“Crowley said Berghast’s real work lay in that other world. Why?”
Mrs. Harrogate sat primly in the velvet chair, adjusted her skirts. Her face was troubled.
“Son of a bitch. You don’t trust him either,” said Alice softly, beginning to understand. Then she thought of something else and her face darkened. “Why have we been collecting children, Mrs. Harrogate? What are they used for?”
“Calm yourself, Miss Quicke. You will have our good landlady listening at the keyhole.”
“I left Marlowe and Charlie in Berghast’s care.”
“And they are quite safe behind the walls of Cairndale,” Mrs. Harrogate said. “Henry may be misguided, but he is not mad. The same cannot be said of Jacob Marber. I am certain their sudden proximity to him would result in a rather different fate.”
“You keep saying Cairndale’s safe—”
“Because Jacob cannot enter. The perimeter is protected.”
“But he got through before. Isn’t that what Crowley was saying?”
“Its protections have been changed,” said Mrs. Harrogate smoothly. “No one—absolutely no one—wishes for a repeat of what happened when your Marlowe was a baby. But the only way the children will be safe, truly safe, will be to kill Jacob Marber.”
As Mrs. Harrogate spoke, she took out the folded handkerchief from her handbag. Alice felt once again the sudden dizziness but she forced herself to look at the two keys as the older woman unwrapped them. Mrs. Harrogate put them on the pier table. “They affect you strongly,” she said.
Alice swallowed. “They feel … wrong.”
“Excellent. Yes. It is because you are a sensitive, Miss Quicke. That is the injury from Marber affecting you. I had hoped for this. These are called weir-bents.”
Alice, who had a long knowledge of keys, studied the weir-bents. “They’re old. I don’t recognize their like. They’re not for a safety box or a vault. What do they open, a room somewhere? Where do we find the thing?”
“What thing?”
“The weapon. To kill Jacob Marber.”
Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes glittered. “Ah,” she said, smiling a patronizing smile. “You are mistaken. This is the weapon.” The older woman lifted the leather cord carefully, studied the weir-bents where they dangled in front of her. “There were three once,” she said. “Now there are two. Someday there will be only one, and when the last key is lost, there will be no way left to fight the drughr.”
“What are they?”
“Evil things, Miss Quicke. Unnatural things. These are not keys but vessels, Miss Quicke. They hold inside them, like a fly in amber, something that does not belong in our world. You understand the or-sine at Cairndale is a doorway, a passage to another world. What is trapped in these weir-bents is from that world.” Mrs. Harrogate closed her fist around the keys and winced. Her voice lowered. “And they are conscious, Miss Quicke. They have their desires and fears, just as we do. You must resist them.”
In the weak gaslight of that strange room, Alice watched the woman in her black clothes rise and pad noiselessly to the locked door, like a ghost. It all felt eerie, and mysterious, and unreal. But she had long since given up on real. That same awful dread was rising in her again.
“Show me,” she said in a flat voice. “Show me what they can do.”
But Mrs. Harrogate held out the leather cord, the strange weir-bents swaying like some hypnotist’s charm.
“No, Miss Quicke,” she murmured. “It is you who must show me.”
* * *
So it was for this, then, that she was needed.
Alice turned the weir-bents in her fingers, feeling a coldness go right through her, like a knife. The room swam. And then she was staggering, reaching for the edge of the bed, while a black nausea washed over her and ebbed and came again, and the incision in her side where Marber had stabbed her bloomed in pain. In her fist, the weir-bents were so cold they burned.
“You must give into it,” whispered Mrs. Harrogate, from someplace near. “You must not try to control the pain. Accept it. Let it become you.”
And gradually, though the awful feeling did not leave her, Alice did so, and was no longer overwhelmed. She opened her fist, shaking.
They were not identical. One, she saw, was made of black iron, or something like it, its surface porous and pocked and rough to the touch. The other was carved out of a black wood that looked like iron, but seemed somehow much harder. They were heavy, with shanks almost as long as her hand. In place of the bow on the iron weir-bent was a Celtic knot, seamless and intricate as a snowflake; on the wooden weir-bent had been carved a crosspiece, and inside it a disk that turned in place, the wood oiled and burnished so that its veins glowed. At the end of its shank each had a strange twin collar, finely shaped, unlike anything Alice had seen, and a single uncut bit with no wards at all, as if neither had ever been shaped to a lock. And now, looking closer, Alice saw interwoven in both a fine silver metalwork, shaped almost like letters in a script she didn’t know, though the patterning was different.