He’d laid his brother out flat with his little hands crossed on his chest and cleaned the soot and grime from his face and neck and then he’d got to his feet, only just nine years old, and gone in search of Herr Gould. Blind with fury. He was turned away from the drinking houses and brothels but he found the man at last in a gambling den off the Unterstrass. The man at the door took him for a messenger lad and let him through and Jacob stood in the roar and the darkness with his fists clenched and he watched Herr Gould laughing and drinking at his cards and whatever it was that was in him, whatever evil, or fury, boiled up out of him, and that talent he’d had for twisting the dust just exploded. He felt the dust come to him, swirl around his fists, and a pain and cold shot through his arms and made his head swim. He lifted his hands. His cheeks were wet.
And then the dust was shooting out from his outspread fingers, wrapping itself in ropes of darkness around the big man, his chest, his throat. And it started to squeeze.
The lanterns flickered all around the room. By then the patrons were falling over themselves, overturning tables, scrambling to get out of the way, the prostitutes screaming in fear. And Herr Gould’s face reddened, then purpled, and his eyes half burst from their sockets, and the force of the dust had lifted him clean off his feet so that his big-knuckled hands were clawing at the air in horror.
When Jacob let him go, he fell in pieces to the floor. And Jacob turned, emptier even than before, and went out into the city, truly alone.
Somehow Berghast had heard of it. Somehow he’d come looking. Jacob had thought at first that the man had come to save him, but he hadn’t, he knew that now. He’d come to use him, as he used everyone. Little Jacob Marber, dustworker, killer of men, was to have been his weapon.
Walter was waiting for him in a small alcove shadowed from the wall sconce nearby and he licked his lips and pointed to the nursemaid’s door.
“It’s in there, Jacob,” the man whispered. “But the nurse is with it. She’s always with it. Don’t never leave it alone.”
“He is a baby, Walter. Not an it. And why ever would she leave him alone?”
The man nodded obsequiously. “Yes, yes, of course, why ever would she, hm?”
But Jacob was unnerved all the same. Berghast had put the baby in Jacob’s old room. He murmured instructions to Walter, telling how the man was to distract the nursemaid, and then he watched as Walter rapped softly on the door and stuck his hands in his pockets, then took them out, then smoothed his greasy hair.
Jacob slid forward, soundless.
The nursemaid who answered the door was young, a girl still, big-boned and black-haired. She watched Walter with a wary politeness as he spoke, asking after her, gesturing past her at something in the room, something needing repair, then stepping briskly through despite her protestations.
As she turned in irritation—“I beg your pardon, Mr. Laster, what do you think you are doing, I did not invite you in, sir, the wee babe is sleeping”—Jacob drew a fine cloud of dust around him, like a veil of darkness, and let himself silently in behind her. Then he crept along the perimeter of his old room. The nursemaid had lit only the two candles and it was easy for him to keep to the shadows.
Walter was making some nervous joke about a clock on the mantel, laughing weirdly.
Jacob slipped over to the curtain, moved it just slightly. Creeping like a nightmare toward the cradle. He held his breath. There, he saw, was the tangle of blankets.
And there, the helpless child.
31
THE BEGINNING
The fire crackled in the grate. Henry Berghast leaned back from his desk, uneasy, dissatisfied, unable to do any work at all. He screwed back on the lid of his ink bottle and drummed his fingers on his closed journal and then he put on his hat and took up a lantern and went down to the underground passage that led across to the orsine. If the drughr were to come, it would of necessity be through there.
He walked swiftly. He had not informed Bailey of his going. No matter.
What was troubling him was not, in fact, the drughr. No. He saw no reason to believe the drughr’s reach could extend past the glyphic’s wards. No; it was, he understood, the nursemaid Crowley. He did not like the way she had reacted when he told her the child must be sent away, for its own protection. Would she prove an impediment? He was not sure.
He was sure, however, of the danger. It would be only a matter of time before Jacob Marber came for the baby, before the drughr came. He knew this with a certainty. The glyphic had hinted as much, some days ago. It was not the child’s welfare of course but everything the child represented—the possibility of power, of redemption—that drew both the drughr and Henry himself to it, like lake pike to the scent of blood in the water. It was an old, endless game of strategy that he and the drughr played. The child might yet prove decisive.