For fourteen months I’d walked out on the mud every Sunday to look at a rotten post, and every Sunday it told me nothing.
This Sunday it had my brother’s handwriting on it.
Not real handwriting. Aldo never wrote anything down if he could help it. It was a mark. A little wave, scratched into the wood with the point of a knife, with some notches and other bits after it. Our code. I’ll explain it in a minute. Right then I was too busy freaking out.
The mark was low down, below the line where the mud usually sat. Last night’s storm had come in off the sea like it wanted to knock Saltmire flat, and it had scoured the flats clean. The old mud was gone. Underneath, the wood was pale and bare, and there it was.
I knelt in the wet and put my fingers on it.
The scratches were grey, not fresh. Old. He’d cut it before he left, and the mud had covered it, and it had been sitting there the whole time. Fourteen months. Waiting for a storm.
“You idiot,” I said. I don’t know if I meant him or me.
Behind me, up on the harbour wall, a fisherman was burning a paper wind-charm to see which way the weather was going. The charm went up in a puff of green smoke. The little green sparks it left behind drifted down past my ear, slow as dandelion seeds, and winked out one by one.
I didn’t look at them. I’ve had a lot of practice not looking at them.
More on that later.
Here’s the code, since you’re going to need it as much as I did.
~ a wave = here, this place
| a notch = one (count them)
v a point down = go down
x a cross = danger
o a ring = safe
# a hatch = hidden here
When we were small, Aldo and I used to copy the tide tables off the harbour wall. Then we started making up our own. It was a game. Then it was a way of leaving each other messages that Mam couldn’t read, and then, after Mam, a way of leaving messages that nobody could read.
This is what was cut into the post:
~ ||| v #
Here. Three. Down. Hidden.
I didn’t even have to think about it. I’d been reading that stuff since I was six.
I dug.
Three hands down, right at the foot of the post, where the mud was cold enough to make my fingers ache. The flats stank of salt and rotten weed and I didn’t care. At three hands my nails hit something that wasn’t mud.
A tin. The flat kind that boiled sweets come in, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with twine. I knew the tin. It had lived on the shelf above Aldo’s bed. He kept his fishhooks in it.
I sat back on my heels in the mud with the tin in both hands and I couldn’t breathe properly.
That’s when I saw the man in the fog.
Saltmire has fog the way other cities have pigeons. It sits on the mudflats at first light, thick and grey and smelling of fish. You get used to shapes in it.
This shape was standing still.
It was tall, maybe forty paces off, right where the flats met the first row of beached boats. A long grey coat. I’d seen that coat before. Outside the fish market on Thursday. Across the street from the tavern on Friday. I’d told myself I was imagining things, because what kind of person follows a thirteen-year-old barrel-boy around a port town?
The kind who was now walking towards me.
He had something over his face. Leather, dark, covering his mouth and nose. A mask.
Then a second shape came out of the fog beside him. Also masked.
Then a third.
I did what any sensible person would do. I shoved the tin down the front of my shirt and ran.
Running on mudflats is like running in a dream where your legs don’t work. Every step sinks. The mud sucks at your boots and makes a noise like it’s laughing at you. I’m small and I’m fast and I still felt like I was wading through soup.
I didn’t look back. Looking back is how you fall over.
The first thing I reached was a fishing boat, lying on its side where the storm had dumped it. I went up the keel and over the top, and from up there I got one look at the flats behind me.
Three men. Running. They were sinking too, but they had long legs, and long legs beat short ones every time.
I jumped down the far side and kept going.
Past the boats there’s a row of posts where the fishermen hang their nets to dry, and that morning the nets were all up, hanging in walls, wet and heavy from the storm. I ducked under one. I heard a man behind me hit it and swear.
Good.
Then the harbour wall. Slimy stone steps. I took them two at a time, and at the top I was on the quay, on proper cobbles, with the fish-sheds in front of me and the town climbing up into the fog beyond.
A hand grabbed my collar.
I never heard him. He must have come along the wall instead of across the mud. The grip was like iron, and the mask was right there, inches from my face, dark wet leather with a slit for the mouth, and the breath behind it wheezing.
“Give it here,” he said.
Something about the wheezing scared me more than the mask. I don’t know why.
I did the thing Aldo taught me the first time a bigger boy tried to take something off me. I didn’t pull away. I dropped. Straight down, all my weight, like a sack of fish.
My shirt tore and I was out of the collar and rolling, and then I was up and into the fish-sheds, and I’ve been climbing those sheds since I was old enough to get in trouble for it. Barrel, window ledge, gutter, roof.
Up.
I lay flat on the wet slates with my heart going like a drum and I’ll be honest with you. I counted.
I count when I’m scared. One to ten, then start again. Aldo says I do it under my breath without knowing. Said. Says. I never know which one to use.
So let me tell you about Aldo while I’m up there being terrified, because you need to know.
He’s my brother. He’s eighteen. He’s bossy and he’s clever and when Mam died he was thirteen, my age now, and he just carried on. He got the landlady to let us keep the attic room over the tavern. He got her to give me work. He taught me to climb and to swim and how to fall out of a collar.
Fourteen months ago he went off with a crew of treasure hunters to dig up something in the forest inland that would, and I’m quoting him, “make us so rich you’ll have a bath every day, Wicky, whether you want one or not”.
He was supposed to be gone two months.
The crew never came back either. Nobody looked for them. People go into that forest all the time and some of them don’t come out, and nobody in Saltmire wastes a watchman on a mudflat boy’s brother.
So I looked. Every Sunday, at the post. Because if Aldo was going to tell me something, he’d tell me in the code.
And now I had the tin against my chest, and three men in masks wanted it, and I had no idea why.
Eight. Nine. Ten.
One.
Boots on the slates behind me.
I rolled over. One of them had found my barrel-and-gutter route. He was pulling himself up onto the roof, slow and heavy, the mask turning towards me. Below, in the street between the sheds, I could see the grey coat of the wheezing one, and a third figure going round the far side to cut me off.
Nowhere to go but up the roof, and the roof ended in a drop to the harbour.
Then a voice yelled from the quay. “Oi! You lot! Stop there!”
A watchman. Just one, in his green coat with his lantern-pole, standing at the top of the harbour steps and looking at three masked men on and around a fish-shed. He didn’t look like he fancied it much.
But he did what watchmen do when they want help. He pulled the little clay tube off his belt and cracked it on the wall.
A flare-spell.
It went up with a scream, straight up into the fog, and burst red. For a second the whole quay was lit pink, every cobble, every wet rope, three masks turning to look at it.
And then it did the thing it always does. The thing only I ever seem to see.
The red light was gone. But the sparks weren’t. They hung there in the air above the roof, hundreds of them, tiny red ones, drifting and turning, like somebody had shaken out a bag of embers and told them to wait.
I’d seen that all my life. Every charm, every spell, every penny light-trick in the market. Little sparks that hang about for a few seconds after, and nobody looks at them, because nobody else can see them.
I was six when I found that out.
The man on the roof got his feet under him and came at me.
I didn’t decide anything. I’d like to say I did. I put my hand up to ward him off, into the cloud of red sparks, and I closed my fist.
They came.
That’s the only way I can say it. The sparks poured into my hand like water going down a drain, all of them at once, and my hand went cold. Not cold like the mud. Cold like it had been in the sea for an hour. Cold right up to the elbow, so fast it hurt.
And in my fist there was fire.
Not sparks. Fire. A lump of it, about the size of an apple, orange and red and roaring with no sound, and not burning me at all.
The masked man stopped dead.
I threw it.
I was aiming for him. I missed, which I’m quite glad about now. It hit the slates between us and went off like a dropped lamp, a whump of flame and a wave of heat that threw him backwards onto his hands. His coat was smoking. He scrambled away from me down the roof, and I heard him go off the edge, and I heard him hit the harbour.
The watchman on the quay said a word that I’m not going to write down.
I ran. Along the ridge, a jump to the next shed, a slither down a drainpipe, through a yard, over a wall, and I didn’t stop until I was three streets away and nobody was behind me.
Then I looked at my hand.
It was white. Not pale. White, like a dead fish, all the way up to my wrist, and I couldn’t feel my fingers.
The attic room over the tavern is up four flights of stairs and a ladder, and that morning I did all of it on legs made of string.
Nobody saw me come in. The landlady was shouting about barrels somewhere below. I lay on Aldo’s bed, because it was nearer than mine, and I held my white hand under my armpit until the pins and needles came, which I’m telling you was worse than the cold.
Then I opened the tin.
Inside, wrapped in a scrap of sailcloth, there were two things.
One was a key. Small, iron, old, with three teeth. It didn’t fit anything I’d ever seen in my life.
The other was a letter. On a page torn out of a tide table, in a pencil that had got wet and dried again.
I’m going to put the whole thing here, because I’ve read it so many times since that it’s the only bit of my brother’s writing I know by heart.
Wicky.
If you’re reading this, they’ve got me. Don’t come after me. I mean it.
They want the map. I split it up and hid it where only someone who reads our marks can find it. That’s you. Nobody else.
I’m not doing this to play games with you. If they come for you, and they will, you’ll need what I found. All of it.
Don’t trust anyone who’s nice to you for no reason.
Start where the sea keeps a flame. Look at the bottom.
A.
I read it four times.
Then I put it down and looked at the ceiling, and the ceiling looked back, and I thought: start where the sea keeps a flame. Which makes no sense. The sea doesn’t keep flames. That’s the whole point of the sea.
I’d work it out. I had to. Because they had come for me, just like he said. And he’d told me not to come after him, and I want you to know, right now, before anything else happens, that I never had the slightest intention of listening.
Under my armpit, my hand was starting to come back. In the quiet, I could hear Mam. Not a ghost. Just the memory, the way she said it every time, with her hands on my shoulders and her face close to mine.
“Never show anyone, Wicky. People will want it.”
Well.
Too late for that.