The hall was lit like a market.
That’s the first thing I saw, coming off the bottom step with Skritch’s tail in front of me and eight lamps behind. Lamps on every wall, hung on pegs the men had hammered into the rock, dozens of them, yellow, and two braziers going on the floor with coals in them, and jars of light stood along the foot of the walls like somebody had tipped out a stall. The old man had wanted it bright. He’d got bright.
And every single flame in the place was leaning the same way.
Towards the Door.
It had moved. Not much. But a thing the size of a house doesn’t have to move much. There was a black line down one side of it now, where before there’d been stone, a crack as wide as my hand and as tall as the hall, and out of the crack, grey, slow, like smoke off a candle somebody’s just pinched, something was coming.
Not dogs yet. Threads. Grey threads, pouring out of the black and spreading along the floor, and where they touched the rock the frost ran out white.
Aldo was on the stone.
They’d pinned his chain to a ring in the floor at the Door’s foot. He was standing with his right hand flat on one of the carved hands, the left-hand one, and the frost had come up his arm. Not on his sleeve. Out of it. White to the shoulder, white in his hair, white on his face, and he wasn’t shouting any more, and that was worse than the shouting.
“There you are,” said Professor Quill.
He was standing at the foot of the Door in a robe. Grey, old, too big for him, the kind of thing you’d find in a chest in a library and put on because the book said so. He had the book under one arm. He looked like somebody’s grandad dressed up for a play.
“I did tell you to stay at the top,” he said.
“You knew I wouldn’t.”
“I did.” He coughed, and it went on, and he waited for it. “I’m glad. I’d not have liked to do this without you. Vosk.”
And Vosk came for me.
Here’s how it went, and I’m going to tell it one move at a time, because that’s how it happened.
The lads went left. Four masks were coming off the wall at them and the lads met them with shovels, and the lamps went everywhere, and I lost them in it.
Ilsa went right. The two grey coats were at the far brazier with the chest of jars between them, and the one with the beard had a flame out already, bottled, blue at the edges, and he threw it at her.
She didn’t duck. She put her own flame up, hers, off her palm, and it was not small, and his went into it like a match into a bonfire.
“Hello, sir,” said Ilsa.
I didn’t see what she did to him next. I heard it. I’ll tell you later.
Skritch went nowhere. He went flat along the wall, in the dark under the lamps, where nobody was looking, the way he’d gone across the fish market. Towards the Door. Towards a chain, and a ring, and a lock the size of a walnut.
And Vosk came across the floor at me, not fast, with his lamp down on a rock behind him, the way he’d done it before.
“Light,” I said. “Two. Now.”
The lad with the bad arm was nearest. He didn’t ask. He grabbed two of the dropped lamps off the floor and said the word at them, the lamp-word, the one bit of magic nearly everyone’s got. Not me. I’ve tried. They lit, and the gold sparks lifted off them in the cold.
I took both.
Right hand, left hand. Fire in each fist. Cold to both elbows, and Vosk was five paces off and I had an apple of fire in each hand and he looked at them and wheezed, and the wheeze was a laugh.
“Throw them, then.”
I didn’t.
“Go on, lad. You have to throw them. I’ve been told.”
Three paces. I stood still. I’ve never stood so still in my life.
His hand came for my collar.
I didn’t drop.
I’d like you to understand what that cost. Every bit of me wanted to drop. Aldo taught me to drop. I’d dropped on the harbour wall and got clean away, and I’d dropped in the cave and Vosk had had his other hand ready under my arm, because he’d learned. So I didn’t. I let him have the collar, and his other hand went under my arm for a boy who’d gone, and found a boy who hadn’t, and for one second, one, he didn’t know what I was doing.
Neither did anyone else. That was the point.
“Don’t look!” I shouted. To Ilsa. To Skritch. To all of them.
And I shut my eyes, and I brought my hands together in front of his face.
Recipe number one. Fire and fire. BIG flash. Do not repeat.
I repeated it.
I didn’t see it. I had my eyes shut. I felt it, the way you feel a door slam when you’re standing next to it, a wall of light and heat that hit me in the face with my eyes closed and still went white, and a sound like the whole hall clapping once, and I was on my back on the rock and so was Vosk.
My ears were ringing. There was a smell of burnt hair, and I’m going to leave that there.
I got up. The floor went sideways and I waited for it and it came back.
Vosk was on his knees with both hands over his face. The leather mask was smoking at the edge. He was wheezing, and the wheezing was words, and the words were all the one I’m not going to write down. He got one hand off his face and reached out with it, and it went past me by a yard. He couldn’t see. He’d had his eye open, one inch from the biggest flash I’d ever made, and he’d been told what I could do, and nobody had told him that, because nobody knew it but Ilsa and me, and it was on a list in my head under do not repeat.
A lad with a shovel came and stood over him. That was the end of Vosk, for the moment.
I’d like to tell you I felt clever. I felt sick, and deaf, and I had nothing in either hand, and I’d have given a lot for a wall to lean on.
“Wick!”
Ilsa, from the far side. I turned round.
The wizard with the beard didn’t have a beard any more. He had something that had been a beard, going up in a sheet of gold, and he was running in circles with his hands at his chin, and the tall one was standing with his mouth open and a glim in his hand and snow all down the front of him, where a jar had hit him. Ilsa was standing between them with a flame on each palm, breathing hard, with one sleeve and snow in her hair and a look on her face I’d never seen.
“By accident?” I said.
“No,” said Ilsa. “Not this time.”
Skritch had got to the Door.
I saw him when I turned back. A small wet shape at Aldo’s feet, under the great breathing curve of the stone, with the frost round him and his fur going white at the tips, and he had the chain in one hand and the padlock in the other and the key in his teeth.
Nobody had seen him. Everybody was looking at the wrong things. That’s the whole of Skritch.
He took the key out of his teeth. He put it in the lock.
I was running by then. I didn’t know I was. The floor was still going sideways and I ran across it anyway, past the brazier, past the old man in his robe, who turned his head and watched me go by like I was weather.
Skritch turned the key.
Click.
I heard it. Over the ringing in my ears and the grinding of the stone, I heard a lock the size of a walnut open, and Skritch’s face came up, and he said, to me, to the hall, to the Door, “Best bit,” and the chain fell off my brother’s ankle onto the rock.
Then Skritch pulled.
He got Aldo round the waist and pulled with his whole body, and Aldo didn’t move. Not an inch. His hand was on the stone and the stone had him. The frost had grown over his fingers like a glove, white and thick, and it had grown up the carved hand and into it, and I understood, standing there, that you couldn’t just lift him off. The Door had hold. It had been drinking him since before we’d heard him, and it wasn’t done.
“Wicky.” His mouth moved. Nothing much came out. “Don’t.”
I didn’t listen. You know that by now.
I got his free hand. His left. I got it in both of mine, and it was as cold as the stone, and I set my boots on the rock and I pulled.
And I meant it.
That’s the thing. That’s the whole thing. I want to be very clear, because I’ve had a long time to think about it since. I meant it with everything I had. Get him off. Get him out. Let him GO. I meant it the way you mean a thing when it’s your brother and you’ve walked three days and gone down a stair with three crosses on it and sat in a cell and been given a sweet by the man who put him there.
Two of one blood. One on the stone and one holding on to him, which turned out to be near enough. Meaning it.
Nobody had said what it was.
I’d meant let go. A door only knows two words, and it heard open.
The grinding stopped.
For one second the whole hall was quiet, and I thought: I’ve done it, it’s stopped, he’s coming off—
Then it turned.
Not a crack. Not a hand’s width. The whole stone, the size of a house, went in, away from us, into the dark, with a sound I felt in my teeth and my knees and the two fingers I can’t feel, and the frost on it blew off in a wave across the hall, and every lamp on every wall went out at once.
Not dimmed. Out. The braziers went out. The jars went out. The only light left was Ilsa, across the hall, with two flames up on two palms, and I watched them lean.
And in the dark where the Door had been, there was a bigger dark.
It came out. All of it. Dogs, and deer, and tall thin things that weren’t either, pouring out of the black like water out of a broken gate, grey and silent and with the cold running ahead of them, and they went past the old man in his robe on both sides like a river going round a post. They didn’t touch him. He stood in the middle of it with his book under his arm and his face turned up, and he was smiling.
“Thank you,” said Professor Quill. “Oh, thank you.”
I couldn’t let go.
I tried. I had Aldo’s hand in both of mine and the cold had come up through his hand into mine and we were one thing now, him on the stone, me on him, and the Door drinking through the both of us like a man drinking through a straw.
And then, a long way back, past the dogs and the deer, in the black behind the black, something turned round.
I can’t tell you what it was. I didn’t see it. There was nothing to see. But I knew the exact moment it looked at me, because everything in me went still, the way a mouse goes still, and I knew that it was bigger than the Door, and older than the Thornwood, and it had been waiting a very long time for somebody to open the door and stand in it.
I’ve been looked at by Vosk. I’ve been looked at by a stag with no eyes. I’ve been looked at by Hettie when I broke a barrel.
None of them looked at me like that. Like I was food that had walked in on its own.
Somewhere behind me, Ilsa was shouting my name.
I couldn’t have told you which way behind was.