The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(95)

“Something is not right,” Rurick said. “This place, it is deserted.”

“He told me to come here.”

“Do you remember rule one?”

“He said he would be here.”

“Here,” Plešec repeated. “But where is ‘here’? What is this place?”

“It’s called a Dakhma,” I answered.

Rurick pressed his hand to his mouth. “What is that smell?”

I decided Rurick had to be first. Rurick had the gun. I dropped my hand into my jacket pocket.

Give it to Will Henry; I’ve nowhere to put it.

If you carried a smaller weapon, you could stick it in your garter.

“Something is not right here,” Plešec said. He turned to Rurick. “Something is not right.”

There is the boy in the inner circle, above the pit in which lies the dry bones and the dust of the dry bones. He is for the sun now and the flies and the birds that take his sightless eyes first. It is the first hour of the fourth day, above the pit, at the summit of the abyss.

Rurick’s eyes widened. His mouth came open. The last thing he saw before the bullet tore into his brain did not make sense. Having been a very self-assured man, he died very confused.

Plešec lunged forward; the knife blade flashed in the final, dying embers of daylight. His thrust tore into my shirt-front; the knife’s tip struck Fadil’s present that hung around my neck, the scarab to bring me good luck; and I fired point-blank into his stomach.

He fell face-first at my feet. I stumbled backward until I smacked against the white wall of the tower, and then my >knees gave out and I sank onto the stony ground with Plešec, who was not dead but bleeding badly and crawling toward me, and his blood shone wetly on the bare rock, trailing behind his jerking legs.

I raised the doctor’s revolver to the level of his eyes. I held the gun in both hands, but I still couldn’t keep it steady.

He stopped. He rolled onto his side. He clutched his bleeding stomach with one hand and reached toward me with the other. I didn’t move. He was nasu, unclean.

I looked past him, to the sea framed in the arched opening of the wall, to the line formed where the water met the sky. The world was not round, I realized. The world was a plate.

“Please,” he whispered. “Don’t.”

Unlike Rurick, Plešec did not die confused.

The boy’s spirit comes to the Chinvato-Peretu, the bridge of sighs joining the two worlds. There he meets himself in the form of a beautiful maiden, his Kainini-Keherpa, who guides him to Mithra to be judged for what he has done and what he has left undone.

I left them there for the flies and the birds and the sun and the wind. In the silence outside the Tour du Silence, I left them. Where the faceless dead faced the sky, I left them there at the center of the world.

Folio X: Tυφωεύς

Chapter Thirty-Three: “Our Only Hope for Success”

I discovered Arthur Rimbaud lounging on the front steps of the Grand Hotel De L’Univers, wearing a fresh shirt and an ironic smile.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?” I felt certain he could see it in my eyes, smell it rising from my being. The Zoroastrians believe the dead do not depart at first; for three days they circle around their abandoned bodies, lost and forlorn. They have been evicted, and they do not understand why.

“Has Dr. Warthrop returned?” I asked.

“Yes, but he is about to leave again—to look for you.”

“Where is he?”

“There,” he said, with a nod toward the lobby. I took the steps two at a time. “Better have something good to say. He has a few good things to say to you,” he called after me.

The monstrumologist was standing in the middle of the room surrounded by several uniformed members of the British colonial police, as well as one or two armed sepoys. Warthrop, by far the most experienced hunter in the group, spotted me first. He shoved a man out of his way and strode over to greet me with a hard slap against the side of my head.

“Where have you been, Will Henry?” he cried. His face was contorted with fury and pent-up anxiety. I’d seen him that way before. I will not suffer you to die! He grabbed my shoulders and roughly shook me. “Tell me! Why did you wander off like that? Didn’t I tell you to stay with Monsieur Rimbaud? Why didn’t you wait for me? Well? Have you nothing to say for yourself? Speak!”

“I’m sorry, sir—”

“Sorry? You are sorry?” He shook his head with wonder. Keeping one hand on my shoulder—fearing, perhaps, I might fly away unless anchored—he turned to the search party, informed them that the lost little lamb had wandered home, and thanked them for their speedy response to his call for help. He said no more until they had gone, and then he said to me, “With no further halfhearted apologies, Will Henry, please explain why you snuck off without a word to anyone.”

I avoided his eyes. “I went to look for you, sir.”

“Will Henry…”

“I tried to get Monsieur Rimbaud to come with me, but he said he was tired and wanted to take a nap.”

“And the reason you took it into your head to look for me?”

“I thought…” The words would not come.

“Yes, I am interested in hearing those—your thoughts. What were you thinking? And if you were thinking some ill fate had befallen me, why did you go off by yourself? Did it not occur to you to wake Rimbaud from his nap and at least tell him where you were going?”