The boy was rubbing at his face with the heels of his hands, obviously exhausted.
“This map,” said Dr. Berghast, gesturing at the canvas, “is rather unusual. If you look closely, you will see it is not made of ink at all. That is dust, Marlowe. It is a map written in dust; and the canvas is human skin. Ah, you are disturbed? Do not be; it is the stretched skin of a dustworker, one of the oldest and greatest of their kind; and it was his wish to be used so. See how the dust moves, even now. It moves because that world you have just come from moves also, is in constant flux.” Berghast leaned forward, filled for just a moment with a deep, liquid regret. He breathed softly. “This was a gift from someone I have not seen now in many years. Oh, we have all lost those we loved; it is a condition of this world. That person had an identical map hanging on her wall, and as this one changed, so did hers. They were connected, you see.”
For a long moment neither spoke. The bonebirds clicked in their cage.
“Jacob didn’t kill my mother, did he?” said the boy. He said it so quietly that Berghast almost didn’t hear it, and when he realized, and looked up in surprise, he knew his face had betrayed the truth.
“No,” he replied, reluctant. “He did not. Did he tell you that? Did he also tell you who your mother is?”
The boy stared at his lap. He nodded.
“Then you understand why I lied to you,” continued Berghast. “Jacob Marber is a corrupted and conflicted soul. Your mother, sadly, is something far worse. But you do not have to be like her. I did not want you … confused by the truth.”
“Charlie said it too. He said I didn’t have to be like her, I can choose.”
“Then he is wise.” Berghast said it gravely, in a voice that was both his and not his. He went back to the fire, sat close to the child. He turned the strange glove in his fingers, stared at its lightless wooden plates. Every part of his being was electric with caution. He was close, so close, to completing what he’d labored so long to make possible. He must make no missteps now.
“Do you know what this is?” he said softly. “A glove, yes. But not only that. It is a repository of knowledge, a … book. A book, written before men had language. You can read, yes? Then you know. You know what it is to gain entry to another’s mind. I have been asking a question for many, many years, and no one has been able to answer it. But this”—and he cradled the armored glove in his two hands as he spoke, the sleek black surface reflecting no light, utterly dark, utterly still—“this will tell me what I wish to know.”
“How?” said the child, doubtful.
Berghast smiled. “I will show you.”
He placed the glove carefully on the sofa and stoked the fire until it was burning very hot and then he dropped the glove into the fire. It did not burn, of course. But it heated until its armored surface was clear like glass and Berghast could see a gray smoke twisting and drifting inside the glass, and then he reached in with a pair of tongs and drew the glove out and went to where the child sat. “You must put it on,” he said. “Do not be afraid. It is quite cool, I assure you.”
The child, though afraid, did as he was asked; and when the glove had been slipped on, he looked up in amazement. His skin hadn’t burned. The glove looked enormous on his little arm, still translucent, so that the boy’s hand was like a stone in a river. Berghast kneeled in front of the boy, turning his wrist outward, staring into the glassy palm. “If you wish for the drughr to be destroyed, if you wish to keep your friends safe, you must hold your hand steady.”
“How does it work?”
But it was as if the boy knew the answer already, as if he knew it and feared it.
“This was not made in our world,” said Berghast, without looking away. “It requires a spark from the orsine, to function. It was not made by us, you see, to travel there. It was made by them, to come here.”
“Them?” whispered the boy.
But Berghast didn’t answer. He could see his own reflection now, a vague distorted visage curved and crazed in the glass palm. And beneath that, the beautiful folding patterns of smoke. “Show me,” he whispered to the glove. “Show me what I seek.”
Slowly then, all around him, it seemed his study walls were dissolving until there was only himself, staring with fierce intention deep into the glove, and all at once he was seeing all of it, how to lead the drughr to the orsine and contain it there and how to take its power into his own flesh. There were colors he could not describe and a dazzling light shining on his face and he couldn’t feel his body, his muscles, anything, and instead there came an immense will, emanating from his mind, almost like a sound, a musical note. He did not understand all that he saw; it was as if it were being shown in a language he didn’t fully understand, if pictures could be a language; and then all at once the plates of the glove darkened and he fell back, blinking, the feel of his own skin rolling over him like a hand over a mouth.
But he knew, now. He knew what to do.
The only way to destroy the drughr would be to infect it. He had known this for a long time, but he had not seen that it must be the blood of an exile, of a fallen talent, infecting the drughr. If the talents were its sustenance, the exiles were its toxin.
Trembling slightly, he rose to his feet. His stomach lurched. He took the glove from the child and then looked at the child in disgust. The glove had drawn out a part of the boy that had been hidden.
“I was a talent, once,” he muttered. “Did you know? A haelan, like your friend Mr. Ovid. I thought my usefulness was ended, when I lost my power. But I see now it was only beginning. It was always in flux, my path, it was all a part of the same river.”
The boy’s hand looked red, raw where the glove had been.
“I will absorb the drughr’s power, Marlowe, because of the emptiness that is in me. And that part of me that will go into her, will destroy her. For she cannot survive this world.” He ran a slow hand over his shaved scalp and saw in the window his watery reflection do the same. “Those of us who have lost our talents, we are like emptied vessels. The shape is still there, but it is no longer filled. We are returned to a potential state. I will become, again; the drughr’s power will fill me.”
The boy looked at him, afraid.
“But Mr. Thorpe weakens by the hour. If he dies, the orsine will rip apart; and there will be no way to contain the drughr. Have you any idea how many of my friends she has devoured? It is because of her my talent faded. I will not fail. And you,” he said, rising to his full height, “you must be the lure, Marlowe; you must draw her to me. She will come if you call to her.”
“How will I know what to do?”
He made a fist. “It will be as easy as closing your hand. It is in your nature. Come, see.” He picked up a candelabra from his desk and he led the child to a looking glass above the pier table by the door. “What do you see?”
And the child, weak, afraid, looked in at his reflection. A drughr looked back. Slowly, as they watched, the horns and thickened skull shrank back into the boy’s own shape.
“You will know what to do,” said Berghast, almost tenderly, his big hand resting on the child’s shoulder, “because an abomination lives inside you. It is a part of you. And you cannot choose it away.”
* * *
He was here. His Jacob had come.
Walter crouched in his cell, feeling the blood well up out of the meat in his palm where his thumbs had been. His face and chin tasted like sour iron, there was wetness everywhere, and pain, such pain, washing over him in waves.
But Jacob was near, Jacob had come.… Nothing else mattered.