He had no interest in the woman—she had tried to kill him, after all—but there was something about Norcross’s design for her that didn’t sit well with Daud. Despite his past actions, he had lived almost his entire life by a code of discipline. True enough, it was the code of death, that of a trained killer. But even so, a desire stirred within him.
He needed to kill the monster of Morgengaard Castle.
The left-hand passage was pitch black. Daud looked around the preparation room, lit only by the processing machine’s whale oil tank.
He yanked the tank free of its moorings and held it in front of him as he exited the room. Its blue glow was bright but the light didn’t travel far. But, paired with Daud’s preternaturally acute eyesight, it was enough.
The passage curved back and forth and soon split into other paths, all featureless, identical, service tunnels beneath Norcross’s reconstructed fortress. Fortunately, Daud had a trail to follow: blood, and lots of it, streaked across the white stone floor, shining and black in the blue glow of the whale oil tank.
Eventually he came to a large vaulted chamber, the ceiling disappearing up into darkness. Ahead of him were two arched black doors. They were not quite closed—through a half-inch gap, a yellowish light shone.
Daud pushed the door open, and froze in his tracks.
The room was a basement gallery, windowless, lit by the ever-present light globes that hung from the high ceiling—more here, perhaps, to compensate for the total lack of natural light. But now the globes were dark, the yellowish light instead coming from the two squarelanterns on the floor in the middle of the room.
Daud looked around, his jaw set.
The gallery was full of people. Most of them were on metal racks, their limbs pinned in place. Daud counted ten bodies on each side, with another two rows fixed to the walls above. Sixty corpses in total, hanging on display. They were all dressed, they all had their eyes open, and their skin shone with a waxy quality.
But that wasn’t the true horror of Norcross’s secret gallery. In the space between the racks, occupying the central display area of the gallery, were a series of low daises. On each stood the rest of Norcross’s collection of people. Like the ones in the racks, these subjects were clothed, but they were also posed, the bodies arranged in groups as scenes, frozen in time. Three members of the City Watch took aim at a fleeing thief. A gangster—a Hatter—slit the throat of a victim. An aristocratic couple gave each other a loving look as they walked hand-in-hand. A mother handed her two children to their governess.
The people, they were real. Daud knew that. He walked toward the nearest, drawn to the hideous tableau. This one showed two factory workers—whalers—wiping the sweat from their brow as they worked on something that wasn’t there. They looked like they could just spring to life at any moment. The low angle of the yellow light from the lanterns illuminated the display from below, if anything making the corpses look even more lifelike.
The dark secret of Norcross’s collection—the real secret—wasn’t the heretical artifacts in the tower room. It was this.
This was an altogether different sort of crime.
“I knew you would like it.”
Daud turned and walked to the center of the chamber,where the two lanterns had been placed. Sitting cross-legged between them was Norcross, and draped across his lap was the stiff and bloodied body from the preparation room, her dead eyes staring up at the collector as he stroked her cheek.
The collector was smiling, his eyes glittering in the lantern light as he looked around. “Do you know, I have examples from every corner of our fair Isles here. Of course, it took a long time to complete the collection—well, I say complete, but is a collection ever complete, hmm?”
Daud said nothing. He just clenched his fists by his sides, the leather of his gloves creaking loudly.
Norcross looked down at the head in his lap. He traced the line of the woman’s jaw with a finger. “They’re all dead, you know. Every last one. And it is such trouble getting the right kind of staff. You can’t just hire any mercenary. I have certain secrets that must be kept from prying eyes, and sometimes money isn’t enough to keep mouths shut. Do you know what they took?”
Daud nodded, but still he didn’t speak. Norcross returned his attention to the body in his lap. He began to hum something—a lullaby, one Daud recognized from his own childhood in Serkonos.
Daud left the hidden gallery with the flames from the smashed whale oil tank licking at his heels. When he closed the great double doors, the last thing he saw was Norcross’s lifeless eyes staring at him, from where the infamous collector lay, next to his final victim.
21
THE EMPIRE’S END PUBLIC HOUSE, PORTERFELL, GRISTOL
4th Day, Month of Harvest, 1852
“They met in secret and spoke in whispers, their huddled forms cloaked against the night, their heads bowed low, so as almost to touch.
But then there was betrayal, as terrible and as cold as the snows of Tyvia. Each man had a dagger—the blades long and silver and hidden no longer! Together, the instruments of death were raised. Together they fell, as did the men, their bodies sliding to the earth in a silence that was befitting their craft. The men would not move again, their secrets safe to the very grave!”
—THE NIGHT OF DARK SHADOWS
Extract from a popular penny novel
“Unusual, perhaps a little heavy, but not without some, shall we say, primitive charm.”
“I think the word you are looking for, my dearest Mrs. Devlin, is naiveté.”
“Ah, yes, Mr. Devlin, how right you are. Unusual, perhaps a little heavy, but with a certain kind of—” shewaved her
