Mark Chadbourn - The Silver Skull

Will had no time to catch his breath. One of the other riders was preparing to leap at the terrified driver, who lashed out frantically with his whip. The final rider was ready to jump onto the carriage roof from his saddle.

As Will threw himself towards the driver, another severe lurch knocked him off balance. When he next looked up, the Enemy was on the seat, fighting with the driver. Even with his whip, the driver didn't stand a chance. His attacker caught a hand in the neck of his cloak and wrenched him up with ease. Holding the screaming man over his head for a second, the Enemy flung him from the racing carriage.

At that moment, the third rider leapt onto the carriage roof.

Will didn't wait for him to land. With his sword, he slashed through the rope holding his wrist and in the same fluid movement propelled himself forwards. The momentum almost took him over the driver's seat and down among the horses' driving hooves, but at the last he caught the flailing reins. His head and shoulders dipped below the level of the seat, but Will brought his left foot up to kick the Enemy assailant from the seat. Plunging down the side of the carriage, he flew under the rear wheels.

Dragging himself up into the seat, Will gripped the reins with one hand to slow the horses, while turning with his sword raised to face the final rider, who was prowling towards him across the carriage roof.

They thrust and parried, but Will was hamstrung by his lack of mobility. The Enemy swordsman took full advantage of his uncanny balance, ducking and darting along the entire width of the roof.

In the full glare of the moon, the carriage crested the top of the hills and began the long descent towards Edinburgh. Will smelled smoke on the wind.

Slashing back and forth, the Enemy swordsman made the most of the carriage's sudden career downhill to press his attack on Will, who fought to stay upright on the seat.

At the last, the Enemy was distracted by a loud cry. Hanging half out of the window, Nathaniel brandished the long iron needle the driver used to repair the horses' bridles.

"Nat, inside!" Will yelled-too late.

As the swordsman fixed his gaze upon Nathaniel, a haunted expression slowly crossed Nathaniel's features.

Will thrust his sword into the distracted Enemy and used his weapon to lever the attacker off the side of the carriage. With relief, he turned all his attention back to the horses, refusing to slow the pace further until he was sure any Enemy survivors were far behind.

"Nat, inside, now!" he shouted, afraid his friend had already seen too much. After the devastation he felt at Miller's suicide, Will could not bear for Nathaniel to be infected by the same creeping despair. The words he had spoken to Nathaniel's father all those months ago were still heavy on him. He would keep Nathaniel safe.

After another mile, he reined in the horses and called for Nathaniel to sit with him. Will could see clearly in his assistant's subdued demeanour how greatly he had been affected.

"What was that, Will?" Nathaniel asked quietly once they had set off again.

"What kind of question is that, Nat?" Will replied lightly.

"The face-"

"Did not have the ruggedly handsome features of my own, but that is no reason to pour scorn on a poor, afflicted highway robber. Perhaps those same unsavoury features were what drove him to a life of crime. Why, perhaps we should pity him, Nat! Were he not now a bloody smear 'pon the road."

Will's tone eased Nathaniel a little. "I felt I saw my own face looking back, though frozen in death ..." He gave a humourless laugh at how ridiculous that sounded.

"Exactly," Will affirmed. "An illusion. The mind plays strange tricks, especially when it is jolted free of its moorings by a runaway carriage ride."

"Then it was a highwayman I saw? Nothing more?"

"Nat-"

"Yes, I am a fool! I am sure you will find great humour at my expense when you are in your cups." Nathaniel feigned annoyance, but his relief was palpable.

Cracking the reins to urge the horses on, Will hid his own relief. At times, it felt like he was attempting to hold back a torrent that would wash away everything he held dear if he failed for a moment. Every word was a lie designed to create a world that did not exist. It was not surprising that the members of Walsingham's crew rarely survived long. Will was convinced many reached a point where they simply gave up, let themselves die, because they were worn down by the lies, and by the harshness of the reality that lay behind the fiction they created.

He put on a grin and showed it to Nathaniel. "Wine and women are within our grasp, Nat," he said. "Let us make haste so we can enjoy the night before it is gone!"

Nathaniel grumbled quietly, but sat back to watch the last of the countryside flash by.

Will let his own thoughts drift to what lay ahead. Whatever threat they had faced there on the road paled into insignificance compared to what waited for them in Edinburgh.

CHAPTER 20

dinburgh was a slash of forbidding grey against the soaring, craggytopped heights that ranged behind the city. Running along the top of -a granite spine from the ancient fort of Castle Rock in the west down the gentle slope of the king's High Street to the Netherbow Port, the east gate to the city, it consisted of little more than one broad, mile-long street of large houses, kirks, and shops, and hard against it jumbled, stinking rat-runs of alleys and side streets, the wynds and closes, all of them poorly constructed, dark, narrow, and filthy, and packed to the brim with the poor. Often several generations of a family were crammed into a single room. Beyond Netherbow Port, the street continued through the burgh of Canongate to the king's Palace of Holyroodhouse.

During the time of Elizabeth's rule south of the border, Edinburgh's population had soared, like London's, by more than a quarter to nearly seventeen thousand people, all of them constrained within the walls of a city little more than a mile square in area. With no new room for building, the only way to go was up. Newer residents added precarious, poorly constructed stories on top of tenements-known as the "lands"-designed to carry less than half their new height. Barely a week passed without a new collapse, plunging the occupants to their deaths on the cobbles far below. From the top of these teetering towers, a constant rain of excrement and urine fell at morning and night, as the uppermost residents cried out "Guardez-1'eau!" and emptied their chamber pots from the windows.

All Edinburgh society mixed in the lands, from lawyers and judges to merchants, nobility, and commoners. There was no space to breathe; no peace.

After the unsettling dark of the wild Scottish countryside, Will was comforted by the candlelight and lanterns glinting as the carriage rattled through the city gates and onto the cobbles of the main street. The boom of the closing gates behind, too, was oddly reassuring.

Though filled with high art, scholarship, and religious thought, Will could see Edinburgh was a world away from London. It was a city of shadows, still attached to the old world while London was scrambling into the bright modern future. In the claustrophobic gloom among the dour stone buildings, the overcrowded, filthy streets were a breeding ground for disease and crime, where cutthroats and murderers preyed upon their own and hope was thin. It was the perfect hunting ground for the Enemy.

No Dee here to keep the people safe, he thought. Only the harshness of daily life.

Will was not blind to the irony that the city's brooding aspect reflected his own state of mind. Miller's death lay heavy upon him. He would never reveal it to Nathaniel, or anyone else, for that matter, but he felt the world slipping under his feet as it had after jenny's disappearance, only this time the stew of emotions was infected with guilt and a sense of his own personal failure in defending Miller's life.