Half Discovered Wings (25 page)

Gabel
suspected that the magus was picking up his anxiety, and that added
to his worry until the old man sat beside him to tend his
wrist.

‘
It’s okay, Joseph. The brain just needs to sort itself out
after such events. You are bound to have such dreams.’

‘
How do you know that I dreamt at all today?’

‘
Because I saw your eyes when Caeles questioned you after you
awoke.’

‘I
murdered the captain … and I almost did the same to Rowan. What if
the dreams—’

‘
Don’t worry,’ the magus said quietly.

That night, as Caeles steered the
Tractatus
toward Goya, he listened
carefully for any singing. He wasn’t intending to sleep that night
– he could last a night or two anyway, and often did – and so
passed the time by shutting down the electrical equipment for a few
seconds at a time, listening intently to the sounds of the lake in
the absence of humming machinery. He heard nothing, every
time.

The rusalki
had stopped calling.

~

They made tremendous time. The dark outline of the shore
appeared around noon two days later, just visible through the
thinning mist. They would arrive in only a few hours.

Lanark requested that the captain be wrapped and laid to rest
on the seabed, as the chief had been, and Caeles did this for him
without reluctance. The prisoners were unchained. Wrapped in filthy
cloth from the storeroom, the captain sailed like a stone mummy to
the bottom of the lakebed, vanishing as the chief had into the
murky depths.

An hour before they reached port, Lanark moor the vessel. The
coast guard – a single tiny boat with two men aboard – gave them
instructions and led them safely in. They offered assistance, only
out of habit, and were asked to call the doctor Lanark knew and
tell him they were coming with a sick girl, who would arrive before
nightfall.

Lanark left, pointing out that he had work to do. He shook
the magus’s hand before he departed, and told Gabel that he held no
grudges. So said, he and the group parted company, at which time
Caeles had flagged down two phaetons. He and the magus went to the
nearest inn to arrange lodgings. Meanwhile, Gabel would take Rowan
to the doctor.

Gabel carried Rowan to her seat himself, and watched with
sorrow in his eyes as she rocked with the phaeton while it moved
over the broken tarmac street. He eventually moved to sit beside
her to stop her toppling. They rode in silence as the sun began to
set.

~

Topiary men
ushered the hunter in, leading from the mansion’s great brass gate
to its grand front door. On his back he carried Rowan, her cold
cheek pressed against his.

The door of
the doctor’s mansion opened before he could knock, and a
blue-garbed servant let them in.

‘
This way, please,’ he said. ‘Oh … do ye need help with ye
friend?’

‘
I can manage,’ said Gabel. Rowan’s limp arms dangled down his
chest, swinging as he walked. His hands tenderly gripped her
thighs, and though his face showed nothing, his injured wrist
burned with the effort.

The room the manservant led him to had a notice on the door
saying ‘Sanctuary’. The hunter expected something like a chapel or
chantry, but instead entered to discover a large room filled with
the strangest things he had ever seen.

The corner to his left held a large clay-red structure that
looked like papier-mâché, fenced off behind a wall of clear glass
or plastic. Along the wall, inside another enclosure on top of a
carpet of dull metal, was a line of earthen mounds topped in grass,
in which were several fist-sized holes that vanished off at various
angles and into darkness. The rear right-hand corner seemed to be
an aviary, with small mud-coloured birds rustling noisily inside,
its floor splattered with guano. To the near right of the door
there was an assortment of animal baskets and cages, none of which
seemed occupied. In the centre of it all, in front of a polished
oaken desk in a high-backed rotating chair, sat Doctor
Fenn.

‘
You’re the one that knows Lanark Harris,’ she said. ‘My skin’s
been crawling since I received that call from the coast guard. It
made me quite nervous.’

She looked as if she was about to stand, but was merely
shifting her weight in her seat. It was then the hunter noticed
there was something large on her lap, swathed in a blanket. As she
moved, the bundle moved too, letting out a sharp, dog-like
yap.

‘
This,’ she said quietly, pulling back the bundle’s shawl, ‘is
an echidna. I had him sent all the way from Australia. Poor thing’s
home is sinking. I wouldn’t be surprised if this lad was the
last.’

‘
If you don’t mind too much,’ Gabel said, moving forward a
step, ‘I’m afraid I might stumble if I don’t put your patient to
rest somewhere.’

‘
Oh,
I’m sorry!’ Fenn cried, lifting the squirming insect-eater from her
lap and putting it on the carpet by the aviary. ‘Here…’

She cleared everything off her desk – a roll of pens, a sheaf
of papers, two textbooks and a bowl of something that looked like
potpourri – and flipped a brass catch on the side. The top of the
desk folded over to form a sturdy wooden examining
table.

‘
Rest her on here, quickly! I had no idea I was needed so
urgently. The message the coast guard sent me was
vague.’

Gabel laid Rowan
carefully onto the table, putting her legs together and folding her
arms over her chest.

‘
What did this?’

‘
Something called a bolt-hornet,’ said the hunter.

Fenn looked up
past her spectacles into his eyes. The middle-aged doctor was not
unattractive, with short brown hair cut just off the shoulders. Her
eyes were a deep green and large, and her rounded figure was
dressed in an expensive-looking outfit, covered by a grey lab-coat.
She was quite short.

‘
A bolt-hornet, you say? Well, that
is
something. Here, move out of the
way a second.’

She pushed
past Gabel and picked up one of the textbooks that now sat on the
floor beside the golden-brown echidna. The creature stalked over to
the birdcage, where it licked the metal bars with a long, sticky
tongue.

Fenn flicked through the book, stopping at a page that held a
colour-coded tag on it. ‘Nothing here on it specifically, but it’s
something relatively new. Not many people can get ahold of them;
they’re quite rare. Fairly dangerous. Apparently they can be
trained to have masters, you know, like servants have masters. They
can be kind of programmed, if you do it right, according to what
I’ve heard. I had a specimen once, let me get it out…’

‘
Don’t you want to check her first?’

‘
I already have done. Slow pulse, cold skin … Have you seen her
eyes?’

Gingerly Gabel stepped forward and pulled back one lid. The
pupil was less than five millimetres in diameter, and around it the
iris was a bleached brown, very pale. Each tiny ring of muscle
shimmered an arcane blue. The iris was so contracted that the outer
strands were white from strain.

‘
What’s wrong with them?’

‘
Her body is full of static electricity,’ Fenn said, flicking
through the book. ‘Or something like that. Like I said, no-one
knows. Her body’s in a kind of shock – literally. Now feel her
arms. See how the muscles have all contracted?’

‘
Not all of them.’

‘
No, no, some are limp, yes. But all the ones that work with
each other, closely with others, they’ve been pulled tightly
together. The arms, the legs, her neck … I didn’t touch the
abdomen, would you mind…?’

The hunter hesitated for a second, and the doctor saw for a
brief moment just how sincere and respectful this strange man
really was. The doctor seemed to warm to him
immediately.

‘
They are bunched together as well,’ he said
quietly.

‘
Hmmm.’ Fenn tapped a finger on the closed book for a second
and looked at the ceiling. ‘Yes, she’ll be okay temporarily, I
think.’

‘
You can help her?’

‘
I can try. Nothing’s guaranteed, of course.’ She rummaged
about in a cupboard drawer in the far corner, beside the strange
hills on the metal floor. ‘Here we go.’

‘
What’s that?’

‘
This is a tranquilliser.’

‘
Tranquilliser? Is she not in a coma?’

‘
Who’s the expert here? This is local, it’s to relax the
muscles before I use
this
, which is for the paralysis.
Once things get going normally again, she should begin to work the
toxin out of her system.’

‘
Just like that?’ he asked.

‘
No,
not
just
like that,’ she snapped, about-turning and holding the hypodermic
needle in her hand like a weapon. ‘Of course not. You have any idea
how complicated the body is? How it all works, like a
machine?’

‘
I have some idea,’ the hunter said.

‘
Then you’ll know nothing in medicine works
just like that
. It’s all
complicated.’

‘
Where’s the doctor?’ he asked suddenly. ‘We were told that
Doctor Fenn is a man.’

‘
I
am
Doctor Fenn. But perhaps Lanark was referring to my father,’ she
said, visibly much calmer. She injected the needle into several
places around Rowan’s body, moving the clothes where appropriate:
the thighs, once in her side, and in the lower abdomen, over the
diaphragm. She spoke while she did this. ‘This is the
anti-paraplegia shot I’m administering, by the way. After this, if
it works, we’ll have to do her other muscles again. They can’t be
as tense as they are.’

‘
Why not?’

‘
The shot might cause a seizure,’ she explained, looking again
at Rowan’s eyes. ‘Tensed muscles can get damaged if that
happens.’

She seemed
much more relaxed now, happy even. She felt Rowan’s arms, and
nodded to herself. Then she turned, and looked at the hunter.

‘
Coffee?’ she asked.

~

‘
Since we may be here a while,’ she began, sitting down heavily
into a large leather chair, ‘I might as well clear up a few
things.’

‘
Like what?’ Gabel sat in the same stiff position he usually
did: back straight, arms on the rests, hat on the floor just by his
feet. He had refused a drink.

‘
First of all, things about my father. Bramo Fenn was the man
who taught me, as well as Lanark Harris and a few others. He was a
great doctor, but he passed everything on to me and now I’m even
better. He was a stubborn man, hadn’t the capacity to change any of
his ideas once they were written down. People condemned him for it,
because with him as the only doctor in this town they could turn to
no-one else, even though he was often patently wrong.’

‘
Okay.’

‘
He was killed, in a city far to the west of here, past the
desert. There was some kind of epidemic and he was called for, but
as a result of his obstinacy he and a few people died.’

‘
Why did you not go with him?’

‘
Because I was only just out of my teens at the time,’ she
replied. ‘I didn’t know how to treat this plague they presented to
my father. I’ve since studied it and not found much more, so I
wasn’t much use then and I’m not now. They killed him because he
couldn’t save three children. I’ve now taken over his business in
Goya, and I’m pleased to say I know everything he did and more
besides. There’s not much I can’t treat,’ she said.

‘
How long have you been training for this?’ he
asked.

‘
Mister Gabel, I am forty-eight. You, if you forgive me, look
like you’re not two-thirds my age, so you wouldn’t know that I’m
not naïve, or still ambitious as the young invariably are. I’ve
been training since I was about twelve, when I was my father’s
assistant. My age and experience allow me to boast like
this.’

‘
You say this came from the northern continent?’ Gabel
inquired.

‘
Yes. The same place as these little guys.’

Around Fenn’s feet ran
two golden rabbit-like creatures, furred and round-faced. They
chattered like monkeys as they ran. One of the over-grown gerbils
sat in her lap, and lay quietly as she stroked it.

‘
They’re
Ochotoria
,’ she said. ‘Pikas. Quite friendly. They live in the burrows
you saw in the other room.’

‘
The pen with the metal floor.’

‘
Yes. My floorboards might prove too tempting for them,’ she
told him, smiling. ‘The echidna you saw I acquired just recently. I
have a little joey, and some sparrows, in my office. There’s a room
just next door with Pardy inside.’

‘
Pardy?’

‘
Felis
Pardalis
,’ Fenn explained. ‘I just call
him Pardalis, or Pardy. He is an ocelot. Would you like to meet
him?’

‘
Not particularly,’ Gabel said, resting the coffee down. He’d
held it for its warmth but was never interesting in drinking
stimulants of any kind. ‘I’d like to talk about Rowan.’