Bringer of Dust, page 55
And all the time they were being dried, and calmed, and even all the long journey back to the villa in Sicily, after they were strong enough at last to travel, still they did not know how to speak of what had happened on the other side of the orsine. Charlie would lay his head back on the seat, feeling the railway tracks clatter up through the carriage, and close his eyes, hating the pity he saw in Alice and Ribs and the bone witch. Marlowe, small as a bird, would curl into Charlie’s side, keeping close, always close, but with his own shadowed eyes open as if afraid all that he saw would vanish, if he just stopped looking at it.
And the days passed, the horror of Paris receding gradually. The keywrasse slept in Alice’s lap on the train, a soft purring engine of warmth. One evening on the deck of the steamer, bound for Palermo, Ribs said some sly thing and Marlowe laughed—he laughed—and Charlie raised his face at that, as if awakening from a dream. By the time they’d reached the villa outside Agrigento they were themselves again, or nearly so, more living than dead. And they greeted Oskar and Lymenion and Mrs. Ficke on the gravel drive, hearing the terrors of the drughr’s attack with heavy hearts. Jeta walked all around Lymenion, fascinated, her dark eyes grave and polite, while Ribs and Oskar looked on. Mrs. Ficke gave a strange old-fashioned curtsy to the keywrasse, as if to thank it. Only Komako was absent. Charlie followed his friends into the ruined villa, trying to imagine how that frightening night had been. All wept for the dead, the lost children, Miss Crowley the governess, Miss Davenshaw whom they had loved.
In the gardens, Charlie gathered his courage at last and asked, “Where’s Ko?”
She had taken herself away to a cave, in the nearby hills. Herself and the twelve children. She came out to the edge of the sunlight with sorrowful eyes as Charlie and Marlowe trudged up through the dry grass, Charlie raising a hand in greeting. She wore all black with thin gray fingerless gloves and strong men’s work boots under her hem, and her eyes were painted with thick black makeup. Her hair hung loose and snarled at her shoulders.
Marlowe ran the last few steps, into her arms. She’d held him a long while, saying nothing, watching Charlie over his tousled hair. And Charlie had seen in the shadows of the cave the children, her litches, gathered there pale and quiet with the three red lines at their throats, with their unnatural stillness. He’d never felt so old, so tired, as then. His heart ached. But Marlowe went over to the nearest girl, Zorya, she had been, and kneeled in front of her, and whispered some quiet thing, and she’d folded herself into his little chest with the same sweetness Charlie had remembered from life. And then the others emerged, pale and cautious and strange, their teeth sharp, their eyes as sad as Komako’s, and they all gathered around Marlowe, reaching their fingers out to brush his arm, his face, his shoulder, a family.
Miss Davenshaw and the children’s governess, Susan Crowley, had been buried in the southeast corner of the garden, within view of the sea, along with several of the little ones, those Komako had not resurrected. Their small stones were white and simple and shaded by a lemon tree. The drughr Ko had killed had been burned on a pyre outside the walls, its ashes scattered, and where the fire had burned nothing now grew. Lymenion and Oskar were often down at the graves, tidying them.
In those first days, Charlie did not like to be indoors. He’d walk the dusty roads or stand at the fountain in the garden, while gradually the Abbess’s strange account of his father’s journey, what he had tried to do at the Grathyyl, what Charlie himself was fated to fulfill, came back to him. He told no one, not Ko, not Marlowe; he peered out at the sky, afraid of what he was, and wished he could forget. But the dark truth of it cast its red light over everything. He found a sapling, a golden wych elm, like what had grown on the island at Cairndale, pushing up out of the soil above the wash-house. And when he went down into the chamber, he saw Deirdre sleeping at peace, tendrils thickening all around her, as if she lay in a nest of roots, and he placed a hand on her cool cheek, thinking about fate and how it didn’t have to be the way everyone said it was.
The keywrasse kept close to Alice. It would climb onto her lap or walk in front of her plate at lunch, its four eyes narrowing in pleasure as she stroked its fur. For her part, Alice felt weak but whole again, with the corrupted dust drained from her. Her thoughts kept straying back to Adra Norn, to her mother, to the ways her life had been altered by a callous woman with no regard for the havoc she’d wreaked. All that had happened, all that had been so important to Alice, had mattered not at all to Norn. Somewhere that awful woman walked free, even now. Alice brooded, telling no one, spending her days alongside Lymenion, her sleeves rolled high, the two of them repairing the stonework on the balcony, trying to keep busy. She liked the ache in her muscles at the end of the day, the dark dreamless sleeps as they took over.
Caroline Ficke sat in a wicker chair in the sunlight, recovering from the wound in her side. She left her apparatus unbuckled and spent her days reading. One day a letter came from Edinburgh. It was from her brother, Edward. It read, in part: Deer Caroline, I am hapy you ar hapy. I werk hard evry dae. I miss you. It is kwiet at the shop. How ar the litl wuns? And she set it aside, and began to cry.
The trees grew fat with fruit. Songbirds returned to the garden.
The daylight grew long.
And always everything came back to Marlowe, to Charlie and Marlowe. They were together almost from morning to night, together and quiet and often not speaking, just surprised, both of them, surprised to have found each other again, amazed and grateful. And in the evening sun, after dinner and washing up, they would go out to the broken fountain at the center of the garden, and find Ribs and Jeta, Oskar and Lymenion all sprawled about, sleepy with the goodness of it all, and sometimes even Komako would come down from her cave in the hills to join them. Insects were buzzing in the flowers. They were all alive, and together. The sun fell warm on their faces and the backs of their hands, and when they leaned back and closed their eyes they felt its light sifting through the branches above. Ribs threw bits of grass into Oskar’s hair. Lymenion snorted and breathed. Jeta would hum softly, some Roma song out of her childhood. Charlie had the feeling, for almost the first time in his life, of a languid summer, made all the sweeter because he knew, like childhood, like innocence itself, it could not last.
EPILOGUE
Alexandria, Egypt
It was early yet, the morning warm. In the hour before the household woke, the boy crept up to the roof and reached into his shirt and took out the three little pouches he carried there always. These he unbuttoned by the light of the rising sun and tilted sidelong, sliding their contents onto a cloth.
The first pouch held a severed finger. The second held a lock of black hair, tied with string. In the third was the final joint of an old man’s toe, its skin stained the color of tea.
Pieces of the dead.
The boy, taking out a broken hand mirror, concentrated on his own face then: the bleak eyes, the mouth carved into hardness, the white keloid scar on his left cheek.
Then he reached out two fingers, lightly touched the objects in their turn: toe, hair, shriveled finger. Very quickly, over and over.
Watching the clouded glass in wonder all the while.
It started with the face, as it always did. A sudden sharp pain. His features blurred and bent woozily away, each from each, and then in a blink he was another. The ancient beggar, toothless, blind in one eye, who had died in a doorway two winters ago, whose toe he had taken. The Frenchwoman with the small pretty mouth who had drowned herself in the harbor, whose strangle of wet hair he had dared to cut before the constable arrived. The big stonemason, whose nose had been broken and set badly years before, who had done unspeakable things to women, who had been knifed in the alley twenty-seven times and left for dead but who had opened his eyes in unbearable pain when the boy carved the finger from his hand.
Face after face after face, in the red of the rising sun.
For he was a turner, a skin-shuffler. And though he knew there were other talents in the world, he had met none. His name was Yasin al-Ashur and he was fourteen years old, light-boned as kindling and blue-eyed like his blood-father before him. He had lived as an apprentice in the streets of Alexandria since his fifth year. His blood-father was an English explorer who had died of fever while the child slept yet in his young mother’s belly or so he had been told and his blood-mother had been that household’s servant. Whether conceived in love or by force the boy would never know. She was gone now too. Her people were holy and traveled from wadi to wadi in the sands east of the Red Sea and lived by the old ways and the boy in his loneliness could not have found them even had he wished it. He did not wish it. To the denizens of the alley he was known, simply, as the English Boy. He lived with his master, the goldsmith Kamal al-Ashur, and together they were among the last of the Agnoscenti.
When he felt a hand on his shoulder, he turned. The rising sun through the wooden grille was coppering his hands and the hands of his master’s wife where she kneeled. “Kamal wishes to see you,” she told him. “Come.”
They found the goldsmith at his dressing mirror. He did not look up. He held his thick arms wide and his wife went to him and removed his robe and laid it on his bed and went out and returned with a basin of warm water. She brought in a tin tray of coffee and he drank while she stood holding it. Then he washed his face and hands and dried them on a towel and smoothed and twisted his mustache and picked a white fez from the bedpost, turning it in his fingers.
“My father retained the turban,” he said. His voice was soft and delicate for a man of his size. “What would he think to see me in this? Tradition is not what we remember, but what we have not yet forgotten. Is it not so, young one?”
The goldsmith looked at Yasin, eyelids dark and hooded. In the stillness Yasin could hear the clatter of a milk-cart on its rounds in the alley below. The goldsmith’s wife came back in with a caftan and helped al-Ashur dress and then he waved her away.
“Light of my eyes, may your morning be bright,” she murmured, retreating.
Kamal al-Ashur did not look at her. “Walk with me, Yasin,” he said instead.
They went back up to the roof. Often the goldsmith would take him there when he wished to speak undisturbed. There were pigeons flickering in cages on the high wall and a large wooden coop where yellow chickens dipped and scrabbled for seed and over the alley-side stood a green trellis of hyacinth beans and jasmine. A haze hung over the city and on all sides he saw the brown minarets of Alexandria materializing out of the dust.
“I have had a message from the shaykh,” said Kamal al-Ashur. “The First has awakened. His prison has been opened. He will walk among us again, and there will be no preventing it. It has been seen.”
Yasin looked up. “The First?”
His master kneeled and wiped away the straw covering the roof, baring the ancient crest, burned into the wood long ago. A rising sun, crossed by twin hammers. He placed his big hand on the insignia and a small panel opened. Inside was a velvet bag, which he withdrew carefully. He laid out the gleaming weapons of the Agnoscenti, one by one, their blades still sharp after centuries.
“We are few, and weak,” his master said, with sadness. “But we must do what we can. You must find the Dark Talent, young one. You must finish this.”
“It has begun, then,” said Yasin softly. There was fear in his voice.
The early cries of vendors in the alley below drifted past. There came a scrape of handcarts on the grooved stones, the clang and echo of stalls being erected for the day.
Kamal al-Ashur nodded. “It has begun.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Firstly, always, Ellen Levine, visionary agent and friend. I owe her everything. Also: Audrey Crooks and Lauren Campbell, outstanding in their support, as well as Alexa Stark, Martha Wydysh, Nora Rawn, Ana Ban and the foreign rights team, and everyone at Trident Media.
Megan Lynch at Flatiron Books: brilliant reader, even more brilliant editor. These books are absurdly lucky to have found her. Also: Kukuwa Ashun, who holds everything together. Keith Hayes, for his exquisite designs. Malati Chavali, Marlena Bittner, Katherine Turro, Nancy Trypuc, Cat Kenney, Claire McLaughlin, Elizabeth Catalano, Jeremy Pink, and all the rest of the team. Ana Deboo, my wickedly precise copy editor.
Stephanie Sinclair at McClelland & Stewart, who has taken the Talents under her wing with such grace and enthusiasm. Andrew Roberts, for his stunning designs. Sarah Howland, Tonia Addison, Martha Leonard, Ruta Liormonas, and everyone at M&S who have helped make this book happen. Melanie Little, who copyedited an early excerpt with her always excellent eye.
Vicky Leech Mateos at Bloomsbury, for her intelligence and passion, thank you. Also: Philippa Cotton, Emilie Chambeyron, Stephanie Rathbone, Amy Donegan, and the rest of the UK team. Terry Lee in Edinburgh was wonderfully informative and patient as we walked the old city and I began to dream up this novel.
Rich Green at Gotham Group remains, as always, a champion of the written word. My thanks for all he does.
My gratitude to Pamela Purves, in Nova Scotia, at whose exquisite cottage I wrote many of these pages.
Lastly, those in my life who I write for, whether they know it or not: my parents, Bob and Peggy; my children, Cleo and Maddox; my dear friend and namesake, JM.
And Esi, my love, first and last reader, a shining that will never go out.
Also by J. M. Miro
Ordinary Monsters
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J. M. Miro is the author of Ordinary Monsters, the first in the Talents Trilogy. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his family. He also writes under the name Steven Price. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Lights Were Going Out all Over the World
1. Kindred
A Guest in the House of the Dead, Part I
2. The Summons
3. The Bone Witch
4. Dark Assistant
5. The Presence
6. From Dust
The Glyphic of Mojácar
7. The Girl From Tokyo
8. Adversus Solem Ne Loquitor
9. Fingertips of Fire
A Guest in the House of the Dead, Part II
10. The Shape of Things We Leave Behind
11. The Falls of London
12. A Candle Made of Bone
13. Blood in the Water
14. 23 Nickel Street West
15. A Following Like Smoke
16. The Prizefighter’s Prayer
17. Witching Hours
18. The Hospitality of Lesser Men
19. In the Cells
20. The Litch’s Heart
21. Rising Waters
22. The Quickening
The Crossing
23. Shining Boy
24. Other Monsters
25. Into the Cold To Come
Rise of the Drughr
26. The Villa At Agrigento
27. Monstress
28. Weavers At the Loom
29. Sotto Voce
30. Every Monster Ever
31. The Agrigento Council
32. Risen
In the Gray Rooms
33. The Thing in the Mirror
34. The Threshold
35. Charlie in the Dreaming
The Door at the Center of the World
36. La Belle Époque
37. Paying the Gatekeeper
38. Hauntings
39. The Drughr and the Dustworker
40. The Many Out of the One
41. Like Wind in a Hollow
42. The Kids At the End of the World
43. Book of Unbinding
Epilogue: Alexandria, Egypt
Acknowledgments
Also by J. M. Miro
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
BRINGER OF DUST. Copyright © 2024 by Ides of March Creative Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.flatironbooks.com
Cover design by Keith Hayes
Cover art: hand © Stocktrek Images, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo; clouds © Yaroslav Gerzhedovich / Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-83383-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-83386-0 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250833860
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First Edition: 2024
J. M. Miro, Bringer of Dust
