Nobody said “I’ll go first”, because it was obvious who was going first.
Ilsa came behind me with the glim held up over my shoulder. Skritch came last with the iron lamp from the camp, relit, which he’d been carrying since dawn like it was a baby.
The stair was cut straight into the rock, every step worn into a dip by feet older than the Thornwood. It turned at the three crosses. It turned again. The air got colder and older and drier.
Forty steps. Fifty. Then the wall on my left wasn’t a wall.
It was a hole in the wall, as tall as a door and a half, and standing in it was a man made of stone.
I stopped so fast Ilsa walked into me.
He was bigger than Hettie’s front door. Grey, rough, cut from the same rock as the stair, with arms as thick as barrels and hands like shovels and a helmet with no face under it. Just a dark slot where the face would be. He was standing in his hole with his hands by his sides like he’d been put there and told to wait.
“Statue,” said Ilsa.
“Yes.”
“It’s a statue, Wick.”
“I know it’s a statue.”
“Skritch doesn’t like it,” said Skritch, from the back, holding the lamp between himself and it, as if that would help.
We went past it one at a time, sideways, backs to the far wall. It didn’t move. Stone doesn’t. Twenty more steps, and the stair ended at a door.
Round. Stone. About as high as a tall man, which isn’t very big for a door with three crosses on the way to it. It filled the end of the stair the way a cork fills a bottle.
And it was carved.
Round the edge, spaced out like the hours on a clock if the clock only had six, were six hollows cut into the stone. Bowls, each the size of two hands. In the bottom of each bowl, a picture. Going round from the top: a flame. A sun with rays. A cloud. A wave. A snowflake. And the sixth, worn so smooth you couldn’t tell what it had been.
In the middle of the door, a hand. Carved, open, palm out, and over the hand, little cut marks like sparks going up.
“That’s you,” said Ilsa.
I didn’t say anything. Somebody had carved that before the Thornwood was a wood, and they’d known about people like me.
And under the bowls, grey, scratched with a knife point, was my brother.
flame sun cloud wave snow (worn)
|| | ||| x x x
Three bowls with notches. Three with crosses. I counted the notches twice, because the first time I got the order wrong and had the flame going first, which is what you’d think, which is probably why he didn’t. Notches, not numbers. Anyone can count. Nobody else reads notches.
“Sun first,” said Ilsa, who’s quick. “Flame second. Cloud third. Don’t touch the rest.”
“He’s crossed out half a door.”
“Why would a door have bowls you mustn’t fill?”
“To catch people who fill all the bowls,” said Skritch, who had opinions about traps.
I looked at the hand with the sparks. I looked at the bowls. And I understood, the way you understand a tide-mark, all in one go.
“You put the magic in. In the right order. Light in the sun. Fire in the flame. The door reads it like a word.”
“And cloud?” said Ilsa.
“What’s left in the bag?”
She didn’t need to look. “One jar. Rain.”
“Rain isn’t cloud.”
“I know rain isn’t cloud. I’m not—” She stopped, and looked at the jar.
We both looked at the jar. The jar rained at us, quietly, the way it does.
“Rain’s the wrong end of it,” I said. “Rain’s what a cloud does when it’s finished.”
“So what does it do before it’s—” She stopped again. She’d got there. “Steam.”
“Fire and rain. Recipe four. A cloud’s just rain that hasn’t fallen yet.” I looked at the one jar. “One jar. One go.”
“And if the door doesn’t think steam is cloud?”
“Then we’ve got fire and light and a door, and we’ll be very upset.”
Skritch sat down on the bottom step with the lamp in his lap, like somebody settling in to watch something go wrong.
Sun first.
Ilsa cast the glim and let it go, and the sparks lifted, slow and cold. I reached with my right hand. My hands were already white to the wrist, so the cold didn’t start anywhere. It just arrived at my elbow like it had come from nowhere.
I put my fist in the sun bowl and opened it.
The light didn’t fall out, the way water would. It sank. It went down into the stone, and the carved rays lit up one after another round the edge, and then the whole bowl was glowing, soft and white, like the mushrooms in the Low Streets.
Somewhere inside the door, something went click.
“One,” said Ilsa.
Fire next. She cast. I grabbed with my left. I put it in the flame bowl and let it go, and it sank, and the carved flame went gold and stayed gold.
Click.
“Two.”
Both hands empty now, and cold to the elbow on both sides, and I couldn’t feel one inch of it, which I’m telling you is worse.
“I can catch two more,” I said. “One each. That’s the limit. I’m not going past the shoulder again.”
Ilsa looked at me. It was the first time she’d looked at me since the hole.
“Good,” she said.
She had the jar out. I held my hands over the cloud bowl, one each side, like warming them at a fire.
“Fire and jar. Same time.”
“I know how it works. I was there. On three.”
She said the word and smashed the jar on the step in the same breath, and for a second it rained in a hole under a forest, and the gold sparks went up off her palm and the blue-grey ones came up off the step, and I took them. Right. Left.
I brought my hands together over the bowl.
The steam came out of me like a kettle the size of a house. It filled the end of the stair solid white, and I was holding my hands over where the bowl should be and pushing, pushing it down, the way you’d push a cloud into a cup if you were an idiot and had to.
And the bowl drank it.
The steam went down into the stone like water into sand, and the white thinned, and the carved cloud was glowing grey and soft and turning, like weather.
Click.
Then a sound I felt in my knees. Stone grinding on stone. The door didn’t swing. It rolled, sideways into the wall like a wheel going into a slot, and the dark on the other side came out to meet us, and it smelled of nothing at all.
“Three,” said Ilsa, very quietly.
I didn’t say it worked. I thought it very loudly. But I didn’t say it.
Behind us, up the stair, in the last of the steam, something went crunch.
We all turned round at once.
You couldn’t see the bend for steam. But you could hear it. Stone on stone, heavy, one, and then another one, like somebody dropping a block and then dropping another block.
Footsteps.
“Statue,” said Ilsa.
“Yes.”
“It’s a statue, Wick.”
“I KNOW it’s a—”
It came out of the steam.
Slowly. It didn’t need to come fast. It filled the stair from wall to wall and had to turn its shoulders to fit, and every step came down on the rock like a hammer and left a white crack.
Skritch did the only sensible thing anyone did that day. He picked up his lamp and went through the door.
“Skritch!”
“Rock’s that way! Not-rock’s this way!”
He had a point. Ilsa went. I went backwards, because I couldn’t stop looking at it, into the dark with the stone man five steps behind.
It reached the door. Its helmet came into the opening and stopped, because it was a man and a half tall and the door was a man. The slot of its face turned down at us.
Then the arm came in.
As thick as a barrel, as long as me, swinging across the floor, and we went backwards along a passage I hadn’t even seen yet, falling over each other, and the stone fingers scraped the floor where our boots had been.
It tried again. We were out of reach. It knew. It stood there with its hand on the door and waited, the way the stag had waited at the mouth of the hole.
“Well,” said Ilsa, on her back. “That’s two things today that have been patient at us.”
Skritch’s lamp was burning on the floor. He’d set it down very carefully before falling over, which tells you everything about Skritch.
We were in a passage. Cut stone, narrow, dry, going down into the dark. And on the left-hand wall, at the height of my head, which is the height of Aldo’s chest, pencil.
Not a scratch. Pencil. He’d written on the wall.
I put the lamp to it, and my hands weren’t steady, and it wasn’t the cold.
Day 41. Night.
Wicky. If you’re reading this, you did the bowls. Good lad. Don’t fill the crossed ones. I did, the first time. That’s how I met the big lad on the stair. He wakes when the door turns and goes back to his hole when it shuts, and he’s slow. So shut it, count two hundred, open it from in here with the ring, and run. Don’t be clever. Run.
This passage goes down to the front of it. The Deep Door, the client calls it. I’ve been and looked. It’s the size of a house, Wicky. It’s shut, and it’s cold, and there’s frost on it that moves like it’s breathing. Three crosses isn’t enough. There isn’t a mark for it.
The client came down tonight. First time. Lamp behind him, hood up, in the dark. I never saw his face. He coughs. He smells of peppermint. He knew my name. He asked about you.
I could run. Nobody’s on this stair but the big lad. But they’d go to Saltmire for me, and they’d find you. So I’m going back up.
Three crosses means don’t. Not danger. Don’t. I know you will anyway.
Go home.
A.
I read it twice. I read the last line three times.
Then I turned round, because I couldn’t look at it any more. Ilsa was reading it over my shoulder with the glim, and Skritch was reading Ilsa’s face, which is how Skritch reads.
“He coughs,” said Ilsa.
“Vosk wheezes.”
“That’s not—”
“A wheeze is a cough that’s got stuck.” I could hear myself talking too fast.
“Vosk hates peppermints. Aldo wrote it. ‘Says they stink.’”
“You’d say that if you’d eaten a box a day for a year. Hettie says that about her own pies.” I was pointing at the wall now. “He wheezes. People who wheeze suck peppermints. Everybody knows that.”
Ilsa looked at the wall for a long moment.
“What’s peppermint?” said Skritch.
“Still a sweet,” said Ilsa.
“Skritch would like to try one,” said Skritch. “For the evidence.”
“It’s Vosk,” I said. “And he’s got Aldo. And Aldo could’ve run, and didn’t, because of me.”
Nobody argued. Behind us the stone man drummed his fingers on the door, patient.
Shut it, count two hundred, open it, run.
There was an iron ring on the back of the door, big as a plate. Ilsa and I pulled, and the door rolled back out of its slot, and the stone hand got out of the way just in time, and it shut with a sound like the end of something.
We counted out loud, all three of us, because it was better than listening. Skritch lost count at eighty and started again from one, and Ilsa told him that wasn’t how it worked, and he said Skritch’s two hundred was Skritch’s business.
At two hundred we pulled the ring.
The stair was empty. At the bend, in the hole in the wall, the stone man stood with his hands by his sides and his helmet facing out, like he’d never been anywhere.
“Don’t be clever,” I said. “Run.”
We ran. Past the bowls, still glowing. Up the steps two at a time. Past the hole, sideways, backs to the wall, and I swear the slot of its face turned with us as we went past, the way a dog’s eye follows a sausage.
Then a crunch behind us.
“Don’t look,” said Ilsa, and I didn’t, and we went up that stair faster than I’ve ever gone up anything, with the lamp swinging in Skritch’s paw and the hammer-steps coming behind, one, and then another one, and the square of daylight at the top getting bigger, and bigger—
We came out of the ground on our hands and knees in the moss, in the sun, and rolled away from the hole, and the stone man came up the last steps behind us and put one hand on the top step and stopped.
Just stopped, with the daylight on its helmet. The slot of its face turned slowly from Skritch, to Ilsa, to me.
Then it went back down, one step at a time, like a dog going back to the end of its chain.
We lay on the moss and breathed.
RECIPES (so far)
- Fire + fire = BIG flash. Lost eyebrows. Do not repeat.
- Fire + light = WHITE fire. Burns the Quiet. Burns nothing else. Lasts till morning. Does NOT burn stags.
- Frost + river = ICE. A lot of it. Freezes eels. Freezes me.
- Fire + rain = STEAM. Big cloud. Good for hiding. Wolves hate it. Also: opens doors.
“There you are,” said a voice.
A kind voice. An old one, tired, warm as toast, from behind us, from the camp. It was followed by a cough. A long one, wet and tired, that went on for a while and then stopped.
I rolled over.
Sitting on the fallen block above the badger hole, in a black coat with sagging pockets, with a handkerchief in one hand and a walking stick in the other, and four men in the green coats of the city watch standing round him with their lantern-poles, was Professor Quill.
“I’m afraid I’ve been very worried about you,” he said.