I said I didn’t count. That was true for about an hour.
Then I started looking at the lock again.
The walnut one, on Aldo’s ankle. I’d seen it when I came in, and thought about a key with three teeth, and thought about an otter, and put the whole thing away, because what was the use. Now I couldn’t stop looking at it.
“Whose lock is that?”
“Vosk’s.” Aldo didn’t open his eyes. “Off the supply chest. He’s only got the one, and it goes on whatever he wants kept most. It was on the chest. Then the boats. Now me.”
“Has he got a key?”
“Round his neck. On a string.” He opened one eye. “Why?”
I didn’t answer straight away. I was thinking about a tin, under three hands of mud, and what had been in it besides a letter.
“Aldo. The key in the tin. The one with three teeth.”
He sat up so fast the chain jumped.
“You’ve got it?”
“No.”
“Wicky—”
“I had it. It was the spare, wasn’t it. Off the cart. You took the spare.”
“I took it off the cart on the supply run because it was there and I thought it might come in useful, and then I put it in the tin because I didn’t know what else to do with it, and I did not know they were going to put that lock on me.” He was whispering, and it was still loud. “Where is it?”
“I gave it to an otter.”
He looked at me for a long time.
“Course you did,” said my brother, and lay back down.
He slept. Fourteen months in a hole teaches you to sleep anywhere, I suppose. I sat against the rock and looked at the sleeve on the stool, and I didn’t sleep, and I didn’t count, and the night went on being night.
Then the boots came early.
Not dawn. Nowhere near dawn. Three sets, coming down the stair, with a lamp, and the wheeze in front of them.
Aldo was awake before the bar came off the door. He got his back to the wall and his chain across his lap, and I got up, and Vosk came in bent double under the low door with two masked men behind him.
“Not you, lad,” he wheezed at me. “Him.”
“He said dawn.”
“He says a lot of things.” Vosk went to the ring in the wall. There was a pin through the end of the chain, holding it to the ring, and he knocked it out with the heel of his hand, and the chain came away. He didn’t touch the lock. He didn’t need to. “He wants the big one warm. Fed. Hands done.” He looked at my hands, and then he looked at my pocket, where the green tin was. “You’ve got yours. Use it. He wants you both warm, he says. Cold hands catch nothing.”
They stood Aldo up. He had the loose end of the chain in his fist like a dog that’s picked up its own lead.
“Wicky.”
“I know.”
“Don’t do anything clever.”
“I’m never clever.”
“That’s what I’m worried about.”
Then the door banged, and the bar went across, and the chain went up the stair behind him, clank, clank, clank, getting smaller, and then there was nothing at all.
I tried the bars. Of course I tried the bars. I tried the door. I tried the hinges, which were on the outside, because nobody in the history of the world has ever put a cell door’s hinges on the inside.
The lamp outside had been lit hours ago. No sparks. Nothing in the air but my own breath.
I sat down where Aldo had sat, and put my face on my knees, and I’m not going to tell you what I said, because it wasn’t to anyone.
Drip.
I’d heard that all night. The back wall was wet. There was a crack behind the ring, up where the wall met the roof, a hand wide, with water running out of it in a thread. I’d stopped hearing it.
Drip. Drip.
Scrabble.
That wasn’t water.
I was on my feet and across the cell before I’d decided to be. Something was in the crack. Something was coming down the crack, wet, with claws, and I thought rat and then I thought Quiet and then a voice came out of the rock about a foot above my head, muffled and cross.
“Wick smells of badger.”
I’m not going to describe the noise I made.
“Skritch?”
“Skritch is stuck.”
“Where—”
“In a wall. Where does it look like.”
I got my fingers in the crack and pulled. Wet stone. Then wet fur. Then a nose, flat, with the whiskers pushed back along it, and two black eyes, very wide, and the rest of him arriving behind like he was being squeezed out of a tube.
He came out onto the floor in a heap, with no coat on, soaked to the skin, and lay there breathing.
“If the head fits,” he said, to the ceiling, “Skritch fits.”
“Your head didn’t fit.”
“Mostly fits.”
I got him up. I got him by both shoulders and I held on, and he let me, and his fur was like holding a wet rope, and I didn’t care one bit.
“They’ve got Ilsa,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The old man said both of you.”
“Old man says lots.” Skritch was wringing his tail out like a cloth. “Skritch went through the gate. Ilsa went through the gate. Dry-folk were in the water. Dry-folk had a net.” His whiskers went flat. “Net doesn’t catch Skitter. Skitter is all slippy. Net catches Ilsa. Ilsa shouted. Then Ilsa said Skritch, go. So Skritch went.”
“She said that?”
“Three words,” said Skritch. “She’s better at it than you.”
I sat down on the floor. He sat down next to me.
“Skritch has been in the river all day. All the night. Skritch knows the water under here now. All of it.” He ticked them off on his black fingers. “Water goes past the hole where they keep her. Up top. By the big pit. Water goes past here. Water goes to the gate. Water goes to a lot of places. Skritch has a plan.”
“Where’s Aldo?”
“Up. Skritch saw. Tall boy with a chain, by the fire at the top, with the old man. They’re feeding him.” He sniffed. “Bacon.”
Up. One stair. A hundred steps. Vosk and two men and the old man and whoever else was up there, round a fire, and Aldo in the middle of it with a chain in his fist and his hands being rubbed warm so they’d catch better.
I was up before I knew it.
“The stair. If you can get the bar off this door I can get up the stair, I can get in behind them, there’s lamps up there, there’ll be sparks, I can—”
“Skritch says no.”
“Give me the key, then. The three-tooth one. It’s for his lock. It’s for Aldo’s lock, Skritch, I’ll get it on him and we’ll—”
“Skritch says no.”
He didn’t shout it. He said it the way Gran had said the thing about the door. Slow, and like it had been said before.
“One of you,” he said. “Against all of them. Up a stair. With a chain on the end of it.” He held up one finger. Then three. “Or Wick, and Skritch, and Ilsa, and all the other ones in the hole with her. Tall boy’s lads. Eight. Thin, but eight. Then everyone.”
“There isn’t time. He said dawn—”
“It’s not dawn,” said Skritch. “Skritch can smell dawn and it isn’t.”
I stood there with my hands in fists.
Here’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to go up that stair on my own, right then, the way I’d gone down the drain and over the wall and out of the gate at four in the morning. On my own was how I did things. On my own was fast.
On my own was how I’d ended up on my back in the moss with my lips going blue, while an otter held a stag off with his voice.
“Fine,” I said.
Skritch’s ear came up.
“Your plan. Ilsa first.” It came out like pulling a tooth. “Then the lads. Then everyone.”
“Then everyone,” said Skritch.
“And the key?”
He put his hand over the string round his neck, where the key hung next to the tin button, and he looked at me with his black eyes, and I knew the answer before he gave it.
“Skritch owes,” he said. “Skritch pays. Skritch is saving it for the best bit.”
“What’s the best bit?”
“Skritch will know it,” he said, “when it comes.”
I’ve now seen an otter go through iron bars, and nobody will ever believe me.
He put his head through first. Sideways. Then one shoulder went flat, like it had a hinge in it, and the other followed, and there was a long moment where the front of Skritch was on one side of the bars and the back of Skritch was on the other and he said, “Don’t,” and I didn’t, and then he was through, on the floor outside, like a sock going through a letterbox.
“Skitter is mostly whiskers,” he said, getting up.
The bar was oak and as long as he was. He got under the middle of it with his back and lifted, and his legs shook, and it came up out of its brackets an inch, two inches, and I shoved the door, and it swung.
I was out.
Here’s the layout, because we were about to run all over it. Bottom: the hall, with the cell and the front of the Door. A hundred steps up: the cave, with the top of the Door and the river gate. Then the tunnel. Then the pit. Then sky.
The hall was empty. One lamp on a hook by the stair, and the Deep Door filling the dark like a cliff, breathing its frost in and out, and every out the lamp went thin. Nobody else. They were all up top, round a fire, warming my brother’s hands.
“Stair,” I whispered. “There’s a man at the top. There was when they brought me down.”
“Skritch knows. Skritch has a plan for the man.”
“What plan?”
“Skritch rattles the gate. Man looks at the gate. Wick doesn’t look at the gate.” He was already going. Back along the wall, into the dark at the side of the hall, where the water came down, and he put his head into a crack in the rock I’d never have seen, and he said, “Count fifty,” and his tail went in after him.
I counted fifty. I’d like that noted. It turns out there was a point.
A hundred steps. I went up them the way I go up the fish-sheds, slow, hands on the rock, listening.
At the top was the cave with the whale’s back of the Door in it, and the iron gate in the far wall with the river roaring behind it. And on the top step, on a stool, with a lamp between his boots and his chin on his chest, a masked man.
Not asleep. Nearly. His head went down, and came up, and went down.
Then the gate rattled.
One rattle, iron on iron, and the man’s head came up and he picked up his lamp and stood and looked at the gate.
It rattled again.
He went to look. He walked across the cave with his lamp up, the way you’d go and look at a cat in the yard, and I came up out of the stair behind him and went the other way, along the wall, into the tunnel to the pit, with my heart so loud I was sure he’d hear it over the river.
Behind me I heard him say, “Oi,” at the gate, and the gate not say anything back.
The tunnel came out at the bottom of the pit. Night. The great round hole with the sky over it, and up on the rim, between the tents, a fire. A big one. I could see shapes round it. I could hear a cough.
Skritch came out of the wet rock beside me like he’d always been there.
“Hole’s that way,” he said, and pointed.
It was a side tunnel at the bottom of the pit, propped with timber, and across the mouth of it a door made of planks, with a bar. Outside the door, on a stool, under a lamp, a man. This one was awake. He had a knife out and he was cleaning his nails with it, and he looked bored out of his mind.
“Right,” I said. “You rattle something, I lift the bar—”
“No,” said Skritch. “Skritch has a different plan for this man.”
And before I could stop him he was gone.
Not along the wall. Straight across the open floor of the pit, bold as you like, on his back legs, in the lamplight, with his arms out to the sides. A small wet thing with whiskers, walking up to a man with a knife.
The man stood up.
“Sorry,” said Skritch, in the funny high voice from the fish market. “Sorry, sorry.”
The man grabbed for him.
Skritch went between his legs.
That’s the only way I can put it. One second the man had him, and the next the man had air, and Skritch was behind him, and the man turned, and Skritch was somewhere else, and the man swore and went after him into the dark at the far side of the pit, and his lamp went bobbing off after the two of them, and the door was there with nobody in front of it.
I ran.
The bar was oak, like the other one. I got it up on my own, because there was nobody to do it with, and I’d like it noted that I was aware of that at the time. I dragged the door open.
It was black inside, and it smelled of people, and nobody said anything.
Then a voice I knew, from somewhere near the floor, flat and cross and the best sound I’d heard in a day and a night.
“Took you long enough.”
And that’s when the rim of the pit filled with lamps.
All the way round. And every one of them was looking down at us.