The cell was a hole cut in the rock beside the gate, with a door of iron bars and a lamp outside it, and there was a man chained to the back wall who did not look up.
Vosk opened the door and put Wick through it with the flat of his hand, and shut it, and turned the key.
“The client will be down when he’s had his broth,” he said through the bars, in his hoarse reasonable voice. “He takes it slow on the stairs. Talk. He wants you to talk.” The mask turned toward the chained man. “Marsh. Company.”
He went. His wheeze went away along the rock with the lamp-shadows, and there was only the one lamp, low and yellow, on its hook outside the bars, and the cold.
Wick stood with his back to the door.
The man on the wall was sitting with his knees up and his head down, and the chain ran from an iron ring round each wrist to a bolt in the stone above him, so that his hands could not go lower than his chest. He was thin. His hair hung over his face. He was nineteen and he looked thirty, and Wick knew him by his boots, which were the boots that had hung their heels over the harbour wall while a finger moved along the chalk.
“Aldo,” he said.
The head came up.
For a moment there was nothing in the face. Then the eyes focused, and went wide, and the whole of him came up off the wall against the chain with a sound of iron, and Aldo Marsh said, “No.”
“It’s me.”
“No. No, no, no—” The chain rang. “I told you. I wrote it. I wrote it on the last page in letters a fish could read, go home, Wicky, I said go home—”
“I know what you wrote.”
“Then what are you doing here?” Aldo’s voice cracked up the middle like a plank. “What are you doing in this hole, you stupid, you stupid—”
Wick crossed the cell in three steps and got his arms round his brother’s neck, chain and all, and held on.
It was not a long hug. Aldo could not move his hands, and the iron bit into Wick’s cheek, and his brother smelled of rock and old sweat and cold, so cold, his skin was like the river. But Aldo’s face came down hard against the top of Wick’s head and stayed there, and his breath went in and out, ragged, against Wick’s hair, and when he spoke again it came out broken into pieces.
“You stupid little sprat.”
“Yes.”
“You came.”
“You said I would. You said it in the journal and you said it to Marta.” Wick stepped back. His face was wet, and he did not care. “You said I’d be furious.”
Aldo looked at him. He was crying too, and did not seem to know it.
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Aldo Marsh, and laughed, once, and it turned into a cough that went on too long, and when it was done he leaned his head back on the stone and shut his eyes. “Good. Somebody should be.”
His hands were white.
Not just the fingertips. From the wrist to the nail, every finger, white as fish-flesh and blue at the knuckles, and when Wick took one of them in both of his own it was not cold the way a hand is cold. It was cold the way the song-stone was cold, from the middle out, a thing that had been frozen so long it had forgotten there was another way to be.
“Don’t,” Aldo said, without opening his eyes.
“They’re—”
“I know what they are. I’ve had a year to look at them.” He flexed the fingers, slowly, and they moved like something stiff with rust. “He takes me to the door and he lights six braziers, one for each ring, hedge-weavers he’s bought in the city, and I catch what’s in the air and I give it the door, because if I don’t—” He stopped. “And it bites, every time, cold, and it doesn’t go away after. It’s still in me. All of it. A year of cold.” His white hand turned in Wick’s and gripped, weakly. “Rime, mostly. He uses Rime most, because it’s cheapest; any fool with a form can draw cold. I’m full of it, Wicky. Like a cask. I could freeze the Sound.”
“Then why does the gate not open?”
“Because I’m one.” Aldo opened his eyes. “And because I won’t. I give it a trickle, because a trickle keeps me alive and keeps Marta alive, and he needs the whole river, and he’s not getting it from me. He knows it now. That’s why—” He looked at Wick, and his mouth went down at one corner, the way it had in the attic the night before he marched, when he had said I’m going to make sure you never go on the boats and had known he could not. “That’s why he’s got you.”
“Two of one blood. An Ashborn told me. It’s — later.” Wick made himself say the rest. “He told me himself, by an oak tree. He said he had my name from you.”
Aldo did not look away. He had never looked away from anything in his life; it was his most annoying quality.
“Day thirty-one,” he said. “They’d had me on the wall a week. Vosk asked who else there was. Mam, cousins, anyone with the gift. I said nobody. He asked again the next day and the next, and on the seventh day he brought Marta in and stood her against that door and asked again, and I said my brother. Wick. Thirteen. Saltings. The Drowned Lantern.” His voice was perfectly flat. “I said it to save a woman I’d known five months, and I’d say it again, and it’s the worst thing I’ve done in my life. There. Now you know what you came for.”
Wick sat down on the floor beside him with his back against the stone.
“I came for you,” he said. “Not that.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No, it isn’t.” He put his shoulder against his brother’s shoulder, the way they had sat on the harbour wall. “I’ve kept things. Since you went. I kept the lamps from Hettie, and I kept nine Skitter marks on the cellar stair from Brakka, and I kept the crest on the crates from her, and that’s why she’s in a pen tonight instead of standing on his neck. I don’t get to be angry with you for keeping something. I’m a Marsh. We’re terrible at it.”
Aldo’s breath went out of him in something that would have been a laugh with more air behind it.
“Mam would have skinned the pair of us.”
“Yes.”
The lamp outside the bars shifted.
A warder had come to it, one of the half-masks, and he was turning the wick up with a thumb and finger, because the oil was burning low and the Archivist did not like the dark on his stairs. He did it with a small careless gesture, a form, the way Ilsa flicked a knife; a thing the body did. And when the flame stood up yellow in the glass, the air outside the bars shimmered, warm, and smelled, for a breath, of hot iron.
Ember. A thread of it, gold-red, thin as a hair, drifting through the bars into the cell on the cold.
Wick felt it on his face like a hand. Beside him, Aldo went rigid.
“Don’t,” Aldo breathed.
“I’m not—”
“You feel it. I know you do. I felt you feel it.” The warder had gone; the lamp burned steady; the thread hung in the cell between them, fading. “Wicky. Listen to me. He wants us to touch hands. He’s wanted it for a year. Don’t give it him.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking it.”
He had been. He had been looking at the thread, and at Aldo’s white hand, and at his own, and the thought had come up on its own like the tide: what would it be like. He had been a bucket since the night of the lamps, with other people pouring into him, and here was somebody who was the same thing he was, the only person who was.
“Just once,” he said. “Small. To know.”
“No.”
“If I don’t know, how do I stop him? He’ll put our hands together, Aldo, he’ll make us, with Brakka in the next cell, and I’ll do it then, scared, with him watching, with nothing to go on. Or I do it now. With you. On purpose. Small.” He heard his own voice shaking and made it stop. “Seven says it matters whether it’s chosen. I’m choosing.”
Aldo looked at him with the thread of Ember fading between them.
“You sound like her,” he said, and held out his white hand.
Wick took it.
It was not like catching.
Catching was a thread running to his fingers, cold going up his arms, a double fistful of snow in the dark. This was a door. The moment their palms met, something that had been shut in him his whole life opened, and on the other side of it was Aldo, not Aldo’s hand, Aldo, the whole of him, a year of cold packed in him like ice in a cask, and his fear, and his tiredness, and under all of it a small hard stubborn thing that had said no to a door for a year and was still saying it. And Wick knew that Aldo could feel him back. The lamps. The river. Hettie’s griddle. The box in his head where he put things, and everything in it.
The thread of Ember, which had been a hair, went white.
It came to them both at once, into both their hands, and it did not bite. It did not warm either. It simply was, as if it had always been theirs, and it was so easy that Wick nearly laughed, and then he understood what he was holding, and did not.
One lamp. One warder’s careless thumb. And between the two of them they held it like a sun.
Something turned its head.
He felt it the way you feel someone in a dark room turn to look at you. Not near. Under. Beyond the wall, beyond the bars, beyond the great black disc with its six rings; something vast and cold and patient that had been lying with its face to the stone for four hundred years lifted its head and looked. At the white thread. At the two hands round it. At him.
The song-stone had been a dead thing in his pocket for two days. Now it was less than that: a hole in his pocket where a stone had been.
Aldo tore his hand away.
The thread snapped. The Ember went out of the air. The cell was a cell again, cold, with one lamp, and the two of them sat on the floor with their white hands held away from each other as if they were hot, both breathing like people who had run.
“That,” said Aldo, when he could. “That’s what he wants. Did you feel it look?”
“Yes.”
“That was one lamp.” His face was grey. “Six braziers, Wicky. Six, and the two of us. It’d come up through that door like the tide up the Saltings.”
Wick put his hands under his arms. They were not aching. That was the terrible part. They had held a sun and did not ache at all.
“It’s still in you,” he said. “The year. I felt it. It’s not gone anywhere. It’s yours.”
“It’s a cask of cold with a chain on it,” said Aldo. “Leave it.”
Something was turning over at the back of Wick’s head, slow, the way the tide turns, and he could not see the shape of it yet. He left it.
The wall above Aldo’s head was scratched.
Wick saw it when he got up to walk the cell, because he had to walk or he would shake. Above the bolt where the chain went in, the rock was covered in marks, hundreds of them, in rows, scratched with the edge of an iron ring over a year: a wave, and notches, and a wave, and notches, going along the wall and down and along again, like the tide tables on the harbour wall.
“Days,” Aldo said. “A wave for each. The notches are how many times they took me to the door. The crosses—” He did not finish.
There were a great many crosses.
Wick put his fingertips on the last wave, the newest, the one scratched that morning, and followed the row back with his hand, wave after wave, and found what he was looking for a quarter of the way along: a wave with a bar under it. Hidden here.
“What’s under that?”
“Nothing. There’s no under. It’s rock.” Aldo’s mouth twisted. “I did it for you. Day sixty. I thought, if Wicky ever stands in this cell, he’ll go looking for the bar, because he always does. And there’d be nothing. And he’d know I was thinking about him when I made it.”
Wick stood with his hand on the wall and could not see for a moment.
Then something scratched at the dark.
Not at the door. At the back of the cell, high in the corner, where the lamplight did not reach: a small sound, metal on stone, and then a whisper so thin it could have been the draught.
“Big-folk. Is it the right hole, Skritch has been in nine holes—”
“Skritch—”
“Shh!” A grey-brown face came out of the corner of the ceiling, upside down, with its whiskers flat and a tin button swinging, and behind it, in the black, there was a grate. Iron bars, rusted, set in a square hole no bigger than a hearth-mouth, and a Skitter paw was working at one of them from the inside with a bit of broken hatchet-blade. “Vent. For the braziers. Goes up and up and comes out in the long gallery. Skritch ran it twice.” The bar came out of its socket with a grinding and Skritch caught it before it could fall. “And Skritch got friends.”
Two more faces, behind his. One grey at the muzzle with a claw missing. One very young, with its paws over its mouth.
“Whisk,” said Wick, stupidly. “Dabble.”
“Put-out came back and said all the big-folk were in the pens and the old one was the no-no,” said Whisk, in her dry whisper, “and the Tally counted, and when she’d done counting she said two for the gallery. That’s us. Don’t ask for more.”
“It’s enough. It’s—” Wick had his hands on the stone under the vent. “Aldo. Aldo, it’s a way out, we can—”
“I can’t.”
The chain rang, once, as if to agree.
Wick stopped.
He looked at the chain. He looked at the bolt in the stone, and the iron rings on the white wrists, and at the hole in the ceiling which a Skitter fitted and a boy might fit and a man with his hands bolted to a wall never would. And then, because he was a Marsh and could not help it, he looked at the lock on the rings, and it was a proper lock, iron, the kind Ilsa opened with two picks in the time it took to say so, and Ilsa was in a pen.
“Key,” he said. “Who has the—”
“Vosk.” Aldo’s voice was very steady. “On a cord. Round his neck. He showed me, the first week, so I’d know.”
“Skritch can—”
“Skritch is not going for the wheezing one’s neck,” said Skritch, from the ceiling, with feeling. “Not for all the shinies in Saltmire. Not for the Tally. Squeak true.”
“Then I’ll—”
“You’ll what?” Aldo did not raise his voice. “Go and get it? He’s standing at the top of a stair with twenty men and an old man coming down it with his broth. Hide here till he comes, and bite him? Wicky. Look at me.”
He looked.
“There’s a pen,” Aldo said, “with your captain in it, and your scout, and a Pell, and a tree that’s gone grey for you. And four Hounds that were free one day. And there’s a hole in this ceiling that you fit through and I don’t. You can sit in here and hold my hand till the old man comes, and he’ll put the six braziers up and he’ll bring them in one at a time to watch, and you’ll do it. You’ll do it for them. Any boy would.” The grey face was Aldo’s face, the one that had taught him sixes, fierce and bossy and so tired. “Or you can go through that hole with the rat and get them out, and come back for me with more than a boy and a knife. That’s soldiering. Marta’ll have told you.”
“She did.”
“Then you know.”
He knew.
He knew the way he had known in the pen, with the Greystep people on the straw. It was the worst thing in the world and it was right, and his whole body stood in the cell and refused it. He had come a river and a wood and a cistern and a gallery full of legs for the fourth name on the board, and the fourth name was here, in his hand, cold, and he was being told to let go of it.
And it would have been so easy to stay. That was the strange thing. He had carried everything alone since the lamps because that was what a Marsh did, and here was the one time when alone was the thing he wanted: to sit in the cell with his brother and let the rest come. And it was wrong. The way out was through a hole too small for one and big enough for the others.
“I’ll come back tonight,” he said.
“I know you will. You’re furious.”
“Wicky.” Aldo lifted his chained hands as far as they would go, which was to his own chest, and Wick came and put his forehead against them, against the white cold knuckles, and stayed there. “Go.”
“Aldo—”
“Go.”
He went.
He got up on Aldo’s shoulder, because there was nothing else to stand on, and Aldo did not make a sound under his boots, and Skritch’s paws got his wrists and Whisk’s got his collar and he went into the hole in the ceiling head-first, into iron and rust and a dark that smelled of old smoke. It fitted him the way the water-crack had fitted him. Barely. He got his shoulders through and his hips and his boots, and lay in the vent with his cheek on cold iron and looked back down through the hole.
The cell. The lamp. His brother against the wall with his face turned up and the scratches going along the stone over his head, a wave, a wave, a wave.
Boots on the stair outside.
A great many of them, and under them a wet drag like a bellows, and under that, slow and careful and coughing, an old man taking the steps one at a time.
“Marsh,” said Vosk’s voice, at the bars. “Up. The client’s ready for you.”
The key turned. Aldo did not look at the ceiling. He got his feet under him, slow, with the chain ringing, and turned his face to the door, and the last thing Wick saw before Skritch’s paw closed on his ankle and pulled was his brother standing up straight to meet them, on one foot, like a heron, thinking.