The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [156]
“Stupid fuckin bastard,” said Monique. “It’s fuckin killed me, thanks ta you.”
“No,” Manuel moaned, going to her, but Paracelsus snatched his arm.
“The lady is in dire need of assistance,” said Paracelsus, his eyes glancing to the hyena. “We must act quickly if we are to save her limbs. But I cannot work unfettered of anxiety with this, this beast at my back.”
“Right,” said Manuel, but his sword hand felt as numb as his rattled brain. For an instant he considered going back for his charcoal and planks, but then the monster begged for help with the plaintive voice of a little girl and he advanced with his weapon.
“What are you about, boy?!” said Paracelsus, though the pudgy doctor was obviously the better part of a decade younger than Manuel. “I didn’t say kill it, I said watch it!”
The doctor had actually said neither of these things but Manuel did not debate this point. “You don’t mean to let it live?!”
“No,” Paracelsus scoffed. “Do I look like a suicidal madman? No no no, by dawn that monstrosity will be dead as iron.”
“Then what are you waiting—”
“I have a patient to attend,” said Paracelsus. “Afterwards I will examine the monster, thoroughly, and inspecting it after it is dead will be worthless.”
“What do you mean, worthless? It—”
“If you wish to learn about life, you study the living!” Paracelsus turned his back on Manuel, clucking to himself as he saw Monique had passed out. “How else will you see how it all fits together? I’ve examined enough corpses to tell you that if you want to see how it all works you need a living, responsive subject.”
Paracelsus kept on but Manuel stopped listening, walking around the creature’s head. From here it looked like an exceptionally large dog, one with a small stumpy tail and a very large, boxy head, but just a dog. Then one of its eyes focused on him, the voice of a child crying out in fear, and he stumbled back. It could not be real, it could not, and yet it was.
“Oi!” Monique came to. “What’re ya doin?”
“Saving your life, my lady,” said Paracelsus as he splashed water on her ruined right hand.
“Alright then,” said Monique, shock helping her relax. “Ya know where she’s at?”
“No,” said Paracelsus. “I was looking for her, have been ever since she left my employ. Manuel did not tell you I barely missed the both of you in Bern, what, six years past? Shortly after you, ah, quit my clinic.”
“Didn’t mention it,” said Monique, resolving to have a little chat with her artist friend about being more forthcoming with information. “So what’s this? He said you was ’ostage of some chickenheads?”
“Certainly, certainly. Our friend Sister Gloria—”
“Who? Oh.”
“Our friend Sister Gloria speaks in her sleep, habitually, at least when she stayed with me, and so I gathered she spent the bulk of her time in graveyards—”
“Nah, not Awa, that don’t sound like’er,” said Monique.
“Indeed she does, or at least did. I have been … misled, I fear.” Paracelsus scowled over his shoulder at Manuel. “I was told that you and she had gone to Petersburg, or maybe Spain or Africa, they were not sure which, and so I scoured the sunbaked southern deserts, the once-great Granada, the icy steppes of the far north, all with predictably little success, realizing as I do now that you made no such sojourn. Or did you?”
“What? Nah, Spain’s full of—fuck!” Monique swooned as he gently pressed on her shattered left arm.
“So I took my time, making many, many advances of my own, but of course found no trace of her, and so I set to searching the countryside near the last place I knew she had been—Bern. And as I gathered from her unconscious mumblings it was her custom to speak to the stones in churchyards and ask them strange questions, I took to camping in cemeteries myself, in hope, vain though it proved, of finding a trace of the necromancer. Instead something