And walked away.
Jacob watched her go, then lifted his gaze. The shadow woman, that creature of smoke and darkness, lurked silent and brooding in her black skirts beside the smooth trunk of the foremast. A sailor crouched next to her, picking oakum from a coil of rope, unaware. Jacob didn’t even know her name. It was strange, not knowing what to call her. The drughr, of course. He’d figured that much out. But not evil, maybe. Was it possible? She was with him often now, not only in sleep but also on waking, like an eerie second shadow of what might yet be. She loomed behind Coulton at the captain’s table in the evenings, while his gruff friend tore a bread roll with his thumbs. She stood unswaying on the sunlit deck while the bowsprit heaved and sank in the spray, weightless, the wind never in her skirts. In the dim cramped cabin he shared with Coulton, she often hung in the open doorway, as if not quite touching the floor, the smoke obscuring her eyes. Sometimes seeing her frightened him. Mostly, though, it just left him feeling unaccountably old, and sad.
He didn’t speak much in those first days. He’d stare in the evening lantern light at Coulton’s red face, his auburn sideburns, the way he sucked deeply on his cigar and held the smoke in his lungs with his eyes closed like a man profoundly satisfied with his lot. His friend was often in conversation with the girl Ribs, that skinny wastrel with her thatched red hair. She was always eating and she chewed with her mouth open and that gap in her teeth visible.
Coulton seemed easier, happier even. Certainly Jacob was happy for him. It wasn’t only that they were sailing for home, he knew. It was the brash kid, too.
So Frank Coulton has a heart, he remembered thinking, seeing him like that in those days. Who’d have guessed it.
Ribs, for her part, flashed like a salamander in and out of any room Jacob wandered past. It was almost like she was avoiding him, almost like she knew something he didn’t. She was everywhere, and nowhere, talking a mile a minute, her voice carrying to every corner of the creaking bark. Scrawny and quick, with eyes that weren’t the eyes of a child. On that first morning she wore a yellow child’s kimono, bought with care by Coulton from the silk district, but by the second morning she was wearing a rolled-up pair of sailor’s pants and a shirt torn at the sleeves and still too long, and these she wore for the rest of the voyage. It hurt Jacob’s heart to see her like that, wondering just what she’d had to put up with, what cruelties, how few kindnesses must never have been extended, but she didn’t seem to dwell on it. The only times he saw her silent was when she’d sit with Komako on a lashed crate on the poop deck, both of them peering out at the sun-reflected water, its flaring blades of light, two girls maybe of an age, a friendship maybe blossoming between them.
They were already clear of Sagami Bay by then, tacking west of Oshima Island, the wind strong and southerly. They were making for Taipei, and the East China Sea.
With little to do beyond keep tabs on the two girls, and drowse, and shield his eyes against the brightness, and observe the sailors swinging in the high rigging like macaques, Jacob’s thoughts would drift ahead to Scotland and Cairndale and the lonely stone buildings there. He’d been away too long.
There was almost no alone on that ship. Always a sailor would appear, grunting, working away at some task, or Coulton would emerge out of a hatch, restless, or the girl Ribs would run past on her way someplace. Or he’d turn suddenly and see the drughr, ghostlike, watching him from across the ship. He was already sleeping less and less. What Komako had done to Teshi was inside him, somehow, too, and he couldn’t let it go. He turned it over in his head, brooding, until it blurred with what the drughr had said about Bertolt’s little spirit, suffering, alone, afraid, and about how he could bring his brother back.
And so it was Jacob summoned the drughr to him, on the third night at sea. He went up on deck under the stars to be alone and he sat with his back to the railing at the foredeck, the warm wind in his beard. He crushed his eyes shut and he willed her to him, and she came.
You told Mr. Coulton about us, she said. Her voice wasn’t pleased.
Jacob, holding his knees to his chest, looked up. She was so close, he might have reached out and pinched her skirts between his fingers. Above the stiff ruffed collar, smoke curled and thickened where her face should have been. “There is no us,” he muttered. “You said death is just a door. You said it can be opened and closed, by anyone who knows how.”
Yes.
“Is he still … Bertolt? Is he still who he was?”
You must open the orsine. You must open it so that it does not close again.
“Will you give him a message for me?”
You will give it to him yourself. When you open the orsine.
“Why can’t you do it? What do you need me for?” He rubbed angrily at his face and glared off at the darkness. “Anyway I don’t even know how. You can’t open something you don’t understand.”
It is easy, Jacob. You must kill the glyphic.
Jacob stared at her. “Mr. Thorpe?”
He has gone by many names. But it is one and the same. Yes.
“I know what you are,” he said suddenly.
And what am I?
He swallowed. “Drughr.”
She kneeled, demurely, with her gloved hands in her lap. That is one name. There are others. I am old, older than your good Dr. Berghast, older even than your precious glyphic.
“Coulton says you’re evil,” he whispered.
Her head tilted then, as if giving him a long flat look. Almost like she were human. Evil, she said softly, is a matter of perspective.
“It’s not.”
Oh? And is a tree evil? Is dust evil? We are a part of a greater darkness, Jacob, that is all. The second side to the coin. And what are you? What is dust, what does it mean to have a power over dust? Is that not evil?
“Talents aren’t evil.”
Yours is a very particular talent though. Is it not?
He saw the silhouette of a sailor rise from the forecastle and cross to the railing. The sea was calm, glowing now with the eerie blue glow of jellyfish under the starlight. After a moment the sailor drifted back to his watch.
Imagine if you had learned then, what Komako has learned now. You could have kept Bertolt alive, you could have kept him with you. It is a part of the dustworker’s gift. Did Berghast not tell you? Of course not. He would not wish you to know. But I can give you that power.
“I wouldn’t want it. I don’t want it.”
It is yours regardless. The drughr leaned forward, her face all smoke and blackness. Dust is the power to bring darkness into the world, she said. You know so little of what you are, Jacob. You are still so young. I have seen sandstorms at midday in the Empty Quarter, how they block out the sun. You would think it the dead of night. Their roaring obliterates every sound. And the feel of the sand blown against your skin obliterates all other sensation. There is no smell, no taste, no sound, except the sand. The sandstorm strips away all of the human senses, until a person is no longer a person. They are cut off from their own self. That is the power of dust.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone—”
Of course not.
Jacob shook his head. He felt sleepy, almost drugged. The drughr had that effect on him, somehow. “You said … you said you knew a way—”
To find your brother, in the other world. To help him, yes. The orsine is the door, it is true, but there are other ways through too. Little windows. I can take you through, Jacob, I can do what Henry Berghast will not. But the orsine must be opened if your brother is to be brought back for good.
“You said he’s suffering—”
It will not be easy. And there is a price. Will you pay it? That is the question.