Imagine if you had learned then, what Komako has learned now. You could have kept Bertolt alive, you could have kept him with you. It is a part of the dustworker’s gift. Did Berghast not tell you? Of course not. He would not wish you to know. But I can give you that power.
“I wouldn’t want it. I don’t want it.”
It is yours regardless. The drughr leaned forward, her face all smoke and blackness. Dust is the power to bring darkness into the world, she said. You know so little of what you are, Jacob. You are still so young. I have seen sandstorms at midday in the Empty Quarter, how they block out the sun. You would think it the dead of night. Their roaring obliterates every sound. And the feel of the sand blown against your skin obliterates all other sensation. There is no smell, no taste, no sound, except the sand. The sandstorm strips away all of the human senses, until a person is no longer a person. They are cut off from their own self. That is the power of dust.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone—”
Of course not.
Jacob shook his head. He felt sleepy, almost drugged. The drughr had that effect on him, somehow. “You said … you said you knew a way—”
To find your brother, in the other world. To help him, yes. The orsine is the door, it is true, but there are other ways through too. Little windows. I can take you through, Jacob, I can do what Henry Berghast will not. But the orsine must be opened if your brother is to be brought back for good.
“You said he’s suffering—”
It will not be easy. And there is a price. Will you pay it? That is the question.
“What price?”
Ah. The drughr paused, as if considering. Why is it the smallest creatures, Jacob, the most defenseless, the mice and the voles, prefer darkness to day? Your Dr. Berghast wishes to preserve the world as it is, the powerful in their interests, the meek in their place. But I … I do not believe it has to be the way it is. Do you know why the dark talents are called dark, Jacob? Oh, it is nothing to do with good or evil, with rightness or its perversion. It is because they make it possible for the weak to conceal themselves, to live like the strong.
“Bertolt wasn’t weak,” he whispered.
The drughr was silent, smoke swirling over her face.
“Why would you help me?” he said. “Why?”
The rigging creaked in the starlight. The drughr rose smoothly, a blacker shadow against the shadows of the ship’s masts.
Because I need something too, Jacob, it said quietly. I need your help, too.
* * *
In the morning, Frank Coulton sat on a deck barrel, hearing the soft swish of the cards being dealt, a warm wind flaring in his shirtsleeves and crackling in the yards of canvas overhead. The shadows played across his face. He was distracted, thinking of Jacob, worried about the lad. His eyes looked ill, like he was no longer sleeping.
There were four Orang Laut sailors cross-legged and grinning, all leathery and tough, the second mate dealing out their hands. The sailors’ poison was zanmai, a game using those strange little colored karuta cards so common in the Tokyo streets. The rules were basic: three cards, trying to add up to nineteen. The cheating, though, was exquisite.
Coulton, a connoisseur of skill no matter its nature, enjoyed the way the sailors peeled his coins up off the deck, one by one, with exhalations of surprise each time they drew nineteen.
Later, at dusk, Ribs said: “I can tell you how they done it. I been watchin.”
He stopped what he was doing, looked at her. “You get caught working your talent, here on this little ship, an we’ll all be swimming to Singapore. Just act like a normal kid. Can you do that, like?”
Ribs gave him a withering look.
“I ain’t,” she sniffed, enunciating slowly, “a kid.”
But the sun-drenched days were long, the warm air soupy and thick. He couldn’t really blame Ribs for her boredom. He too was fading. Increasingly sick of the sea’s swells, eager for dry land and a cold bath, he tried and failed to smother his irritation.
They were two days past Taipei and Coulton was in his little cabin with the door closed and the hammock stowed, writing at the narrow desk nailed to the floor, when he paused and put down his pen and half turned on the stool.
“Right,” he said softly. He stared up at the ceiling. “If you’re wanting to go all the bloody way to Scotland with us, there’s got to be rules, like. First rule is: no sneaking.”
The cabin was empty. Jacob was up top. The ship lifted and fell, lifted and fell.
At last, out of the emptiness, came Ribs’s voice. “How’d you know I was here?”