A thing I’ve learned about old doors: when you shut one, everything that was leaning on it falls over.
The roof of the hall came down in pieces. Not all at once. A crack, and a block the size of a barrel dropped into the river with a smack, and then another one, and the lamps on the walls started going out, not from cold this time, just from being hit by rocks.
“Stair,” said Ilsa.
“Stair,” said Skritch, who was already on it.
We went up a hundred steps with a river coming down them. Aldo in front, because Aldo was always in front, with his chain gone and his legs like string and me under one of his arms. Ilsa behind with a flame up. The lads behind her, and two of them had Vosk between them, with his hands over his eye and his mask gone. Nobody had said leave him. Somebody had said, “The watch’ll want him,” and that was that.
The cave at the top was shaking. The great whale’s back of the Door was going down, into the floor, into the hole they’d dug round it for a year, like something sinking back into the sea where it belonged. The iron gate was gone. Just a hole in the wall and the river pouring out of it.
“Skritch did that,” said Skritch, to the lads, in case they’d missed it.
We came up the ramp of the pit into daylight.
Real daylight. I want you to understand that. Not green, not lamp, not a glim in a jar. The sun was coming up over the Thornwood, red, through the thorns, and the pit was full of dust and the ruins were groaning all round us, and I stood on the rim with my brother’s arm over my shoulder and my face in the first bit of sun I’d seen in two days and I thought: dawn. He said dawn.
Well. He got one.
We walked out the way we’d come in, past the hollow oak, past the slab in the moss with Aldo’s v on it. As we went by, from somewhere under it, there was a crunch.
We walked a bit faster. All of us. Nobody had shut the bowl door, and nobody was going back to. Nobody said statue.
I’m going to go quick now, because the rest of the way home was walking, and you’ve had enough walking.
The thornwolves didn’t come. Ilsa said it was the smell of the lads. The lads said it was the smell of Ilsa. The ferrywoman was on her raft on the far bank, and she looked at us coming out of the trees, two kids, a man with a beard who said it wasn’t, an otter, eight thin men and one blind man with a bag on his head, and she said, “You again,” and then, “Penny each.”
“He’s paying,” said Ilsa, and pointed at Vosk.
He did, in the end. He had a purse. Skritch found it.
Two days on the road. On the second day the fog came up to meet us, grey and smelling of fish, and I’d never been so pleased to not see anything. Except the Library on its hill, which you can always see, and the window under the dome, which was dark. The land gate. The watchman asleep in his box. We woke him up and gave him Vosk, and three real watchmen came, in coats that had been through three men and were going through a fourth, and Ilsa looked at the coats and said, “Filthy. Look at them,” like it was the best thing she’d ever seen.
They took Vosk away. He didn’t say anything. He’d stopped wheezing words a day ago. The last thing I heard him say was on the road, in the dark, to nobody: “I was told.”
The lads went to their own doors. The one with the bad arm shook Aldo’s hand, and then mine, and then, after a bit of thought, Skritch’s.
And we went down the hill to the Drowned Lantern.
Hettie was in the doorway with her arms folded.
Of course she was. It was a week since I’d gone over the yard wall in my socks. She’d have been in that doorway every night, I knew it the way I know the tide, and there she was, with her plait and her folded arms, looking at four of us coming down the street, and at the one in the middle, who was taller than she remembered.
She didn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then she unfolded her arms and took a piece of paper out of her apron and read it out.
“Gone to get Aldo. Back soon. Don’t sell my bed.”
“I was in a hurry,” I said.
“Three goes, this took you. I found the other two in the grate.” She folded it up and put it back. “I’m going to ask. Not now. But I’m going to ask, Wick Marsh, and you’re going to tell me, and it’s going to take all night.” She looked at Aldo. “You’ve a beard.”
“It’s not a—”
“It’s a beard, love. There’s soup.”
And she laughed. The harbour laugh, the one you can hear from the water, and she got hold of Aldo and I’m not going to tell you about that either, except that Skritch said afterwards it was the first time he’d ever seen a dry-folk cry upwards.
Skritch went home the next morning. By the grate in the yard.
He came back that night and said the dim hadn’t come. First night in a year. The mushrooms had stayed blue the whole way to the end of the cave, and nobody had had to back up along the quay, and Gran had sat in the mouth of her boat and looked at him with the black eye and said, “It came so,” and gone back to her knitting.
“They sang anyway,” said Skritch. “All night. Not because. Just sang.”
“That’s good.”
“Skritch sang loudest.” He thought about it. “Skritch sang best. Loudest is Gran.”
He’d got a new coat. I don’t know where. I didn’t ask.
The man from the Guild came on the fourth day.
Grey coat, brass buttons, a beard that was a good deal shorter on one side than the other, and he stood in the bar at the Drowned Lantern with his hat in his hands and looked at Ilsa like she was a letter he’d rather not open.
The ferrywoman had been talking. A boy froze my river. A girl set fire to two wizards. It had gone up the hill, the way things do, and it had gone through the brass doors, and here he was.
“The Guild,” he said, “is prepared to review your case.”
“Is it,” said Ilsa.
“In light of recent events. Your place could be restored. Under supervision.”
Ilsa looked at him for a while. At the beard. At the short side of the beard. I watched her look at it and I watched her think about it, and I thought: she’s going to say yes, this is what she wanted, this is the whole thing she wanted.
“No, thank you,” said Ilsa.
“I beg your—”
“I’ve got a job.”
She hadn’t. Not then. But Aldo was at the table behind her with a bowl of Hettie’s soup, and I was on the stairs, and Skritch was under the table, and the Guild man looked at all of us and put his hat on and went, and when the door shut Hettie said, from behind the bar, “What job?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Ilsa. “Something with fire.”
Here’s how we got a name. I want it written down, because they’ll all tell it differently.
It was that night, round Hettie’s kitchen table. Aldo said we should be finders. Things people had lost, places people couldn’t get to, old maps. He knew about old maps. Ilsa put her half on the table next to mine, and he put them together the way I had on the quay. Skritch said he was already a finder and had been for years, and that Skritch and Associates was a good name, and nobody liked it but Skritch. Ilsa said Marsh Brothers was out, because she wasn’t a Marsh and she wasn’t a brother, and Aldo said fine, what then, and everybody looked at me.
I looked at the door. At the bracket over it, through the window, where the old brass lantern hung, empty and dark.
“The Lantern Company,” I said.
“That’s my sign,” said Hettie.
“We’ll pay rent.”
“You’ll pay double rent, and you’ll roll the barrels, and your brother’ll mend the cellar hatch that something came up through, and the otter stays out of the pantry.” She folded her arms. “The Lantern Company. Fine. It’s a stupid name.”
“It’s a good name,” said Skritch.
“Everyone knows,” I said.
My birthday was the Sunday after.
I’m fourteen. I’d like that noted. It happened in a kitchen, with a cake, and Hettie had put fourteen candles on it, and Ilsa said she’d light them.
“Small,” I said.
“I know small.”
“Ilsa. Small.”
She said the word. The whole top of the cake went up like a bonfire, fourteen candles at once and most of the icing, and Hettie said a word that the Guild had definitely not taught her, and Aldo laughed so hard he had to put his head on the table.
I’d had eyebrows for about a week. I’d been quite proud of them. I’d like to say they survived.
The cake was fine underneath. Hettie’s cakes always are.
We did the lantern at dusk.
Hettie held the ladder. She’d said she wasn’t going to ask, and she didn’t, she just held it, with her arms not folded for once. Aldo stood in the street with Skritch on his shoulders, because Skritch wanted to see and Aldo is tall now. Ilsa came up the ladder behind me, adequately.
The lantern was where it had always been. Brass, green with age, full of seawater that was just seawater. Dark. The step under it black. I’d stood on that step a thousand times and never once looked up, and then one night it had gone out, and I’d said I meant to get it one back.
“Go on,” said Ilsa.
She held her hand over mine. Palm down, an inch above. She said the word, and the glim came up between us, white, and she let it go the slow way, and it came down onto my palm like snow by a fire, and it was warm.
I put my hand flat on the brass.
I didn’t grab. I didn’t throw. I let it go the way you let a thing sink into a bowl, the way it had sunk into the sun bowl on a door under a forest, and it went down through the brass and into the water, and the water took it.
Green. Soft, pale green, like the sea on a sunny day, coming up from the bottom of the lantern and filling it to the top and spilling out through the glass onto the step, and the first few cobbles, same as it always had.
Down in the street, Skritch said, “Ohhh,” which is three more letters than Ilsa’s ever managed.
I tapped the glass with my left hand. Two fingers. The little one and the one next to it. White to the knuckle, and nothing. They’re not coming back. I’ve stopped asking.
Then they’re the price. The old man had been right about that one. I’d paid it before I knew what I was buying, and what I’d bought was standing in the street looking up at a green light with an otter on his shoulders.
I’d pay it again. I’d like that noted too.
Last thing.
That night I couldn’t sleep, so I went up on the roof, the way I do, out of the attic window and up the slates to the ridge, and Aldo was already there.
He’d found my way up. Course he had. He was sitting on the ridge with his legs either side of it and the fog below him and the whole of Saltmire under that, all its roofs and its lamps and its one green light over one door, and I sat down behind him and we didn’t say anything for a while.
“I read the diary,” I said. “All of it.”
“I know you did.”
“Some of it’s yours.”
“Some of it’s yours now.” He didn’t turn round. “The note. At the warren. The torn one. You’ve been wanting to ask.”
“Who tore it?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I was out of paper, Wicky. That’s what it says. I’m out of. I was going to write paper and there wasn’t any paper left to write it on.” He shrugged. “So I tore the blank bit off to use for the next one, and then there wasn’t a next one. It was a long week.”
I sat there.
“I thought a villain tore that.”
“Your brother tore that.”
“I thought about it for days—”
“That’s what a brother’s for.”
I’d have hit him, but he’s bigger than me now, and he’d have let me, which is worse.
And then, sitting there, with the fog below us and the lantern green at the bottom of it, I felt it.
Not in my hands. In the middle of me, where the morning had been. A long way down. Under the pub, under the street, under the Low Streets and the blue mushrooms and the old harbour where the otters sing. Right at the bottom of everything.
Something cold.
Faint. Small. The way the lantern had flickered, that first night, before it went out. Like a thing a very long way under the city turning over in its sleep.
Aldo had gone still in front of me. I saw his shoulders go.
“You felt that,” he said.
“No.”
“Liar.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a bit. Then he said, “The old people opened doors, the note said. Not a door.”
“I read it.”
“Doors, Wicky.”
I looked down at the fog. At the one green light. I thought about Ilsa asleep on the kitchen floor, and Skritch somewhere under us with a new coat and a tin button and a key he wouldn’t give back, and a company with a stupid name, and I found out that I was grinning. I couldn’t have told you why.
“There’s another one,” I said. “Under the city. Isn’t there.”
“Probably.”
“Good,” I said.
Look. I know how that sounds.
I started counting anyway.