But then Marlowe smiled weakly.
“Charlie,” he said, his voice soft and dry. “I knew … you’d come.”
Charlie felt his chest swell with grief. He wiped at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I’m sorry, Mar, I’m so sorry. I lost it, I lost the glyphic’s heart, I was supposed to seal the orsine, but they took it from me, I tried to stop them—”
But the boy just sighed and closed his eyes again.
“Mar?”
He looked up and saw Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes were open. She was watching him.
“My knives,” she whispered. “If you can. Get to the edge of. The pool. You can still. Stop him.”
He followed her gaze out, saw the long evil-looking things on the floor not far from Berghast.
“The glyphic, he’s gone,” Charlie said, choking back a sob. He couldn’t see what good any of this would do. “The dead will get through now. There’s no way to close the orsine. It doesn’t matter.”
Mrs. Harrogate’s eyes flashed with pain. “It always matters,” she hissed.
Charlie looked at Marlowe, looked back at Mrs. Harrogate. Dr. Berghast was still leaning out over the orsine, plunging his free hand into the muck of the drughr, draining it.
All at once Charlie ducked low, and at a crouch he started forward. He moved from pillar to pillar in the watery blue light. But he couldn’t get to the knives. Almost without thinking, he closed his eyes; he breathed slowly and tried to empty his mind. There was stillness; silence; a feeling of great peace. And he reached out, calmly, and then it was like he was still reaching, still reaching, and he felt the muscles in his arm pull and cramp and pull harder, and it seemed his bones were being sucked from their sockets, and the pain was dizzying; then he felt his fingers close around the hilt of a knife, and he opened his eyes. The knife was heavy, heavier than it should have been, and the metal was warm to the touch. His arm looked weird, snakelike, and silently he drew it back into his flesh, the pain staggering. And yet his heart leaped.
He had done it; he had done the mortaling.
The enormousness of it, of what it meant, vanished in the moment. Berghast was still bleeding the drughr of its strength. He looked bigger, his back broader, he seemed filled with a frenetic energy. It was too late. It was always going to be too late.
Charlie ran forward. He plunged the knife all the way to the hilt directly into Dr. Berghast’s back.
The effect was immediate. The shine flickered; the drughr slid bonelessly back down into the depths of the orsine. Berghast whirled around. His beard was gone, his hair was gone. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in a rictus grin, the eyes sunken and bright. An eerie blue energy was crackling over his skin, over his hand, just like Charlie’d seen with Marlowe. Berghast stumbled, and fell to his knees, as if the effort of whatever he had been doing was too much, and he had nothing left.
Charlie saw the second blade on the sill of the cistern and he lunged for it and came up holding it out in front of him. Berghast hadn’t moved. He was kneeling with his shoulders slumped and his face down and just breathing.
But when Charlie stepped forward to stab him through his heart, Berghast’s gloved hand rose to meet the knife and it clanged aside. He gripped Charlie’s wrist and Charlie felt a savage agonizing fire. Something was happening to him, he could feel it in the old man’s grip, a kind of hollowing out as if some part of his self were being scraped away.
“What—what’re you doing?” he cried.
“You,” gasped Berghast. “You don’t … understand…”
For a long terrible moment the blue fire seemed to engulf both of them. Charlie shuddered in pain. The skin on his wrist was bubbling. But it was worse than that, it was like some part of his insides was being peeled slowly away. Berghast held on, not strong enough to do more. There was a flash of movement on the floor behind Berghast: Mrs. Harrogate had dragged herself across. Charlie watched as she reached up and pushed, ever so gently, on Berghast’s shoulder; and as he wrenched his own wrist away, he saw the man who had done so much harm to all of them lean casually out, and pitch weakly over the edge, into the luminous pool.
It all happened so slowly, with such gentleness, that it didn’t seem real.
But then Berghast started thrashing, trying to keep afloat. And Charlie saw, ascending from the depths of the orsine, a shadowy figure—the drughr—rising up through the cloudy blue water to wrap an arm around Berghast’s throat, and drag him slowly down into the depths, away.