“Ko?” came Ribs’s voice from nearby. Alice saw smoke curling around the girl’s silhouette, faint, shading her in. “We can’t stay here. If Jacob Marber come into Cairndale, that damn drughr’s got to be close too.”
“Ribs is right,” said Oskar. He was bleeding at his forehead.
Cairndale groaned, shuddered all around them. They didn’t have long. But Alice was peering out through the broken wall, past the dissipating dust, at the island, the vast canopy of its tree. It was all lit up with an eerie blue shine. “You think Charlie’s sealed it?”
“No,” said Komako, joining her. “Not yet. Can you walk?”
In a flash Alice saw the towering horror that had ripped a hole in the air, back in London. None of these kids had seen it. Only she. She looked at them and then at the exhausted keywrasse and knew they couldn’t fight the drughr, not like this.
“We have to get down to the courtyard,” she said, deciding something. She got shakily to her feet. “There’s a carriage there; Margaret and I arrived in it. It can’t have gone far. We have to get all of you out.”
She turned to the keywrasse, and kneeled, so that it came limping to her and nuzzled her open hand. She was holding both weir-bents in her other hand and she set them carefully down in the broken mortar and stepped back.
“These are yours,” she said quietly.
The keywrasse sniffed cautiously at the weir-bents, then raised its snout as if to regard her with wary consideration.
“Go on,” Alice whispered. “Go.”
And the keywrasse, as if understanding, suddenly angled its face sideways and gulped the weir-bents down its throat in two quick gulps, and then turned and padded noiselessly out into the fiery corridor with its shadow sawing over the walls and was gone.
The kids stood back, watching all this in silence.
Ribs, still invisible, groaned. “Bloody Americans! Always got to make the grand gesture, like.”
“What’s that mean?” said Alice.
“It means, maybe next time you could wait till after we get safe.”
Alice started for the hall, checking her revolver as she went, her long coat flapping behind her. “No one’s ever safe,” she muttered, “and there’s never a next time.”
* * *
Just then, while Alice and the children ran through the burning manor, Margaret, on the island, was gripping the ringed knives in her hands and dragging herself slowly across the screaming chamber. The gray figures did not move. They filled her with terror. She knew only that she had to help the poor child, little Marlowe, she had to stop Henry Berghast from whatever it was he was doing. Somehow all this was her fault. She should have known him for what he was, she should have seen it.
She bared her teeth, crawled on. The boy lay slumped at the cistern, unhanded. Everything depended on surprise, on quickness.
But when she was still a few feet away, she saw in shock what he was doing. The drughr, like a stain of darkness, was pressed against the surface of the orsine, trapped there, filled with a fury. Henry Berghast had driven his hand into the muck of the drughr, feeding on it. Then, slowly, he seemed to drag the drughr up, up, so that it rose under the tar-like skin of the orsine, colossal, twelve feet tall. It was struggling and turning its unseeing face in the direction of Marlowe. And as it rose up the screaming gray figures suddenly ceased; they fell silent, with their mouths still black and lightless and wide.
The silence echoed in Margaret’s ears, disorienting her. The blood from the boy’s wrist was still leaking into the waters. She shook her head to clear it.
But then Berghast turned and rose fluidly as if he’d expected her. His beardless face was strained, the dark shadows under his eyes pronounced, the skin across his jaw and cheekbones skull-like and cruel.
His soft measured voice was both his and not his. “Ah, Margaret,” he said. “You have come to warn me about Walter and Mr. Thorpe. You are too late. He is dead.”
She tried to hide the knives but it was too late, he had seen them. He seemed unconcerned. At his back the drughr twisted slowly in its muck, a figure of agony and pity.
“I saw your carriage in the courtyard,” he continued softly. “What has happened to you? You look … wretched.”
He padded in a slow catlike circle around her and then crouched smoothly and seized her wrists. The gloved hand was rough, its wooden plates sharp-edged. It gave off a faint steam though it was cool to the touch. He twisted her knives easily away and she gave a gasp of pain and frustration. The drughr writhed above the orsine, folding over and over itself, like smoke in a jar.