The Silver Door

23 - Trapped

Rye had not really believed it would happen. It had been an idea—the glimmer of an idea. But suddenly he and Sholto were off their feet, tumbling beneath a cold, salty, battering torrent, clinging together by a miracle.

Dimly Rye heard Sonia crying out in his mind. No doubt she had felt his sudden stab of shock and fear. But the fear had passed almost instantly. Now he was exultant. With savage joy he felt the sea serpent scale he had taken from the bag of powers sink deep into the flesh of his hand. He felt serpent strength flow through him. He felt his body become one with the flood.

He gripped his brother tightly. He surged with his brother up to the air. He flung himself forward and rode the wave created by that first massive explosion of water till at last it cast them down by the sealed entrance at the other end of the vast room.

And then, clinging together knee-deep in water thick with sodden, stinking straw, Rye and Sholto looked back. And they gaped in awe as the sea gushed through the huge gap the golden key had opened, and the water rose, and the skimmers died.

For the skimmers, woken, shrieking, flapping, fighting each other for space to fly, were attacking the noisy, swirling flood. They did not fear it, because they did not recognise it for what it was. To them, sound and movement meant only prey. Muddy eyes on fire with a ravenous hunger that was never satisfied, they plunged, snarling, to their deaths. They clawed at tumbling clumps of bloody straw, sank their needle teeth into writhing strands of seaweed, slashed at long-dead fish and rolling bones. Then they went under, their wings flailing helplessly as the rushing water dragged them down.

The air was thick with them. The dark water gushing through the wall was swirling with them. In moments the eddying lake that the floor of the huge room had become was filling with pale bodies struggling and dying.

And still the sea poured in, and still the water rose, and still the skimmers attacked, till the flapping and shrieking had ended, and there was no sound except the ceaseless roaring of the flood.

‘We must open—the doors!’ Sholto gasped, ripping off his black head covering. ‘The water must reach the workrooms—the daylight skimmers. None must survive to breed!’ He was numb with shock, but he knew what he wanted. He wanted the sea to take possession of every corner of the cursed building that was the skimmers’ breeding ground. He wanted the sea to sweep away every skimmer in existence, to flood the nest, to drown it.

‘The cell first,’ Rye said. ‘Then the rest.’

For it had come to him that the key could save them all. It could save Sonia, and Bird’s people, and it could save him and Sholto as well. It could free them from the Harbour. It could give them a chance to escape the horror in those swollen, red-rimmed clouds.

Sholto’s door wand, soaked through, was dead and useless, but the entrance door slid open at a touch of the golden key. Water surged into the dressing room, and the door did not close again. The hanging black garments floated and tangled in the rising tide as the brothers waded waist-deep to the outer door, and opened it as well.

And then there was nothing to stop the sea. It surged through the short passage, and spilled into the larger corridor. Straw, weed, and dead skimmers floated with it, bobbing and swirling. Rye and Sholto splashed through the debris, turned to the left and began to run.

‘There!’ cried Sholto, pointing as they ran. ‘There, Rye, there!’

And for all his eagerness to reach the cell, whenever Sholto called and pointed, Rye reached out and touched a place on the wall with the golden key. Then he would see a door slide open, and water spill into the room beyond.

Every moment he expected to see grey-coated figures dart, startled, from the gaping doorways. Every moment he feared the sight of guards pounding along the streaming passage.

But no one appeared. Rye’s heart began to sink.

By the time he and Sholto reached the cell, he knew what he would find. He knew what he would find, but he looked anyway, hoping against hope.

As he had feared, the cell was empty.

This was why they had seen no guards. This was why no one had come to investigate as doors opened and water flooded into the workrooms.

The underground floor was deserted. The prisoners had been taken, and everyone else had gone to witness the test.

‘We are too late,’ he said bleakly.

Without a word Sholto turned and ran. Rye did not call after him. He knew where his brother was going. He knew what he would say when he came back.

Too late.

Rye closed his eyes. He was remembering the cry of fear that had come to him when the sea first gushed through the wall. He had thought Sonia was feeling his panic, but it had been the other way around. He had been feeling hers. That had been the moment when the guards came for the prisoners sooner, far sooner, than any of them had expected.

Too late. The terrible words were clanging in his brain, on and on, like the tolling of a great bell.

Like the bell of Oltan summoning the people on Midsummer Eve, Rye thought. And into his mind drifted the memory of Hass the fisherman’s dark, anxious face, and Hass’s earnest voice begging him to be still, to keep hidden, to accept that he was powerless to stop what was going to happen.

It’s begun, Hass had said. The bell is tolling. Nothing will stop it now.

But I did stop it, Rye thought. I stopped it. And I can stop this.

He heard splashing behind him and turned round. Sholto was plodding back, his head down. When at last he reached Rye and looked up, his face was sagging with despair.

‘The workrooms are flooding. The bases of the cages are dissolving in the salt water, as I had hoped. The skimmers there will die. But the skimmers chosen for the test have gone. They are safe. I cannot believe it. We came so close …’

‘It is not over,’ Rye said. His voice sounded harsh and strange, even to himself. ‘Where is the testing room?’

Sholto shook his head. ‘On the upper level of the building somewhere, but where I have no idea.’

‘Show me the nearest way to the upper level!’ Rye begged. ‘Show me, Sholto!’

Sholto stared at him. Then, without a word, he turned and led the way past the deserted cell. He pointed to the wall. A door slid open at a touch of the golden key, but behind it there was only dark, echoing space.

‘There is usually a lifting chamber here, but the guards would have used it to take the prisoners and the skimmers up to the test,’ Sholto said, as water rushed past them into the dark space. ‘No doubt it waits at ground level, blocking the shaft, and I have no means of calling it down. Its twin on the other side of the workrooms is certainly in the same state. The supervisor and the others from the workrooms would have gone that way.’

He took a breath. ‘So we are stranded down here,’ he went on in a level voice, his eyes on Rye. ‘The water is rising quickly—even more quickly than I had hoped. All that remains for us is to escape the building through the gap in the Dispatch Area wall. Better to drown quickly, under the sky, than slowly between these cursed walls.’

We would not drown, Sholto, Rye thought, touching the smoothness of the serpent scale with a fingertip. The scale was beginning to loosen, but it would soon sink into his palm again when it felt water.

And for a moment he imagined bearing Sholto through the oily swell of the Harbour, dragging him to shore, and hurrying with him back to the Saltings. The speed ring would aid them. The hood would hide them. The armour shell would protect them. In no time they would catch up with Dirk. Then they could all, all three of them, find their way back to Weld.

Leaving Sonia to be torn to pieces without lifting a finger to help her. Leaving Bird and her people to suffer the same fate. And leaving the worst of the daylight skimmers alive, to breed at the Master’s evil will.

No. Rye thrust the idea of flight aside, hating himself for even allowing it to cross his mind. But what if he and Sholto escaped into the sea and then circled back and tried to get into the building by one of the outer doors?

No. That would take too long—far too long. He could feel it in his bones.

‘We must find another way to the upper floor,’ he said aloud.

Sholto shook his head. ‘There is no other way. Believe me, Rye. I have searched this level from end to end. I have found and mapped every door. I have entered every room except …’

Rye pounced. ‘Except what?’

‘Except the room where the guards sleep,’ Sholto replied reluctantly. ‘My door wand would not open it. The guards’ area is strictly forbidden—that was one of the first things I was told when I came here. But I am certain there is no way out from there. The guards use the lifting chambers like everyone else.’

‘Where is the door?’ Rye said urgently. ‘Where, Sholto?’

Sholto looked down pointedly at the water eddying around his knees. Then he sighed as if he no longer cared what he did, and led the way further along the passage till they reached a sign on the wall.

Rye put the golden key to the sign, and a door began sliding open.

The stench that rolled out of the widening gap was so vile that he jerked back, his hand pressed to his nose and mouth.

Then his heart thudded as he realised that something was driving the smell. There was a draught—a draught of cool, sea-smelling air. And there was light!

Water was already pouring through the doorway. Rye felt it tugging him on as he stumbled forward, dragging Sholto with him. And the door, like all the other doors they had opened, did not close behind them.

Rye had the impression of enormous, echoing space, but for a moment all he could do was stare straight ahead. The wall facing the door was in two sections, one set above the other. The bottom half, as tall as the wall of a normal room, was made of dark, oozing stone. It was like the walls in the dungeons beneath Olt’s fortress. Plainly it marked the end of the underground part of the building.

The top half of the wall was the usual grey. Smooth and sheer, it stretched up towards a flat roof so high that it made Rye’s head spin. But it did not quite reach the roof. It stopped short, leaving a gap screened by black iron bars. The light of early morning was flooding through the bars, as if the space on the other side was open to the sky.

And Sonia was there, in the light. Rye could feel it as surely as he could feel the draught blowing softly on his face, and water swirling around his knees. He took a step forward, heard Sholto make a muffled sound, and only then turned and saw what loomed close by him, to his left.

It was a giant cage made of thick iron mesh. It almost filled the vast room’s floor space, and rose to just below the roof. And perched high inside it were two monstrous, winged beasts.

His eyes still dazzled by the light, Rye thought at first that the creatures must be the dragons of legend. Then he made out feathers, spines, and vast, curved beaks, recognised the evil reek of ash and rotting meat, and realised what he was seeing.

This cage, two storeys high in the heart of the Harbour, was the roost of the Master’s creatures—the giant birds Bones called ‘sky serpents’.

Rye half smiled. So the terror that had attacked him at the very beginning of this ill-fated quest was to confront him at the end. Well, so be it.

‘Why in Weld are you smiling, Rye?’ Sholto whispered, sounding as close to panic as Rye had ever known him to sound. ‘Come out of here—now! There is nothing beyond that wall of stone but earth and sand. It is part of the foundations of the building! And the guards sleep here, with those stinking birds! By the Wall, how do they bear it?’

‘They are not human,’ Rye said, glancing at the beds of straw, the tubs of drinking water and the gnawed bones that lay around the base of the cage. Already the water surging through the open doorway was turning the floor of the room into a swamp.

Sholto gritted his teeth. ‘What does it matter what they are? Rye, come away! Do you not see? There is no way forward from here.’

Rye looked up, narrowing his eyes at the glare coming through the barred gap below the roof.

‘There is,’ he said. ‘Those bars are far enough apart for us to be able to squeeze between them, I am sure of it.’

There was no reply. Rye glanced around and what he saw in his brother’s face made him realise that Sholto thought he had taken leave of his senses.

‘This room is two storeys high, Sholto,’ he went on, forcing himself to speak calmly, though his heart was racing. ‘Part of the upper floor is on the other side of the grey section of the wall. It is the place where the test is to be held. Sonia is there, and the other captives. We must get to them before it is too late.’

‘Are you mad?’ Sholto cried, his control breaking at last. ‘You cannot know what is on the other side of that wall, Rye! And even if what you say is true, we cannot get through those bars! We cannot reach them!’

The giant birds in the cage cocked their heads. Perhaps they had heard Sholto’s voice only as a faint cheeping far below, but they had heard it. They squatted on their perches, very still, listening.

‘We can,’ said Rye.

He slipped the golden key into his pocket and opened his clenched fist. The armour shell still bulged on the tip of his little finger like a huge, deformed fingernail. But the serpent scale was lying loose and glimmering in the palm of his hand. Only an oval-shaped red scar remained to show where it had buried itself into his flesh.

‘What is that?’ Sholto hissed, looking down in horror at his brother’s outspread hand. ‘What is that scar? And what is that—that thing on your little finger? It looks like—”

Rye pushed the scale back into the brown bag that dangled around his neck. When he drew his fingers out again, he was holding the small red feather. As Sholto stared at him wildly, he shrugged.

‘There is no time to explain,’ he said. ‘The iron of the cage will slow us, and it will make us faintly visible as well, but we have to take the risk.’

He held out his scarred hand. And Sholto, his face expressionless, took it, and allowed himself to be led to the stone wall.

Rye edged into the corner of the room—as far from the sky serpents’ cage as he could get. He lifted his arms. Up! he thought.

And slowly, falteringly, the magic of the feather drew him and Sholto up the sour-smelling stone wall, up past the smooth grey wall above, and onto the ledge where the bars began. And then the monstrous birds saw them, and came swooping and screeching, battering their wings on the iron mesh of the cage.