Bringer of Dust, page 52
“Ah, a haelan,” murmured the First Talent. “Of course. Alas, your talent will not help you overly much, here. Talents do not work well inside this … abode of mine. Which is why I must thank you for the gifts of sight and speech. I have been without, for too long. But you are not only a haelan, yes? There is something else I taste…” Alastair Cairndale withdrew his fingertips from Berghast’s flesh. His eyes widened. “Oh, you have been busy. A drughr? You have drained one of my drughr? Fascinating. I imagine there is a story, there…”
He wiped his fingers, gently, in the rags of Berghast’s chest. Then he made a tsking sound. On the other side of the window, the blind drughr stood very still and dark in the fog.
“You thought to kill me while I slept,” he said softly. “What did you wish to do? Did you wish to protect the talent world? You wished to slay the terrible monster, and protect the little children? Is that it?”
Berghast made a gurgling noise.
“Please!” Marlowe shouted at last. “Please! Leave him alone!”
The First Talent paid him no mind. “Did you not realize that if you kill me, you destroy them too? All of your precious talents? Why do you think I was put in this prison, rather than executed, all those years ago? Do you imagine it was mercy? Do you imagine any of those who sat in judgment on me wished to spare me?”
Marlowe’s hands were balled up into fists. But he didn’t dare go any closer.
“And if they—your betters—did not dare to kill me, what arrogance could have brought you here, into my house, to commit such a deed?”
Berghast was groaning, trying to protest.
Alastair Cairndale reached out one bony finger, lifted Berghast’s bloodied chin. “What is that? What are you saying?” He brought his ear close to Berghast’s lips. “A lie? No, I assure you, it is quite true. You would have done well to have listened to the old stories. They were not lies. I am the Dreaming. I am what connects all talents. Had you destroyed me, you would have severed all talents from their source. Talentkind would be no more.”
Berghast groaned.
“Isn’t it wonderful, that you failed? Aren’t you grateful?”
Now Alastair Cairndale looked across at Marlowe, his eyes the haunted eyes of Henry Berghast. He stood smoothly. “My life is, quite simply, of greater importance. To feed it, to help it heal … why, that is a kindness to all those you might love. You, little one. You are here because you fear for those you love, are you not?”
Marlowe was shaking.
“Do you love this man? Is it love that has brought you here? Is he your father? A mentor? A friend?”
Marlowe took a shivery step backward, up the stair. Then a second. He knew he shouldn’t run, shouldn’t leave Dr. Berghast, that he needed help, but he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t.
The older man crossed to a small pier table with a blackened aspidistra. He ran his fingers over it. “Not love, then. Something else. Fear?”
That was when Marlowe started to shine. The blue shining came up out of him, between the wrappings and the rags on his arms and his hands. The First Talent went still.
“What is this? What are you? A part of the Dreaming, and yet not a talent…” He curled a long finger. “Come closer. I wish to see you.”
“No,” whispered Marlowe.
A flicker of anger appeared on the First Talent’s face. “You resist. How is that possible?”
That was when Marlowe turned, and ran. He burst through the door and found himself in a strange hall, and he ran to the nearest door and threw it open. It was an old parlor, the wood dark and splitting, and seated calmly in a wingbacked chair by the fire was Alastair Cairndale.
“Child. Why do you run?” he asked.
Marlowe ran back out. He looked over his shoulder but the First Talent made no move to pursue him. And yet when he ran through the next door he found himself in a dining room. Alastair Cairndale stood behind the farthest chair, facing him, his face composed.
“Child,” he said again. “There is no running from me here. Come, do not—”
Marlowe ran back out. He ran the length of the dim hall, his footfalls muffled on the thick carpet, and rounded a corner and found himself in a long gloomy library. A fire was burning in a grate along one wall. Shelves of leather tomes loomed up into the darkness. Marlowe, breathing hard, ducked around behind a shelf, drew his knees up to his chest. Make yourself small, make yourself safe. He stuffed a fist in his mouth to quiet his breathing.
Moments later he heard slow footsteps.
“This is becoming tiresome,” said Alastair Cairndale, an edge in his voice. “Do come out. You are not hidden, child.”
Marlowe waited. The silence seemed to stretch out around him. He felt so little, so helpless. His heart was hammering with fear. But after a moment he got to his feet, his eyes wet, and he stepped out.
Alastair Cairndale stood in the shadows, staring directly at him.
“Better,” he said softly. “Now. What is your name, child?”
“Marlowe,” he whispered.
“Tell me, Marlowe. Why does the dust answer you? Why does the orsine shape itself to you? I can see how you are moving these rooms around, hoping to deceive me…”
He came forward in his bloodstained gown, his long white beard discolored, his fingers oddly thick and red. Marlowe could see the waxen look of his skin now, this close, could hear the faint sticky give of the wound at his throat.
The horrible man’s words reminded him of what Dr. Berghast had said, how this house would listen to him, how it wanted to, and he crushed his fists tight and he thought of the woman in white, the woman they had seen in those strange dreamlike loops upstairs. And suddenly she was there, at the far bookshelf, removing a green leather volume and leafing through the pages, and Alastair Cairndale froze.
“Callista?” he murmured. “No. You are not here. It cannot be. It is the dream…”
The woman looked up, her eyes clear. But she looked through him, as if he wasn’t there; then she tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and walked into the gloom and was gone.
The First Talent turned slowly back to Marlowe.
“You did that,” he said quietly. He was not angry. “Your talent works here. How?”
But then, before Marlowe could think how to reply, with an impossible quickness, suddenly the First Talent was there in front of him, reaching down with his swollen hands, gripping Marlowe hard on the sides of his shining head, as if to crush his skull. His eyes did not look right, up close. The irises were blue with the reflected light of Marlowe. There was blood in the ancient man’s teeth. He smelled like the grave.
“You are what woke me,” he hissed. “You were in my dream … but you were not a part of it. I see that now. What a gift your companion has brought me. You are not a child, are you? You are something more … Ah. Ah.” His expression darkened with sudden understanding. Marlowe could see the veins in the whites of Berghast’s ripped-out eyes. “But you do not know, do you? You do not know what you are.”
“I’m just…,” Marlowe said, struggling. “I’m just me…”
The First Talent’s hands crushed his skull harder. Marlowe’s legs kicked. “Oh, but you are more than that, little one. You are what they built the orsine for. Has no one told you?” His voice was almost too soft to hear. “All this was built to hold you, not me. To contain you, not me. I am just the vessel. But you?” Alastair Cairndale smiled. “You are the sixth, the greater part, what they stole from me. You, child, are my talent.”
Marlowe stared at him, horrified.
“We are one. We are what they fear. And we will be whole, again.”
But then Marlowe reached up, just as he had at the edge of the orsine all those months ago, he reached up with his hands and clasped the ancient man’s wrists and he felt the flesh bubble and sear and begin to melt under his grip. The smell was awful, horrifying.
The screams of the First Talent came out guttural and strange, shrieking like a steel cable flailing through a winch like he’d heard in the circus when he was younger. The old man tore free of Marlowe’s grip and stumbled backward, holding his hands up before him. The stumps were dripping like molten wax, the clawed hands dissolving, dripping onto the floor.
The fire in the grate guttered. The First Talent’s gaunt face was aghast. He stared at Marlowe and there was fear and horror and pain but also something else, some dark shadowy thing overtaking him, something very much like hunger.
And then he started forward.
42
THE KIDS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
In the villa gardens, in Sicily, Komako, desperate, was running.
She was running from Mrs. Ficke and the glyph-twisted girl and the ruin of the Agnoscenti chamber, running from the accusations in the old alchemist’s words, running from the guilt and horror she herself felt at what she’d done. Back up the stone steps, through the shed, out into the coming night, the garden dense and still in the gloom. She ran down the path, toward the darkened villa, fearing for Oskar.
And the litches, untiring, ran with her.
There were roots and creeping vines snaring her ankles as she ran and then suddenly she slowed, stopped. She didn’t know what compelled her. But she turned, and started running into the dark gardens. And as she hurried toward the center she smelled the unmistakable reek of Lymenion, somewhere up ahead in the quiet.
She came out at the clearing with the stone fountain, the narrow benches under the lemon trees. Her lungs were on fire from the running. The drughr had Lymenion pinned by the throat, and its tentacles were peeling the flesh from his legs in long strips, as if peeling away the skin of a fruit. Two of the benches had been overturned and under their broken stone she could see Oskar. He raised his head weakly at her arrival.
She should have felt fear. Any drughr powerful enough to overwhelm Lymenion would not be stopped by a dustworker. And yet she didn’t; she raised her chin and felt the litch-children move as one, surging forward at her command. And then they were swarming the drughr, spinning lightly and smoothly around its tentacles and four muscular arms, dancing across its back. She watched it catch and throw her litches one by one into the darkness and yet they came hurtling back, their little teeth bared, their nails sharp. Two caught it by the throat, three swung by each arm. Slowly, heavily, they dragged the monster down to its knees, pinioning the toothed tentacles to the ground.
Komako watched all this with a terrible fury. She felt scoured out, only part human herself. There was no mercy in her. She could feel the eerie dust that was inside it, sifting through its bulk, like dark sand in a sieve. A thickness at the back of her skull was filling with a strange and beautiful music, a music coming from the dust itself. She’d never felt so powerful, so unfettered. Gradually she understood it had something to do with the children, her litches, that each was like a kind of mirror she had polished to a shine, a mirror reflecting her own talent back toward her, amplifying it, so that the power that was in her was staggering, unlike anything she’d known.
She walked slowly up to the struggling drughr. Something in the way it shifted its antlered skull, twisting its face as if to query what manner of creature she might be, gave her pause.
It was afraid.
Afraid of her.
Then Komako raised her two hands, fingers spread wide, and pressed them against the drughr’s chest. There was a slight resistance, like the surface of a jelly; then her fingertips pushed through, and her hands dipped into the drughr’s flesh, all the way to her wrists.
Her heart was beating very fast. Something was happening to her. She withdrew her hands and felt a resistance, as if she were pulling them out of a thick mud, and as her fingertips emerged she saw why.
The drughr’s corrupted dust—that stuff, that shining substance from the other world that animated the drughr, gave it its form, that shaped it—was pulled out, unspooling, in a long smoldering line from the gashes in its chest. And Komako stumbled backward, pulling and pulling with her hands, and the corrupted dust kept pouring out from the drughr, draining it.
The creature made no sound, except a long shuddering sigh. Its enormous body sagged.
Faster Komako pulled the dust, faster and faster, her own arms aching with the weight of it, and as she pulled, the drughr began to shrink. Its tentacles sucked up into crumbling ropes. Its chest caved in on itself. Its antlers crumbled. The monster got smaller, smaller, until it was almost the size of Komako herself. And there, deep inside the massive creature that had been, Komako could see the lineaments of a person, a human being, ancient and still shriveling, its face tight over its skull, its eyes sunken and hollowed. Until at last no more dust could be pulled from the creature, the person, the talent that had once been a woman, and Komako fell to one knee, gasping, and let the dust go free.
A mummified husk lay sprawled in front of her, naked, eyes wide and staring. Her thin lips were parted in an expression of horror. Her long white hair tangled under one dark cheek. All around her, the earth was stained black.
And then Lymenion stumbled over on his peeled legs, using his powerful fists for support, and took the dried skull in his two powerful hands and twisted it from the mummified corpse, wrenching it clear.
It was done. The drughr was dead.
She closed her eyes. The gardens smelled of sweet leaves, its white flowers closed like eyelids. Somewhere the fountain made a soft trickling of water. Every part of Komako’s body ached.
When she raised her face, Oskar was looking at the litches. Blinking his big slow eyes, wiping the snot and tears from his face with his bloodied hands. He didn’t try to move, to crawl toward her. She could feel the fear and dread in his glance, the recrimination. The children. What she’d done. The wrongness of it. She bit her lip. She thought of Mrs. Ficke, the appalled sorrow in her eyes. She thought of Miss Davenshaw’s body, somewhere in the upper villa. She didn’t try to explain, didn’t try to tell her friend that she hadn’t done it on purpose, that they’d all be dead otherwise.
Something clinked in the rubble; silently around her in the settling dust her litches came forward, a horde of ghostly children, their inhuman eyes searching hers, their little bodies quivering.
“Oskar—” she started to say. But she didn’t know how to continue.
“Rruh,” rumbled Lymenion softly, sadly.
The flesh giant staggered weirdly over on his ravaged legs. Scooped Oskar up with great gentleness. Oskar’s silence was like a slap, a fierce disapproval. He looked at her; he looked miserably away.
But you’re alive! she wanted to shout. You’re both alive! It didn’t win, the drughr didn’t win!
But the words wouldn’t come; there was a lump in her throat, a painful lump, getting in the way. The eyes of her litches glittered in the darkness, awaiting her command, unmoved.
The warm night was quiet.
* * *
In Paris, Charlie was staggering through the dark catacombs, following the torch in Ribs’s fist. His wet clothes clung to his skin, freezing.
He’d never have found his way back to Alice, to the second orsine; he could have been lost down here forever, stumbling along the stone arcades, up rough-cut steps, quarries carved from limestone. But Ribs, clever Ribs, had marked the path when she’d followed him and the Abbess, and she hurried confidently through the darkness. The torch in her hands guttered and swooped as she walked. She’d thrown over herself the red robes from one of the dead acolytes, and strapped a pair of sandals to her feet, and now Charlie could see her, see the tangle of red hair at her neck, the quick fierce movements of her hands.
“This way,” she whispered. “Come on.”
Behind them both came the bone witch, the dark girl with the braids and the coin at her throat, who had tried to kill Charlie once, who had killed the urchin Micah, who’d walked with the drughr and learned its secrets. Fragments of bone and skull clattered softly behind her as she walked, like a weird procession.
Charlie knew he was probably crazy to trust her. But he’d asked himself, what would Mar have done? And known the answer. Where would he himself be now, if Alice and Margaret Harrogate and Mar himself hadn’t given him a chance, a chance to be more than he was?
But just let her make one wrong move, he told himself.
The acolytes at the entrance to the orsine gallery were sprawled in a heap of limbs just within. Ribs slipped past, the torch high, and Charlie saw at once something was wrong. Alice was leaned up against the far wall, her legs outstretched. There was blood in her hair and all down her face. She was holding something in her lap. Adra Norn lay unmoving some feet away. In the flickering light he could see the arms of the orsine had been peeled back, and were curled upward, like the hundred legs of some exotic insect, crushed. The air was thick with dust and smoke.
Alice raised her head wearily as they neared. “Took your … sweet time,” she said.
Charlie saw then what she was holding. It looked like a calcified stone, about the size of a man’s fist. But it was cracked all over with tiny fractures, fractures that were oozing with a gelid black blood.
The glyphic’s heart.
“The drughr,” she said with a grimace. “It was … Jacob Marber’s drughr … She ripped out the heart … went through … the orsine…”
Charlie put a hand on his head and looked back. The bone witch stood very still six feet away, her bone fingers glinting in the firelight. Her face looked ashen, shocked. Then he glanced at the Abbess. She didn’t look dead.
“But it didn’t get the dust,” he said. “It’s still in me. How could it go through? Doesn’t it need—”
Then he saw the careful way Alice held her ribs, and understood: the drughr had drained her wound, had taken the corrupted dust trapped inside her, the dust left by Jacob Marber after he’d hurt her on that train ride to Scotland, so long ago. Alice’s face was gray. Her eyes were blurred with pain.
“Jesus,” he whispered, kneeling. “Are you okay?”
She waved him away.
