Charlie looked at Marlowe, looked back at Mrs. Harrogate. Dr. Berghast was still leaning out over the orsine, plunging his free hand into the muck of the drughr, draining it.
All at once Charlie ducked low, and at a crouch he started forward. He moved from pillar to pillar in the watery blue light. But he couldn’t get to the knives. Almost without thinking, he closed his eyes; he breathed slowly and tried to empty his mind. There was stillness; silence; a feeling of great peace. And he reached out, calmly, and then it was like he was still reaching, still reaching, and he felt the muscles in his arm pull and cramp and pull harder, and it seemed his bones were being sucked from their sockets, and the pain was dizzying; then he felt his fingers close around the hilt of a knife, and he opened his eyes. The knife was heavy, heavier than it should have been, and the metal was warm to the touch. His arm looked weird, snakelike, and silently he drew it back into his flesh, the pain staggering. And yet his heart leaped.
He had done it; he had done the mortaling.
The enormousness of it, of what it meant, vanished in the moment. Berghast was still bleeding the drughr of its strength. He looked bigger, his back broader, he seemed filled with a frenetic energy. It was too late. It was always going to be too late.
Charlie ran forward. He plunged the knife all the way to the hilt directly into Dr. Berghast’s back.
The effect was immediate. The shine flickered; the drughr slid bonelessly back down into the depths of the orsine. Berghast whirled around. His beard was gone, his hair was gone. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in a rictus grin, the eyes sunken and bright. An eerie blue energy was crackling over his skin, over his hand, just like Charlie’d seen with Marlowe. Berghast stumbled, and fell to his knees, as if the effort of whatever he had been doing was too much, and he had nothing left.
Charlie saw the second blade on the sill of the cistern and he lunged for it and came up holding it out in front of him. Berghast hadn’t moved. He was kneeling with his shoulders slumped and his face down and just breathing.
But when Charlie stepped forward to stab him through his heart, Berghast’s gloved hand rose to meet the knife and it clanged aside. He gripped Charlie’s wrist and Charlie felt a savage agonizing fire. Something was happening to him, he could feel it in the old man’s grip, a kind of hollowing out as if some part of his self were being scraped away.
“What—what’re you doing?” he cried.
“You,” gasped Berghast. “You don’t … understand…”
For a long terrible moment the blue fire seemed to engulf both of them. Charlie shuddered in pain. The skin on his wrist was bubbling. But it was worse than that, it was like some part of his insides was being peeled slowly away. Berghast held on, not strong enough to do more. There was a flash of movement on the floor behind Berghast: Mrs. Harrogate had dragged herself across. Charlie watched as she reached up and pushed, ever so gently, on Berghast’s shoulder; and as he wrenched his own wrist away, he saw the man who had done so much harm to all of them lean casually out, and pitch weakly over the edge, into the luminous pool.
It all happened so slowly, with such gentleness, that it didn’t seem real.
But then Berghast started thrashing, trying to keep afloat. And Charlie saw, ascending from the depths of the orsine, a shadowy figure—the drughr—rising up through the cloudy blue water to wrap an arm around Berghast’s throat, and drag him slowly down into the depths, away.
* * *
Alice and the others ran through the long corridors of Cairndale, stopping where the fire was too much, turning back, seeking a different way. There were bodies in the hall, small bodies. She tried not to look at them. Go! she was thinking. Just go!
The stained glass over the grand staircase had shattered and as they descended the steps their boots crunched over the broken shards. The fire was burning all around them. A part of the ceiling fell with a crash and Alice stumbled but kept a hand on Oskar and dragged him clear. Her hands and face were streaked with soot, her hair singed. Oskar’s eyes looked wild with fear.
And then they were outside, the night air whooshing around them, and the light from the fire casting the landscape all around in an orange glow. The carriage was gone. She gestured at the gatehouse and the gravel drive beyond it and shouted that the horses couldn’t have got far—they were still in their harnesses; they might have run the carriage up the lane or even into the fields, but they’d find it, they would. She didn’t look to the right—she simply refused to—not at the pile of bricks and masonry that had spilled out onto stones, the clawed hand of Jacob Marber protruding from it. The keywrasse was nowhere.
She was pushing the kids ahead of her, through the fiery courtyard, her long coat heavy at her shoulders. There were too many for the carriage but they’d make do—they’d have to—and she’d drive the horses into the ground to get them all clear.
It was then she saw a figure, collapsed in a doorway, gasping. She slowed; she stopped. The others were some way ahead by then, slender outlines, running across the cobblestones for the gatehouse. She went to the doorway, kneeled cautiously down.
Komako had seen her stop. “Alice!” the girl was shouting. “We have to go! Alice!”
But Alice didn’t look around, didn’t dare look away. It was Coulton. He was leaning with his back to a door, holding his stomach in his clawed fingers. She looked at his blood-flecked face, the red lips twisted in pain, the long needlelike teeth. His eyes were dark with knowing.
“Al … ice…,” he gasped.
She leaned closer, breathing hard. She wasn’t afraid. There was in his expression a recognition, some part of the old Coulton, the man she’d known and trusted. It was as if, with Jacob Marber’s death, he’d come back to himself, and what he saw horrified him.
“Please…,” he whispered, almost crying. “Kill me. Please.”
She wet her lips. The manor was burning all around them, beginning to collapse. The wreckage was filled with the dead. She was blinking something from her eyes and she took out her revolver and cocked the hammer and held the barrel to his chest where his heart should have been. He wrapped his bloodied claws around it, and he held it with her. He nodded.
“Frank—” she whispered.
She’d been about to say something more when his thumbs found her trigger finger and squeezed. The Colt bucked once in her hand, recoiled in a slow cloud of smoke.
* * *
Charlie, weak, leaned over the stone rim. He was breathing raggedly, shaking his head. Berghast had done something to him. His wrist was an agony of fire. Deep within the orsine, down where Berghast had been dragged, he saw the blue shine flicker, grow fainter, and then suddenly it was like the brightness was rising up out of the depths, rushing up toward him. Charlie staggered back.
It was the dead, the spirit dead. Their gray figures were climbing slowly, methodically out of the orsine, one after another. There were twenty, thirty of them now. More kept coming. They gathered and turned and stood swaying, casting their gray heads from side to side, as if seeking something.
The waters began to rise too, overpouring the edges of the cistern, the strange glowing waters spilling out across the floor. Charlie splashed over to Mrs. Harrogate, pulled her by the armpits to the pillar where Marlowe lay. He kept an eye out for the gray figures. Some of them had turned their way.
But when he got Mrs. Harrogate back, he could see it was too late. She was dead.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Charlie cried, holding her head. “Please, Mrs. Harrogate. No.”
The waters pooled around them. Everything was going wrong. The ceiling shuddered. The island was shaking now, starting to come apart.
Marlowe sat up in the rising flood, his glassy eyes watching one of the gray figures. He looked so little.
“Hey,” said Charlie, crouching down, getting right in his face. He forced himself to speak calmly. “I was coming back for you, I was.”
“I know it, Charlie.”