Bringer of Dust, page 47
“Is Dr. Berghast really your brother?” Charlie asked quietly.
“Yes.” She paused, studied him with dark eyes. “Do you have a sibling, Charles?”
“I’ve got Marlowe,” he said, peering up at her. “He’s what I’ve got.”
They descended a rough-cut stair and turned left, passing through a chamber half-filled with water. Charlie soon lost all sense of direction. The Abbess led him into a narrow passage, one Charlie hadn’t noticed, and then they went deeper still. There were limestone sarcophagi along the walls, bones arranged on shelves above them.
“The quarries go on for miles,” the Abbess told him. “But these tunnels we are in now are cut off from the others. There can be no reaching the orsine, except from the gardens above. We are quite safe here.” She lifted the torch as she walked, to see his face more clearly. Her own eyes glittered with reflected fire. “Is it strange, how the corrupted dust has changed you?”
Charlie slowed. “You … you know about that?”
“I have been alive longer than half the countries of Europe, child. You are not the first talent to be infected with a drughr’s dust. Your gift will be different now, though. Does it feel like some other is within you? Like there is a hand upon your hand, guiding you?”
“Yes,” said Charlie.
“Mm. How awful it must be.” But the Abbess’s voice did not sound unhappy; it sounded pleased.
Charlie didn’t know if she knew about the dustworking, ineffectual and impractical as it was, or about the dreams that felt so real. He didn’t know if she had any suspicions like Komako had, if she knew anything about the foretellings of the Spanish glyphic. He made a careful fist; a hot prickling pain rose in the wrist. The corrupted dust under his skin was glowing a faint blue, and he tugged at the cuff of his sleeve to hide it.
At last the Abbess slowed. “We are here,” she said, in her deep voice.
The passage ended at a wall. A small iron door, as if built for a coal scuttle, or an ancient children’s prison, was fastened into the limestone. Standing beside it, with her red hood drawn low to obscure her features, was a small acolyte. Much smaller than any other he had seen thus far. She held a candle in a dish, its orange light pitifully weak.
Laboriously, from deep within her red robes, she withdrew a heavy iron key, and unlocked the door. It all felt sinister, and Charlie stopped some feet away. He gave the Abbess a quick perplexed glare.
“You’re not putting me in there,” he said firmly. “No.”
She turned. Her head was angled weirdly because of the ceiling and she smiled grimly down at him. “You are afraid, child?”
“Yes,” he said truthfully.
“And what,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper, “are you afraid of?”
He shivered, despite himself. A cold air was seeping from the open door. The blackness beyond was absolute. He became aware of the weight of rock above them. But he was a haelan, and somehow a wielder of dust, and he knew that there was little this woman could do to him, powerful as she might be. A locked room could not hold him. No injury could stay him.
But the Abbess just held the torch wide, her broad shoulders in their burlap blocking the darkness, and said, “Relax, Charles Owydd. I only wish to show you something, something for your eyes only. So that we understand each other.”
“Is it to do with the orsine? With how to unseal it?”
“It is to do with your father.”
Charlie froze. The shadows in her eye sockets and under her nostrils made her look monstrous, like a drughr pressing through a human face.
But she was just Adra Norn, a haelan who had lived too long, who had seen too much, and who was as hard and cruel and inhuman in her way as her brother Henry Berghast had been in his. He saw this suddenly, without quite knowing how, and he knew he must be careful with her. She turned, pushed the burning torch through the doorway, and disappeared inside.
Charlie, wary, followed.
The gallery was surprisingly wide. He could just make out the far wall of bones, in the firelight. The ceiling was higher here and domed and the Abbess could stand comfortably. She set the torch in a bracket away from the door. In the middle of the floor stood a stone well, a few feet high, not unlike the orsine. All around it stood a complicated pattern of bones. A heavy mound of ancient chains was stacked beside the well and a complicated iron brace with a winch and hook had been constructed over the water. Its surface, Charlie saw, was very black and still.
“I knew your father, Charles,” said the Abbess, her back turned. “We shared many beliefs.”
She crossed the chamber and plucked a skull from the wall. Lifted it reverently in two hands.
“No—” Charlie whispered, horrified.
The Abbess laughed. It sounded unhappy, strange. “Ah, no,” she said. “Your father is not here.” Her powerful hand tightened and the skull burst into a cloud of white dust. Bone fragments and teeth scattered on the floor like pebbles. “Tell me, do you have the artifact?”
Charlie reached a hand to the cord at his neck without thinking. Caught himself too late.
Her eyes glittered. “Good. What do you know about your father? Did Mr. Renby tell you he was a thief, a coward? An exile?”
Slowly, Charlie nodded.
“You must not believe it. Your father was no coward. He went down to the Falls deliberately, to gain Jack Renby’s trust, in order to locate and steal the very artifact you wear. Steal it back, I should say. It had been his by rights, all along. When he understood who he was, what he was, what other choice did he have? Meeting your mother, having you—that was his mistake. He would still be alive today, had he not tried to protect you both. To take you with him, when he went in search of the Grathyyl.” She paused, her eyes filled all at once with a dark concern. “Oh, child. Have you not yet figured out who your father was?”
Charlie ran his tongue along his sharp teeth, wary. He knew there was no answer he could give that would be correct. He thought of his mother, how she used to speak about him. How much she had loved him. Whatever this Abbess would say, he tried to hold on to that as the truth. He remembered Alice’s warning, to trust nothing the Abbess said. That she would twist the truth until it became a lie.
“Your father,” said the Abbess, taking a step toward him, “was descended from the same bloodline as Alastair Cairndale. As are you, of course. You and the First Talent are kin.”
“The First Talent—?” whispered Charlie. “But I’m not…”
“And do you know what made the First Talent preeminent? First, among all others?”
Charlie shook his head.
“All five talents manifested in him. He was the only talent ever to do so. But the gift was in his blood; it was believed that another like him would appear. Emergent of the drughr, the old writings claimed. A child of the First. And that this descendant would bring the fire that would burn all to dust.”
Charlie wet his lips. “But talents don’t run in the blood,” he said. “They’re not … passed down. Right?”
“Who told you that?”
“We learned it. At Cairndale.”
The Abbess sighed. “Oh, child. Talents are as varied as anything on this earth. There is no rule, one way or another. Merely probabilities. It is unlikely for talents to be blood. But it happens. My brother and I, for instance. Your father and yourself. Tell me, now. How many talents have manifested in you, Charles Owydd?”
“One,” he whispered.
“Mm. I think more than that.”
Charlie followed her gaze down to his fists and saw, to his horror, that a thin spiral of dust was orbiting his knuckles. The skin was on fire. He heard a scraping behind him: the acolyte in her red robe had entered the chamber, her little hands loose at her sides. It would have been a laughable attempt to restrain him, had he intended to fight. But Charlie wasn’t laughing.
“Your father was supposed to be the one,” the Abbess continued. She took another step, looming closer. “The one that had been foreseen. The one who was to bring about the destruction of all talentkind. I saw the five talents manifest in him with my very eyes. The glyphic at Cairndale had granted him a vision of what was to come. A vision of the artifact and its use, and of the First Talent in his cell, and of the Grathyyl where it all began, and will end. Your father did not want to be what he was, but he took the artifact from Mr. Renby, and went in search of the Grathyyl, because there was no other way. He believed he had found a back door, a hidden way in. He intended to destroy the world beyond the orsine, the prison that holds the First Talent captive. Hywel Owydd wanted to find the source of talentkind, and smother it.”
“But he didn’t make it,” whispered Charlie.
“No. He did not.”
“Because of us? My mama and me?”
The Abbess inclined her head. “He was weak, yes,” she said, “and he didn’t dare leave you in London, to be found by Mr. Renby’s exiles. But that is not the reason he failed. The truth is, we were … mistaken. Your father failed to reach the Grathyyl because he was not the one, after all.”
Charlie was shaking his head. Don’t listen to her, don’t! he told himself sharply. But he knew what was coming, even before she said it, knew it and felt a rightness in it that made him sick.
“You are the one, Charles Owydd. The one who will destroy our kind.”
“I won’t,” he protested. “I just came to save Mar. That’s all.”
“You will not mean to, no,” agreed the Abbess. Her eyes were terrible in the firelight. “But it will be so. You have brought the dust to the catacombs, as was foreseen. And you can do more than heal, also.” Her eyes flared at the emotion in his face. “Hush. I mean you no harm. I want to keep you safe. If you were to die, Charles, then some other would acquire the dust; the foretelling would change, and yet not change. Killing you would not stop anything.”
“Killing me—?” Charlie took a nervous step backward, toward the door.
“Of course, killing a haelan is nearly impossible,” continued the Abbess. “It rather makes you the perfect vessel for what is in you. The perfect … containment. You will live to a great age, with the drughr’s dust inside you.”
The acolyte behind him withdrew something from her robes. A long thin blade.
“Jesus—” Charlie hissed. “Tell her to put that away. Or I’ll hurt her. I mean it.”
“I ain’t a bleedin her,” whispered the acolyte. Pulling back the red hood to show a boy’s face, pinched and mean, with hair so fine and blond as to look white.
It was the murderous urchin from the Falls, the one who’d attacked him in the London fog, who’d cut him badly and stolen his father’s ring and left him for dead at the docks.
Whose sisters had died in the devastation.
“Alice will come looking for me,” Charlie said wildly, an unbridled fury rising in him all at once. But even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true; she’d never find him. “And not just her,” he spat. He turned his face from side to side, trying to keep both in his view. “We fought drughr, we stopped Jacob Marber and his litches. We stopped your brother. What are you? You’re nothing.”
But already the urchin was moving, swift as firelight, sliding alongside Charlie with his thin blade flashing and Charlie felt the tight hot seep of blood in his side where the knife passed. He stumbled, spinning around. And then the dust was at his fist, thickening, rising up out of his skin and being sucked up from the stone floor, a great dark webbing of it, and he unleashed it on the boy and the boy collapsed, choking, under its pall.
Suddenly the Abbess loomed up, one enormous hand enclosing his throat. Her grip was strong, impossibly strong. She lifted him onto his toes, crushing his windpipe slowly. Her eyes were flat, uninflected.
Charlie was scrabbling with his hands, trying to pry her grip loose. Her arms were too long and he couldn’t reach her throat, her face, her eyes. He fumbled for the dust and felt it spin ropelike from his knuckles, he felt it enclose her throat and begin to squeeze.
But some eerie change came over her then. Her throat shifted, thinned under the pressure, as if adjusting to the new envelope of its flesh; he realized, in horror, that it was the mortaling: she was a haelan of tremendous power.
His vision was blackening around the edges. He glimpsed, for only just a moment, her free arm snaking weirdly across the floor, dragging back the heavy chain. He kicked weakly out. The dust was thinning, he wasn’t strong enough.
That was when he felt the urchin’s fierce angry grip on his wrists, twisting his arms behind him, looping with incredible speed a rope into place and tying him fast.
The Abbess released him. He fell, coughing, to the floor, the bloodied wound in his side already healing. He was shaking his head, glaring up at them. They couldn’t hold him; surely she knew that? No chain could hold him.
Already the urchin was kneeling, looping the chain with cold precision around his body. Over his shoulders and around his legs and ankles, back up across his ribs, pinning his elbows fast, his wrists still tied behind him. Over and under and around. Again, again, until the chain was fastened.
And then the Abbess reached down and picked him up, chains and all, as if he were no more weight than a sack of dried apples, and she carried him to the edge of the well. The heavy hook that dangled there was attached to an open link of chain. And there Charlie balanced in horror, at the edge of the well, slowly beginning to realize what she intended. He looked all around. The chamber was dim, deep in the halls of the dead, and hidden from all living memory.
“You will not drown here, Charles Owydd,” she said softly. “Or rather, the drowning will not kill you. It cannot kill you. But the water will stop you from working the dust. And the drowning will stop you from trying to get free.”
Charlie was shaking his head. “Why are you doing this? You said you’d help us!”
“And I shall. I shall help all of our kind.”
The urchin lurked in the shadows, his filthy little face grinning. There was blood in his teeth.
And then the Abbess raised one enormous heavy foot, pressing it to his chest, and she tipped him over into the black water. He felt the shock of the cold close over him. The winch was loosed and it spun wildly as he plunged under. He sank swiftly, his panicked eyes watching the circle of firelight above grow fainter, like an eyelid closing. In the blackness he collided with the well’s bottom. His blood was pounding in the roar. After that there was only the furious pain of his lungs, bursting, filling with water, the muffled sound of his screams, their bubbles soon extinguished, and then the endless thrashing of his legs and arms as he died and healed, died and healed, died and healed again, returning to consciousness only long enough to drown all over again, for all time and for never in the awful endless circular agony of his flesh.
* * *
Marlowe opened his eyes in the gloom.
His heart was battering away at his ribs like a caged thing. He rolled onto his back to catch his breath and he saw Berghast, on his knees, gasping also. They were alive.
The drughr had not followed.
They’d not closed the door behind them and yet it stood closed now, the drughr somewhere on the far side. A massive door, black and imposing. The smooth wood was unmarred by any kind of pull or handle, Marlowe saw. Dr. Berghast had spoken the truth: it could not be opened.
He was sprawled on the floor of the great hall at Cairndale. Nearby, a reeking blanket lay in a tangle; beside it, a solitary child’s shoe. All around in the shadows the manor rose up around them, thick with silence, its walls bare, its sconces dark. His ears were still ringing from the screams of the carykk outside, but here no sound penetrated. Yet they were not alone; he could feel it, the presence of others, like a draft from an open window. He glanced anxiously at the cold hearth. Slowly, he understood.
“I couldn’t have got through, anyway,” he mumbled. He dialed his face upward, looking to Dr. Berghast. “If I’d tried to just go home, I mean. I looked. There was no island. Just the loch, with nothing in it. I couldn’t have got home, could I? And that drughr would have caught me. I had to come here.”
“Yes,” murmured Berghast. He did not seem surprised.
Marlowe scowled, all at once suspicious. “Did you know? Did you know the island wasn’t there? That the carykk wouldn’t let me pass?”
“Lower your voice,” Berghast replied sharply. He began to unwrap the rags and scarf at his head and face, until he stood bare. He withdrew the ancient knife from his belt. “The drughr will not follow us in here. But it does not mean we are alone.”
The artifact glove clicked as Berghast worked the fingers of it. His shoulders were long and narrow, his eyes lost in their hollows. In the half-light of that place he looked almost, thought Marlowe, like one of the carykk. He shivered.
“I suspected,” said Berghast softly, when he was ready. “But I did not know. Now, let us finish what we started.”
It was Cairndale and yet it was not Cairndale, Marlowe saw almost at once. That was maybe the worst thing. The gloom was thicker, darker. The ceilings seemed to bend away into the shadows. The carpet under his feet thrummed softly. How much it was like a part of his own memory, how close it was to the place he’d found his friends, his true family, and yet how much it was not that at all.
The house creaked and shifted. They made their slow way up the great curved staircase. The wallpaper was peeling, spotted with mold in places. The floor was soft with rot. At the edge of his vision, Marlowe kept glimpsing flickers of movement, but when he turned always there was nothing. Berghast continued to climb.
Now the light changed, the light that had been gray and exhausting for so long. It filtered in through the grand stained glass windows of Cairndale, the huge elaborate windows. Marlowe’s hands and face were stained green, then red. Berghast walked on, glowing with all the colors of that place.
And then they were at the upper landing, and the corridor stretched out ahead of them, narrow and peeling and dim. A patch of carpet had been rubbed raw, was curling back on itself. A small table, under a rusting sconce. There were doors on both sides, waterstained doors Marlowe did not recognize. He shuddered. Once again he had the unmistakable feeling that they were not alone.
