“Ready?” he asks and Rhyme nods.
The Keeper looks around the office once more but takes nothing save the glass of wine as they move into the next room, the ginger cat following.
“Could you give me a hand with this, please?” the Keeper asks, placing his wine on a shelf and together he and Rhyme move the large painting of Zachary and Dorian aside, revealing the door set into the stone wall behind it.
“Where shall we go?” the Keeper asks.
Rhyme hesitates, looking at the door and then back over her shoulder. The sea has reached the office, lapping at the desk and the candles and toppling the broom that had been resting in a corner.
“We are past the time for vows,” the Keeper adds and Rhyme turns back to him.
“I’d like to be there, if we can,” she says, each word careful and slow, sitting strangely on a tongue she has not used for speaking in years. “Wouldn’t you?”
The Keeper considers this suggestion. He takes a watch from the pocket of his suit and looks at it, turning the hands this way and that before he nods.
“I suppose we have the time,” he says.
Rhyme picks up the ginger cat.
The Keeper places his hand on the door and the door listens to its instructions. It knows where it is meant to open, though it could open anywhere.
Waves of honey sweep into the room as the Keeper opens the door.
“Quickly now,” he says, ushering Rhyme and the cat through the door and out into the cloud-covered daylight.
The Keeper turns back and lifts the glass of wine from the shelf.
“To Seeking,” he says, raising his glass to the approaching sea.
The sea does not answer.
The Keeper drops the glass, letting it spill and shatter on the floor by his feet, and then he steps out of this sinking Harbor and into the world above.
The door closes and the Starless Sea crashes into it, flooding the office and the room beyond. It smothers the fire and the smoldering braids within it and slides over the painting, pulling measures of time and depictions of fates under its surface.
This space that was once a Harbor is now part of the Starless Sea again.
All of its stories returned to their source.
Far above, on a grey city sidewalk, the Keeper pauses to glance in the window of a bookstore while Rhyme stares up at the tall buildings and the ginger cat glares at nothing and everything.
They continue walking and when they reach the corner Rhyme looks at the sign informing her that they are leaving Bay Street and turning onto King.
Perched on the street sign there is an owl, staring down at her.
No one else seems to notice it.
For the first time in a long time, Rhyme doesn’t know what it means.
Or what will happen next.
DORIAN SITS ON the stone shore next to Zachary’s body at the edge of the Starless Sea.
He has sobbed himself numb and now he simply sits, not wanting to see the unchanging tableau in front of him and unable to look away.
He keeps thinking about the first thing he encountered in this place that looked like Zachary. He doesn’t know how long ago it was, he only remembers how unprepared he was, even after multiple Allegras and greater nightmares wearing the skin of his sister who died when he was seventeen.
It was snowing. Dorian only believed for a moment that it was really Zachary and that moment was enough. Enough for the thing that was not Zachary even though it wore his face to disarm him. To bring him to his knees and Dorian does not remember how he managed to dodge the claws that came for him in the blood-soaked snow quickly enough to retrieve the sword and get to his feet again.