Merciless Reason (17 page)

Nate felt something like a white-hot poker plunge through his left shoulder and he was knocked to the ground again. On the roof above him, the man with the rifle was lining up for a final shot. Nate put a bullet through his neck with the pepperbox and the man fell flailing from the roof. His body hit with a bone-breaking thud and he lay still beside the crippled spider-fly.

A foot stamped on Nate's gun-hand, making him cry out. The foot kicked his gun away across the alley and then jammed its boot-heel into the bullet-wound in his shoulder. Nate screamed out, and in a moment of weakness he opened himself up to the thing inside him. Just the slightest release of his hold over it—just the tiniest loosening of the mental grip that held it in check. In seconds, it soaked up the pain, surging power through him. He grabbed the booted foot with his right hand and slammed the heel of his left hand in just below the man's knee. The man let out a cry of pain as his kneecap dislodged and he fell, but his other foot caught Nate across the head. Nate recovered quickly, rising up on his knees to go for a ground-hold … and then the twin barrels of a sawn-off shotgun leveled at his face. The man with the ridged face and the squinting eyes stared up at him.

“There's better money for you alive,” he rasped, his face pale with pain. “But I'm willin' to forego the bonus for the sake of convenience. Git yourself face down on that there ground, your
Grace
, or I let you have both barrels.”

Nate took a deep breath, staring intensely at the American. He was in a fighting rage now, liable to try for that gun for the sheer hell of it. But a shotgun blast at this range would destroy most of his head. And with the spread of shot from that short barrel, the man didn't have to be very accurate to score a hit. Nate breathed out slowly and backed away, keeping his eyes on his enemy.

“Face down. I won't tell you again. I don't need your head. There are other parts can be used to identify you if needs be.”

Nate lay face down on the ground. He wondered where Clancy was—the fact that he was not here did not bode well, and Nate didn't want to think about why Clancy wasn't here. The billowing rush of emotion and energy that was flowing out of the engimal coiled in his gut was threatening to overwhelm him. He should never have loosened his control over it. He felt a panic-inducing fear that had nothing to do with the shotgun pointed at his head. The creature was trying to seize another chance to turn the tables on him—to take over his mind again. He couldn't let that happen. Better that he die in a shotgun blast than let that happen.

Then the cocking of hammers on pistols and rifles clacked from either end of the alley.

“Drop the gun, Harmonica,” a familiar voice called out, though it was not Clancy's. “Wildensterns going to be walking out of here and you're going to let him. There's no need for you to die to make it happen—but there's no real reason for you to live either.”

There were men at both ends of the alley, all with weapons aimed at Nate and his attacker. The American hesitated, a low snarl escaping his lips. One of the other men came forward, a dark-skinned man with black hair and a black beard. He looked more Mediterranean or Arabic than Irish. Perhaps one of those black Irish from the west, who had Spanish blood in their veins. In the drab middle-class clothes and with the new beard and his longer hair, Nate might not have recognized the man if not for his voice. Lieutenant William Dempsey, formerly of the British Navy. Cathal Dempsey's father.

“There are soldiers on their way down the street,” he said to the American, who was putting on a defiant air, his gun still leveled at Nate's head. “Somebody must have told them to turn a blind eye, but you've caused a right commotion with your little Wild West show, Harmonica, so even they couldn't ignore it. Somehow, I don't think you want to run into them any more than we do.”

That was enough for the American. He picked himself up, grabbed his hat off the ground where it had fallen, and limped on his injured knee to the end of the alley. He disappeared from sight round the corner, and then Dempsey and another man helped Nate to his feet. Nate had his eyes closed and was taking deep breaths, his mind entirely focused on subduing the will of the serpentine engimal coiled within his gut. Slowly, ever so slowly, it settled down and Nate felt his head begin to clear.

“Come on, you,” Dempsey muttered. “We've a train to catch.”

XVIII

TO IMPOSE ONE'S WILL

DAISY SAT ON A STOOL
in Gerald's old laboratory, holding her breath as he unwound the bandage that held the dressing in place on her injured fingers. She let out a tiny gasp as she saw them again. The engimal wire had cut in a clean diagonal line across her index and middle fingers, slicing through the flesh to the tip of the bone. The wounds had already started to bleed again as the dressing came off.

“Have you any sensation in the fingers?” Gerald asked.

“Pain,” she replied shortly. “And it's getting steadily worse.”

“That's better than nothing at all, believe me,” he said. “You won't be playing the piano again for a while, but I think I can clean the wounds up a bit. Beyond that, you have a choice.”

He gazed at her with a disturbing intensity, as if weighing her up. But his manner was gentle and he handled her injury with a professional tenderness.

“You have been living among us long enough to know we have extraordinary powers of healing. You have no doubt about this, do you?”

“No,” she said quietly. “Why do you ask that?”

“Because with the tips of your fingers in this state,” he said, “I can do one of two things. I can trim back the ends of the bones and sew flaps of skin across the tops of the fingers. The wounds will seal up, but you will be left disfigured. Your fingers will never look normal or work properly again. And there will still be a risk of infection, and the subsequent need for amputation, if the wounds do not heal properly.”

“I see. And the alternative?”

“I can inject you with some of my blood,” Gerald told her. “I leave the wounds open, dress them, and let the intelligent particles in the blood do their work. You would have a chance of regaining the full use of your hand, and possibly even regrowing the ends of your fingers You know enough about us—about me—to know that this is no idle boast.”

Daisy looked away. She believed that these intelligent particles in the Wildenstern blood could do everything Gerald claimed. She had seen the evidence. The question was whether his strange science would work on
her
body, and if so, what other effects it might have. A memory of a man falling to his death from the roof of Wildenstern Hall flashed into her mind—a man who had walked up there because he had listened to a lullaby.

Gerald gestured to her to hold the hand up above her heart to slow the bleeding. The pain in her fingers felt like a mixture of sharpness and pressure, as if someone was crushing the missing ends in a vice with needles in its jaws, and she could still feel it at the end of her fingers. The fingers were stiff and useless and ugly. Something caught in her throat as she said:

“Do it. Give me your blood.”

It was done with little ceremony. Gerald took a clean syringe, found a vein in his arm, inserted the needle and drew out enough to fill half of the syringe. He drew the needle out. Once it was removed, his arm did not bleed any further. He changed the needle on the syringe.

“I've heard that people have different kinds of blood, and that they cannot be mixed,” she said in a faltering voice. “That to give someone the wrong blood can be fatal.”

“There is truth to that,” he said. “But this is not
normal
blood. You will remember how I used some from Elizabeth's brother to save Clancy's life years ago. He was at death's door with a crossbow bolt through his chest, and he made a full recovery. The trick is in the mind.”

“I don't understand.”

Gerald rolled up her sleeve a little to keep it out of his way, then found a vein on the back of her injured hand and rubbed it with some alcohol. He inserted the needle and slowly pressed the plunger on the syringe, injecting the contents into her bloodstream.

“For centuries, the Wildensterns have believed in their innate healing ability. They often associated it with gold, for they found that if they applied gold to an injury, it healed faster. You know how this family loves its gold. The same was true, to a lesser extent, with other precious metals. You will no doubt have noticed how much gold Gideon and his wife and sons wear. They think it lengthens their lives and gives them better health—and then they eat like pigs and indulge like fools in all manner of damaging habits.

“I discovered some time ago that the healing effects of gold are nothing but an ignorant superstition.” Gerald did up the dressing on her fingers and tied it off with just the right degree of tightness. “What matters is the intelligent particles and the link we create between them and our conscious minds. They respond to our intentions—our thoughts. To a point, they obey
orders
. The particles can float there, thinly scattered through our systems, asleep for all intents and purposes. They have to be willed into action. The gold worked because the Wildensterns of the past—and others with
aurea sanitas—
believed it would work. They, in essence,
commanded
their bodies to heal, even though they didn't know how it worked. Their belief in the gold was a crude, but effective link.

“Now you must do the same. You now have
aurea sanitas
in your blood. This is not a superstition, or some kind of witchcraft, or even some hereditary gift. You do not need gold or any other mystical material. You have intelligent particles in your body—you must focus your will on healing your fingers, and they
will
heal. Do you understand now?”

Daisy hesitated, and then nodded. Gerald took her uninjured hand and squeezed it. She felt great strength in his grip, but he did not use it. His gaze had the hypnotic grip of a snake's; the pupils of his eyes looked huge.

“You have to believe what I'm telling you, Daisy,” he insisted. “There must be no doubt in your mind. Whatever your opinions of me, you know I am in earnest about how science will change all of our lives. If there is anything that gives my life meaning, it is that. You have to believe that you can impose your will on these particles and command them to heal your body.”

“I believe,” she said. “I do, I believe what you tell me, Gerald. I may despise you to the core and think you are on a path that could lead to your own death and the deaths of all those around you, but I believe you know more about these things than anyone else alive.” She clasped her bandaged fingers tenderly in her undamaged hand. “It's the small matter of what, in your merciless reasoning—or your raving insanity, whichever prevails—you will ultimately do with that knowledge that chills my blood.”

“Try to enjoy that sweet mystery, as I enjoy the challenge of keeping you in the dark,” Gerald said with a smile as he checked her dressing one more time. “The answer eludes you for now but, given time, I'll sure you'll put your finger on it.”

The only way Cathal had to judge time during the day was by the shift changes of the guards, and by the meal times. Otherwise, there was just the work. The other children were all much younger than him, the oldest aged around thirteen. They had all been here for some time, though nobody was quite sure how long—weeks, certainly, probably months. Time became blurred here in the noise of the machines, the grey haze of dust from the massively heavy rollers, the smell of torn, ground metal and crushed ceramic. The children's senses had become dulled, as had their minds. It was what happened, Cathal guessed, when you worked in a slaughterhouse. The mind closed down to protect itself.

But it wasn't cattle or pigs that were being killed and dismembered here; instead, the carcasses of engimals passed across Cathal's workbench. The smaller ones were handed to Cathal by the boy beside him. The larger ones were lifted from one bench to the next by a crane that could reach almost across the ballroom-sized cavern. There were thirty children, some working in teams of three or four, others sat or standing alone at a bench. Each bench was assigned a role—a part to be removed from each engimal carcass. Cathal had been tasked with removing the creatures' brains.

The children did not do the slaughtering. There was a team of three men who took care of that, working in a smaller chamber off to one side of the cavern. Killing an engimal without causing it enormous damage was not all that easy. They came in so many shapes and sizes that there was no single clean method that worked for all of them. Some could be dispatched with a hammer, others could be shot, but some had to be beheaded or worse. Every now and then, a creature was brought forth which had the executioners standing around looking at it and scratching their heads.

Gerald's orders were explicit. Each engimal had to be killed with as little damage as possible. Then the engimal's body was passed across the benches, dismantled piece by piece. The parts would be separated and categorized, and Gerald would examine each bit to see what could be used and what could be discarded. Every now and then, there would be some engimal that he insisted on dissecting while it was still alive, but he did these on his own. There were others that he kept alive while he took them apart and rebuilt them for his own purposes.

Some of the engimal parts could be reshaped to perform new functions, and this was done in the furnace, or using one of the steam presses. Anything that could not be used was emptied into the grinder, with its three sets of massive iron rollers. Anything that went in one end of the grinder came out as powder or liquid at the other end. A near-constant cloud of dust rose out of its workings. This was the noisiest, most overwhelming part of this macabre factory.

Cathal was still new enough to the Engimal Works to feel thoroughly sick every time he thought about what they were doing. He supposed that this was how meat ended up on his dinner table every night, rendered from the corpses of animals; but distasteful as this was, he could accept that human beings would always eat meat, and it had to be got somehow. Farm animals lived a protected life and bore their young before being slaughtered. He could not accept what was being done to these engimals.

Engimals did not breed. There was a finite number of them, and that number was dwindling over time. Cathal did not believe, as some did, that each one was a unique and immortal creation of God. Charles Darwin's (and Gerald's) theory was the creatures had been created thousands of years ago, by some unknown civilization. There were no new engimals being born, or being made. Each one that died meant a permanent loss to the world. This was why they were so valuable.

Each engimal was a beautiful, strange, unique mystery—and Gerald was slaughtering them on an industrial scale. Cathal could only guess at what kind of money it must be costing. According to some of the older children, thousands of engimals had passed through the works. Cathal had heard once that there were estimated to be just a few million on the entire planet, and most of those were in captivity. How many did Gerald intend to destroy?

One of these creatures had saved Cathal's life, years ago. An old woman had come to him when he was dying of tuberculosis and laid a serpentine on his chest. The snakelike engimal had injected something into him … and then sang to him. Cathal had not merely recovered; he had become healthier than before—stronger, more agile. Gerald later told him that it had injected a high concentration of the intelligent particles into his bloodstream and the song had been some form of instruction to them. Nathaniel had taken the creature before he left, but Cathal suspected that Gerald had a piece of the thing hidden somewhere. Gerald was convinced that something about that serpentine could unlock untold secrets, if only someone could find a way to communicate with it.

Cathal stared at the self-propelling wheelbarrow that sat on his workbench. It was hard to tell where the brain was in some of these creatures. The wheelbarrow was roughly cube-shaped, but with rounded corners. Unlike ordinary wheelbarrows, it had a lid and four wheels. The two large wheels on the front and the smaller wheels that steered at the back had already been removed. The eyes were on the corners at the front, just under the slightly domed lid, but as Cathal had learned, the brain was not always to be found near the eyes—unlike most of Mother Nature's creations. He had decided to obey Gerald's commands for now—at least for as long as it took him to figure this place out and how to escape from it, and hopefully bring all these poor urchins with him.

He jammed a chisel into a seam between the edge of the barrow and the front and hammered it in, trying to prise out the front panel and see what was behind it. Whoever had built these things, they had built them well. They were devilishly difficult to take apart.

Probably because they're not
meant
to be, Cathal thought miserably.

“Sometimes dere's a wire coming out of deh back of dee eye,” a boy's voice said. “If yeh take out dee eye and follow deh wire, it can lead yeh to deh brain.”

The boy's name was Pip, or at least that was what everyone called him, and he was standing at the bench beside Cathal. Pip was responsible for removing the eyes from the bodies. He was a worn-out, thin-looking boy with pale skin and shadows under his own large blue eyes. He had a nervous, twitchy energy and a smile that kept coming and going, as if there was a happy thought in his head, but he only got a view of it from time to time.