Where the otters sing is a harbour.
An old one. The oldest one, I suppose, from the city that sank. We climbed out of the water onto a stone quay as wide as a street, worn smooth, with iron rings in it where boats had once tied up, and the water we’d come out of was the river, running black and slow through the middle of a cave so big I couldn’t see the end of it.
The mushrooms were everywhere. Walls, ceiling, the undersides of the old arches, glowing blue-green like the whole place was lit from inside the sea. And on the quay, and in the mouths of the old houses, and sitting along the edge with their feet in the water, were the Skitter.
Dozens of them. Sleek, brown, whiskered, in bits of coat and scarf and nothing at all. Grown ones as tall as Hettie. Little ones the size of cats, who came pelting along the quay to look at us and then pelted away again. And every one of them was singing.
I’d heard it through the water. Up here it was in the air, and it was in me. One long note, low, held by all of them together, rising a little and falling a little, like the sound a glass makes when you run a wet finger round the rim, if the glass was the size of a cathedral.
It stopped when they saw us.
Not all at once. It sort of ran out, from the near end of the quay to the far, as one Skitter after another turned and stared, and then there was nothing but water dripping off me and Ilsa onto the stone.
“Skritch,” said a voice from the dark. “What have you brought.”
It wasn’t a question.
Skritch’s gran lived in a boat.
An old rowing boat, pulled up on the quay and turned on its side, with a bit of sailcloth over it for a roof. She sat in the mouth of it like a queen in a doorway. She was grey, grey all over, with one eye gone milky and the other one black as a bead, and she was knitting something out of what looked like fishing line.
Skritch stood in front of her with his coat dripping and his ear flat and talked very fast.
I didn’t get all of it. Dry-folk came into it a lot. So did found, and pocket, and owes, and at one point bread, said very softly, like a prayer.
Gran let him finish. Then she looked at me with the black eye. I got the feeling the milky one was looking at me too, just from somewhere else.
“The tall boy,” she said. “You’re the tall boy’s brother.”
I think my mouth fell open.
“He slept here. Two nights. He paid.” She knitted a stitch. “He said another would come. A small one who talks too much. He said show him this, and nobody else.”
She put down the knitting, reached into the boat behind her, and brought out a packet.
Oilcloth, tied with twine. Exactly like the tin had been wrapped. My hands were shaking before I’d even touched it.
Inside the oilcloth was the other half of the map.
I knew it would be. I’d still have cried if Ilsa hadn’t been watching. I put the two halves together on the stone quay, torn edge to torn edge, and they fitted. Of course they fitted. Aldo tore things in half the way other people cut bread, and he’d have been furious if they hadn’t. And for the first time I saw the whole thing.
A river. A road along it. A ferry marked where the road crossed. Then the forest, drawn in those spiky little trees, going on and on across the whole right-hand side. In the middle of the forest, a ring of broken shapes. Ruins. And in the ruins, in the very middle, a circle.
And our marks, all over it, in Aldo’s pencil.
~ o by a tree at the edge of the ruins
x x x around the circle in the middle
“Here, safe,” I said, pointing. “By that tree. And there, where the circle is. Danger. Three times.”
“Three crosses,” said Ilsa. “What’s three crosses?”
“We never did three. One cross is danger. He’s never done three.”
There was something else in the packet. A page, folded small, in Aldo’s pencil, and it was for me.
Wicky.
If you’ve got this far you’ve got the map and you’ve ignored everything I said. Fine. Then listen now.
The thing in the Thornwood isn’t treasure. It’s a door. A big round stone door under the ruins. The old people who built the sunken city opened doors like it, and that’s why their city sank. What’s behind it is what makes the lamps go out.
The man who hired us doesn’t want gold. He wants the door open. And here’s the thing. It takes two like us to turn it. Two of one blood. That’s why I’m not enough. That’s why they’ll come for you.
Don’t come. Go home. Be a barrel-boy. I mean it, Wicky.
There’s more I need to tell you but I’m out of
And then nothing. The page was torn along the bottom. Not folded. Torn.
I turned it over. Blank.
Two like us. He’d never said. My whole life in the same room as him and he’d never once said, and I thought of Mam with her hands on his shoulders, not mine, and the same words.
“Was there another page?” I said. “Gran. Was there more?”
She looked at the torn edge with her one good eye for a long moment.
“It came so,” she said.
I didn’t know if I believed her. I still don’t.
We were sitting on the edge of the quay with our feet over the black water, and nobody had said anything for a while. Skritch was beside us, eating a fish he’d got from somewhere, head and all.
“Door,” said Skritch, through fish. “Gran knows door. Gran sings it.”
Gran had come out of her boat. She stood over us with her knitting under her arm, and when she spoke it was slow, the way you say something you’ve said a thousand times and want said right.
“The door only turns for two of one blood,” she said. “Turn it one way, it opens. Turn it back, it shuts. Nobody else can touch it.”
She let that sit.
“That’s why we sing. Our old ones sang it shut, long ago, with the two who turned it. We’ve sung every night since. So the dark knows we’re still here. So it knows the door’s still watched.” She looked down the cave to where the river went off into the black. “It doesn’t care any more. It comes anyway.”
“Comes?” said Ilsa.
And right then, like it had heard her, the singing at the far end of the quay went wrong.
It didn’t stop. It bent. The long note at the far end wavered and dropped, and I looked, and the mushrooms down there were going dim.
One wall. Then the next. Like someone was walking along the cave turning the lights down.
“Quiet,” said Skritch. He’d dropped the fish. His whole body had gone flat and tight. “Quiet. Every night now. Closer every night.”
The Skitter at the far end were backing up along the quay, and the singing was going thin, I could hear it, the one long note breaking up into a lot of small frightened ones. Grown ones in front. Little ones behind. And the dim came on anyway, slow and sure, and in it, grey shapes. Low ones. Dogs. More than three. A lot more than three.
Frost ran along the stone quay ahead of them like something spilt.
Ilsa was on her feet. “Wick.”
“I know.”
“Two hands. Fire and light. Right?”
“Right.”
We ran towards it. I’d like you to notice that. Past the backing-up Skitter, past Gran, who didn’t move an inch, past Skritch, who was herding a knot of cubs into a doorway with his arms spread and saying “no, no, Skritch says very no” over and over like it was a song of his own.
Ilsa stopped at the edge of the dim. Flame in her right hand. Glim in her left. She held them both out and said both words and let them both go, and the sparks lifted off her, gold and white, and I was already reaching.
Both hands. Both arms gone cold to the elbow. I brought them together.
The white fire came up between my palms like a sunrise, and I didn’t throw it.
I held it up.
The dim stopped. Right there, at the line where the white light fell on the stone, it stopped, and the dogs behind it stopped, and the frost stopped, and for one second the whole cave was still. Me with the sun in my hands. A dozen grey dogs with no faces, looking at it.
Then I threw it.
The three in front went up like paper. The rest kept coming.
Not over the line. The white fire sat on the stone where it had landed, burning nothing, and the dogs stopped at the edge of its light, the way they had when I’d held it up. But they didn’t go back. They stood there in the dim, a dozen of them, no faces, waiting, and the frost crept up to the line and sat there too, and I had nothing in my hands. Two more catches in me, at most, and a dozen of them.
“Ilsa,” I said.
“I know. I’m—”
And then, behind me, the singing came back.
It had gone thin when the dim came. Now it came back all at once, every Skitter on the quay, louder than before, one note shoved at the dark like a wall, and it went through the stone and the water and my feet and the top of my head. And the dogs went. Not burned. Pushed. They went backwards into the black the way the dim had come, and the mushrooms on the walls came up blue again, one after another, like someone was walking back the other way.
I didn’t do that. Not on my own. I’d like it noted that I noticed.
I put my hands in my armpits and sat down on the quay.
“Show-off,” said Ilsa, sitting down next to me. Her voice was shaking.
“You cast it.”
“I cast it. You held it up like a lantern.”
“It worked.”
“It did work,” she said. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
Here’s what I decided, on the quay, with the singing in my teeth.
I was going to the Thornwood.
I didn’t decide it like a brave person. I decided it like somebody who’s done the sums and doesn’t like the answer. They had Aldo. They needed me. That was why the masked men had never once tried to hurt me. They didn’t need to. They just wanted to know where I was, all the time, and they knew where I lived. Sooner or later, masked men or grey dogs, they’d get me, and then there’d be two of one blood standing at that door whether we liked it or not.
Or I could go first. With the map. And find him. And find out what the three crosses meant before anyone made me stand in front of them.
“I’m going to the forest,” I said.
“Yes,” said Ilsa.
“Tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“On my own.”
“No,” said Ilsa.
“Skritch says no,” said Skritch, who had come back. He said it very firmly. “Skritch says very no. Skritch owes. Skritch comes.”
“You can’t come. It’s two days’ walk. It’s a forest. You live in a drain.”
“Skritch lives in a warren. It’s got a quay.”
“Wick,” said Ilsa. “Shut up. We’re coming.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, and I meant it, and I think I even believed it.
Skritch took us home by a different wet way, a shorter one, that came up through a grate in the yard behind the Drowned Lantern. He’d known it all along. Of course he had.
He stayed in the yard. He wouldn’t come in. But before he went back down he caught my sleeve and said, “Tomorrow,” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Tomorrow,” and went.
I didn’t sleep.
I lay on Aldo’s bed with the whole map in my shirt and listened to Ilsa not sleeping on the kitchen floor below me. Around four I got up. I wrote Hettie a note and left it on the pillow. I’m not going to tell you what it said. It took me three goes.
Then I went down the ladder in my socks with my boots in my hand, and I went past the kitchen door without breathing, and I went out through the yard and over the wall, and I’ll tell you now, I was quiet. I’ve been getting out of that pub without Hettie hearing since I was nine.
The streets were empty and the fog was down. I looked back once, from the corner. The lantern was hanging over the door where Hettie had put it back, empty and dark, and the step under it was black. Somebody had put it out, and it had kept my door for a hundred years, and I meant to get it one back.
I went up through the town with the sky just starting to go grey, and I got to the land gate, which is the only way out of Saltmire that doesn’t involve a boat, and the gate was open, and the watchman was asleep in his box.
And sitting on the wall beside the gate, with her boots swinging and a bag over her shoulder, was Ilsa.
And sitting next to her, in his too-big coat, with his tail hanging down the stones, was Skritch.
I stopped.
“Morning,” said Ilsa.
“How—”
“You’re not very good at sneaking,” she said.
“I am excellent at sneaking.”
“You were humming.”
I opened my mouth to say I was not.
Then I shut it. Because I had been. I’d been humming the Skitter song, under my breath, the whole way up the hill.
Skritch held up a bundle. “Skritch brought fish,” he said. “For the road.”
And there, round his neck, on the string next to the tin button, catching the first bit of light, was a small iron key with three teeth.
“That’s my key,” I said.
“Skritch found it.”
“In my pocket.”
“Pockets,” said Skritch, with great dignity, “are where things are found.”
I looked at him. I looked at Ilsa. I looked at the open gate, and the road going off into the fog.
“Keep it,” I said. “It doesn’t fit anything anyway.”
I looked back one more time, from the gate. Behind us Saltmire was all fog, except the Library on its hill, and one small round window up under the dome with a light in it. Somebody was up early.
And the three of us walked out.