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.
24 - The Testing Hall
The light pouring through the bars was dazzling. The great birds were gigantic shadows, lunging and shrieking at the intruders they could see only as ghostly outlines. Their eyes streaming, Rye and Sholto clung to the bars and peered through to the room on the other side.
The first thing they saw was bright sky. Vivid squares of clear blue sparkled above the silvery grating that stretched over the testing hall. Sunshine streamed through the grating, and now that he was so high, Rye could feel its warmth.
He thought of Dirk, and in his mind Dirk’s face was framed in that bright, sunny blue. But no doubt wherever Dirk was by now a sullen pall of grey cloud still hung over the tortured earth. No doubt the blue was just a solitary patch over the Harbour building, and the Master would allow it to gleam only for as long as the test continued.
The monster birds screeched in fury. Again and again their talons rasped on the mesh of the cage, setting Rye’s teeth on edge. He felt Sholto’s fingers tighten painfully on his arm, and looked round.
Sholto’s face was grey, and gleaming with sweat.
‘I—daresay this gap was left to give the birds more air,’ he said, his lips barely moving. ‘It—is very convenient for us. But I wish it was not—so far above the ground.’ He swallowed.
Rye cursed himself. How could he have forgotten? How could he not have realised what this climb had cost Sholto? Sholto was amazingly agile and had lightning reflexes. He could dodge a danger or duck into hiding faster than anyone Rye knew. But he had always feared heights. That was why it had been understood in the family that he would never be able to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a Wall worker, like Dirk.
As a schoolboy, Dirk had taken mischievous delight in climbing onto the roof of the house in Southwall and walking close to the edge, just to make Sholto turn pale and sick at the sight while young Rye laughed.
‘Come down, Dirk!’ their mother would scold, if she caught him. ‘What would the Warden say if he saw you playing such dangerous games? And do not think you are better than Sholto because you can climb without fear, either! Sholto is good at other things.’
But not the things that mattered to Dirk, or to me, or to our father, in those days, thought Rye. And for the first time he realised that Sholto, for all his learning, might have had all his life the sense of not being good enough—a feeling that only his mother had suspected.
At this moment, Sholto was no doubt thinking that Rye would have done far better if he had had Dirk as a companion in this desperate adventure.
Wondering guiltily if this was why thoughts of Dirk kept floating into his mind, Rye pressed closer to the bars and looked down.
The room beyond the bars was very large—more like a meeting hall than an ordinary room. Long balconies jutted from all four walls. Slight shimmers in the air showed that invisible barriers shielded them. The balcony on the wall Rye was facing was the only one that did not have a narrow staircase leading up to it from below. The front of its transparent shield bore three large, black circles.
‘Almost certainly the skimmers will be released through those openings,’ Sholto said, jerking his head slightly at the circles and clearly making an enormous effort to keep his voice even.