For one thing, he wasn’t alone.
No one else outside the old theater seemed to notice the woman. She wore the same old-fashioned dress from the dream, with the ruffled linen collar, and the long dark cloak with the little silver clasp, and the same silk bonnet with the curved wire frame. And though he should have felt menaced, anxious at the very least, Jacob found himself instead feeling a strange dreamlike solace, as if she had come in kindness and in hope. And so he turned and joined the flow of people pouring in to watch the kabuki.
He wavered in the low entryway, amid the torch smoke, surprised that he was not stared at more, and then as the first gong crashed he slid back around the corner and saw the apparition watching him from a side corridor, and then she slipped away. He followed, a dreamlike slowness in his every movement. The dark woman led him through a labyrinth of dim airless passageways, sliding screens, crooked flights of steps, until at last he entered a small still room at the top of the theater, a brazier burning in the middle of the floor, and there she was, the girl, Komako.
She was kneeling at Teshi’s side and she rose to her feet as he appeared. He glimpsed a rope, tied to an ankle, as if to restrain the little one.
“Who let you in here?” Komako demanded.
She didn’t wait for his reply, but turned and opened the screen and led him away, into the creaking hall, then up a narrow stair that had been hidden in darkness, to a trapdoor in the ceiling. He found himself outside on the high roof. The city spread out below, a dizzying sea of little fires and colored lanterns. The muggy air smelled of rain. The girl was already ten feet above him, climbing nimbly across the clay roof tiles in her bare feet. She didn’t pause, didn’t look back to see that he followed.
When he reached her at last, she was on a sheltered balcony, gabled, with a low dark door behind her, looking locked and unused for years. The railing was a kind of wickerwork, very old and very beautiful, but Jacob didn’t trust it with his weight.
The girl sat, dangling her feet through the railing, like a kid, exactly like a little kid, and Jacob was reminded again with a sudden pain just how young she really was. He took off his hat, sat next to her, his hair sticking to his temples.
“What is this place?” he said quietly.
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said. “I don’t want to see you.”
He didn’t point out that she’d dragged him up to the roof, that she could’ve said that below, or just refused to talk, or even hollered for someone to remove him.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve angered you.”
“I’m not angry.”
He wanted to smile at that. But he just regarded her gravely, remembering how he was at her age, when Berghast had found him in the grime of Vienna, how old he’d felt, peering at the wealthy clothes and soft face of the older man, how he’d felt like that man couldn’t know anything about the world, not really. And he’d felt such fear, too. He felt it still. He searched the girl’s face and tried to think of some way to begin. “Your English is excellent.”
She shrugged. “It was my father’s tongue. My mother made me learn.”
“I’m lucky that she did. What’s wrong with your hands?”
She hesitated. Then she slowly unwrapped the linen bandages, held up her hands. Her small fingers were chapped and red. “They’ve always been like this. Yours aren’t?”
“No.”
“When did you … know?” she asked, choosing her words with care. “I mean, that you could do—?” She flicked her hands, as if shaping dust. Suddenly it was obvious to him how much she needed to talk, how many questions she must have. He determined at that very moment to be as honest and direct with her as he could.
“Always,” he said.
“Can you do anything else?”
He paused, studied her in the darkness. “Like what?”
“Like anything.”
He shook his head. “No. Just the dustwork.”
“Does it hurt you?”
“It’s cold, especially in my wrists. That hurts.”
She seemed to think about that. “How did you learn to control it?”
He wrapped his arms around himself, leaned back to study the humid night sky. There were no stars. “On my own, at first,” he said softly. “Like you. But when I got to Cairndale, they taught me things about it there too. Ways to use it safely.”
“Cairndale. That’s where you’re from?”
“In Scotland. Yes.”
“That is in Europe?”
“Yes.”
“You traveled halfway across the world.” Her voice was hushed.
He nodded.
But she didn’t seem pleased by this. She started winding the linen bandages back up, around her hands, in quick deft movements. “You traveled halfway across the world … for me? Because I can do what you can do. Why? What is it you want from me, Jacob Marber?”
It sounded strange, hearing his name from her like that. She didn’t talk like a child, that was the thing. He looked at her. “I want to bring you back with us. To Cairndale.”
She laughed a sharp, angry laugh.
“Why not?” he said. “What’s here for you? Who can do what you can do? Who would understand it, even, if they saw it?”
She bit her lip, looked away. “I know nothing about you. You could be anyone.”
But he knew she was thinking of her little sister, what would become of her. He turned the hat in his fingers. “You know one thing about me. Is that not enough?”
The girl’s eyes flickered to his hands, away.
“You can’t live here unprotected, Komako-chan, not forever. Our kind, we don’t do well on our own. People fear us.”
“Are there no people in Scotland?”
He smiled slowly. “Some. But the Scottish, they’re very … practical.” He looked at her and winked. He started to talk then, gently, about his childhood. He told her a little of how he’d survived as a boy in the alleys of Vienna, scared, hungry, until a man had come seeking him out, too. A doctor. The very man who’d written them in Kyoto about her. They’d been in Japan over a month now, he and his partner, and only sheer chance had brought her to them now. Chance, or fate. She could decide. He told her dustwork was not the only talent in the world and that his companion, Mr. Coulton, could make himself very strong. It was, he said, something to see. She listened in silence and never took her eyes from his face as he spoke and he didn’t know how much she believed. He said to her that he’d had a brother, a twin, who died when they were maybe Komako’s very age. That death had broken him and he’d never got over it and he never would. Lastly he told her about the glyphic, a man as old as the oldest tree, who lived in the ruins of an ancient monastery at Cairndale. They called him the Spider, because of what he did, because of his talent. He was, said Jacob, a finder.
“It is he who led us to you,” he explained. “In his dreaming, he waits at the center of a kind of web, and every time a talent is used somewhere, he feels its vibrations and tries to locate it.” The girl was watching his lips, as if fascinated by the words, and all at once he fell quiet, suddenly self-conscious. “I’m nothing like you, Komako-chan, it’s true,” he said. “I don’t know your life, what you’ve been through. But somehow, you and I, we’re the same. That must mean something.”
He raked his hands through his beard. She was maybe the very age he’d been when Henry found him in Vienna. Her eyes were dark and sad. Her hands were wrapped in linen, as if burned.
“Your brother,” she said. “He was sick?”
Jacob shook his head. “It was an accident.”
“The doctor who found you. He did not save him?”
“It was before that. He was … too late.”
“You would have done anything.”
Jacob breathed quietly in the night air. “I still would,” he said softly. And saying it out loud like that, hearing it said, suddenly he knew it was true, and he thought of the shadow woman and the orsine and what she’d said.
Komako took a long, slow breath.
“My sister is sick,” she said. “No one knows what is wrong with her.”
He nodded.