They weren’t on the rim. They were coming down it.
A line of them, on the ramp, one behind the other, the way you’d carry lamps if you were walking somewhere in the dark and in no hurry. I counted eight before I stopped counting and started looking at who was carrying them.
Masks. Six of them, and four green coats with the creases still in them, and I’d like it noted that the coats weren’t fooling anyone now. Two men in long grey coats that weren’t masks and weren’t watch, with a chest between them on poles. An old man on a stick, slow, with somebody’s arm to lean on.
And in the middle, with a chain in his fist, my brother.
“He said dawn,” I said.
“He said dawn to you,” said the voice near the floor. Ilsa had got up. She was in the doorway beside me with no sleeve and no knife and a face like a slammed door. “He’s been telling the rest of them ‘before’. All night. I could hear them through the planks.”
The front lamp stopped on the ramp. The man holding it had seen the open door. He’d seen me. He turned round and shouted up the line, and the line stopped, and in the middle of it Aldo’s head came up.
“Wicky—”
Then Vosk’s hand was on the back of his neck, and he was being shoved down the ramp, fast, past the others, towards the tunnel. Towards the stair. Towards the Door.
“Oh no you don’t,” said Ilsa.
Here’s what I’d forgotten about the hole. It wasn’t just Ilsa in it.
They came out past us like water out of a broken barrel. Eight men. Thin, bearded, filthy, in rags that had been a crew’s clothes fourteen months ago, and every one of them had been digging for a year with a mask standing over him, and every one of them had just seen the masks come down a ramp with their hands full of lamps.
The tools were stacked by the door. For the morning. Picks. Shovels.
Nobody said get them. Nobody had to.
“Fire,” I said to Ilsa.
“Yes,” said Ilsa, like she’d been waiting a day and a night to hear it, which she had.
The flame stood up on her palm. She let it go. I grabbed. The cold went up my arm, and I’d like to say it felt like coming home, but it felt like cold. I threw it at the bottom of the ramp, where the first masks were, and it went whump and lit the whole pit gold, and in the gold I saw everything at once.
Vosk, with Aldo, going into the tunnel. The old man going after, with one of the grey coats holding him up. The other grey coat dropping his end of the chest and running to catch up.
And six masks and four green coats turning round on the ramp to find eight diggers coming at them with shovels.
It wasn’t a battle. I’ve seen a battle now. This was a fight in a pit, in the dark, with lamps going over and men shouting, and I’m going to tell you one thing about it, which is that I was no use at all.
I’d thrown my one fire. I went for the chest the grey coats had dropped, because I thought jars, and a mask came at me out of the dark with his lamp up and his other fist back, and I got halfway to a drop before I remembered he hadn’t got my collar, and then he had, and I was off my feet.
Then he wasn’t there.
A man with a shovel had hit him. Not hard. Just enough. A thin man with a bad arm and a beard to his chest, who looked down at me on the floor and said, “You’re the little one. He talks about you,” and pulled me up, and went back to it.
It was over in the time it takes to tell. Masks and green coats on the floor of the pit, or running, up the far ramp and away into the ruins with no lamps, and the lads standing round breathing like bellows, and Skritch coming out from under a barrow where he’d been very sensibly the whole time, and saying, “Skritch’s plan,” to nobody in particular.
Ilsa was standing in the middle of it with a flame in each hand, and not one of them had come near her.
“That’s the first thing all week,” she said, “that’s run away from me.”
The tunnel was black. Vosk had taken the lamps that way. Somewhere down there, a hundred steps under us, my brother was being walked to a stone the size of a house, and the old man was going with him.
I started towards it.
“Wick.”
“They’ve got him down there—”
“I know where they’ve got him. I can count. Wick.” Ilsa had my sleeve. “Last time you went into a tunnel on your own after him, how did that go?”
I stopped.
I’d been practising this for a day. In the cell, with the sleeve on the stool. On the stair. On the floor of the pit with a mask’s lamp in my face. I’d had a lot of words and I’d thrown most of them out, and I turned round and looked at her, with her one sleeve and her face like a door, and I said the ones that were left.
“You were right. Sorry.”
She looked at me.
“That’s four,” she said.
“I counted.”
Something happened to the door of her face. It didn’t open. But somebody had unlocked it.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “I had a whole thing ready.”
“Do the thing.”
“I can’t do the thing now. You’ve said sorry. It ruins the thing.” She hit me on the arm, hard, with the hand that didn’t have a flame in it. “I’m still angry.”
“I know.”
“Less.” She let go of my sleeve. “Right. What have we got.”
What we had was this, and we had about as long as it takes to say it.
Eight lads with shovels and the masks’ dropped lamps. A chest of Guild jars, which one of the lads had cracked open with a pick: snow, rain, light, two of each. A wizard who’d been thrown out of the Guild. An otter with a key he wouldn’t give anyone.
And me, with two hands and a green tin in my pocket.
I got the tin out. I rubbed the stuff into my hands, the way he’d done it, goose fat and something sharp, and I thought you wanted them warm, old man. Fine.
“The two in grey,” I said. “Who are they?”
“Guild.” Ilsa said it like a bad taste. “I know them. The tall one does light. He taught me glims. The one with the beard does fire.” She looked at the chest. “Badly. He bottles it because he can’t hold it.”
So. Two wizards. However many masks he’d kept back down there. Vosk. And the Door.
“Ilsa gets the wizards,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Skritch gets to Aldo.”
“Skritch has a key,” said Skritch, and patted it.
“And the lads get the masks, and the lamps, and keep the light up. And I get Vosk.”
Nobody said anything.
“He’s twice you,” said Ilsa.
“He knows what I can do. He’s been told.” I looked at my hands, pink and shining with the old man’s salve. “He doesn’t know what I’m not supposed to do.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’ll tell you when it’s done.”
“Wick—”
“It’s not alone,” I said. “I promise. You’ll all be there. I just don’t want to say it out loud in case I lose my nerve.”
She looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded, once, which from Ilsa is a whole speech.
“And then what,” said the lad with the bad arm.
“What?”
“You get your brother off the stone. Then what? That thing’s been breathing all year. The old man says it’s thin. Say he’s right. Say it opens, or half opens, with nobody at it. What then?”
I didn’t have an answer. I’d had get Aldo in my head for fourteen months and nothing after it.
“It turns back,” said Skritch.
We all looked at him.
“Gran said. Two of one blood. Turn it one way, it opens. Turn it back, it shuts.” He said it in Gran’s voice, slow, like a thing that had been said a thousand times. “Nobody else can touch it.”
“Vosk pressed Aldo’s hand on it and nothing happened,” I said. “Aldo says you have to mean it. It’s not a key.”
“So mean it.”
“Mean it with what? Everything I’ve ever caught has come out of my hands cold, and that thing drinks cold.”
“By the river,” said Ilsa.
I stopped.
“When I set it down,” she said. “On your hand. Instead of you grabbing it. You said it was warm.”
“Like tea.”
“It didn’t take anything off you. Did it. I was watching. You weren’t white after. Not even a finger.” She was talking fast now, the way she does when she’s got there. “Everything you’ve caught, you’ve taken. Off me, off the ferry, off a jar, off a lamp. Taken is cold. That’s the price. The old man said. Grabbed magic takes its price from the hands.”
“And given doesn’t,” I said.
“And given doesn’t.”
I thought about it. I thought about a flame coming down onto my palm like snow, and my hand feeling fine, and me saying weird and walking on.
“That’s what mean it means,” I said slowly. “Not me meaning it. Not just me.” I looked at her. At Skritch. At eight thin men with lamps who’d been in a hole for a year because of my brother. “Given. By people who mean it.”
Nobody said anything. The lad with the bad arm looked at his lamp. Skritch looked at the tunnel.
“Skritch hasn’t got any,” said Skritch, very quietly. “Magic. Skritch has got a key.”
“Then give me the key when it’s time,” I said, “and we’ll call it even.”
“Skritch gives the key,” he said, “to the lock. That’s the best bit. Skritch said.”
That’s when the pit went cold.
Not the air. The ground. It came up through my boots like standing on the mudflats, and every lamp in the pit, every one, the masks’ on the floor and the lads’ in their hands, went thin. All at once. Like something had breathed on them from a long way down.
Then, through the rock, a sound.
Stone grinding on stone. Slow. Enormous. The sound the bowl door had made when it rolled, if the bowl door had been the size of a house and had somebody’s hand on it.
And under it, thin, from the bottom of a hundred steps, a voice. Not words. Just a voice, going up, the way a voice goes when something’s being done to it.
“Tall boy,” said Skritch. His ear was flat. “That’s the tall boy.”
“He’s doing it with one,” said Ilsa. “It’s thin, the old man said. It’ll move for one if one’s all it’s got. He’s got him on the stone on his own and he’s trying it, he doesn’t even—”
“It’s hurting him.”
I’d said it. I don’t remember deciding to. The grinding went on, and the voice went on under it, and the frost came out of the mouth of the tunnel across the floor of the pit in fingers, white, towards us.
Eight lamps came up. Eight shovels. Ilsa put her hand in the chest and came out with a jar in each pocket. Skritch had the key in his fist, off the string, ready, and I don’t think he knew he’d done it.
I didn’t say come on. I didn’t say anything. I just went, and they came, and for the first time in fourteen months I wasn’t the one in front.
Skritch was. He runs faster.
We went down into the dark after my brother’s voice, all of us, and the frost went back ahead of us like it knew we were coming.