“Otters eat fish,” said Ilsa.
“I know otters eat fish.”
“So. Fish market.”
It was the next morning and we were walking down to the harbour, and I’d been awake half the night with the half-map on my chest, and this was the best idea either of us had.
I’d like to say I argued. But where do otters sing? Nowhere. Otters don’t sing. There aren’t even otters in Saltmire, not real ones, not since the river got so filthy. So we went to the fish market, because it was that or stand in the attic saying “otters” at each other.
The fish market is a long shed on the quay, open on both sides, and at eight in the morning it is the loudest place in the world. Everyone’s shouting. Fish, prices, insults, the lot. The floor’s wet and the gulls come in under the roof and nobody looks where they’re going.
We walked up and down it twice.
There were no otters. There was a woman selling eels out of a barrel, singing, which Ilsa got quite excited about until we listened to the words.
“Ask someone,” said Ilsa.
“Ask them what? ‘Excuse me, where do the otters sing?’”
“Yes.”
So I did. I asked the eel woman. She looked at me and said, “When they’re drunk, love, same as everyone,” and went back to her song.
I turned round to tell Ilsa, and somebody bumped into me.
It was a kid. Smaller than me, in a coat three sizes too big with the hood up, and he went past me low and quick, and he said “sorry, sorry” in a funny high voice, and he was gone into the crowd.
I put my hand on my shirt.
The map was gone.
“Hey!”
I was already running. Ilsa was already running beside me, because Ilsa doesn’t ask questions when there’s running to do. The hood was ahead of us, bobbing between legs and baskets, and it was fast. It didn’t run like a kid. It went low, almost on all fours when it ducked under a stall, and it came up the other side without slowing.
Out the end of the shed. Along the quay. People shouting at us. The hood went left into an alley I knew, and I knew it had no way out except a drain, and I thought: got you.
The hood went down the drain.
I don’t mean it fell. I mean there’s an iron grate in the alley floor, and it was pulled up and leaning, and the hood went down the hole under it like a rat going into a wall.
I stopped at the edge. Black. The smell coming up was something I don’t want to describe.
“Well?” said Ilsa.
That was my brother’s map. The only piece of him I had that wasn’t a letter.
I went down.
There’s a ladder, and then there’s a pipe you have to crouch in, and then the pipe opens out into a tunnel you can stand up in, with water running down the middle of it and a ledge on either side. It was black. Not dark. Black. I put my hand on the wall and went by feel, and I could hear splashing ahead of us, fast, and Ilsa’s breathing behind me.
“I can’t see,” she said.
“Do a light.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
The glim came up in her hand, white, and the tunnel jumped out at us. Old brick, dripping. The water was brown. Fifty feet ahead, the hood looked back at us over its shoulder, and for one second in the white light I saw a face that wasn’t a face. Whiskers. A nose like a dog’s. Two round black eyes.
Then it ran.
We ran. The tunnel went down. It went down a lot, with steps cut in the floor that were slippery with slime, and side tunnels going off into the black, and the splashing always just ahead. And then the brick stopped.
The brick stopped, and the tunnel came out into the open, and I stopped running because I’d forgotten how.
There was a street under the city.
I knew the stories. Everyone does. Saltmire’s built on top of an older Saltmire that sank into the mud a long time ago, and the stories say you can still find bits of it under the cellars. I’d always thought that meant a few old stones.
It meant a street.
A real one. Cobbles under my boots, old and worn. Houses on either side, stone, with doorways and windows, the windows black and empty, the roofs gone, and above where the roofs should have been, instead of sky, the great dark underside of the city we’d just come from. Arches, beams, the bottoms of cellars. All of Saltmire sitting on top of this street like a lid on a box.
And it was lit.
Not by lamps. By mushrooms.
They grew on every wall. Shelves of them, like plates, big as my head, and every one of them glowing. Blue-green, soft, like the light in the drowned lantern. They lit the whole street from end to end, blue house after blue house, and the mist that hung over the cobbles glowed with it, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen and I was standing in a sewer.
“Oh,” said Ilsa again.
Twice in two days. I was starting to worry about her.
“The Low Streets,” I said. It was what the stories called it. I’d never thought it was a name for a real place.
Then I remembered the map, and the hood, and I looked, and there it was. Halfway down the street, stopped, in a doorway. Looking back at us.
“Oi!”
It ran. So did we.
It was a dead end. The street went along, and bent, and stopped at an archway full of fallen stone, and the hood was standing in front of the stones with nowhere to go.
It turned round. Slowly, this time. And it put the hood back.
It was an otter.
I’m going to say that again because I didn’t believe it either. It was an otter, the size of a kid, standing on its back legs in a stolen coat, with sleek brown fur and whiskers and a round wet nose, and one ear torn, and round its neck on a bit of string a shiny tin button. Its eyes were black and bright and absolutely terrified.
It held up the map. It held it up in a hand that was almost a paw, with little black fingers.
“Skritch didn’t take,” he said. “Skritch found.”
His voice was high and quick and clicked a bit at the edges, like he had too many teeth for it.
“You found it in my pocket,” I said.
“It was in a pocket. Things in pockets are found. Everyone knows. Skritch is not a thief. Skritch is a finder.”
“Give it back.”
He looked at the map. Looked at me. Looked at Ilsa, who had a flame standing up in one hand, which I thought was a bit much.
“Trade,” he said.
“No.”
“Small trade. Tiny.” He swallowed. I saw him swallow. “Food.”
And I looked at him properly. Not at the fur and the whiskers. At how the coat hung off him. At the way he was standing, with one arm across his middle like it hurt. At his face, which was thin, so thin you could see the skull under the fur.
He was starving. That’s what it was. He’d picked my pocket because he was starving, and he’d run because we’d chased him, and now he was backed against a wall holding my brother’s map in front of him like a shield.
Ilsa’s flame went out. She’d seen it too.
I had my lunch in my coat. Hettie had packed it. Bread, cheese, an apple, wrapped in a cloth. I’d forgotten it was there.
I took it out and held it up.
“Map first,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“Fine.” I put the lunch down on the cobbles between us and stepped back. “There. Have it. Keep the map, I don’t care.”
I did care. But I’ve been hungry. Not like that. But enough to know.
He looked at the bundle on the ground. Then he moved, so fast I barely saw it, and the bundle was gone and he was crouched against the wall with the cloth open on his knees, eating. I’ve never seen anything eat like that. The bread went in. The cheese went in. It didn’t chew, it just went.
When he was done, he sat there with the apple in both hands, and he looked at me for a long time.
Then he held out the map.
I took it. I checked it. Half a map, left side, river and road and spiky trees. Aldo’s pencil along the bottom. All there.
“Skritch owes,” he said. His voice had gone quieter. “Skritch always pays. Everyone knows.”
“Skritch,” said Ilsa. “That’s your name?”
“Skritch is Skritch.” He bit the apple. Through the apple, he said, “Skritch is Skitter. Not otter. Dry-folk always say otter. Otter is an animal. Skitter has pockets.”
I laughed. Skritch looked offended, and then he patted the front of my coat, over the pocket, two little pats, like he was saying thank you.
I thought that was sweet.
I’ll come back to that.
“Where the otters sing,” I said. “Do you know what that means?”
Skritch had stopped eating. He was looking past me, down the street, the way we’d come.
“Skritch,” said Ilsa. “He asked you—”
“Shh.”
We shushed.
Far down the blue street, past the bend, something was moving in the mist. Not a mushroom glow. Yellow. A lamp. Then two.
Then a voice, carried along the stone, hollow and clear.
“Down here! Vosk! The boy’s down here!”
I knew that word was a name before I knew anything else, because of what came after it. A second voice. Lower. Wheezing. The voice from the harbour wall, the one that had said give it here with its hand in my collar.
“Just the map, lad.” It echoed down the whole street. “That’s all. Hand over the map and you can go home and get warm.”
“They followed us,” whispered Ilsa. “They followed us down the drain.”
Three lamps now. Coming. Not fast. They didn’t need to be fast. We were in a dead end.
“Ilsa,” I said. “Fire.”
She cast, I caught, I threw it high. It hit the mushrooms on the wall above the lamps and they went off like wet wood, hissing and sparking, and the lamps stopped. For a second.
“That’s one go,” said Ilsa. “We’ve got one go and a wall.”
“Not wall,” said Skritch.
He was on his feet. The coat was off. Under it he was all muscle and fur, sleek as a fish.
“Wet way,” he said. “Skritch knows wet way. Dry-folk don’t like it. Dry-folk come?”
“What’s the wet way?”
Skritch pointed. At the bottom of the fallen stones in the archway, where I’d thought it was just rubble, there was water. A pool, black, with the mushroom-light sliding on it.
“Breathe big,” said Skritch. “Then don’t.”
The lamps were coming again.
Look. I can swim. Aldo taught me in the harbour. But I had never swum into a hole in the dark under a city with masked men behind me, and I want it on record that I didn’t like it.
“Hold,” said Skritch, and put the end of his string and tin button in my hand. “Hold tight. Skritch pulls. She holds you.”
Ilsa grabbed my belt.
“Big breath,” said Skritch.
I took it.
We went under.
I’m not going to describe it, because there’s nothing to describe. It was black and cold and it went on. Stone scraping my shoulders. Skritch’s string in my fist pulling, pulling. Ilsa’s hand on my belt. My chest getting tight, then tighter.
I counted.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
One, two, three—
My lungs were burning. The string pulled up.
Air.
I came up gasping into a dark that wasn’t black. There was light somewhere, blue, bouncing off water. Ilsa came up beside me and made a noise like a kettle.
And I heard something.
Through the stone, from somewhere ahead, deep and slow, a sound I’d never heard before. Lots of voices. Not words. Just a long, low note held together, going up and coming down, humming through the water and the rock and up into my teeth.
Skritch’s head popped up beside me, sleek and dripping.
“Home,” he said. “Skritch’s home. You hear? They sing.”