He lifted the lantern, and hurried in.
* * *
There were nights when Henry Berghast would walk the unlit halls of Cairndale, watching the darkness, feeling the movement of air across his skin and the way time moved around him and through him, like sand through a fist, and he would feel his body decay.
Aging. That is what it was, still strange to him, even after decades.
He would drift in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves with his collar stiff past the closed doors, the display cabinets, the framed watercolors and etchings on the walls, all of them strange in the night dark. And he would lose himself in his own remembering, remembering the way the sun had set over the mouth of the Nile in those early years when British warships were still unknown to the Egyptians, and how the air in the jungles of New Spain had smelled of rotting fruit. He would recall the many dead he had known, his colleagues, his friends, some of them famous now in the annals of science. Gradually, over the centuries, his friendships and attachments had fallen away. He had been alone a long time now, had watched those he loved grow old and die, abandoning him, leaving him with nothing, no one, only an ache where his love for them had been. There had been his parents, centuries dead; and a brother; and even a wife and child once, a little girl—what was her name?—who had liked white flowers and brought him joy, though all their faces were long since lost to him, and to remember them now was like reading of them in the pages of a book, a book written by someone else. He had been told many years ago that all talents, even the most powerful haelans, must age and die. He had waited for it. But he had not aged.
He had instead, he considered with a quiet detachment, slowly corrupted from the inside out, corrupted like an old piece of fruit, blackening and dying and the rot spreading, until what he was and what he appeared to be bore no relation. If you live long enough, you cease to be human, you cease to understand anything that fills the human heart. For the heart is made of time, and consumed by time, by the knowledge of its own eventual death, and Berghast could not die.
Except … now he could.
That was the cruel part of it, he thought, as he descended the stairs and drifted through the lower halls. He was the greater talent, he was the one whose existence ought to go on, it was he and no other who had seen and known true power. He had glimpsed a power like his own in another only once, in that ancient creature known as the drughr. She was beautiful, and terrifying, an intoxicating creature. Something of the absolute filled her, some deep inhuman purity, and Berghast had seen it and hated it and desired it. He knew the drughr was stalking the baby, just as Jacob was. And he knew, too, that there had been a prophecy long ago, from a glyphic in a cave in Bulgaria: a child would be born in the other world, in the land of the dead, a living child who would cut the fabric of the worlds and remake the talents in his own image. The Dark Talent.
Berghast had hunted that child for years, reducing his own talent in the process. And now, because of Jacob, the boy had been found.
Found, yes, and made safe; but Berghast was too weak to do anything with him, too weak to use him as he needed to, as he wanted to. It was a bitter knowledge. His talent had seeped away, so that he no longer healed, and now there was nothing but the long slow pain of his dying.
It filled him with a fury beyond imagining.
30
THE UNDER—TUNNEL
Jacob Marber found the cave entrance half-hidden by gnarled, wet undergrowth, on a low rise of rock, overlooking the valley. The entrance was narrow, the rock slick and cold. But just within, the roof lifted and the walls widened, and the tunnel opened right out.
He’d left a candle in a dish just inside the entrance. He took off his gloves, folded them twice, slid them into the pocket of his frock coat. Then he rubbed the dust between his fingers and a small blue flame erupted and he lit the candle and started forward, down the sloping cavern, scrambling and sliding to the back wall where a darker crevasse opened in the earth.
He was thinking about the two children at the river, the sounds of the drughr feeding. He gave a small shudder. There is nothing you could have done, he told himself.
And hurried deeper.
There were passages in the earth, all under Cairndale and around it. Few knew of them. No one had mapped them. Ancient tunnels, formed by the meltwater of the last glaciers, when the great pressure of the ice scraped out the lochs of Scotland and made the land what it was.
He walked on in silence, slipping on the wet rocks, his small firelight flickering over the stone. The air was cold, sour, unpleasant. He kept a careful eye as he went. He had some idea of where to go, a left here, a right turning farther on, but the going was uncertain, and he was afraid of getting lost.