Charlie watched Marlowe. The little boy was listening intently.
“Lord Cairndale and his … associates, constructed the orsine and banished the drughr through it. He was powerful, far more powerful than we are today. His talent could not merely manipulate, as ours do, but even create. In the struggle he was dragged into the orsine, alongside the monster. How he perished, under what circumstances, was never known. But somehow he managed to contain the drughr; it was trapped inside the orsine.
“Yet now it is back,” he continued calmly. “And it falls to me to stand against it.”
Charlie could sense the older man’s seductive sadness, the intensity of it, and he didn’t like it. “You mean it falls to us,” he said, reproach in his voice.
“I am no Alastair Cairndale,” Berghast replied, just as if Charlie hadn’t said anything. “And yet I must become him. All of us must carry what we are, Charles. Whether we wish to or not.”
Charlie glanced over at Marlowe, whose face was expressionless. “I’m getting tired of being told that in fifty different ways. It’s always someone else saying what’s got to be carried and who it’s got to be carried for.”
A subtle flare of the nostrils betrayed Berghast’s impatience. “Mr. Thorpe is dying,” he said. “Cairndale’s glyphic is dying, Mr. Ovid. Your outrage will change nothing. The orsine will rip itself open; Cairndale will be defenseless. The dead will pour through the breach into this world, and there is no telling what will become of us then.”
Charlie swallowed, abashed.
“When that happens, the orsine will have to be sealed,” Berghast continued, in a soft angry whisper. He might have been alone. “Sealed forever. And then our only way of destroying the drughr will be lost. If I am to enter the orsine, if I am to confront the drughr, I must do it soon. Its powers are different there; I can stop it there.”
“I don’t understand, Dr. Berghast,” murmured Marlowe.
The man smiled his cold smile. “I have been preparing for this for longer than you can imagine, child. I do not need your understanding. Only your trust.”
“You mean our obedience,” muttered Charlie.
Berghast unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a long metal box. He rested his hand on the lid. “There was a time when I would send the talents through, so they could map the world beyond the orsine. So we would be prepared, you see, if the drughr returned. I’d found an object, an artifact of immense power. I’d been searching for it for years, across oceans of sand, mountains of ice. At last I tracked it down in a community of talents east of the Black Sea.” As he spoke, he opened the box and lifted out a strange glove, made of wood and iron and cloth. It looked heavy and clicked as he picked it up. “Once there were three artifacts; now there is only one. This is a replica.”
He passed it across and Charlie took it and turned it in his fingers. Plates of iron and wood like an armored gauntlet. Sewn inside the wrist of the glove was a band of sharp studs, like little teeth. “The real artifact allows the talent who wears it to pass through the orsine, intact, and to survive in the beyond. It allows them to return alive. But not only talents. The artifact’s power is such that it protects anything that wishes to cross between the worlds. From either side.”
Charlie blinked. “You mean, the—”
“The drughr, yes. It would be protected here. In this world.”
Charlie was running his finger over the soft wood plates. He saw there were delicate carvings, line work, like the trails left by beetles in bark. Each plate was different. Stamped into the iron palm was the same crest as his mother’s ring, the same design as what hung over the gates of Cairndale. Twinned hammers against a rising sun. The wood was soft, warm. The iron was supple. Even this replica felt immensely old. Charlie offered it to Marlowe, who handed it back to Dr. Berghast.
The older man’s face darkened as he studied the copy. “A beautiful thing, isn’t it? But the real glove was lost, years ago. It was lost inside the orsine.”
“You want us to find it for you,” said Marlowe.
He nodded cautiously. “We must find it before the glyphic dies. While the orsine can still be controlled.”
Charlie scowled. “Why us?”
“Because you are both … unusual. You, Charles, are a haelan. Your body, your very talent, sustains itself, regenerates itself. You can stay in that world much, much longer than any other talent. And you, child,” he said, fixing his eerie gaze on Marlowe again, “you are another thing entirely.”