They fell silent, looking over at him. Ribs opened her mouth, closed it.
The boy blushed under their scrutiny. “Bodies don’t bother me,” he said. “It’s what I do. It’s how I make Lymenion. I just … I might need some help.”
There came a sound from the darkness. They all turned as one, as the door pull clicked and opened silently in the gloom beyond. Charlie stood there, looking filthy and tired and like he’d maybe been walking the halls for hours, crying. His clothes were ragged and his hands were held out before him, the fingers clawlike and pained. He stopped when he saw them.
“Jesus, it’s Charlie,” Ribs breathed. “What—?”
Komako went to him. She felt a surge of something inside her, not relief, not worry, but something else, something like an angry kind of happiness, and it confused her. She touched his dirty sleeve and then she said, “Where’ve you been? What’s happened, Charlie?”
“I left him,” he whispered. “I left Mar. I did, Ko. Me.”
She put her hands on either side of his face and tilted it down to look at her. “Hey,” she murmured. “It’s okay. Where is he? Where is Marlowe, Charlie?”
“I … I can’t remember,” he said, grinding his knuckles into his forehead. “We went through the orsine, Ko. Me and Mar. We went inside it.”
Then in the candlelight he told them all that he remembered, broken as it was. How Berghast had drawn them into volunteering, and the murder of Marlowe’s mother, and the cold fire of the orsine, and the city of the dead and the glove and what Berghast had revealed about his own mother’s ring. They listened in silence. Komako’s heart hurt when he talked about Marlowe, seeing the stricken look on his face. He couldn’t remember abandoning him. That was almost the worst of it, it seemed. He couldn’t remember it at all, only knew it was so, only knew his friend was in there still, alone, little, afraid.
When he was finished, Ribs told about Edinburgh. She left out nothing, not Mrs. Ficke and what she’d said about Berghast, not the glyph-twisted kids, not the girl Deirdre.
“It were Dr. Berghast what done it,” she said. “It were awful sad to see, Charlie.” Last of all she told about the orsine tearing open and the terrible method of sealing it forever. However a glyphic’s heart was to be carved out of the thick armor of its bark, it had to be done. Oskar, she said, giving the boy a quiet appraising look, had already volunteered for it.
Charlie cleared his throat. “What about Marlowe?” he said softly. His eyes searched their faces. “If you seal the orsine, he … he can’t get out.”
Ribs was solemn. “We all want Marlowe back, Charlie. But what’s he comin back to, if the orsine rips open? There won’t be no one here.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying it,” said Komako. “But Ribs is right.”
“I’m not leaving him in there.”
“Charlie?” said Oskar, nervous. “Marlowe can survive in the orsine, right? So we got time to think of something.” He looked at his flesh giant, as if listening. “Lymenion says we could ask one of the old talents. They might have some ideas. He says maybe there’s a way to get Marlowe out and seal the orsine.”
Charlie lifted his face and his eyes were haunted. “It’s worse than that,” he said in a low voice. “I … I think Jacob Marber’s on his way here.”
Komako looked up sharply. “Jacob—? Here?”
“It’s just a … a feeling. I can’t explain it.”
“Aw, hell,” growled Ribs. “We ought to just go on over to the island and seal the orsine now. While we can, like. There won’t be no drughr comin through then, an no dead neither.”
“But the wards will fail too, when the glyphic is dead,” said Komako. “Jacob Marber can just walk right in. There’s no good side to this, there’s no right way. Either we close the orsine and risk trapping Marlowe inside it, and Jacob being able to come into Cairndale as he pleases…”
“Or we don’t,” Ribs finished, in a tone of disgust, “an the dead come through, an the drughr, an the whole fucking world breaks.”
Oskar breathed out slowly. “Dr. Berghast cares only about trapping his drughr,” he whispered. “He won’t help us.”
Komako got to her feet, running her hands through her tangled hair. She was exhausted. She hadn’t slept properly since before they went to see the Spider, hadn’t eaten, hadn’t washed. She rubbed at her neck. The others looked at her, expectant, like maybe she had an answer. Only Charlie didn’t look at her. He seemed different from how he’d been before, older somehow. More determined.
The shadows in the room were thickening.
“Right,” she said tiredly. “We need to find a way to get Marlowe safe. Obviously. But whatever happens, that orsine has to be sealed.”
* * *
After the others had gone up to wash and change, maybe to try to rest, Charlie climbed onto the windowsill and stared out at the darkening lawn. He could just make out the mist moving across it. Like the spirit dead, he thought dimly, though it was nothing like the spirit dead, not really. The candle burned down. His heart was empty. He sat and he stared at his hands and he felt nothing at all.
It was Komako who came back, twenty minutes later, who found him like that. She didn’t explain why. He was alone and then suddenly he was not and he lifted his face and saw her.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered, just as if she’d been there the whole time. “I don’t know how to fix it. It’s my fault, Ko. It’s my fault Mar’s still in there.”
Komako rested her hand on his, watchful, quiet. And then, when he said nothing more, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were as soft as flowers. He stared in surprise.
Her eyes were grave. “We’ll find a way, Charlie,” she said. “Somehow we will.”
He swallowed. The heat had risen to his face and he was flustered and he swallowed again. “Yeah,” he said.
“Just don’t give up hope.”
But he wasn’t about to. Hope wasn’t something he could afford to give up. “Marlowe’s still alive, Ko,” he said suddenly, fiercely. “I can feel it. He’s, he’s trying to—”
But then he broke off, staring out at the mist.
“What is it, Charlie?” she whispered.
“He’s trying to get back,” he said softly.
38
THE LAND OF THE DEAD IS ALL AROUND
The thought unfurled in the glyphic’s mind like a flower.
Jacob Marber is coming.
Time was a mist all adrift around him, without future or past, and he dreamed as he had always done of the beginning and the end of things. He was dying. This he knew as he knew the soft give of the earth in his fingers, as he knew the feel of sunlight on the baked stones of the monastery above him. He had lived longer than there had been nations and he observed the workings of the living with a detachment. He had seen generations pass into dust and lived on and the greater pain in such a long life was the remembering. Now he stirred and he felt the slow tendrils of root stir and shiver all along the tunnel and through the stones and up to where the orsine lay.
Soon, now, Jacob Marber will be through.