Bringer of Dust, page 1
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For my brothers,
Kevin and Brian
It happened as he expected. He turned his head
And behind him on the path was no one.
—Czeslaw Milosz
LIGHTS WERE GOING OUT all OVER the WORLD
1883
1
KINDRED
Alice Quicke stood under a ragged plane tree in the gloom of Montparnasse, her hat brim dripping, the collar of her oilskin coat turned high against the rain.
She was quiet, dark-eyed. She carried a finger-blade hidden in her sleeve, another at her ankle. In one hand she gripped a four-foot-long iron bar, like a cudgel. A fiacre rounded the corner, clattering and splashing past, its driver hidden, side lanterns swaying. Otherwise Paris was dark. The rain was dark.
She looked ordinary, to the ordinary eye. That was the thing about monsters: the real ones always did. She’d been in the city nearly a month, spreading a ripple of unease through any crowd. It wasn’t the clothes she wore, the trousers, the stained oilskin coat; in Paris, at least, a woman in a man’s clothes drew little interest. Though her knuckles were bigger than most men’s, and the backs of her wrists were scarred like a blacksmith’s, and there was clay clumped in her tangled yellow hair, none of that mattered. What mattered was the thin crescent of light in her eye, like a blade turned sideways, that warned off most inquiries. Four months ago she’d killed her partner and friend, shot him in the heart while looking into his eyes, and before that she’d seen horrors that belonged only in fairy tales, children afflicted with strange talents, and monsters too, real monsters, the kind she couldn’t stop seeing even after she’d shut her eyes. She’d been hurt badly by one of those monsters, impaled by a tendril of smoke on the roof of a speeding train. Whatever it was that had infected her then was in her still. In the mornings she’d awake in pain and press a hand to her ribs, to the old wound of it, imagining some monstrous thing uncoiling there, just under the skin, a part of her.
Now a figure in a mud-spattered cloak turned onto the boulevard, walking fast in the rain. It was Ribs. She carried a bull’s-eye lantern clipped to a belt at her waist. Alice stepped out of the shadows and together they hurried to a manhole cover in the street. Alice pried it up with the iron bar, the rain foaming over the edge, over the rusted iron rungs, pouring down into the sudden blackness. Ribs clambered in. Alice followed.
And then, clinging to the iron rungs, Alice reached up and dragged the heavy covering back into place, cutting off the rain. And in the darkness she followed her friend down, deep into the catacombs of Paris.
“Jesus,” she muttered, when she felt her boots collide with the bottom. Her voice echoed back. “Some light here, maybe?”
After a moment the shutter on the lantern opened. It was an old-fashioned candle lantern with a fish-eye lens, a beam of weak yellow light illuminating the gallery. Ribs had taken it off her belt and leaned it against the wall. Alice could see the girl drawing back her wet hood, smoothing her red hair. The air was cold, sour.
Ribs was grinning, gap-toothed, at her. “Not Jesus. Just me.”
Alice gave her a flat look.
“What?”
“I waited nearly an hour.”
The girl winked. “It weren’t my fault you was there early. Anyway I got us lunch. I don’t reckon you remembered to?”
“No one saw you?”
“Saw me?” Ribs’s tone was wounded. She sniffed, opened her cloak to reveal a package in brown paper, tied off under one arm. “Look at this. A baguette an half a cheese. No reason we got to be all bones, just because everyone else down here is, right?”
Alice suppressed a smile. Ribs was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old but there was something about her that made Alice think she’d never been a kid, not really. And something else that made her think she’d never quite be a grown-up.
The catacombs were thick with silence. Three tunnels branched off in different directions, tall and arched. Alice closed her eyes, and the dark ache bloomed in her side.
They were seeking the second orsine, a door between worlds, a way to cross into the land of the dead and find a living boy trapped within. It was somewhere under Paris. Dr. Berghast had told Alice as much, in his sunlit greenhouse at Cairndale long months ago, a bonebird clicking weirdly at his wrist, his eyes cold and dead. And almost as soon as she’d arrived in Paris she’d felt it, an ache radiating up out of the old wound in her side, a coldness that seeped down her left arm into her fingertips. It was as if the infected dust that Jacob Marber—corrupted talent, servant of an evil more terrible than anything Alice had imagined—had left in her was stirring, waking up. As if it knew an orsine was near. And like a hook in her side, tugging at her, it had led her forward, first through the crowded lanes and boulevards, across the bridges, then down into the maze of the ossuaries. Ribs, who’d come with her, could only trail along, watchful. Alice, for her part, just went where it hurt worst.
But they weren’t in the ossuaries now. There were miles of ancient quarries under Paris, tunnels and stairs carved out of the limestone, submerged chambers, wells hidden in the absolute darkness. Only a small part of it was known. There were stories of things living deep in the underground, pale creatures, vengeful spirits. Cutthroats and pickpockets. Stories of servants lost in the black when their lanterns extinguished, their bodies only found years later. Stories of sudden drops, of dead ends, of ceiling collapses.
Maybe some of it was even true. But Alice, for her part, figured probably the worst thing in that darkness was her own self and the thing that was inside her.
Ribs was looking at her funny. “So? Which way, then?”
Alice grimaced. She started down the left-hand tunnel, retracing their steps from the night before, following the line of red chalk they’d slowly been adding to. Ribs came along behind.
The tunnels were wide at first, dry. The lantern’s beam was weak and wobbled as Ribs walked. They could see a few feet ahead, nothing more. The tunnel turned and turned again, then they descended an iron staircase put in sometime in the last century, and crept past a well and through a fissure in the limestone. All the while they watched for the line of red chalk that marked their way. They came out in a long gallery, the ceiling supported by pillars, their shadows crooked and silent in the black. The air was colder. They hurried on.
They’d stop now and then for a sip of water or a twist of bread but they did not linger long. Ribs would climb up onto a block of limestone and sprawl out with her arms dangling, or flop down onto the ground if it was dry, and she’d breathe wearily in the bad air.
It was during one such rest that Ribs mentioned their friend, the dustworker Komako. She’d gone to Spain in search of an ancient glyphic, and its secrets about the second orsine. She’d insisted on going alone. “So bloody stubborn. Je-sus. I guess she’s probably all right, though?”
“That girl can handle herself,” Alice murmured. “It’s the glyphic I’d be worried for.”
She heard Ribs snort.
The darkness seemed to lean in, muffling their voices. Alice didn’t like the new tiredness she heard in her friend. She said, “We’re going to find this second orsine. You know that, right?”
The girl was quiet.
“Ribs?”
“Sure,” Ribs said at last. “But it’s after we find it what worries me.”
“After, we’ll get Marlowe out. That’s what’ll happen.”
Ribs rolled onto her side, raised her face. In the glow of the lantern it looked unearthly and pale. “It’s what else gets out I don’t like to imagine. Charlie was awful scared when he come out, back at Cairndale. I remember it.” The damp turned suddenly colder in the gallery. “I keep thinking bout him, like. At night. When I try an sleep.”
“Charlie?”
“Not Charlie.”
But Alice knew who Ribs meant. They didn’t talk about Marlowe, not often. She thought of the little boy she’d known, the calm certainty in his face, the way he’d chosen to believe in her goodness despite everything, the strange power that had been in him. It felt like a lifetime ago. That night she’d first seen his talent, the blue shine in that sideshow tent outside Remington. The rough men watching him with tears in their eyes. She wasn’t sure what to say. Ribs had sat up now and was pushing the tallow higher into the lantern, then taking out the spare candle she’d brought.
“You go into the dark because it’s where the bad things are,” Ribs murmured. “Because it’s the only way to fight them. I get it. But in the dark, it’s easy to start thinking evil is stronger than it is.”
Alice was quiet. Ribs surprised her sometimes. She could feel the little blade strapped to her wrist, the consolation of it. Sometimes, she thought, the bad things
She got to her feet. The rock overhead felt heavy, crushing. Beyond the candlelight, the dark seemed to go on forever.
“We should keep going,” she said softly.
* * *
Nine hundred and seventy miles to the south, in an overgrown garden on the south coast of Sicily, Abigail Davenshaw walked barefoot below a villa, her long skirts swishing at her ankles.
The night air was warm with the scent of the potted basil plants near the old gardener’s shed. She could hear voices and children’s laughter spilling out of the shuttered windows. All her life she had been blind but her lord and benefactor, the man who had raised her and educated her, had refused to allow her blindness to stand in the way of who she might become. Blindness and seeing were not opposites, he’d told her. That was just the prejudice of the sighted. She had learned in the years since that there were many kinds of seeing. It was not darkness that she walked through, but a faint snowy haze at the edges of her vision, always there, night or day, and in the presence of a stark light—a bright lamp, the sun on a fierce day—she would sense the glow and turn her face toward it. She was thin and straight-backed still, like the schoolmistress she had been at Cairndale, but she was something else now, too, something new, and the weight of her responsibilities for the children she had brought out of England, and for this new refuge they were building, had changed her.
She’d come to like this hour of the day, when the rescued children were being settled by Susan, and she could slip out into the gardens and be alone with her thoughts. They were scattered now, those teenagers she’d come to know and love: young Oskar here with her, protecting and guiding the little ones; Ribs, under Alice’s shadow in the grand boulevards of Paris; her eldest ward, Komako, somewhere in Spain, hunting the glyphic rumored to live in that country. Charlie would be somewhere in northern waters, she hoped, perhaps already arrived back in Edinburgh. She worried about him most of all, his haelan talent lost—stolen from him, really, ripped out of him at the edge of the orsine by Berghast—his young mind overbrimming with anger, blaming himself for what happened at Cairndale. Well, nearly most of all. Always at the back of her mind was Marlowe, little Marlowe, adrift somewhere in a world of the dead, maybe not even alive.
She smoothed her already tight hair, grim. No, she must not think that.
What she wanted, above all, was to bring them all back together, to offer them a safe harbor, a place where they could just be young and protected and learn the limits of their talents and how to conceal them in a world that feared their difference.
But that, she thought sadly, pausing to trace her fingers through the leaves of a bougainvillea, might not ever be possible.
They were lucky to be here at all. The villa had been held in trust by the Cairndale Institute since the last century, an ancient refuge for talentkind. By chance, they’d found the documents attesting to this among Margaret Harrogate’s papers in London, and she’d made the reckless decision to move all of them south. Perched high on a rocky promontory near the sea, the main house had been shuttered by an Englishwoman eighty years earlier, while Napoleon marched burning through Europe, and not inhabited since. The roof had given way in places. A tree was growing out of the carriage house. There was an air of deep sadness around the property. Perhaps it was just the feeling of time passing. It was in the second week that Charlie and Oskar had found the room hidden below the wash-house, a long room carved from the rock, with inscriptions chiseled over every surface. She’d run her fingers over the writing, amazed, listening to the echo of the boys’ footsteps, beginning to hope. She studied the crude images of orsines, of talents, of a horned figure she knew must be the drughr, that ancient evil that had fed on young talents, and seduced Jacob Marber into its service. Secrets were contained here, old truths, if only they could be deciphered.
But mostly the days were spent in the difficult labor of restoring the villa. Abigail Davenshaw would rub the backs of her hands against her cheeks, reading the hard raised veins there, wondering at how the years seemed to grow up out of her skin. She still wore her hair drawn sharply back from her face and up off her neck, as she had done at Cairndale, and a long cloth was still tied over her eyes. That was for the children’s benefit, as it had always been. But her old blindfold—a gift from her benefactor a lifetime ago—had been lost in the institute fire, when Jacob Marber had attacked them, and now she wore simply an ordinary black cloth, purchased at a market in Palermo as they were arranging supplies for the long ride out past Agrigento.
When she reached the stone fountain at the center of the garden, she stopped. All the paths converged here, like the spokes of a wheel. Under the fragrant hibiscus and magnolia, a rotten stink was in the air, like the heavy murk of a slaughterhouse.
She turned her face. “Mr. Czekowisz, please tell Lymenion to step out of the fountain.”
There was a scrambling sound from the bench to her left, and the boy hissed, “Lymenion! I told you not to go in there. It’s not appropriate.” The boy made a noise of regret. “I’m sorry, Miss Davenshaw, I am. He just likes the feel of the water on his feet. He gets so hot here.”
“Rruh,” said the flesh golem. She could hear the wet pulpy shift of its weight as it climbed out.
“There is a water barrel beside the gardener’s shed, Lymenion,” she said sternly. “You know that.”
But she wasn’t annoyed, not really. She was thinking about how brave the creature had been in that terrible conflagration in the autumn, the way it had sacrificed itself fighting Jacob Marber, been torn to pieces. In their final days in Palermo, Oskar had disappeared, and when he returned two days later Lymenion had been refashioned. She did not ask where the boy had found the flesh to do it.
Oskar was changed now, too. He had taken it upon himself and Lymenion to keep the other children safe and she’d been surprised at how seriously he had grown into the role. He was still shy, still hesitant, and yet there was an undercurrent of steel in his voice now. He was only thirteen and yet he had faced terrible things, and survived. Whatever else, he was no longer an innocent, and would not ever be so again.
But that was true of all of them, she thought with a pang. Their childhoods had never been theirs, not really, not ever.
“Jubal and Meredith have almost finished rebuilding the wall, like you asked,” the boy said now. “Lymenion’s been helping. I know they’re both clinks but they’re still little, they can’t get strong for long. The wall should be strong enough soon. Whatever’s been digging around it will have a harder time of it. Lymenion thinks it must be a dog. Oh, and Miss Crowley wanted me to tell you the larder is low again on flour and salt. She said the delivery wagon is late. She wanted to know if maybe you wanted her to find a new dry goods seller?”
The town was a good hour away. Abigail Davenshaw shook her head dryly. “Miss Crowley is used to English schedules. I believe we will all need to adjust to the ways of the Sicilians.”
“Rrrr,” said Lymenion in agreement.
“And what of Mr. Ovid? Have we had any word?”
“This morning. A shop boy from town ran up the post. Charlie’s arrived in Edinburgh, he’s safe. He doesn’t say anything much.”
“Nothing about the inscription? No word yet of the alchemist woman, if she will help us?”
“I think he’d just arrived when he wrote.” Oskar hesitated. “You know what his letters are usually like? Well, this one was even shorter. But, Miss Davenshaw—”
“Yes?”
“Lymenion found something outside the walls, this morning. Something … unnatural.”
She turned her face, interested.
“I … I think it was a dog, maybe. Or it used to be. One of the wild dogs from the hills. It was hard to be certain. Its head was missing. And something had got into it, pulled it apart. Made a mess of it. Where I come from, they’d say it was the work of wolves. Except the insides weren’t eaten, Miss Davenshaw. They were all just sort of … pulled out, and laid in a circle around the kill. Like a kind of … warning.”
