“Do not be alarmed,” he murmured. “We had to see what you could do; I had to see it. For myself. I had to be sure.”
He seemed very tall. She stared at his companion—stouter, red-faced, mopping at his moist face—and then back at the man. “Who are you?” she said. “What do you want?”
He came closer. He stood looking down at Teshi lying on the tatami, small and deathly pale. “Your poor sister,” he said. “She must be very cold?”
“What do you want?” Komako said again, fiercely now, stepping in front of Teshi. She clenched her small fists. She couldn’t imagine what a foreigner would want of her. And then she thought of something. “Did my … did my father send you?”
“Oh, child,” said the witch.
The stranger didn’t answer. He was filled with an immense, slow concentration. He crouched down over the open box of dust and took off his black gloves. He had the most beautiful fingers, long and elegant and soft. The skin was like milk. He moved them in a series of strange gestures, as if he were writing in the air.
And then Komako gasped.
For the dust in the box was moving. She watched as it flowed up, up, into the man’s pale hands, leaping playfully from finger to finger, twisting around his wrists, a silver ribbon of dust. He held it there a long moment, as if consoling it, as if it were a living thing. Then he let it pour back down, smoothly, into the open box, and he closed the lid with his long fingers, and he met her eye.
“I’m not here from your father,” he whispered. He ran a hand through his beard. “What we can do, Komako … It is called dustwork, where I come from. It must frighten you sometimes? It must hurt you, to use your gift? And you cannot do it for long, without losing yourself in it?”
She nodded, fingers at her lips, afraid to speak.
“For me also,” said the man, sadness in his voice.
13
JACOB REAPER, JACOB BLOOD
The bearded man was, of course, Jacob Marber. Young still, in those days, his world still full of the possible.
The summer light was going when he left the witch’s garden. The mud streets beyond her house were quiet and there were crows on the wet roof tiles, watchful. He and Coulton hailed a rickshaw and made their bumpy way back, past darkening shop fronts, torchlights in the alleys, all the way back to the foreigners’ inn above the harbor. The diseased city stank of decay. Jacob held his silk hat in his fingers and turned it, turned it, preoccupied, brooding about the girl Komako and what he’d seen her do. He felt strangely happy. He’d never met another who could work the dust.
The rickshaw hit a loose wood block in the street and lurched and Coulton put out a fast hand, swaying. “Well,” he said, breaking his silence. “She isn’t coming with us easy, that one.”
Jacob glanced over in surprise. “I thought it went rather well.”
“The devil it did.”
“She’ll come around. Give her a day.”
Coulton gave him that look. Jacob didn’t know the man well. Coulton was older by ten years and liked to remind Jacob of it and to use it to defend a cynicism Jacob suspected wasn’t even entirely real. “Listen, lad,” Coulton said now. “You get to my age, you seen a share of crazy in your life. I’m telling you, that one ain’t picking up what we’re putting down.”
Jacob put on his hat, slowly, adjusting the brim. He watched the man in rags running their rickshaw, barefoot, his skin shining with sweat. The tall wheel whirred at his left elbow. He said, “There’s always a way. She’ll listen.”
“There ain’t always a way.”
Jacob grinned.
He watched Coulton brush grimly at his sleeves. “You’re like a bloody puppy, lad. I worry for you, I do.”
The truth was, though, he wasn’t half so sure as he let on. The rickshaw rattled on, into the coming darkness, the streets gleaming. It wasn’t only their long sea journey, and it wasn’t only this little girl and her sister. Lately, he kept seeing his boyhood self, struggling as a sweep in the grimy narrow chimneys of Vienna, half-starved, red-eyed, desperate, in those lonely years after his twin’s death.
That was before Henry Berghast had come into his life, before he’d been plucked out of its horrors, taken back to Cairndale, clothed, fed, guided. But he’d already got sick from that first life; his breathing hadn’t ever been right; and there was a different kind of sickness in his heart. He always thought: Why couldn’t Berghast have come sooner, why couldn’t he have come while his brother Bertolt still lived?