The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(117)

“These are his hands,” Kearns murmured into my ear. “The hands of the magnificum. It’s very curious to me; I don’t understand what compels them to build the nidus, but they’ll work for days without rest, until the moment they succumb.”

The maker of the nidus was crying. From deep in his throat there issued a whimpering, an inarticulate, protesting whine, as if the irresistible force that drove him also repulsed him, and the tension between them—the him and not-him—could break a world in half.

“Do you hear it, Will?” whispered Kearns excitedly. “That is the voice of the magnificum, the last sound at the end of the world.”

The once-Sidorov reached down to the desecrated body curled at his side and pulled its lifeless left hand to his chest. With an anguished sob the un-Sidorov snapped off the index finger. It pulled free from the corpse’s hand with a soft crunch. He bent down again to incorporate the digit into the “nest.”

The kneeling child of Typhoeus grunted sharply, his back arched, his mouth yawned open, and a viscous stream of clear fluid erupted from his mouth and poured onto his work. Not the rot of stars. Not the spit of monsters. Not pwdre ser but pwdre ddynoliaeth—the rot of humanity.

And John Kearns whispered into my ear: “Do you see it now? You are the nest. You are the hatchling. You are the chrysalis. You are the progeny. You are the rot that falls from stars. All of us—you and I and poor, dear Pellinore. Behold the face of the magnificum, child. And despair.”

Though I was sickened by the sight, I looked. In the bower of the beast at the top of the world, I beheld the face of the magnificum, and I did not turn away.

Behind us a gunshot rang out, the retort no louder than a popgun’s in the thin air. We whirled around. In the drifting mist I made out the shape of a tall man striding across the lake bed. He walked up to one of the kneeling figures and shot it point-blank in the back of the head. Then he walked on, stepping over the fallen as he went, till he reached the next one, whom he executed in the same manner. The monstrumologist paused only once in his rounds—to reload the revolver. He worked his way around the entire cavity, his actions methodical and eerily unhesitant—walk over to the kneeling victim, stop, blast apart his head, move on to the next.

You have given yourself in service to ha-Mashchit, the destroyer, the angel of death.

I stood up when Sidorov’s turn came, but Warthrop said nothing as he passed. He walked straight to the mindless artisan, raised the gun, and put a bullet into what was left of his brain.

He walked back to us, and the fog melted before him, burned away by the cold fire that roared in his eyes. I did not recognize him, this man with the tangled beard and long, wind-teased hair and eyes whose icy flame could freeze the sun. I do not know how to refer to the man who now strode toward us. I cannot call him Pellinore Warthrop or “the monstrumologist” or “the doctor,” for he was not the same man who had attained the summit of the abyss, the locus ex magnificum, the beating heart of the nameless unwinding thing one ten-thousandth of an inch outside our range of vision.

The stranger seized Kearns by the collar and said, “Where is it? Where is the magnificum?”

“Have you not eyes? Open them, and see.”

I heard a sharp click—the hammer drawing back. I saw a flash of black—the barrel coming round.

Kearns barely flinched. “Pull that trigger, and you’ll never get out of these mountains alive.”

e is it?” Finger quivering on the trigger.

“Ask Will Henry. He’s just a boy, and he sees it. You’re the monstrumologist; how is it that you cannot? Look at it, Pellinore. Turn and see! The Faceless One. The Faceless One. You have been pursuing something that has been right in front of you since the beginning. There is no monster. There are only men.”

He might have killed John Kearns then. He had come to that place—the same place, here at the top of the world, where, at its center, I had stood. I will tell you honestly that it is not very hard to kill a man in that place. It takes hardly any thought at all. It is the place of the unwinding, the place where hunter meets monster and sees in its face his own reflected. It is the place where desire meets despair.

I had to stop him. I said, “He’s right, sir. We need him.”

He did not look at me. Though I stood right next to him, he was alone in that place. I pulled on his arm; it felt like iron beneath my fingers.

“Dr. Warthrop, please, listen. You can’t. You can’t.”

“You’re lying,” he shouted into Kearns’s face. “This is another of your damnable tricks. You think it’s funny to make a fool of me—”

“Oh, you don’t need my help for that,” Kearns responded, laughing. “Of course I would love to take the credit for our penchant to put a monster’s face on all things monstrous. It’s comforting, in a way, to think a big dragon drags us up into the sky and rips us to shreds or that some gigantic spider weaves her nest from our leavings. If we’re going to be put in our place in the grand scheme of things, why, it had better damn well be from something impressive.”

The doctor’s hand had begun to shake. I was afraid he might pull the trigger accidently.

“There is… nothing,” Warthrop said hesitantly, echoing the anguished Nullité! of Pierre Lebroque.

“Nothing!” cried Kearns in mock astonishment. “Tell that to poor Sidorov, or to that shredded-up piece of clay beside him. Tell it to those poor buggers in Gishub or the mother who lost her child or the child who lost his mother! Tell it to the czar and those of his ilk who would tame the magnificum to subdue the world! Really, Pellinore, what sort of monstrumologist are you? A contagion with the potential to wipe out the entire human species—and you call it nothing!”