“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.”