“I guess you just found your own way.”
The boy smiled feebly. “I guess so.”
The island shook again and there was a faint sound of explosions and Charlie blinked away his fear. Whatever Berghast had done to him, it left him feeling light-headed. The water was past his ankles. “Well, you got to tell me all about it,” he said. “But we’ve got to go now, Mar. Can you walk?”
Marlowe shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Sure you can. I’ll help.”
But the boy gently pushed his arms away. Charlie didn’t understand. He followed Marlowe’s gaze back to where the orsine was flooding across the chamber floor and the earth shook suddenly and then he did, he understood, he knew what his friend was thinking.
“It’s not possible, Mar,” he whispered. “I lost the glyphic’s heart. It’s done.”
“I can close it, Charlie.”
Charlie tried to laugh incredulously but it came out sounding more like a sob. “What can you do? That’s not something you know about.”
But there was a calmness in Marlowe’s face that unnerved Charlie and made him doubt his own words. “Brynt knows how,” said the boy. “She’ll show me.”
And then Charlie looked again over his shoulder and saw the gray figure Marlowe had been watching. It was big, far bigger than the others, and stood facing Marlowe with her massive arms at her sides. It was her.
Charlie was crying and nodding and looking at his friend’s face. “What’ll happen to you?” he whispered. “There’s got to be another way. Please.”
The boy bit at his lip. And even as he said it, Charlie knew there wasn’t. Marlowe was struggling upright, gripping the pillar, leaving tiny bloodied handprints. Charlie stood with him. In the water at their feet Mrs. Harrogate lay in her ragged black dress, her bruised face turned away, her hair lifting slowly. Charlie set his jaw.
“Then I’ll go with you,” he said firmly. “I’ve got this ring. It’s an artifact, like the glove—”
“You can’t come with me,” said Marlowe, in that same maddening calm way. He seemed different, not only because of the hurt and the exhaustion. He seemed more … centered. More himself. Like he’d glimpsed the person he would grow to be and was already becoming. He said, “You got to stay here, Charlie. I need you on this side.”
“Why?”
Marlowe gave him a smile that looked strange on a face so etched with pain and blood and leeched of its color. “Because you have to find a way to bring me back,” he said.
Charlie, devastated, couldn’t think of what to say.
He watched as the boy waded over to the orsine, his small feet splashing in the glowing water, his wrists cradled against his chest and his little shoulders rolled forward. He looked so small. The huge gray figure of Brynt was with him. The shine was coming from Marlowe now, too, Charlie could see it, the brightness in him, and he saw in his mind’s eye the boy as he’d been when they first met in London, how warm and soft the boy’s hand had been in his own, and he saw too the prison cell in Natchez and he smelled the good smell of his mother’s skin from before all that, when she’d held him, when he’d heard her heartbeat, and he had to turn away because he was crying.
The dead Brynt reached for the boy.
Charlie felt afraid. The blue shine intensified. It had a sound within it, mournful, in pain, and he could just see the silent gray figures gathered in that chamber swell with light as if from the inside, and disintegrate into light, just as if they’d never been, and then his friend, the only friend he’d ever known, as much a brother to him as anyone could have been, stepped down into the orsine and with a terrible strain drew the skin of the water over his head. His little hands were pulling, pulling, and then Charlie saw the furious blue shining from deep below shrink and narrow and sliver away until it winked out, and the chamber went dark, the surface of the orsine as cold and lightless as flowstone, and that strange blue shining of Marlowe’s was gone, gone from the world, forever, gone.
* * *
Alice put a hand to her eyes and stared back at the burning manor. The great cloud of dust that Jacob Marber had made was thinning. Then she heard Ribs, hollering. The old carriage was down near the cliffs overlooking the loch. Alice came down the slope at a run, her boots sliding in the soft muck, her strong legs passing Oskar in the firelight. Komako was already at the wreckage, standing with her hands upraised on her head and not saying anything.
The horses must have spooked when the fires first broke out and galloped this far and then tried to turn hard when they saw the cliff in front of them. The carriage was overturned, two wheels splintered and askew. One of the horses was down tangled in its gear, not kicking, just lying quiet as if it had tired itself out. She didn’t think it was injured. The other stood with its eyes rolling in fear as it caught Ribs’s scent. There were three other horses, loosed from the burning stables, that must have followed these into the dark and that stood now with eyes rolling in terror, shying sideways whenever a kid got close.
“Stay back,” she said to Ribs, wherever the girl was.
Far out across the loch she could see the island where the ruined monastery stood, the island where Charlie had gone. Something was happening there, something strange. There were lights rising from the trees like tiny moths, circling and spiraling upward. A strange blue glow was pulsing in the ruins, flickering out across the dark waters.
The first horse snorted, tossed its head. The second one suddenly kicked out, trying to get upright.
“Easy,” Alice murmured. She had her hands up and stood so that the first horse could see her clearly. “It’s all right,” she soothed, “it’s all right. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
The horse was calming. She reached up and lay a hand on its damp neck murmuring all the while.
But then Oskar cried out in a panic. Alice stepped smoothly back and looked.
Ragged and smoldering, striding down toward them like a figure of wrath, was Jacob Marber. Even at that distance Alice could see the blood in his beard and the wounds where his ear had been torn away. His clothes were ripped. His big hands were raised.
“For fuck’s sake,” she snapped.
She took out her Colt and leveled it and fired five times directly into Marber’s chest, staggering him. But he did not fall. Calmly, quickly, she opened the chamber and dumped out the shells and began to reload. She shouldn’t have released the keywrasse so soon.
She saw Oskar lifted into the air and thrown like a child’s toy down the slope, toward the cliff’s edge. The boy lay where he landed, unmoving. Three other kids tried to run and were swept bodily out into the darkness, screaming. She saw Komako, hands raised, struggling, falling to one knee, then the other, her long braid sweeping out behind her. A cloud of dust encircled her. Still Marber came on, toward her, Alice. Then her revolver was loaded and Alice dropped to one knee and held her revolver over one wrist to steady it and she shot out Marber’s legs.
That stopped him. His legs went out from under him sideways and he fell hard. Alice was already up and running for the others, for Oskar and for Komako, and she was shouting at Ribs to get the horses out of their harnesses. That was when the island exploded.
It blew in a vast blue fiery conflagration and the weird flames arced upward and spilled out over the loch. Alice staggered back, seeing it, thinking of Charlie out there, her heart suddenly breaking. But there wasn’t time—Marber had got back to his feet, was screaming at her, coming at her now at a run just as if he hadn’t been shot at all, or crushed, or torn up by the keywrasse, and she saw it and knew even as she lifted her Colt that there was no stopping him.