Half Discovered Wings

by David Brookes

  When he stepped into the light, his feet felt warm as if they had never experienced the icy lake. All he knew then was tender warmth, and the soft colourful light that moved in ripples over his body.

  Looking up, Gabel saw a formation of coral before him, five tentacular growths coming up and over almost to meeting-point in the centre of a pentagon of reef.

  As he stepped inside the coral edifice, the rest of the universe faded away and he was in a dark, frightening place. There was no light, no noises except the blowing wind, a sound he had not heard since they departed from São Jantuo.

  He looked around, and longed for release from this depressing and fearful place.

  Son. You left, but you must return. There can be no other.

  Whose voice, and why?

  A light, a blinding orb, appeared in front of him. He followed it away from the darkness, away from the deep, resonant voice.

  Gabel closed his hands around it. As he did so, mist swam outward from the orb, engulfing it as it side into the shape of a human figure and began to condense, solidify. He let go and stepped back.

  The young woman standing before him was completely naked. Her abdomen was bloated, the skin pulled tight over her belly where, inside, a tiny person developed. She stroked the fleshy curve with both hands and smiled softly. Her eyes, a deep blue, were watery with tears of joy. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and wavered as if in water.

  ‘Oh god,’ Gabel cried silently, hot tears streaking down his cheeks and marking his face. His lips moved in random formations as he attempted to find the words to express his pain.

  You can have her, said a voice in his ear.

  She can be yours again, said another. Both were harmonious, warming to his soul, cheering him. The pain subsided enough for him to stand and step closer to the woman clutching her stomach.

  ‘Rebekah,’ he said, reaching out toward the mirage.

  The two beautiful voices sang in his ears, joined by a third:

  Your friends are your enemies. The old man knows what you really are, the smoke and flame that bore you, even though you do not. He is using you for his own purpose!

  ‘I want her!’

  We know … Three unseen figures hovered by his ears, gently nipping his lobes with invisible teeth, breathing hot breath over the skin of his cheeks. Do what we ask of you, they say, and she is yours once more.

  ~

  Gabel woke up and heard the singing through the hull. He absorbed the song, drew it into himself. He didn’t register the voices, but they had their intended effect, and he rose from where he had been lying.

  He understood.

  Alone in the berth, he had nothing to worry about. The icy chill of the graveyard had compelled the crew and passengers to sleep in the lower deck, so he didn’t have to be worried about disturbing anybody for the time being. He headed toward the stairs, which led him outside.

  His eyes saw the coral formations, just visible through the white mist that pacified the night’s darkness. His brain didn’t register them; they were simply another signal to reinforce what he had promised to do. He turned, walked past the door to the shrine, ignoring it, and entered the bridge where the wheel stood locked and unmanned. Caeles was supposed to be steering, but had left it on auto while he gazed out across the Lual, letting the sensors make the minute adjustments that may or may have not be necessary on top of his programmed instructions.

  Gabel noticed there was no resistance on this level, but didn’t dwell on it – in fact he was already through the bridge and down the stairs to the lower berth, where three of the remaining passengers slept. Because he had accepted that the bridge was clear of all danger, he didn’t hear the voice from the entrance to the bridge calling out:

  ‘Gabel? That you?’

  Gabel cracked his knuckles, quietly, almost silently, as he crept past the sleeping Lanark. He didn’t hear the footsteps coming down from the bridge behind him.

  The captain slept in the fold-out bunk on the wall adjacent to the rear of the deck, and Gabel had to creep past not only Lanark, but the magus to get to him. He didn’t hesitate before placing his sturdy weather-worn hands on either side of the captain’s skull and twisting violently. The sound and feel of the snap settled into the hunter’s mind, but didn’t sink in. Not just yet.

  From the bottom of the steps, Caeles looked through the darkness in disbelief as Gabel moved on, the factotum expelling a long sigh.

  Further up the wall, back toward the deck, was the bed where Rowan lay. Gabel walked quietly over, stopped by her sleeping form, and for a second something twitched inside his mind. His body spasmed slightly, as if it wanted to be elsewhere, but it was over as quickly as it began – and the song was still playing.

  He propped Rowan up against the wall. His fingers, like a hot nest of worms, slid behind her ears, and his palms flattened her cheeks. Muscles popped all down his arms, preparing to twist—

  Caeles yelled and lunged, tackling Gabel in such a way as to knock his arms back before the fatal twist was carried out. The hunter had knocked his head in the scuffle and, through a haze of dizziness as the awakened others piled upon him, simultaneously realised what he had done, and forgot the dream. All he knew was suffering, confusion, and the song that drifted over the water, fading to silence.

  ~

  ‘Restrain him,’ Caeles said to the magus. ‘He looks like he won’t put up a fight. And him too,’ he said, pointing a finger at Lanark.

  ‘What? Why me?’

  ‘Lanark: don’t argue. I’ll talk to you later. Old man, just do it. Take them up to the passengers’ berths.’

  Caeles moved to where the captain was lying. He didn’t need to check for a pulse this time: he was undoubtedly dead. Checking on Rowan, he found her unharmed but still comatose. Her pulse was thready and she was thin, desperately thin. He would feed her when he had this more immediate problem sorted.

  He helped the magus chain Gabel to one wall, and the complaining but compliant Lanark to the other. Each link seemed strong enough to hold them.

  ‘Why do you not chain me as well?’ the magus asked brightly, already knowing the answer.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll be a problem,’ Caeles replied, then rushed to the bridge.

  Checking the controls and displays, Caeles assured himself everything there seemed okay and untampered with. He let out a puff of breath that had never been processed by his long-dead lungs.

  When he looked up, he saw the centre of the Lual.

  ~

  The magus joined him on the deck as they sailed past the massive coral formation. In the centre, perched upon makeshift seats in the reef, sat three women.

  The two on either side were piscine in appearance. One, salt-bleached and scaled, pinched together her eel-grey lips, twitching her webbed fingers. Bare legs rippled with tiny fins. The other woman had a single flat fishy eye, round and unblinking, and was spotted with mould from wrinkled breasts to slimy fishtail. She had dead seaweed in her hair.

  In between was a woman completely different. Standing she would have been nearly seven feet tall, and even sitting she towered above the others. Soft red hair hung down to her waist, obscuring her body, and in it she had downy feathers that stuck up at the crown like the crest of a grebe. Her right arm was more like a wing, and was gangrenous and twisted back in a birdy cystic fibrosis. She had a sallow face with one eye encircled by white knobbly skin. This garishly thin face was perched upon a crooked neck, which twitched left and right, left and right, avian eye swivelling to look at the passing vessel.

  ‘Who are they?’ Caeles whispered.

  The three women looked at them with empty eyes, in total silence. The music had stopped completely.

  ‘Rusalki,’ the magus murmured. ‘They’re called rusalki.’

  *

  Fifteen

  THE WATCH OF THE SENTINEL

  As far as Caeles could tell, the magus seemed unaffected by the allure of the songs, though Caeles had his suspicions. He k
new that he himself felt no compulsion to do anything out of character, and had dreamt no strange dreams (he rarely did, and whenever they occurred they were twisted memories of the past, or frightening visions of the future that he had no intention of participating in). He didn’t, however, know if the magus harboured his own suspicions. Did the old man’s silence mean he didn’t think Caeles affected, or that he thought he could handle him if he was?

  Caeles spent most of his time on the bridge, using what little knowledge of the vessel he had gleaned from observing the captain to steer and program their way through the graveyard. They traversed this far side of the ring of dead ships far quicker than before, with the Tractatus now operating at faster speeds.

  They passed the final shipwreck in the second afternoon following Timothy’s death. The magus was sitting with the confined Gabel and Lanark, describing to them the trio of creatures and sparing no detail. It was difficult to know if Gabel found any of it interesting; the hunter suffered greatly from the guilt that had overwhelmed him as the result of his actions, and spent all his time looking at the floor as he sat on it, one hand chained to the bed, the other resting limply on his leg. His twisted wrist throbbed, but his conscience was killing him.

  The effects of the rusalki’s singing seemed to have diluted, or else they were no longer sending their voices out to meet them. In the little sleep they managed, no-one mentioned any odd dreams. Gabel had dreamt ones similar to the ones he’d had earlier, though said nothing. These dreams were made worse by the gradual inclusion of a figure that had often haunted his sleeping hours: a leathery-winged person, concealed by shadow, who whispered his name over and over. It didn’t help to find that sudden mild hair loss, the first signs of which he’d had the day before finding the bunker in the woodland before São Jantuo, was becoming more pronounced by the day. Scabs developed on his scalp.

  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 q
uite 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.’