The Isle of Blood

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.”