There was that ancient haelan, Berghast, who had lost his talent, who feared the glyphic’s dying and brought elixirs to keep him alive, and there was the terrible hunger deep inside him, like a fire that would not go out. And there were all those others, the talents in the big house across the loch, who used to come to him sometimes, to ask his permission to enter the orsine. And there were the dark ones in the other world, moving, always moving like water in a river, but with nowhere to go, and the evil that lurked just on the other side of that, desperate, furied, utterly inhuman and unknowable and black. It was she whom he held the orsine closed against, she alone who made him fear. And far beyond her, a darker power, banished so long ago it was like it had never been.
The glyphic turned his slow tendrils through the earth, feeling the cool soil shift. There, almost hidden, silent, was the man of smoke. Marber. A rip had opened in the fields beyond the wards and he was pressing through, even now. Cairndale’s wards would not hold. The glyphic saw in an instant all he would lose, all he would gain, for what was to come and what had already been were as one.
Now he could feel fingernails, scraping at the skin of the orsine, fumbling, feeling for the soft scars where the other’s knife had sawed. If it was a dream or real he couldn’t say. But the pain in him was thick, real, spreading through his limbs like a heat, and he began to shudder, and in the shuddering he sent out dreams, like pollen in a wind, dreams that they might find their dreamers.
Soon.
“Oh,” he whispered, into the darkness under the earth.
Let them know, let them see, let them come before it is too late.
* * *
Henry Berghast woke from the dream filled with an unfamiliar fear and he looked around, confused at first, coming back to himself gradually. A dream. It had been a dream.
He was in his study, his collar loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled. The hour was late, almost evening, to gauge by the deepening blue in the curtains. The fire in the grate was cold. The bonebirds clicked and rattled in their cage. He rubbed his face and he stood—his back stiff—and he rang for his manservant, Bailey.
He’d been waiting, yes. Ever since the Ovid boy had returned from the land of the dead, with the glove in his possession. All he lacked now was a lure to draw the drughr out.
But that, too, would come. He had dreamed it.
He went to the narrow water closet and poured out a basin of cold water and splashed his face and dried it on his shirttails and then he stared into the pier glass. His eyes were pouched and heavy-lidded and old. He held his palms over his white beard and stared as if at a stranger and he drew the hair back from his face and held it flat with his two hands. Then he opened the little cabinet and took out a pair of scissors and a razor. He shaved his beard slowly, pausing often to consider his reflection. It was a face he didn’t know. It amazed him to think about the true faces of things, of what lay beneath the surfaces, how all he and everyone thought they knew was but appearance and illusion. His fingers worked away at his beard. Then he began to cut and shave away the hair over his eyes and across his forehead, at last drawing the razor in long sweeping motions across his scalp, splashing it in the cold basin, until he was standing with small cuts bleeding and his bony scalp weird-looking in the glass.
There came a knock at the door. His manservant, Bailey, betrayed no alarm at his changed appearance. The man—tall, bony, grim—merely nodded to him and held out a towel as if he had been summoned for that very purpose and Berghast took it and turned back.
You are going mad. He smiled to his reflection.
His reflection—hairless, blood-speckled where the razor had cut too deep—smiled back.
He caught Bailey’s face in the mirror, watching. “We must be like water, Bailey,” he murmured. “We must be clean, and empty.”
He went back into his study, his manservant silent. It was then Berghast saw the door to the tunnels was open. Lurking in it was a small figure, ragged, with bloodied fingernails, his black hair wild. A blue shine seeping up out of his skin. He could have been standing there a long time. He could have been standing there but an instant. It was all just exactly as Henry Berghast had dreamed it would be.
The shining boy.
Marlowe.
Marlowe had come back.
* * *
Abigail Davenshaw, asleep in her rooms, woke suddenly. She went to the opened window with her heart in her throat and she felt the afternoon light fall across her face.
The child was back. Marlowe.
He had returned.
She knew it to be true. She was trembling. Outside, the grounds of Cairndale were quiet, the air tinged with a distant smoke like burning leaves. She could smell the loch below the manor. But there were no voices, no students calling to each other, no signs of life. She had dreamed little Marlowe so clearly and she knew somehow that it was not a dream, not really, and she had dreamed other things also. Rarely did she dream in images but this day she had. If it resembled sight, she could not say. But she had dreamed a man striding across a field in a hat and cloak and she’d known it to be Jacob Marber with that same clarity and she had dreamed flames and heard weeping and the weeping had been her own.
She knew she must go to Dr. Berghast, tell him what she had dreamed. She couldn’t imagine doing so, it seemed so foolish. Forgive me, Doctor, I have been having bad dreams.… And yet there was a fierce conviction in her that filled her with certainty. Go, she must. She put on her shawl and carefully ran her hands over her dress and her hair, smoothing out any strays, and then she tied the blindfold at her eyes and picked up the birch switch for speed and opened her door.
There were presences in the hallway, hurrying past. She could tell at once by the sound of their footsteps and the smells, like of dried cotton and the acrid stink of urine, that it was some of the old residents, the ones she thought of as ghosts.
“Miss Davenshaw,” said a shaking voice. It was Mr. Bloomington, the ancient talent who lived down the corridor. “You would be best, my dear, to stay in your rooms. This is no time to be going out. We have told Mr. Smythe the same.”
She bit back her pride and turned her face in his direction. “And why ever not?” she said. “You seem like you could use assistance, sir.”
She could hear his labored breathing. It sounded like fear.
“He’s back, Miss Davenshaw. He’s come back. He’s got through the east wards and is on his way here, Lord only knows how. The children … the children must be kept safe. We are all going out to meet him.”
For a brief confused moment she thought he was talking about Marlowe. But Mr. Bloomington must have seen something in her face, for he added, in his croaking voice: “It is young Jacob, Miss Davenshaw. Jacob Marber is coming across the fields.”
She felt the shock of it. “What will you do?” she whispered.
“What we should have done long ago,” said the old man. “We will fight.”
39
THE RISING DARK
It was the stillness on the long crooked road to Cairndale that made Margaret Harrogate afraid.
The quiet of it.
The road meandered past stands of trees and ribbons of plowed field and yet in the fading light she saw no crows, no creatures, nothing. Even the bushes and the twisted oaks seemed to shrink back away from the road, to seek out the coming darkness. Their hired carriage rattled on.