The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(115)

“How is the baby?” I asked.

“Hungry,” he answered. “And very weak.” The child was gnawing on the monstrumologist’s knuckle. “But he has no symptoms, and certainly he was exposed through his mother’s milk. It suggests he may have some kind of natural immunity.” He nodded toward the instrument case beside him. “I have taken samples of his blood. If nothing else comes of this, we may be able to find a cure for the rot of stars, Will Henry.”

Kearns returned a few minutes later, carrying his rifle and a small leather satchel. He dug through his small stash of supplies inside the cave and returned with a bundle of rags, which he arranged carefully into a conical pile before setting it on fire. The rags burned hot and bright at first, and then settled into a smoldering mound.

“There’s no decent wood in these mountains for a proper fire,” he said. He dug into his satchel and removed three dead spiders—the largest I had ever seen, bigger than Awaale’s enormous hand—and dropped them into the middle of the smoking ashes. “Solifugae—camel spiders. You must try one, Pelliore. I’ve developed somewhat of a taste for them.”

“How far is it to the nesting grounds?” asked my master, ignoring Kearns’s suggestion.

“Not far. Half a day if we don’t stop to rest and the mountain is in a good mood. It has moods, you know. Yesterday it was very angry, stomping and puffing its stony cheeks. He is very prideful, and quick to anger. Not unlike a certain scientist I know.”

“The child is starving,” Awaale said, his patience with Kearns wilting. “I must leave at once for Hoq. Do you know the way?”

“I do.” Kearns stabbed one of the spiders with the tip of his knife and crammed the entire blackened wad into his mouth. A bit of greenish-yellow juice rolled down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, chewing thoughtfully. “But I wish you’d reconsider. Your services would be much more valuable to us, and as I’ve said, the villagers’ first duty is to protect themselves from potential carriers. They will kill the child… and probably anyone who bears it.”

Awaale stiffened and stuck out his huge chest. “Do you think I am afraid?”

“No, I think you’re stupid.”

“Hope is not stupid. Faith is not stupid.”

“You left out charity,” Kearns said with a wicked smile.

“That is enough, Kearns,” said the monstrumologist wearily. “I am in agreement with Awaale. It is true; the child may be doomed. It is also true that without Awaale we may be doomed. But the alternative is worse. It is no alternative, really.”

Warthrop rose to his feet. He seemed to tower over us, as tall and impregnable as the soaring peaks encircling the camp, a colossus hewn from flesh and blood, against which the mighty bones of the earth seemed puny.

“You may have fallen long ago over the edge of the world, John, but I have not. Not yet anyway. To show mercy is not naïve. To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness. It is fundamentally human. Of course the child is doomed. We are all doomed; we are all poisoned from our birth by the rot of stars. That does not mean we should succumb like you to the seductive fallacy of despair, the dark tide that would drown us. You may think I’m stupid, you may call me a madman and a fool, but at least I stand upright in a fallen world. At least I have yet, like you, to fall off the edge into the abyss.

“Now bring me to it, so I might confess with my lips what I have seen with my eyes. The time has come to redeem the time, so bring me to it, damn you. Bring me to the magnificum.”

Chapter Forty-One: “The Angel of Death”

Awaale and the child parted our company not long thereafter, with nothing more than one day’s rations and ammunition for the rifle. “If you hurry, you might make it to the caves before nightfall,” Kearns told him. He sketched out a crude map on a slip of paper and handed it to the Somali. “But if night catches you and you run across my Minotaur, remember that I am Theseus in this little drama and you are… Well, I̻m not sure who you are.”

“Shut up,” Awaale said.

“You’re a dead man,” Kearns returned cheerfully. “On a fool’s errand.”

“And you are a fool with a dead man’s heart,” Awaale retorted. He drew me aside and said, “I have something for you, walaalo.” He pulled out his long knife and pressed it into my hand. “I will not tell you that it will bring you luck—it is the knife I used to sacrifice the one I loved—but who knows? You may redeem its blade with the blood of the wicked.” He glowered at Kearns. “No, no, you must keep it. I cannot leave without giving you a present, walaalo. I will see you in Gishub before long, so I will not say good-bye!”

He turned to Warthrop, who said simply, “Don’t fail.”

“You are hard man, dhaktar Pellinore Warthrop. Hard to understand and harder still to like. I will not fail.”

He shouldered his rifle, accepted Warthrop’s burden—the baby looked impossibly small in his massive arms—and headed up the trail. We watched him until he stepped around the bend and was gone.

To the top John Kearns led us now, to the very summit of the abyss, over deep drops and shadow-stuffed ravines, up craggy edifices where every handhold was precarious and every step fraught with peril, around heaps of shattered stone and deep pools of crystalline water reflecting back the empty sky, along terraced ledges thrust out like balconies overlooking the Diksam Plateau, an empty, featureless landscape two thousand feet beneath us. It was cold, and the air plunged into our lungs like the sharp blade of Awaale’s knife.