Quietly, his heart pounding, he began to prepare what he needed. He was remembering the words he had glimpsed in the glove, the incantation, and he began to murmur them now, softly, under his breath. He was not one to believe in the spiritual or the unseen by nature and knew much of what the ancients had believed was nonsense and superstition, but he’d do as the glove had shown him. Better to be cautious.
He heard the child stir.
“You hit me,” the boy whimpered.
Berghast allowed himself a quick brief frown. “You left me no choice,” he murmured. “I did not like doing it. Do not make me hurt you again. Now hush; we are not alone.”
The little boy must have seen them then, too, for he went silent.
Berghast hurried at his work. He approached the orsine warily but the spirit dead paid him no mind. He wore the glove on his left hand and he pressed it against the surface. The orsine’s skin had thinned, split apart in places, already failing.
He ran his big roughened hand over his bare scalp, brooding. Then he began slowly to walk around the cistern, leaning down with the ancient knife and sawing away the roots where they dipped into the pool. The blade cut smoothly, easily, and the glyphic’s roots hardly bled at all.
Still the dead did not stir.
Last of all he brought the boy to the edge of the pool and took off the little shoes and rolled back the trousers. The child was calm, turning his big eyes to the gray figures all around. Berghast plunged the boy’s little white feet into the freezing orsine. They looked waxen in the blue shine.
“Now we wait,” he murmured.
Marlowe looked up in fear. “I know you think you have to do things,” he whispered. “But you don’t. You aren’t a bad person. You can choose.”
“Ah, but I have chosen,” he replied softly. “I have chosen this.”
What the child thought, what he knew, was of no consequence. Jacob Marber was inside Cairndale, carving his way through the old talents. Let him come, he thought with a grim smile. Let him see what will be. The glove had started to ache on his hand. Its little teeth felt like they were chewing away at his wrist. Under his breath, he began to repeat the incantation, the words in their ancient tongue, thrumping like a drumbeat in the back of his throat.
Come, come, come, come.
How long did they wait then in the quiet? It seemed the world around them was receding in the stillness, so that there was no Cairndale, no Marber, no spirit dead nor fire nor ruin. There was only a man and a child, at the edge of a pool, staring in at their own watery selves.
And then, in the murky blue cistern: a shadow. Something was down there. A silhouette was rising up out of the depths, growing bigger, bigger, impossibly large.
“Ah,” Berghast whispered, pleased. He curled his gloved fingers. “Your mother has come, child. She has sensed you, and she has come. Now we can begin.”
The child turned his startled face downward. Berghast seized his little arm and slashed the blade across his wrist. The boy cried out; and the drughr, the beautiful drughr, swam up toward him.
And in that very instant the gathered spirit dead, all as one, opened their dark mouths wide and began to scream.
* * *
Komako watched Alice Quicke shove Charlie through the window, shattering the glass, all of it plunging onto the hard granite setts below. She knew he’d be all right, had seen enough of his talent to know that much, but her heart was sick with fear all the same.
She turned to face Jacob. “You deal with the other one,” she said to Alice. “Jacob’s mine.”
Oskar’s soft features hardened. Lymenion, hulking, glowering, stepped near. But Alice wasn’t listening; she was kneeling in front of a strange dark cat, whispering to it, arguing. When she looked up, she looked right at Komako, and said, “He says he can’t help us. Not against Marber, not while Marber has the weir-bent.”
Komako didn’t understand.
“A key, it’s a key,” Alice said hurriedly. “We have to get it off him, or the wrasse can’t help us.” She must have seen something in Komako’s face, and frowned in quick irritation, and pulled out a cord around her neck and held up a long elaborate-looking key. “It’s sort of like this. I can’t explain it all now. Just look for a key, try to get it away from him.”
“Right. A key—”
Her revolver was in her hand and she was thumbing back the hammer and turning so that her long oilskin cloak snapped behind her. “Hurry. Ribs and I will deal with the litch.”
And she strode off back the way they’d come, murder in her eyes.