The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [159]
“Certainly!” His voice echoed up and down the stair as he paused and smiled up at her. She saw his canines jutted out and down like pearl tusks, yet as he closed his mouth there was no bulge to his lips. Awa supposed the clip-clopping her left foot made on the stair might seem similarly odd to her host. “We are going down because you came here looking for answers, and unlike some we do not believe in punishing the curious by keeping them prisoner in drab little rooms. The iron lining above will keep your so-called bonemen insulated from our leaking wisdom.”
“Leaking wisdom? What is—” Carandini broke into a trot down the stone stair, and Awa hurried after him.
“We are a collective of scholars,” his voice echoed up to her. “As such, it does not behoove us to keep our individual minds isolated from one another. We have adapted ourselves to share our intelligence with one another, but once you let something as vaporous as intellect out of its vessel it can go any old place, including into normally mindless servants.”
“The wolves and birds outside,” said Awa, impressed with herself for coming to the conclusion so quickly. “They’re normal animals that absorbed your leaking wisdom?”
“Bats aren’t birds,” Carandini said aloofly.
“Oh,” said Awa.
“And not my personal wisdom, thankfully. One of our servants noticed you, and so I volunteered to monitor your progress through the wood. When it was obvious you were coming here I alerted the others, some of whom went above to orchestrate my entrance, and ensure you were who we suspected. If you were not the lady Awa, but instead that insane tutor of yours wearing the flesh of yet another apprentice, then we would have been ready with beast as well as brains.”
“I knew my tutor had come here before, and I inferred you didn’t care for one another,” said Awa. “So when you’re around other creatures they become as smart as you?”
“Not at all,” said Carandini, slowing to a walk upon finding Awa more than capable of keeping pace with him. “We leak, as I say, so that here, when we work in the laboratories together, we are all of equal intellect. When we go above, however, or allow others into our sanctum, our carefully cultivated intelligence seeps out of our skulls and infects anything in the vicinity. This does not make them equal to us, at first, but the longer we are near them the more we lose, and the more they gain, until the balance has shifted.”
“The balance has shifted? So were there, were there just as many of you up there with the wolves and bats as there were animals?”
“Of course not. Simple beasts cannot, alone, drain more than the slightest fraction of our intelligence, which is why so many of us keep familiars. They are far more useful than your so-called bonemen, and just as loyal—their borrowed wits allow them to realize that loyalty is the soundest option for their continued self-interest.”
“I see,” said Awa. “So you become less clever the longer you’re around other beings. At what point does it cut off ? Your leak, I mean, what is the minimum intellect you can have? Say you were trapped in a room with a hundred human doctors, smart as you are that would put quite a drain on you, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Carandini, grinding his teeth. “To even master that number of wolves and bats my associates lost themselves, I fear, for there is no minimum intellect, as you put it. The volunteers who went up are no doubt loping around on all fours as we speak, no better than wolves themselves, and if they have lost so much of themselves that they no longer realize that they should seek what solitude the forest affords to recover their wits we will need to send up others to capture them and bring them back down. Otherwise they’ll be pillaging farms and gnawing the udders off cows by dawn.”
“I see.” Awa smiled to herself, quite liking all of this—she was completing his sentences in her head before he even voiced them. Most of them, anyway. Then a concern regarding the practicality of transforming Chloé into one of these bizarre undead impressed itself upon her, and she