"What is it?" I asked.
"I'm not sure. It might be the wolves, but it would be very unusual for them to be awake so early. It might just be the beauty, playing tricks on me."
"Wonderful," I said.
The demon looked nervously over each shoulder, but didn't move forward. I knew that he was panicking as I had out on the fields of Harakun.
"Come on," I said. "Your father will die without the antidote. Everyone will die."
"There's something out there," he said.
"It's your fear," I told him.
"This way," he whispered. Then he pointed down the street to where the road was blocked by the fallen facade of the Ministry of Education. "Through there," he said, and began to run, using his wings to propel him.
"Wait," I yelled, and sprinted to catch up.
I followed the demon through a chaotic maze designed by explosion, leaping from rock to rock, squeezing through tunnels, sprinting down powdered streets. Misrix used his wings and legs together in a way that made his every move fluid and weightless. I was a crooked shadow, stumbling merely at the thought of his ease.
When we finally came to a long stretch of clear street,
Misrix slowed down and waited for me. I caught up to him and stopped to get my breath.
"It looks like we will make it there, Cley," he said.
"I'm glad you think so," I said, still heaving.
"A quarter of a mile up this street," he said.
"One of the old munitions factories?" I asked.
"Where they used to make the shells?"
I nodded.
"Very good, Cley," he said, and the tip of his barbed tail came up and tapped me on the shoulder.
He started walking more slowly then, and I easily moved along at his side. From his dazed expression, I could tell he was lost in a daydream of the beauty.
"Stay with me," I said to him.
"I was thinking," he said.
"I know."
"I was thinking about my father telling me that you were a great Physiognomist. No, not great …the best, he said. He told me that no one read a face like you did. It makes sense to me, the Physiognomy, as he described it."
"It's one of those things that sounds like it's got to make sense, but it never does," I told him.
"Read me," he said, and stopped walking.
"Here?" I asked.
"I know you have no instruments, but give me an estimated reading," he said putting his enormous horned head down in front of me. "What do you see?"
Behind Misrix on the side of the street was a grim tableau—a mother, cradling an infant's skull in a splayed web of finger bone. I preferred to stare at that than to stare into his face and apply the bogus science that had in the past made both a fool and a butcher of me.
"I see, 'intelligent,' " I said, and quickly began walking.
"Intelligent," the demon said. He followed behind me.
"Perhaps it is merely the spectacles," he said.
"It's the wings," I told him.
"What about the horns?"
"A nice touch," I said.
"What do you say to the way my forehead bulges and to the prominence of my cheekbones. They must say something to you."
He continued to beg for my approval the rest of the way to the laboratory. It became difficult thinking up accolades that would be subtle enough to make them convincing. I won't describe to you what the Physiognomy really told me about him. If I'd believed it, I would have fled.
7
"They know he is sleeping" said Misrix as we sur-veyed the damage to the lab. Not one beaker or test tube was left unbroken. Brightly colored liquids had spilled out, painting the floor like a dream. There was a horrific stench of chemicals and werewolf excrement.
"How do they know?"
"You don't understand; the wolves know things that we can't know. They have been waiting for this for a long time. Once, when I hid above them in a dark nave of rubble among the ruins, I heard them whispering of revolt. I told my father about it. He called them to him from the plain and the ruins the next evening and served them large platters of a green, raw meat. They ate ravenously and when they were satiated and lying on the ground in a daze, he put a pistol to the heads of two of them and blew out their brains. The others cowered. He kicked one in the side and put a few bullets into the ground near Greta. Later that night, I was awakened by them howling out on the fields of Harakun."
"They've done a thorough job, here," I said, stepping over a pile of shit. "Still, we might find something."
"They've marked this place as their territory," he said. "I think they knew we would come here."
"Take anything that appears remotely interesting," I told him. "See if there are any vials of the antidote, any written notes." I moved farther into the lab, pushing aside nets of wire, glass shards grinding beneath my boots. The stench was blinding.
I followed a row of wooden tables along the back wall. Gingerly picking through the remains of beakers, I searched for a shred of Below's thoughts. Instead, I uncovered a dozen palm-sized creatures that mixed the attributes of man and fish. The heads were bulbous and gilled. Although there were legs with feet, there were also tails. I stared far longer than I should have.
It was slow going, and the discoveries were all wondrous but unsettling. I found gears made of bone, and bones grafted from metal. These lay in a patch of grass that grew out of the top of a table as if it were dirt instead of wood. Next to this was a collection of female heads of a lime complexion. They lay drenched in a clear viscous solution beneath the shattered remains of the huge jars in which they had once floated. There were racks of instruments, none which I could identify, and springs and gears scattered amidst the glass.
Every few minutes a machine in the shape of a diminutive lighthouse at the center of the lab would begin to glow and project three-dimensional images of colorful, long-tailed birds flying through the air. Their different songs filled the lab. As abruptly as the device turned on it would suddenly go dark, and the sounds and images would fade. It was during one of the flights of the birds that I found a scrap of paper on the floor. On the shred of rumpled parchment, rendered in ink were two objects, an hourglass and an eye, with an equal sign between them.
"Come here, Gey," Misrix called. I put the paper into my pocket and carefully made my way past an operating table rigged with wires and tubes and around a chair made of metal. When I reached him, he was pulling a case out from beneath a worktable.
"What do an hourglass and an eye have in common?" I asked him as he hefted the object up onto the table.
"The past has run through both of them?" said the demon, then flipped the latches on the sides of the case and opened it to reveal a blue-velvet lining and five vials of some liquid arranged in a star-shaped pattern, their corked tops almost touching at the center.
"What is it?" I asked.
"This isn't it," he said, and shook his head. "I remember Father telling me that he called this mixture Holy Venom. What it does, I can only remember is not good."
"Have you seen any other cases like this one?" I asked.
"None that haven't been broken into and the vials shattered."
"Let's keep looking," I said, but just then Misrix held his hand up, motioning for me to stay quiet. He leaned his head back as he had done earlier and sniffed at the air. I could see his ears actually twitch slightly as if tracking some vague sound.
"They are coming, Cley."
"We haven't had a chance to find anything."
"There's nothing to find. Everything is destroyed, and Father never committed his ideas to paper. We've got to leave now."