Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

“I will leave you here,” said Ellion. “When I am gone, lock the door and hide the key. In the further corner to your right you will find a stair. Climb it until you reach a locked door. Here is that key. Go through, lock the door and again hide the key. Hide it well. You will find yourselves on the inner-city wall. It is not guarded along its length, only at the main gates. But you will see flashes of light here and there, where fragments of loose magic strike against the wards that ring it round. My friend says that the bit of country magic you propose to do should have much the same effect, and so pass unnoticed by any Watcher. Go to your left, until you are well away from this house, before you attempt anything, be as quick as you can, and when you have done leave instantly.”

“Well, thank you kindly,” said Meena as if she were talking to a neighbor who’d brought her a basket of pears. “I can see you’re doing the best you can by us, and we’ll do the same for you. Come along then, girl. No point in hanging around.”

Tilja closed the door behind Ellion and tucked the key under some sacking that she found by touch down against the wall. She took Meena’s hand and with her free hand groping before her and feeling her way with each footstep she worked across into one of the shafts of moonlight and down it to the right-hand wall. There were piles of barrels stacked against it. She felt her way from barrel to barrel to the corner, where she found another door, not locked. She opened it and found the first step with her foot.

“He didn’t say how far up it was,” she whispered. “Are you going to be able to manage? Wait—there’s a hand rope.”

“You take my cane, then. Where’s your shoulder? Right. One at a time.”

Very slowly they climbed eight winding flights. The ones against the two outer walls had slit windows through which Tilja could see the stars, and moonlit roofs, but it was still pitch black inside the stairwell and she had to make sure of every tread by feel. Meena muttered under her breath from time to time, but never groaned nor asked to rest. The ninth flight ended in a door.

Tilja found the keyhole with her fingers, turned the grinding lock and pushed the door open. Beyond it was a battlemented parapet and a wide moonlit sky. She stepped outside and found herself in a kind of alley stretching left and right between the parapet and the much higher wall of the building they had just left. She couldn’t quite see over the parapet.

She locked the door as soon as Meena was through and followed her along to the left, looking for somewhere to hide the key. She fully understood the need. If they were caught doing whatever it was Meena was planning, they mustn’t be carrying any clues about where they’d come from. There was a small tree growing out of the parapet. Its roots had broken some of the brickwork away, so that Tilja could look over. Below her the wall dropped dizzyingly down to the cleared space that circled the old city, and beyond that the moonlit roofs of the outer city reached away.

Tilja managed to wedge the key in among the roots, then hurried after Meena. Buildings lined the inner side of the walkway, screening the central city, but anyone outside the walls must surely have seen Meena’s head and shoulders as she hobbled along through the moonlight. Some distance ahead of them a wisp of pale light flickered above the wall and vanished. Then another, further on. Loose magic striking the wards, Ellion had said. Every hundred paces or so they came to a small watchtower, with a doorless opening onto the walkway. A little beyond the third of these there was a gap in the screen of buildings on their left, with only a waist-high wall to prevent them falling. The gap was wide enough to show them most of the inner city.

“This’ll have to do,” Meena whispered. “I’ll stay back here. Keep yourself down. First thing, we’ve got to get our bearings. Moon must’ve come up over there, so that’ll be eastish. North’s somewhere behind there, then. Drat this moon—can’t see a thing this side. You go on ahead, girl, and see if you can spot the Fisherman—he’ll be low down this time of night, so he should show up spite of the moon—and that should give you the Axle-pin. Once you’ve got that you take old Axtrig out and put her down on her cloth—here—and stand a bit beyond, facing this way so you can see me as well as her. Put your hand up when you’re ready.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“I’ll tell you. You remember what happened in Ellion’s house when I said the man’s name out loud—how Axtrig twisted round and pointed herself toward Talagh, showing us that was the way we’d got to go. Only thing it could mean, far as I can see. What I’m hoping is she’ll do it again now, but this time I’ll keep myself well clear and just whisper his name. That way maybe it won’t hit me as hard as it did back then, but it’ll still be enough for Axtrig to move. Soon as you see her twist, you run in and check the line, and then you pick her up and put her away and we’ll be out of here as fast as we can go. And if nothing happens, I’ll come a bit closer and try again.”

“It’s still a lot more than country magic, isn’t it, Meena, whatever you said to Ellion?”

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but if you was in my shoes you’d give it a try, wouldn’t you, girl?”

“I expect so. But one line’s not going to be enough, is it? We’re going to have to do it somewhere else, and see where the lines cross.”

“Well, maybe. But what I’m thinking is this. There’s got to be a reason why he gave Dirna the peach in the first place, and why we’ve kept Axtrig in the family all this time, and why I brought her along without rhyme or reason, just feeling it was important. It’s so we could find him when the time came. So maybe when I say his name he’ll feel it himself, and he’ll know we’re here and looking for him, and then either he’ll help us, or he won’t. Now, don’t hang around arguing. Off you go, and let’s get it done with.”

From the sharpness of her whispered voice Tilja could tell that Meena was as scared as she was herself. Crouching low and keeping in the strip of shadow beneath the parapet, she scuttled along the walkway to the center of the gap. There she turned and gazed out across the dark and jagged roofscape of the inner city, rising in a gentle swell from east and west to the palace at the summit. Each of the twenty fantastic towers that ringed it had one or two lit windows near the top, and everything below was dark and still. Were the Watchers still awake, even at this hour? Awake enough, in spite of what Ellion had said, to notice something different about a flicker of country magic striking the city’s wards? A sense of steadily increasing danger filled the night air.

She turned her eyes upward and searched among the familiar stars. Yes, there, faint, because of the moon pallor, and lying on his side, was the good old Fisherman, his rod bowed from the weight of the Fish. She followed the line of the last section of rod, and found the Axle-pin, fainter still, directly over the third tower from the left. So that was due north.

She rolled up her sleeve and with trembling fingers untied the ribbon that for the last sixteen days had kept Axtrig safely against her forearm. She had grown so used to the spoon being there that she seldom noticed her, but now as she took her in her hand, that curious slight numbness seeped across her palm and the pads of her fingers.

Something moved in the darkness beside her.

She froze.

Again, in the utter stillness, the same faint pad. A cat meowed softly. She stared and saw the green of its eyes. As her heart resumed its proper beat, the cat moved into the moonlight and meowed again. It was a large, bony creature, neither starved nor cared for. The moonlight sparkled faintly off its shaggy fur. Automatically her hand moved to stroke it, but it backed away and sat down.