The drughr had seized the keywrasse by the throat. It was twisting it this way and that, shaking it, screaming. Alice fumbled for her gun, trying to find it in the smoke. But the drughr raised itself up to an awful size and hurled the keywrasse against a far pillar so that the walls shuddered and dirt poured down around them and darkness descended.
And then the drughr, too, was fleeing through the tear it had made in the fabric of the world, and the silver hole closed like a mouth.
And after that, a long deep silence, into which Alice fell back, exhausted.
* * *
There came a darkness.
* * *
A greater darkness.
* * *
Then: movement.
Pain, blooming in her chest. Alice coughed, reached for the lantern. Somehow the candle within had not gone out and she turned it, swung its light across to Mrs. Harrogate. The older woman’s dress was white with dust, her blood a vibrant red in her hair and hands and her ribs. Alice crawled over to her, cradled her head.
Mrs. Harrogate grimaced up at her. “You … look … awful.”
Alice sobbed a bloody sob. “Yeah,” she said, through the tears and the snot. “And you look fit for the fucking opera.”
“My legs…” She gasped, wet her lips. She was fumbling for her knees. “I can’t feel my legs.”
Alice looked at them, twisted strangely in the dust. She blinked the blood from her own eyes. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “We just need to get you out of here. We’ll find you a doctor.”
But she knew it was not fixable. Mrs. Harrogate was shaking her head. “It wasn’t supposed to be here, it shouldn’t have been able to … I don’t understand.…”
“That was your drughr, I guess?”
Alice heard a soft meow then and saw the keywrasse sitting nearby. It was again just a black cat. It turned its four glinting eyes toward her, narrowing them, then looked away, bored. And then, with the greatest drama imaginable, as if the whole world might be watching, calmly it lifted one paw and began to wash it with a little pink tongue.
The older woman looked up suddenly, her eyes bright. “The weir-bents, are they—？”
Alice looked away, remembering. She got painfully to her feet, the rubble clinking, and with the lantern she cast around in the shadows. She stumbled to where the silver door in the air had been and then she began to claw through the wreckage. She remembered Coulton’s long teeth snapping at her throat, she remembered the thing in Marber’s fist as he fled. She’d lost them. She’d failed.
But then she lifted away a piece of broken wall. And there lay one of them, the iron one, left in the dust like a broken piece of calipers. But the wooden one was gone.
“Then we have already lost, Miss Quicke.” Mrs. Harrogate was nodding bloodily. “Without the other weir-bent, you cannot send the keywrasse away. You will lose control of it. Nothing else can stop Jacob. He will be waiting for Mr. Thorpe to die now. He will be watching the glyphic. You need to get the weir-bent back.”
Alice spat. “First we need to get out of here,” she said. She didn’t know where Marber and that drughr had gone, or if they’d be coming back. She wouldn’t put it past him. “That’s what we need to do. While we still have light to see by. We can figure out what to do about the keywrasse later.”
But Mrs. Harrogate was shaking her head. “No, Miss Quicke,” she whispered. “Alice—”
It was the first time the older woman had called Alice by her name and she was surprised to find herself blinking back tears. “What is it?” she said gruffly.
“I can’t. My legs…”
Alice tried to think. She looked at the older woman’s body, twisted like a bad nail, and she set her jaw. The lantern was flickering, going out.
A darkness came flooding in.
28
OVERMORROW
In the morning, Charlie and Marlowe went back to Dr. Berghast.
It was still early; through their window while they dressed they could see a pale mist hanging over the inky darkness of the loch; the island was lost to view. Inside, the corridors of Cairndale were dim, and cold, and deserted. They saw no one. The other kids were still asleep. As they went, Charlie gripped his mother’s wedding ring in one fist for luck or consolation or maybe just out of habit until, reaching the upper corridor where Dr. Berghast would be waiting, he slipped the cord around his neck and tucked it all under his shirt, out of sight.
When they knocked, softly, at Dr. Berghast’s study, the older man opened the door at once, just as if he’d been waiting, just as if he’d known they would be back, at that hour, with that resolve. He looked haggard and drawn; he stood breathing; but his eyes were bright.