Berghast hurried at his work. He approached the orsine warily but the spirit dead paid him no mind. He wore the glove on his left hand and he pressed it against the surface. The orsine’s skin had thinned, split apart in places, already failing.
He ran his big roughened hand over his bare scalp, brooding. Then he began slowly to walk around the cistern, leaning down with the ancient knife and sawing away the roots where they dipped into the pool. The blade cut smoothly, easily, and the glyphic’s roots hardly bled at all.
Still the dead did not stir.
Last of all he brought the boy to the edge of the pool and took off the little shoes and rolled back the trousers. The child was calm, turning his big eyes to the gray figures all around. Berghast plunged the boy’s little white feet into the freezing orsine. They looked waxen in the blue shine.
“Now we wait,” he murmured.
Marlowe looked up in fear. “I know you think you have to do things,” he whispered. “But you don’t. You aren’t a bad person. You can choose.”
“Ah, but I have chosen,” he replied softly. “I have chosen this.”
What the child thought, what he knew, was of no consequence. Jacob Marber was inside Cairndale, carving his way through the old talents. Let him come, he thought with a grim smile. Let him see what will be. The glove had started to ache on his hand. Its little teeth felt like they were chewing away at his wrist. Under his breath, he began to repeat the incantation, the words in their ancient tongue, thrumping like a drumbeat in the back of his throat.
Come, come, come, come.
How long did they wait then in the quiet? It seemed the world around them was receding in the stillness, so that there was no Cairndale, no Marber, no spirit dead nor fire nor ruin. There was only a man and a child, at the edge of a pool, staring in at their own watery selves.
And then, in the murky blue cistern: a shadow. Something was down there. A silhouette was rising up out of the depths, growing bigger, bigger, impossibly large.
“Ah,” Berghast whispered, pleased. He curled his gloved fingers. “Your mother has come, child. She has sensed you, and she has come. Now we can begin.”
The child turned his startled face downward. Berghast seized his little arm and slashed the blade across his wrist. The boy cried out; and the drughr, the beautiful drughr, swam up toward him.
And in that very instant the gathered spirit dead, all as one, opened their dark mouths wide and began to scream.
* * *
Komako watched Alice Quicke shove Charlie through the window, shattering the glass, all of it plunging onto the hard granite setts below. She knew he’d be all right, had seen enough of his talent to know that much, but her heart was sick with fear all the same.
She turned to face Jacob. “You deal with the other one,” she said to Alice. “Jacob’s mine.”
Oskar’s soft features hardened. Lymenion, hulking, glowering, stepped near. But Alice wasn’t listening; she was kneeling in front of a strange dark cat, whispering to it, arguing. When she looked up, she looked right at Komako, and said, “He says he can’t help us. Not against Marber, not while Marber has the weir-bent.”
Komako didn’t understand.
“A key, it’s a key,” Alice said hurriedly. “We have to get it off him, or the wrasse can’t help us.” She must have seen something in Komako’s face, and frowned in quick irritation, and pulled out a cord around her neck and held up a long elaborate-looking key. “It’s sort of like this. I can’t explain it all now. Just look for a key, try to get it away from him.”
“Right. A key—”
Her revolver was in her hand and she was thumbing back the hammer and turning so that her long oilskin cloak snapped behind her. “Hurry. Ribs and I will deal with the litch.”
And she strode off back the way they’d come, murder in her eyes.
Komako could see Jacob Marber walking steadily now, calmly, up the long corridor. His face was savaged, his beard matted with his own blood. There was little about him she recognized from the young man who’d rescued her all those years ago, who’d saved her kid sister, Teshi, from that mob in Tokyo, who’d held her as she cried after Teshi was dead. She remembered how he’d talked about his own brother, his frantic search to help him, how he’d confessed that no matter the evil, if something could bring his Bertolt back to him, he’d do it. That something was the drughr. Maybe even while he was helping her, while he was holding her, that drughr had been courting him. She’d carried the guilt of it inside her for so long, the feeling that she’d failed him, that she might have sensed the ravenousness of his grief and helped him out of it except she was too overwhelmed by her own. All her brief life since she’d tried to remember that one truth: that her own suffering, her surrender to it, had increased the store of others’ suffering in the world. But maybe, just maybe, Jacob could still be reasoned with. Maybe there was a part of him in there she could reach. And if not? She’d grown stronger than he could know; let him find it out.
Jacob came on. The candles in the hall smothered, one after another, into smoke. He strode toward them like a harbinger of some greater dark. Komako saw him and was suddenly nine years old again, in the crooked wooden streets of Tokyo, while the rain came down and her sister, Teshi, swayed and Jacob glared at her with an angry fear that was not so far off from love.
“Jacob—!” she cried. “You don’t want this, I know you don’t!”
He paused at her voice. His gaze slid past her to Oskar and Lymenion and then back.
“Komako?” he said, and there was a tiredness in him that nearly broke her heart. Slowly the smoke and dust faded. His eyes were glassy. “Please,” he said, “go. Stand aside. I’m not here to hurt you, any of you. I came for Berghast.”
“You killed the old ones. Out in the field. I watched you—”
“I tried not to. I warned them. They wouldn’t listen. Alice Quicke has something I need.” He studied her in the faint glow of distant fires. “You know nothing of all this, do you?”
Oskar whispered from across the corridor, “Don’t listen to him, Ko. He’s lying.”
But she wasn’t so sure. “Why are you here for Dr. Berghast?”
Jacob spread his hands. A darkness writhed under the skin. The brim of his hat was low over his eyes. “To kill him,” he said softly. “And the keywrasse will help me do it. After Berghast—”
“Yes?”
“I’ll kill the drughr. All of you will be safe.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re evil. Both of them.”
She found the tiny pricks of light where his eyes were and stared at them hard. There was a lump in her throat. She made herself look at him and not look away as she said, “But so are you, Jacob. You’ve become that way, too. You’ve killed. Killing more won’t change it.”
All the while she was drawing closer, biding her time. Lymenion, near her, crept along the wall in darkness. She was maybe ten feet from Jacob when she saw it. On a chain in the watch pocket of his waistcoat, its knuckled head sticking out. The key.
He looked taller, fiercer, but there was also a slouched and twisted cast to the way he moved. He was favoring one side. He’d been savaged by someone, somehow, and the wounds were healing badly. All at once Komako let the chill seep into her wrists and her arms ached and she summoned the living dust to her and let it enter her, a great thick deep void that filled her and filled her, all of this in only an instant, and she felt the satisfaction of knowing Jacob couldn’t have guessed at her power, at what she’d learned to do, at the speed and deftness in it. And she spun a thin strong tendril of dust out toward him, quick as a whip, and snarled the key, and snapped the chain and brought it back to her open hand.
He didn’t even flinch.