Except that he hadn’t yet done what Jacob had asked. He hadn’t yet stalked the glyphic, he hadn’t yet torn the glyphic’s throat out for his own dear Jacob, no. He stood painfully feeling his knees creak and gingerly he paced the length of the lightless room. He’d slipped the loose shackles over his bloodied hands once he’d bit his thumbs off and nothing now would stop him.
He clicked his needlelike teeth. He closed his eyes, and he saw.
Jacob, his dear beautiful friend, Jacob. Walking slowly in the twilight along the perimeter of Cairndale, tracing a hand over the stones in the crumbling wall. The soot and dust smoldering up around him like a living smoke. The wards were weak, yes, even with the glyphic still alive, and Walter watched with his mind’s eye as Jacob reached out and pushed his two hands against the invisible barrier, and it compressed softly, like rotten wood, it shivered under the pressure. It was no dream. He saw Jacob gather some strength into himself and then a slender crack appeared in the air before him and widened and split and then there was a tremendous roar and the stone wall burst inward and Jacob Marber, beautiful, shining, powerful, stepped grimly onto the grounds of Cairndale.
Oh, but there was another with Jacob, a second, a companion, skittering along crablike through the breach. Who was this? Walter felt a stab of envy and decided, yes, he would help his dear Jacob, that other litch was not good enough for Jacob, no, it would have to be removed. Eliminated. Gutted. Yes. For Jacob’s sake, only to help his dear Jacob, yes.
But first: the glyphic. He must do as he’d been told. He could feel what was coming, the closeness of it, he knew there would be fire and bloodshed and horror and his lips tingled with the idea of it. At the cold door he pressed the shell of an ear to listen. The great deep underground of Cairndale was immense, and absolutely still. It was almost time. His blood was singing inside him.
Someone, yes, would be coming down the stairs soon.
And then Walter would be free.
* * *
Deep in the warm root tangle of the earth the glyphic felt his life loosening, unfurling bit by bit like the fingers of a hand, opening. He’d felt the shattering of the wards in his very skull, a sharp obliterating pain, and he’d known in that instant that Jacob Marber had come back. He had foreseen it and dreamed it and now here it was. But he was simply too weak now, too frail, to hold both the orsine closed and the wards along the walls at strength. And Jacob Marber had known it.
The warm darkness was all around. It was his own death he was seeing now. There had been a time far in the past when he had imagined he would feel sadness, and a later time when he’d thought he’d feel relief. He felt neither. A change was moving inside him like his own blood. He had lived so long on this earth that the lifetimes of men and women were to him as days and he regarded them as a child will an insect. He thought of the sunrise over the great ships of the Spanish Armada and the forest of masts that he had witnessed setting out across the channel and how the sunlight was like rigging and the trumpets at Valladolid were filled with longing. And he thought of the burning monasteries in Essex in the time of the invaders and the longboats that crept up the rivers, shields lining their walls, the dragon-headed prows cutting the air. The fear in the villages then. And he remembered the late dances in the formal gardens of Edinburgh in the time of King James, and the first hot-air balloon sailing over Glasgow and the Clyde and the last maypole on the village green in those days when he still walked above-ground. And the sunlight catching on the ice shards hanging from the gallows in Greenmarket and the cloud of steam that rose from the mouths of the newly dead when they were cut down at the dawn of the eighteenth century. And the blush in the cheeks of a newborn he’d held in Sicily once like the rosy color in a late-summer peach and the wonder in that while the exhausted mother slept in the straw behind him. And the way a child looked at him in the harbor at Alexandria as he climbed down the gangway and into the haze. All this, all this and more, would vanish from the world with his ceasing, all the ineradicable beauty that lived now only inside him would be lost, moments as fragile as coins of light on water, and this more than any other part of it made him feel alone and sorrowful and frail. For in all this feeling there was, he thought in his slow treelike way, the last remnants of what had made him human once, so that he was, still, one of them.
Something trembled in the earth. Far down the tunnel he felt it, a thing, brushing up against the walls and gnarls of root. Something was coming. His death was coming.
40
EVERYTHING AND NOTHING
The glasses rattled and danced softly across Henry Berghast’s desk. He turned where he stood at the pier glass to watch them, and then he met Bailey’s eye. Through the curtains, a quick bloom of light appeared. The boy Marlowe pulled out of his grasp and crossed the room and peered out. Something was lighting up the darkness; something was on fire.
“It’s him,” the boy whispered. “It’s Jacob.”
Berghast followed him across. He unlatched the window and swung it open. In the courtyard stood a strange coach, just arrived. He saw the woman detective, Miss Quicke, pause in the open door and peer out at the reflected firelight. What is she doing here?
But then came a distant shouting, the low muffled thrump of something detonating, and his thoughts went elsewhere. The outbuildings were burning. Those voices would be—must be—the older talents, gathering in the firelight. If it was Jacob Marber, if the wards had fallen … then they would not be strong enough.
He looked to Bailey, silent and forbidding in the shadows. “See to Mr. Laster,” he commanded. “Then dispose of the papers here. I will take the boy. Come,” he said to Marlowe. “We must hurry.”
But the boy glared at him, suddenly willful, stubborn.
“Come,” Henry snapped again.
“I won’t go,” the little boy said. “I want to see Charlie first. You said I could see Charlie.”
Berghast forced himself to speak calmly. “There are things in this world more important than what we want, child. If we delay now, there will be no finding your friend at all. Jacob Marber and the drughr will see to that.”
He could see the boy didn’t believe it but he didn’t have time to argue, not now. He turned and struck the little boy a powerful blow with an open hand and the boy’s legs went out from under him. He collapsed, unconscious, to the floor.
Henry allowed himself his anger; he’d thought he had more time, he’d thought the glyphic’s wards would hold longer. Perhaps Jacob was stronger even than he’d feared. He’d beaten Jacob back, years ago, before his own talent had faded. But he couldn’t do it now.
Or not just yet, he thought in satisfaction.
He took the ancient orsine knife from the lowest drawer of his desk, the same blade he’d given the Ovid boy for his satchel. He slid it into his waistcoat. Then he put on the iron-and-wood glove. Its tiny teeth bit into his wrist. At the last moment he remembered the journal, his book of secrets, and just to be safe he unlocked it from his desk and went to the fire and threw it in.
Then he swung the unconscious boy up over one shoulder, unhooked a lantern from inside the door, and hurried down the stairs into darkness.
* * *
They were too late.
Marber was already inside the perimeter, Marber and his litch Coulton. Alice Quicke pushed Mrs. Harrogate at a half run over the flagstones, the wheeled chair squeaking and jouncing. The older woman made no complaint; she had her wicked-looking knives gripped in both hands on top of the blanket on her lap. Something was on fire behind the manor and they hurried around the side and through the portico and stopped at the edge of the field.
For a long confused moment, Alice didn’t know what she was seeing.
Figures, silhouetted against the firelight, in a long line. They were in nightdresses and robes, and facing away, into the darkness. She counted eight. They were the old ones, the talents who had lived at Cairndale for decades, ancient and trembling and frail.