The witch was staring at her. “It is true,” she whispered. “You—are a talent.”
“I’m not anything. I’m just … me.” Komako, shaking, folded her red hands into her armpits for the warmth. She felt exhausted. Her face was wet. “You will help my sister, mistress?”
The witch had got to her feet and drifted to the edge of the warm darkness, and she stared out now, unseeing. “This is the girl,” she said quietly. “You were right.”
A voice replied from the shadows. “Ko-ma-ko…,” it said, slowly, as if tasting her name syllable by syllable. “Yes, Maki-chan. This is the girl.”
Komako scrambled to her feet, stumbling backward.
Two figures stepped into the spill of light. They were men, Westerners. The taller had a thick black beard and wore a long black frock coat despite the mugginess and he turned a silk hat in his fingers. He had deep-set eyes, and a craggy worried brow, and ink-black hair raked back off his forehead. His clothes smelled faintly of soot.
“Do not be alarmed,” he murmured. “We had to see what you could do; I had to see it. For myself. I had to be sure.”
He seemed very tall. She stared at his companion—stouter, red-faced, mopping at his moist face—and then back at the man. “Who are you?” she said. “What do you want?”
He came closer. He stood looking down at Teshi lying on the tatami, small and deathly pale. “Your poor sister,” he said. “She must be very cold?”
“What do you want?” Komako said again, fiercely now, stepping in front of Teshi. She clenched her small fists. She couldn’t imagine what a foreigner would want of her. And then she thought of something. “Did my … did my father send you?”
“Oh, child,” said the witch.
The stranger didn’t answer. He was filled with an immense, slow concentration. He crouched down over the open box of dust and took off his black gloves. He had the most beautiful fingers, long and elegant and soft. The skin was like milk. He moved them in a series of strange gestures, as if he were writing in the air.
And then Komako gasped.
For the dust in the box was moving. She watched as it flowed up, up, into the man’s pale hands, leaping playfully from finger to finger, twisting around his wrists, a silver ribbon of dust. He held it there a long moment, as if consoling it, as if it were a living thing. Then he let it pour back down, smoothly, into the open box, and he closed the lid with his long fingers, and he met her eye.
“I’m not here from your father,” he whispered. He ran a hand through his beard. “What we can do, Komako … It is called dustwork, where I come from. It must frighten you sometimes? It must hurt you, to use your gift? And you cannot do it for long, without losing yourself in it?”
She nodded, fingers at her lips, afraid to speak.
“For me also,” said the man, sadness in his voice.
13
JACOB REAPER, JACOB BLOOD
The bearded man was, of course, Jacob Marber. Young still, in those days, his world still full of the possible.
The summer light was going when he left the witch’s garden. The mud streets beyond her house were quiet and there were crows on the wet roof tiles, watchful. He and Coulton hailed a rickshaw and made their bumpy way back, past darkening shop fronts, torchlights in the alleys, all the way back to the foreigners’ inn above the harbor. The diseased city stank of decay. Jacob held his silk hat in his fingers and turned it, turned it, preoccupied, brooding about the girl Komako and what he’d seen her do. He felt strangely happy. He’d never met another who could work the dust.
The rickshaw hit a loose wood block in the street and lurched and Coulton put out a fast hand, swaying. “Well,” he said, breaking his silence. “She isn’t coming with us easy, that one.”
Jacob glanced over in surprise. “I thought it went rather well.”
“The devil it did.”
“She’ll come around. Give her a day.”
Coulton gave him that look. Jacob didn’t know the man well. Coulton was older by ten years and liked to remind Jacob of it and to use it to defend a cynicism Jacob suspected wasn’t even entirely real. “Listen, lad,” Coulton said now. “You get to my age, you seen a share of crazy in your life. I’m telling you, that one ain’t picking up what we’re putting down.”
Jacob put on his hat, slowly, adjusting the brim. He watched the man in rags running their rickshaw, barefoot, his skin shining with sweat. The tall wheel whirred at his left elbow. He said, “There’s always a way. She’ll listen.”
“There ain’t always a way.”
Jacob grinned.
He watched Coulton brush grimly at his sleeves. “You’re like a bloody puppy, lad. I worry for you, I do.”
The truth was, though, he wasn’t half so sure as he let on. The rickshaw rattled on, into the coming darkness, the streets gleaming. It wasn’t only their long sea journey, and it wasn’t only this little girl and her sister. Lately, he kept seeing his boyhood self, struggling as a sweep in the grimy narrow chimneys of Vienna, half-starved, red-eyed, desperate, in those lonely years after his twin’s death.
That was before Henry Berghast had come into his life, before he’d been plucked out of its horrors, taken back to Cairndale, clothed, fed, guided. But he’d already got sick from that first life; his breathing hadn’t ever been right; and there was a different kind of sickness in his heart. He always thought: Why couldn’t Berghast have come sooner, why couldn’t he have come while his brother Bertolt still lived?
Hating himself and Berghast and fate and God even as he thought it.
Now, from the middle of the road, they heard chanting, saw a procession of monks in yellow robes banging wood blocks, singing in their strange intonations. The rickshaw puller waited at the side for the monks to pass. Jacob frowned, looked away. No, it wasn’t just the old worry, the one he’d lived with all his life, as long as he could remember, that weighed on him. It was also the dreams.
At least that’s what he told himself they were, dreams. He hadn’t told Coulton yet. He didn’t know why not. Maybe it was the peculiar vividness of them, maybe it was just he didn’t think he could explain how real they felt, how undreamlike. They had to do with his dead brother, always, though his brother wasn’t in them, didn’t appear even as a memory. Instead there was always a figure, a lady, shrouded in darkness, dressed in an old-fashioned high-collared dress and a cloak and silk hat, talking to Jacob calmly, reasonably, in gentle tones, questioning him, speaking in riddles. Always it took place in whatever room he’d fallen asleep in, the ship’s cabin on their voyage, the creaking old Japanese inn three streets up from the harbor here in Tokyo, wherever, and always it was just as if he were waking normally up, the woman seated across the room, a visitor, bringing news from a world unimagined.
“You’re back,” Jacob would say, frightened, in the dream. “What are you?”
Are we not all we can imagine, Jacob? would come the reply, low, soft, soothing.
He’d try to sit up in his bedclothes, try to see the woman’s face. “What do you want? Why do you come to me?” His own voice sounding querulous and frightened to his ears.
And so would begin the strange call-and-response of the dream, like a catechism, the questions he seemed unable to ignore, the answers that came from him almost unwillingly, almost as if he couldn’t help it:
What is it you want, Jacob?
“To know those that I love are well. To bring those I have loved back to me.”
And are those that you loved not with you always?
“I fear, and I do not know.”
It is your brother, your twin brother that I mean.
“I did not save him. I did not save him.”
The woman’s soft voice, filling then with love: Death is not death, Jacob, and nothing is forever. I can reach him still, as can you. And if Berghast will not let you open the orsine, you must find your own way to me.…
And the dream would turn then, melt away, into some more ordinary dreaming, and when at last he awoke, unsettled, he’d be half-unsure he’d even dreamed it at all.
* * *