“You are not sufficiently trained, young man. I will show you. Come closer. Do not mind the feel of the wards, the glyphic will not harm you. He knows we are here, he knows our intentions. Now, here, where these two stones meet in the wall.” She took his hand and moved his fingers softly along the crack in the stones. “Here is a gap you could slide through. It seems impossible, hm? Nevertheless. The mortaling will move a body without a body’s moving. It will overflow your imagining.”
Charlie felt the gap. He shut his eyes. His entire body was thrumming with the energy of the glyphic’s wards. There was stillness; and all at once the silence was like a sound in his ears. Something was happening. He could feel his fingertips where they pressed up against the stones, seeking the space between, and he tried to envision that gap creeping open, a narrowness he might pour his fingers into. Nothing happened.
“I … can’t,” he said, breathing hard. “I just … can’t.” He felt, strangely, as if he’d disappointed her.
“Indeed, Mr. Ovid,” she said. “One thing at a time. If you are ready?”
“Right,” said Charlie, trying to keep the anger from his voice. “I’m ready.”
Miss Davenshaw gestured to a ring of stones, laid out in the red clay.
“Then let us begin,” she said.
* * *
The days passed.
Charlie was in the candlelit library one afternoon when Komako found him. He had taken to wearing his mother’s ring on a cord around his neck, in part because it wasn’t easy or painless cutting it out of his flesh. He was gripping it unhappily where he sat, brooding, on the wide sill of the window, when he heard the heavy brass pull of the door, twisting. Then he heard the click of Komako’s shoes on the inlaid parquet and slid the ring back inside his shirt.
“Ribs is looking for you,” she said, hesitant.
“What for?”
“Oh, not for anything.” A sly grin, just at the edges of her mouth. “I just think she can’t relax unless she knows where you are.”
Charlie frowned. If she was teasing, he couldn’t tell. She came forward a little and drew out a chair and sat, very close. He could smell the lye soap in her skin.
She was wearing the fingerless kidskin gloves again, protecting her sore hands. “How was your first lesson with Miss D? I hate to think what a haelan learns. Did she make you recite the five talents?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Did she tell you about the sixth?”
“There is no sixth.”
Komako tugged at her thick braid. “Or is that just what they want us to think? Ask Ribs about it. Ribs has all sorts of theories about the sixth. The dark talent, she calls it. There’s a story the old-timers like to tell, about the dark talent bringing about the end times, and destroying all the other talents.…” She paused, shifting to see his face more clearly against the window. “Hey, Charlie. I’m just teasing. Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
“When I first came here, I got sad all the time. It wasn’t just the place. I mean, it was a little bit the place.”
“I’m not sad.”
“Well. I was.” Her mouth was open just a bit, as if with anticipation, as if she knew how closely he was watching her lips. “I’d just lost my sister, Teshi. She was my little sister, she’d been sick for a long time. And then she just wasn’t sick anymore. It was Mr. Coulton and Jacob who found me, who purchased passage for me here. Ribs was there, too. She’d just sort of … attached herself.”
Charlie raised his face. “Jacob—?”
“Marber. Yes. He was different then. I don’t know what he is now. He disappeared while we were sailing south from Tokyo. He was just … gone, one night. The sailors all believed he’d jumped overboard. But for years after, he’d be seen near Cairndale, off in the valleys, just walking. Head down, like he was looking for something.”
Charlie suppressed a shudder. He imagined that monster of smoke and darkness, stalking the walls of Cairndale, trying to find a way in.
Komako’s face was suddenly serious. “I know what it looks like here. Dr. Berghast and Miss Davenshaw and the like all act like this is a refuge for us, for our kind. And they want it to be, they do. But nowhere’s safe, not really. You be careful, Charlie One-of-Us-Now.”
“You don’t know where I’ve been,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
“You’re not the only one who’s had it hard, Charlie.”
There was something about the way she said it. He looked at her then, really looked at her. Wondering suddenly and for the first time just what she’d lived through. How her sister had died, or her parents, or how she’d had to leave her entire life behind to come here. He scraped at the sill with a fingernail, feeling ashamed.
“What you saw the other night, the carriage in the courtyard,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to see it. It makes deliveries sometimes. Crates. And sometimes it takes things away, too.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Only because you don’t know. You don’t know what’s happening here.”
He lifted the candle from its dish where it was guttering and poured out the wax and set it back upright. “So tell me.”
But he could see she was deciding some argument in herself. She got up and listened at the door. She was looking at him darkly as she did so and her eyes were shining in the candlelight. Then she came back and sat very close to him.
“Kids have been going missing,” she whispered.
He blinked. “From Cairndale?”
She nodded gravely. “Maybe even being killed. We don’t know. Last semester I saw Brendan O’Malley going out to that same carriage in the middle of the night. No one ever heard from him again. When I asked, I was told he’d come of age and gone back to his family. But he didn’t have any family, none worth going back to, at least.”
“Wait. What do you mean, what’re you saying?”
“I don’t know, not yet. But I’m going to find out. All of us are, me and Ribs and Oskar.”
“How?”
Komako leaned in close. He could feel her breath on his cheek. “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said softly. “We need your help, Charlie.”
* * *
It’d been Ribs’s idea, to approach Charlie, to ask for his help. Oskar and Lymenion hadn’t liked it, true, but Komako could see the sense in it. He had a wary sidelong way of looking at you, the way of a kid who’d lived rough, that had made Komako think he just might agree. And he was, after all, a haelan.
It was that, his talent, which had finally convinced her. Because if they wanted to know more—if they wanted to get closer to whatever was going on—then they’d need a haelan.
The disappearances had started two years ago. Not many, not enough that anyone seemed alarmed; and always there was an explanation—gone down to London, or returned to their families, or sent on a journey to Romania, to Peking, to Australia. But no one ever said goodbye. And they left all they cared about behind. When Brendan was smuggled out to the carriage, in the dead of night, he’d been building a replica of Cairndale out of matchsticks in his dormitory; he left it unfinished. This other girl who disappeared six months before him, Wislawa, had just captured a rabbit and was raising it in a cage behind the toolshed; she left it unfed. Admittedly, Komako didn’t know any of the disappeared well: Cairndale kept its kids apart, as much as it could; but she’d heard the talk and knew they weren’t the sort to want to go.
Which meant there was something going on. And, worse, there must be someone at Cairndale who knew about the carriage, who was helping make it happen. The thing was, Cairndale itself was such a pit of secrets, the vanishings could be nothing, or they could be everything. Komako had lived at the institute for almost ten years now and it was her home as much as anything and yet there were parts of it she’d not even guessed at.