“What dark?” I’d said to Skritch, in the night. “Which dark? Where?”
“Skritch doesn’t know.” He’d been whispering, and his whiskers hadn’t stopped. “Dark is dark. Skritch’s nose knows. Skritch’s head doesn’t.”
“The tunnels? The quay? The hole, last night?”
“Dark,” said Skritch, miserably, and that was all I got, and in the morning there was bacon again and four men in new coats and an old man coughing into his handkerchief and saying “Right”, and I put it where I’d put the peppermint, which was down.
Here’s what I’d tell you if you asked me now. Skritch’s nose had never been wrong once. Not in the fish market, not in the Low Streets, not in the moss above a slab with a ring in it. And I had him sitting next to me with his ear flat, telling me, and I patted him on the head.
I patted him on the head.
The plan was simple, which I liked.
“Vosk’s crew are diggers,” said Professor Quill, at the edge of the stones in the grey before dawn. “Not soldiers. They’ve not seen a green coat in a year. Four men go down that ramp with lanterns, shouting watch, and they’ll run like rabbits. Then we walk in and find your brother.”
“We,” I said.
“You and I and your friends stay here, at the top, where it’s—”
“No.”
He looked at me over his spectacles for a long moment. Then he sighed, and it turned into a cough, and when it was over he said, “You’ll do as you like. He did,” and nodded to the four.
They went.
The dig was the circle on the map. Up close it was a pit. A great round hole in the middle of the ruins, as wide as the fish market is long, with timber ramps going down the sides and tents round the rim with nobody in them, and lamps burning down in the bottom of it, yellow, where the dark hadn’t lifted yet.
The four men went down the ramp in a line with their lanterns up and started shouting.
“City watch! Down! Down on the ground!”
It was loud. It was very loud. Men came out of the holes at the bottom of the pit, masked, half-dressed, and looked at four lanterns and four green coats, and they ran. They actually ran. Into the tunnels, dropping things, one of them dropping his lamp, which rolled, and the watchmen went after them, shouting, and the shouting went down into the ground and got smaller.
“Well,” said Ilsa.
“That was easy,” I said.
I’d like that noted. I’d like it noted that it was the easiest thing that had happened all week, and I said so, out loud, and I still went down the ramp.
Quill came behind us, slowly, on his stick, with one hand on the timber rail. By the time we got to the bottom he was a long way back, a black shape against the grey sky at the top, and I thought: he’ll be all right, he’s got the whole watch with him, which was four men, which were all in the tunnels.
The bottom of the pit was mud and timber and lamplight. The dropped lamp was still burning on its side. I picked it up. Lit by the lamp-word, the way everyone lights them, and when I turned the wick up I saw the sparks over the flame, gold, faint, drifting, and I reached without thinking and had fire in my right hand before I’d finished thinking.
Pink hands. Cold up the arm. It was almost nice, feeling it again.
“Keep it,” said Ilsa.
“I’m keeping it.”
The tunnel went in from the bottom of the pit, propped with timber like a mine, and the shouting was somewhere ahead of us and to the left. We went right.
I don’t know why we went right. Skritch went right. His nose was down and his ear was flat and he went right like he was following a string, and we followed him, because he’s Skritch.
And twenty paces in, the tunnel opened out, and I stopped.
They’d found the top of something. Aldo had written it, day twelve. A curve of stone, under the big block. A year of digging later it wasn’t a curve any more.
It was the top of the Deep Door.
It came up out of the floor of the cave like the back of a whale coming up out of the sea. Stone, grey, smooth, and round, I could see the curve of it going down into the earth on both sides where they’d dug, and the bit that showed was taller than the Drowned Lantern and that was only the top of it. It was carved. Lines, going round it in rings, worn almost to nothing. And it was white with frost, every inch, and the frost was moving.
In. Out. Slow. Like a thing asleep.
“Oh,” said Ilsa.
Three times now. I didn’t say anything about it.
The cold came off that stone like it came off the sea in winter. My breath went white. Beside it, against the far wall of the cave, they’d dug into something wet: there was an iron gate set in the rock, barred, and behind the bars the river was standing up against them, black and fast, spraying through in sheets, with a roar coming off it that I felt in my chest. The diggers had cut into it, and the gate was all that kept it out.
Skritch’s nose went straight up.
“River,” he said. “Under. Skritch smells the river.”
“Later,” I said. “Aldo first. Where—”
And that’s when I saw them.
Off to the left, where a side tunnel came in, there was lamplight, and in the lamplight, two men.
One of them was tall. He had a leather mask over half his face, and I’d have known him anywhere, because I’d had his hand in my collar. Vosk. Standing with his lamp up. Not running. Not hiding. Standing there in the mouth of his tunnel like a man waiting for a cart.
The other one was wearing a green coat.
A new one, with the creases still in it. One of our four. He walked up to Vosk, and Vosk looked at him, and the watchman looked at Vosk, and they nodded at each other.
Just that. The little nod. The one men give each other across a market when they’ve both been told the same thing.
I’ve thought about a lot of things in my life, but I don’t think I’ve ever thought so many of them so fast. One of the four is his. The shouting’s a show. Nobody ran, they walked. The Professor’s at the top on his own with—
“Ilsa,” I said. “The watchmen. One of them’s—”
Vosk had seen me.
He didn’t shout. He put his lamp down on a rock, carefully, the way you put down a thing you’ll want again, and he came across the cave at me, and I threw the fire.
It was a good throw. I’d had a lot of practice. It went straight at his chest, and he didn’t duck, and he didn’t flinch. He just turned his shoulder, like a man walking past a doorway, and the fire went past him and hit the wall and went whump and lit the whole cave gold for a second.
He’d been told what I could do. That’s what that was. Somebody had told him, and he’d believed them, and he wasn’t scared of it.
Then his hand was in my collar.
I dropped. Straight down, all my weight, like a sack of fish, the way Aldo taught me. The way I’d done it on the harbour wall.
His other hand was already under my arm. He remembered that one himself.
“Hello, lad,” he wheezed, into my ear. “Told you to go home and get warm.”
I had one hand. The left. And Vosk’s lamp was sitting on its rock with its sparks going up off it, gold and faint, and I reached for them with the hand that had two dead fingers in it and got them, and the cold went up my arm, and Vosk took my wrist and turned it, just turned it, behind my back, and I couldn’t throw. You have to throw them. I couldn’t throw.
The fire sat in my fist behind my back and burned nothing and I couldn’t do a thing with it.
Ilsa threw hers.
Not through me. Hers. She stood in the middle of the cave with the Deep Door breathing frost behind her and put a flame off her palm straight at Vosk’s head, and it was a good one, it was not small, there was a forest of it, and Vosk turned his masked face away from it and the mask smoked and he didn’t let go.
Masked men were coming out of the side tunnel. Three. Four. Walking. Not one of them was running.
“Wet way,” said Skritch.
He was at the iron gate. He had both paws on the bar across it, and the bar was lifting, because Skritch is all muscle under the coat, and the river behind the bars was roaring to be let in.
“Ilsa! Wet way!”
“I’m not leaving him—”
“GO,” I said.
She didn’t move. She had another flame up and three men between her and me.
I had four words. I’d been practising.
“Ilsa. I’ve got nothing. GO.”
She looked at me. She looked at my face. I don’t know what she saw there. I know what I meant.
She went.
She turned and ran for the gate, and Skritch had it up, and the river came over the sill in a wave to our knees, and he went through into the roar and the black and she went through after him with her coat flying, and a masked man grabbed for her and got a sleeve, and the sleeve was the burnt one and it came off in his hand.
The gate crashed down. The wave stopped with it, and ran away across the floor, and was gone.
Then it was just the roar of the river behind its bars, and the cave going dark where the lamps had been dropped, and my brother somewhere under my feet, and a man wheezing in my ear.
They took me down.
There was a stair. Not the old one, not Aldo’s stair with its worn steps and its three crosses. A new one, rough, cut by men with picks over a year of trying, going down beside the great curve of the Door, down and round and down, following the stone. Vosk had my arms behind me and two men in front with lamps and I counted the steps because counting is what I do.
I got to a hundred. Then I stopped, because the stair had stopped, and we were at the bottom, and I saw it.
The front of it.
It was round. It was the size of a house. I don’t mean a big door, I mean a house, with its roof and its walls and its chimney, standing on its end and made of one stone. The lamps didn’t reach the top. The frost on it was thick as fur, and it was moving, in, out, in, slow, and with every out the lamps dimmed, and with every in they came back.
In the middle of it, at the height of a man, there were two hands carved into the stone. Side by side. Open. Palm out.
Two.
Vosk pushed me forward. My boots slid on frost. The cold coming off it went through my shirt and through the diary and through the map and into my chest, and I thought: this is it, they’ll put my hand on it now, and there’s no one to hold the other—
“Not yet,” wheezed Vosk, like he’d read my face. “Not till he says.”
He.
They turned me away from it. There was a door in the rock beside the stair, low, with iron bars across it, and a lamp hanging outside, and as they pushed me towards it, from the dark behind the bars, somebody said my name.
Not Wick.
“Wicky?”