I got to seven.
Then the thing in the street moved, and I stopped counting, because it was moving towards the door.
It didn’t walk. I want to be clear about that. Nothing about it went up and down the way legs do. It just got nearer, the way fog gets nearer, and the frost on my window went from a few feathers in the corner to a solid white sheet while I watched.
I scraped a hole in it with my thumbnail. The street was black. The grey shape was on the step.
Right under the dead lantern. Right outside the only door.
I went for the ladder.
Four flights down in the dark, in my socks, with my breath going out in front of me like I was running through my own little cloud. Every stair was colder than the one before. By the bottom I could feel the cold coming up through my feet like I was standing on the mudflats.
The kitchen first. Ilsa was in the kitchen.
I came through the kitchen door and she was already sitting up in her blanket with her hair on end.
“Why is it cold?” she said. “Why is the fire like that?”
The fire in the hearth was down to one red eye. Not burnt out. Pressed down. Like something was sitting on it.
“There’s something outside,” I said. “It put the lantern out.”
“Nothing puts the lantern out.”
“Then nothing’s outside,” I said, “and it’s standing on the step.”
She got up. She didn’t argue. I’ll say that for Ilsa. When it matters, she doesn’t waste time.
We went through into the bar.
The bar at night is just tables and the smell of beer and the big front door with the iron bar across it. We never light it after closing.
We didn’t need to. The frost was lighting it.
It was growing across the inside of the door, white and thick and spreading out from the middle like a hand opening. The iron bar had gone white. The floor in front of the door had gone white. Little feathers of it were running out across the boards towards us, and I could hear them. A tiny crackling, like someone very far away screwing up paper.
Then the cellar hatch moved.
It’s in the floor behind the bar. It leads down to the barrels, and the barrels come in from the yard, and the yard door has a bolt that I’d put across myself at sunset.
The hatch lifted an inch and settled. Lifted again.
Nothing came up the ladder. Nothing had to. The hatch just opened, slowly, all the way, and the thing that came out was a dog.
I’m calling it a dog because it was the shape of one. It was grey. Not grey fur. Grey all the way through, like it had been drawn in pencil and someone had rubbed half of it out. No eyes. Nothing where the eyes would be. It came up out of the hatch without climbing and stood on the floor behind the bar and it didn’t breathe. I was breathing clouds. It wasn’t breathing at all.
Where its feet touched the boards, the frost ran out from them.
A second one came up behind it.
“Ilsa,” I said.
“I know.”
“Do something.”
“I’m doing something.”
She put her hand up and said the word, and the flame stood up out of her palm.
The dog turned its no-face towards it.
And the flame leaned. That’s the only word. It leaned towards the dog like a candle in a draught, stretched out long and thin, went blue, went small, and went out. Ilsa stared at her empty hand.
“It drank it,” she said. “It drank it.”
But I wasn’t looking at her hand. I was looking above it. Because the flame was gone, but the sparks weren’t. Gold, dozens of them, lifting off her palm like nothing had happened.
The dogs couldn’t see those either.
I grabbed.
Cold up to the elbow, fast, and fire in my fist, and I threw it before I’d even thought about where. It hit the first dog in the chest.
It did something. The dog went backwards and sort of rippled, like a reflection when you drop a stone in it, and for a second I could see the barrels through it. Then it pulled itself back together and came on. Slower. But on.
“Again,” said Ilsa. “Again, again—”
She cast. It drank. I caught, with the other hand. I threw. The second dog rippled and came on.
And a third one came up out of the hatch.
“What in the name of all the saints in the sea,” said a voice from the stairs, “is going on in my pub?”
Hettie. In her nightgown, with her hair in a plait as thick as a rope, and in her right hand the big iron frying pan from the kitchen.
She looked at the frost. She looked at the dogs. She looked at me, with my white hand and my fist full of fire.
I waited for her to scream.
She didn’t scream. She came down the last three stairs, walked up to the nearest dog, and hit it with the frying pan.
The pan went straight through it. There was a sound like a sheet tearing, and the dog came apart into grey rags, and then the rags slid back together and it was a dog again, and it turned its no-face towards her.
“Right,” said Hettie. She didn’t put the pan down. “Right.”
She backed up until she was beside us. The dogs were coming round the end of the bar, all three, not fast, not slow, the frost running ahead of them across the floor like it was clearing a path.
“My mother said the lantern was there to keep something out,” said Hettie quietly. “I thought it was a story she told drunks.”
“It’s in a book,” said Ilsa. Her voice had gone high and fast. “There’s a room at the Guild nobody’s allowed in. I got in twice. There’s a book about the old city, the one underneath, and there’s a page about these. Lamps go dim. Frost comes. They drink light. They drink warm.”
“What does it call them?” I said.
“The Quiet.”
Nobody said anything for a second. It’s a good name. It’s exactly the right name. That’s what made it horrible.
“Does the book say how to stop them?” said Hettie.
“It says they hate the sun.”
“It’s midnight.”
“I know it’s midnight.”
The sun. I looked at the fire in my hand, orange and roaring with no sound. The dogs had drunk the fire off Ilsa’s palm like it was soup. But the sun isn’t fire. Not really. The sun is light.
“Ilsa,” I said. “Can you do a light?”
“A glim? That’s the first thing they—” She saw my face. “Yes. Yes. Hang on.”
She cupped her left hand and said a different word, and a ball of white light the size of an egg sat in her palm and lit the whole bar.
All three dogs flinched. Properly flinched, backwards, like I’d thrown the fire again. The frost at their feet stopped spreading.
Then the light started to lean.
“Let it go,” I said. “Let it go now.”
She closed her hand. The light went out. And above her palm, white sparks, slow and cold and bright, drifting.
I still had the fire in my right hand. I reached out with my left.
The white sparks poured in. The cold went up my left arm to meet the cold in my right, and for a second I couldn’t feel my chest. I had two things. Fire in one fist and a cold white glow in the other, like I’d caught a bit of the moon.
Recipe one had cost me my eyebrows. I did think about that.
“Do it,” said Ilsa.
I brought my hands together.
There was no flash. There was no bang. The two things touched and became one thing, and the one thing was white. Not white like the light. White like the sun on the sea at noon, white so bright it had edges, and it sat in my hands and burned nothing and the whole bar went the colour of day.
The dogs made a sound.
It was the first sound they’d made. It wasn’t a bark or a growl. It was like steam coming off a pan.
I threw it at the middle one.
It didn’t ripple. It just went. The white fire hit it and it came apart like a thing made of paper when you drop it on a stove, curling up and going to nothing, and there wasn’t even any ash. The frost under where it had stood turned to water.
The other two were already going backwards. Back round the bar. Back towards the hatch. Not fast. They couldn’t go fast. But they went, and the white fire was still burning on the floorboards where the middle one had been, not spreading, not catching, just sitting there like a dropped piece of noon.
Hettie stepped forward, pan up, and the last dog went down the hatch like water going down a drain.
The hatch shut.
The frost on the door stopped. Then, slowly, it began to melt and run.
Outside, down the street, I heard a tiny sound. The far lamp at the corner, coming back on with a pop. Then the near one.
The thing on the step was gone. I knew it without looking. The cold had gone out of the floor.
I sat down on the boards, because my legs decided it for me, and I put my hands in my armpits, and I shook.
RECIPES (so far)
- Fire + fire = BIG flash. Lost eyebrows. Do not repeat.
- Fire + light = WHITE fire. Burns the Quiet. Burns nothing else. Lasts till morning.
Hettie made tea. That’s what Hettie does.
She stood the frying pan against the hearth, and she put the kettle on the fire, which had come back up like nothing had happened, and she didn’t say one word until there was a cup in front of each of us. Behind the bar, the white fire sat on the floorboards, small and quiet, and burned nothing. It was still there at dawn. Then it just wasn’t.
Then she looked at my hands.
“I’m not going to ask,” she said.
“Hettie—”
“Your mam was a close one as well. Never said two words about where you two came from. I didn’t ask her, and I’m not asking you.” She sat down heavily. “But I’ll say this. Whatever that was, it came for this house. And this house is mine. So whatever you’re doing, you do it quick, and you do it careful, and you don’t do it alone.”
“I’m not alone,” I said. “I’ve got Ilsa.”
Ilsa looked at me over her tea. I’d like to tell you she smiled. She didn’t. But she didn’t say anything sarcastic either, which for Ilsa is almost the same thing.
We got the lantern down at first light.
Hettie held the ladder. I went up. The bracket was rusted and the lantern was heavier than it looked, and the water in it sloshed about, cloudy green, with a hundred years of sea-silt at the bottom. I’ll be honest: it felt wrong taking it down. Like taking the door off.
We carried it into the yard and set it on the barrel-ramp.
“Look at the bottom,” I said.
There’s a brass cap on the top with a hinge. It hadn’t been opened in my lifetime. Ilsa worked at it with her knife and swore at it in two languages. I only knew one of them. It was enough. Then it came up with a crack, and the smell that came out was the smell of the sea, old and strong and strange.
We tipped it, slowly, into a bucket. Water. Water. Green silt, sliding out in a sludge.
And at the very bottom, in the last of the silt, something that clicked against the brass.
I put my fingers in and brought it out.
A bead. Glass, dark green, the size of a hazelnut, with a hole through it like it had come off a string. I rubbed it clean on my shirt and held it up to the light.
It was scratched. Somebody had sat with a needle and scratched tiny lines into the glass, so small you had to turn it to see them.
On one side, a picture. An open book, and in the middle of the book, an eye.
On the other side, our marks.
v ||| #
Down. Three. Hidden.
“I know that,” said Ilsa. She was looking at the book with the eye. “I know that picture. It’s on the gates.”
“What gates?”
“The Library. Up the hill. The big round one with the dome. That’s its mark, it’s carved over the gates and stamped in all the books.” She frowned. “Your brother went to the Library?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s the one place in Saltmire that won’t let us in. There’s a man on the door whose whole job is to say no to people like us. I tried four times when I was at the Guild. They don’t even let apprentices in. Kids, mudflats, Guild coat, doesn’t matter. No.”
I turned the bead over in my white fingers. Down. Three. Hidden. Inside the one building in the city that wouldn’t open its door to me.
“Then we won’t use the door,” I said.