Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (13 page)

Joey didn’t look nervous exactly, but was certainly wary. In the years since he’d left Mary King’s Close, Joey hadn’t met with or even seen a single member of The Brotherhood. The distance between him and them, coupled with the certain knowledge that they’d refuse, hadn’t stopped him from volunteering to visit The Brotherhood’s patriarch, Father Grayson, and try to convince them to join the refugees in the Castle.

Alys knew that her friend didn’t wish to come anywhere close to The Brotherhood, but she knew also that he felt responsible for giving them an opportunity to be safer. Despite how he’d left and how he’d lived whilst in their protection, care for him they had. Whether he wished them to be or not, The Brotherhood were still his family.

“Okay, Joe?” she asked.

“Aye, I’m good. Just thought I saw a movement down there. It’s nothing.” He nodded down the hill. “Kind of half-expected Jock to come strolling up Castlehill there. ‘Member that outfit with the beak? Scared the life from me that night.”

Alys moved to punch his arm, but placed a palm gently there instead and gave him a moment.

Jennifer, having tied the fence closed into a neat scar with copper, joined them and broke the spell.

Alys nodded up at the main gate. “Let’s do it.”

The Castle entrance was arched. Heavy oak and iron gates sealed it tight. The doors bore the marks of failed attempts to prise them open as well as old blood and clawing trails gouged into the softer parts of the wood. Time and weather had left visible erosion, but the entrance had been built centuries before to defend against people, armies, the weather or the undead, and stood as strong and immovable as it ever had been. The heavy gates and the portcullis stood against the years and death, as they had done since erected.

Alys moved her eyes over the familiar stonework around the doors. To either side, two regal-looking men dressed as knights, sword points down in their hands, stood guard. Above was a faded lion rampant shield with the words
Nemo me impune lacessit
carved into the stone beneath and still very visible.

“Wonder what it means?” Alys whispered.

“Why you whispering?” Joey asked.

Alys had been unaware she’d been keeping her voice so muted. She laughed, but again quietly, and gave him the punch she’d decided against earlier.

“Dunno,” she said in a normal voice.”

Jennifer rolled he eyes and pointed to Joey’s hand.

“Perhaps we might try the keys now, boy?”

Alys hid a grin.

“Yeah. Get a move on… boy.”

“Have you been through the gates before?” Jennifer asked as he fumbled with the keys, deciding which of the older keys looked most likely to fit in the ancient locks.

“No. when I was given these, I’m not sure I really believed that they were real – that they were actually able to open the doors and gates. What they were to me was something, aside from my bow, that was mine. A gift. I suppose that it really didn’t matter to me what they were for. The gesture, the kindness of him giving them to me was more meaningful than their potential use. My world was limited to the caverns of the close and the moments when I could run free up here with my bow. I suppose I was scared of finding out if the man was just another nutter and the world was indeed as limited as it felt, so I hid them in here.”

Joey gestured at a loose cobble near the base of the stone recess.

“I figured that if I went back to Mary King’s Close with them, they’d either be taken away or discarded. I was twelve years old when the man gave them to me and I went back to where I’d hidden them only once afterwards: the night I left here. They sort of became a part of me that no-one could discover or own or even know about. They became my hope for escape. Pretty lame.”

Alys didn’t answer. Jennifer pursed her lips, holding in an insult, and stepped forward, hand offered.

“Would you like me to try them?”

Joey nodded and handed the keys to the only member of the threesome who had ever actually used a functioning lock.

Alys watched as her mother inspected the two older keys, selected the larger of the two and slid it into the lock. Jennifer jiggled the key back and forth, in and out a few times, and gave a non-committal little grunt.

Alys saw a tiny sag of Joey’s shoulders.

“Give me one of your knives, Alys. A smaller one.”

Jennifer accepted the blade and slid it into the large lock. Working it in and out a few times, rotating the blade inside the lock as she did so, Jennifer sawed back and forth across the keyhole. A small pile of rusted metal was scattering at her feet.

She blew forcefully into the lock and cursed loudly as decades of dust, rust and God knows what shot out of the lock and into her eyes. Finally she slid the key back in. It seemed to sink in a little further this time.

Jennifer turned and gave them a little nod.

“Let’s see, shall we?”

Rotating her wrist firmly, Jennifer turned the key, felt a little resistance and twisted harder until a wonderfully mechanical KLUNK issued from the doors.

Alys laughed again, and Joey whispered an old prayer, drilled into him by hours of repetition in the darkness of Mary King’s Close until it had become an habitual ‘thank you’. Jennifer simply pushed the heavy door, ploughing it through a stack of dirt behind and opening it just enough for the three to slip through. Once on the other side, Jennifer closed it gently behind them.

They were in the gatehouse, a lobby of sorts, with the doors they’d just come through on one side, the iron
portcullis on another and walls composed of heavy stones all around.
 
One of the walls had an older-looking, locked door. It was dark, but not dark enough to prevent Jennifer feeling at the keys and selecting a smaller version of the one that’d allowed them through the main doors. Slipping the key into the door’s lock, Jennifer turned it on the first try and stepped into an ante-chamber. Inside was an automated mechanism for pulling the portcullis up. Without electricity, it would not function. Fortunately, the original mechanism had been left in place as backup.

Taking two large wooden spokes in hand, Alys pulled at them, passing her hands from one to the next, and then onto the next; rotating the wheel, winding the chains, lifting the gate. It squealed loudly, either in protest after long disuse or in joy in stretching its parts once more after so long at rest.

Joey whooped loudly and ran through the open gateway.

Alys felt her mother’s arm lay across her shoulders. Since revealing some of her history, Jennifer wasn’t quite a different person, but she’d broken enough of her emotional barriers to allow these small acts of fondness to resurface. Alys felt odd at the newly-surfaced affection, but welcomed the return of mannerisms and gestures absent from their relationship for over a decade.

They followed Joey through the gates to the inner entrance, a narrow corridor with large stone walls. The cobbled path sloped downwards and bore the marks of Joey’s passing in the scuffs of his footprints in the snow. Frost crept and clung to the ancient brick, giving it a wonderfully ancient feel. Passing a faded red pillar box, her mother a few feet behind her, Alys emerged out onto the lower courtyard.

 
Its buildings looked like a mini town, one with enough room and shelter and security for any who chose to accept their offer of sanctuary. In their ancient resilience, the stones, towers, buildings and surroundings looked and felt safe. They felt impenetrable.

This was a good idea.

 
She braced her knees against the low wall in front of her, part of a battlement that swooped around the perimeter of the castle in a half-moon shape and was lined with mini-cannons poking their barrels through holes out at the city below. Alys turned her face and eyes to take in every detail of the sprawling city below.

Scanning along the one-time main artery of Princes Street, down into her home in The Gardens, along to the West End, the east, Stockbridge and out to Leith, Alys gasped at the beauty of the city she’d seen only seen death and struggle in, until that moment.

She forced herself to focus and absorb every detail. From her vantage point, she was able to see how few of The Ringed remained in the city-centre.

 
Looking out at the Firth of Forth she saw the fences along Newhaven. She’d never travelled north, but Joe had, extensively and he’d described the outer fences to her
–
the ones the government had used to seal off their city. He’d softened their appearance in his description.

In reality they were monstrous panels of heavy lead-like metal. As high as a football pitch was long and wide as five men lying down, they cut across from beyond the reach of her eyes in the west, along through Newhaven, Leith, out onto the bypass and beyond her vison once more. Only a wholly vicious or terrified government could have erected such an efficient barrier so swiftly. In front of the fences, and scattered throughout the streets of Newhaven and up towards Granton, were legions of Ringed.

Alys peered out at them. Watching the concentrated mass of hungry killers shambling around in such numbers was fascinating and terrifying. She felt a pang of fear for any survivors in the area.

Alys blinked hard and reopened her eyes, focusing them on the Fife shores beyond the Forth. Lights twinkled in the distance. Cars moved through the landscape. Perhaps some of those people over there in the
real
world watched her now as she stood looking out from the castle walls. She wanted to spit at them.

As she scanned along the sea, further east, Alys squinted, trying to pick out the bridges across the Forth. She gasped. The red-orange of the Rail Bridge was there, just as Joey had described to her, but behind, where she’d expected a grey steel suspension bridge, were tonnes of steel scattered along the rocks and shores, piled up and poking through the water from the sea bed.

The Ringed had clearly been drawn there by the calamitous noise of the bridge’s collapse. The Ringed had always followed sound, movement and smell. Often when a group began to shamble after a movement half-glimpsed, or chased a noise from hours before, other Ringed would be attracted to the movement of the group, adding to their number. Sometimes armies of the infected would move en masse in a particular direction, having long ago forgotten what stimulated them.

From their number, Alys reckoned that every Ringed from the north shore to the meadows must have heard the thousands of tonnes of steel crash down and followed the sound to the north.

Alys leaned onto the frozen stone wall and sighed heavily. Sensing her mother’s presence, she looked over her shoulder at her and gave a wee nod out at the city.

“Beautiful, isn’t it.”

“Yes. I came here once, with your Aunt Fiona. Paid a bloody fortune for entrance, and looked out at Edinburgh from over there.” Jennifer jutted her chin at the cannon furthest from them. “As you say, beautiful.”

Jennifer brought herself closer to Alys and pressed her body tight up against her daughter’s. Alys felt her mother’s breath at her ear as she delivered a kiss to her cheek. “Now, with this place, we have a chance, Alys.”

For several hours they wandered the Castle’s walkways, buildings, courtyards, rooms, battlements and dungeons. They’d expected Ringed inside but had found none. From the state of the buildings and the grounds, it was apparent that the infected had never entered this place.

Jennifer said that made sense. The Castle had been used as a tourist attraction for years before the plague broke. It must have been closed, locked-down, when The Ringed were released just after midnight on the ceremonial opening of the old Mary King’s Close. The Castle’s interior grounds were badly overgrown and filled with winter flora and fauna. They were stunningly beautiful but still came second to the views out over their city from the battlements.