Here’s what it’s like to be drunk by a door.
It’s not pain. It’s the opposite. It’s everything going quiet. The ringing in my ears went, and then the cold in my hands went, and then the floor, and the hall, and the shouting, and I stood there holding my brother’s hand with the dark coming out of the stone and I thought: oh. This is fine. This is actually fine.
That’s how it gets you. It doesn’t hurt. It just makes you not mind.
The grey was coming in at the edges of my eyes. In the grey I could see Ilsa’s two flames, a long way off, leaning, and dogs between us, more than I could count, and the lads’ lamps all dead, and the lads backing up to the stair with their shovels. Skritch had gone. I couldn’t see Skritch anywhere.
Aldo’s hand in mine was like holding a stone.
And then, from inside the Door, from the black behind the black, somebody said my name.
“Wicky.”
Not loud. Close. The way you say it to someone who’s nearly asleep.
“Wicky. Come and rest.”
It was Mam.
It was her voice. I’d not heard it in five years and I knew it like I know my own hands. The way she said the W. The little tired laugh under it. And everything in me that was already going quiet went: yes. All right.
And then one bit of me, a small bit, the bit that counts, said: she never once said rest.
Not once. Mam said up you get. Mam said you’ll live. Mam said never show anyone, Wicky, people will want it, with her hands on my shoulders. Mam was a mudflat woman with two boys and a bad chest, and nobody in that house ever got to rest.
And Wicky. There was only one person alive who called me that, and the dark had been drinking him.
It had taken the name out of Aldo. It had put it in her mouth.
“No,” I said. It came out like a croak. “You’re not her.”
The voice didn’t argue. It just went on, soft, over and over, and I stopped listening, because I’d thought of something else.
Given, not taken. We’d worked it out at the top of the stair, and then I’d walked down here and grabbed anyway, because that’s what I do. I reach and I grab, and you can’t out-grab a thing the size of a house.
“Ilsa!”
I didn’t know I had that much voice left.
“Don’t throw it! GIVE it! Like the river! GIVE it to me!”
She heard me. I saw her head come up.
She had a dozen dogs between us, and her two flames leaning towards them and going blue at the tips. And she did the thing Ilsa does, which is not waste time.
She let them go. She put her hand in her pocket and came out with a jar and smashed it on the floor at her feet.
Light. A glim the size of a barrel, white, going up out of the broken glass, and every dog in front of her flinched back, the way they had in the pub, and there was a path through them for the time it took the light to lean.
It was enough. She came through it running.
She got to me and she didn’t say anything. She stood in front of me with the thing in the dark looking over my shoulder, and she put her hand up, flat, and said the word, and the flame came up on her palm.
It was the biggest one I’d ever seen her make. There was a forest of it. It stood up off her hand taller than she was and lit the whole hall gold, and the dogs went back from it, and the thing in the dark stopped looking at me for one second and looked at her.
Then she let it go. Slowly. Like she was setting something down.
The sparks didn’t lift. They sank. They came down onto me, gold and soft and slow, like snow that had been by a fire, and they didn’t go into my hands, because my hands were full. They went into the middle of me. Where the cold had been.
Warm.
Not like tea. Like a kitchen. Like Hettie’s kitchen with the pot on, and the floor by the fire, and two plates out instead of one.
The grey went back from the edges of my eyes. I could see the hall.
“By the river,” said Ilsa. “You walked right past it.”
“I had a lot on.”
The lads couldn’t get near. Eight of them at the foot of the stair with the dogs between, and their lamps all out in their hands, and not a thing a shovel can do to something you can put a frying pan through.
The one with the bad arm looked at his lamp. Then he looked at me, over the backs of a dozen grey dogs.
“He lit the way for me once,” he said. “In the dark. With that.”
He said the word. The lamp-word. The one bit of magic nearly everybody’s got, and his lamp lit, and the nearest dog turned its no-face to it and the flame leaned and went blue.
He didn’t care. He held it out. Not at the dog. At me.
Then the one next to him said it. Then the next. Eight lamps, lit, leaning, dying, held out across a hall full of the Quiet, and the flames went out one by one and the sparks didn’t lift.
They came to me. Gold, across the whole hall, through the dogs, who couldn’t see them, slow as dandelion seeds. Into the middle of me.
Warm.
Light, given. I had fire in me and I had light in me, and I had Aldo’s hand, and the thing in the dark had gone very still.
“Skritch!”
I’d seen him. Not in the hall. At the top of the stair, a hundred steps up, a small dark shape against the lamplight from the cave, going the wrong way.
Running. I thought he was running.
I’d like it on record that I thought that for about a second and a half, and that I’ve been ashamed of it since.
The sound came first. Through the rock. A roar, like the one I’d felt in my chest at the iron gate, except the gate wasn’t there any more.
Then the river came down the stair.
All of it. The whole black river that ran under the ruins, let loose by one wet otter who’d gone up a hundred steps while the rock was already cracking, and found the iron gate half shaken out of its wall by the Door’s turning, and got into the water behind it and kicked out the pins that were all that still held it. The river took the gate. Then it came down a hundred steps like a thrown bucket the size of a street, and it hit the floor of the hall and went everywhere.
It hit the dogs and they came apart like grey rags and went spinning. It hit the lads and they went down in a row and came up swearing. It hit Ilsa and me and the Door, and it was round our knees, roaring, freezing, and it was the best thing I’d ever felt.
Because in it was the song.
Skritch was on the top step, with the river going past him on both sides and his fur flat, and he was singing. One note. The long low Skitter note, the one his people had sung every night so the dark would know they were still there, and the river had it. It carried it. It was in the water round my legs the way it had been in the water under the Low Streets, humming up into my teeth, and over the water, turning, slow, were sparks.
Not river-blue. Blue-green. The colour of the mushrooms. I’d never seen them before. I’d never been standing in the song before.
“Skritch hasn’t got any!” he shouted, down the stair, over the roar. “Skritch has got a river!”
He wasn’t throwing it. He was giving it. The whole river, and the song in it. It was all he had.
The sparks came to me through the water, heavy and cold and blue, and they went into the middle of me, and they were warm. Warm like the harbour on the one hot day a year. Warm like a tide coming in.
Fire. Light. River.
And my brother’s hand in mine, as cold as the stone it was stuck to.
“Aldo.”
He turned his head. It took him a long time. His face was white to the lips.
“It’s been pouring into you since they put you on it,” I said. “All of it. The cold. Everything it’s got. You’re full of it.”
His mouth moved. “Can’t—”
“Don’t fight it. Give it to me. On purpose. Like Ilsa. Like you’re setting it down.”
He looked at me. My bossy brother, who’d walked back up to Vosk when he could’ve run, because they’d have come to Saltmire for me.
He didn’t say anything. He just stopped holding on.
I felt it come. Through his hand into mine, all the frost the Door had put into him, white and old and enormous, and it should have killed me.
It was warm.
Given, not taken. Even that. Even that was warm.
RECIPES (all of them)
- Fire + fire = BIG flash. Lost eyebrows. Do not repeat. (Repeated once. Worth it.)
- 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.
- Fire + light + river + frost, all GIVEN = MORNING. The real one. Doesn’t go in your hands. Doesn’t hurt. Shuts doors. (Opening them is free. Nobody tells you that.)
I’ll try to tell you what it looked like.
It was the mudflats. At first light. The sun coming up out of the sea behind the fog, and the frost on the mud going gold, and the whole flat world lit from the side, the way it is on a Sunday morning when you’ve walked out to look at a rotten post. It was that. In the middle of me. Not in my hands. My hands were just hands.
I’d been given a morning.
The dogs went back from it. Not from a line on the floor. From me. The whole hall of them went backwards into the dark they’d come from, and the thing behind the dark turned its face away, the way you do when somebody opens the shutters.
“Aldo,” I said. “Both hands.”
He understood. He’d always been quicker than me.
His right hand was on the left carved hand. I put my right hand, with the cold all gone out of it, flat on the other one.
Two hands. Two of one blood.
Opening had been easy. Things fall open. Shutting a thing that’s been drinking you takes something to shut it with, and I had it now.
“Mean it,” said Aldo.
“I’m counting.”
“What?”
“I count when I’m scared. You said. Ten.”
“Wicky—”
“Nine. Eight.”
And he was counting with me. Under his breath, the way he said I did. Seven. Six. Ilsa behind us with her hand on my back, and the river round our knees, and eight lamps coming back on across the hall one by one as the lads found the word again, and Skritch’s note coming down the stair over the roar of the water.
Five. Four.
Shut. I meant it. I meant it more than I’d meant the other thing. Shut, and stay shut, and let the lamps burn, and let the otters sing because they want to and not because they have to.
Three.
The stone moved under my hand.
Two.
It turned. Back. The way it had come, with the grinding in my teeth, and the dark on the other side going narrower, narrower, the crack closing like an eye.
And a man walked past us into it.
He’d taken the robe off. He was just an old man in a black coat with sagging pockets, with a book under his arm, and he walked past the three of us without looking, slowly, on his stick, through the river, into the dark, and the last of the Quiet went round him on both sides like fog round a lamp-post and didn’t touch him.
I understood it then. He’d been cold for years. He’d said so. He’d been cold so long they thought he was one of theirs.
Maybe he was, by then.
He stopped in the crack, with about a yard of it left, and turned round, and all the lines of his face went the way they always had.
“I did say,” said Professor Quill, “that I’d not like it to be a boy’s funeral. I’d like that remembered too.”
Then, quieter, like he was mentioning the weather:
“Tell them I was careful.”
And he stepped back, and the dark took him, and I said, “One,” and the Door shut.
Silence.
Real silence. Not the Quiet kind. The river had stopped roaring and was just running, finding the low places, going somewhere. The lamps were burning straight up. My brother’s hand came off the stone like a hand coming off a table, and he looked at it, and he sat down in the water.
I sat down next to him.
Ilsa sat down next to me, and put her forehead on my shoulder, and said, into my shirt, “You said mean it and then you counted.”
“It worked.”
“It did work,” she said, and her voice cracked right down the middle. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
Skritch came down the stair. Slowly. He’d stopped singing and his voice was a thread and he walked through the water like it was a street he owned, and he got to us and sat down in it with his tail across all our boots.
“Best bit,” he said, hoarse.
“That was the lock.”
“Skritch has decided,” said Skritch, “that there were two.”
I looked at the Door. Shut. Grey. The frost on it already going soft and running, like a window on a morning when the fire’s been lit. No breathing.
Then it cracked.
Not the Door. The roof.