For the sleeping hut whooshed and crackled, and the roof fell in, and the conflagration roared on, and not a soul staggered out.
While the stars in their orbits wheeled and turned, and the sky in the east did lighten, and the fires ate and ate and did not die.
22
THE STUDY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
It was late when Charlie went down to the appointed alcove at the edge of the courtyard. There in the darkness he found Komako, pale as an apparition, already waiting for him. She had wrapped her long braid in a coil around her head.
The night air was cold on his face and cold on his hands and he folded them up under his armpits for warmth. Under his cloak he was in shirtsleeves to make the climbing easier. There were lanterns burning in some of the older talents’ windows and the orange glow reflected in Komako’s eyes like firelight. He saw no sign of Ribs nor of Oskar and Lymenion.
“Ribs is already waiting,” said Komako softly. “She’s been hiding outside Berghast’s study since lights out. Don’t let her get distracted. We need those files. When you unlock the door, you won’t see her, but she’ll be there.” Komako paused. “Unless she got bored, that is. And fell asleep.”
Charlie grinned. Then he saw her face and stopped.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Komako, with a shrug.
“What if Dr. Berghast is still up there?” said Charlie. “Say I get up to his window and he—”
“He is not. I watched him leave.”
“But if he comes back?”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. Can’t sleep? He forgets something?”
Komako peered up at him in the darkness. She was nearly a head shorter than he. “If you don’t want to do this, Charlie—”
“I never said that.”
“If you don’t want to do this,” she continued quietly, “you don’t have to. No one will think the worse of you, if you’re afraid.”
“I’m not afraid,” he muttered. He leaned out around the alcove, listening to the night, and then he gestured at the east wing. “It’s that window there? Under that funny roof? Not much to hold on to.”
“That’s why we need you.”
He knew her meaning. She meant it was dangerous and likely to lead to serious injury and what they needed was a body, any body, that could plummet thirty feet onto the cobblestones if a foot got put wrong and yet not make a bloody mess of it. Literally. What they needed, in other words, was someone who could break his bones, over and over again, and not get caught.
But he had something he wanted too. And he wasn’t leaving Berghast’s study until he got it.
You’re still a damn fool, he thought to himself, as he crouched low and ran silently across the courtyard. You just can’t keep your hand out of the fire.
* * *
At that very moment, Ribs was counting the flowers in the wallpaper in the east wing. She’d got as high as 612 and started to think they were moving around when she raised her face to listen and lost track and had to start all over. She was crushed up against the wall, knees to her chest, bored out of her mind. She was invisible, of course, feeling the pinprick of light on her skin almost like a current of electricity. It felt like rolling naked in a tub of nails.
The sconces had been doused at the going of Dr. Berghast and his manservant and the doors were shut fast and locked. The corridor was dim, creepy. When she was sure she was alone she got up and tried the door to Berghast’s study just in case but it was locked, of course it was. She stood at the window. All was dark. She couldn’t see Charlie or Komako and it occurred to her maybe they weren’t coming, maybe it was all a setup, a joke, to get her stuck up here in the east wing all night and in a scramble to explain herself come morning.
She grinned to herself. That’s the kind of thing she’d do, maybe. But never Ko.
In a nook in the wall stood an old glass cabinet filled with tintypes and etchings of Cairndale from decades past, bucolic and mild. She peered close, trying to find the windows of the girls’ rooms, but the windows were all in the wrong places.
It’d surprised her that Charlie had agreed to help them. She’d told Ko and Oskar with perfect confidence that he’d do it, he was just the sort of person who would, but she hadn’t believed it, not really. She wondered what Ko had said to talk him into it and felt a sharp ache of jealousy at the two of them alone.
The hell with it, she thought. He’d be coming soon. It was late, it was time. She tried to listen for sounds outside: scrabbling on the walls, the clink on the slate roof. Instead she heard something else: footsteps, unhurried, down the hall.