The towers of Kell stood up out of the roots like the fingers of a buried hand.
They came on them in the middle of the next day, with the Ashborn fifty paces behind and the mist, for once, thinning. First one tower, a grey stump three times Brakka’s height with a black oak growing out of its top like hair. Then two more. Then a dozen, scattered across a hillside, every one broken off at a different height, with the roots of the wood wrapped round them so tight that stone and trees had become one thing. Carrovan work. The blocks fitted without mortar, and carved on every lintel, worn almost to nothing, was a ring of six smaller rings.
“Six Currents,” said Oswin, touching one. “They put it on everything. We weave all six, we are the Carrovans, mind your manners.” His frill flickered. “Didn’t help them much.”
Quill’s map said the lower entrance was in the hillside below the towers, where the slope dropped into a ravine. It was. A round door, exactly as he had drawn it, twice Brakka’s height, under a lintel of six rings, sealed with a slab of grey stone that had not moved in four hundred years.
And it was not what anybody had been using.
Ilsa came back along the ravine edge at a jog and said, “Pit. Quarter-mile east. Dug, not fallen. Ropes, a windlass to wind them on, big drum and a crank, a hut, a mule-track going off north toward the river. Two men on it with crossbows.” She wiped her mouth. “Nobody’s been through this door. They’ve been going round it.”
“Why go round a door?” said Wick.
“Because it is locked,” said Seven, “and they could not open it. And so they dug.” It had its grey arm inside its coat now, as if to keep it warm. “Little flame. Come and look at this.”
The door was not a door. It was a lock. Carved into the slab, at the height of Seven’s chest, were six rings, one inside the other, like ripples in a pond, and each ring had a small hollow cut into it, a thumb-print of darkness. Seven laid its good hand flat on the outermost ring, and the stone hummed under its fingers, and a bite of winter came into the air.
“Rime,” it said. “This ring wants Rime. The next wants something else. They go inward, in an order, one Current to a ring, and when all six are fed the door remembers it is a door.” It took its hand away. “The Carrovans locked things with the Currents because only Carrovans could open them. They shut things the same way, at the end, when there was something behind the door that had to stay there: six, woven against it, and the shutting held. The old locks were made against something. Remember that, little flame, if you ever meet one that is more than a door.” A pause. “There are no Carrovans now.”
“There’s you,” said Brakka. “Rime and Gleam. That’s two.”
“And Oswin’s eggs are Ember,” said Wick, slowly. “And you’re Loam. And Ilsa’s Gale. And—” He looked round. Skritch was sitting on a root with his tail round his feet, watching the Ashborn watching them. “And Skritch is Tide.”
“Skritch is what?”
“That’s six,” said Wick.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“But not in the right order,” said Oswin. “I mean, technically, we don’t know the order. And if we get it wrong—”
“Then the Sprat fixes it,” said Brakka. “That’s what he’s for. Isn’t it, Sprat? Somebody puts something in the bucket, and you pour it where it’s wanted.”
He looked at the six rings. He looked at his hands.
“Yes,” he said. “I think so.”
It took the rest of the afternoon.
The outer ring was Rime, and Seven fed it, and it went from grey to a frost-white that ran all the way round. The second was Loam, though it took Seven and an egg and a good deal of swearing to find that out, and Brakka’s palm lit it grey-gold. The third was Ember, red, off a cracked egg. The fourth would not take Gale, no matter how many times Ilsa threw, and would not take Gleam, and Wick stood with his cold hands open and felt the wakes of the three lit rings hanging round the door like three colours of smoke, and said, “It wants two.”
“Two?”
“Two at once. It’s not — it’s not one Current, it’s a mix. Like the ground in the hollow.” He could feel it, the hollow in the ring, the shape of what it wanted. Cold and wet. “Rime and Tide. Ice.”
Skritch had come down off his root. He looked at the ring, and at Wick, and his whiskers went flat.
“Skritch doesn’t do anything. Skritch swims.”
“Then swim,” said Seven. “Here. In the air. Show the stone what you are.”
The Skitter looked at the Lumen as if it had gone mad. Then he shut his eyes, and crouched, and did with his whole body exactly what he had done on the pier stair when he went into the harbour without a splash: a long smooth dive into nothing, on dry land. And the air went damp. Wick felt it on his face, a sheen, and heard it, a shell held to his ear, and there was a grey-green thread, thin, shy, running from the Skitter to his hand.
Seven snapped nothing. It only drew, a little, and the glitter came.
He took them both, blue-white and grey-green, and wove them without knowing how, and put his white hand on the fourth ring, and the ring went crack and lit a pale sea-green, and there was ice on it.
Skritch opened his eyes.
“Skritch did that?”
“You did that.”
“Skritch did—” His whiskers went up like a fan and his tail lashed. “Squeak true.”
The fifth was Gale, and Ilsa threw, and it lit. The sixth, the innermost ring, the one at the centre of the ripples, wanted Gleam, and Seven gave it, and the six rings burned white, grey-gold, red, green, silver and white in the dusk, and the door remembered it was a door.
It did not swing. It sank. The whole slab went down into the hill with a grinding that Wick felt in his feet, and the air that came out of the dark behind it was dry and old and smelled of nothing at all.
“Right,” said Brakka. “Sel! We’re going in! If you want to follow, follow, but I’m shutting nothing behind me and I’ll not wait!”
From fifty paces back, in the trees, nobody answered.
The guardian was waiting at the bottom of the first stair.
They thought it was a statue. The stair went down out of the dusk into a hall as long as Lampwick Lane, with pillars down either side, and at the far end, on a plinth, sat a figure the size of two Brakkas: bronze plates and grey stone, kneeling with its hands on its knees, with a head like a helmet and no face at all, only a ring of six rings where a face should be. Oswin wound Pip and sent it fluttering ahead, and Pip’s green glow lit the bronze and went past it and showed a door beyond, and the figure did not stir.
“Carrovan,” said Seven. “A warden. The old ones put them at thresholds.” A pause. “I have never seen one. The seed I grew from had, and it left me the shape of it, the way you are left a dream. Walk quietly. Do nothing with a Current. Nothing. It is asleep, and what wakes it is wake.”
They walked quietly. Wick counted pillars. Eleven, twelve. The door beyond the plinth was another lock, another six rings, and when they reached it Seven put its good hand on the outer ring and lit it, Rime, and the glitter hung in the air, and behind them, on the plinth, something went clank.
The warden stood up.
It did not look at them. It had nothing to look with. It turned its ringed face slowly toward the lit ring on the door, toward the glitter, and took one step off the plinth, and the floor shook.
“It sees Currents,” Wick said, very far off. “It doesn’t see us. It sees wake. Seven, stop—”
Seven took its hand off the door.
The warden stopped. Its head turned, this way, that, toward the fading frost on the ring; and as the glitter thinned it slowed, and when the air was only air it stood quite still, ten paces from them, like a thing that had forgotten what it was for.
Wick found he had been holding his breath, and let it out through his nose, slowly.
“Right,” said Brakka, very softly. “So we don’t use the door.”
“We need the door.”
“Then we need the door and we need that thing not to notice the door.” She looked at the warden, and at the five dark rings, and at Oswin. “Tallowby. How loud is your Thunderclap?”
“It has never,” said Oswin, with dignity, “gone off. So I couldn’t say.”
“Then find out. Take it down the far end. Make the biggest wake you’ve got, and get it to follow you. The rest of you, the rings, fast, while it’s looking the other way.”
“Captain, I want it noted that this is a terrible—”
“Noted. Go.”
Oswin went down the hall on his short legs with the copper egg in both hands and Pip wobbling ahead of him, and at the far end he turned, and put the egg down, and struck a sulphur-stick.
The rest happened very fast.
Seven lit the first ring, Rime. The warden turned toward it. Brakka slapped the second, Loam, and the hum went through the hall and the warden turned faster, and took a step, and another, straight at them. Oswin, sixty feet away, said “Light, you absolute—” and the fuse caught, and he picked the Thunderclap up to throw it—
It went off in his hand.
It went off like the sky falling, a flat enormous CRACK that hit Wick in the chest and put him on the floor, and the far end of the hall vanished in yellow fire and stone-dust, and three pillars came down together like dropped sticks, and a piece of the ceiling the size of Hettie’s bar fell where the warden had been standing.
The Ember-wake rolled down the hall at Wick like a wave off the Sound.
He grabbed it. It was in his hands before he had got up off the floor, gold-red and so thick it burned, and the warden was coming up out of the rubble, cracked across its ringed face and still moving, turning toward the biggest wake in four hundred years, and the door behind Wick had four dark rings on it. Seven’s glitter. Ilsa’s thrown knife. Skritch, flat on the floor, diving at nothing with his eyes shut. Four threads in his hands at once, gold-red and blue-white and silver and grey-green, and the rings wanted fire, and ice, and air, and light—
He gave the door everything.
He did not weave it. He poured it. Ember into one ring, ice into the next, Gale into the next, and when the last ring wanted Gleam and there was no Gleam in the air he reached into the warden’s own cracked face, where a white light was leaking from the broken rings like sap, and took that, and it was like putting his hand into a frozen lake and pulling out something that did not want to come.
The door sank. The warden fell forward onto its face with a crash that shook dust off the whole hall, and lay still, and the white light went out of it.
Wick fell down too.
He was lying in a cold so complete that it had no edges, and far away somebody was shouting Oswin, Oswin, answer me, and farther away somebody was saying I’m fine, I’m — technically I’m on fire, but it’s a small—, and nearer, over him, a voice like something said from a long way down.
“Slack. Carry him. Quickly, before it notices.”
He came back in pieces, in the dark, in a room that smelled of dust.
It was a chamber beyond the second door, square, stone, with a ceiling lost in black and a floor that somebody had swept. There was a fire. Oswin had made it out of broken crate-wood, and sat beside it with his eyebrows gone and the front of his coat charred black, saying nothing, which was so unlike him that Wick knew the Pell was in shock. Brakka was on the far side with Auntie across her knees. Ilsa was by the door, not looking at anyone. Skritch was curled by the fire with his paws over his nose.
And Seven was beside him, and Wick was shaking so hard that his teeth hurt.
It was the river again. Worse. The cold was in the middle of him, and he could not get warm and could not make his mouth say words. He felt what the Quiet felt. He understood that now, properly: not cold like winter, but cold like nothing, like a hearth with the fire gone out of it and the ashes gone too and only the stone left. And he understood, with the small part of him that could still think, that something very far below the hill had lifted its head and was looking for the hearth.
“Little flame.”
Seven’s hand on his face. Warm. Bark-warm, like a tree in sun.
“Listen to me. I am going to do a thing, and you are going to let me.” Its voice was very slow, and very low. “I am going to draw Rime. A little. Not at you; for you. And you are not going to grab it. You are going to hold your hands open, and let it come, like rain. Do you understand?”
He did not. He nodded anyway.
Seven drew. The glitter came up in the firelight, blue-white, a drift of cold sparks hanging between them, and he felt it pull at his hands the way it always did, and his hands wanted to grab, to close on the thread and drag it in because that was what he had always done—
“Open,” said Seven.
He opened them.
The thread came anyway. Blue-white, thin as a hair, running from the glitter to his palms. But it did not go in like cold water through the bones. It went in like sitting down by Hettie’s hearth with wet feet. It ran up his arms into the empty middle of him and filled it, a little, and the shaking eased, and his teeth stopped, and he lay there with his mouth open and stared at the Lumen.
“It’s warm,” he said. “It’s Rime and it’s warm—”
“Yes.”
“It didn’t bite—”
“No.” Seven took its hand away. Its face in the firelight was copper and gold and very tired, and a leaf fell from it onto his chest. “Taken, it bites. Given, it warms. Remember the difference, little flame. It is the whole of it.” It sat back. “Everything you have done, you have taken. From a bottle. From a river. From a warden’s face. That is why it costs you, and why they come. What is given freely goes where it is sent, and nowhere else, and costs the one who holds it almost nothing. I did not know if a Kindler could be given to. Now I know.”
Wick lay still and felt the warmth in him, small and steady, like a coal.
“Why didn’t you do that before?”
“Because I was not sure it would work, and I did not want to promise you a spring I could not give.”
Brakka told her story later, when the fire was low.
Wick had sat up, wrapped in Ilsa’s cloak, which Ilsa had put over him without a word and then gone back to the door, and he had told them about Aldo, and the tide-post, and their mother folding his hands shut in the mud; he did not know why, except that the warmth in him had loosened something. When he had finished Brakka was quiet a while, and then she said:
“I had a crew. I told you.”
“Six out of thirty.”
“Six out of thirty.” She turned Auntie’s haft in her hands. “Whaling ship. Grey Mother, out of the north ice. The captain was my aunt and she was old and I did the deciding. A man came to us on the ice with coin. A lot of coin. Said there was a wreck in a bay he knew, full of good iron, and he’d pay for the lift. Said it like a man says a true thing.” She stopped. “There was no wreck. There was a thing in the bay the Murk had got into, and he wanted it fed, and he’d been feeding it ships for ten years on the same story. My aunt went first. I brought six home and I owe twenty-four, and I’ll be paying that Ledger when they put me in the ground.” She looked at Wick. “So I don’t trust easy, Sprat. Except coin. Coin’s honest. Coin doesn’t say it’s your friend.”
Wick thought of three hundred marks on a table, and a red seal, and said nothing.
“That’s what the Lanterns are for,” Brakka said. “Ones that didn’t come back. We go and look. I started it because nobody looked for mine.” She stood up, and the firelight threw her shadow up the wall like a mountain. “Sleep. Quire, wake me at the turn.”
“Captain.”
Wick lay down. He was nearly asleep when Skritch’s whisper came out of the dark beside his ear, small and fierce: “Skritch did the ice,” and he smiled, and was gone.
The crates were in the next chamber, and he saw them in the morning, by Pip’s light.
A dozen of them, stacked against the wall. New wood; the nails were bright. Somebody had carried them in by another way, from inside, and stacked them here where the front door would never open. Rope, lamp-oil, iron spikes, sacks of something white and crystalline that Oswin sniffed and called binding-salt and would not touch.
“Store-room,” said Brakka. “They’ve been cutting a second way up to this door from below, and couldn’t shift the slab, and gave it up.” She kicked a crate. “Left their stores where they’d not have to carry them twice.”
And on the lid of every crate, burned into the wood, a seal.
The thumb. The Merchant Compact’s mark, a thick thumb-print in a ring. Anyone could buy that. Half the goods on the Wharves carried the thumb, and Wick had seen it on a thousand barrels and thought nothing of it. He thought nothing of it now.
Below it, small, in one corner of every lid, there was a second mark, burned fainter. A private mark, the kind merchants put on their own goods so nobody could swap them. He crouched and held Pip’s green glow close to one, because he read everything, and made it out: a key, and a pen laid across it, and above them both a star with six points. Neat work. Somebody had cared about the brand. He looked at it for a breath and let it go. There were a hundred such marks on the Wharves, and his hands hurt.
“Fresh,” said Ilsa, from the floor.
Boot-prints. In the swept dust, going from the crates to a black doorway in the far wall, and back, and on into the dark. Big boots, hobnailed. The dust had not settled in them yet.
“Days,” she said. “Two. Three.”
Everyone was quiet.
And in the quiet, from far below, through the stone, so faint that at first Wick thought it was his own blood, came a sound. Steady. Patient. A chink, and a chink, and a chink.
Picks. Somebody, a long way down, was digging.