“Evil things, Miss Quicke. Unnatural things. These are not keys but vessels, Miss Quicke. They hold inside them, like a fly in amber, something that does not belong in our world. You understand the or-sine at Cairndale is a doorway, a passage to another world. What is trapped in these weir-bents is from that world.” Mrs. Harrogate closed her fist around the keys and winced. Her voice lowered. “And they are conscious, Miss Quicke. They have their desires and fears, just as we do. You must resist them.”
In the weak gaslight of that strange room, Alice watched the woman in her black clothes rise and pad noiselessly to the locked door, like a ghost. It all felt eerie, and mysterious, and unreal. But she had long since given up on real. That same awful dread was rising in her again.
“Show me,” she said in a flat voice. “Show me what they can do.”
But Mrs. Harrogate held out the leather cord, the strange weir-bents swaying like some hypnotist’s charm.
“No, Miss Quicke,” she murmured. “It is you who must show me.”
* * *
So it was for this, then, that she was needed.
Alice turned the weir-bents in her fingers, feeling a coldness go right through her, like a knife. The room swam. And then she was staggering, reaching for the edge of the bed, while a black nausea washed over her and ebbed and came again, and the incision in her side where Marber had stabbed her bloomed in pain. In her fist, the weir-bents were so cold they burned.
“You must give into it,” whispered Mrs. Harrogate, from someplace near. “You must not try to control the pain. Accept it. Let it become you.”
And gradually, though the awful feeling did not leave her, Alice did so, and was no longer overwhelmed. She opened her fist, shaking.
They were not identical. One, she saw, was made of black iron, or something like it, its surface porous and pocked and rough to the touch. The other was carved out of a black wood that looked like iron, but seemed somehow much harder. They were heavy, with shanks almost as long as her hand. In place of the bow on the iron weir-bent was a Celtic knot, seamless and intricate as a snowflake; on the wooden weir-bent had been carved a crosspiece, and inside it a disk that turned in place, the wood oiled and burnished so that its veins glowed. At the end of its shank each had a strange twin collar, finely shaped, unlike anything Alice had seen, and a single uncut bit with no wards at all, as if neither had ever been shaped to a lock. And now, looking closer, Alice saw interwoven in both a fine silver metalwork, shaped almost like letters in a script she didn’t know, though the patterning was different.
Different, too, were the edges of the bits, sharpened to a knifelike sharpness, and edged by that same curious silver inlay. Otherwise the darkness of the weir-bents seemed to increase as she looked at them, almost as if the shadows in the room were being sucked in, so that it felt as if she were looking through them, into the darkness of a vast night sky.
“Miss Quicke,” murmured Mrs. Harrogate, and Alice came back to herself with a start.
“Yes,” she said quickly. “What. What do I do?”
Mrs. Harrogate indicated the iron weir-bent. “This is the weapon. It may be used in the keyhole of any closed door, in any lock. It will fit. And when you open that door, the keywrasse will come out. Its purpose is your purpose; but it does not simply obey your commands. The keywrasse will try to master you. You must not let it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will. One last thing. The weir-bent does not work in daylight. It can only be used at night. I do not understand how, or why; I only tell you what has been told to me. You must return the keywrasse through a door, and seal it again in the weir-bent, before the sun rises.”
“Or what?”
“The weir-bents are what hold the keywrasse in bondage. The longer the wrasse remains out of the weir-bent, the weaker that control becomes. When the control weakens too much, the wrasse will be free to act as it wishes, here, in this world. It will obey only its own desires. It will follow only its own appetites. You will no longer command it.”
“What will it do, then?”
“Let us not find out, hm?”
“But why is it I can do this and no one else?”
Mrs. Harrogate gave her an angry look, almost bitter. “Because you are the one who carries Jacob Marber’s dust. But you are not the only one.”
She meant Marber, Alice knew. Jacob Marber could control it also. She shivered and went to the door and started to slide the iron weir-bent in and then stopped. “Wait,” she said. “The other key, what does it do?”
“Weir-bent, Miss Quicke. It is called a weir-bent. The iron unlocks; the wood locks away. It is for closing. When it is time for the keywrasse to leave you.”
“Before sunrise.”
“Or you shall have to wait until nightfall, again. Yes.”
Alice nodded and turned back to the door. She slid the iron weir-bent in, and turned it.
Nothing happened. A long silence followed.
“You must open the door,” said Mrs. Harrogate, sounding faintly exasperated.
Alice, nervous, turned the door pull. The hall outside was narrow and dimly lit by a single gas sconce near the top of the stairs and Alice cautiously stepped out and peered in both directions. It was empty. Then she felt something slide against her ankle and she leaped back but it was only a cat, a black cat with one white sock, belonging no doubt to the landlady, and Alice glared at it and started to go back in, feeling a strange mixture of both relief and disappointment.
But Mrs. Harrogate, however, was standing transfixed in the middle of the room, staring at the cat.
And all at once Alice understood. She looked down, looked back, feeling ridiculous. “No,” she said. “The cat?”
It had padded noiselessly into the room and leaped now up onto the bedclothes and there it curled up, its long tail sweeping in around it. Calmly it started to lick at its white forepaw. And that was when Alice saw that it had two extra eyes, four in all, shining with light in the smooth black fur.
“What does it do?” she whispered.
Mrs. Harrogate calmly clasped her hands in the small of her back. She did not move. “It understands you, Miss Quicke. You may ask it yourself.”
“But it is here to help us, isn’t it?”
“We must hope so. Be polite; speak to it directly.”
“Hello, uh, kitty,” she said, feeling vaguely foolish. The keywrasse, if that was what it was, just continued its grooming. “My name is Alice Quicke. I, uh, I opened the door.… The thing is, we need your help. There’s a man, a—a drughr, that’s killing our friends. We need your help in stopping it. Please.”
The keywrasse raised its whiskers and yawned widely, baring its long fangs, and for a quick moment Alice thought it might acknowledge her, she thought it might respond in some strange uncatlike way, but instead it just leaped noiselessly down and padded to the window and jumped up onto the sill. And there it sat, head raised, ears dialed forward, peering out at the darkness.
“This is ridiculous,” Alice muttered. She had the creeping feeling that a joke was being played on her.
But Mrs. Harrogate did not seem to think it ridiculous. She’d moved closer to the window and stood now warily just behind the creature, trying to see what it sensed. “What is it? Is something out there?”
The keywrasse did not move.
“Yeah, there’s something out there,” said Alice. “A mouse.”
Mrs. Harrogate did not smile. “My name is Margaret Harrogate,” she said politely. “We have summoned you because we wished to introduce ourselves. We will ask your assistance tomorrow night; we will go out into the city, looking for the one we seek. A servant of the drughr.”
The keywrasse’s ink-black tail flicked, curled, flicked again. Otherwise it gave no indication of having heard Mrs. Harrogate at all.
“Miss Quicke,” she continued. “If you would insert the wooden weir-bent in the lock, our guest would be able to leave us.”
And Alice did so; and the keywrasse, or cat, or whatever it was, as if understanding Mrs. Harrogate perfectly, sniffed and lazily dropped back to the floor.
But then, as if to prove leaving was its own idea, it paused a long moment in the open door before sauntering out into the hall. Quickly Alice shut the door, and withdrew the wooden key, and tied the leather cord around her throat.
The room was still; Mrs. Harrogate had turned back to the window, peering out at the fog.