The House of Major Weir
“It’s a grim-looking place,” Quire observed.
The courtyard he and Agnes McLaine peered into was narrow, gloomy. Desolate. A low-browed, vaulted passageway had brought them in beneath the soaring tenements of the West Bow to this hidden square, buried like an abscess in the very heart of the Old Town. They could hear the thud and grind of the building works on the new bridge; they could hear, less clearly, the rattle of carts over the West Bow’s cobbles and the cries of hawkers in the Grassmarket. But all of that was as the sound of another world, for the courtyard felt abandoned and lifeless.
There was a crust of grime on the ground, and heaps of debris scattered around: rotting pieces of wood, piles of cloth or clothes so filthy it was impossible to say what colour they might once have been. The dusty smell of mould was in the air. A rat ran along the foot of one of the walls, its head bobbing up and down. When it realised it was no longer alone in its foraging, it vanished into a narrow crevice in the stonework.
Yet the place was not abandoned; there were clearly some folk calling it home. There were doors around the yard, and dark stairways leading up into the surrounding tenements like burrows cut by maggots. Some of the higher windows, Quire saw as he cast his gaze upwards towards the distant square of sky, were open. A white sheet hung from one of them, though there was no breeze to dry it in this tight little space.
“A few in here who’ll not be happy to have a sergeant of the police poking about, I’d guess,” Agnes mused.
“I’m not with the police,” Quire said. “Not any more.”
And that was true. He was cut loose from the foundations he had tried to set under his life in the last few years, his name struck from the books of the Edinburgh police.
It had been unceremonious, abrupt. No opportunity to defend himself, or to face his accusers. Just a courier at his door, presenting letters signed by Baird himself, in ostentatious style, that informed Quire he was dismissed, on grounds of misconduct. No pension would be paid, no appeal heard.
Reading those formal, impersonal lines of text, Quire could imagine quite clearly the satisfaction with which Baird must have signed his name beneath them. Seldom would a man have been so pleased to be the conveyor of bad tidings.
“That’s where we’re bound,” Agnes said, nodding towards a door at the far end of the courtyard.
She had come with her head and shoulders wrapped in a woollen shawl, though the weather was clement enough.
They crossed the square side by side, Quire going cautiously and with a certain trepidation, Agnes advancing in her heavy leather shoes with an almost eager tread. The door they approached was black with rot, its wood drilled through by worms and decay. There were gaps between it and its frame. When Quire put his eye to one, he felt a cool touch on his skin, the dank apartments beyond breathing out over him.
“It’s dark in there. Should have brought a lantern.”
“There’ll be light enough,” Agnes said.
Dismissal should have dismayed Quire more than it did, perhaps, but he was numb, and unsurprised. He had already resigned himself to this outcome. His life was being shaken apart, like a fox cub clasped in the jaws of a hunting dog, and he had come to expect little better. His mind had set itself to other purposes, though, and was too bent upon them to admit of mourning for his losses. He meant to do some shaking of his own now, of Ruthven and the rest. He needed only to find the right grip upon them.
Agnes gave the door an exploratory rattle, curling her fingers around its edge where rot had eaten back the wood. Little flakes and splinters fell from it, even beneath such slight assault.
“Should open up all right,” she said, but instead of testing that assumption, she took a step back and groped around in a pouch looped over the waistband of her heavy skirt. She brought forth a finger length of brown wood, unworked and unpolished. Just a section cut from a thin branch, with a hole in one end through which cord was threaded. She fastened that cord about her left arm so that the little piece of wood hung there, a pendant at her wrist.
“Rowan, cut at Samhain,” she told Quire. “A ward against spirits, against evil.”
Quire regarded the crude bracelet with a faint sense of puzzlement. He could still hear the shouts of the workers struggling to raise that huge new bridge over the Cowgate. He was standing in the midst of a city famed throughout Europe for its fostering of rational, secular thought; a city, it was said, that had lately held more learned men in each square foot than any other the country had ever seen. Yet he was looking at a witch’s charm, something out of a folk tale, and believing it might work; a wise precaution, perhaps.
“Have you got another one of them?” he asked Agnes, and she smiled.
“Course I have.” She dropped the second pendant into his outstretched hand. “Can we call you a believer yet, then?”
“Call me what you like,” Quire sniffed. “I stopped knowing what to believe a while back. I’m playing the game by the rules my enemies have set for the next wee while, that’s all.”
He held up his arm, rolling his wrist to set the rowan charm swinging.
Agnes pushed at the door. It shivered, and caught on the uneven ground, came free and scraped open. Cold air flowed gently over them as they stared into a short, dingy passageway with a low roof and undulating, unpaved floor.
For an instant, at the touch of that air, a terrible, lurching dread ran through Quire. His hands trembled suddenly, and he was seized by the urge to flee. He steadied himself.
“You feel something?” Agnes asked.
“Aye.”
“Not without its protections, this place,” she said, but offered no further explanation.
She made to step across the threshold, but Quire barred her way with an outstretched arm.
“I’ll go first,” he said.
“Oh? Well, if it’ll make you happy.”
She sounded faintly amused. Quire found her lack of a caution a little discomfiting. He had not told her of the pistol he had tucked inside his jacket, and did not mean to. Most places he went now, he went armed.
It was colder in there than he had expected, like a cave. That shawl draped around Agnes’ head suddenly did not seem so redundant. The walls, when his fingertips brushed them, were damp to the touch. Hundreds of small webs were tucked into the edges of the ceiling. The floor had a disquieting hint of softness to it, the layers of dirt giving beneath his feet. Not a cave, not quite; a tomb. Quire felt himself to be disturbing a place that had been asleep for a long time.
He advanced a few paces, accompanied in every step by that awful dread; that moaning fear within him, pleading with him to turn about and run. He could feel sweat upon his brow.
Agnes lingered, just inside the doorway. He turned towards her, wondering for a moment whether she was overcome by the same gnawing unease that assailed him.
“See?” she asked, gesturing at the crumbling wall of the passage.
He looked where she pointed. Just barely, he could make out a thin line of some brownish, earthy material, running directly up the wall.
“All the way round,” Agnes said, swinging her arm up and over.
Now that Quire’s eye was tuned to it, he could see clear enough that the line did indeed traverse the ceiling, descend the opposite wall of the passage and run back across the floor to join with its own tail.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A warding. Grave soil, I’d guess. It’s why you’re feeling set to piss yourself, and why you can’t stop thinking what a fine idea it’d be to get yourself out of here and never come back. Like as not, if it wasn’t for that wee twig at your wrist, you’d have run off already.”
“Visitors aren’t welcome, then,” Quire murmured.
“So it seems.”
Quire pushed his way into a side room, through another stiff and resistant door. There were floorboards, almost lost beneath the drifts of soggy dust. They grumbled beneath him, yielding with murmurs of exhaustion. Dark smears were all over the walls, where water had come through to discolour the plaster and spread stains of mould. Patches of that plaster had fallen away, from walls and ceiling alike, littering the floor like plates of bark
