‘Come on,’ said Ellie. ‘Let’s get to work.’
After an hour spent pulling nails out of the floorboards and attaching hinges so they could make the boards fall inwards, Ellie thought she heard a very faint jingling in the street.
‘Um, I’m just popping over to the orphanage to talk to Anna,’ she said, checking that Seth was busily engrossed with the floorboards. She stepped out of the workshop and closed the door quickly behind her. Finn was leaning against a wall, chin resting lazily on one fist.
‘Go away,’ she hissed. ‘He’s not coming out.’
Finn chewed his lip in disappointment. ‘Fine,’ he said, scowling. ‘You win. Unless . . .’
Ellie’s heart quickened. ‘Unless what?’
Finn’s scowl softened, then vanished. ‘Unless I change my plans. I think I need to remind you which one of us is cleverer.’
Ellie pressed her thumb through the hole in her coat sleeve. ‘Finn, you can’t do anything. He’s safe in here with me.’
‘I know that,’ said Finn. ‘But she isn’t.’
He smiled an angelic smile, then darted round the corner. Sharp pricks of worry stabbed at Ellie’s skin.
‘Anna.’
She rushed across the street and into the orphanage. She checked Anna’s bedroom, the kitchens, and the storage room, where the forgotten possessions of past orphans were piled to the ceiling. Anna wasn’t in any of them.
Fry and Ibnet were lounging on the floor of the games room.
‘Where’s Anna?’ Ellie asked them.
‘She’s out,’ said Ibnet.
‘Where?’
‘They’re having a festival for the anniversary of the seventeenth Vessel’s execution,’ said Fry, holding out a pouch for Ellie to see. ‘Look, Ellie, Anna’s been teaching me to pick pockets. This is Ibnet’s purse – I stole it from him and he didn’t even realize!’
Ibnet leapt across the room to wrestle his money away from her, but Ellie turned and raced back to the workshop.
‘Anna’s not in the orphanage,’ she told Seth. ‘I think Finn’s going to try and do something to her.’ Her heart was firing like a cannon in her chest. ‘I’m going to go and find her. You –’
‘Stay here,’ Seth muttered moodily. ‘Yes, I know.’
~
The Markets of the Unknown Saint were right on the southern edge of the City, on the Immutable Waterfront. They spilled through a dozen streets and many more alleyways; scores of stalls and hundreds of shoppers. Ellie had to duck and weave between them, eyes darting around for any sign of Anna. She came to an open square where a hungry, raging bonfire had been built for the celebration. But the people standing round it looked glum, the children waving their streamers half-heartedly. Ellie guessed it was hard to celebrate the anniversary of an old Vessel being killed, when a new Vessel was loose in the City.
On the corner of the square, Ellie passed another massive, sturdy-looking building that she’d always thought abandoned. It had boarded-up windows, a spiked roof, and a shiny silver lock on its front door. As she watched, an Inquisitor pulled along a small man bound in chains. He hurled him inside the building, then went in after, slamming the door behind him.
Ellie leaned against a jewellery stall to catch her breath, looking around anxiously for a bright shock of ginger hair, or a familiar blue jumper.
‘Hey, watch what you’re touching!’ shrieked the stall owner.
Three burly men hurried by, carrying crates of eels, and another elderly shopkeeper yelled at her to buy a wooden engraving of the Enemy.
‘Burn it in a bonfire!’ he screeched. ‘Banish the Enemy for only twenty pennies!’
Ellie rubbed the sides of her head and tried to think like Anna. Where would she have gone? The market stalls only sold things like earrings and fish, and wouldn’t interest Anna. And there were very few sailors for her to pester here, so far from the docks.
‘Think, think, think,’ Ellie told herself. What was the most reckless, dangerous thing someone could do near the Immutable Waterfront?
‘The Oystery!’ she cried.
Anna loved it there! It combined so many of her favourite things: a perilous three hundred-foot drop, seagulls to spit cherry stones at, and grizzled old fishermen who could teach her new swear words.
Ellie broke into a run, darting between a group of musicians, and four children flinging sardines at each other. As she got nearer to the seafront, an enormous tower reared up, far taller than the buildings around it. It was called the Tower of the Serpent. It had once been used as a lighthouse, a beacon fire lit on top of it every night. Winding in a spiral round the outside was the vast, graven figure of the sea serpent that gave the building its name, so large that a stairwell ran up its insides. Ellie’s mum had often taken Ellie and her brother to the top of the tower when they were little. When her brother had got scared of being up so high, her mum had bundled them up and sung to them. On a better day, the sight of the tower would have made Ellie feel safe and warm.
‘Anna!’ she cried, turning her head wildly. ‘Anna!’
Ellie burst out of an alleyway and the sea exploded into view, the sound of crashing waves filling her ears. The Immutable Waterfront didn’t slope down smoothly to join the water, but fell sharply into the sea – a cliff made from a hundred submerged buildings. Every day, when the tide went down, the walls of these buildings were covered in thousands of oysters.
Ellie’s mum’s oyster-catchers could be seen ponderously climbing the walls, gathering up the oysters into a compartment in their bellies. From here, the oysters dropped into a sack trailing beneath the machine, like a clutch of insect eggs.
Stretching out from the walls of the Oystery was a sprawling network of wooden walkways and platforms, raised up high above the sea on towering stilts, connected to each other by rope bridges and staircases. Dangling from these platforms on long ropes were hundreds of cages for catching the lobsters and crayfish that swarmed over the rooftops beneath the sea. Fishermen winched the lobster traps back up from the water and carried cagefuls of shellfish back to the City. Some even lived in huts on the platforms, their washing lines tangled with the bunches of mussels that clung to the wooden stilts.
And there, sitting on the edge of the platform furthest from the City, legs waggling back and forth as she stared glumly out to sea, was Anna.
‘Anna!’ Ellie cried. ‘Anna Stonewall!’
But her voice was drowned out by the wind. She looked up and down the flat street that wound along the edge of the Oystery, and saw him instantly, sitting on a bench and idly winding a lock of golden hair round his finger.
Finn caught Ellie’s eye and waved enthusiastically.
‘ANNA!’ Ellie roared. She pulled a flash-bang from her pocket and launched it as hard as she could in Anna’s direction, only the wind caught it, and it swirled in a graceful loop before plummeting towards the sea.
Ellie gritted her teeth and ran along the closest rope bridge. Wooden planks rattled. Fear stabbed like needles driven into her hands and feet.
‘Anna! ANNA!’
At last, Anna looked over her shoulder, and saw Ellie. She scowled, stood up, and started walking in the opposite direction.
‘No, no, Anna! Come back – it’s not safe!’
But Anna couldn’t hear, or didn’t want to. The wind whipped Ellie’s hair painfully against her neck. She ran, and her leg nearly plunged through the gap between two planks in the rope bridge. Behind her, someone was shouting, but Ellie only cared about reaching Anna.
‘Go away, Ellie!’ Anna yelled above the wind, turning to hurl the words in Ellie’s direction.
Then Anna’s eyes went wide, as she looked over Ellie’s shoulder. Ellie turned, and was hit by a cloud of smoke.
The Oystery was on fire.
The Tower of the Serpent
Men were shouting and screaming. Somehow, the platforms had caught fire: a hut, two staircases, and a long stretch of platform were already ablaze, and the flames were spreading at a terrifying p
ace, as if the wood had been coated with whale oil.
‘Anna!’ Ellie cried.
‘Ellie!’
They ran at each other, hugging tightly. Anna had dried tears on her cheeks and smelled of cherries. Ellie looked around the Oystery – already the fire had claimed another platform and was racing down a wooden stilt towards the sea. If they didn’t move quickly, there’d be no path back to the City, and they’d have no choice but to jump hundreds of feet into the sea below. Ellie had once read that falling into water from a great height was like falling into solid rock.
She scanned the platforms, trying to figure out a path to safety. ‘This way!’ she cried, taking Anna’s hand. Of all the people in the Oystery, they were by far the furthest out to sea. The fishermen were all running back as fast as they could – none had noticed the two girls trapped behind them.
Ellie and Anna raced up a flight of stairs. The fire streaked out in all directions, consuming rope bridges and wood and spreading like a fiery spider’s web. Below, Ellie could see flames licking at the dangling lobster traps. She kicked the levers of every winch they passed, dropping the lobsters back into the sea before they could be burned alive.
‘It’s okay!’ Anna said, as they crossed another swinging rope bridge. ‘We’ll make it!’
But then the fire reared up before them, and the bridge lurched beneath their feet. Down to their right, an entire platform collapsed into the sea, as its wooden stilts gave way and its rope bridges crumbled to ash.
‘No, no,’ said Ellie. She searched the faces of the hundreds of people who’d gathered along the waterfront, watching in horror. Where was Finn? Surely he wouldn’t let her die?
She took a deep breath, and was about to speak when she spotted someone she did recognize, standing apart from the crowd.
It was Seth.
He wasn’t looking at them, though, but at the sea far below. His hands were out at his sides. His eyes were wide and wild.
‘Ellie,’ said Anna, tugging at her sleeve and pointing downwards. ‘Look.’
The sea was wild too, seething like a pot of boiling water. Waves crashed in all directions, as if some mighty creature were thrashing around beneath the surface. Then, that same beast seemed to hurl itself from the water – a blue-black construction of seawater, the size of a ship and rising upward. Not towards the flaming, crumbling platforms, but towards the City. Towards Seth.
Something was wrong. Ellie pulled a telescope from her pocket to get a closer look at Seth, and saw blue misty swirls on his skin again, larger and angrier than she’d ever seen them. Worse, the dark blue of his eyes was bleeding out from its edges, blotting out the pupils and the whites and turning them all one colour.
‘He’s too angry,’ Ellie said fearfully, watching the sea twist and thrash as it smashed against the stone of the sea wall, higher and higher each time. ‘He’s making the sea all angry.’
Seth shuddered. His mouth opened, like he wanted to scream, but no sound came out. His arms fell limp and he dropped to his knees, his body jerking and swaying like flotsam caught in a riptide.
Ellie groaned as she watched the sea climbing towards him: a swirling mass of darkness, spraying white foam in all directions, rising up the side of the City to claim its prize. A rush of heat singed the hairs on her neck; she could hear the sound of the fire around her, a strange, sucking sound, like it was gulping up the air.
She reached into her pocket, her fingers trembling as they groped around for what she needed. They closed round a small spherical object wrapped up in paper. She ripped it out and launched it towards Seth, aiming for a large wooden stake that jutted from one of the platforms between them.
There was a deafening CRACK and a brilliant, blinding blaze of light that eclipsed even the light of the fire. Seth’s eyes flicked from the sea towards it, like someone drawn from a dream. His eyes met hers.
Ellie tried to pour all the meaning that she could into her gaze. Seth frowned, his eyes all blue and expressionless, blue mist-shapes curling over his face. He put his hands flat on the ground. He stood up. His pupils returned to his eyes. He breathed in deeply.
The towering column of seawater spun away from him, back towards the fiery platforms. It surged, and grew, and more of the sea rose up to join it, until the entire ocean seemed to be rising. Seth lifted his hands above his head.
‘We need to tie ourselves to something!’ Ellie cried.
They flung themselves flat on the rope bridge and Ellie pulled a length of rope from her pocket. She threw it round them, then tried to tie a knot. But her fingers were trembling too much, and Anna snatched the rope from her hands and tied it herself.
The water hit, swallowing them up and crashing in on Ellie’s eardrums. They were pulled roughly in all directions as the rope bridge twisted and turned upside down. Salty froth rushed up Ellie’s nose. A mussel shell cut her ear as it spun by. They were turned round again, and again, until Ellie couldn’t remember which direction was up.
At last, the wave fell back to the sea, leaving steaming puddles on the platforms and a mist of swirling vapour. Anna untied the rope and they clambered to their feet, shivering and coughing. Their hair was soaked, slicked flat to their skulls. Ellie could feel the heat from the charred wood through the soles of her boots. She looked around. Rotten chunks of wood had been sucked away by the wave, and the whole structure was now a frail walkway of steaming charcoal and wobbly wooden planks. But if they were careful, they’d be able to climb back up to the waterfront. Ellie wanted to laugh. They had done it! They’d beaten Finn!
Then a cry came from the crowd.
‘It was that boy!’ a man yelled. ‘I saw him! He made the sea do that.’
‘Look at his skin. Oh, Saints have mercy – that’s him!’
‘THAT’S THE VESSEL!’
‘No!’ Ellie cried. She grabbed hold of a blackened stump of wood and used it to vault across a crumbled gap in the platform, racing back to the waterfront with Anna right behind her.
‘Get the Inquisitors!’ someone screamed in terror.
The crowd shoved and pushed as they tried to flee. Seth swayed and staggered – he looked like he was going to pass out. Ellie ran towards him, but got stuck among the surging crowd.
‘Ellie!’ Anna cried, grabbing hold of Ellie’s coat. ‘Ellie, wait!’
Ellie twisted, shaking Anna off. ‘Go back to the orphanage – it’s not safe here!’ she said, pushing further into the crowd. A chill travelled up her spine as she saw, between the blur of panicked faces, the distinctive black coat of an Inquisitor.
‘Out of my way!’ he roared.
Ellie was knocked about by the mass of hysterical people. She felt Anna’s hand grab hold of her, then get pulled away again. At last she squeezed free of the crowd, the Inquisitor still caught among them.
‘Idiots! Control yourselves!’ he cried, shoving men and women out of his way.
Ellie saw Seth stumbling into an alley at the edge of the Oystery. She hurtled after him, catching him just as he was about to fall. His hand was ice-cold.
‘The Inquisitors are coming,’ she whispered.
But Seth slumped against the alley wall, eyes closed.
‘Come on, Seth,’ said Ellie desperately. She reached up and yanked some hairs from his head. Seth winced and his eyes flashed open. ‘Now,’ she said, grabbing his hand and pulling him along the alley.
They turned a corner, and Ellie heard the heavy tread of boots behind. From her pocket she pulled a small, wheeled device with a key sticking in its back, like a child’s clockwork toy. She wound it up, then hurled it down a cross street, in the opposite direction from where they were heading. It emitted a high-pitched whistle as it rattled along the cobblestones.
‘That will distract them,’ she said, as they hurried onwards.
‘Won’t they know it’s yours?’ said Seth.
‘No. In about thirty seconds it’s going to explode.’
Ahead, the Tower of the Serpent loomed above them.
‘What do we do?’ said Seth, searching for places to hide. All the doors around them were locked shut.
‘We could get into the sewers maybe?’ Ellie said, glancing around. ‘Oh, but there aren’t any entrances nearby! Come on, this way – we’ll hide up here.’
At the base of the stone serpent they found the entrance to the staircase, which would take them right to the top. They climbed, winding through the snake’s insides. Ellie let out a sigh of relief as they left the streets beneath them.
They emerged on to the flat top of the tower, looking down on the mossy rooftops of the City, a kingdom of nests and gull droppings. Seth collapsed on his front, his hands on his head. Ellie’s knees hurt from running, and she had swallowed so much seawater she felt sick.
She looked about the flat rooftop. There were dozens of large crates scattered around, which she didn’t remember being there before. Seth staggered to his feet and walked to the edge, looking down at the streets below.
‘They’re still chasing that whistling thing,’ he said with mounting excitement. ‘They’re not following us!’
Ellie almost laughed. They’d done it. They’d actually done it.
Then she heard the tinkling of metal.
‘I just knew you’d come up here,’ said a cheerful voice nearby.
Ellie’s heart seemed to stop.
Finn was lying on his back behind one of the crates, staring up at the sky. Ellie checked over her shoulder to make sure Seth wasn’t watching her, but he was focused on where the Inquisitors were going. Ellie scrambled towards Finn, kneeling down at his side behind the crate.
‘What are you doing here?’ she whispered. ‘You can’t be here!’
‘You’ve always been so fond of this place,’ he said. ‘I thought, if you were going to hide anywhere, it would be here. Isn’t it nice to have someone on your side who knows you so well?’
‘They’re still going the wrong way!’ Seth cried.
‘What have you done?’ Ellie snarled, grabbing Finn’s wrist and squeezing tight.
‘Dear, dear, Nellie, such a short fuse,’ Finn said, then smiled. ‘Oh, and speaking of which . . .’
Orphans of the Tide Page 11