The child’s wrist had been cut. Berghast held it stiffly out over the pool, the blood draining. The little boy’s face looked ashen.
Margaret reached for her knives.
* * *
At that very moment, Abigail Davenshaw was walking softly across the carpet in Dr. Berghast’s study, feeling her way with her birch switch, straining to hear any movement. There was the eerie soft clicking of bonebirds in a cage, as regular as machinery in the dark. There was the muffled thrum of the stillness. Footsteps far down a corridor, hurrying.
She made her careful way past the chairs, the desk. She could smell something, a scent of scorched leather and paper, very faint. A bite of cold air came from somewhere under the earth and she found the door she’d gone through before, the door to that strange locked room, standing wide.
“Hello?” she called down. Her voice clattered and faded into the depths. “Dr. Berghast? It is Miss Davenshaw.…”
Nothing.
She bit her lip, frowned.
So be it.
She started down. Feeling her way with her toes, slowly, cautiously at each step, willing herself not to fall here inside the walls, where no one would find her, while Cairndale burned itself to the ground.
But she didn’t fall. And when she got to the bottom she knew by the way the air moved that something was different. The locked door had been ripped from its hinges.
“Hello?” she called uncertainly. She remembered the ragged breathing she’d heard before and she moved now with great caution, the fear she’d felt then filling her again. But whatever she’d heard was gone now, gone or dead; there was nothing alive but her.
When her birch switch touched the thing sprawled out inside the cell she wasn’t sure what to make of it. A chain clinked softly. Her soles slipped in a puddle of some viscous fluid and she knew by the iron scent of it what it was.
She kneeled, fumbled for the face of the dead man. It was Dr. Berghast’s manservant, Bailey. His throat had been torn out, there were deep wounds on his chest and arms. It was like he’d been attacked by a wild animal.
Abigail Davenshaw wet her lips and rose grimly and went back up the long stairs the way she’d come. In the study she made her careful way over to the fire and she fumbled for a poker and she carefully dragged a half-burned journal from the grate. It was this she’d smelled earlier. If Berghast had tried to destroy it, it must hold something of value, she reasoned. Then she went to the desk and tried the drawers and looked for anything more of value. The fires were getting nearer, she could feel the heat through the walls, and at last, with a hard expression on her face, clutching the scorched journal under one arm, Abigail Davenshaw crossed the silent study and fumbled for the door handle and hurried out into the burning building.
* * *
Charlie was scared, so scared.
He flew through the door of Berghast’s study, his shattered collarbone still stitching itself together, the thousand cuts and nicks from the broken glass already healed. The glyphic. He had to locate the glyphic and carve out its heart. He knew he’d have to maybe face down the litch, Walter, the litch who had so terrified him in London and had tried to tear his throat out and whose claws had hurt him in a new way, so that he’d healed only slowly, only painfully. There was his memory of the litch, and there were the dreams he’d suffered in the months since, the dreams of its scrabbling across the ceiling, dropping down on him like some enormous white spider. He’d wake drenched, shivering.
And now he was seeking the very creature out. Everyone was depending on it.
But there wasn’t time to think it through. He only paused long enough to stare around the study, making sure Berghast or his giant manservant were nowhere, his eyes alighting instead on the bonebirds at their perch, clicking their bones softly, on the coals in the grate still pulsing with heat, and then he ran for the door to the tunnels, the door that led below, and out under the loch to the island. If he’d been only just five minutes sooner, he’d have caught Miss Davenshaw plucking the burned journal out of the grate; he’d have seen her, and maybe been able to ask her advice, her help, but she was gone, drifting back out into the labyrinth of Cairndale, into the burning manor with that smoldering journal pressed tightly to her chest, half its secrets burned away, and he’d not see her again.
He descended the stairs three at a time. The tunnel was blacker than anything, the air foul. He’d forgotten a lantern or a candle. His footsteps splashed steadily in the standing water and though at every step he felt like he was about to collide with something he did not and he neither stumbled nor fell.