She bared her teeth, crawled on. The boy lay slumped at the cistern, unhanded. Everything depended on surprise, on quickness.
But when she was still a few feet away, she saw in shock what he was doing. The drughr, like a stain of darkness, was pressed against the surface of the orsine, trapped there, filled with a fury. Henry Berghast had driven his hand into the muck of the drughr, feeding on it. Then, slowly, he seemed to drag the drughr up, up, so that it rose under the tar-like skin of the orsine, colossal, twelve feet tall. It was struggling and turning its unseeing face in the direction of Marlowe. And as it rose up the screaming gray figures suddenly ceased; they fell silent, with their mouths still black and lightless and wide.
The silence echoed in Margaret’s ears, disorienting her. The blood from the boy’s wrist was still leaking into the waters. She shook her head to clear it.
But then Berghast turned and rose fluidly as if he’d expected her. His beardless face was strained, the dark shadows under his eyes pronounced, the skin across his jaw and cheekbones skull-like and cruel.
His soft measured voice was both his and not his. “Ah, Margaret,” he said. “You have come to warn me about Walter and Mr. Thorpe. You are too late. He is dead.”
She tried to hide the knives but it was too late, he had seen them. He seemed unconcerned. At his back the drughr twisted slowly in its muck, a figure of agony and pity.
“I saw your carriage in the courtyard,” he continued softly. “What has happened to you? You look … wretched.”
He padded in a slow catlike circle around her and then crouched smoothly and seized her wrists. The gloved hand was rough, its wooden plates sharp-edged. It gave off a faint steam though it was cool to the touch. He twisted her knives easily away and she gave a gasp of pain and frustration. The drughr writhed above the orsine, folding over and over itself, like smoke in a jar.
Something shifted then, behind Berghast; he half turned away, and Margaret glimpsed Marlowe kneeling with both hands gripped hard on Berghast’s bare arm. The boy was shining with a terrible brilliance, his skin translucent so that she could see the shape of his skull and his hollow sockets and the bones and veins in his arms. His teeth were clenched. The shine erupted.
And she saw Berghast’s skin begin to boil where Marlowe gripped it.
She didn’t understand what she was seeing. It did not seem possible. But Berghast stood suddenly and threw the child backward so that his head struck the rock floor and all at once the light in him died and he looked boneless and strange.
Berghast’s own skin was shining.
“Why are you doing this?” Margaret cried, filled with a sudden helpless rage. “I came to warn you. I thought you’d try to protect them, all of them. Henry, I believed in you! All these years, I helped you! My Mr. Harrogate helped you! But you’re just a—a monst—”
“I am not,” he said. “There is a greater purpose to this.”
He pulled her upright, twisting her wrists back so that she feared they might break. Then he let one go and brought his own knife up.
“Henry—” she said.
But he slid the blade painfully into her belly, paying her no mind. It went in slippery and without any give all the way to the hilt, and she gasped at the slow grinding hurt of it, her whole body filling with amazement.
“I am not a monster,” he said again, looking into her eyes, forcing her to look into his own. “I take no pleasure in this.”
And then he pulled the knife free and left her.
* * *
Charlie carried the dripping heart out of the crypt.
All around him a blue light shone. He held the glyphic’s heart swaddled in his shirt like a newborn, feeling the warm slick of it, his cupped hands cradling it as he went.
Far across the loch, Cairndale was on fire. He watched the scaffolding of flames. His arms and legs were scratched and bloodied but the scratches were already closing and when he could breathe again he staggered around the ruined monastery and entered the dark monks’ quarters and crept down the stone stairs. He had to sink the heart into the orsine.
The blue shine below was blinding. He stumbled at the edge of the underground chamber, wincing. The orsine was too bright. But as he turned his face aside he saw, lurking around the walls, strange gray figures. The light seemed not to register in their grayness, nor the darkness; and they turned their faces to Charlie where he stood, and he knew them. They were different, no longer beautiful, no longer ribboning with memory; but he knew them. The spirit dead.
Suddenly they swarmed him. They made no sound. But they moved at an incredible speed, and he felt the first one’s touch with a tremble, as he tried to cradle the glyphic’s heart. For it was as solid as anything in this world; and its touch glowed with that same blue fire; and he felt his own flesh begin to bubble and melt in agony.
And then a second, a third, was upon him, and as the spirit dead pressed in close, Charlie couldn’t hold on to the glyphic’s heart any longer, and it slid from his grasp, and suddenly the dead let him go and were swarming the small glowing blue heart. They were eating it.
“No—” Charlie fell to his knees, horrified. The dead paid him no heed, and soon the heart had been devoured entire. It was gone. Their mouths and fingers were stained with black slime.
It was then Charlie lifted his eyes and saw something was trapped in the orsine, a huge gluey giant straining against the orsine’s surface. It looked thickened and elongated and covered in tar. And then he saw Dr. Berghast leaning out over the orsine, the artifact glove heavy at his side, his other hand plunged elbow-deep into the sticky thigh of the figure, as if gripping it, as if holding it in place. But something was happening to him, he was shivering, there was a low blue shine in his skin that looked almost like how Marlowe would look, sometimes, and Charlie understood. Berghast was draining the drughr’s power.
The rip in the orsine was still widening. The dead were standing again, arms at their sides, watching the orsine. Charlie had failed, failed everyone, he had lost the glyphic’s heart and now the orsine would never be sealed.
And that was when he saw, huddled half in darkness, the unmoving bodies of Mrs. Harrogate, and his only friend, Marlowe. They were lying near a pillar and it looked like Mrs. Harrogate had somehow dragged Marlowe there. He could see a long smear of blood where she’d crawled and when he got to her he saw the blood in her belly and knew she was dying. Marlowe’s left wrist had been cut and he was covered in his own blood and his face was very white. Charlie was too late.
But then Marlowe smiled weakly.
“Charlie,” he said, his voice soft and dry. “I knew … you’d come.”
Charlie felt his chest swell with grief. He wiped at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’m sorry, Mar, I’m so sorry. I lost it, I lost the glyphic’s heart, I was supposed to seal the orsine, but they took it from me, I tried to stop them—”
But the boy just sighed and closed his eyes again.
“Mar?”
He looked up and saw Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes were open. She was watching him.
“My knives,” she whispered. “If you can. Get to the edge of. The pool. You can still. Stop him.”
He followed her gaze out, saw the long evil-looking things on the floor not far from Berghast.
“The glyphic, he’s gone,” Charlie said, choking back a sob. He couldn’t see what good any of this would do. “The dead will get through now. There’s no way to close the orsine. It doesn’t matter.”
Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes flashed with pain. “It always matters,” she hissed.