Charlie swallowed. A flash in his mind of scrabbling claws, of that creature looming out of the darkness. He shook his head. “Mr. Coulton’s dead, Mar,” he said.
But the little boy was looking at him with haunted eyes in the gloom. “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know that he is, Charlie.”
Sometimes Charlie just didn’t know what to make of the kid, he didn’t. Like on the roof of the train. Or in the glyphic’s lair. This was one of those times. He nodded as if he understood but his heart was full mostly of pity and what he was thinking was that the kid had been through a lot of crazy and there was no knowing what was true, not really, no matter what he’d seen.
He wet his lips. “So what do you want to do? What is it you want?”
The boy breathed quietly in the dark.
“Mar?”
“I want Brynt back,” he said, his lip quivering. “I want Alice back. I want everything the way it used to be.”
Charlie, who wouldn’t have gone back to his old life for anything, didn’t know what to say to that.
He closed his eyes.
But if he’d got up instead and gone to the window, he’d have seen in the moonlight three figures—silhouettes that were almost familiar—running silently across the grass in long coats and ill-fitting hats, a fourth figure lumpen and strange shambling just behind, all of them racing over the clay fields to the wall and its wards and the road south to Edinburgh.
27
HUNTING MARBER
Alice Quicke landed squelching in something soft. Mud. Just mud. They were in a dark warehousing yard beside the river. The keywrasse was crouched on a coil of rope, listening to the night.
Coulton was gone.
She lifted the lantern cautiously, shining a thin beam at the wall, the crates, the ropes and cranes in the fog. She could see the impress of Coulton’s feet in the muck, the smeared grime where he’d clambered up onto the planking and padded into the warehouse.
In the distance they could hear the shouts of laborers on the docks. The fog hung thick and unmoving and Alice had little fear of being seen but still she crept warily up to the open door of the building, her oilskin coat shushing at her knees. She held the bull’s-eye lantern in one hand, her heavy Colt Peacemaker in the other. The keywrasse purred against her ankle.
“Go on,” hissed Mrs. Harrogate. “Hurry. We’ll lose him.”
Alice glared back at the older woman. But when she kicked the door open with her boot there was only darkness, the thick scent of oiled metal and lumber and wet ropes.
The air inside the building felt cold, and vast, as if it went on for miles. The light of the lantern shone barely ten paces. Coulton could be lurking anywhere.
“You go on,” muttered Alice.
But she didn’t really mean it; and when the keywrasse poured forward into the stillness Alice followed quickly, all of her senses alert, expecting a blur of white to leap at her at any moment, remembering in flashes the horror of that other litch. Whether Walter had died on the train or waited with Coulton up ahead, she didn’t know.
The keywrasse padded swiftly along the rows of crates and barrels, the floor slick in places where brine had spilled, the boards creaking underfoot. Alice’s side began to ache. She made no noise as she went.
If Coulton had sensed their presence, he’d be lying in wait somewhere. But if not, chances were good he’d lead them directly to Jacob Marber.
At last the keywrasse stood with its back arched in front of a closed door. It had the number twenty-one in white paint. Inside was a storage room, the lantern illuminating open wooden boxes of nails and screws and fasteners. The keywrasse went at once to a trapdoor in the corner.
“Fuck that,” whispered Alice. “We go down there?”
The keywrasse flicked its tail.
Mrs. Harrogate slipped past in her black skirts and lifted the iron ring and pulled. A gust of foul air came out. “He does not know we are hunting him,” she said softly. “They are the ones who should be afraid, Miss Quicke. Hand me that lantern.”
There was a steel in her voice that hadn’t been there before. It was the sight of Coulton, Alice knew, that had done it.
Harrogate withdrew both her long black knives and slipped her knuckles through their rings. She should have looked ridiculous, a middle-aged woman in petticoats with a killer’s weapons. Instead, thought Alice, she looked fierce, deadly. She dangled her feet over the edge, then slid down into the blackness.
“Yeah,” Alice muttered. “Perfect.”
And with a quick glance around at the dark storeroom, she swung herself down, and in.
* * *
She landed in an old sewer tunnel, a branch line, the stones slick underfoot. Mrs. Harrogate hissed for silence and Alice stayed crouching, her blood loud in her ears, straining for something, anything.
The older woman opened the shutter of the bull’s-eye lantern a crack. Her knives were held out low and flat at her sides.
“He is ahead,” she whispered. “Coulton, I mean. The keywrasse is already following. Come.”
And then the shutter snicked shut, and she heard the hiss of the older woman’s skirts, and all again was darkness.
Or almost darkness; gradually Alice’s eyes adjusted, and she could just make out the curve of the tunnel, the dark watery slime running down its middle. Other darker tunnels opened out on either side and the keywrasse would wait for them at each turning and then vanish again ahead. Alice thought of the stories she’d heard, of rats devouring people in the sewers, and shuddered. They crept on, wary, through the reeking labyrinth. Gradually a faint glow could be discerned, around a curve up ahead.
They came to an ancient chamber, part of a Roman bathhouse once, by the look of it, pillared and tiled and shrouded in shadow. A deep feeling of unease, of wrongness, was in that place. It might have been the haunt of some gang of waifs or urchins, once; the floor was cluttered with broken furniture, odd crates and boxes and junk dragged in from the back lanes of Limehouse. But good new candles burned now in brackets on the walls, their light dancing across the grotesque frescoes of bulls and half-naked boys and women in folded robes.
And at the center of the chamber, in the stone hollow where the baths had once pooled, was a man. He lay covered in blankets, on a faded green daybed, next to a small table and a collection of jars and flasks and suchlike. He was ill; slowly, with effort, he turned his head at their approach.
It was Jacob Marber.
At once Alice felt afraid. The wound in her side flared with pain.
“Margaret Harrogate,” he said softly. His voice was like dark honey and when he spoke a whispering seemed to echo up from the cavernous darkness all around. He looked at Alice, baring his strong teeth, and there was a strangeness in it.
“Ah. Is that Alice?” he said, as if they knew each other.
She shivered, putting a hand involuntarily to her side. She was not used to being afraid, and it angered her; and because of her fear, she made herself observe him carefully.
The shadows liked his eyes. That was the first thing she saw. And he was confident, too much so, pleased by his own cleverness. That was the second thing. He wore a stained black suit, his cravat rumpled, his shirt collar loose, like a gentleman back from a night in the gutters. A silk hat stood upended on the cushion beside him, gloves folded beside it, the black scarf that usually concealed his face inside the crown. Alice knew its silhouette from the quayside at New York Harbor. His beard was black and groomed and thick like a pugilist’s, and his eyes were long-lashed and beautiful. But his skin was gray, and old—far older than his years—and he was thin in the throat, and lean-cheeked, as if he had not eaten in a long time. Alice glanced around at the shadowed pillars and at the candles in their brackets but she did not see Coulton or Walter or any other. If the keywrasse was anywhere, it too had glided into the darkness and disappeared. Very deliberately, she took the revolver from her pocket and cocked it and leveled it at the sick man’s face.
“Ah,” he said again.