The Kingdom of Bones

TWENTY-SIX

Cartaphilus!” she screamed at the floor. “Salathiel!” And she would have screamed more had Sayers not taken advantage of her distraction to floor her with a neat right-cross clip. In some secret and shameful corner of his heart he’d always wondered what it would be like to hit a woman, in the way that the mind tends to dally with the taboos it most ought to shrink from. Like defiling the cross, or dissecting a fairy. It was the thought that could not be entertained, the awe that one sensed before a door that one never dared to open.

Yet when the moment came, it gave him no trouble at all. He responded as he would to any armed man who had cut him and now threatened his life. Only as she hit the floor, with the sword clattering away from her outflung hand, did he recognize the wrong in it. But by then she was down, and he was safe.

He tried to prize open the leaves of the trap, but the stage carpenter had done his work well and they were too close a fit. From the stalls, an onlooker would detect no sign of any device. Sayers crossed the stage to where the sword had fallen, and picked it up. The Mute Woman was stirring slightly, but was no threat to him for the moment. Using the tip of the blade, he levered out one of the star sections and then was able to lift the others and so open up the trap completely.

The first thing that he saw when he looked down was the body of Edmund Whitlock, sprawled across the apparatus. The platform had jammed about halfway up and his limbs were hanging over its edges. There was little blood, but by the look of him his neck was broken. Sayers swung himself down into the hole and, placing his feet with care so as to bestride the body, he lowered his weight onto the platform. With a load of two grown men on board, it slowly descended in its runners. When he could reach the lever that would lock off the counterweights, Sayers secured it.

Whitlock was dead. There was no doubting it now. But where was Louise? When he’d seen the two of them last, they’d been together. He looked around in the gloom of the stage basement, but the only face that he could see was Sebastian Becker’s. The policeman was sitting on the ground a few yards away, with his back against one of the hefty wooden pillars. There was soot and dust everywhere, but he seemed not to care. He was staring at Whitlock’s outstretched body.

“Where’s Louise?” Sayers said. “Becker, where is she?”

Becker didn’t respond until Sayers climbed through the woodwork to where he was sitting. Then the policeman finally seemed to become aware of him, without actually taking his attention from the body.

“I do not know what I saw,” he said.

“You saw a man meet an end he well deserved,” Sayers said. “But what happened to Louise? Was she with him?”

“She went to him,” the policeman said. “He’d flung her aside, but she went to him. She took the blood from his face, and she drew it onto her own. Like tears. I called to her. I would have gone closer, but she signaled me a warning.”

“Against what?”

“I cannot say. But it stopped me as I stood. She took his face in both her hands and placed her lips against his. I do not know if he was dead, or on the point of death. But she drew out his last breath and made it her own.”

Finally tearing his gaze from the dead actor-manager, Sebastian Becker turned his head to look at Tom Sayers.

He said, “It was not physical. Nor material. I don’t know what it was I saw. But I can swear to you, Sayers. I will swear it until my dying day. I did see something happen. I swear that something went from him to her.”

As Tom Sayers had been entering the basement through the star trap, Louise had been leaving it by the ladder. Her heart was calm and her head was clear. For the first time in many weeks, she felt that her life now had a shape and a purpose.

What shape, and what purpose, she did not yet know. She merely sensed the presence of meaning, where before there had been none. It flooded her, it filled her. It was as if she began to have an exact sense of her location in the great scheme of things, all the way from the center of her being out past the sun to the cold, cold stars.

She found the Silent Man and his wife on their way to the pass door. They were a sorry-looking pair. It would have been hard to say which of them was holding the other up.

She stopped them and said, “Listen to me. Whitlock is dead. I have bared my soul to God and offered myself for damnation in his place. I believe that God has considered the condition of my soul, and has accepted my offer. I am in hell already. Let Whitlock find peace. As God is my witness, for the things I have done I will not be redeemed. I have opened my heart to the Wanderer’s burden. Will you guide and serve me as you served him?”

They stared. But she did not doubt that they understood. The Silent Man released his wife and took a step closer to Louise. He was studying her, looking into her eyes as if for signs.

She waited, and allowed it. Her dress was torn to the point of indecency and filthy as well, while her cheeks were marked with drying blood. But she stood there, straight and confident and entirely without shame.

After a while, the Silent Man looked back at his wife. She was waiting for his assessment. When her husband nodded, it was as if she filled out and grew an inch or two. The woman’s eyes brightened and her cheeks flushed with life.

“Come,” the man said to Louise, and led the way out of the theater.