Wintercraft: Blackwatch by Jenna Burtenshaw

they were lit from deep inside. She stopped walking. ‘There’s something down here,’ she said.
     
    ‘You saw something?’
     
    ‘I’m not sure.’
     
    ‘Is it something good or bad?’
     
    ‘I don’t know yet.’
     
    ‘Is it the Skilled? Are they ahead of us?’
     
    ‘I can’t tell, can I, with you talking all the time?’
     
    Edgar looked back the way they had come. There was no sign of anyone back there, and when Kate started walking without him he hurried to catch up. The movement of their bodies stirred up the stagnant air, raising thick breezes of dust from the floor.
     
    ‘This is definitely not the way out,’ he said.
     
    Kate’s eyes fogged over again, and this time the feeling did not lift. The link between the veil and the living world was stronger here than in other places she had been, as if something down here was attracting it. The tunnel became wider the further they went and she saw thin doors set into the sides of it, most of them cracked and hanging awkwardly from broken hinges.
     
    Edgar shone the light into the space behind one of them. ‘Someone has cleared these rooms out,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing in there. We could hide in one.’
     
    ‘No,’ said Kate. ‘We have to keep going.’
     
    They kept walking, following the path to the very end where it stopped at a final dark red door. The handle had been smashed from its fixings and the door swung open easily against her hand. The two of them stepped inside and Edgar shone the lantern around an oval room with alcoves sunk into the walls at shoulder height, each one holding a small wooden box no bigger than the book Kate still had hidden in her coat.
     
    ‘Funeral boxes,’ she said. ‘Filled with ashes of the dead.’
     
    ‘Well that isn’t creepy at all,’ said Edgar.
     
    The room was filled with long tables, each one covered in sackcloths that hid whatever was on it from view. It looked like someone was storing things in there. The clothes covered a collection of small shapes that were all roughly the same size, but neither Kate nor Edgar wanted to lift the sacking to look at what lay beneath.
     
    ‘Maybe we can hide in here,’ said Kate.
     
    ‘I’m not spending more than five seconds in this place.’ Edgar unclipped the lid of one of the boxes and wrinkled his nose at the ashes he found inside. ‘The boxes are full, all right,’ he said. ‘But there’s no inscription on the front of any of them. It should at least say who the ashes belong to.’ He shut the box carefully. ‘Does it feel a bit odd in here to you?’
     
    Kate ignored him and walked deeper into the room. Whatever the things beneath the cloths were, she did not like the feeling she had when she walked past them. It was a pulling sensation, as if each one of them was connected to her by string. All the cloths were fresh and clean. They had not been there for very long. Then she spotted something up ahead. A collection of tools had been abandoned against a narrow door in the wall. The door was broken, and the space beyond it was filled with old spiderwebs. As she drew closer she saw that something had been partly excavated from behind a covering of old bricks halfway up the wall; something made of stone with a curved edge set with a ring of small circular tiles.
     
    ‘Edgar,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve found what the person who opened this room up was looking for.’
     
    Edgar made his way towards her, squinting in the lantern light. ‘Is that …?’
     
    ‘It’s a spirit wheel,’ said Kate.
     
    Only the right hand side of the wheel had been cleared of its covering bricks. Kate could see half of the stone tiles that ran round the central palm-stone, but the main carving in the middle had been scraped away.
     
    ‘I’ve never seen one of these before,’ said Edgar, reaching out to one of the exposed tiles. ‘What is that? A wolf?’
     
    ‘I think so,’ said Kate.
     
    Edgar touched the tile and the wall quivered,