Bringer of Dust, page 5
Ruth was wrestling on her gloves. She drew her satchel crosswise over her cloak, the bottles there clinking. “A sailor drowned himself? In the middle of Scotland?”
The driver rubbed at his whiskers. He peered curiously at the satchel, as if wondering what sort of drink might be concealed there. “Aye. Rotten luck, that.”
“How did they know it was a sailor?” asked Jeta.
The driver blinked in surprise. “Why, on account of the tattoos, miss. Peculiar, they was. My cousin knows the lad what found him. Said he were awful shaken by it, such a tragedy. If you insist on going in, I’d advise the two of you to be careful. Stay well back from the loch, now. I could come with you, if you like. Carry your … bags, an such.” He nodded at the satchel.
“We do not require a porter,” said Ruth sharply, “nor a chaperone. Be sure to wait until we’re back. It wouldn’t do to be stranded here.”
Jeta crossed to the gates, peered through. Her breath stood out in the cold. The snowy fields beyond were smooth and unmarked, as if no one had ever set foot there, as if nothing had ever happened. She walked some few feet along the stone wall and cleared off the snow with her elbow and hoisted herself up. After a moment Ruth followed.
“How long do you and your daughter expect to be, ma’am?” the driver called. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
But the older woman didn’t bother to reply, and Jeta, who had dropped over the wall into the strange still air of the Cairndale estate, had already forgotten the question.
It was not a long walk. Jeta stopped at the edge of the courtyard, glanced back. Their crooked tracks led back across the white field, to the distant wall, to the carriage waiting beyond. Ruth came up alongside her. An eerie quiet rang out in the cold air.
“It’s a peculiar feeling, arriving at a ruins one once knew,” Ruth said softly.
Jeta drew her cloak in close.
In front of them, the ruined manor house loomed up out of the snow, a blackened shell standing against the white sky. The size of it, its deep age, impressed Jeta. A massive edifice of stone and dark promise. She imagined all the children who had come to this place, who had found refuge here, and felt an old bite of fury. The second level stood open to the weather in places, its walls blasted wide, the interiors lost in gloom. The whole of it, she saw, must have burned hot in its destruction, for the stones were scorched and the glass had melted from the frames. A wrongness hung in the air, even now, like smoke.
The hairs at the back of Jeta’s neck were prickling. She felt a sudden dark pull in her bones, painful, arthritic, such as she had not felt before. The pull was summoning her, drawing her toward the manor.
She looked sharply at Ruth. “You said the estate was abandoned.”
“It should be. Why? Do you feel someone?”
“Not someone.” Jeta frowned. “Something.”
“The dustworker’s bones?”
“No. Something … alive, I think.”
“An animal, perhaps.” Ruth reached into her petticoats, withdrew the knife she carried there, tested the blade against her gloved finger. “But let us not linger. We’ll begin at the orsine, if it is still there. Come.”
Reluctantly, still feeling the pull from the ruined house, Jeta turned and let herself be led down across the snow to the loch. The water was glassy and reflected the silver of the sky. The dock leaned crookedly, half-submerged now on one side, black water seeping through the boards when Jeta stepped out onto it. No boat was in sight. Jeta peered across at the island, the shell of the ancient monastery there. For a moment, in the distant shadows, it looked like a small figure was staring out at them.
Ruth came up beside her, the dock creaking. “Fires don’t cross lakes,” she said, nodding over at the burned island. “What happened here was no fire. There used to be a tree there. A wych elm. It grew right over the orsine. With gold leaves, even in winter.”
Jeta frowned. “Even in winter?”
“Some said it was the glyphic who fed it. Others said the glyphic fed on it.” Ruth adjusted the neck of her cloak in the chill, regarded Jeta with her pale eyes. A web of fine lines appeared as she squinted. “I was very young. But I used to stand here and look out at it and it seemed to me the glyphic and the tree were one and the same. I used to think it was singing to me.” She made a face. “I was a foolish girl. I should have hated this place. I should have hated its director.”
Vaguely, Jeta remembered a tall figure, severe, terrible. A silhouette who’d sent her to the workhouses. “To hell with him,” she muttered.
“Mm. I expect that is precisely where Henry Berghast is.”
She spat. “I’d have sent him there myself.”
“You’d have tried, perhaps,” said Ruth quietly, as if she’d feared him in life. “He didn’t live as long as he did by being weak. You are not the only one he refused. But Claker Jack raised a glass when he learned of his death; did you know that? He raised a glass, as he does for all those whose lives are cut short by talentkind.”
The last word came out with disgust.
Jeta tried to imagine it. Claker Jack had always taken care of her, watched out for her, loved her, even, maybe, despite her talent. But there was a hardened core inside him, a core of hatred for Cairndale. She looked out at the island. She saw now how half the surface had been pried back, like the lid of a tin can. A ruined nest of pale roots from the great wych elm stuck sideways out, like the thin arms of the dead.
But she felt nothing in her bones, no ache, no dark pull at all from the monastery. There could be no mistaking it: if the glyphic had truly existed, it was long since obliterated. The island was dead.
* * *
They had come for the corrupted dust.
They’d departed King’s Cross Station in a roar of steam in the early darkness and were already nearing Peterborough when the red sun cracked the winter darkness. From Edinburgh they’d made the long wearying journey out to Cairndale. Jeta was to be Ruth’s bloodhound. She was to sniff out the bones of a dead talent, a dustworker who’d perished in the blaze: a killer of children, servant of the drughr, a man named Jacob Marber. If his body was not at Cairndale, they would scour the cemeteries and streets of Edinburgh next. For the body must be somewhere; and its dust was still powerful.
And Claker Jack wanted it.
All this Jeta knew because Claker had chosen to tell it. She wasn’t so foolish as to imagine there weren’t things he chose not to tell. Why both of them were needed for such a task, for instance. Or how the drughr could be a real thing, and not just the stuff of nightmares. Rumors had reached London quickly about the burning of Cairndale, the dying of its glyphic, the collapse of its orsine. Even Jeta, who kept to the shadows, a shred of darkness against a greater darkness, had heard within days about the institute’s fate and the death of its feared director, Henry Berghast. She’d felt a sharp twinge of pleasure, hearing it. Had walked into the first chocolatier she saw and ordered a box of caramels, ignoring the looks of the other patrons. She was surprised, then, when Claker Jack arranged to see her in person months later, on account of Cairndale.
They met at a slaughter yard and walked between the hanging carcasses, still bleeding out. Ruth waited in a doorway. He’d aged, since last she saw him. Or maybe she had. Regardless, he looked different, frailer—that was the thing she sensed—and there was a nervous flicker in his eyes, as if he didn’t quite trust her. She didn’t like seeing that. She wanted to tell him how grateful she was, how much she owed to him. How he was a kind of father to her. Wasn’t he the one who’d saved her, who’d plucked her out of that terrible Ladies’ Aid Society, who’d known about her talent and taken her in, anyway? Didn’t he tell her she could be more than just her talent? Why would he look at her like that now?
His gray face was grave, his eyes fierce. She was to find Jacob Marber’s body. From the corpse Ruth would remove the corrupted dust, and isolate it, and preserve it; Jeta would erase all evidence of his passing. In Edinburgh they were to learn what they could of the fate of Cairndale. What had happened to Henry Berghast’s experiments? What had happened to the old talents? Had they truly all perished? Oh, it was most curious, Claker Jack told her softly, threading his hands between the hanging chains, and parting them like a curtain. Most curious indeed.
“I knew Henry Berghast, of course,” he whispered, moving closer. “Oh, not as a boy. But long after I was sent down from Cairndale. We corresponded for many years. I watched him change. I did not much agree with him. But when we cease to listen to the world, we cease to understand it. Berghast was a brilliant mind, I grant you. But one with a terrible vision of what might come.”
The lowing of cattle in the pens outside drifted through. Their boots left bloodied prints across the concrete floor.
* * *
Jeta and Ruth turned now from the lake, their skirts sweeping the snow. The white sky was darkening with weather. Far up the slope the black manor house crouched, patient as a spider.
Jeta wouldn’t grieve for Cairndale, what it had been. Not for the glyphic who had located her in his dreams, far off in the eastern forests north of Mostar, not for the orsine that had given him the strength to do so. Not for the man Coulton who’d brought her to London, riding at first on a train out of Vienna, the hordes of human bones making her faint, and then later, more slowly, through the empty countrysides when Coulton saw how her talent pained her. Because in the end he’d left her, too. Nor would she grieve for the terrible Harrogate woman in her black veil, who’d held her in that basement room, testing her, probing her with questions. Nor for all those children who’d lived here, happy, a kind of family, all of them cared for and beloved, in exactly the ways she’d never been. No. And she’d never—never—grieve for that monster Berghast, who’d traveled to London to see her, who’d stood over her in the crooked lantern light one night, terrifying, disapproving, and shaken his head in refusal.
She is not for us, he’d said.
He hadn’t wanted her; Cairndale hadn’t wanted her.
And the next morning Coulton had left her on the doorstep of the Orphan Working Home in Stepney with a donation of two guineas for her keep and a folding box with a single change of new clothes. She used to crush her eyes shut at night while the other children slept around her, the pull of their bones making her dizzy and sick. This was her tabor now, these gadji. The whole world was unclean. She’d imagine the grand hall of Cairndale as Coulton had described it to her, the laughter of children like her, bone witches, talents, all running through its corridors, gathering together for hot meals. And, just eight years old, understanding English badly still, she’d cry herself to sleep. She hadn’t lasted long in Stepney; they’d been only too glad to give her bed over to a new orphan; and she’d lived rough after that, drifting among the guttersnipes in the rookeries around St Giles High Street, stealing and fighting for scraps, clutching her skull for the pain of all those bodies and their thousands of little bones, wrapping her bone fingers in rags like a leper to hide what she was really. Until one day, when a tall, dirty man in mismatched clothes appeared. He’d kneeled next to her, taken off his silk hat, whispered that he knew what she was. And reached down and touched her wrapped fingers gently.
That was her first meeting with Claker Jack.
He took her from that place, from that life, whispering all the while of the wickedness and evil that Berghast and Cairndale had done to her, whispering that he too had been abandoned by them once, many had, that he and Jeta were not so different, her talent notwithstanding. They could almost be a kind of family. In a shabby carriage waiting at the curb she met Miss Ruth, who looked her up and down as if assessing a cut of meat, and then turned her face away.
“We will feed you and care for you, child,” Claker Jack told her, rapping the partition for the driver to start. “And in time, you will find a way to repay us.”
London had been a brown sooty horror, unimaginable to a little Roma girl growing up in the eastern forests of the Balkans. It was Cairndale’s doing—Berghast’s doing—that had plunged her into it, then left her to die. They’d all seen what she was, and reviled her for it.
All except this strange, dirty man.
“But you must trust no one,” he added, “no one but me. What is the matter? Is it the bones all around us? Ah, but I have a medicine that can help with your sickness. You would like that, yes? Come now, steady yourself. You will be my secret, and I will be yours.”
She felt the sway of his bones, plucking at her, the metacarpals of the woman Ruth picking at her skirt, the scaphoids and lunates in the wrists of the driver up front.
“You won’t … hurt me?” Jeta had said, in a small voice.
“Oh, child,” said Claker Jack. “I will keep you safe, forever and for always.”
And he’d reached across slowly, as if toward a skittish animal, and drawn her close. The feel of another human touch, even through his overcoat and gloves, his arm heavy at her shoulders, had made her begin, quite suddenly and helplessly, to cry.
Jeta was thinking of that first meeting, the sway of the carriage, the pipe smoke in Claker Jack’s wool coat, and how long ago it seemed. Ruth had led her across to the snowy courtyard, the shattered front entrance of Cairndale Manor, and now she stopped.
“Well?” said the older woman. “Is the dustworker buried here, or not?”
But Jeta wasn’t sure. She went in. The roof had collapsed. She raised her eyes to a white sky, dazzlingly bright. Charred beams stood out in silhouette. A great staircase was white with untouched snow and where the snow had not reached it was black from the firestorm. The railings were gone, half the steps had fallen through. And yet despite all this Jeta felt herself dreaming, saw in flashes moments she had long imagined. Running through the foyer hand in hand with another girl, laughing, late for breakfast. Counting the steps of the stairs as she went up, in a girlhood game. Staring in wonder at the great stained glass window as the sun rose beyond it. She turned. An entire wall had been blown out and the famous stained glass was gone and there was now no trace of the beauty that had been.
Then she felt it. A pull, almost like a current of cold water, tugging at her hair, at her clothes. “Ruth,” she whispered sharply.
And pointed at the ceiling.
She picked up her skirts, her gloved fingers brushing the loose balustrade, and started upstairs. Halfway up, she had to turn sideways and jump to get past. Ruth, unsteady, her bottles of potions and tinctures clinking in her satchel, followed.
The upper floor lay in darkness, broken by shafts of sharp light falling aslant the scorched walls. They made their way slowly along the wide corridor, passing burned-out rooms, broken bedframes, shreds of curtains. The dark pull that drew her onward was unlike anything she’d felt before. Impossibly strong. The pain bloomed in her marrow, an ache that made her rub her wrists and wince and step gingerly.
It led her to a room at the end of the hall. She stepped through the clinking rubble on the floor and found herself blinking in the sudden daylight. The back half of the room had fallen away, and she could see where the snowy fields descended to the slate-gray loch. There on a pile of rubble sat something she didn’t immediately understand, or recognize.
Until it turned its head, and she saw.
It was a bird, made entirely of bones. Bones, and ragged feathers. Its furcula and sternum fused together and held compressed under a breastplate. The eyeless sockets stared at nothing. The bird, the creature, whatever it was, clicked its reedlike carpals and digits in a shivering movement and then fell still.
As if in a kind of trance, Jeta stepped forward, very gently, so as not to startle the thing, and removed the glove on her left hand, and reached out her own two bone fingers. The creature hesitated only a moment, and then hopped stiffly down and onto her fingers, and was still.
“My God,” whispered Ruth, from the doorway. “It’s a bonebird.”
Jeta raised her other hand and traced her fingers over its delicate architecture. How beautiful it was. “A bonebird,” she murmured in wonder. She’d never imagined such a thing. She could sense the exquisite artistry that had built it, the webbing of knots and invisible strings, bones fused to bones. Its caudal vertebrae shivered. Somehow she understood it was the work of a powerful bone witch, far more powerful than she.
“It feels … old,” she said.
Ruth grimaced. “They were all thought destroyed. There were nineteen of them, once,” she said. “Or so I have read. Created by a bone witch nearly a hundred years ago. She’s long dead, and yet this remains.” Ruth shook her aged head, her eyes pale and creepy. “Extraordinary that Dr. Berghast kept it, all this time. It is said they were messengers, from our world to the other. What messages they could take to the world of the dead, to what end, for whom … no one ever wrote that down. That is the problem with histories. We have only what the once-living chose to preserve. And who is to say how much has been lost?”
A scroll of paper was tied with twine to one leg. Jeta removed it, studied it. It was a warning for Henry Berghast from before the fire. It mentioned Jacob Marber and a litch and something about the glyphic’s dying. She passed it across to Ruth, who read it and looked up.
“It’s from London. From months ago. It didn’t arrive in time, it seems.” Ruth regarded the creature on Jeta’s fingers. “This … thing has been here since the fire. Just waiting.”
“London,” Jeta said slowly. “It must have come from Nickel Street West. From Harrogate.”
“Most likely. God only knows what Margaret was up to. A despicable, interfering woman, she was.” Ruth folded the paper and slipped it inside her glove. “Was it this you sensed earlier, downstairs?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s hard with … the medicine.”
“I expect it was. Evil calls to evil, yes? Well, a bonebird won’t lead us any nearer the dustworker’s body. Give it to me.” Ruth held out her two hands.
