He just sighed, as if it was this he’d been afraid of, and lifted the brim of his hat, and she saw what was in his eyes, all the tiredness and resigned fury and the years of cruel acts, and she knew she couldn’t fight him.
She didn’t have even a moment to try to run. Dust was seeping up out of him, long ribbons of darkness, it was inside him, a part of him. And suddenly it was snaking around her ankles, her knees, pinioning her elbows fast to her ribs. She glanced up and started to speak but couldn’t, the dust was pressing on her windpipe, Jacob’s dust.
Slowly he walked toward her.
It was then, bursting out of the darkness, that Lymenion struck. He struck with the force of a freight train and smashed Jacob backward, off his feet, and followed through with a tremendous fist, raining punches down on Jacob so that the floor shook and plaster fell from the ceiling and Jacob was crushed hip-deep into an indentation in the boards. All this happened so quick Komako could only glimpse it, a blur of fury. Jacob would have been smashed clear through into the floor below except at the last moment something checked Lymenion’s fist, and it held stiff in the air, and then the mighty flesh giant staggered backward, turning its head this way and that, as if suddenly confused, as if some unseen force were harrying it from all sides.
“Lymenion!” Oskar was screaming. “Lymenion!”
Now the flesh giant was pummeling the air, batting at the dust swirling around him as if at a cloud of angry bees. The dust thickened until Komako couldn’t see him. She could hear Oskar screaming, hollering something from down the corridor. And then Jacob raised his hands and squeezed them into fists and the darkness surrounding Lymenion squeezed itself down too and then Lymenion burst apart in a shower of reeking flesh, leaving only a stain on the floor and walls and ceiling.
Komako’s ears were ringing. She couldn’t move. The key was gripped in her fist but the ropes of dust and smoke were too strong for her. She looked at him desperately, her arms pinned to her sides. “What about Bertolt? Is this what he’d have wanted? Jacob!”
“Maybe,” Jacob whispered.
She could see him deciding something, his expression hardening. “I loved you like a brother!” she cried. “Please!”
Jacob raised his hand, the tattooed darkness twisting in it. A black dust swirled, harrowing, beautiful.
“I know you did,” he murmured sadly.
The dust when it struck her did so with the force of a terrible wind, snapping her head backward, spinning her sideways into the ruined wall. She couldn’t see anything for the storm of soot in her eyes and when she opened her mouth to cry out it was filled with smoke and the living dust poured its darkness down her throat, into her lungs.
* * *
Margaret Harrogate knocked over her wheeled chair as she tried to get out of it, at the edge of the loch, where the sunken dock began.
She fell hard. She had to cast around in the gloom for the knives she’d balanced in her lap. But she’d been prepared for this and had worn thick wool sleeves to protect her elbows and she dragged herself grimly toward the rowboat and untied it and clambered in.
Behind her a wall of smoke roiled and flickered and the loch’s reflection burned also. She allowed herself a quick pained moment to pray for Alice to get the littles away. All of them. Just go, she prayed, go and don’t look back.
The hull rocked softly. She reached for the oars. Slowly the little rowboat pulled out into the lake of fire. There were flecks of blue light adrift over the wych elm, like glowing ash. Her shoulders ached, her arms ached. There would come from time to time the low muffled thrump of explosions up the hill at the estate. It stood enshrouded in a black cloud of dust and smoke, pulsing with an orange glow where it thinned. Something within was burning.
On the island she hauled herself out of the boat and tied it fast and crawled on her forearms along the rocky path, up the slope to the ruined monastery. Her elbows were torn and bleeding by then. In the firelight the monastery walls gleamed redly, as if drenched in blood. She paused and swung her dead legs around and sat up to think. The glyphic; the orsine; Dr. Berghast and his drughr …
When all at once a screaming started.
The scream was low and eerie and filled with the music of sadness and longing but there was hatred in it, too, and hunger, and Margaret shuddered to hear it. It was not the sound of anything human. She pressed her cheek to the cold rocks; it was coming from the earth itself.
Slowly Margaret clawed her way around the building. A heavy door stood open, a lantern burning on a hook beside it. The screaming grew louder. Berghast, she thought. She dragged herself in and through an antechamber and down a rough curving set of stone stairs and came out, gasping, into a large rocky chamber. A cistern. The light within was blue. The floor and walls were broken and crisscrossed with hundreds of roots, like tentacles, and the terrible screaming filled and reverberated off the walls. There were figures, gray, indistinct, standing all around in the gloom, their mouths open. The screaming came from them.
Her head swam. For there, at the edge of the cistern, his monstrous shadow cast huge from the strange light shining under him, loomed Henry Berghast. For a moment she didn’t know him. His head had been shaved, his thick beard was gone. He wore a strange glittering glove, that ran halfway up his forearm. His broad back was to her, and pinned beneath his arm was the boy, Marlowe.
The child’s wrist had been cut. Berghast held it stiffly out over the pool, the blood draining. The little boy’s face looked ashen.
Margaret reached for her knives.
* * *
At that very moment, Abigail Davenshaw was walking softly across the carpet in Dr. Berghast’s study, feeling her way with her birch switch, straining to hear any movement. There was the eerie soft clicking of bonebirds in a cage, as regular as machinery in the dark. There was the muffled thrum of the stillness. Footsteps far down a corridor, hurrying.
She made her careful way past the chairs, the desk. She could smell something, a scent of scorched leather and paper, very faint. A bite of cold air came from somewhere under the earth and she found the door she’d gone through before, the door to that strange locked room, standing wide.
“Hello?” she called down. Her voice clattered and faded into the depths. “Dr. Berghast? It is Miss Davenshaw.…”
Nothing.
She bit her lip, frowned.
So be it.
She started down. Feeling her way with her toes, slowly, cautiously at each step, willing herself not to fall here inside the walls, where no one would find her, while Cairndale burned itself to the ground.
But she didn’t fall. And when she got to the bottom she knew by the way the air moved that something was different. The locked door had been ripped from its hinges.
“Hello?” she called uncertainly. She remembered the ragged breathing she’d heard before and she moved now with great caution, the fear she’d felt then filling her again. But whatever she’d heard was gone now, gone or dead; there was nothing alive but her.
When her birch switch touched the thing sprawled out inside the cell she wasn’t sure what to make of it. A chain clinked softly. Her soles slipped in a puddle of some viscous fluid and she knew by the iron scent of it what it was.