The Isle of Blood

“Stay out here,” he ordered Awaale before we stepped inside. “Shoot anything that moves.”

There was no question what had delivered these corpses to the makeshift tomb. While I held the light, the monstrumologist examined their eyes—those that still had eyes—and they stared sightlessly back at him with irises the size of dimes—Oculus Dei, the eyes of God inanimate. The same sharp-tipped bony growths that had erupted over the entirety of Mr. Kendall’s body protruded through their pale papery skin. The same exposed, swollen muscles and yellowish rock-hard claws for nails. The doctor puzzled over several corpses whose bodies appeared to have blown apart, spraying the walls and ceiling with their pulverized innards. A woman who’d already given up her face to the progeny of the flies that swarmed around our heads, whose skull grinned wetly at the doctor as he bent to examine her—brushing the maggots away with his little finger—gave away her particular causa mortis. Her cheekbones had been shattered, her skull crushed, her chin broken in half. She had not perished from the pwdre ser; she had been beaten to death.

Beside her a man lay on his side holding a child to his chest. It was a touching tableau, until I saw the claws imbedded to their roots in the child’s back and the stringy bits of its dried flesh hanging from the man’s elongated incisors. The child exhibited no signs of exposure; she had been healthy when the man had pulled her into his arms.

“It is wondrous, Will Henry,” breathed the monstrumologist over the maddening hum of the flies. “I feared we might be wrong—that Socotra was not the locus ex magnificum. But we have found it, haven’t we? And is it not wondrous?”

I agreed with him. It was wondrous.

He insisted on inspecting the rest of the village, so house by house we went, with Awaale standing guard at the door of each. Some we found relatively undisturbed, as if the inhabitants had simply stepped out for a few moments and were expecting to return. Other houses displayed evidence of violent struggle—tables overturned, cookware shattered, clothing strewn across the floor, blood splashed upon the walls and splattered in cone-shaped patterns across the ceilings.

We came to one house that appeared abandoned, but as we turned to leave, a pile of rags in the corner quivered and a small hand emerged, clawing impotently in the direction of the lamp.

The doctor drew out his revolver. He motioned for me to stay back and eased toward the squirming pile. The little fingers undulated, fell to the floor, and commenced to scrape across the hard stone with a horrid, dry scratching sound. Standing as far back as possible, Warthrop leaned down and carefully unpacked the makeshift cocoon, until he revealed a child, a boy no more than five, I guessed, in the final stages of exposure, with huge black eyes, more marsupial than human, and a suppurating face split apart by dozens of thornlike growths. He was naked from the waist up; his trousers hung about him in tatters. Long lacerations ran down his chest, like the mauling marks of a tiger; the wounds wept with fresh blood, and his lips shone with it and his nails dripped with it, and I remembered what the doctor had told me and realized that the boy was the last of the living and he had turned upon himself; he was eating himself alive.

And when the light struck him, his body jerked violently, his mouth came open in a gargled scream, and he heaved up a mass of clotted blood mixed with a clear, viscous fluid. The boy lunged toward the light, but he was very weak; he collapsed upon his belly, clawing at the hard stone. His back arched, and the skin pulled taut over the protuberances growing from his spine and then split apart, from the base of his neck to his lower back, like a zipper coming open.

Awaale heard my cry of revulsion and rushed into the house in time to see the monstrumologist step up to the writhing body, level the revolver at the small head, and, with a quick squeeze of his finger, launch a saving bullet into what was left of the child’s brain.

The former pirate (who had lost count of the number he had killed; Awaale the Devil, they had called him) stared at Warthrop uncomprehendingly for a long moment. Then he looked at the dead child by the doctor’s feet. One of the tiny hands had fallen upon Warthrop’s shoe and was clutching it tightly, as if it had been his favorite toy, and the blood from the wound spread out slowly beneath his small, round head, creating a half-moon shape that reminded me of a Byzantine painting of the Christ child.

Awaale backed out the open doorway without saying a word. The doctor’s shoulders relaxed—Awaale’s appearance had unnerved him more than shooting the child—and he asked for his instrument case.

“Just a sample or two—the first fresh one we’ve found. I won’t need you for this, Will Henry. Perhaps you should keep watch with Awaale.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, you had better take this.” He dropped the revolver into my hands. “You aren’t afraid to use it, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Awaale was sitting in the dirt just to the left of the doorway, pressing his back against the wall of the house, facing toward the sea. I sat beside him. We were only a mile from the ocean, but there was no breeze. The air was still and heavy with dust, and towering behind us, like a great gray battlement, the gray cliffs of the Diksam Plateau.

“Who is this man?” he asked me. “Who is this dhaktar you serve?”

“He is a monstrumologist.”

“A strange name, walaalo.

What does it mean?”

“Someone who studies monsters.”

“What monsters?”

“The ones worth studying, I suppose.”

“The one in there—who looked so very much like a child, a little boy—he was a monster?”

“He was sick, Awaale—very sick. The doctor did the only thing he could. He was… he was helping him.”

“Helping him? What a very strange kind of medicine this monstrumology is!” He looked at me. “And you have been with him how long?”

“Two years now.” I could not meet his appraising stare. I kept my face toward the unseen sea.

“And such things”—he meant what had happened inside the little stone house—“they are not new to you?”

“No, Awaale,” I said. “They are not new to me.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh, walaalo.” His huge hand engulfed mine. “I am sorry; I did not know. You have seen the face of the faceless one, haven’t you?”

He closed his eyes and his lips moved, but he spoke no word. It took me an absurdly long time to realize that he was praying.

The doctor stepped outside, and Awaale and I scrambled to our feet. We both were anxious to quit Gishub. The village was nasu. The monstrumologist had a different idea.

“We will stay here for the night,” he announced quietly. “By all accounts magnificum is a nocturnal hunter, and as his hunters, we should keep his hours, but there is great risk in that. Exposure to pwdre ser leads to extreme sensitivity to light as well as a ravenous appetite for human flesh. A brilliant adaptation, really, for by so infecting his prey he forces them to keep his hours. The survivors act as his scouts. Oculus Dei indeed!”

We chose one of the clean abandoned houses in which to spend the rest of the night. Awaale volunteered to take the first watch, but the doctor demurred; he was not tired. He would wake Awaale in four hours.

“I shall take the rifle. Will Henry, give the revolver to Awaale, and try to get some sleep! We have a long march ahead of us.”

There were no beds, just sleeping mats that we rolled out onto the floor of hard-packed dirt. I saw the monstrumologist sit down in the open doorway. Anything that might want to get to us must first get past him.

“Walaalo,” Awaale whispered. “What happened to your hand?”

I kept my voice very low, lest the doctor hear me. “It makes a nest, and it uses its spit—the pwdre ser—to hold it together, and if you touch it, you change into… into what you saw tonight.”

“And that is what happened? Y hoched the nest?”

“No, I… Indirectly, yes, I touched it.”

He was silent for a time. “He cut it off, didn’t he? The dhaktar.”

“Yes. To save me.”

“Like he saved the child.”

“It wasn’t too late for me.”

He was silent for a long time. “What is this thing, this magnificum?”

“No one knows. No one has seen it. That’s why we’ve come.”

“To see it?”

“Or kill one. Or capture it. I think the doctor would like a living one, if he can manage it.”

“For what reason?”

“Because he’s a monstrumologist. That’s what he does.”

We could see the doctor’s still silhouette framed in the doorway. “This is very strange to me, walaalo,” Awaale said. “Like a dream. As if before you came I was awake and now I am dreaming.”

I thought of the woman standing in the kitchen and the tall glass of milk and the smell of warm apples.

“I know,” I said.

They swapped places at some point during the night; I slept through that. I was dreaming I was the boy who had died of cholera and the Nassesalars had borne my swaddled body to the innermost wall of the circle, placing it with my exposed face to the cloud-barren sky. My soul was trapped inside the unclean flesh; it did not circle round like it should. It was trapped, and I could see the crows and white vultures land on the ledge beside me, their small eyes clever and shiny black, and I watched as their sharp beaks filled my frozen vision, when they lowered their heads to peck out my eyes.

Sometime before dawn a startled cry jolted me awake. A shadow raced past me toward the open doorway. It was the monstrumologist. Alarmed, I leapt up and ran after him. Awaale was several feet away from the building, standing beside a small fire he had made with no small effort from bits of driftwood that had littered the beach. He swung the rifle around at the doctor’s approach and then shuffled backward as the monstrumologist attacked the fire, stomping on the glowing embers and grinding them into the sand.

“No light, do you understand?” he snarled into the larger man’s startled face. “You’ll draw every last stinking one of them down upon us.”

“I understand, dhaktar,” Awaale answered, holding up his hand. Perhaps he had begun to think he’d joined company with a madman.

“You have only seen the final stages of an exposure,” the monstrumologist said. “They are very strong and very quick and mad with hunger before they succumb. Ask Will Henry if you doubt me.”

thamped on the lingering coals until the last red speck was black. He ordered me back into the house.

“I’ll stay out here with Awaale,” he said. “In case he is tempted to do some other foolish thing.”

Like accompanying a monstrumologist on the hunt for the Father of Monsters, thought I.

We set out at first light, heading straight toward the rising sun, and our shadows stretched long and thin behind us on the rocky soil. To our right the land sloped gently to the sea. On our left were the cliffs, soaring more than a thousand feet straight up, their craggy faces inscrutable in the early morning sunlight. The wind hissed and whistled sharply high over our heads as it rushed across the highland plains and over the jagged lip of the plateau. Below there was no wind, just the sound of the wind, and that sound was incessant. It hovered in the background like the voice of an unseen chorus.

Around ten o’clock we came upon a great gash in the rock face, carved out over the centuries by the flash floods of the monsoons. The rocks shone wetly in the defile, and water still trickled along the course that cut directly across our path as it made its way toward its birthplace, the sea. Along either side of the riverbed, strange pale-skinned plants clung to the rock, with bulbous trunks and skinny branches festooned with dark green waxy leaves. The monstrumologist pointed these out to me and said, “They grow nowhere else on earth, Will Henry, like so many species on Socotra. This is why the island is called the Galápagos of the East.”

“Is that what you call it?” muttered Awaale under his breath.

The monstrumologist did not hear him, or chose to ignore him. He pointed to the winding path into the cliffs. “What do you think, gentlemen? Shall we break our fast here before we attempt the ascent?”

During our breakfast of cured beef and hardtack, Warthrop took a stick and drew a map of the island in the sand. “We are here, midway between Gishub and Steroh. Up here is Hadibu, about thirty miles to our north and west.”

“Thirty miles?” said Awaale. “That isn’t so bad.”

“Thirty miles as the crow flies,” the doctor said. “Between us and Hadibu lies the Hagghier Mountains, nearly impassible this time of year—flash floods, high winds, rock slides.… No, we must head north first, past the mountains, and then turn west for Hadibu.”

“That is where your monster is, then, in Hadibu?” asked Awaale.

The doctor shook his head. “I’ve no idea. It’s the most logical place to start, though. Hadibu is the largest settlement on the island. If you would find the tiger, find first the antelope.”

We hiked up to the plateau. The ground was steep and wet, and I slipped several times. Each time, Awaale grabbed whatever piece of me was closest at hand—a wrist, the back of my shirt—chuckling at my clumsiness.

“Perhaps I should carry you across my shoulders like a shepherd his lamb, walaalo,” he teased me.

“Perhaps if you and Will Henry would talk less and focus more on the task at hand, we might make better time,” the monstrumologist snapped. With each minute the unnerving fire in his eyes grew brighter and colder. He paused only once about halfway up, when a gust of wind came rushing down the defile. He lifted his head and allowed the wind to bathe his face, eyes closed, arms spread wide for balance. The wind died to a gentle trickle, and he resumed the climb at a quicker pace, as if he had smelled something promising in the wind.

At the top, with the vast heart of Socotra spread out before me, I saw little that I would deem promising. The central plateau was a flat, nearly featureless landscape, crisscrossed with lines of scrub and clusters of green-crowned trees that looked like giant umbrellas turned inside out. Their exposed, interwoven branches reminded me of wicker baskets at first, and then I decided, No, they are more like the intricate weave of a nidus ex magnificum. Two were clinging to the rocks above the riverbed, and we rested for a moment in their meager shade. The day had grown hot, though the dry wind still blew.

“Awaale,” the doctor said. “Let me borrow your knife for a moment. I want to show Will Henry something.”

Warthrop rammed the blade into the trunk of the tree and sliced downward, making a six-inch incision. Thick, bright red resin oozed from the tree’s wound.

Awaale groaned softly. “Bleeding trees? How did I not guess?”

“This is Dragon’s Blood, Will Henry,” the doctor said, “from which Socotra derives one of her names. It was highly valued in antiquity. They say Cleopatra used it for lipstick. This particular species, like the one you saw earlier, grows nowhere else on earth.”

“It does not look like any tree I have ever seen,” said Awaale, carefully wiping the blade clean on his trousers. “But this island is full of things I’ve never seen, and I have seen many, many things.”

Warthrop pointed to his right. “The Hagghier Mountains. And, on the other side, Hadibu.”

In the distance the range undulated in the noonday heat. The tallest peaks reared their saw-toothed heads more than five thousand feet into the air and thrust them into the billowing clouds draped over their jagged shoulders. They puffed their broken cheeks and blew a flurry of wind that stirred the monstrumologist’s dark hair.

“Hurry, gentlemen,” he said. “I think there may be a storm coming.”

The wind off the mountains played with our hair for a while and flicked at our collars. The wind was dry, though, the sky clear, the sun high and hot. After we’d traversed a mile or two, when the gigantic serrated teeth of Socotra sidled closer to our right, the wind grew tired of toying with us and began to prod and push, with an occasional thirty-mile-per-hour shove thrown in, testing our will to hold our northerly course. At one point a massive gust hurled me to the rocky ground. Awaale helped me up and said to the doctor, “If we walked in the gully, the wind could not reach us.”

“If we walked in the gully, a flash flood could sweep us off the plateau and into the ocean,” Warthrop answered testily. Both hado raise their voices to be heard. “But you are free to do as you wish.”

“I think I am not so free, because my wish is to be off this accursed island!”

“I did not ask for you to come!” returned my master.

“I did not come for you, dhaktar. I came for—”

“Yes?” The monstrumologist whirled on him. “Tell me. What did you come for?”

Awaale glanced at me. “For the unspoiled beaches.”

Warthrop stared at him for a long, awful moment. He started to say something, and when his mouth came open, the wind abruptly died. The sudden silence was deafening.

An object tumbled out of the sky and landed at the monstrumologist’s feet. Thin and shriveled, yellowish gray and speckled with gore—a human finger.

We followed the doctor’s thoughtful gaze upward. A shadow was descending from the cloudless sky, a whirling mass of blood and shattered bone and the blasted bits of a human carcass. The doctor was the first to react, and his reaction was to shove me as hard as he could with a panicked cry of “Run, Will Henry! Run!” In two strides he had outpaced Awaale and me, making for a tight grouping of Dragon’s Blood trees clinging precariously to the lip of the three-foot-deep gully along which we’d been hiking. The big Somali scooped me up under his massive arm and followed, shouting in abject terror, “What is this? What is this?” as the bloody rain began to slap and spatter the hard ground, popping all around us. A large piece of an organ—probably a portion of a liver—fell directly in front of him, and Awaale hopped over it with that peculiar grace that is born of desperation. We joined the monstrumologist beneath the relative safety of the trees. He was tearing through the rucksack, looking for our ponchos.

“Did it strike either of you?” Warthrop asked breathlessly. He did not wait for an answer. His eyes glowed with exultation. “Red rain! You understand what this means, don’t you? We are not too late.”

“It feels as if we are,” Awaale shouted in his face before yanking on his poncho.

The monstrumologist laughed, and lifted his face toward the bleeding sky.

The red rain ended as abruptly as it had begun, and now a great shadow raced across the plain, the sky was engulfed, and the wind returned with a vengeful howl. Then the heavens split open in a furious cannonade. Like a gray curtain slamming down came the torrential rain, driven sideways by the wind, full of hate.

“Stay here!” the monstrumologist commanded, and he dove into the maelstrom and was quickly lost in the twisting sheets of gray. He returned after a moment and threw himself to the ground beside us with a great sigh of relief not altogether owing to the paucity of shelter offered by the trees.

“Well, the rain has washed away most of the evidence, but I did manage to scoop this up,” Warthrop said, opening his hand to show us the severed tip of a human finger. He dug into the instrument case for something to put it in. Awaale watched him impassively; it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. His stony expression unnerved me, though.

Not so the doctor of monstrumology. “Before you volunteer for an expedition with a practitioner of aberrant biology, perhaps you should educate yourself in what precisely constitutes aberrant biology,” he said to Awaale.

“The missionaries who taught me must have overlooked that part of my education, dhaktar,” returned Awaale dryly. The poncho was too small for him. The hood would not fit over his large head, and water coursed down his wide face and dripped from his chin. Fat drops splattered from above, filtered by the tangled arms of the Dragon’s Blood trees.

“I am not surprised,” Warthrop return. “It’s not the sort of thing that God-fearing men like to think about.”

“Now you will tell me that you do not fear God.”

“I don’t know enough about him to form a reasonable basis for fear.”

The doctor wrapped his long arms around his upraised knees and looked to the east—the source of the storm and the gruesome shower that had preceded it.

“We must correct our course, gentlemen. The way lies due east of us.”

“East?” Awaale asked. He glanced over his shoulder but could not even see to the other side of the gully through the ruffling gray shroud of water. “But you said the mountains were impassible this time of year. Rock slides and wind and—”

“Well, I suppose we could send Will Henry ahead with a polite note for the magnificum to rendezvous with us in Hadibu?” The monstrumologist laughed harshly and humorlessly, and then spoke gravely. “Those remains were carried aloft by the winds coming down from the Hagghier Mountains, so it is to the Hagghier Mountains that I intend to go, with your charming company or without it!”

He turned to me, unable to restrain his childlike enthusiasm. “You understand what this means, Will Henry. Despite their best efforts to keep the prize from my grasp, the Russians have failed. The magnificum still roams free!”

“Russians?” asked Awaale. “What Russians?”

The doctor ignored him. “I suspect they put their trust in Sidorov, a terrible scientist who couldn’t find the Statue of Liberty if you plunked him down on Bedloe’s Island!” He tapped the container that held the severed digit. “Maybe this belongs to my former colleague—a fitting end to an ignominious career!”

Awaale was slowly shaking his head. In all his travels he’d never met a man like the monstrumologist, and Awaale, you will recall, had traveled with bloodthirsty pirates. Warthrop’s particular brand of bloodlust was of a peculiar vintage, though, a taste that was wholly foreign to the Somali, like the difference between rotgut and fine wine.

The doctor dropped the specimen container into the instrument case and pulled himself to his feet, holding on to the trunk of the Dragon’s Blood tree to keep from sliding down the muddy slope. He cocked hiis head, as if listening for something hidden in the tumult of the smashing rain. In the gully below, the trickle of water had swelled into a shallow stream merrily racing over the rocks.

“We have to cross,” Warthrop said suddenly. He threw the instrument case over his shoulder and started down. “Now!”

We were nearly too late. A wall of water five feet high spun around the bend ahead, a churning debris-laden foaming mass that roared toward us like a runaway locomotive. Halfway across I slipped and pitched forward, my terrified cry smothered by the heavy throw of rain. Awaale, who had already reached the other side, turned and ran back for me, driving his legs furiously through the knee-deep water. He grabbed my arm and slung my body over his shoulders with the same fluid motion of a Steamer Point coal-heaver. With a mighty roar he hurled me up toward the doctor, who managed to grab hold of my collar before the slippery rocks shot me back down. I scrambled backward, like a scuttling crab up the slope, pushing my heels hard against the stone. Below me Awaale clutched and clawed at the rocks, while below him the muddy floodwaters churned and chewed along the course, bearing the effluvia of the mountains, their foul vomitus, to the sea.

Warthrop sensed it coming somehow—he must have, for we did not seek shelter upon reaching the summit of the opposite bank. He squatted on the lip of the gulch, pulled his hat low to shield the rain from his eyes, and waited. He raised his hand, one finger extended, and, as if on cue, a headless human torso came round the bend, turning lazily in the slowing current, its trunk split wide down the middle, its intestines trailing behind in the bloody froth.

More refuse followed. Some of the larger pieces were easily identifiable—a hand here, a head there. Others had been shredded past all recognition. The rain slackened; the current eased; the cosmic stage manager willed the pageant to slow to a stately pace befitting the solemnity of the occasion. The water went from muddy brown to rusty red—a river of blood coursing from the island’s fractured heart.

The monstrumologist looked down upon the human tide, and was entranced.

He murmured. “‘In this thou shalt know that I am the Lord: behold, I will smite with the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in the river, and they shall be turned to blood.’”

“This does not belong to him,” Awaale whispered back. There was no need to whisper, really, yet somehow there was every need. “You pervert his word.”

“To the contrary,” answered the monstrumologist. “I am his devoted servant, the faithful scrivener of his handiwork.”

His hour had come. The hour when all the blood and death in his wake would be justified, the ledger sheet would be balanced, the debt repaid. James and Mary, Erasmus and Malachi, John and Muriel, Damien and Thomas and Jacob and Veronica, and the ones whose names I have forgotten and the ones whose names I never knew… Finding the magnificum would redeem the time, would redeem the dream. It was the hour—his hour—the hour when desire met despair. I saw it in the icy, unquenchable fire within his eyes. What fueled that infernal flame? Was it desire or was it despair?

The rain had departed, but the scudding clouds remained; the day would die a premature death. The mountains loomed before us, their serrated teeth draped in mist and shadow, and the earth beneath our feet was broken and crumbling, like the bones in the Dakhma’s ossuary. Huge boulders littered the way, hurled down in ages past by angry gods long since dead. Deep, shadowed-filled fissures, some only inches across, others spanning six feet or more, fanned out from the mountains’ feet like the tentacles of an enormous beast reaching for us. The ground rose and dipped in a frozen undulation, each hill a little higher, each valley a little shallower, and the wind dove down to test the monstrumologist’s will. It barreled across the plain, a wall of wind against which Warthrop pushed us without pause. It snatched the breath from our lungs, trammeled our words to the ground, spat dust into our eyes, and still he strove against it, bending forward lest he be driven backward or knocked off his feet entirely, moving like a man wading in waist-deep water, each step forward a victory hardly won.

I tried to stay by his side, but little by little the wind wore me down, and I fell farther and farther behind. The doctor did not notice—or did not care—and kept walking, but Awaale came back for me, hollering to Warthrop that I needed to rest. The monstrumologist did not hear him—or did not care.

“Here, I will carry you, walaalo,” Awaale shouted over the wind.

I shook my head. I would be no one’s burden.

We did not halt until we’d reached the mountains’ rock-strewn base. We threw down our packs and collapsed against an outcropping, while the wind whined and whistled through the rocks and the setting sun broke through the clouds, painting the plain below us golden, a breathtaking, starkly beautiful sight.

You’ll swear the sun has fallen into the sea, for every tree on that island is a golden tree, and every leaf a golden leaf, and the leaves shine with a radiance all their own, so even in the darkest night the island seems to burn like a lighthouse beacon.

“Night is coming,” Awaale said. “We must find some shelter.”

The doctor did not argue with him. He may have been thinking, like I was, of iris-less eyes. Awaale rose, shouldered his rifle, and hiked farther up the trail, disappearing between two boulders that stood like mute sentries on either side of a narrow pass—the gateway to the lair of the magnificum.

“It’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” the monstrumologist said, looking down upon the golden plain. “And I have seen many beautiful things. Did you ever dream of anything so lovely, Will Henry?”

I see it, Father! The Isle of Bliss. It burns like the sun in the black water.

“No, sir.”

He looked at me, and I looked back at him, and his face shone in the golden light.

“Did I show you the telegram I received before we left Aden? I don’t think I did.” He pulled the crumpled form from his pocket and pressed it into my hand.

TERRIBLE NEWS. FOOLS GOT IT

WRONG. WERE LOOKING FOR TWO

BALD MEN, ONE SHORT AND FAT

THE OTHER TALL AND THIN. JUST

NOW LEARNED. STAND GUARD,

MIHOS. MENTHU

He watched my expression carefully. I was careful too. I said, “Rurick and Plešec?”

He nodded. “Apparently they slipped through Fadil’s net.”

He pulled out his revolver and held it loosely in his lap. The barrel glistened in the kiss of the dying sun.

“There are two bullets in this chamber. By my count, Will Henry, there should be five. Three missing bullets. Two missing Russians.”

“I didn’t have a choice, sir.”

“Oh, Will Henry,” he said. “Will Henry! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know—”

“Stop that.”

“I didn’t know how—”

“Stop that.”

“I didn’t want you to be… disappointed in me.”

“Disappointed in you? I don’t understand.”

“I was afraid you’d leave me behind again.”

“Why? Because you defended yourself against two soulless brutes who would have killed us both without batting an eye?”

“No, sir,” I answered. “Because I killed them without batting an eye.”

He nodded; he understood.

“Do you want to know how it happened?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The place may vary and the names may be different, but the crime is the same, Will Henry.”

He scrubbed his hand across his whiskered chin, picked up a stick lying by his foot, and began drawing in the soft ground.

“Born under the same roof,” he said pensively. “Perhaps it is like the mark of Cain.” He lifted his face to the setting sun, tapping the end of the stick against the dirt. “Do you remember when you first came to live with me—how we would keep a bucket beside the necropsy table in the event you became ill? And you always became ill—in the beginning. I can’t remember the last time the work made you sick.”

He tossed the stick away; it tumbled down the decline toward the golden plain and was lost.

“It is a dark and dirty business, Will Henry. And you are well on your way.” He patted my knee, not to congratulate, I think, but to console. His tone was sad and bitter. “You are well on your way.”

Awaale returned and reported he’d found a suitable spot to spend the night. We shouldered our packs and followed him up the narrow trail, a steep, serpentine corridor that wound between two sheer rock walls. A lid of low, gray clouds spun restlessly overhead; and a river of wind funneled through the pass. After traversing a hundred yards or so, we came to a cleft in the cliff face, six feet across at the bottom and about that high, narrowing to a point at the top, a deep gash in the stone that could not be properly called a cave, but it would offer some protection from the elements. The shadows inside the cleft were deep, and the doctor peered anxiously inside.

“It is safe,” Awaale assured him. “A scorpion or two, but I took care of them.” His smile was bright. He was proud of his accomplishment.

Exhausted, I threw myself upon the ground and refused to get up, though Awaale tried to entice me with some food. I rolled up my poncho to make a pillow and closed my eyes. Their voices floated over me—some discussion about who would take the first watch. Outside, the clouds sent down the wind and the wind blew out the light, and darkness lighted upon the trail like a great black bird of prey. Someone lay down next to me, and a warm hand pressed briefly upon my brow—Awaale.

I fell into the lightest of dozes, and then light shot into the space, and I sat up—Awaale, too, and then we stood up.

“Dhaktar?” Awaale called softly. “You said no light!”

We could see him standing just outside the opening, holding the lantern in one hand and the revolver in the other, peering off into the gloom.

“There is something out there, on the other side of those rocks,” he said. “Awaale.”

He motioned with the gun. Awaale picked up his rifle and stepped outside. The two men remained motionless for some time.

“There!” whispered Warthrop. “Did you hear it?”

Awaale slowly shook his head. “I hear the wind.”

“There it is again! Stay here.”

The doctor eased up the path, disappearing from view. I scooted forward; Awaale waved me back. He raised his rifle. The doctor’s light faded, and the dark washed over Awaale, swallowing him whole.

“Awaale,” I called to him quietly. “Do you see him?”

The light returned, throwing jittery shadows as it came, flowing over Awaale and then illuminating the entrance to the cleft. Awaale slung his rifle over his shoulder and accepted the lamp from the doctor, who needed both hands to keep his burden upright.

Leaning against the monstrumologist was a young woman, her clothes hanging in tatters, her long hair matted and encrusted with filth, her bare feet leaving bloody tattoos on the rock. He brought her inside, eased her down carefully, and motioned for Awaale to hand me the lamp. I saw then the woman was not alone: She was clutching a sleeping baby to her breast.

She said something. The doctor shook his head; he did not understand. She repeated it, her eyes wide and frightened.

“What is she saying?” Warthrop asked Awaale.

“I don’t know.”

The doctor looked sharply at him. “What do you mean? You speak their language.”

“I speak Somali and English and a little French. I do not know the language on Socotra.”

“You don’t…” Warthrop was staring at him as if he’d just confessed to murder. “Captain Russell told me that you did.”

The woman pulled on Warthrop’s sleeve, pointed outside, and jabbered something hysterically. The doctor’s focus, however, was on poor Awaale.

“It was the only reason I allowed you to come with us! Why did you lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie to you. Captain Julius lied to you.”

“To what purpose?”

“So you would let me come? I don’t know. You should ask him.”

“And I will, if I live long enough!” He turned to me. “My instrument case, Will Henry.” He turned back to the woman. “I am doctor. Doctor. Do you understand?” He tried it in French. Awaale tried it in Somali. The monstrumolo-gist tested Arabic next. Nothing. He pulled the stethoscope from the case and held it up. “See? Doctor.”

She nodded emphatically and broke into a smile. Her teeth were dazzling white against the backdrop of her smudged face. She calmed down considerably, shaking her head with wonder at her good fortune—a doctor, here, of all places! She meekly submitted to the examination—heart, pulse, breathing, and last, her eyes, while I shone the light. The doctor sighed, and pointed at the child. “I will need to examine him. Yes?” He gently slid his hands beneath the slumbering infant, and her eyes hardened; she shook her head violently and tightened her grip. Warthrop held up his hands, smiling reassuringly, and said, “All right, good mother. You may hold him.” He pressed his fingers gently against the child’s wrist. Listened to his heart. Peeled up one eyelid and stared for a very long time at the exposed orb. He smiled again at her, nodding as if to say, He’s fine. He set down the lamp and backed out of the cleft, motioning for me to follow.

“She is in the early stages of exposure,” he said.

Awaale gasped. “And the child?”

“The child is not infected.”

Awaale wiped his hand across his mouth. He looked up and down the path, then back at the doctor.

“What must we do?”

“We must convince her somehow to give up the child,” whispered the monstrumologist.

“And then… what? Kill her?”

Warthrop said nothing. In his eyes was something I rarely saw—the agony of the impossible choice.

“That is what you’re thinking,” Awaale said. “We must kill her.”

“She is doomed,” my master said hoarsely. “She will die anyway, and not before infecting her he child.”

“So we must kill them both.”

“Is that what I said? Listen to me! She has hours. The child could have years, if we can get him away from her in time.”

“I will get him away,” Awaale said grimly. “I will save him, and then you do what you will do.” He stepped into the opening.

“No!” Warthrop grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “If you try to take him now, you risk her inadvertently infecting him—or yourself. It takes but the slightest scratch.”

“Then, what do you suggest?” snapped Awaale. He’d reached the end of his endurance.

“I don’t… I don’t know.” As if winded, the monstrumologist was struggling to catch his breath. “Probably… if I can get close enough, a quick shot to the head…”

“Your hands are shaking,” Awaale pointed out. And they were, badly. “I will do it.”

“You won’t be able to get close enough,” the doctor argued. “Besides, it’s me she trusts,” he added bitterly.

“I’ll do it, Dr. Warthrop.”

The men started. I think they’d forgotten I was standing there. Warthrop looked stunned at my offer, Awaale horrified. I held out my hand for the gun. Unlike the monstrumologist’s, my hands did not shake.

“It’s the only way to save him,” I said.

“No. No, I won’t allow it, Will Henry.”

“Why?”

“Because to shoot someone in self-defense is one thing. This is something entirely different.”

“How?” I demanded. “We can’t let her live. We can’t let him die. I’m just a boy; she won’t suspect anything.”

“I can do it,” the monstrumologist said, sounding more firm than he looked. “It should be me.” He laid his hand upon my shoulder. “Stay here with Awaale, Will Henry.”

He ducked inside the wound in the mountainside. Awaale turned away. I turned to watch.

In the lamplight she looked very young, still in her teens, I guessed, and despite being covered head to toe in dirt, she was beautiful, in the first full flush of womanhood. She smiled trustingly at the doctor as he knelt beside her. He touched her cheek, the heel of his left hand dangerously close to her mouth, while dropping his right hand into his pocket. He spoke softly to her, using his eyes and his tone to lull her. And the gun came out. He held it against his leg outside her range of vision. Now, I thought. Do it now.

I could not see his face. I do not know what she saw there, but she continued to smile and he continued to talk softly, stroking her cheek, and I wondered what he was saying. He could have been saying anything, anything at all, because she couldn’t understand him. He could be saying, “For your child, I must do this. For our child…” Or: “My name is ha-Mashchit, and the Lord God created me on the first day…”

His hand fell from her cheek. The other did not rise. Then he fell away entirely, scooting backward until he hit the opposite wall, and there he stayed, his back pressed against the rock, head bowed, arms hanging uselessly by his sides. I started toward him, and he held up his empty hand. Stay.

“What is he doing?” whispered Awaale over his shoulder. He refused to turn and see.

“He can’t do it,” I murmured in reply.

Awaale grunted. “Maybe he’s wrong. Maybe she isn’t sick.”

“No. Her eyes—I saw it.”

“You saw what in her eyes?”

“Oculus Dei, the eyes of God.”

“I do not understand, walaalo.

What are the eyes of God?” Within the cleft the monstrumologist raised his head. His dark eyes shone wetly in the lamplight. What are the eyes of God?

“I know,” whispered Awaale. “He waits for her to sleep. And when she falls asleep…”

“I don’t know what he’s waiting for,” I said. His hesitation in the necessity of the hour troubled me deeply. He’d never hesitated before. He hadn’t in Gishub. He hadn’t in the kitchen at Harrington Lane when he’d raised the butcher knife high over his head. The monstrumologist had always followed the dictates of his discipline. Jacob Torrance may have worn the Society’s motto on his finger, but Pellinore Warthrop had it engraved upon his heart. He was, as Fadil had named him, Mihos, the lion, the guardian of the horizon. What stayed him? Was he clinging to something—or had he let something go?

“I do not understand this man you serve,” Awaale said. “He seems to revel in death and fear it all at once. He chases after it like a rabid hound and then runs from it like a frightened rabbit. Why does a man like this hunt monsters?”

He plopped down beside the mouth of the crevice, holding his rifle upright between his knees, and leaned his head back against the rock.

“I am tired, walaalo,” he sighed.

“You can sleep if you like,” I said. “I’ll stay awake.”

“Ah, but you forget my bargain. I am the one who must watch over you.”

“I don’t need you to watch over me.”

“It is not you I must answer to one day, walaalo,” he returned gently.

I eased myself to the ground, facing Awaale so I could keep the doctor within my peripheral vision. He hadn’t moved; neither had the mother and child. Maybe the doctor besidewas wrong, I thought. Not about the woman but about the child. How could the mother be infected and the child not be? Better to end their suffering now. I did not raise this possibility to either of my companions, though. I sat with it, and thought, and waited, while the night grew deep around me and my companions nodded off. I watched the woman’s eyes grow heavy, watched her head fall forward and then snap back as she fought her exhaustion. I was wide awake. I could have stayed awake for a thousand nights, so tightly wound was the thing inside me, das Ungeheuer, the me/not-me, the thing that whispered, I AM, and the thing that strove within me—and strives within you—to be free.

And while Mihos slept, Ophois rose.

There was the sigh of the wind and the crunch of the earth’s shattered bones and the cold steel of the gun and the sleeping woman. There was the baby pressed against her naked breast and the soles of her bloody, rock-chewed feet and the top of her head pointed toward me as if in offering. I raised the gun. Brought it to within an inch of her scalp.

The world is not round. The horizon is the summit of the abyss; there is no crossing back.

My eyes dropped to the baby as I started to squeeze the trigger. Its eyes looked back at me. He was awake, and he was suckling on his mother’s breast. My heart slammed against my ribs in panic. I dropped the gun and yanked him from her arms.

She snapped awake with a sharp cry and lunged forward, but I’d already backed out and turned up the path. There was no light to speak of to guide my way, and I didn’t get very far before I tripped over a rock and pitched forward, spinning at the last second to protect the child. Her wraithlike shadow loomed over me for a long, awful instant, frozen in time, and in that space between the one second and the next, a shot rang out from above, and the mother fell dead at the feet of the one who had stolen all that mattered to her. I looked up, expecting to see the doctor or Awaale, and seeing neither, but the smiling face of the one who’d begun it, the reason I was in this place of blood and rock and shadow, holding a bawling infant in my arms, the face of John Kearns.

With a little laugh he jumped down from his perch, dropping his rifle immediately when he saw Awaale and the doctor running toward us with the light. He raised his hands into the air.

“Don’t shoot; I’m clean!” he called in that distinctive leonine purr of a voice. “My!” he said, sizing up Awaale. “You’re a tall African!”

“Cover him, Awaale,” said my master. “If he moves, kill him.”

He knelt before Kearns’s victim. She had been shot cleanly through the back of the head.

“Are you hurt?” Warthrop asked me anxiously. I shook my head. He quickly examined the baby, and then pulled it from my arms.

“I saved your life once again, Master Will Henry!” Kearns said teasingly. “Not that I’m keeping score. Warthrop, I thought you were dead—or mad, or both—soam halfway right—or wrong. Like everything else, it’s all in how you look at it. Is this very tall African going to shoot me for saving your assistant’s life?”

“Who is this man?” demanded Awaale.

“Jack Kearns, that name will do, or you may call me by my African name, Khasiis. And you are Awaale, which means ‘lucky,’ I believe.”

Awaale nodded. “And I know what your name means, Khasiis Jack Kearns.”

“Good. And now that we’ve been properly introduced, I suggest we extinguish that light and find cover as quickly as possible. The light draws them like moths to the flame; you must know that, Pellinore.”

The doctor did know. He directed me to pick up the surrendered rifle and ordered Kearns forward, followed closely by Awaale, back to our little hideout. Warthrop and I followed, the child twisting and whimpering in his arms. His little face was streaked with dirt and tears, and his mouth was glimmering with his dead mother’s milk. When we reached the cleft in the stone, the monstrumologist extinguished the lamp.

“I can still see you,” Awaale warned the Englishman.

“Really? Then, you have the eyes of a cat—or of a rotter.”

“Where are your friends, Kearns?” demanded the doctor.

“What friends? Oh, you mean the Russians. Dead. Except Sidorov. He might not be dead… yet. Not the eyes of a cat, but certainly the lives!”

“So it was to Sidorov that you offered the magnificum.”

“The magnificum? Well, I suppose. I offered to take him to its nesting grounds—but the beast itself, that was up to him and his friend the czar.”

“And?” Warthrop barked softly. “Did he find it?”

“Well, yes—or it found him.”

The doctor hissed through his teeth. He had been beaten to the prize, and by the worst possible rival, a disgraced and disbarred monstrumologist, a scientific charlatan who would take all the glory of being the first to lay eyes upon the Father of Monsters.

Kearns read the doctor’s reaction, and said, “Now, don’t be angry with me, Pellinore. I did send you the nidus, after all.”

“Why did you send it to me, Kearns? Wouldn’t you need that to convince Sidorov you were telling the truth?”

“Oh, the truth,” Kearns said dismissively.

“You knew I would come looking for you.”

“Well, it did occur to me that you might. And to Sidorov. He wasn’t too happy when I told him I had sent it to you for safekeeping. ‘Not him,’ he said. ‘Not Warthrop.’” Kearns’s Russian accent was ipeccable. “And I said, ‘Oh, Warthrop’s a good enough bloke, a fine fellow for a scientist and bloody moralist.’”

“That explains Rurick and Plešec.”

Kearns laughed. “Oh, good. Those two fairly scream for an explanation.”

“But not Arkwright.”

“Who is Arkwright?”

“You don’t know Arkwright?”

“Should I know Arkwright?”

“You offered the locus ex magnificum to the British.”

“I don’t think I should comment on that, except to say I am a loyal servant of Her Majesty the queen.” He raised his voice: “God save the queen!”

“When you are finished with him,” Awaale said to Warthrop, “I would like to kill him.”

“Well, aren’t you a bloodthirsty African! Wherever did you find him, Pellinore? Did you kidnap him from a pirate ship?”

“How did you know I was a pirate?” demanded Awaale.

“Enough, Awaale,” Warthrop said. “It’s best not to parlay with the devil, if you can avoid it.”

“That’s the trick, yes,” agreed Kearns cheerfully. “Avoiding it.”

“Where is it, Kearns?” growled the monstrumologist. “Where is the magnificum?”

John Kearns took his time in answering. My eyes had adjusted to the dark; still, I could see only the barest outline of the man, a shade of lighter gray against the black backdrop of the mountain. The voice issuing from that shadow was a low thrum, like the sound of a fly’s wings beating the air.

“Where is the magnificum? It is right above you. It is right beside you. It is behind you and before you. It is in that space one ten-thousandth of an inch outside your range of vision. Look no farther than the length of your nose and you’ll find it, Pellinore.”

Beside me the doctor huffed in frustration. I could feel his body tense, as if at any moment he might launch himself at Kearns and choke the life out of him. The whimpering child cradled in his arms probably saved Kearns.

“I don’t have the stomach for this, Jack. I have suffered too much to suffer your riddles, too.”

“And not just you, I’d guess! I saw little Willy’s hand. Curiosity got the better of him, hmmm?”

Warthrop ignored the jibe and snarled, “Where is the magnificum?”

“You really want to see it? All right, I’ll take you to it. Not now, though. His children are about at night, and they are very protective of him, as my Russian friends discovered and you probably already know.”

He asked for some water, and then emptied Warthrop’s canteen. He announced he was ravenously hungry, and then tore into our provisions, cramming food into his mouth as fast as he could pluck it from the bag.

“Been hunting that one for days,” he said around a mouthful of hardtack. “All the way from Moomi. They exile the infected ones, you know—throw them out of the caves to fend for themselves, but I was waiting for the beast to take full hold of her—much better sport that way. The females are much harder than the males. The males come at you head-on, no stealth or subtlety about them, but the females are very clever. They’ll lure you into dead-end traps, lead you round in circles, sit statue-still for hours to ambush you. I’ll take a male as big and strong as Awaale here over a rotter like her any day.”

“You knew we were here,” Warthrop said. It was not a question.

“Saw your light. Knew you took her in. Didn’t know quite what to do; thought you’d take care of her yourself, Warthrop. Why didn’t you?”

The doctor looked down at the infant against his chest. The child had fallen asleep, its fat lips wrapped around its tiny thumb.

“You’ll have to do it, you know,” Kearns said.

The monstrumologist looked up. “What?”

“Kill it.”

“It has not been infected.”

“Impossible.”

“I’ve examined it.”

“It’s been sucking on its mother’s teat. How could it not be infected?”

Warthrop chewed on his bottom lip for a moment. “It has no symptoms,” he argued stubbornly. I wondered who he was trying to convince, Kearns or himself.

“Well, do what you like, then. Let it starve out here.”

“We’ll bring it with us.”

“I thought we were going to see the magnificum.”

The doctor was rocking the child gently as it slept. “Awaale will remain here to watch him,” he decided.

“I will?” asked Awaale.

“And when the tyke gets hungry, he’ll stick its little mouth on his big black nipple?”

“Where is the nearest settlement?”

“With living people in it? Probably the caves over in Hoq.”

“He will deliver the child to Hoq, then.”

“For what? It’s been exposed; they’ll just kill it. Should do it now and save you and them all the time and trouble.”

“I can’t kill it,” the doctor said. “I won’t kill it.”

Warthrop instinctively pulled the child closer to his chest and changed the subject. “What happened to your Russian friends?”

“The same thing that happened to the girl out there—that happens to anyone who touches the rot of stars. It started out well enough. Mating season had just begun, and the casualties were limited; the sultan had it quite under control, contained to a couple remote villages. They isolate the plague, you see, rather like a smallpox outbreak, and let it burn itself out. Sidorov and company traced the nexus to the birthing grounds, deep in the belly of the mountains, and then one of the fools got strung up by his vanity. He literally put his foot in it—stepped in a fresh puddle of the pwdre ser—and then insisted on cleaning his boots! The rot burned through the entire company after that. I barely escaped. Been hunted—and hunting—ever since.”

“And Sidorov?”

“Oh, it got him, too. What day is this? Tuesday? Isn’t it funny how unimportant the days of the week become? Anyway, I think it was Thursday last that it took him.”

“Took him?”

Kearns nodded. “To the nesting grounds, where I’m taking you. If you still want to go.”

“What does it look like?” Warthrop asked. He did not wish to ask John Kearns that question—he wasn’t confident he’d get a straight answer—but he couldn’t help himself. The dead in his wake compelled him. He’d sacrificed them to know the face of the Faceless One.

“Well, it’s quite large,” Kearns replied in a serious tone. “Huge, actually. Been around as long as us, hopping from island to island to roost before going back into hiding for a generation or two. The males aren’t very bright, rather indolent, I would say, like a lion, sitting back and letting the females bring home the spoils.”

“But what is their appearance? Are they reptilian? Avian? Or are they more closely related to the flying mammals, like bats?”

“Well, their brains are quite small, like a lizard’s or a bird’s, but they don’t have wings. They’re covered in thorns—like a rose!—and their hides are very pale and thin, their claws sharp, and their digits are quite dexterous. Well, we all know the intricacy of their nests.”

“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?”

The notion was so absurd, I laughed in spite of myself. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“The child! Kearns chases him down to where we are, and now I am to bring him safely back to his people.”

“Except he said those people would kill him.”

Awaale cursed softly, but he was smiling. “I am only saying God might have sent me for the little one—not for you.”

“That makes more sense,” I replied. “I was going to kill her, Awaale. The gun was an inch from her head and I was pulling the trigger…”

“But you did not.”

“No. I saw he was feeding, and I panicked.”

“Ah. You mean you were meant to save him.”

“I’m not meant to save anyone!” I snapped. I was suddenly very angry. “I’m here to serve the doctor, who’s here to serve… to serve science, and that’s all. That’s all.”

“Oh, walaalo.” He sighed. “You are more a pirate than I ever was.”

Kearns’s cave was actually a warren of small chambers connected by tunnels bored into the rock by a million years of monsoon rains eating their way through tiny cracks in the rocks. Nature is anything but impatient. The deepest chamber was also the largest and probably the safest, but Kearns warned us against bunking there, for it was home to thousands of bats, and their guano was a foot deep on the chamber floor.

It was the bats that woke me the next morning, fluttering over our heads in a dizzying ballet of black and brown, squealing excitedly as they made for their roosts. I was the last to rise, finding the doctor and Awaale sitting outside the cave, the foundling squirming listlessly in Warthrop’s lap.

“Where is Dr. Kearns?” I asked.

“Scouting the trail, or at least that’s what he said he was going off to do.”

“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.”

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.

The clouds arrived at midmorning, swallowing the mountaintops, sliding swiftly and silently a hundred feet over our heads like a great white door slamming closed. And still higher we climbed, until I could reach up with my hand and touch the misty belly of the clouds. We came to a level spot in the trail, and there Kearns abruptly stopped, hands on his hips, head bowed, pulling hard for air.

“What is it?” Warthrop demanded. “Are you lost?”

Kearns shook his head. “Tired. I have to rest.”

He sank to the ground and fished about in his sack for a canteen. Warthrop could hardly contain himself. He paced the area, at times coming dangerously close to stepping over the edge and tumbling into the empty air.

“How much farther?” he asked.

“Five hundred feet… six?” Kearns shook his head. “Still haven’t figured out how the poor bastards do it, much less why.”

“Who? How they do what?”

“The rotters. Some protohuman instinct, I suppose. Get to the highest point before you pop…” He shrugged.

Warthrop was shaking his head. “I don’t understand.”

Kearns looked up at him ad said in a voice drained of all playfulness, “You will.”

We entered the clouds, and the world dissolved into a spinning white nothingness, the complete abnegation of color, and we but wraithlike shades, shapes without substance, forms without dimensions. I walked very close to the doctor; another foot or two between us and I would have lost him in the void. The wind whipped around the mountain and slammed into our backs. I was terrified it would push me right off the edge. I lost all sense of time. Time did not exist here at the summit of the abyss. A million years was the same as a minute.

An eight-foot-high rock wall rose out of the mist directly in front of us. We had come to the end, the doorstep of the Magnificent Father’s abode, the nesting grounds of the magnificum.

The moment my master had longed for and dreaded had come. The monstrumologist rushed forward. I’ve no doubt that if Kearns—or even I—had tried to stop him, he would have flung him over the side of the mountain. He paused only long enough to don a fresh pair of gloves before slapping his hands over the top of the wall and heaving himself up with a kick against the side. He disappeared into the fog.

“Well?” Kearns said softly to me. “Aren’t you going up?”

“Dr. Kearns,” I whispered. “What is the magnificum?”

“You’re a very sharp lad, Will. Surely you’ve discerned his face by now.”

I flinched when he touched me lightly on the cheek. His gray eyes sparkled.

“They may be a different color, but we’ve the same eyes, Master William Henry, you and I. Oculus Dei—the eyes that are not afraid to look, that see where others are blind.”

I pulled away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you not? In the beginning man made God in his image, and God saw that it was good. You agreed with me about the child. Don’t deny it; I saw it in your eyes. Your eyes have come open, haven’t they? It’s why he keeps you with him, because you see in the dark places where he is afraid to look. So don’t ask me what is the magnificum. The question insults my intelligence.”

He knelt before me and held out his cupped hands.

“Come on, then; I’ll give you a boost. He is in a dark place and he needs you to be his eyes.”

I stepped into Kearns’s hands and he lifted me up and over the wall.

I was standing upon the rim of a vast cave whose roof and walls had given way after a millennium of rain and wind and earthquakes. Gigantic slabs of the collapsed chamber littered the ground. Interspersed among the boulders were the remains of stalagmites, polished to a glimmering finish by the monsoons, some worn down by the relentless wind to foot-high nubs, others rising to twice my height, their tips as sharp as their bases were wide. They reminded me of the bony spikes erupting from Mr. Kendall’s face.

I did not see the doctor. He was hidden in the swirling white. I saw the mountain’s glittering teeth and its broken bones, and then a few feet farther in I came across the first body, badly decayed and picked over by scavengers, its gut blown apart, the cavity like a great black yawning mouth. Half of its face had been stripped away, and in one empty eye socket a scorpion snuggly nestled. A gust of wind tugged at the remnants of the papery flesh that still clung to its bones, and a few pieces tore away, rocketing aloft, like hot ash in the superheated air of a fire.

Behind me I heard Kearns say, “This is his mouth. When Typhoeus’s children sense the end has come, they drag their rotting, bloated bodies to this spot at the top of the world, where they explode—some after they’ve died, some before. I have seen the breathing corpses of his children blow apart with the force of a grenade.… And the winds come down. They scoop up the bloody viscera and carry it for miles until it falls as red rain from a clear, blue sky.”

He drew me forward, the curtain of mist pulled back, and I saw hundreds of bodies frozen in the agony of death, crumpled between the rocks, strewn around the shining, sharp columns, growing more numerous as we went, until it was nearly impossible not to step on them. We picked our way carefully through the magnificum’s bountiful harvest, and the thin air was heavy with the rich smell of rot rising from the threshing floor.

We came to a shallow indention in the earth, the remains of an ancient cavernous pond. Kearns pointed out the kneeling, bent-backed shapes of the still living scattered throughout the dry lake bed, each sitting beside a dead brethren, all worrying with something cradled in their laps. Kearns pressed a finger against his lips to signal for silence. He crouched down, motioned for me to follow suit, and proceeded to lead me along the shore of the sterile pit. He brought me close—but not too close—to a kneeling man whose face had been smashed apart by the horns of bone growing from his skull, whose black eyes lacked any white in them, whose mouth hung open to reveal a bewildering profusion of thornlike growths, and whose suppurating fingers picked and plucked with exquisite delicacy at the exquisitely delicate object resting between his legs. I did not know it then, but this human wreckage had once been a man named Anton Sidorov.

“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!”

Warthrop’s hand fell away. He sank to the ground, overwhelmed by the enormity of his folly. The dark tide swept over him and bore him down to its crushing, lightless depths. Kearns was right. The signs had been all around the doctor since the beginning—from the jelly-filled sacks in Mr. Kendall’s stomach to the blasted-open corpses in Gishub—but he had turned away. He had not forced himself to look upon the true face of the magnificum, and now the blood of those who had sacrificed their lives upon the altar of his ambition cried to heaven against him.

I knelt beside him. “Dr. Warthrop? Dr. Warthrop, sir, we can’t stay here.”

“Why not?” he cried. “It’s good enough for them.” He swept his arm across the blasted mountaintop. He looked up at me, and I saw nothing but ashes in his eyes; the cold fire had gone out. “You said it yourself at Harrington Lane. What they are I am inside. I am their brother, Will Henry. I am their brother, and I will not leave them.”

There was no moving him. I begged, I coaxed, I appealed to his reason, the one thing to which he always clung, no matter how strongly the dark tide pulled him down. He would not budge—or, I should say, the dark unwinding thing in his heart would not loosen its grip. He did not seem to hear me, or perhaps my words sounded to him like mere gibberish, incoherent ranting that made no more sense than the cackling of a chimpanzee. I looked around for Kearns, thinking our situation must be desperate that I would turn to him for help, but Kearns had vanished into the mist. Gently, so as not to startle the doctor, I eased the gun from his trembling hand; I was afraid he might discharge it and blow off his foot.

The swirling white cloud had grown thick around us. I could see no more than a few feet in any direction, and I heard no sound but the wind whistling between the mountain’s broken teeth, and my own ragged breath. I stood up, unnerved and disoriented, turning in a slow circle, a panicky voice whispering inside my head, Where is Kearns? Where did he go? Why did he go? as my finger caressed the trigger. What was that in the mist? Was it a stalagmite or the shape of a once-human child of Typhoeus, looming out of the blurring white? I pointed the gun at it and called out Kearns’s name.

Something a ten-thousandth of an inch outside my range of vision rocketed toward me, slamming into the middle of my back and hurling me head over heels toward the shallow bowl in the center of Typhoeus’s ruined throne. The impact knocked the wind out of my lungs, and the doctor’s gun out of my hand. I landed on my back and rolled over, coming up to face the leering, desiccated remains of a living corpse, a human sack of poison, its gut filled with star rot, its explosion of thorny teeth glistening in the anemic light of a suffocated sun. I scrambled backward as it lunged forward, my cries of terror and its cries of rage warring with the high-pitched grinding of the wind against the ageless stone. I jammed my hand into my jacket pocket for Awaale’s knife. The cold steel sliced open my palm as I fumbled for the handle. The monster’s mouth yawned wide when it smelled my blood; I could see my reflection captured in its black, unblinking eyes.

I retreated; it came on. The knife was in my hand now, and its wooden handle was slippery with my blood. I could feel the blood weeping from the wound to the rhythm of my galloping heart. Time itself began to jiggle and come apart, and we slipped into the space between spaces, the child of Typhoeus and I, skittering together upon the precipice while on either side was the depthless divide, the pit without bottom, das Ungeheuer. Its mouth stretched so wide, the hinges of its jaws tore apart. The tendons ripped with a wet pop!, and then the entire lower half of its face fell off and was trammeled beneath its shuffling feet. It reached for me, flexing its fingers, its sharp yellow nails clicking. I swung wildly at what was left of its face; the knife, slick with blood, flew from my grip; and then the thing was upon me.

I reacted without thinking. For more than two years I had stood by the monstrumologist’s side at the necropsy table. Human anatomy was as familiar to me as the lines on my master’s face. I knew precisely where to find the organ that powered the mortal engine. I could see it now, pounding furiously against the thin covering of decaying skin, and it beat in time with my own, in that space between spaces, upon that dizzying precipice above the abyss.

I punched my hand into its torso with all the force I could muster, just below the rib cage, and forced my fist deep into the center of the beast, my four outspread fingers digging up past the liver and between the laboring lungs until I was elbow-deep in its guts and my clawing hand found its heart.

And I crushed it with my bare hand. My fingers burst through the chambers of its heart. The beast’s weight came down upon me. We sank to our knees together, its black eyes boring into mine as its blood poured out the cavity I had made. I yanked my arm free with a disgusted sob and rolled away from it. Its hand slapped at the earth, once, twice, and was still.

I was crying hysterically, scrambling about for the knife, my right hand coated in my blood, my left in its, thinking, Done, done, done, you’ve done it now. You’ve poisoned yourself with it; the pwdre ser, it’s all over you. Done, done, done.

I found the knife, stood up, and called the doctor’s name, but the words were caught in my throat, and what little sound I made was snatched by the wind and whipped away like the blasted remains of the magnificum’s victims scattered all around me. I had lost all sense of direction in the fog. It seemed the ancient lake bed spread out to infinity; there was no horizon for Mihos to guard.

And then I turned and saw them shambling toward me, dozens of them, black shadows against the spinning white, their screeches of pain and rage akin to those of animals in the slaughterhouse. The blood draws them, Kearns had said. They can smell it for miles. If I stood my ground, I would be overrun. If I ran, the blood would lead them right to me.

For an eternity I stood in indecisive torment. There was no fighting it; there was no running from it. It was already in me; I was already one of them. Better to let them take me here, from without, than to allow it to devour me from within.

I stood upon the shore of a dead sea, and there were two doors before me. Behind one, a savage beast that would rip me to shreds. Behind the other, a monster of a thousand faces that would make my face one of his. That is the magnificum. Ours is the face of the beast.

Nil timendum est. “Fear nothing.” The motto of my master could be interpreted two ways. There was Jcob Torrance’s interpretation, and then there was Pierre Lebroque’s. But we are more than the sum of our fears. We are greater than the gravity of the abyss. I had come to that terrible place for one reason and only one reason:

Why the devil are you going again?

To save the doctor.

Save him from what?

Whatever he needs saving from. I’m his apprentice.

I tore through the roiling mist, screaming his name, and the teeth sprung up from the ground, and the broken bones crunched beneath my feet, and the mist spat them out, the once-human hands and teeth of the magnificum, their arms opened wide to receive me, their new brother. I thought I heard gunfire off to my right and stumbled toward the sound, thrashing my arms as if I could wave away the fog. And then I stepped into empty air; I had come back to the ledge, the eight-foot-high wall at the end of the path leading to the magnificum’s roost. For an awful instant I teetered upon the edge, flailing my arms uselessly to regain my balance, before gravity took me down.

I tucked my shoulder instinctively and hit the ground below in a roll. I rose with a cry of frustrated rage and leapt at the wall, but it was too high. I heard my pursuers then, their screams a deeper, throatier echo of my own, and I backed away, holding the knife with both hands in front of me and slicing it back and forth. Oh, what a ridiculous and pitiful sight I must have been!

And this voice, agreeing: What are you doing, Will Henry? You can’t go back for him. You are nasu. You will give the infection to him—or hand him over to the beasts chasing you. It is too late for you. But not for him.

I cried out his name once more before I fled down the path, taking the contagion with me, away from him.

I emerged from the clouds and beheld the world laid out before me, brown and black and shades of gray, and I prayed that the living corpses would follow the blood-smell that rose from my skin. I prayed that they would follow me down, their unclean brother, to their fate. The path diverged; I choose the steepest, thinking it would bring me down quicker to the plain. I had a vague idea I would lead them to Gishub, the city of the dead by the sea. It was not the way we had ascended, and at spots the path was nearly impassable, littered with huge boulders that left barely enough room for me to squeeze past. The wound in my right hand throbbed horribly, the bleeding would not stop, and my left hand was growing numb. That’s how it starts, I thought, remembering the doctor’s lecture to Mr. Kendall. First the numbness, then the aches in the joints, then the eyes, then…

I came to a sharp bend in the path. I turned the corner and stopped, for the way was blocked by a large pool of the clearest water I’d ever seen. Protected from the wind by the soaring peaks surrounding it, the water’s surface was unperturbed by the slightest ripple, reflecting back to the brooding clouds their own gray faces.

I was exhausted. I was at the end of it, the end of all of it, and I t by the water’s edge.

And the clouds raced across the sky above the undefiled water.

And I raised up my head and peered into the mirror, and there was my face looking back at me.

Without thinking I stood up and tore off my jacket. I stripped off my shirt. I strode into the water.

I walked until the water lapped against my chest, and then I kept walking until it kissed the underside of my jaw. I was surprised how cold it was. I closed my eyes and ducked beneath the surface. There was the wind and the clouds and the pure pool and the boy beneath its unsettled surface, and the blood, the boy’s and the monster’s, defiling the pool.

I am nasu now.

I came out of the water and threw myself back upon the ground. I was shivering uncontrollably; I had no feeling in my left arm. My neck was stiff and my eyes felt very dry. The hour was late.

The day was dying, and so was I.

To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness, the monstrumologist had said. It is fundamentally human.

I sat with my back against the mountain, Awaale’s knife cradled in my lap.

The knife was very sharp. Its edge was stained with my blood.

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.

Two doors: I might wait for death to come in its own time—or I could choose the time. I could perish a monster or I could die as a human being.

We are the sons of Adam. It is in our nature to turn and face the faceless thing.

The day was dying, and yet the world seemed dazzlingly bright, and my eyes gathered in the smallest detail with astounding clarity.

It is called Oculus Dei… the eyes of God.

It had found me out at last, Typhoeus, the Faceless One of a Thousand Faces.

I was the nest.

I was the hatchling.

I was the rot that falls from stars.

Now you understand what I mean.

Night fell upon the Isle of Blood, but no darkness crowded my eyes. Mine were the eyes of God now, and nothing was hidden from me, not the smallest speck of matter. I could see through the mountains. I could see clear through to the burning heart of the earth. The wind drove the clouds away, and the stars were an arm’s length away; if I wanted, I could reach up and pluck them from the sky. I was numb; there was nothing I did not feel. I felt the contagion worming innt>

I still held the knife. I would not wait for the moment that the doctor had said would come—When everyone else is dead or has run off, he turns upon himself and feeds from his own body.…

“I’m sorry, Dr. Warthrop,” I whimpered. “I’m sorry, sir.”

I had failed him and I had saved him. I had gone down to the darkness that he might live in the light.

I think you are lonely a great deal of the time.

I set down the knife and dug into my pocket for her photograph.

It’s for luck, she had said, and for when you get lonely.

I eased it out of my pocket; it had gotten wet, and the paper was soft. The last time I had seen Lilly, I’d had the urge to kiss her. Some of us never learn the difference between urge and inspiration.

I picked up the knife again. In one hand Awaale’s gift, and Lilly’s in the other.

I think you are lonely a great deal of the time.

I heard them coming long before I saw them. I heard the bones of the earth snap and crunch beneath their feet, and I heard their labored breath and I heard their anxious hearts in the spaces between their ribs. I turned my head and saw Kearns first, and his voice was the width of a fingernail from my ear, “Here, Pellinore; I found him!” He slung his rifle over his shoulder and hurried over, and then I saw the doctor racing past the water’s edge, and his hand shot out and shoved Kearns out of the way.

“Don’t touch me!” I cried. “It’s too late, Doctor, too late, don’t touch me, too late!”

“I told you one of the buggers got him,” Kearns said, and the monstrumologist cursed him and told him to be quiet.

He opened his instrument case, donned a pair of gloves, murmuring to me all the while, telling me to relax, to stay calm, he was here now, and he had not forgotten his promise, and I wondered what promise he was talking about as he felt my pulse and shined a light into my eyes. My lips drew back in a snarl of pain and anger when the light struck. With shaking hands Warthrop carefully withdrew a vial of blood from his case. It was one of the samples he had extracted from the baby. The yellowish-white serum had separated out from the coagulated blood and now floated on top, suspended above the deep crimson. The doctor pressed the vial into Kearns’s hand and instructed him to hold it very still while he loaded the syringe.

“What the devil are you doing?” Kearns asked.

“I am attempting to slay a dragon,” answered the monstrumologist, and then he plunged the needle into my arm.

Throughout the night he remained by my side, the man I kept human, battling to keep me human. He did not sleep that night or for the two that followed. Occasionally I would fall into a fitful, feverish doze, and when I woke, there he would be, watching over me. My dreams were terrible, filled with shadows and blood, and he would literally pull me out of them, shaking me roughly and saying, “Snap to, Will Henry. It was a dream. Only a dream.”

My symptoms did not immediately disappear. For two days the light scorched my eyes, and he would prepare compresses soaked in the cold lake water to lay over them. While the numbness in my other extremities slowly faded, my left arm had lost all sensitivity. He forced me to drink copiously, though the tiniest morsels made my stomach heave in protest.

Once I gave in to despair. It was too late. The serum was not working. I had seen the face of the Faceless One, and it was my face.

To which the monstrumologist replied fiercely, “Do you remember what I told you in Aden, Will Henry? Not by numbers or force of arms.” He seized my hand and squeezed it. “By this… by this.”

On the morning of the third day I was able to open my eyes a little, though tears of protest streaked down my cheeks, and I actually had an appetite. While my delighted caretaker dug into our bag of provisions, I looked about for Kearns. I could not remember seeing much of him.

“Where is Dr. Kearns?” I asked.

The doctor waved his hand toward the mountaintop. “Playing Theseus, looking for his Minotaur. He’s become quite obsessed with it. It offends his estimation of himself as a tracker par excellence.”

“Are we… Is it safe here, Dr. Warthrop?”

“Safe?” He was frowning. “Well, that is always a matter of degree, Will Henry. Is it as safe as Meister Abram’s brownstone? Probably not. But the worst is over, I would say. There may be a few of the infected still wandering about up here, though I doubt any are left in the plains or coastal regions. The natives are well acquainted with Typhoeus, and when an outbreak occurs, they isolate the infected villages and take to the caves until it burns itself out. Pwdre ser loses its potency over time, as I think I’ve told you, and the monsoon rains wash the remnants to the sea. I suspect the contagion emerged in Gishub and spread from there. Kearns informed me it was a fisherman—a boy around your age, actually—who was first exposed, probably on one of the smaller islands, and he gave—or, mostly likely, sold—his gruesome discovery to Yeoman Stowe.”

“So there is no monster,” I said. “There never was.”

“Really, Will Henry? What do you want in a monster, anyway?” he asked. “Size? The magnificum was the size of Socotra with the potential to grow as large as the world. An insatiable appetite for human flesh? You have experienced firsthand how ravenous it is. A grotesque appearance? Name something—anything!—more grotesque than what we have seen on this island. No, the magnificum is worthy of the name—a dragon by functionh, not—as we’d supposed—by design.” He patted his instrument case, where he had carefully packed the remaining samples of the baby’s blood. “And I have it in my power to slay it.”

He rose and walked the few steps to the water’s edge, and the man in the glassy surface gazed upward into the monstrumologist’s eyes.

“It nearly undid me,” he said pensively. It struck me as an exceedingly odd thing to say to the one recuperating from its terrible bite. I did not realize he was referring to an entirely different monster.

“My ambition bore me up like the wings of Icarus,” he said. “And when the truth of the magnificum burned those wings away, I fell. I fell very far. And I did not fall alone.”

He turned to me. “When you were attacked and I lost you in the melee, it… broke something in me. As if I’d been rudely shaken from a deep sleep. In short…” He noisily cleared his throat and looked away. “It reminded me of why I became a monstrumologist in the first place.”

“Why did you?” I asked.

“Why do you think?” he returned testily. “To save the world, of course. And then, at some point, as with most self-appointed saviors, it became about saving myself. Neither goal is entirely realistic. I cannot save the world, and I don’t care much anymore about saving me… but I do care very much about…”

He returned to sit beside me. I saw something in his hand. It was Lilly’s photograph.

“And now I must ask you about this,” he said. His tone was grave.

“It’s nothing,” I said, reaching for it. He held it just beyond my grasp.

“Nullité?” he asked. “Nothing?”

“Yes. It’s… She gave it to me…”

“Who gave it to you? When?”

“Lilly. Lilly Bates, Dr. von Helrung’s great-niece. Before I left for London.”

“And why did she give it to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“She said it would bring me luck.”

“Ah. Luck. Then, you did know why she gave it to you.”

“I don’t like her very much.”

“Oh, no. Of course not.”

“Can I have it back now?” I asked.

“You mean ‘May I have it back now.’”

“May I?”

“Have you fallen in love, Will Henry?”

̶That’s stupid.”

“What is? Love or my question?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You’ve tried that trick once. Why do you suppose it will work better the second time?”

“I don’t love her. She bothers me.”

“You have just defined the very thing you denied.”

He stared at her face in the photograph with a curious expression, the naturalist stumbling upon a strange new species.

“Well, she is pretty, I suppose,” he said. “And you are getting older, and there are some contagions for which we will never find a cure.”

He handed the photograph back to me. “I told you once never to fall in love. Do you think that was wise advice or self-serving manipulation?”

“I don’t know.”

He nodded. “I don’t either.”

Kearns returned at dusk with a fresh catch of camel spiders and a chip on his shoulder. For Kearns, he was downright sullen.

“Bagged only three today,” he said. “This isn’t a hunt; it’s a turkey shoot.”

“Except they are not turkeys and we are not hunting them,” replied the doctor. “We are ending their agony and preventing the spread of a deadly disease.”

“Oh, you’re always desperate to be so bloody noble.” Kearns glanced at me. “Are you cured?”

“It appears so,” Warthrop answered for me. He preferred to limit Kearns’s interaction with me, as if he feared an altogether different sort of contagion.

“Then, shouldn’t we be using what you have to cure them and not be slaughtering them like cows?”

“Human beings are not cows,” retorted the doctor, echoing his old master. “I’ve only two vials of sera. These vials must be preserved in order to replicate the antidote.”

“You realize you are talking out of both sides of your mouth, Pellinore. You didn’t worry about preserving the antidote when it came to your assistant here.”

“And you really should avoid mimicking the voice of conscience, Kearns. It rings hollow, like someone attempting to speak in a language he does not understand.”

Smiling mischievously, Kearns stuffed a whole spider into his mouth. The monstrumologist turned his head away in disgust.

The doctor had designed a brutally efficient protocol to finish the grisly work of eradicating the magnificum from the island. We set up camp at a spot that provided good cover and some shelter from the elements, a few hundred feet below the clouds that enveloped the nesting grounds. We kept our quarry’s hours, sleeping by day and luring them into the killing zone by night.

Fire was our bait. It drew them in, and Warthrop and Kearns would hide behind an outcropping or a boulder and pick them off as they crept into the circle of light. The bodies from the night before were used for fuel for the next night’s fire.

It was grim, grisly work. There was no thrill of the chase, no near brushes with death. There was just death.

This was the somber side of monstrumology, heroism of the grittiest kind, the labor in darkness that the rest might live in the light. It began to take its toll on my master. He stopped eating. He slept only a few minutes at a stretch, and then would be up again, staring into the distance with eyes that had taken on a desperate, haunted look, like a man caught between two unthinkable alternatives.

Kearns was not faring much better. He complained constantly that he still had not found his Minotaur and this was far from the epic quest he had envisioned.

“Come now, Pellinore. Surely we could make this more fun,” he said late one night. Not a single victim had wandered into our trap. “We could split up—make a game of it. Whoever bags the most wins the prize.”

“Leave us if you like, Kearns,” Warthrop said wearily. “In fact, I wish you would.”

“You’re being very unfair, Pellinore. It isn’t my fault, you know. I didn’t invent the myth of the magnificum.”

“No, you just used it to turn a profit.”

“And you would have used it to profit your reputation and take revenge upon your rivals. ‘All hail the great scientist, the self-righteous knight who brought home the grail to Christendom, Pellinore the Pure, Pellinore the Proud, Pellinore the Magnificent!’” He laughed merrily. “As motives go, mine was by far the most pure.”

“Leave him alone!” I snapped at him. I wanted to take Awaale’s knife and slice off that insufferable smirk. “It’s your fault—all of it! He almost died because of you!”

“What are you talking about, boy? The Russians? I didn’t tell the Russians to kill Pellinore. That was their idea.”

“You sent him the nidus.”

“For safekeeping, and you should thank me that I did it.”

“I should kill you, is what I should do!”

His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Well! Aren’t we the bloodthirsty little savage? What have you been teaching this child, Pellinore?”

The monstrumologist shook his head ruefully. “Lessons of the unintended kind.”

For a week we labored in the vineyards of the dead. After two nights without a sighting, Kearns began to talk of returning to Gishub, where we would await the arrival of the Dagmar.

“I suppose I must give up on my Minotaur.” He pouted. “But all things—even the best of things—must eventually come to an end.”

A troubled look passed over the doctor’s face. He pulled me out of Kearns’s earshot and whispered, “I have made a terrible mistake, Will Henry.”

“No, you didn’t,” I whispered back. “Everyone thought the magnificum was real—”

“Shhh! I’m not talking about the magnificum.” He glanced toward the ledge upon which Kearns lay hidden. “I don’t know what he’s waiting for. Perhaps his mind is divided; perhaps he still retains some vestige of his humanity, though I’m hard-pressed to see much evidence of that. Most likely the opportune moment simply has yet to present itself.”

He smiled grimly at my startled expression. “He has to kill me. Well, you too, of course—both of us. What choice does he have? He’s trapped here until the end of the monsoon, and even then he will find it difficult to escape. To whom can he turn for help? The only port on the island is controlled by the British, but he’s wanted by them for murder and treason. The Russians? They will hold him accountable for the expedition’s debacle and will seek retribution. Stay and be hunted—or risk escape and be arrested.”

“But that’s why he won’t kill us,” I argued. “He needs us to escape.”

“Does he? He knows when and where we will be rendezvousing with the Dagmar. That was my terrible mistake, telling him that. All he has to do is inform Captain Russell that you and I were lost or killed on the hunt. And then John Kearns is free to go anywhere he wants, become anyone he wants. He will melt back into the human family with his human mask—and life—intact.”

I was quiet for a moment, thinking it through, worrying with it, trying to poke holes in his argument. I decided it was useless and focused instead on finding a solution.

“We could hit him over the head, knock him out, tie him up.… Or wait till he falls asleep…”

The doctor was nodding. “Yes, of course. It’s the only way. He has to sleep sometime.…” His voice trailed off. The haunted look of the past few days flitted across his countenance. “Well, we can’t tie him up. That would be a death sentence, and a particularly cruel one at that.”

“Then, we hit him over the head and take his rifle.”

“Why do you insist on hitting him over the head? We merely have to wait for him to fall asleep to take his rifle.”

“Then, that’s what we do. Wait till he falls asleep and take his rifle.”

“And then… what? Take him prisoner?” he asked.

“We can turn him over to the British.”

“Who will then question him about Arkwright, and you will be arrested omplicity in his murder—von Helrung, too.”

“He said he didn’t know Arkwright.”

Warthrop gave me a withering look. “Why is it, Will Henry, that at the precise moment when I begin to think you might actually have a head on your shoulders, you say something like that?”

“Then, we don’t turn him over to anyone. We hold him until we board the Dagmar, and then we leave him here.”

The monstrumologist was nodding, but he still seemed troubled. “Yes. It’s the only acceptable alternative. When our work is finished, we’ll spring the trap.”

I did not ask, The only acceptable alternative to what? I did not need to.

It was close to dawn on the last night of our bitter harvest, and so far only one of the stricken had stumbled into our trap. Kearns shot him, and then pushed the body onto its back and stared down with disappointment at its face.

“Where is he?” he wondered aloud. “Where is my Minotaur?”

“Dead, I’d guess,” answered Warthrop.

“Oh, don’t say that! Should I fail to take him, I would feel the entire enterprise was for naught.”

“What, not enough death for you, Kearns?”

“That’s the wonderful thing about life,” retorted Kearns heartily. “It’s just chock-full of all the death you can handle!”

“I hope you get your fill, then, before the Dagmar returns tomorrow.”

“It’s tomorrow? Then we must find my Minotaur tonight. Perhaps we should return to the locus. He might be up there, ready to pop.”

“You see the condition of this one,” replied Warthrop, referring to the victim at their feet. “If the uninfected populace has isolated itself safely, the contagion has nearly run its course. The odds are he has already ‘popped.’”

Kearns was not willing to let it go easily, however. He decided to bleed the latest victim instead of burning him, hoping the smell of blood would succeed where the fire had failed. Then he shooed us away. “Have a good rest. We’ve quite a hike down to the sea in the morning. I won’t abandon you, I promise.”

“Perhaps that is his plan,” mused the doctor after we had retired to our shelter. “Sneak off and trust we won’t find our way out in time.”

I thought my master was being naïve. A man like John Kearns did not leave such things to chance.

“We should do it now,” I said. “He thinks we’ve gone to sleep. I’ll do it, if you’d like.”

“You will do ‘it’? What is ‘it’?”

“Hit him over the head.”

“Again, I understand the appeal of such an act…”

“You heard him, sir. He won’t go to sleep today, and today we are going to Gishub to meet the Dagmar.”

“We could wait till he quits for the night,” he proposed. “He’ll have to lay his rifle down at some point.”

“Why would he do that?” I felt myself losing patience with him. Me, with Pellinore Warthrop! “He plans to kill us today, as soon as the sun rises.”

“Yes. Yes, of course you’re right, Will Henry. That must be his plan. And he must suspect ours, so he will be on his guard. How do we lower it?”

I told him my idea. He raised several objections to it, the chief of which being the most obvious—Kearns might smell a rat.

“And if he does,” the monstrumologist said, “most certainly you will pay the ultimate price.”

But he could think of nothing better. We needed to act quickly; at any moment Kearns might decide our time had come.

Before we parted, he touched my shoulder and looked deeply into my eyes. I saw a question in his. I repeated what I’d said to him at Dover: “I am not afraid, sir.”

“I know that,” he said gravely. “And that makes me afraid.”

There is no monster, John Kearns had said. There are only men.

He heard my approach long before I reached his hiding place, and he whirled to face me as he brought the rifle round. I drew up at once and called to him softly, “Dr. Kearns! Dr. Kearns!”

“What is it?” he called back softly. “Where is Warthrop?”

“We heard something… back there.” I pointed down the path. “He went to see what it was.”

“He went… Why did he do that, Will?”

I stepped closer. He did not lower the rifle. That gave it away. If he had lowered the rifle, I might have thought the doctor and I were indulging in a paranoid delusion. But he did not lower the rifle; he kept it trained at the exact center of my chest.

“To see what it might be,” I answered.

“Then he has lost his mind. All he had to do was join me here and wait for it to come to us.”

“It was very close to the cave,” I said in a quivery voice. “Just on the other side of the boulders. He didn’t want to chance it. It was very close, sir, and he’s been gone too long. I’m afraid…”

“Are you?” he asked. “Are you?”

He stepped down from his perch and walked slowly over to stand before e.

“Are you?” he asked again. His gray eyes shone hard in the firelight. His expression was uncharacteristically serious.

“Can we go find him, please?” I whimpered. There was the familiar tightening in my chest, the compacting force that could break the world in half, and the doctor’s voice in Aden, saying, We must be indispensable to each other.

“Well, of course. We’ll go together, Will. Strength in numbers, yes?”

He broke out his Kearns-ish grin, shifted the rifle into the crook of his arm, and patted me kindly on the head, the way an uncle might a beloved nephew.

“There is no need to be afraid,” he said.

I lifted up my eyes—Oculus Dei, Kearns had called them—and looked directly into his, and he recognized in them his own, but too late, too late, and before he could raise the gun or pull away, Awaale’s long knife came whistling around and buried itself in his neck.

He sank to his knees, his eyes wide in astonishment. He started to raise the rifle. I kicked it out of his hands. He brought them up toward the gushing wound in his neck—the blood pulsed with the rhythm of his dying heart—while he looked up at me with wonder. And then he toppled over, reaching for me with bloody hands, but I was too far. I was beyond his grasp.

I went over to the rifle, picked it up, brought it back to where his body lay. I shoved it under him. Then I lifted his right hand and forced his finger through the trigger guard. I stepped back to examine my handiwork.

There are no monsters. There are only men.

I scooped up the knife and ran to fetch the doctor.

“Tell me again,” the doctor said.

I did without hesitation, my gaze, like my story, unwavering. Kearns had indeed smelled a rat and had given me no choice but to defend myself.

“He was going to shoot you point-blank,” the monstrumologist said dubiously. “With a Winchester rifle.”

“Yes, Doctor. He pointed it right at my chest and told me he was sorry but he didn’t have a choice.”

“Like you. No choice.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you stabbed him in the neck. While he held a rifle to your chest.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did you manage it? To get close enough with the barrel of a Winchester between you?” He was having a hard time picturing it.

“I knocked it away with my left hand and swung with my right.”

“You knocked it away?”

“I mean I shoved it away. He never let go of it.”

“And he didn’t notice you were holding a knife the whole time?”

“I was hiding it behind my back.”

“So when he brought the rifle up to shoot you,” he said slowly, “you whipped your right hand behind your back, knocked the gun away with your left, and at the same instant pulled out the knife with the other and swung it around to stab him in the neck?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, sir.”

He scratched the underside of his chin thoughtfully. “That was quick thinking.”

“Yes, sir. I mean, thank you, sir.”

“And even quicker reflexes. You must demonstrate it to me sometime.”

“I had to kill him, Dr. Warthrop.”

“Hmm. Yes. I suppose you did, Will Henry. Self-preservation is your inalienable right.”

“I had to,” I insisted. “For both of us.”

“I liked the plan better when it entailed luring him down the path so I could bop him over the head.”

“I didn’t plan it. It just… happened.”

“Did I say that you planned it, Will Henry? Now, that would be a different animal altogether. It wasn’t like what happened in Aden. There was no need to kill John Kearns.”

“It’s better that he’s dead, though.”

He frowned. His eyes sought out mine, and still I did not look away.

“How so, Will Henry?”

“If we had just left him here, he might have found a way off the island. I think he would have somehow, because he’s… he’s John Kearns.”

“So? What does that matter as long as we escape?”

“It matters, sir, because you’d still be a threat to him. You know too much. You’ve seen too much.”

A silence came between us. He looked at me, and I looked back at him, as the last stars faded gently from the sky.

“I think we both have, Will,” he said, breaking the silence between us but not the thing that lay in silence between us.

On the tenth hour of our last day on the Isle of Blood, the great arms of the mountains opened before us, and we saw the plain stretching toward the sea. The day was bright and hot and nearly windless, and I saw several brilliantly colored lizards sunning themselves on the rocks. A butterfly fluttered by upon wings of iridescent blue. The monstrumologist pointed it out and said, “Look at him. Not a flower for miles. He must be lost.”

A hulking figure appeared below us, between the two boulders marking the trailhead. At first my heart rose. It must be Awaale, I thought. I quickened my pace; the mo eyes soogist grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. We stood and watched the huge figure shuffle painfully toward us. Rags hung from its massive frame. Its feet were bare and lacerated by the sharp stones, and left bloody footprints in its wake. Its mouth hung open; its eyes were black and unblinking; its hands were large and caked in blood. A large horn protruded from its wide forehead. We had found the Minotaur.

I raised Kearns’s rifle. Beside me the monstrumologist made a soft, protesting sound, and he reached over and forced the barrel down.

The child of Typhoeus lifted its ponderous head, and its mouth curled into a snarl of agonized rage, the blood-flecked drool of pwdre ser glimmering in the midmorning sun. It stumbled toward us, too weak to run, and lost its footing. It fell. With a shudder of its huge shoulders, it pushed against the rocky ground, tears of pwdre ser streaming down its wasted face, and the light penetrated the translucent flesh and I could see clear down to its bones. It rose, swayed, fell again. The head reared back; the black eyes regarded the unalloyed sky and wept.

“‘Seek a fallen star,’” said the monstrumologist, “‘and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which, in shooting through the horizon, has assumed for a moment an appearance of splendour.’”

Tears of pity shone in his eyes. They both were crying, the monster and the man, the fallen star and the seeker of it.

And when I step upon the shore of the Isle of Blood to plant the conqueror’s flag, when I attain the summit of the abyss, when I find the thing that all of us fear and all of us seek, when I turn to face the Faceless One, whose face will I see?

The man lifted his gun to the level of the monster’s eyes.

We found Gishub as we’d left it, abandoned, a city of the dead. Years would pass before life returned. The fallen would be burned, their ashes returned to the earth from whence they’d come, the houses cleared and cleaned, and another generation would take to the sea for the harvest. Life would return. It always does.

We waited for Awaale. I had no doubt he would come. All names mean something, he had told me. We sat in the lengthening shade of a Dragon’s Blood tree, and the sun fattened toward the horizon and the air was suffused with golden light. The light danced upon the leaves singing softly over my head. I looked down the slope to the sea and saw balanced upon the edge of the world a ship of a thousand sails. My father had found a way to keep his promise, through the unlikeliest of men.

That man’s arm slid around my shoulders. His voice spoke into my ear.

“I will never leave you again, Will Henry. I will never abandon you. As long as I live, I will watch over you. As you brought me out of the darkness, I will keep the darkness from you. And if the tide should overwhelm me, I will raise you upon my shoulders; I will not suffer you to drown.”

It was his moment of triumph. The moment when he’d turned to face the thing that all of us fear and all of us seek.

I could almost hear it, the conqueror’s flag, snapping in the breeze.

At dusk we walked down to the shore. The Dagmar lay anchored between the wet sand and the horizon, and between us and the Dagmar a dinghy rode the incoming current to take us home.

“Awaale?” I said.

“He may not come, Will,” said the doctor. “Kearns may have been right.”

I thought of a man standing like the colossus in a fallen world, cradling a child in his arms, saying with a voice like the thunder’s, To show mercy is not naïve. To hold out against the end of hope is not stupidity or madness. It is fundamentally human.

“No,” I said. “You were right, Doctor.”

I pointed to the east, where a man walked barefoot in the crash of the surf, a giant of a man whose dark skin shone in the last rays of a dying sun. Even from a distance I could see his wide smile. I knew what that smile meant. And he, the murderous pirate, his heart no longer burdened, raised his hand and waved with childlike joy.

From Socotra to Aden, then from Aden to Port Said, where Fadil kept his promise, providing a feast of fasieekh and kofta and introducing me to his twin daughters, Astarte and Dendera. He told them they could do worse than marrying Ophois, the ward of Mihos, guardian of the horizon. I may have left Port Said engaged to one of them; I am not certain.

Warthrop sent a cable to New York before we boarded the steamer for Brindisi:

THE MAGNIFICUM IS OURS.

“‘The magnificum is ours’?” I echoed. I was afraid my master had lost hold of his reason.

“Well, it certainly doesn’t belong to the Russians!” he said with a smile. “We have ‘defanged’ the terrible beast.” He patted his instrument case. “I hope you can appreciate the irony of it, Will Henry. A healthy sense of the ironic is the best way to remain sane in a world that often isn’t; I highly recommend it. But there will be no hero’s welcome, no rewards or parades in our honor. Our victory over Typhoeus will go unheralded and unsung. A defeat for Pellinore Warthrop. A triumph for monstrumology.” Then he corrected himself. “No. For humanity.” Across the Mediterranean to Brindisi, where we boarded the train for Venice. The doctor sent me on a special errand, one that proved quite challenging for a thirteen-year-old boy. “Don’t bother with the first-class passengers. Go straight to the third-class. Money has a way of curdling the milk of human kindness, Will Henry.” I finally managed to borrow the sought for item from an Indian emigrating from Bombay.

“I don’t normally subscribe to superstition, but it may bring me good luck,” Warthrop confessed as he sat down. He loosened his collar and lifted his chin. He eyed the razor gleaming in my hand. “Steady now. If you nick me, I shall be very angry and send you to bed without any supper.”

He examined my handiwork in the mirror and pronounced it fairly executed.

“Should I find a barber in Venice?” he wondered aloud, running his fingers through his shoulder-length locks. Then he shrugged. “I shouldn’t press it, should I?”

It was well past nine in the evening when we arrived in Venice. The dark waters of the canals glittered like diamond necklaces, and the air was moist with coming rain. I recognized the same people in the club that I had seen weeks before, as if they had never left, as if time stood still in Venice.

Perhaps it did. The doctor ordered a drink from the same basset-hound-faced little waiter; Bartolomeo came out and sat at the piano, wearing the same black vest and white shirt soaked in sweat; the door beside the stage came open and Veronica Soranzo emerged in a faded red gown identical to the one she had given my master. Bartolomeo played energetically, Veronica sang badly, and Pellinore watched, enrapt. At the end of the song, she came to our table, slapped his freshly shaven cheek in greeting, calling him bastardo and idiota, and from the stage Bartolomeo laughed.

“You never answered my cable,” the doctor said to her.

“How many of my letters did you not answer?” she retorted.

“I thought you might be dead.”

“I feared you might be alive.”

“Have patience.”

She laughed in spite of herself.

“What do you want, Pellinore?” she asked. “What monster are you chasing now?”

He whispered something into her ear. I saw her blush beneath the heavy makeup.

“But why, Pellinore?” she asked.

“Why not?” he returned with a laugh. “While I am here—and while you are here—but most important, while we both still can!”

The monstrumologist swept her into his arms. Bartolomeo took the cue and began to play a waltz. The patrons sitting at the tables lifted their glasses and paid no attention. Bartolomeo was not watching either; he was absorbed in the music. I was the only one who watched them dance in the smoky yellow light, as outside the rain kissed the cobblestones of the Calle De Canonica. There was the woman in red and the lonely man who danced with her and the boy who watched, alone.

The world is large, and it is easy to forget how very small we are. Like the rot of stars, time consumes us. He had thought the quest would bring him immortality, a triumph that would outlast his brief appearance upon the stage. He was wrong. Pellinore Warthrop would pass into oblivion, his noble work unrecognized, his sacrifice overshadowed by the deeds of lesser men. He could have wallowed in despair; he might have chewed upon the dry bones of bitterness and regret.

Instead he came to Venice, and he danced.

We are hunters all. We are, all of us, monstrumologists. And Pellinore Warthrop was the best of us, for he had found the courage to turn and face the most terrifying monster of all.

The morning after I finished reading the tenth folio, I called my friend, the director of the facility where Will Henry had ended his 131 years on earth.

“Was he missing a finger on his left hand?” I asked, and held my breath.

“Why, yes he was, the index finger,” the director replied. “Did you find out why?”

I started to say yes. Then it occurred to me that that answer was a bit misleading. Like so many things in the journals, there were the facts and then there were Will Henry’s explanations for them—not unlike the story of the magnificum, attributing circumstantial evidence of a monster to a monster that did not exist, a phenomenon that might fairly be called Warthrop’s Folly.

“He wrote about it,” I said. I told him I had just finished with the tenth notebook.

“Any more name-dropping?” he asked. He found that aspect of the journals the most intriguing.

“President McKinley; Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes; and Arthur Rimbaud.”

“Rimbaud? Never heard of him.”

“He was a French poet from the period. Still considered pretty important. I read somewhere that Bob Dylan was influenced by his work.”

“Did Will Henry know Bob Dylan, too?”

I laughed. “Well, I haven’t finished with the journals yet. Maybe.”

“Anything more about Lilly?”

There was. I had found the article in the Auburn newspaper reporting the fire in 1952 that had destroyed Will and Lilly’s house. I’d also obtained a copy of Lilly’s obituary that had run two years before the fire. Lillian Bates Henry had been born in New York City, the daughter of Nathaniel Bates, a prominent investment banker, and Emily Bates, an influential figure in the women’s suffrage movement at the turn of the century. Lillian had served on the boards of several charitable organizations, devoting her life, the article stated, to the service of others. She was survived by nieces and nephews on her brother Reginald’s side of the family, and by her beloved spouse of thirty-eight years, William J. Henry.

“Thirty-eight years,” the director said. “Means they must have gotten married in…”

“1912,” I finished for him. “In 1912 Warthrop would have been fifty-nine years old.”

“Warthrop?”

“If there ever was a Warthrop. If there was, then by 1912 he was dead.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Will writes that he was Warthrop’s constant companion till he died. I can’t imagine them getting married and moving Pellinore Warthrop in with them.”

“But do you relly think there ever was a Pellinore Warthrop?” I could detect a smile in his voice. Will Henry’s words popped into my head at the question. I was pursuing the one I had lost.

“I’m beginning to think there’s some underlying allegory here,” I said carefully. “At the very beginning of the diary, Will Henry says Warthrop has been dead for forty years. If Warthrop ‘died’ around 1912, that means Will began the journals around the same time the house in Auburn burned down, right after he lost everything—not just his sole companion in life but everything he had. Maybe the journals are some weird way of dealing with all that.”

“So he invents a past populated by monsters to understand the monsters of his past?”

“Well, it’s just a theory. I’m no psychiatrist.”

“Maybe we need to get one involved.”

For whom? I wondered silently. Will Henry or me?

I lay awake in bed that night, thinking of fire—the first fire that had yanked his parents away from him and the second fire that had claimed everything else. Fire destroys, he had written, but it also purifies. Here was a man who had lost everything—not once but twice, if that element of the journal was to be believed. He must have questioned, like John Kearns, if our colossal human error was in praying to the wrong god. Perhaps the folios were his attempt at making sense of the senseless, the unseen monster that is always there, the Faceless One that lurks one ten-thousandth of an inch outside our range of vision.

While I pondered that possibility, my heart began to race, and I was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to simply turn away… to not finish the three remaining journals… to return all of them to the director and drop my investigation, or whatever you wanted to call it. A little voice warned me I was heading down a path where I did not want to go, where I should not go. I had the sensation of something coming unwound inside me, something that was an intimate part of me and yet somehow totally foreign and unrecognizable, and those two parts pulled against each other with enough force to break the world in half. Will Henry had called it das Ungeheuer, the monster, and he had promised me I would come to understand what he meant.

He had kept his promise.

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1At her request, the name has been changed to protect her identity.