‘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.
‘The news came to us this morning, by way of Glasgow,’ she said. ‘Catrin Attard had joined a Mime Order raid on a factory and killed the Minister for Industry, the man they call the Ironmaster. Roberta confronted her and the two of them ended up fighting for leadership of the Scuttlers.’ She shook her head. ‘Terrible thing to happen. Roberta was a good woman, by all accounts. She wanted the best for her people.’
I sat quietly.
An Underqueen should consider this purely in tactical terms. And maybe in those terms, this was good; this was progress. Catrin was a warmonger. With her sister gone, she could prepare the voyant community to take action against Scion. This was war, and war was ugly.
Yet the knowledge that my actions had resulted in Roberta’s death, even if it hadn’t been my intention, was stomach-turning. Catrin would have killed her brutally, publicly, to prove that she was the one their father should have chosen, the one who would do anything for the Scuttlers. She had warned me. She had said there would be trouble between them.
I had turned the Manchester underworld upside-down, and I had no idea what would happen to it now.
‘On you go.’ The Spaewife nodded to the glass in my hands. ‘Hot toddy. Always makes me feel better.’
I had to put Manchester behind me. Now was the time to reveal what I was really here for. When I raised my head to address the Spaewife, I caught sight of faces behind her.
Photographs clung to one wall of the vault, yellowed and faded by age. In one of them, a family of three stood in the mist, with verdant hills in the background. One was a thin woman with a wistful expression; the other, a man in an oilskin, smiling in a way that didn’t reach his eyes. They each held the hand of a small girl with the same black hair, coiled into ringlets and bound with ribbons on either side of her head. Even though I’d met her many years after this photograph had been taken, I knew her.
‘You knew Liss Rymore?’ I said.
‘Aye.’ The Spaewife studied me. ‘And who might you be?’
I hesitated before unwinding my scarf, revealing my face. The hooded voyants exchanged glances before looking back at me.
‘Goodness me,’ the Spaewife muttered. She clasped her shawl around her shoulders. ‘Paige Mahoney.’
I nodded.
‘You were in Manchester? You led the raid on the factory?’
‘I did. I wanted to steal a military secret from Scion. What I found there led me here, to Edinburgh,’ I said. ‘I’m close to uncovering the information I need – so close – but I need allies here, people who know we have no choice but to fight. If you want to help the Mime Order, then help me find what I’m searching for.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You sent the visions?’
‘A friend of mine did that. An oracle.’
‘And you let Catrin kill the Minister for Industry.’
My lips pressed together. ‘Catrin Attard made her own choice,’ I said after a moment. ‘What she did to Price, and to Roberta – that was not on my orders.’
One of the other voyants grasped her arm suddenly. ‘Wait, Spaewife,’ he said.
He spoke to her too quickly for me to properly follow, but one word got my back up: fealltóir, an Irish word, used during the Molly Riots to refer to the handful of Irish people who had assisted Scion.
‘I’m no traitor,’ I said curtly.
The Spaewife’s eyebrows crept higher. ‘You have Gàidhlig, do you, Underqueen?’
‘Gàidhlig or no, she ought to prove her claim,’ the bearded man beside her said, looking askance at me. ‘You might be one of Vance’s spies, for all we know. Someone who only looks a great deal like Paige Mahoney, and who wants us all on the gallows for treason.’
‘Don’t be a fool. The Underqueen is a dreamwalker,’ the Spaewife said. ‘Have you ever seen that sort of red aura?’ Apparently the whole of Britain knew about my gift. ‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘she knows Liss.’
She went to stand beside the wall of photographs and gently touched the one that Liss was in. For the first time, I saw the resemblance.