Half Discovered Wings (48 page)

The climate made him feel worse. The overpowering heat of the
rainforest was worse than the desert. It was a terrible humidity
that made his shirt cling to his back and the hair under his hat
plaster itself to his forehead. It seemed to rain constantly – a
shock from the barren lack of moisture out on the Plains – but the
canopy of leaves above kept the water from cooling him, and it felt
like torture.

Rays of sunlight came through the canopy and tilted until
finally disappearing altogether. Every night when this happened
they made no fire and slept without blankets. Gabel forced himself
to sleep away from Rowan, frightful of what he might do to her; the
horrific memories of what the rusalki had made him do on the
Tractatus
returned to
fill him with dread.

On the second night he began to feel himself lose his mind.
It felt like he was going mad, but he knew – he was
certain
– that it was
something else, some force pulling him in directions it was
unnatural to go, tugging at his mind and playing tricks. He
couldn’t control his limbs that night, suffering a waking paralysis
that terrified him into a stuporous sleep; when he awoke he found
that his faculties had returned and he could move.

The third
night he didn’t sleep at all, chained to consciousness by the
unseen presence that lingered over his dreams. He felt uninhibited
rage wash through him, a constant uncontrollable urge for
destruction and a tireless need for the taste of blood.

He wondered then if perhaps a sanguilac he may have battled
long ago had passed on its base virus. Instantly his mind rejected
the implausible thought. Gabel knew with utter certainty that it
was something else.

The fourth day after they entered the rainforest was when
they finally encountered the gypsy travellers that the
Caballero
hoped would
accommodate him. Gabel barely understood what they were saying,
though they spoke his language and had no accents, yet although his
ears misunderstood, his mind worked out their words for him. His
sight had been blurred for longer than a day now, and it was
getting harder to distinguish between the other members of the
party.

He heard
snippets of conversation, and was aware that he was being led about
the tiny camp and shown where they would sleep for this night and
the next. He heard voices belonging to people he knew were a long,
long way away, yet could understand every word as long as he
trained his mind to it.

He heard Rowan
say how she was worried about him.

He heard, through a haze of conversation, the voices of Sarai
and Colan, alone somewhere far away, each tentatively expressing
what they thought might be love for one another, and
embracing.

He heard
Caeles mutter under his breath, voicing his desire to continue the
journey and “get it over with”. Gabel felt nothing but disdain for
him; the burning new hatred that had integrated itself within every
part of his body felt drawn to the man, and was directed in a
blazing torrent of emotion whenever the hunter heard his voice, or
smelled his clothes that were damp from the air. Every one of his
senses was enflamed.

~

That night he had one of the rare moments of lucidity. He
felt the emotions still there, smouldering away, but could think
much more clearly.

His head was a
mess of sensations he didn’t understand, all seeming to be random,
but after a while of concentrating he realised that something, like
the beating of drums, seemed to hold everything together.

Working his
way through each sensation, he tried to find his way to the
drumbeat.

Sights: the curved, dark ceiling of the caravan, his own
soaked hair over his eyes. Tastes: his own blood (he must have
bitten his tongue), and tiny particles from the plants outside.
Smells: wet foliage, damp clothes and wood, the sweaty bodies
sleeping nearby. Touch: the hard mattress under his back, the hair
against his forehead, the shirt unfastened over his chest. Sounds:
the chirping of insects outside, the steady breathing of people
elsewhere, the rustle of wind and the patter of rain.

All these he
filed away after focusing on each one until he was sure what was
what. All that remained now was the sound of drumbeats, the racket
of a hundred fists pounding some hollow thing from every direction.
He tried to concentrate on just one of them, the loudest, and as
soon as he did he realised that it was his own heart, throbbing
against his ribs.

Gabel laughed,
now finally understanding what had been bothering him all night.
How long had it been, since he first heard the cacophony? Hours? Or
only minutes?

He singled out each of the heartbeats, and placed directions
on each of them. All were slower than his, thumping quietly inside
their owners’ chests. He counted thirty-two altogether, including
his own. All beat with a steady regular rhythm, but there was one –
something he had heard before but didn’t understand – that was
different, and it disgusted him.

He sat up on
the mattress trying to fix a location for this abominable thing,
and when he pinpointed it, he instantly knew. Just as he had placed
the smells and sounds all around him, he immediately recognised the
abomination as Caeles, the creature with the counterfeit body and
harvested organs. That monster was lying there, pumping blood
around what was left of him with an ancient heart that was worn
out, tired of living, but it kept him alive because its job was
reduced with each piece of his body that had been removed so long
ago.

‘
Monster
,’ Gabel said aloud, feeling the heat turn over inside
him.

He associated Caeles with the walking cadavers that he hunted
daily before this oddyssey, with the sanguisuga and the theriopes
that it was his job, and pleasure, to eradicate. A great fiery bird
flapped its wings inside him, imbuing all his being with an
incinerating heat that loaded his body with hatred and
disgust.

He was aware
that he was standing and getting out of the caravan, and felt his
legs pump themselves with blood and propel the rest of him across
the clearing, felt fire in his mind, but after that there was only
pain and confusion, and he slipped into a dark and frightening
unconsciousness.

~

The first
thing he heard was screaming, but before everything else he was
aware of only the darkness. He tried to open his eyes, but
couldn’t.

The screaming
didn’t stop, but it did get louder. He was vaguely conscious of
figures rushing in all directions around him, and heard feet crash
through undergrowth and hands beat back vines and branches.

He was
standing. Feeling bubbling, bitter nausea.

The screams
were still there, coming from two or three people now. He heard a
noise like an animal by his feet, a groan, but it didn’t interest
him when there were so many other confusions to work out.

Like who he
was. Slowly, very slowly, with the screams dragging out the
process, he remembered his name, and then the names of the others
around him. He placed the loudest screamer.

Rowan
…?

He attempted to lift his eyelids, and must have been at least
partially successful because a frightful light lashed his eyes. He
saw shapes moving around, and something large and tall immediately
in front of him. He realised he was standing before a massive tree,
and looked down at his feet to see a collapsed figure, curled up
against its trunk.

He smelled and
tasted blood.

Stepping slowly away, moving backward, he blinked his
painful, watery eyes. A lot of people were standing and watching,
others rushing to the man by his feet. He saw Rowan, backed up
against a caravan, crying into the arms of someone … the magus. He
recognised Colan and Sarai looking horrified amidst a cluster of
young saplings.

He
smelled blood again, and looked over the ground to see a trail of
it leading from a great splatter just outside of one of the
caravans. The spatter turned into a stream that wound its way
toward him. He looked at his feet, which were caked in it. His
hands were also bloody, awfully so, dripping with the thick liquid
that his nerves insisted was still hot. He stood in a pool of it,
and the source of the pool was the man by the tree, shivering and
clutching his gaping stomach, a massive gash stretched from groin
to gullet.

Gabel felt
dizzy, and knew he was falling. He barely felt himself land on some
thick bed of flowers, but smelt the blood all over himself and felt
sick. He sat up though, the nausea abating, and gazed over at the
man who was dying just a few feet away, his glassy eyes fixed
firmly on Gabel.

*

Twenty-Seven

ETCHED IN
TILE

The errant Rosanna waited for her chest to stop heaving. She
slowly counted her breaths. As the length of each intake of air
increased, she felt sleep take her and she became lost in dreams,
dwelling on lingering images from the very-recent past: pleasant
memories that excited her in sleep almost as much as when she had
been awake.

Johnmal
watched her eyelids flutter. When he saw that she was finally
asleep, he got out of bed and padded slowly across the room. Still
naked and glistening, he began his nightly exercises: sit-ups,
push-ups, stretches, then the usual jog around the facility, for
which he wore a robe to conceal himself.

No-one else was around. The boss was asleep, Rose was asleep;
he was entirely alone, and tired as he was he felt nothing but an
exulting pride in being the only conscious being for miles around.
He owned the world.

He and Rosanna had slept together in an unused apartment that
they’d stumbled across just an hour or three earlier, some empty
room deep inside the facility, which had been designed to
accommodate someone but had never been slept in. Obviously Cleric
had had a larger staff in mind when he built the place however many
decades ago, as there were many rooms Johnmal assumed had never
been used. The apartment area had been one of these newly
discovered playgrounds, and were now thoroughly broken in; Rosanna
had torn a heavy notch into the wall above the bed-head, her
territorial mark.

He jogged through the residential block and down into the
subbasement. Johnmal ran quickly past the room with the booth, and
then by the holding pens, which frightened him a little but
continued to fascinate him (though why, he couldn’t fathom). Behind
the thick doors, Cleric’s outlandish creatures stirred.

On the way back up the ramps and staircases he gulped down
water, which he carried in a plastic bottle. Always he needed
water, but more so during exercise, and especially after sex. He
stopped at another apartment and filled up the container in the
sink, then continued at a more leisurely pace back to where Rosanna
slept soundly.

He lay back
down beside her, still in the robe, and slept with the touch of her
hot body against his, saturated by the smell of her skin.

~

An hour before
dawn they dressed and then ate. Cleric was nowhere to be seen.

Johnmal
watched Rosanna as he spooned his wheat to his mouth, as she ate
her own bland cereal and read one of her magazines. When he
finished, he sat watching her until she looked up, having felt his
gaze, and he smiled.

They stood by the inner door and held each other, preparing
to go outside. There were no locks from this direction, and he only
had to pull the door open to get to the small room where Rosanna
often waited for him. She passed through it without
hesitation.

The next door
stood like a gateway to freedom, but was dark and frightened her.
She gripped Johnmal’s hand, fighting the agoraphobia that had
plagued her since she was tiny. Johnmal hadn’t ever told her, but
she had been attacked by a bird as a little girl, just outside the
facility. Cleric had rushed her indoors, blood dripping from the
back of her neck. She still had a scar at the top of her spine that
she had never seen, the incident forgotten or repressed.

Together they
touched the handle, ready to open it to the sweltering rainforest
outside.

‘
Ready?’ he asked her.

She shook her
head, and pulled away from the handle, then led him back to the
guard room and slammed the second door.

‘
Sorry,’ she said feebly, and he got her a glass of something
fermented to steady her nerves.

He left her to
her guard duties with a soft word of encouragement, and one kiss on
the mouth that left a lingering sweetness on his lips.

~

The boss
greeted a sweaty Johnmal in the lounge. ‘Son,’ he said, and clapped
the man’s naked shoulder.

‘
Mister Cleric,’ Johnmal replied, between swigs of
water.

‘
I’d like you to check out the boy again,’ said the boss,
switching on the gas stove and placing a small black kettle on
it.

‘
Mister Cleric.’ Johnmal set down his drink and turned. ‘I’m
not sure I want to try and use my ability again. The last few
times—’

‘
Have been fine,’ Cleric finished for him. ‘And the booth is
there for you, child, it’s always there! You know it’s working to
stabilise your talent.’

‘
So far it has.’

‘
It will always work, and if ever it doesn’t, I’ll fix it.
Don’t worry.’

‘
I can’t help but worry. I don’t want to be unseen
forever.’