She set her jaw. She’d have to warn him, somehow.
Invisible, on silent feet, Ribs slipped inside.
* * *
Charlie winced in embarrassment. Komako was kneeling over him, afraid to touch him, hissing his name. He could feel his shattered tibia already beginning to stitch itself back. Something was wrong with his hip. He had landed badly on his side and one shoulder had popped from its socket and he sat up in pain and wrestled it back into place and felt his body crunch and twist and shape itself anew.
Sweet Lord, it hurt.
There was blood on his face and hands and in his eyes and he wiped it away with his shirt. Komako fell back, watching him from the shadows. He saw fear in her face but also something else, fascination, and he was surprised that he kind of liked it.
“Charlie?” she was whispering. “You’re okay, then?”
“Sure.” He shrugged, tried to smile. “That balcony just doesn’t like me much. Nobody heard?”
“No.”
He got to his feet, grimacing. There was that, at least. His bare feet were damp and there was grit stuck to the soles and he wiped his feet on the inside of his trousers to clean them before starting climbing again. This time he went more quickly, with less dread, feeling as if he’d already done the worst and so there was less to fear. He scrambled from sill to balcony to sill, working his way steadily across in the darkness. There was in one window a candle left burning and when a shadow passed in front of it he stood with his back pressed to the wall, waiting. But when no further movement came he slid silently across, continued climbing.
Later still, his feet kicked an old lead drainpipe, as he made his way past where he’d fallen before. He listened to the rattle and clatter of it roll in the courtyard below, so loud that he was sure someone must hear. But no one came. No windows opened.
He climbed on.
* * *
Ribs watched Berghast’s manservant at the desk, slowly going through the drawers. He’d lit a candle and the orange light cast its flicker over the desk and the surrounding carpet and the big man’s features. He was taking out ledgers and papers in his enormous hands, stacking them, unhurried.
Ribs crept noiselessly to one side of the door. She made no other movement, breathing softly. Even the stir of air could make a target sense her presence. And Bailey, whatever else, seemed eerily aware of his surroundings.
She’d been in this study only twice before, both at Berghast’s instruction: the first time shortly after arriving at Cairndale, by way of a kind of introduction; and later, amid the chaos and panic after Jacob Marber’s attack, all those years ago. She remembered Berghast’s pale gray eyes, as if lit from within, how he had studied her carefully as if looking inside her heart. She shivered, remembering.
His study was dim, oppressively furnished, very cold. A fireplace stood at one end, carved out of white stone, and near it the desk and several armchairs arranged in a half-moon. There were doors on three of the walls, too many doors, doors mismatched and strange and unlike any others she’d seen at Cairndale. She wondered where they led. On one wall hung a long strange framed painting, in ink, all slashed lines and overlapping circles. It resembled somehow the complicated inner workings of a vast tree. In one corner stood a tall birdcage with two bonebirds clicking and shifting inside. Last of all, her gaze fell on the bay window, its curtains open, the spiked iron bars on the ledge outside clearly visible despite the candle’s reflection.
There was no sign of Charlie.
Finally Bailey found what he was looking for—a sheaf of papers of some kind—and began putting the rest back. He cleared his throat, passed a hand across his eyes, and in that moment he looked almost vulnerable, almost human, the shadows pooling under his hand and spilling out like a liquid darkness. Ribs watched in fascination. She liked such moments, liked glimpsing people in their unguarded states, liked the truth of it.
It was then, at that moment, that Bailey turned and stared behind him at the window and Ribs felt her heart lurch. For she had heard it too.
A scrabbling sound, exactly like a hand finding purchase on the wall outside.
Bailey got to his feet.
* * *
Charlie was leaning out over the darkness, breathing, just breathing. He had one hand gripping an iron railing and the other was cautiously feeling around the edge of a sloping stone sill. His toes were hooked around a window ledge, holding himself tight, too tight. He suddenly understood that if he let go, he’d swing out away from the wall, and fall.
And then his fingers found it, a deep groove, enough to lean his weight beneath. And with a grimace he let go and swung and swung back and then used the momentum to draw himself, grunting, upward.