Page 36 of Witchcraft and Fury (Chronicles of the Divided Isle #1)

Solar drew a sharp intake of breath. He may have been a master tanner, standing on his own premises, and Cal was so firmly up himself that she was sometimes surprised he could see straight, but that did not change the fact that people of the tanner’s station simply did not touch a man such as Cal without permission. Not ever.

Cal reacted just as she would have predicted, his hand going to his sword.

‘No, Cal,’ she hissed urgently. ‘We’re surrounded.’ She glanced meaningfully at the workers who stood around them, all holding various tools, and all watching them as they went about their work.

‘Oswald and the others …’ began Cal.

‘It will be a bloodbath,’ Solar insisted. ‘We don’t need to hold a sword to this man’s throat to get answers. We can regroup and rethink.’

‘Listen to the hag, boy,’ said the man, giving a sharp nod over their heads.

A pair of powerful gloved hands grabbed them by the shoulders and whirled them round.

Solar recognised the man from the ramshackle building they’d entered through.

She stumbled as she and Cal were both pushed back from where they’d come.

‘My best guess is she’s the one behind the city’s grievances. Follow her out of here, then burn her.’

Solar and Cal allowed themselves to be guided out of the courtyard, their classmates hurriedly getting to their feet and following with confused, anxious glances. Oswald made to speak to the gloved man, but Cal shook his head sharply.

They entered the gloom of the building, and their hostile chaperone guided them to the opposite door.

‘Thought you nobles were keen on manners,’ he said angrily as he ushered them roughly through.

‘And yet there you go, asking questions about the master’s own son, on the very anniversary of his death!

Bad enough the lad’s dead, worse that he murdered his own twin sister first. What were you thinking, you insensitive bastards? !’

Were she not being ushered forcibly out the door, Solar would have stopped dead in her tracks at this titbit of information.

The master tanner’s son was dead? And not only that, but he’d killed his own sister?

With such an unexpected turn in their investigations, Solar realised they had no choice but to get all the information they could out of the man.

But they were going to have to use force, given his less-than-cooperative attitude, and they were going to have to be fast.

‘Be ready to act,’ she said in a low voice to the boys around her. Then, as the man pushed Pingot out last and made to slam the door behind them, Solar turned around and kicked it from the outside with all her might.

The door collided firmly against the man, and Solar heard him fall. She cursed under her breath as the sound of his cry and a cacophony of tumbling objects carried outside. She ran back in through the entrance, drawing Fury and placing it to his chest before he could react.

‘Be silent. Scream and you die. Understand?’ she said as her classmates followed her back through, open mouthed at the turn in events but alert. ‘Wyman, brace the door to the courtyard. Bear, guard the other. Cal, Oswald, draw your swords and stand ready. Pingot … just try not to be sick again. ’

The man – unsurprisingly, given that he had a sword to his chest – obeyed her. The boys also followed her commands instantly, which was a little more contrary to her expectations.

‘What is the name of the master tanner’s son?’ she demanded of the tannery worker.

‘Edralk Tanner.’

‘And his sister?’

‘Esla. Now let me up!’

‘He killed her? How?’

‘Solar, hurry,’ Wyman hissed. ‘I can hear footsteps approaching.’

‘Pushed her off a cliff,’ the man said, ‘after some trivial argument between them. Then he slipped and fell after her. There were witnesses and all.’

‘Tell me where the cliff is! Exactly!’

‘It overlooks the city from the north, with the forest at its back. You can see it from the doorway!’

At that moment, the door handle rattled. Wyman pushed his weight harder against the door, and he grunted a moment later as someone on the other side threw their own bodyweight at it.

‘Shit,’ he said, no longer bothering to keep his voice down. ‘They’re going to run round to the other door and surround us!’

Solar fought to keep her voice steady. ‘Alright, let’s get out of here!’ She turned her attention back to the man. ‘Make one move to follow us and I will show no mercy.’

She and the others scrambled for the door Bear was stationed at as he flung it open. Wyman’s door, no longer braced by him, collapsed inwards as a burly tannery worker hurled himself through it and smashed into the table in an explosion of splintering wood .

‘Run!’ Cal shouted, and they hurtled outside and for the cover of the residential quarter.

More than once Solar almost lost her footing on the refuse-strewn ground, but they covered the distance swiftly.

The six of them regrouped in the safety of a quiet alleyway, pressing themselves up against a wall.

Solar turned to look back at the tannery.

A huddle of men stood staring in their direction, holding a collection of tools menacingly.

‘They’re not following,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said Pingot, who was still looking more than a little queasy. ‘Seems they have at least half an ounce of sense between them. Pursuing magical students in broad daylight would only get them in trouble with the law.’

‘True. But as if they had the nerve to manhandle us off the premises like that!’ said Bear. ‘If we had more time on our hands, I’d have half a mind to get the city watch involved. They’re obstructing a magical investigation!’

‘We found out some useful information, though,’ said Oswald. ‘This Edralk Tanner killed his sister. His twin.’

‘Let’s head to the inn and think what to—’

‘Wyman, I need you to shut up whilst I try to remember something,’ interjected Cal brusquely, brow furrowed in concentration. He delved his hand into a cloak pocket, fished out a small, battered book and began to rifle through it, murmuring all the while. ‘Twin sister … killed his twin sister.’

The trainees all looked at him curiously, and Solar craned her neck to read the lettering on the front cover. ‘ Ody Goldmont’s Encyclopaedia of Spirits, Ghouls and Ghosts ,’ she read aloud to the others, recognising the title from when she had seen the same book in Cal’s possession months before.

‘Aha! My uncle’s book!’ exclaimed Oswald. ‘He’s a wizard, an expert on spirits and whatnot. ’

‘Quiet Oswald, please,’ said Cal. ‘I need to find something. His twin … he killed his twin sister … he—AHA!’ Cal abruptly stopped rifling on a stained and faded page.

‘Twin Killers!’ he announced, drawing their attention with a finger to the chapter heading at the top of the page.

‘I knew I’d heard a term like that before.

Loveday’s had me studying this book for months now, for my lessons with him.

I’ve never read this chapter before, but I’d noticed the title. ’

‘Are you saying that a Twin Killer is a kind of spirit or ghoul or something? And you think this Edralk Tanner is one of them?’ asked Pingot.

‘I don’t know. Maybe. This should tell us.’

‘Well, read it out then!’ said Solar impatiently.

Cal glowered at her, but he began to read:

‘ Twin Killers commit a sin more terrible than any other.

So great is this sin that, when a Twin Killer passes from this world, the guardians of the underworld forbid his or her soul entry into their shadowed realm.

The soul is left to return to the land of the living as a murderous spirit, inhabiting its own corpse.

‘Denied rest, it spends its days and nights kidnapping boys and girls who are of the same age that it was when it murdered its twin.

The spirit keeps the captives hidden away, usually in some dark or damp place, before murdering them all at sundown every anniversary of their original crime.

It invariably chooses to kill the captives in the same way in which it murdered its sibling.

‘The spirit possesses many magical powers, the deadliest of which is the ability to suck the air of its life-giving qualities. Only fire can stop it.’

‘Murdering them all at sundown every anniversary of their original crime,’ repeated Bear. ‘Well, that’s today, isn’t it? That tannery worker said Edralk died exactly a year ago – today’s the anniversary of his death! ’

‘This explains why all the missing townsfolk have been exactly seventeen years old – it must be how old the Tanner twins were when they fell off the cliff,’ added Pingot. ‘But Solar, when you raided Jacob’s mind, you saw a boy take his sister. Not a spirit.’

‘It could well have been a spirit,’ said Solar grimly.

‘In fact, our best hunch is that it was, based on the new information we have. He had an unearthly look about him, and these terrible eyes. I’m beginning to think Jacob isn’t such a coward after all.

It was a supernatural terror that gripped him and prevented him from acting. ’

The boys all looked at her uncomfortably.

‘Right, we don’t have much time,’ she said, her mind racing ahead.

‘It’s already late afternoon, and Edralk is going to throw half the city’s seventeen-year-olds off a cliff and into the sea tonight.

I’d stake my life in a goblin gambling den that it’s keeping ’em nice and near to the murder scene, somewhere in that forest. It looks dark enough for its liking.

’ She pointed to the clifftop forest standing high above the city walls, far past the canal’s tanneries.

‘What’s the plan then?’ asked Wyman with disquiet.