“A person grows peculiar, in this world,” he said. “It’s not the loneliness but the solitude. One day, the drughr, too, left. And I was truly alone. Devastated. Afraid. I set off in search of her. I had no one else, you see. And after a long time I found her, hidden in a tunnel at the edge of the river. She had a baby with her—a human child, it seemed. But it wasn’t human. It was hers. Her own baby. And she looked magnificent. I could feel the power and fury in her. Somehow the baby was giving her strength, making her even more powerful. And I saw in that instant the horror she’d be capable of, and that the baby couldn’t be allowed to live.” He was breathing heavily now, and Charlie saw he had a hand pressed to his side. “It couldn’t be allowed to.…”
Charlie could feel his blood moving in his head. He knew, even before the man spoke next, what he was going to say.
“I stole the baby. I’d meant to kill it. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it. I knew the horror of that child’s life to come, how terrible its fate, and I couldn’t stand that either. So I fled with the child to the only place the drughr couldn’t follow—the orsine, which Berghast had closed to me—and I begged the glyphic to let us through. You were that baby, Marlowe. You were that child.”
“No,” the boy whispered.
“That is why you are different. And that is why the drughr is hunting you. She is your mother.”
“You’re a liar!” the boy shouted suddenly. “It’s a lie!”
Jacob Marber went on in his low, pained voice. “But that doesn’t mean you have to be like her. You can choose what you are, what you will be.”
Charlie risked a horrified glance. Marlowe was trembling. Charlie could see how desperately he wanted to run away. But he didn’t. And suddenly he understood why: he wouldn’t leave Charlie either.
“When Berghast took you from me,” said Jacob, “I was too weak, after years here in this world, to stop him. I came back for you, before I was strong enough. I wanted to take you away, to hide you away someplace where Berghast and the drughr could never find you. Someplace you could be happy and live a good life. But I failed you. I will not fail you now.”
There was in his voice a genuine regret, as if he did not wish to happen what was about to happen. All at once his eyes turned entirely black, as if a black ink had spread cloudily through his irises and the whites of his eyes until there was only blackness, seeping and smearing around his lids. Slowly he rolled up his sleeves. There was a darkness writhing and twisting under his skin.
“Here we are like gods, Marlowe,” he said, and his teeth showed through the bloodied hole in his cheek. “Here our talents are much, much more powerful. Can you feel it? This world doesn’t like it, it senses that we do not belong. That is why our kind cannot stay here long enough to learn how to harness what we are, what we can do. But you, child, you can stay here. Because of what you are.”
“I’m not, I’m not—”
Jacob Marber didn’t bother to argue. He paused and lifted his face as if listening and then he said, “She is close. I must go.”
“Who is close?” cried Marlowe.
But Jacob Marber was already spreading his fingers, almost gently, moving them in strange arcane gestures. A long thin rope of dust, tensile and somehow solid, snaked through the air and wrapped around Marlowe and held him fast.
Charlie clutched the knife and iron bar in his shaking hands. He felt light-headed, weak, like he couldn’t catch his breath. But he just needed Jacob Marber to walk a few feet closer.
Then the monster spoke again and Charlie froze. “You will be safe here, child. She will not find you here.”
“Wait! What’re you doing? Stop it!” Marlowe was struggling, straining now against the ropes of dust. “Where are you going?”
“To lead her away from you. Then I will find Henry Berghast.”
“Why? To kill him?”
Jacob Marber bowed his head in acknowledgment.
“You should kill the drughr,” Marlowe cried angrily. “If you’re really not bad, that’s what you’d do.”
Jacob Marber paused, his eyes shining. He looked overwhelmed by regret. “The drughr and I, we are bound to each other. I am sustained by her, as she is sustained by me. Killing her would not be so … easy.” He lowered his voice. “But you must be careful, child. You are not alone in here. This is the world where the First Talent vanished. His power is still here. I can feel it. And Henry Berghast can feel it, too.”
Marlowe ceased struggling, and stared at him. “So?”
“So why do you think Berghast wants that glove?”
“To stop the drughr.”
Jacob Marber bowed his head, breathing. Then he looked up. “Be safe, little one. I will be back for you.”
Then Charlie heard the banging of his steps descending through the strange house. A moment later, his dark shape appeared in the fog below, striding across the square. From the strange white tree a second figure detached itself, and scurried alongside, like a dog. Charlie knew that thing, the way it moved. He shuddered.
Marlowe was leaning up against one wall, across from the mummified talent, his arms pinned fast, his legs tied. The boy’s little wrists were already red where the ropes stretched tight. Charlie at once kneeled and started worrying at the bonds.
Marlowe wouldn’t look at him. “Charlie, did you hear what he said?”
“Worry about that later, Mar. Let’s just get you out of this.”
“He’s going to kill Dr. Berghast.”
“He’s going to try. Hold still.” But Charlie’s hands were shaking so bad that he could hardly get his fingers around the cords of dust to try to pull at them. They felt soft, slippery almost, but also tensile and strong, and they flexed around the boy’s arms and wrists and legs like living tentacles.
Outside, the fog slid past, ribboning with the dead.
Marlowe’s voice was quiet when next he spoke and it was the quietness that made Charlie look at him. “I’m not a monster, Charlie,” he said.
And then the boy was crying. Charlie dabbed at the boy’s eyes with his sleeves. He said, “Don’t you listen to him. Don’t you let him get inside your head.”
“I don’t want to be … what he says I am.”
“You’re not.”
The boy started crying again.
“Hey,” said Charlie. “Hey, look at me. What about Brynt?”
Marlowe looked up. “Brynt?”
“She told you once you get to choose who your family is. So do it, Mar. Choose.”
He lowered his face, miserable. “Brynt was wrong.”
“You know she wasn’t,” he said fiercely. “She wasn’t wrong at all. Now let me get these damn things off you. I don’t understand how they’re still here, aren’t they supposed to just … disappear? If I can … just … get them…”
He was grunting, sweating with the effort. But there was no breaking them, no slackening them, nothing. They were not ropes. He couldn’t untie a thing that had no end and no beginning and no knot anywhere and when he looked at Marlowe and saw the boy knew it too he saw a doubt creep into his face and he flinched and looked away. The kid was right to be afraid.
“It’s no good, Charlie,” he whispered. “Look at your hands.”
They were shaking terribly. Charlie held them up in the eerie light. The skin was blotching, losing its pigment.
“You got to go, you can’t stay here any longer. You need to get out. You have to.”
“What if he comes back? And you’re all alone here, tied up like this?”
But the boy was looking at him clearly, nodding his little black-haired head in that sad not-quite-a-child way that he had. And Charlie knew he was right, that he, Charlie, had to go back through the orsine, that he wouldn’t be any use to Marlowe if he got sicker here. And the boy wouldn’t be hurt, couldn’t be hurt, not here, not like this. Charlie hung his head.
“I’ll be coming right back,” he whispered.
He picked up the strange glove from the soft floor, and it was almost like a sound was coming from it, a faint music he couldn’t quite hear. The finger that wore his mother’s ring started to ache. He stuffed the glove into his satchel.
“Do you remember the way back?” said Marlowe.
He did. He didn’t even need the map. He’d find the river and then the dome of the cathedral and the building on Nickel Street and the dead stairs that led back up into the orsine. He’d be fast and he wouldn’t stop for anything and he’d be back to get Marlowe before anything bad could happen. That’s what he’d do. He stumbled to the door, swaying. He looked back at the little boy in his dark bindings, and he ran a hand across his eyes, and then he took the stairs two at a time with the satchel slapping at his side and he started to run.
35
STEAM AND IRON