“It’s no good, Charlie,” he whispered. “Look at your hands.”
They were shaking terribly. Charlie held them up in the eerie light. The skin was blotching, losing its pigment.
“You got to go, you can’t stay here any longer. You need to get out. You have to.”
“What if he comes back? And you’re all alone here, tied up like this?”
But the boy was looking at him clearly, nodding his little black-haired head in that sad not-quite-a-child way that he had. And Charlie knew he was right, that he, Charlie, had to go back through the orsine, that he wouldn’t be any use to Marlowe if he got sicker here. And the boy wouldn’t be hurt, couldn’t be hurt, not here, not like this. Charlie hung his head.
“I’ll be coming right back,” he whispered.
He picked up the strange glove from the soft floor, and it was almost like a sound was coming from it, a faint music he couldn’t quite hear. The finger that wore his mother’s ring started to ache. He stuffed the glove into his satchel.
“Do you remember the way back?” said Marlowe.
He did. He didn’t even need the map. He’d find the river and then the dome of the cathedral and the building on Nickel Street and the dead stairs that led back up into the orsine. He’d be fast and he wouldn’t stop for anything and he’d be back to get Marlowe before anything bad could happen. That’s what he’d do. He stumbled to the door, swaying. He looked back at the little boy in his dark bindings, and he ran a hand across his eyes, and then he took the stairs two at a time with the satchel slapping at his side and he started to run.
35
STEAM AND IRON
Bloodied, exhausted, Alice somehow managed to drag Mrs. Harrogate clear.
The drughr was long gone by then, Jacob Marber and Coulton gone with it. The weird shimmering gash in the air had closed over.
Alice wrestled Mrs. Harrogate through the dying glow of the lantern, their shadows crooked in the smoke. The black dust in the dark was choking. Mrs. Harrogate’s feet left long dark streaks like a trail in the grime. Alice went back for the lantern and walked ahead and set the lantern carefully down and then went back and dragged Mrs. Harrogate farther. In this way, bit by bit, she made her slow return back up through the damp and the muck of the tunnel, toward the trapdoor and the warehouse and the world of the living.
They were maybe twenty feet from it when the lantern died for good and Alice, sweating, wheezing, her own wounds bleeding freely, just left it where it stood and hauled Mrs. Harrogate on. The keywrasse was padding alongside in the darkness, its one white paw seeming to glow as it went. There was a faint crack of daylight where the trapdoor didn’t seal and she left the older woman moaning weakly and, because the ceiling was not high, she reached on her toes and pushed. The trapdoor opened lightly; no one had blocked it, thank God. Alice, grunting, hauled herself heavily up into the storeroom.
She could hear men moving about in the warehouse beyond, already at work. She was peering around for something, a rope maybe, something to help her get Harrogate out. Then she spied it: a ladder.
What she was thinking, as she grimaced and dragged the older woman out of that tunnel, back into the world, was how hopeless it all seemed now. Jacob Marber had escaped, with the help of the drughr; if Marber was a monster of terrible strength, the drughr was infinitely worse. Alice did not know fear but she’d known it when the drughr screamed. Coulton, poor Frank Coulton, had been made a litch; he seemed not to know her, let alone himself. Worse, Marber had vanished into thin air, through some kind of portal, and if he could move in such ways, how would she ever find him, corner him, destroy him? The only weapon she had was the keywrasse, and Marber had escaped with one of its weir-bents. Soon the creature would cease to obey Alice’s commands; soon it would leave them, or turn on them, or both. Mrs. Harrogate feared it, and if Alice was learning anything, it was that what Margaret Harrogate feared, she too ought to fear. She thought of the monsters out there, stalking Marlowe and Charlie, and she bit back her fury. She could do nothing.
She sat a long time, just breathing, there in that storeroom. At some point Mrs. Harrogate lost consciousness. That was probably, thought Alice, for the best. At last she got up and somehow got the older woman over one shoulder and, with the keywrasse at her ankles, she staggered out into the roar and whoosh of the warehouse, a bloodstained and ragged figure carrying a body, her face streaked with muck.
Men stopped at their blocks of tackle to gape, men held a hand to barrels still suspended in the air to stare. The hell with it. Alice just set her jaw and stumbled past, out to the docks, and from there into the gray haze of morning carriages.