Then: movement.
Pain, blooming in her chest. Alice coughed, reached for the lantern. Somehow the candle within had not gone out and she turned it, swung its light across to Mrs. Harrogate. The older woman’s dress was white with dust, her blood a vibrant red in her hair and hands and her ribs. Alice crawled over to her, cradled her head.
Mrs. Harrogate grimaced up at her. “You … look … awful.”
Alice sobbed a bloody sob. “Yeah,” she said, through the tears and the snot. “And you look fit for the fucking opera.”
“My legs…” She gasped, wet her lips. She was fumbling for her knees. “I can’t feel my legs.”
Alice looked at them, twisted strangely in the dust. She blinked the blood from her own eyes. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “We just need to get you out of here. We’ll find you a doctor.”
But she knew it was not fixable. Mrs. Harrogate was shaking her head. “It wasn’t supposed to be here, it shouldn’t have been able to … I don’t understand.…”
“That was your drughr, I guess?”
Alice heard a soft meow then and saw the keywrasse sitting nearby. It was again just a black cat. It turned its four glinting eyes toward her, narrowing them, then looked away, bored. And then, with the greatest drama imaginable, as if the whole world might be watching, calmly it lifted one paw and began to wash it with a little pink tongue.
The older woman looked up suddenly, her eyes bright. “The weir-bents, are they—?”
Alice looked away, remembering. She got painfully to her feet, the rubble clinking, and with the lantern she cast around in the shadows. She stumbled to where the silver door in the air had been and then she began to claw through the wreckage. She remembered Coulton’s long teeth snapping at her throat, she remembered the thing in Marber’s fist as he fled. She’d lost them. She’d failed.
But then she lifted away a piece of broken wall. And there lay one of them, the iron one, left in the dust like a broken piece of calipers. But the wooden one was gone.
“Then we have already lost, Miss Quicke.” Mrs. Harrogate was nodding bloodily. “Without the other weir-bent, you cannot send the keywrasse away. You will lose control of it. Nothing else can stop Jacob. He will be waiting for Mr. Thorpe to die now. He will be watching the glyphic. You need to get the weir-bent back.”
Alice spat. “First we need to get out of here,” she said. She didn’t know where Marber and that drughr had gone, or if they’d be coming back. She wouldn’t put it past him. “That’s what we need to do. While we still have light to see by. We can figure out what to do about the keywrasse later.”
But Mrs. Harrogate was shaking her head. “No, Miss Quicke,” she whispered. “Alice—”
It was the first time the older woman had called Alice by her name and she was surprised to find herself blinking back tears. “What is it?” she said gruffly.
“I can’t. My legs…”
Alice tried to think. She looked at the older woman’s body, twisted like a bad nail, and she set her jaw. The lantern was flickering, going out.
A darkness came flooding in.
28
OVERMORROW
In the morning, Charlie and Marlowe went back to Dr. Berghast.
It was still early; through their window while they dressed they could see a pale mist hanging over the inky darkness of the loch; the island was lost to view. Inside, the corridors of Cairndale were dim, and cold, and deserted. They saw no one. The other kids were still asleep. As they went, Charlie gripped his mother’s wedding ring in one fist for luck or consolation or maybe just out of habit until, reaching the upper corridor where Dr. Berghast would be waiting, he slipped the cord around his neck and tucked it all under his shirt, out of sight.
When they knocked, softly, at Dr. Berghast’s study, the older man opened the door at once, just as if he’d been waiting, just as if he’d known they would be back, at that hour, with that resolve. He looked haggard and drawn; he stood breathing; but his eyes were bright.
“So,” he said. “You will go.”
It was not a question.
He let them in. The cage holding the bonebirds was covered by a sheet. On Berghast’s desk was a tray holding plates of bacon and sausage and boiled eggs and butter cakes, still steaming. They ate ravenously; Dr. Berghast watched without speaking; and when they were done he rose and took up a lighted lantern. With a strange key he unlocked the leftmost door on the easterly wall.
“Mr. Thorpe weakens,” he said gravely. “We must not delay.”
The door opened onto a flight of stairs, winding down into darkness. They were in the walls of Cairndale, descending, and then they were below the manor, and emerging into a dark underground tunnel. The air tasted sour, hard to breathe. The floor of the tunnel was slick with muck and some sort of watery runoff. Dr. Berghast lifted the lantern and, wordlessly, started walking. The tunnel, as far as the light would reach, seemed to go on in a straight line forever.
“Where are we going?” said Charlie. His voice echoed off up ahead, over and over.
“This tunnel leads under the loch, Charles. We are going to the island.”
Marlowe said, “But the loch is deep.”
“Yes, it is, child.” Berghast did not turn as he spoke, only led them swiftly onward. “Except where a singular ridge of rock connects the island to the shore. We are walking inside it now. Above you is solid water.”
Charlie swallowed. He thought of the weight of that water, pressing down on the roof of the tunnel, he thought of the rock splitting and caving in, and the roar of it.…
“Who made this tunnel?” asked Marlowe.
“The dead, child. As they made everything that comes down to us.”
They were quiet then and walked on. The only sound was the splash and scrape of their shoes, the low hiss of the candle swaying in its own wax.
At last the tunnel seemed to slope upward, just faintly, and the air sweetened, and then they had reached a second flight of stairs. Dr. Berghast led them up to an old door, which he unlocked, and on the other side of it Charlie saw, again, the ruins of the monastery. The gray daylight was fierce, painful, after the darkness below. Charlie squinted, grimacing. They were standing in an apse, in a little shelter, the door cleverly hidden from sight.
“Come,” said Dr. Berghast.
He led them through the tumbled stones and the long grass and outside, to the front of the time-ravaged building. And again, laboriously, he unlocked a heavy door, and swung the lantern high, and led them inside, out of the mist.
It might have been a kind of living quarters once, for the monks who had built the island: a long room, windowless, with shadowy little chambers on either end. Dr. Berghast led them swiftly to a broken wall in the back, ducked his head, slipped through. It was a narrow stairwell, carved out of the rock itself, curving downward to a kind of natural cavern.
The dim light within was blue. The first thing Charlie sensed was a kind of thrumming, like a low-grade electric current. There were roots punching up out of the rocky floor, climbing in tangles up the walls. There were stone arches holding the roof in place and in the center of the chamber was a deep stone cistern, tangled and overgrown. Steps on one side led down into it. Its surface looked dark, unreflective; then Charlie saw it was not water at all but a kind of coagulated sap, thickening there. From deep below the skin of the cistern glowed an eerie, startling blue light. The roots had grown into it, the way a tree’s roots will grow into a pool of water. Charlie caught his breath.
“The orsine,” said Dr. Berghast calmly, indicating the cistern. He held out a small old-fashioned knife. “You must cut through it, to the waters below.”
Charlie took the knife warily. “Where’s the glyphic?”
Berghast raised an arm. “Ah, Mr. Thorpe is here, all around you. All this is a part of him. That substance, sealing the orsine? It is a resin, from his roots. He is feeding off the orsine.”
“We’ve got to cut through it?”
“Yes.”