Komako could see Jacob Marber walking steadily now, calmly, up the long corridor. His face was savaged, his beard matted with his own blood. There was little about him she recognized from the young man who’d rescued her all those years ago, who’d saved her kid sister, Teshi, from that mob in Tokyo, who’d held her as she cried after Teshi was dead. She remembered how he’d talked about his own brother, his frantic search to help him, how he’d confessed that no matter the evil, if something could bring his Bertolt back to him, he’d do it. That something was the drughr. Maybe even while he was helping her, while he was holding her, that drughr had been courting him. She’d carried the guilt of it inside her for so long, the feeling that she’d failed him, that she might have sensed the ravenousness of his grief and helped him out of it except she was too overwhelmed by her own. All her brief life since she’d tried to remember that one truth: that her own suffering, her surrender to it, had increased the store of others’ suffering in the world. But maybe, just maybe, Jacob could still be reasoned with. Maybe there was a part of him in there she could reach. And if not? She’d grown stronger than he could know; let him find it out.
Jacob came on. The candles in the hall smothered, one after another, into smoke. He strode toward them like a harbinger of some greater dark. Komako saw him and was suddenly nine years old again, in the crooked wooden streets of Tokyo, while the rain came down and her sister, Teshi, swayed and Jacob glared at her with an angry fear that was not so far off from love.
“Jacob—！” she cried. “You don’t want this, I know you don’t!”
He paused at her voice. His gaze slid past her to Oskar and Lymenion and then back.
“Komako?” he said, and there was a tiredness in him that nearly broke her heart. Slowly the smoke and dust faded. His eyes were glassy. “Please,” he said, “go. Stand aside. I’m not here to hurt you, any of you. I came for Berghast.”
“You killed the old ones. Out in the field. I watched you—”
“I tried not to. I warned them. They wouldn’t listen. Alice Quicke has something I need.” He studied her in the faint glow of distant fires. “You know nothing of all this, do you?”
Oskar whispered from across the corridor, “Don’t listen to him, Ko. He’s lying.”
But she wasn’t so sure. “Why are you here for Dr. Berghast?”
Jacob spread his hands. A darkness writhed under the skin. The brim of his hat was low over his eyes. “To kill him,” he said softly. “And the keywrasse will help me do it. After Berghast—”
“Yes?”
“I’ll kill the drughr. All of you will be safe.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re evil. Both of them.”
She found the tiny pricks of light where his eyes were and stared at them hard. There was a lump in her throat. She made herself look at him and not look away as she said, “But so are you, Jacob. You’ve become that way, too. You’ve killed. Killing more won’t change it.”
All the while she was drawing closer, biding her time. Lymenion, near her, crept along the wall in darkness. She was maybe ten feet from Jacob when she saw it. On a chain in the watch pocket of his waistcoat, its knuckled head sticking out. The key.
He looked taller, fiercer, but there was also a slouched and twisted cast to the way he moved. He was favoring one side. He’d been savaged by someone, somehow, and the wounds were healing badly. All at once Komako let the chill seep into her wrists and her arms ached and she summoned the living dust to her and let it enter her, a great thick deep void that filled her and filled her, all of this in only an instant, and she felt the satisfaction of knowing Jacob couldn’t have guessed at her power, at what she’d learned to do, at the speed and deftness in it. And she spun a thin strong tendril of dust out toward him, quick as a whip, and snarled the key, and snapped the chain and brought it back to her open hand.
He didn’t even flinch.
He just sighed, as if it was this he’d been afraid of, and lifted the brim of his hat, and she saw what was in his eyes, all the tiredness and resigned fury and the years of cruel acts, and she knew she couldn’t fight him.
She didn’t have even a moment to try to run. Dust was seeping up out of him, long ribbons of darkness, it was inside him, a part of him. And suddenly it was snaking around her ankles, her knees, pinioning her elbows fast to her ribs. She glanced up and started to speak but couldn’t, the dust was pressing on her windpipe, Jacob’s dust.