Bringer of Dust, page 20
Ruth, damn her. Jeta was glad to be rid of her. She regretted nothing, even as she felt exposed, walking unaccompanied in daylight, no Ruth at her side. It felt … good to be alone. She’d slept on the train in the third-class carriage and when she awoke even the shining blue figure of the ghost boy was gone.
Now, alone in the city in almost as long as she could remember, she knew exactly where she had to go.
She hired a hansom and sat back and pinched her eyes shut. She could feel the millions of bodies adrift in the streets as she passed. The smells of the city, its smoky air, the reek of effluent and hot-pies in the street-ovens and horses.
At 23 Nickel Street West, she got down, paid with coin from Ruth’s purse. The terraced house loomed above her, dark and forbidding. The curtains were drawn in every window but one.
She knocked.
After a moment she took off her scarlet glove and rested her palm flat against the door, and closed her eyes. She could feel something within, something powerful and strange, not unlike the pull she’d felt back at the ruins of Cairndale. Of the Ficke woman, or Charlie, she sensed nothing.
She picked up her skirts and swept back down the steps and made her way along the little iron railing at the front, to the rusting gates that led below. They stood locked. There were respectable people in the street, passing her, trying not to look too closely. She furrowed her brow and went back up to the door and withdrew the little locksmithing tools from a hidden pocket at her waist.
She was inside in a moment.
Twenty-three Nickel Street West was dark, and silent, and cold. She stood in the entrance hall, listening. Something pulled at her, drew her in, but she resisted. She had been here once, nearly six years ago. Mrs. Harrogate, with a veil at her face. Dr. Berghast in the night, dressed in a suit as if he’d only just arrived, holding a candle over her bed. Shaking his head in disapproval. And then in the morning, waiting in the hall upon a small trunk, the sound of the clock on the landing. And that man Coulton, escorting her gruffly to the orphans’ home.
Damn them all.
She glared at the furnishings, the ferns dead in their pots, the heavy coat pegs standing empty. When she turned she saw the Cairndale crest above the door, its crossed hammers. She turned angrily away.
It was clear to her that someone had been here, only just recently. They had not stayed long. There were footprints in the dust of the parlor rug, and marks as if something had been dragged or wheeled there. Blankets and sheets were piled messily on the sofas.
She went to the large window overlooking the street and drew back the curtains just slightly and tried to decide if she ought to wait. The Ficke woman and Charlie Ovid might yet return.
She began to make her slow way through the rooms, feeling always that dark pull in her wristbones, in her hipbones, a tugging that led her up the stairs. It was coming from somewhere near the top of the house, she understood. But she was cautious and stopped at each floor and went from room to room. A stained glass window illuminated the first floor landing. A huge, ancient clock stood at the second floor landing, its hands stopped. The bedchambers were all empty, tidy for the most part, but the air was cold and musty as if it hadn’t been disturbed in months, and there was an old razor and strop in one of the rooms, a bed with ropes at its posts in another.
At last she reached the top of the house, and went up a rickety staircase, and stood in the attic, letting her eyes adjust. After the dimness of the house, the brightness of the attic was startling. French doors, paned with glass, filled the back wall. Dusty chests, shelves of jars and tin cans. And then she heard the eerie clicking sounds, in cages silhouetted against the brightness, and saw them.
Bonebirds.
Two of them, in a cote near an ancient writing console. She crossed the space quickly, and kneeled down, and stared in at them. They were so beautiful. Delicate, filigreed things, their bones like lace. That strange iron brace at their chests and wrapping over their skulls, as if to hold them together. The little hook on one leg, for the messages. She thought of the poor creature crushed underfoot, in that hotel room in Edinburgh, Ruth’s cruel joy at the destruction. She thought of Ruth.
You’re too late, said a small voice. It’s gone. They’re gone.
She turned smoothly. The ghost boy stood in the attic shadow, watching her. His blue hair wavered and drifted, shining. His eyes were darker than usual, just black holes in the gloom.
“You mean … Charlie,” she said. “Charlie’s gone.” That dreamlike fog was descending over her again. Something about the apparition didn’t seem right.
Charlie. Yes.
She gave her head a slow shake. The bonebirds clicked softly. “Then I won’t be able to find them,” she said, feeling a fierce disappointment rise in her. “London’s too big. It’s not possible. How did they get away? I’m here, I came as fast as I could—!”
The little apparition guttered, as if in a wind.
She looked up, suddenly hopeful. “Couldn’t you sense the dust? Like at the cathedral?”
In Edinburgh I’d just … tasted it. It’s gone now.
Jeta remembered the mortuary, the ghost child crouched like a spider over the dustworker’s corpse, mouth gaping, teeth blackened as if he’d been drinking ink. She shivered.
The little apparition seemed to sense her despair. You can still find it, Jeta, I know you can. You’re powerful, more powerful than you think. I see it. Your talent can find the dust, it can, and together we can—
But she crushed her eyes shut, scarcely listening, and turned away. There was nothing to be done; she’d lost the corrupted dust; she’d failed. Her heart hurt. There was no way forward, she saw.
“I have to go to the Falls,” she said quietly. “I have to talk to Claker. He … he told me never to go there. But I have to.”
She felt the ghost child drift nearer. His voice, soft, came from very close. He’ll be mad. You should find the dust first. There are still ways—
“No.” She swallowed a knot in her throat, looked down at the apparition. Looked through him. “Claker’s always looked out for me, even when Ruth was against me. He’ll understand. I’ll just explain what happened. He’ll tell me what to do next.”
But she was afraid all the same, afraid that he wouldn’t, afraid that he’d look at her differently. Tell her he didn’t need her.
And Ruth? What will you tell him about her? whispered the boy. Going there won’t help us find the dust. It’s a bad idea.
Jeta felt sick. She glared at the apparition, feeling a faint doubt seep in, staining the pity. What did he really want? Through the grimy French doors, the city roofs disappeared in the fog. She unlatched them, stood them wide. The air was cold and tasted of soot. She could just make out the sluggish expanse of the Thames beyond; then all was haze. Somewhere out there was the alley where the urchins lived, the ones Claker Jack used for errands. At her elbow she could feel the little clockwork skeletons of the bonebirds, their eyeless skulls swiveling, tracking her. She remembered the tiny bones on the carpet in Edinburgh, crunching. The horror of it. She unlatched the peg of the cote, stood the door wide.
The first creature exploded outward. It took to the sky, its strange wings snapping and creaking. She watched it vanish crookedly into the smoke above the rooftops.
But the second bonebird did not go.
Her thoughts were still murky. She poked at the bars. “Go on,” she muttered.
Carefully she lifted it out and held it high in the open wall of the attic and when it did not fly she threw it bodily from her. It snapped into flight and circled twice and flew away.
They would’ve been safer here, whispered the ghost.
Jeta frowned. “Nothing belongs in a cage.”
Some things do, he replied.
* * *
She left the terrace house alone, and turned east, seeking the poorer parts of the city. The air was cold. If the apparition was near, he did not show himself. She walked swiftly, her braids swaying against her back, her cloak billowing out around her. The streets were filled with all manner of people, hawkers, shoppers, clerks, ladies in their finery, wainwrights, cabmen. All of them jostling and calling out and muscling their way past. At each dank lane she would pause and turn in and seek the sort of indigent she needed. At last she found an urchin squatting in a doorway, watching a vegetable seller with hungry eyes.
She took him by the scruff of his neck, spun him around. He couldn’t have been older than five. His shirt was ragged, his trousers ripped at the knees. He was barefoot. He swung on the end of her arm, glaring.
She held out a penny in the flat of her scarlet glove. “I’ve got a second one for you, if you can get me where I need to go.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “Where’s that, then?”
“The Falls.” She released him. “Do you know it?”
When he glanced up and down the alley, there was fear etched in his face. “You isn’t working for the beaks or nothing?”
Nuffink, it sounded like. She gave him a hard shake but didn’t bother to reply.
His eyes suddenly looked older, cagier. “Double it an I’ll go far as Cooper’s Runs,” he said. “It’s easy to find from there.”
She leaned down so that her eyes were level with his. She said nothing for several heartbeats. She could feel the pull of his little bones. “See that you lead me directly,” she said softly, “and I’ll pay you in full. But lie to me, and I’ll break your legs and dump you in the Thames.”
The urchin gave her a grin. “Just try to keep up, miss.”
She hitched up her multicolored skirts and followed the urchin down a crooked lane, into a crumbling court, along a passageway, into a second alley. They passed the huddled poor on the doorsteps, wizened indigents picking through bundles of rags.
As they went, Jeta felt a painful tugging at her bones. She raised her face and saw, high up between the mews, what looked like the silhouette of a bonebird, following her; but then the urchin ducked under an arch and down a passageway of dripping stairs, and whatever was up there in the sky was gone.
16
THE PRIZEFIGHTER’S PRAYER
The hands were small and grubby with bitten nails, grime in the seams of their palms. They curled beseechingly up toward Charlie from out of the street’s crowds, little claws of hunger, tugging at his clothes, pawing at him.
But he had nothing to give. Their wagon was nearly at Miller’s Wharf. He could see through curtains of mist the tall iron gates of the west entrance to St Katharine Docks, looming over the crush of the crowd. Unhired laborers and sailors on leave and night stevedores were flowing past, a sudden crowd, spooking the horses in their traces. In the back of the showman’s wagon were the glyph-twisted children, silent, still. Charlie kept a tired ear trained for any sound from them, but there was none; they seemed calm. Even Deirdre. Soon they’d be on board a ship, and setting out for safer shores.
Gradually he became aware that the little hands were still there.
That was when, to his astonishment, he felt one take hold of his loose sleeve, another reach around his knee, a third his elbow. One wore, incongruously, heavy iron knuckles. All at once they started pulling—pulling with an unexpected strength—and he buckled sideways off his perch, like a wet sack of grain, his weight somehow working against him. Men in the crowd swore as he fell, shoving at him. His head cracked the cobblestones.
“Charlie?” cried Mrs. Ficke from above. “Charlie!”
He was too surprised to speak. He shook his head, dazed, not sure what had just happened. His infected hand exploded in a constellation of pain. There were so many people. He saw his bowler crushed under a boot and he started to reach for it when it was kicked to one side, then kicked away again.
But already the crowds were making a space around him, as if an eddy were opening in the current of a river. In all that movement there was one point of stillness; and he lifted his eyes, and looked, and he saw the beggar kid.
The kid was thin and dirty with hair as white as dead grass. He wore a battered satchel over one shoulder. He couldn’t have been much more than twelve years of age but he stared at Charlie with terrible eyes, trembling with intent. Charlie knew that look, had seen it in kids and men alike in the American South, white folk, black folk who’d hit the breaking point and then been pushed past. It was a look of raw fury. Then he saw, low at the boy’s side, the glint of iron knuckles. The other hand held a long knife. He knew who the boy must be: an associate of the bone witch, an underling for the infamous Claker Jack.
Charlie got to his feet, unafraid. “What’re you doing?” he called across, feeling his own anger rise. “I don’t want trouble. Put that down, you don’t want to be doing this.”
The boy took a lazy step forward, catlike, saying nothing.
Charlie didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t a damned fool; he’d learned his lesson at the cathedral in Edinburgh. He reached into his greatcoat and withdrew Alice’s Colt Peacemaker and he cocked the hammer.
Now the crowds took notice. Men stopped and others took unsteady steps backward and one shouted something at him.
He was aware of Mrs. Ficke, leaning over the driver’s bench, the reins looped in her hand. She started to get down but stopped when she saw the boy with the knife. “Charlie?” she said uncertainly.
“Keep going!” he called back. “Try to get the wagon through. I’ll catch up.” Because of his infected hand, his greatcoat hung at a strange angle. He turned square to the beggar kid, the revolver steady. He thought of the bone witch in Edinburgh and looked at the kid and knew he, too, would be dangerous. Never mind how small and grubby he seemed. “We’re leaving the city,” he called across. “You can tell your Claker Jack that. His bone witch failed. You’ll fail too. Don’t do this.”
The boy began circling over the uneven cobblestones, unconcerned.
“You don’t look so dangerous, like,” the urchin called. “But I reckon you got to be, comin back into Claker’s city an all. You got the ring, Mr. Owydd? It’s only just the ring old Claker wants. Give it over.”
Charlie paused, confused. Had the boy called him Owydd?
“The ring, lad,” the urchin called again. “At your throat.”
But Charlie was shaking his head, the gun already lowering. It couldn’t be. “Wait. What you called me, Owydd. Is it Hywel Owydd you mean?”
The urchin’s narrow eyes were bloodshot and unreadable. He took a soft step forward.
But before Charlie could ask more, could ask what he knew about Hywel Owydd, Charlie’s father, who had fled Cairndale as an exile in his youth, and washed up here in this awful city, a father Charlie had never known—he caught a movement from the corner of his eye, a flickering in and out of the thin brown fog.
A second urchin, a little girl.
Charlie scarcely dared risk breaking his eyeline with the kid. But he glimpsed her pale head, narrow shoulders. He lost sight of her and when he saw her again she was on the back of the wagon, clambering lightly up, impossibly fast, then running across the roof and dropping down onto the driver’s bench beside Mrs. Ficke.
“Mrs. Ficke—!” he shouted, too late.
The urchin landed lightly beside her and in the same instant reached around, as if to embrace her, skinny arms snaking around the older woman’s waist. And then—all of it was so fast!—the ragged child just leaned backward, still grasping Mrs. Ficke tightly, and both pitched sideways, over the far side, into the crowds and lost to view.
* * *
Caroline Ficke rolled painfully off the child, her surprise absolute. She’d bitten her tongue and blood was in her mouth. Out of the crowd, an old man in a heavy wool coat stooped to help her up. His white beard was yellowed around the mouth where years of tobacco had stained it.
When he saw the urchin sprawled under her he paused, adjusted his cap in disapproval.
“Taint all rait nowt, is it, missus?” he said. His eyes went to her artificial arm.
She was shaking. A sharp pain radiated through her hips, but nothing was broken, thank the lord. She knew Charlie with the corrupted dust at work inside him would be all right. But she feared what would happen if the children in the back of the showman’s wagon were exposed, and so she didn’t have time to deal with the old man, chivalrous or no.
“Tis nothing,” she said coldly. “Off with you.”
The little girl who’d attacked her scrambled up. She was a pitiful creature. Ten years old, perhaps. Unkempt and stinking with a face streaked with soot, grime all down the front of her ill-fitting clothes. But she wasn’t a talent; that much Caroline felt sure of. Could she be a servant of Claker Jack’s? An exile?
“There are other ways, child, we might do this,” she said calmly. “Speak your business with me. I’d not wish to hurt you.”
Slowly the urchin wiped her hands on her legs. For just a moment Caroline could see the child within—blinking, confused, small and vulnerable and alone in all the world.
But then she heard Charlie hollering from the far side of the wagon, and the horses shied skittishly, and the girl’s eyes hardened.
Caroline untangled her cloak. She pressed a catch on her artificial arm and twisted it counterclockwise and then she turned a small wheel at the elbow. Silently the blade at the end extended, until it was nearly two feet in length. Its serrated edge glinted in the murky day.
“Ach, you poor creature,” she murmured. “The world never gave you a choice, did it?”
The girl crouched.
Caroline raised her blade.
* * *
At that same moment, Charlie was wiping the sweat from his eyes.
