberta Attard, the Scuttling Queen, is dead,” a medium told me. “And you’ll never guess how.”

“Dinna make her guess.” One of the osteomancers chuckled.

“She was murdered,” the medium finished. “By her sister.”

I must have been taken into another vault, but I didn’t remember moving my feet. Next thing I knew I was sitting down, and someone was offering me a hot ochre drink that smelled faintly of honey and clove.

“You’re all right, now.”

My hands were like ice. I wrapped them, finger by finger, around the glass.

“You’re very pale all of a sudden. I hope Roberta wasn’t a friend of yours,” the black-haired cartomancer said.

“Catrin—” I cleared my throat. “How do you know that Catrin killed her?”

She let go of my shoulder and sat on a cushion opposite me. Her hooded attendants stayed close.

---