Litany of Winter

The train rolled beneath the first iron span of Kronvaal station while Severin was still trying to make his left knee bend.

Hours in the same seat had turned the joint stubborn. He braced one hand against the compartment wall, worked the leg back beneath him and stood when the pain settled into something manageable.

Hans already had the leather case down from the rack.

”Don’t rush. We’ve arrived.”

Severin followed him into the corridor with one hand against the wall as the carriage swayed and the station swallowed the train.

Blackened glass stretched above a forest of iron supports, high enough that smoke from the engines gathered beneath the roof before finding the vents. Six tracks lay beside theirs that Severin could count from the carriage door, with more disappearing beyond brick partitions. Porters pushed loaded trolleys through the steam. Soldiers in dark Imperial uniforms moved along the opposite platform while a railway policeman argued with a cab driver near the stairs.

Blackhaven Central had always felt crowded. Here the crowd had somewhere to go and seemed to know how to get there.

Hans stepped down first. Severin took the rail with his left hand and lowered the bad leg carefully. His knee shook when his weight touched the platform but held.

An announcement carried through the station. Most of it passed over him. He caught a number Hans had made him repeat on the train, then found the matching painted board above the nearest passage.

Hans noticed where he was looking. ”See? Educated already.”

”Fuck off.”

They joined the flow toward the exit.

Nobody stopped Hans. At one barrier he showed the tickets and answered the inspector in quick Vhaldrik, moving on before Severin had worked out what had been asked. Severin watched the man’s hands instead. Ticket punched and returned. Simple enough.

Outside, the capital was already awake.

A row of cabs waited beneath the station frontage. Beyond them, the street ran between buildings of dark stone and soot-streaked brick, five and six floors high in places. Delivery carts fought for space with private carriages. A motor lorry rattled past hard enough to make a horse shy against its traces, and a uniformed constable shouted at the driver without leaving the curb.

Severin stopped long enough to look up the street and found no clear end to it.

Blackhaven had streets that felt endless when you were walking them hungry. This was different in a way he could not measure yet. Another broad road crossed ahead, and beyond that rose another wall of buildings. Chimneys stood behind the roofs. He could see the steel ribs of an elevated rail bridge farther west.

Hans was already speaking to a driver.

Severin limped over as the man loaded the leather case. ”We there yet?”

”Almost.”

The cab seat gave Severin enough room to keep the left leg angled forward. Hans settled opposite him and gave the driver an address in Vhaldrik.

They moved away from the station.

Kronvaal passed in pieces through the window. Men in factory coats queued outside a bakery beneath apartments with curtained windows three floors above them while two Imperial officers came out of a hotel, a porter hurrying after them with their luggage.

A woman in a fur-collared coat crossed the road without looking at the cartman cursing as he pulled his horse short. Severin watched the purse hanging from her wrist.

”She’d lose that in Blackhaven.”

Hans glanced outside. ”Probably why she lives here.”

”Yeah, like there are no thieves here.”

”Of course there are. We actually do something about them.”

The cab struck a rut. Pain pulled beneath Severin’s abdominal dressing and he caught the edge of the seat until it passed.

Hans saw it and said nothing.

They left the broad road after several turns. The buildings narrowed as the shops grew smaller and the morning traffic thinned. Severin expected Hans to stop near some guarded compound or government building.

The cab pulled up outside a three-story stone house wedged between a legal office and a shuttered bookseller.

Severin waited. Hans opened the door.

”This is it?”

Hans paid the driver. ”One of the entrances. What were you expecting?”

”I don’t know. Something more mysterious?”

”Wait until we get inside.”

The entrance had no sign. Two shallow steps led to a dark wooden door with brass fittings polished dull from use. The windows above were curtained like any private office or respectable house that did not want strangers staring inside.

Severin looked along the street. Nobody paid the place any attention.

Hans knocked twice and waited before knocking once more.

A slot opened at eye level, and he said something in Vhaldrik. It closed again, followed by the scrape of locks behind the door.

Inside, the disappointment continued.

A narrow vestibule opened into a plain front room with a desk and two wooden benches. Filing cabinets covered one wall. A coal stove clicked in one corner. An older man in a dark waistcoat sat behind the desk with a ledger open beneath his hand and a black patch covering one eye.

The only thing Severin recognized was fixed to the wall behind him: an open eye inside a jagged crown, with thorns beneath.

Hans removed his spectacles.

The man behind the desk looked at Hans’s blind eye, then at Severin.

”Schultz.”

”Heller.”

Heller looked over Severin’s coat and uneven stance, pausing when Severin pressed a hand against his abdomen. When he spoke, the Aethermerian surprised Severin.

”Who’s this?”

”Possible recruit. Found him in Blackhaven.”

Heller turned his good eye toward Severin. ”Name?”

”Hale. Severin Hale.”

Heller wrote it down.

Severin watched the pen finish the surname. Blackhaven police had his name in their books. Now it was being written down again more than a thousand miles from home.

Hans leaned one hand on the desk. ”He’ll be in my care until we sort things out.”

Heller shut the ledger. ”Understood.”

Heller stood and took a ring of keys from his belt. Instead of leading them toward the hall at the rear of the room, he unlocked a narrow cabinet set flush against the wall. It swung outward on concealed hinges, revealing an iron door behind it.

Severin looked at Hans.

Hans smiled. ”Mysterious enough now?”

Heller unlocked the door, revealing stone steps descending beyond it.

The first flight was narrow and finished with the same plaster as the rooms above. After twenty steps the walls changed to brick. The air cooled. Hans went ahead with the case, one hand sliding along a polished rail fixed to the wall.

Severin followed more slowly. The stair turned twice, deep enough for the cellar he had expected. They kept going.

At the bottom of the third flight, another door waited behind an iron grille. A short-haired man in a black coat sat at a small table beside it, reading beneath a caged lamp. One eye was blind and clouded; the other was brown. He looked up when Hans approached.

His attention shifted past Hans to Severin.

”With me,” Hans said.

The man unlocked the grille without asking anything else.

Beyond it, the passage had been cut through dark stone. The blocks were larger than anything in the house above, fitted clean and straight. Caged lamps sat in iron brackets along the wall. Pipes had been added later along the ceiling, crossing old recesses cut into the stone.

Severin touched the wall as he passed. The stone was cold and dry.

”I take back what I said. How far down are we?”

Hans smiled. ”Far enough.”

The passage ended at another stair. Severin stared at it until Hans glanced at his left leg.

”Need a minute?”

”No. Let’s keep moving.”

”You sure? You nearly folded getting off the train.”

”Told you I’m fine.”

Hans shifted the leather case to his other hand and started down at a slower pace than before.

Severin noticed. He let him pretend it was accidental.

Halfway down, the knee began trembling again. He gripped the rail with his right hand. The first three fingers closed normally, but the little finger lagged and slipped against the iron.

At the bottom, voices carried from somewhere ahead. Not many, but enough that Severin could no longer pretend they were under a private house with a few rooms attached.

The next checkpoint had two guards.

Severin recognized the black coats immediately. They were cut much like Hans’s, but heavier and better made than his. One of the men looked at Hans and waved him forward, then raised a hand when Severin followed.

Hans stopped. ”Fresh meat. He’s with me.”

The guard looked Severin over, then reached for a cord hanging beside the door and pulled it once.

A bell sounded on the other side, answered by two short rings before the guard opened the lock.

The door sat so deep in its frame that Severin could not see the hinges. Hans stepped through.

Severin followed, and the space beyond stopped him after three paces.

They stood on a stone landing above a hall that should not have fit beneath the street.

Stairs dropped from both sides into a broad lower level. Across the open space, galleries ran along the opposite wall and disappeared through arches cut deep into the rock. Lamps burned behind iron cages at regular intervals. People moved below them in dark clothes, some alone, others carrying cases or stacks of papers. A pair of men pushed a wheeled crate toward a passage guarded by another locked gate.

Farther down, another flight descended out of sight.

The hall had been built in layers. Newer brick ended against older black stone. Iron supports had been fitted beneath arches cut directly into the rock. Pipes crossed overhead and disappeared through walls thick enough to hide rooms beyond them.

He tried to work out how far the place extended and gave up.

Hans had already started down the stairs. Severin stayed on the landing for another second.

Looking down into the hall, he could no longer picture the desk upstairs without feeling cheated by it. Hans had spent days looking like one strange man with a badge and a dangerous hand. Down here, people crossed the lower hall without looking twice when he arrived.

A door shut behind Severin. The lock turned.

Hans looked back from the first landing below. ”Coming?”

Severin put his left hand on the rail and followed him down.