It was Komako who came back, twenty minutes later, who found him like that. She didn’t explain why. He was alone and then suddenly he was not and he lifted his face and saw her.
“I don’t know what to do,” he whispered, just as if she’d been there the whole time. “I don’t know how to fix it. It’s my fault, Ko. It’s my fault Mar’s still in there.”
Komako rested her hand on his, watchful, quiet. And then, when he said nothing more, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. Her lips were as soft as flowers. He stared in surprise.
Her eyes were grave. “We’ll find a way, Charlie,” she said. “Somehow we will.”
He swallowed. The heat had risen to his face and he was flustered and he swallowed again. “Yeah,” he said.
“Just don’t give up hope.”
But he wasn’t about to. Hope wasn’t something he could afford to give up. “Marlowe’s still alive, Ko,” he said suddenly, fiercely. “I can feel it. He’s, he’s trying to—”
But then he broke off, staring out at the mist.
“What is it, Charlie?” she whispered.
“He’s trying to get back,” he said softly.
38
THE LAND OF THE DEAD IS ALL AROUND
The thought unfurled in the glyphic’s mind like a flower.
Jacob Marber is coming.
Time was a mist all adrift around him, without future or past, and he dreamed as he had always done of the beginning and the end of things. He was dying. This he knew as he knew the soft give of the earth in his fingers, as he knew the feel of sunlight on the baked stones of the monastery above him. He had lived longer than there had been nations and he observed the workings of the living with a detachment. He had seen generations pass into dust and lived on and the greater pain in such a long life was the remembering. Now he stirred and he felt the slow tendrils of root stir and shiver all along the tunnel and through the stones and up to where the orsine lay.
Soon, now, Jacob Marber will be through.
There was that ancient haelan, Berghast, who had lost his talent, who feared the glyphic’s dying and brought elixirs to keep him alive, and there was the terrible hunger deep inside him, like a fire that would not go out. And there were all those others, the talents in the big house across the loch, who used to come to him sometimes, to ask his permission to enter the orsine. And there were the dark ones in the other world, moving, always moving like water in a river, but with nowhere to go, and the evil that lurked just on the other side of that, desperate, furied, utterly inhuman and unknowable and black. It was she whom he held the orsine closed against, she alone who made him fear. And far beyond her, a darker power, banished so long ago it was like it had never been.
The glyphic turned his slow tendrils through the earth, feeling the cool soil shift. There, almost hidden, silent, was the man of smoke. Marber. A rip had opened in the fields beyond the wards and he was pressing through, even now. Cairndale’s wards would not hold. The glyphic saw in an instant all he would lose, all he would gain, for what was to come and what had already been were as one.
Now he could feel fingernails, scraping at the skin of the orsine, fumbling, feeling for the soft scars where the other’s knife had sawed. If it was a dream or real he couldn’t say. But the pain in him was thick, real, spreading through his limbs like a heat, and he began to shudder, and in the shuddering he sent out dreams, like pollen in a wind, dreams that they might find their dreamers.
Soon.
“Oh,” he whispered, into the darkness under the earth.
Let them know, let them see, let them come before it is too late.
* * *
Henry Berghast woke from the dream filled with an unfamiliar fear and he looked around, confused at first, coming back to himself gradually. A dream. It had been a dream.
He was in his study, his collar loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled. The hour was late, almost evening, to gauge by the deepening blue in the curtains. The fire in the grate was cold. The bonebirds clicked and rattled in their cage. He rubbed his face and he stood—his back stiff—and he rang for his manservant, Bailey.
He’d been waiting, yes. Ever since the Ovid boy had returned from the land of the dead, with the glove in his possession. All he lacked now was a lure to draw the drughr out.
But that, too, would come. He had dreamed it.
He went to the narrow water closet and poured out a basin of cold water and splashed his face and dried it on his shirttails and then he stared into the pier glass. His eyes were pouched and heavy-lidded and old. He held his palms over his white beard and stared as if at a stranger and he drew the hair back from his face and held it flat with his two hands. Then he opened the little cabinet and took out a pair of scissors and a razor. He shaved his beard slowly, pausing often to consider his reflection. It was a face he didn’t know. It amazed him to think about the true faces of things, of what lay beneath the surfaces, how all he and everyone thought they knew was but appearance and illusion. His fingers worked away at his beard. Then he began to cut and shave away the hair over his eyes and across his forehead, at last drawing the razor in long sweeping motions across his scalp, splashing it in the cold basin, until he was standing with small cuts bleeding and his bony scalp weird-looking in the glass.