Bringer of Dust, page 13
Her hairy feet, when they brushed Komako’s legs, were cold as ice.
* * *
In the middle of the night Komako opened her eyes to find Mr. Bailey standing over her bed, watching her sleep. He was barefoot in a nightshirt. She lay very still with her eyes open to be sure she was seeing what she saw. Then she whispered, “You are in the wrong room, Mr. Bailey.”
He said nothing. His eyes were caverns of shadow. He drew in a long ragged breath. “You looked like you were … like you weren’t sleeping,” he whispered.
“Because I’m not. Not anymore.”
“I mean you looked dead,” he whispered. “Like the drughr had come for you. I thought—”
The old widow snorted loudly beside Komako, and rolled over. The bed sank low toward her weight. Komako waited to be sure she was still asleep and then she hissed, “For God’s sake, you’re safe here, Mr. Bailey. For tonight, at least. Go to sleep.”
“Tonight.” He nodded. “But tomorrow? What then?”
In irritation Komako raised up onto one elbow, the mattress shivering slightly. The widow snored on. The little whitewashed room looked spare and strange in the moonlight. “Tomorrow we go up into the hills. Tomorrow we find the Spanish glyphic. After that you’re free to go wherever you choose.”
In the silver light the man’s long face looked corpse-like. “None of us are free, who were at Cairndale,” he said quietly. “The drughr has marked us all.”
Komako felt her impatience flare up. “The drughr’s dead, Mr. Bailey,” she whispered angrily. “It’s dead. Dr. Berghast destroyed it at the orsine. Charlie was there, he saw.”
Mr. Bailey began to laugh then, a quiet laugh, more like an exhalation of breath. It was an ugly, not entirely sane sound. He folded his long arms over his head in a weird gesture, his borrowed nightshirt baring his hairy knees. “You can’t kill the drughr, girl. It’s already dead. You can’t kill a thing that’s already dead.”
The old widow was making a chewing sound with her mouth, near Komako’s ear. Komako, fuming, folded her pillow over her face. Her heart was black. Who was he to say she couldn’t?
He had no idea what she was capable of.
8
ADVERSUS SOLEM NE LOQUITOR
In the pale wash of morning they set out, unlikely pilgrims, trudging up into the dark foothills as if fleeing the day.
There were paths invisible in the sharp rocks and steep scree of the hills, paths only Mr. Bailey could find. Small black scorpions and stinging ants and snakes would come out with the day but it wasn’t quite the hour. Still Komako watched the landscape warily.
Mr. Bailey, scraping at the rocks with his walking stick, was different now. He seemed changed. Komako wasn’t sure of the difference at first and then she knew what it was. He was no longer afraid. As if in the night he’d come to some decision about his own fate, and his fear of the drughr had receded. She glimpsed in his milky eye an increased sadness, a regret that had risen in the night, but this only made her the more angry. She didn’t want to forgive anything.
The skin on her knuckles was red and chafing. A rash always broke out when she used her talent, as if her own body resisted it, as if she was allergic to herself. Her boots crunched through the loose rocks. They came over a rise and the yellow foothills were bathed in the morning light and she stopped, amazed. Far below and behind them lay the long sandy beach of Mojácar. White combers rolled endlessly in. Ahead lay the scooped and ragged mountains of the Sierra Cabrera, green and murky brown. There were low bushes and wind-twisted trees in the valleys where water lay. The slopes were long with grasses. And over everything lay a sky as vast and limitless as the world.
Mr. Bailey watched her. He said nothing, only took out a waterskin and offered it to her. Then he drank for himself and set off walking again.
It had been a long time since Cairndale burned. She knew this. The sun rising over the smoky rubble while she and the little ones and Alice rode away. The dead in their stone boats behind. She’d been struggling against her own darker impulses ever since, not liking who she was becoming, not knowing how to stop it. What she feared was Jacob, still, becoming like him, because there was a part of her too that would have bonded with the drughr to get those she loved back. She used to sit up in the night watching Teshi sleep, while their mother lay sick with fever on the tatami near the door, and she would hold her breath until it hurt telling herself no bad would come to the baby, she’d keep her sister safe, just like her mama would want. While the waterwheel creaked slowly outside and the stars turned and all the other poor huddled with them on the floor, snoring or groaning or rustling in their rags. And later how she’d cried and held Teshi in the heat of the theater, begging her, too, not to die, and how her sister had woken up pale and wrong in the morning, with three thin red lines at her throat and a part of her hungry for oblivion. Oh, she understood Jacob too well. It scared her.
In the early afternoon Mr. Bailey led her to a low rocky hill, with a stone escarpment facing east, and he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and stared hard across a valley. She didn’t know what he was seeking. His good eye scanned a slope of loose rock, watchful. She did so too. There was a boulder with starflowers on it, a bush the shape of Ribs’s head. Nothing else of interest.
Suddenly Mr. Bailey stood. He gestured bleakly.
Next to the boulder, where there’d been nothing before, Komako now saw the jagged dark entrance of a cave. It might have been there all along, she thought. Maybe the light had shifted.
“Is that it?” she muttered. “Is that what we’re looking for?”
“It has found us,” he said softly.
* * *
The cave was a narrow, twisting passage of dirt and loose stones, leading down into darkness. Komako took off her gloves for a light to see by but Mr. Bailey set his big hand on her shoulder, shook his head no.
So she descended with him into the dark, trailing a careful hand along the rough wall. The air turned damp. They did not go far before a light could be seen up ahead. Mr. Bailey’s breathing was loud and ragged.
The tunnel ended abruptly at an underground pool of water, about the size and shape of the old theater in Tokyo where she had lived as a child. There were shafts of sunlight filtering down from the rock ceiling above. Komako shivered. The water lay silver and flat and absolutely still and it filled the entire chamber, from wall to wall. To the left the water lay in darkness, where the ceiling sloped low. There were stalactites and pale mineral deposits in weblike formations overhead.
“You are disappointed,” Mr. Bailey whispered. His voice bounced off the cave, distorting. “You thought maybe the second orsine would be here?”
As soon as he said it, Komako realized it was true. It made no sense, but it was true. She’d hoped she’d reached the end of something.
She watched as Mr. Bailey removed his hat, his coat, his shoes. He rolled up his trouser legs to his knees and then he waded noiselessly out into the water.
After a moment, Komako did the same.
The splash of their steps echoed around the walls. The light fell in cathedral shafts. The water she walked through was cold, metallic, strangely viscous. But it stood only as deep as her ankles, and she was surprised to feel the bottom of the pool to be as smooth as glass.
Mr. Bailey kneeled in the waters, and trailed his fingers around him, and breathed.
Then suddenly she knew it: they were not alone. Komako felt a presence. Something was uncoiling from the rocky ceiling, dripping slowly, a gelatinous thing sagging out of the narrow darkness, dipping toward the still waters. Komako’s eyes couldn’t make sense of it. It was the size and shape of a human brain, with a single blue eye affixed in its slime, and it oozed slowly down out of the shadows toward the water.
Komako stared, fascinated. But even as it neared the surface the water itself lifted upward, and cradled the thing, and surrounded it, and there were tiny spectral worms, glass eels, thousands of them, all wriggling in the water as it rose. The water was gurgling, sputtering. And gradually it took on the form of a child, a child made entirely of writhing eel larvae, and its one eye was very blue and stared unblinking at Komako.
Mr. Bailey had not stirred.
A cavity of darkness formed in its face, as the eels parted, and out of it came the low, sweet voice of a woman.
Textor pulvis, the glyphic murmured. The words gave off no echo in the cavern, hanging heavily in the stillness and then simply ceasing. Iam nostis. Venisti ad me. Me roga et videberis.
Komako swallowed uneasily. “Mr. Bailey?” she whispered.
He was kneeling with his hands on his thighs and his ravaged face upraised. “It knows what you are,” he said softly. “It knows why you are here.”
“Right. Okay. That should make this easier.”
Lutetia Parisiorum, the glyphic murmured. Debes ire ad Lutetiam.
Komako’s glance flickered again over to Mr. Bailey. “What did she say?”
“It said you must go to Paris. That the orsine you seek is in Paris.”
“Paris,” Komako whispered, the echo of her words fading. “I already knew that. I have friends there even now, looking for it. Where in Paris?” She looked at the glyphic, rippling and glassy and slick in the shaft of sunlight, as if soaked by the light itself, as if the light itself were dripping. “Does she say where to look?”
The shafts of daylight shifted in the cavern. The pool dimmed. Slowly the glyphic glided nearer; the eels on its face, surrounding its one eye, wriggled sickeningly. Clausa est. Glyphic fuit illic semel. Eius cor clausit omnia. Petas Abbatissam.
“It says … the second orsine is closed,” Mr. Bailey translated. “The orsine lies dormant. A glyphic’s heart has … has already closed it. Sealed it. You will not be able to pass through. You must seek out the Abbess.”
“Wait. The second orsine is closed? Like at Cairndale?”
The glyphic’s blue eye did not blink.
Komako whirled on Mr. Bailey. “What good is it, then, if it’s sealed? Is there a way to reopen it?” She spun back to face the glyphic. “Who is this Abbess? Will she help us?”
“If it is who I think,” interjected Mr. Bailey softly, “then she will be little help. In Paris is a commune of powerful talents, women all. They live chastely. That is, they have sworn off use of their talents. Their leader and Dr. Berghast … corresponded for many years. They did not agree on many things. I did not know she controlled an orsine,” he added.
Komako gave a bitter smile. “Well, if she disagreed with Berghast, how bad can she be?”
“She murdered her orsine’s glyphic,” whispered Mr. Bailey. “She cut out its heart and sealed her orsine with it. Slaughtered any of her followers who objected, one must presume. She is ruthless, Miss Onoe. Can you not feel the pain in the waters here? The grief? It is an evil place, that commune.”
Komako remembered with a pang their own intentions back at Cairndale, on that terrible last night. How the alchemist woman Ficke had told them to do the same. That the only way to seal an orsine was with a glyphic’s heart. And how, as Jacob Marber and his litches strode through the dark fields, and the old talents gathered to meet them, Charlie had slipped away to find the Spider. She thought of the blood that would have been on their hands. Who was she to judge?
But the glyphic now was gliding toward her, out of the half-light. She felt the waters at her ankles tighten, as if to grip her fast. A heat was rising from the mass of wriggling eels. It was like standing before a fire. She saw the glyphic’s blue eye fix upon her.
The glyphic reached out a writhing limb. Touched Komako’s wrist. She braced for the slither of eels but instead a bubble of shimmering water encapsulated her hand and arm and grew, spreading slowly up, past her elbow, toward her shoulder. It felt exactly as if she’d plunged her arm into a moving river. The sleeve of her dress floated within it. She flexed her fingers slowly in wonder, and the water, pulling as if in a current, flexed with them.
The glove of water surrounded her chest and ribs and hips and down to her ankles, where it met itself, and then it rose up over her throat and mouth and nose and last of all her eyes. And yet Komako found she could breathe, somehow, even under the water, while her hair drifted like webbing slowly around her. The waters refracted the light, bent it, so that now the cave around her looked distorted and strange. The glyphic rippled in the light. Its blue eye was piercing.
You have a part to play in all that is to come, Komako Onoe, it said in its calm, melodic voice. You must resist what you are, to become what you will be.
Komako stared. All around her the waterlight danced. “You … you speak English? I can understand you—?”
The glyphic paid her no mind. The Bringer of Dust brings more than he knows, it continued. Only those touched by his dust can pass through the orsine. Jacob Marber was not the only conduit. There is a second. Fear the dust.
“Jacob?” Komako whispered. “What does he have to do with anything? What’s the Bringer of Dust?”
I dreamed this age long ago, Dust Weaver. That a child would be taken from the talent world and raised unknowing. A child unlike any other. A child who would wield the talents of the five as if they were one. Who would face down the First and bring about his ruin and the ruin of his kind. The Dark Talent is rising, Komako Onoe. Our time is nearing its end.
Komako lifted her arm. It felt so heavy. The water moved thickly around her.
“Please,” she begged. “I don’t understand. You mean the foretelling? What is … the First? And the dust? Is it Marlowe you dreamed of, is he the Dark Talent?”
The glyphic wavered in front of her, a writhing mass of eels. Its face when it turned its head looked to be melting. Komako felt a sudden fierce heat bloom in her skin, as the glyphic’s blue eye came very close to her own.
Not a foretelling, it murmured, and there was a hint of scorn in the word. I dreamed a possible future, long ago. It does not mean it will come to pass. I have dreamed others. The dream changes, for the future is not yet written.
“But Mr. Bailey believes—”
Oh, they are all so eager to believe. But not you.
And all at once Komako crushed her eyes shut, and asked the question she’d been afraid to ask.
“Is he even alive?” she whispered. “Is Marlowe alive?”
A long stillness followed. She could hear the ripple of waters. Mr. Bailey’s breathing. She opened her eyes, afraid.
And then, at last, the glyphic’s voice rang out, like a bell. He is not gone yet.
Komako gave out a low moan. He wasn’t dead. Marlowe wasn’t dead. She hadn’t realized how much hope she’d still had inside her, how desperately she’d wanted to believe. In the water her eyes were stinging with water.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The glyphic writhed and folded over itself and turned its eye away. You have brought me your offering. I accept. No other gratitude is necessary. You will depart now.
Suddenly the cocoon of water was collapsing all around Komako, crashing flatly into the pool. She heaved and gasped and sucked at the air. Put her hands on her knees, coughed and coughed.
Nunc dimittis, the glyphic whispered, releasing her from its spell.
She was still spluttering when the glyphic poured itself toward Mr. Bailey. He kneeled yet in the shallow waters, his burned face upraised, his gaze fixed on the glyphic. Komako felt a scaly coil flick past her ankle. There were things in the water, small biting things, very quick. She stumbled backward, uncertain, to the dry tunnel they’d climbed down through. Her mind felt slow, clouded. A fin broke the surface, like a little blade, and then a second, a third. In an instant they’d flickered away.
“Mr. Bailey!” she called, shivering. Her wet hair was in her face. “Get out of the water! There’s something in it—”
But he only looked at her, a calmness in his eye.
And all at once she understood. Understood what the glyphic had meant by “offering,” its “acceptance.” Why Mr. Bailey had spoken of the glyphic in horror. It had answered Komako’s questions, in exchange for a life. His.
“Wait! No!” she cried. “Mr. Bailey—!”
But there wasn’t time; the glyphic was leaning slowly in toward him. Already the tiny glass eels were dropping in clumps from the glyphic, dropping into the waters, then boiling up all around Mr. Bailey’s kneeling form. He didn’t move. She saw then a dark red cloud of blood fill the waters around him. He started to shudder, then convulse. His head was banging loosely around on his neck. His back was twisting, cracking. She stared in horror as a patch on his shirt bloomed red, then a second, and then all the blood was seeping together and there was blood running down his face and his throat. And that was when she saw the eels, the little glass eels, dozens of them, furrowing up out of Mr. Bailey’s skin, frothing and pink with his blood, then wriggling back under, eating their way through Dr. Berghast’s manservant, carving their way into his imperfect heart.
But the glyphic wasn’t done with her yet, either. All at once she felt something pierce her thoughts, an image, an image in motion. It was, she saw in horror, the dream itself, the vision the Spanish glyphic had discerned all those centuries ago. She saw a man with no eyes, blood pouring from his sockets, a man of great strength, imprisoned in a world of darkness and swirling dust; she saw a child, alone and suffering in darkness. His face was hidden. Yet somehow she sensed a resemblance between them, even across the centuries, a shared bloodline. And she saw what that child would become, how he shone with an eerie blue light, shone so brightly she could not see his face but only the skull and veins and muscles under the skin. And there were little ones, talent children, all fallen like rag dolls and lying dead in a ruined house. The mutilated man was on his knees, clawing at his own face. A drughr loomed near, with a clawlike hand outstretched, against a sky the color of blood. But the child ignored the drughr, and stood over the fallen man, merciless. And at last everything blurred, as in a fog, and Komako saw a face—the face of the Dark Talent, a face twisted by its own power—and, in the seconds before everything went dark, she threw her hands over her eyes in horror.
