He had to lean back against the far bank of the ditch then, for he was trembling so violently that he thought he might fall. As it was, he only vomited, heaving his guts up into the dark water at his feet, while Davey slipped slowly down the opposite bank, still staring at him with that single, unblinking eye.
Quire turned away and pulled himself laboriously up into the field. He got unsteadily to his feet and staggered away, quite numb. He did not know if anyone—or anything—else would come after him. If they did, he had nothing left with which to oppose them. All he knew was that he needed to put as much ground as he could between himself and the gravedigger, still stirring feebly in the drainage ditch. Get himself away from this foul farm and out from under the light of this leering moon.
Beneath the powerful mid-morning sun, Davey Muir’s hand clawed weakly at the soft earth. His fingers dug in, gouging out little ruts, piling up the grass between them. He had left a scrabbled trail of mud through the field, where he had hauled himself from the ditch, dragged his broken body another few dozen yards.
Blegg stood looking down at him. The lower half of Davey’s left leg was rotated a good quarter-circle further than it should have been, the knee joint ruptured. A stick protruded a few inches from the ruined socket of his right eye. He made no sound. Just reached, and took a feeble handful of soil and grass, pulled it towards him. Reached, and held, and pulled.
“Go back to the farm,” Blegg said without looking round to the man standing disconsolately behind him. “Get a fire started.”
The man did not move at once. He stared in dumb horror at the crippled form on the ground.
“Wallace, did you get deaf as well as drunk and stupid last night?” Blegg snapped.
“No. No.”
“Then go back to the farm and get a fire started. Same place as we did the one got shot at Duddingston. I’ll bring this.”
Wallace turned and began to trudge away, sluggish. Blood still crusted his hair where his head had been cracked against the farmhouse wall. As he walked, he favoured his left side, protective of the aching bruises put there by a couple of good punches.
“When we’re done, you’ll need to start loading the wagon up,” Blegg called after him. “Everything. This place isn’t safe any more. Not after this. Ruthven’s equipment’ll be needing another home.”
Blegg bent down over Davey and pulled the stick from his eye. Fragments of skin and eyeball adhered to it. Blegg threw it casually away. He regarded the sluggishly moving figure for a moment or two, then turned to shout at Wallace’s receding back.
“Have you a knife?”
Wallace paused and looked back.
“Not on me.”
“Get one from the kitchen, then. I may have a use for a part of this thing yet.”
Blegg picked Davey up, slung him without difficulty over his shoulder and began to walk after Wallace.
“Quire,” he murmured, with a strange mixture of loathing and relish.
XVIII
Quire’s Last Day
Dr. Robert Knox paused, his blade poised above the cadaver, and looked up. A whole gallery of attentive faces gazed down upon him from the seats of his teaching theatre. Two hundred or more young men waited for the incision and what it would reveal. The fractious whine of the gas lights was the only sound, as if every breath in the great chamber was held.
Knox slowly set down the scalpel and clasped his hands.
“You are privileged, gentlemen,” he said, taking a pace to interpose himself between the corpse and its audience. “Privileged to have been born into an age of comprehension. A transformative age. By your presence here, you accept an invitation to join a brotherhood of sorts.”
He looked up, and addressed himself to the highest corner, where wall met ceiling. His voice swelled with passion the better to fill the space. And though this was not what his students had expected, they listened with rapt concentration.
“It is a brotherhood that holds reason, and its fearless application, to be the holiest of sacraments. It is a fraternity built upon the achievements of men who laboured long and hard to uncover secrets, and render unto all of humanity the fruits of their labours.
“Yet I was reminded, not so long ago, that there are those who would set obstacles in the path of reason. Those who would forbid us to follow where it leads, because they find our discoveries, or our conclusions, or our methods—particularly our methods—distasteful. They care nothing for the benefits mankind may derive from the rational, clear-headed pursuit of knowledge. They are prisoners of their superstitions, and their fear, and would have us be the same.”
Knox returned to the side of the dissecting slab at his theatre’s heart. He looked down at the naked form lying there: a middle-aged woman. Blotched skin, shorn hair. Nameless and empty.
“A great enterprise is under way,” he called out, so sharply as to set a few of the assembled students jumping on their hard benches. “A noble enterprise, and you are all a part of it, though it was begun before a single man of you was born. It will change our world entirely. It is the substitution, gentlemen, of superstition and mysticism with a spirit of rational enquiry that promises to make possible wonders of every kind.”
He pointed with a thick, long finger at one of the gas jets burning so brightly on the wall.
“It is by the light of just such a wonder that you see me at this moment. There have been boats out upon the Forth this very day driven not by the wind or the strength of men but by engines. We shall, undoubtedly, have the railway in Edinburgh before this decade is out, and then we all shall make our journeys not by stagecoach but by steam carriage. Wonders, gentlemen!”
Knox carefully reached down and took hold of the scalpel once more. It was small in his big hand, but its blade took a gas-fired gleam from the air and sparkled.
“It is our joint responsibility, we members of this rational brotherhood, to stand firm against the assaults of those who would hobble our investigations. We pursue higher ambitions than they conceive, and cannot be bound by the petty concerns of mob, or church, or polite society. It is both our burden and our honour to stand above such considerations.”
He surveyed the attentive faces, as if to determine their worth.
“In one more way are you privileged, gentlemen,” he proclaimed with a dramatic flourish of his scalpel, much as the conductor of an orchestra might wield his baton. “It is this: you have found your way into my charge. I tell you frankly that you are most fortunate, or wise, to have arrived at such a destination.”
A ripple of amusement tumbled down the steeply raked gallery of seating. His students knew the shape of this theme. They had heard it often enough before, and it was one that seldom proved less than entertaining.
“You have escaped, some of you all too briefly, from under the dead hand of the university. These men they call lecturers and professors”—Knox gestured at the wall with his blade, sending their imaginations out beyond the Royal Infirmary, over the tenement roofs, to where the great college of the university lay—“they rest upon laurels earned by those now dead. They rely upon the notes of men who gave the same lectures, word for word, thirty years ago. There is no movement. And thus they allow the torch that they inherited to falter, its flame to dim.”
He lowered his voice at last, surveying his assembled acolytes with one final sweep of his distinguished head.
“Not here, gentlemen. Here we still pursue the mysteries. Here we still stride forward, admitting of no restraint that lesser mortals might seek to set upon our advancement of human knowledge. So. Let us see what discoveries await us this evening, shall we?”
He bent over the dead woman and set his scalpel to her throat. A pause. An expectant hush. Then, with a
