“Let her go,” Alice cried. “Leave her be!”
But Marber just walked calmly over to her, to Alice, and with his long twisted fingers lifted the leather cord, pulled at it with a snap. He stood very close. Alice could smell the dust in his clothes. His eyes were wholly black, so that he seemed to be looking everywhere and nowhere at once. But then he turned away, studying the weir-bents in his palm.
Margaret made a gurgling noise, her face darkening with blood.
“Let her go, please,” begged Alice.
And Marber, with a casual glance back at Alice, shrugged. “As you wish.”
All at once the tendrils of dust lifted Mrs. Harrogate into the air and hurled her bodily across the chamber. She struck a pillar and fell crumpled against the stone floor. One of her knives clattered away across the floor. Her body looked strange, bent wrongly. The litch, Coulton, still had not moved. Alice heard his teeth clicking, clicking.
“These,” said Marber, sliding them from the cord, “these are rather … unusual, yes? What do you know of them, Alice?”
She could feel the muscles tightening at her throat. She was breathing in quick shallow breaths. She couldn’t seem to get enough air.
He was watching her with that same cruel indifference and now it was she clutching at her throat, trying to breathe, knowing that she would die. She wanted to shout, to scream at him, to hurt him in some way, but all she could do was fall, heavily, to her knees, gasping. The keywrasse, she was thinking, where was the keywrasse? She tried to summon it, silently. But she could do no more; for, at that very moment, Mrs. Harrogate lifted her head weakly from the ground and slid her small silver-plated pistol out of her handbag and leveled it at Jacob Marber’s heart and pulled the trigger.
Everything erupted. The sharp roar of the gunshot ricocheted off the ancient walls. Marber recoiled and spun under the impact and fell back in a sudden explosion of black dust. The weir-bents flew from his grip. All at once the air rushed back into Alice’s lungs, and she was wheezing and shaking her head and heaving with the effort, stars in the corners of her eyes.
“Miss Quicke!” Mrs. Harrogate cried. And she flung her other knife skittering across the floor.
Alice had turned her head in time to see the knife spin toward her, and to see Coulton scrabble, leaping forward, his long teeth clicking, his claws scraping at the stone floor. And she crouched and grabbed the knife and rose to meet him.
Coulton! she was thinking, her head spinning. Frank!
And in that mass of smoke: Jacob Marber himself. It would not be possible to fight both. She and Mrs. Harrogate would die.
But then, in a blur, the keywrasse came among them. Where it had been hiding, Alice couldn’t imagine. It flew between the pillars on its swift catlike feet, its one white paw shining, and it seemed to grow in size as it raced in and out of shadow, now as big as a dog, now as big as a lion, and it had too many legs somehow, and then it was smashing into Coulton and knocking him weightlessly back against the far frescoes and propelling itself sideways onto his back snarling and driving its tremendous fangs into his shoulder, tearing at him under its weight, and still not slowing but leaping again, driving itself toward Marber, still growing, now six-legged, now eight-legged, a creature of darkness and nightmare and fury.
All this unfolded so quickly Alice barely had time to adjust her knuckles in the rings of the handle and raise the long knife in front of her.
And then the keywrasse had plunged into the swirling cloud of dust where Marber was, and Alice twisted back in time to see Coulton—the thing that had once been Coulton—rise up out of the gloom smeared with its own blood, and crouch on its coiled legs, and spring at her.
She fell back, heavily, cutting fast and hard with the blade. She needed to keep Coulton at arm’s length. The candle fire caught the strange unreflective orbs of his eyes, glinted off his long yellow teeth. He was hissing and snarling and there was nothing of the man she had known, nothing of the man she had come to admire.
And then she leaned in too far, trying to cut his belly, and his claws caught her shoulder and raked across the side of her neck.
He was on her in an instant. Some part of her was aware of Mrs. Harrogate, across the chamber, dragging herself bloodily back up against a pillar. And the dark cloud where the keywrasse and Marber fought thickened in the air, and parted, and she saw the keywrasse hook a claw into Marber’s mouth and pull, slicing his cheek in a great ragged tear so that his face blackened with blood and through the hole she could see the teeth in his mouth, as in a skull. He screamed in pain.
But mostly it was the weird, slowed-down sense of time that she noticed, as Coulton dipped his head, trying to bite her neck, her face, and she gripped his throat with one hand and plunged the long knife over and over into his side, his arm, his ribs, his throat, seeking for purchase in the slippery blood.
But she wasn’t alone; she felt again an enormous powerful weight as something, some creature, smashed into Coulton, hurling him across the floor. It was the keywrasse, panting, its long fangs snapping, its many legs crouched to spring.
She saw Marber, splayed out on the floor. And she saw Mrs. Harrogate, crawling toward him on her forearms, a blade in one fist. Slowly, through a fog of pain, she started to understand that they might survive, that they might even destroy Marber and Coulton. The keywrasse might succeed.
But then something else happened, something … horrifying.
The candles in their brackets guttered, one after another, as if some invisible presence were rushing along the walls of that chamber. One by one they went out.
And then a sliver of gray light, like an incision in the air, slowly appeared. It widened, wound-like. Sliding out of that ragged hole came a thing, a monster, a creature of sheer and utter darkness. The only light left was the light of the bull’s-eye lantern, upturned on the floor, and in its beam of light Alice saw the horror stand tall. It stood twelve feet high, its shoulders crushed up against the ceiling, and its arms were a blur of smoke so that Alice could not be sure if there were four, if there were six.
It was the drughr.
And then it screamed. The drughr screamed and the sound was the sound of death, of pain, of absolute terror. And the keywrasse roared in challenge and leaped forward and then Alice could see nothing, only the darkness, but she could hear the clash and ringing and shrieking of the two creatures in their fight, a sound of metal striking metal. She fumbled weakly for her knife, then crawled over to the bull’s-eye lantern. She opened the shutter wide. She turned it upon the chamber.
The air was thick with a choking black dust. She couldn’t see Mrs. Harrogate. But she saw Marber on his feet, clutching his face, black blood pouring through his fingers. He had something in one fist, clutching it close. She saw him climb through the silver hole in the air. Then Coulton, bloodstained and staggering, followed him through.
The drughr had seized the keywrasse by the throat. It was twisting it this way and that, shaking it, screaming. Alice fumbled for her gun, trying to find it in the smoke. But the drughr raised itself up to an awful size and hurled the keywrasse against a far pillar so that the walls shuddered and dirt poured down around them and darkness descended.
And then the drughr, too, was fleeing through the tear it had made in the fabric of the world, and the silver hole closed like a mouth.
And after that, a long deep silence, into which Alice fell back, exhausted.
* * *
There came a darkness.
* * *
A greater darkness.
* * *