A light was burning in Dr. Berghast’s study.
* * *
Henry Berghast ran a hand over his smooth scalp, down the back of his neck, the skin prickling.
“Marlowe,” he said softly. “You have returned.”
The child stood in the doorway wavering, his face very white. Berghast could see abrasions on his wrists. He was staring hollow-eyed around him, as if he did not know the place, as if there was something he was trying to remember.
“Easy, child,” murmured Berghast, coming toward him with his hands outstretched the way he would approach a skittish horse. “Come, sit. You will be tired.”
The child came dutifully forward, sat in the big armchair by the fire. His voice when he spoke sounded cracked, thin, as if he hadn’t used it in a very long time.
“I … want to see Charlie. Is Charlie … here?” he said.
Berghast was already moving around the desk, locating the glove, returning to gather fuel for the fire in the grate. His manservant, Bailey, had melted back into the shadows on the far wall and loomed there silent, watchful.
“Charlie is safe, child,” said Berghast. “He will be pleased to see you.”
The boy nodded to himself.
For just a moment Berghast felt a quick sharp twinge of guilt, seeing how little he was, how exhausted. He’d been afraid the boy would not make his way back out in time but his fear was not over the child’s welfare but rather his usefulness and he knew, in that moment, that something inside himself had been lost, lost for good. But he’d been alive too long, had seen too many decades slide past, too many lives fade away, for him to dwell on it. Death was a part of life and did not distinguish between the very young and the very old. His death would come in due course too. He would not weep.
He saw the boy looking at the glove in his hands.
“Your Mr. Ovid brought it to me,” he said smoothly. “We hoped it might help us get back to you, get you free. We were just preparing to come for you.”
“It was Jacob Marber,” whispered the boy. “He found us.”
Berghast met Bailey’s eye across the study and something unspoken passed between them. “You saw Jacob? You are certain?”
The boy nodded, his blue eyes watchful.
“What else do you remember?”
“I remember all of it.”
Berghast felt a slow, deep satisfaction welling up inside him. “Of course you do. It is because you are a part of the orsine. I wish to know everything, child. I presume Jacob tried to steal the artifact?”
Again the boy nodded. “But he gave it back.”
At this, Berghast frowned. He knew the nature of the drughr and how badly it wanted the glove and he didn’t understand why Jacob Marber would give it back.
“He’s coming here now,” added the boy quietly. “He’s coming to kill you.”
Berghast crossed to the canvas on his wall, folded his hands at his back. In the dim light the lines seemed to track and drift and move. “So they have failed me, then,” he said. “Your Miss Quicke and Mrs. Harrogate have failed me.”
The boy’s voice faltered. “Is Alice okay?”
“Well. She is resourceful.”
The boy was rubbing at his face with the heels of his hands, obviously exhausted.
“This map,” said Dr. Berghast, gesturing at the canvas, “is rather unusual. If you look closely, you will see it is not made of ink at all. That is dust, Marlowe. It is a map written in dust; and the canvas is human skin. Ah, you are disturbed? Do not be; it is the stretched skin of a dustworker, one of the oldest and greatest of their kind; and it was his wish to be used so. See how the dust moves, even now. It moves because that world you have just come from moves also, is in constant flux.” Berghast leaned forward, filled for just a moment with a deep, liquid regret. He breathed softly. “This was a gift from someone I have not seen now in many years. Oh, we have all lost those we loved; it is a condition of this world. That person had an identical map hanging on her wall, and as this one changed, so did hers. They were connected, you see.”
For a long moment neither spoke. The bonebirds clicked in their cage.
“Jacob didn’t kill my mother, did he?” said the boy. He said it so quietly that Berghast almost didn’t hear it, and when he realized, and looked up in surprise, he knew his face had betrayed the truth.
“No,” he replied, reluctant. “He did not. Did he tell you that? Did he also tell you who your mother is?”
The boy stared at his lap. He nodded.