catch.”
Chapter 6
The Night Train
Back inside the black carriage, Kate sat beside Silas as they rolled their way speedily across town. But this time, Silas opened one of the curtains to make sure he wasn’t being followed, giving Kate the chance to see her town for one last time.
The snow made it all look eerie and unreal. Children wandered without parents, dogs snuffled through the streets, and the black robes of the wardens were never far away, breaking down doors or wrestling people into cages. She thought about Artemis and about all the years they had spent worrying about this day. It had made no difference in the end. Artemis was gone. Edgar was gone. Kate was alone.
It was almost dark by the time she spotted the Night Train’s thick tracks slicing through the town like a scar, carving a hard iron curve through the Eastern Quarter as it threaded from the trading towns of the north to the capital city of Fume in the distant south. Those rails linked every town in Albion like an ominous metal vein, and the people who lived close enough to see the Night Train pass by always closed their curtains against its eerie light. It was easier to pretend that it didn’t exist, that it didn’t choke the air with foul smoke and leave the heavy rumble of metal on metal thrumming through the ground long after it had gone.
The road they were traveling upon ran alongside a stone wall that lined the track’s route, but Kate did not recognize this part of town. The houses were larger and grander than any other part of Morvane, yet few people lived there. The station cast too dark a shadow over that part of the Eastern Quarter. It made people uncomfortable. Kate had seen pictures of the station in books at her uncle’s shop, but he had never let her see it for herself. Now that she was so close to it, she found that her curiosity had gone. She didn’t want to see it anymore. All she wanted was to be back at home, getting ready for the Night of Souls, living life just as she had lived it the day before. But all that was impossible now. Silas had made sure of it.
The driver shouted out to someone up ahead. A gate screeched open and the carriage wheels crunched onto gravel, rolling past row after row of wheeled cages with flaming torches punched into the ground to light the paths between them. There were many more there than Kate had expected. What she and Edgar had seen in the market square must have been only a small part of the wardens’ plans for the town that day. There were at least five times as many cages outside that station as there had been in the square, all filled with so many people that it was hard to believe the wardens had left anyone behind.
Most of the prisoners were yelling angrily at the wardens, rattling their bars, trying to find a way out. Others were trying to bargain with them, offering up their businesses or savings for a second chance at freedom, while the rest just sat there, quietly accepting the grim truth that they were no longer in control of their lives.
“Every one of these people will do their duty to Albion,” said Silas. “Just as thousands of others have done before them. You are fortunate you are not one of them.”
“My uncle is one of them,” Kate said quietly.
“That part of your life is over. There is nothing you can do for him now.”
The blazing torches lit up the night and, as the carriage turned, Kate finally saw the station with her own eyes. It was an ancient place, centuries old, built for a single track and one special train. Kate knew from her books that, long ago, the gravel where the cages now stood had been a beautiful garden where the coffins of Morvane’s dead were taken before being carried by train to Albion’s graveyard city. Friends and family would have gathered for a funeral in that garden before passing the coffin over to the bonemen—the keepers of the dead—who took it on to the train, ready to make its final journey south.
The bonemen were a select group of the Skilled who had devoted their lives to helping the spirits of the dead pass safely out of the living world and into the next. They had once been the sole guardians of