The Isle of Blood (50 page)

“So they lay eggs, like a bird or reptile.”

Kearns shrugged, smiled. “Haven’t seen an egg—wouldn’t want to. Can’t imagine how that might happen.”

“How many are there?”

“Here on Socotra? Hundreds, I would guess.”

“Hundreds?” The monstrumologist seemed shocked.

“In the world, I would say thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. As many as there are grains of sand on this blessed island’s beach. Look up, Pellinore. How many stars are there in the sky? That’s how many
magnificum
there are, and that’s the number of faces they?”#8221;

My master realized that he was wasting his time. He fell silent, and Kearns fell silent, and then there was the sound of the wind and no other sound for some time.

“If this is one of your tricks, I will kill you. Do you understand?” the doctor said at last.

“Oh, really, Pellinore. I
want
you to find it. Why do you think I sent the
nidus
to you in the first place?”

He asked for his rifle back. Warthrop refused.

“They’ll be here soon, and I’d rather be armed,” Kearns argued. “
You
would rather I’d be armed.”

“Who?” demanded Awaale. “Who will be here soon?”

“The rotters,” Kearns answered. “The children of
Typhoeus
. The blood draws them. They can smell it for miles, especially in this wind. May I please have my gun back?”

“I do not trust this man,” Awaale said. “His name is true. He is
Khasiis
, the evil one.”

“If I wanted to kill you, I had my chance hours ago,” returned Kearns reasonably.

“Will Henry,” the doctor said. “Return Dr. Kearns’s gun to him.”

Awaale muttered something under his breath. Kearns laughed softly. Warthrop rocked the baby in his arms, his expression as troubled as the baby’s was serene.

And thus we waited for the children of
Typhoeus
to come.

Warthrop decided to entrust the child to me.

“If the worst should happen, take him back the way we came,” he instructed me. “Down the path and out of the mountains. Make your way south, back to the sea. Gishub should be relatively safe until the
Dagmar
returns.”

“Let Awaale take it,” I protested. “I want to stay with you.”

“You are fierce, Will Henry,” he acknowledged. “More Torrance-fierce than Kearns-fierce, I hope, but…”

“It is all right,” Awaale put in. “
Walaalo
has his own bargains to keep. But your master is right, at least in this. Do not worry. I will protect him with my life.”

Kearns was loitering near the opening of the cleft, staring into the dark where the body of the woman lay crumpled upon the stone.

“It’s a perfect spot. Perfect!” he breathed. “We could not have arranged it better, Pellinore. I shall take my old roost there, on that ledge on the eastern face. You can take the northern approach, and Awaale the other end, at those boulders marking the trailhead. Oh, that devil Minotaur. I shall have his head ye#8221;

“Minotaur?” echoed the doctor.

“My name for him. A big brute, almost as big as our pirate here. Been after that one for days. He’s not a mindless animal like the others. He’s very clever, probably was a leader in his village, and he’s very, very strong. You can’t miss him—has a long spike growing right out the middle of his forehead—the stag of the herd, as it were. Travels in a pack of them, four or five the last time I counted, but they fall fast from the
pwdre ser
, as you know, Pellinore. So they may be down one or two unless a straggler’s joined the cause. A single bullet won’t take him down. He’s carrying around three of mine and still shows no sign of slowing. The last time I shot him—now, that was quite interesting. The wound bled a good deal, and usually it’s the blood that sets off the frenzy, but with the Minotaur the rest gathered around the spot and one by one gave it this kind of sycophantic lick, a rotter pledge of fealty. It was poignant, really, given that their lifetimes can now be measured in weeks.”

He raised his head, and we listened with him—but I heard nothing but the wind rubbing on stone.

“Something is coming,” he whispered. “I suggest we take our positions, gentlemen. Don’t fire until my signal or unless you have no choice. Best to wait till they’re distracted with the bait; then it’s rather like shooting fish in a barrel. Watch out for my friend the Minotaur!”

He scrambled up the trail; Warthrop followed a few steps behind. Awaale patted my shoulder, picked up his rifle, and took off in the opposite direction. I eased to the very back of the cut and hunkered down, holding the child awkwardly in my lap and thinking how stupid I was to be pressed into a corner like this with no means of escape and no way to defend myself. My fate—and that of the child—was completely in the hands of a psychopathic killer who liked to go by the Somali name for “the evil one.”

The baby whimpered in its sleep. I ran my fingertips lightly over his face, brushing across closed eyelids, his stubby little nose, his soft cheeks. There was another child, not so long ago, whom I had stepped over in a filthy tenement hallway, whom I had abandoned, when it had been in my power to save him, whom I later found floating in pieces in a basement flooded in raw sewage.
You are my redemption, the key to the prison of my sin
, Awaale had said.
By saving you, I will save myself from judgment
. At the time, I will confess, I had a distinctly Warthropian reaction to those words. An illogical leap, I thought, from a chance meeting to divine intervention. But are not all leaps of faith by their nature illogical?
Redeem the time
, the stars had sung down to me. I thought of their song while I caressed the child’s face.
Redeem the time
. If it came to it, I decided, I would leave him here and try to draw them away—an abandonment that this time would not doom but deliver, that would not damn but redeem.

The north wind brought a sound down from the peaks, a high-pitched squeal I can only liken to that of a pig in the slaughterhouse, an ear-piercing shriek that did not strike me as human, and for a terrifying moment I was convinced it was not
Typhoeus
’s children, but
Typhoeus
himself who was coming for Kearns’s “bait.” I pictured the
magnificum
descending the mountainside, pale flesh glistening and covered in wickedly sharp spines, slathering maw agape and dripping shining globs of
pwdre ser
, a black behemoth with twice the reach of a man and three times the height, and a face that was utterly blank, a face that was not a face, the faceless face that caused Pierre Lebroque to cry in the agony of perfect recognition, “
Nullité!
That is all it is! Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

That first shrill call was answered by another, and then another, each from a different direction, and they were drawing closer, the calls coming quicker but in shorter duration, until they resembled the short, hysterical bursts of hyenas on the hunt. Then, abruptly, nothing but the wind. It was terrible sitting there, not knowing what was happening outside. For all I knew, they could have been just outside, waiting for some signal before they sprang. I dropped one hand to the ground and groped about for a rock, a stick, anything I might use as a weapon. In my mind’s eye I saw Mr. Kendall leaping down the stairs, his black eyes filling my vision.

And then I heard, very distinctly, a ripping sound and a loud crunch, the way the leg bone of a chicken sounds when you rip it from the carcass. Something—well, more than one
thing
—was sobbing, a horrible, snuffling, hiccupping kind of wail—the tears of damnation, the bitter despair of the pit, and I knew that they were eating her, tearing her to pieces and stuffing the dripping offal into their mouths, gnashing with fury, chomping with such desperate hunger that more than one had already chewed their own tongues in half. And from his mountain throne
Typhoeus magnificum
, the magnificent father, looked down upon his children, and smiled.

Kearns cried down from his post, giving the waited for signal. I heard only six shots, two from Kearns’s rifle, the rest from Warthrop’s revolver, but their echoes scampered and skittered along the pass, chasing one another down to the bottom. I cried out softly when a large shadow flitted across the opening, and then I realized it was Awaale, running toward the site of the slaughter. I stood up and went outside. I felt no fear now, only the familiar, sickening curiosity to see what should not be seen, what most would not
want
to see, but what I
had
to see.

There were four bodies where before there had been one, all of them draped over one another in a confusing jumble of limbs. I had to step over a rivulet of blood worming its way down the slope.

“Very nice work, Warthrop,” John Kearns was saying. “Four to my two. I’d no idea you were such a fine shot.”

“But how can this be?” Awaale said, his voice shaking with revulsion and wonder. “This woman is very old, yet she is heavy with child.”

“It isn’t a child she’s heavy with,” said Kearns with a smile. “Stand back, gentlemen, and I will show you.”

He pulled a bowie knife from his boot and bent over the old woman, who lay curled on her side, blood pooling beneath her mat of steel gray hair.Kearns did not stab her. He made a quick, shallow incision in her abdomen and then hopped back. The cut pulsed once, and then her stomach blew open with a loud
pop!
spewing a fine, clear mist and a foul-smelling soup of watery blood and atrophied entrails. Kearns laughed heartily and said, “You see? She isn’t pregnant. She’s just got a terrible case of the winds!”

Awaale turned away in disgust, but Warthrop seemed fascinated by the phenomenon, comparing it to the cases of beached whales whose decomposing bodies fill up with gases produced by certain bacteria in their guts, causing them to literally explode. It explained the blasted-open stomachs and bloody walls and ceiling of the death house in Gishub.

“Either some substance contained in the
pwdre ser
or the body’s reaction to the exposure…,” Warthrop mused.

“I thought you’d like it. Remember the Russian I told you about with the obsession with shiny shoes? Happened to him. Hosed down two men while Sidorov was examining him.”

The doctor nodded absently. “I don’t see your Minotaur.”

“No.” Kearns sighed. “He escapes my clutches once again. But I’m not finished with him yet. Before this is over, I shall have his head mounted on my study wall, I can assure you of that!”

There followed a lengthy debate between the monstrumolo-gist and Kearns about what we should do next. We were all exhausted and desperately in need of sleep, but Kearns insisted we should quit the scene immediately. He knew of at least one more troop of “rotters” in the general vicinity, and he worried our luck—or our ammunition—might run out. Warthrop reminded Kearns that he had called it “the perfect spot,” and the monstrumologist said it was better to lay a trap than risk an ambush.

“There is a cave higher up, about a mile from here,” Kearns allowed. “I suppose we could make for that. But it’s really best to keep their hours—sleep during the day and hunt at night.”

“I understand,” Warthrop said. “But we won’t make much of the latter if we don’t get some of the former! Here, Will Henry, I’ll take the child now. Fetch our pack and my instrument case. Kearns and I will take the lead; Will Henry and Awaale in the rear. Quietly now, and quickly.”

And that is how we proceeded deeper into the heart of the mountains. The way was not easy, littered with rocks—some as large as a brougham carriage—riven with deep fissures, at times so narrow we were forced to turn sideways and shuffle with our backs against the sheer cliff face while our toes dangled over the crumbly edge a thousand feet above the jagged ground. The air grew thin and cold. The wind pressed down from above and bit harshly at our cheeks. I felt my face grow numb.

“There is an old saying in my country,
walaalo
,” Awaale said at one point. “‘Do not walk into the snake pit with your eyes open.’ I used to puzzle over that proverb. No more!” He laughed softly. “Do you think this viper Kearns may have been sent by God?”