A puzzle.
And probably dangerous, of course. Most things in this land were dangerous, in one way or another. He drew his hand back, wincing as the pain returned.
He sat back on his heels and glared at the damaged menhir. It offended him. To understand stone as deeply as that unknown lout must have, and then use that understanding in such an ugly way . . .
His arm throbbed, hot and aching. Greenish pus stained the bandage into blotches edged with thin red and yellow fringes. Rot twisted his nose, and he grimaced as he unwrapped the linen strips he'd stolen from an unused bed. Fiona's experiment, indeed. The twin arcs of the bite glared at him, high on his biceps where that damned snake had twisted in his hands and clamped down like a vise, livid red ringing black dead flesh.
Dead and rotting. And it was his right arm, and him right-handed. He couldn't work out a way to cut it off. Not one that would leave him alive afterwards.
But the red rings around each tooth-mark seemed narrower than before, and the stink less violent, and the throbbing less intense. Maybe the power of the labyrinth had helped.
Or maybe he was wishing that it had. It was worth trying, anyway. He leaned forward and laid his hand on the quartz star again, letting the hot ice flow up his nerves and veins, soothing the throb and cooling the burn.
Then his eyes turned toward the door, and his legs straightened, and his feet moved without orders from his brain. Fiona was back. She had something she wanted to find out, up in the keep where that deadly witch stalked with her hand always resting on the pommel of her knife.
* * *
Fiona gazed at the whiteboard in her lab, seeing other things through other eyes. No, she was not about to let little Fergus find magic healing for his wounds. That would destroy all her data, ruin the experiment. As it was, she needed to find a human subject to provide the baseline of a different species' physiology. Maybe one of those refugees cowering in Maureen's kitchen would do.
And maybe Cáitlin, as well. One subject, or two, or even ten -- not enough for a statistical sample, that was certain. Fiona wouldn't be able to publish her results in the New England Journal of Medicine with such a small base of experimental data. "Bacterial Ectoenzyme Reactions and Soft Tissue Necrosis in Mythical Reptilian Bite Trauma." Well, the title had enough syllables for a research paper, even if it never would see print.
Cáitlin could wait in her tree, puzzling over a leopard that refused to kill her. Fiona never destroyed a tool before it had lost all usefulness. If Cáit survived Maureen's forest long enough, she too would meet that nasty little lizard.
Fiona brought her eyes and mind back to her lab and the question of the lizard. Lab equipment hummed around her, gleaming with stainless steel and gray hammer-tone enamel, displays glowing green or red with numbers and graphs. She glanced over the readings on the mass spectrometer, ticking off compounds in her head. Nothing new. Her projection microscope displayed a tissue culture at 300X, blackened disintegration marching out from the lower left corner as one cluster of cells after another dissolved into slime.
Nasty stuff. She touched her mask with a gloved hand, then covered the filters and tested for an airtight seal. The suit ballooned around her, hissing slightly as the positive pressure air supply found its way to relief valves. No reason to take chances, even though she'd spoken nose to snout with both the dragons and lived to tell the tale.
She caressed the cold rounded enamel of the centrifuge beside her on the table. She'd used it only once since setting it up -- like her neat green pastures, the lab served mostly as a stage setting for performance art, the Mad Scientist at work, Dr. Frankenstein surrounded by the crackle and ozone of high voltage electricity.
But the equipment she did use gave her such solid, satisfying facts. Just because the humans had invented science didn't mean that it was useless. They'd invented these machines as well, and then politely donated them to Fiona's lab.
Well, maybe not donated, or at least not consciously. They were still carried on the inventory at Jackson Labs, or listed as destroyed in a bad fire they'd had a few years back. But none of the instruments had ever been signed out to the visiting post-doctoral research geneticist Fiona Fálta, PhD, or to her microbiologist colleague and brother Dr. Sean Fálta. None of the machines had ever been logged to a lab where she had worked. She might want to go back there again sometime.
Fiona turned back to the cage, her belly swinging awkwardly until she felt like she was waddling along with the entire earth tucked under the front of her moon suit. Her back ached, and her ankles throbbed with the swelling. This pregnancy bit walked perilously close to bad design. She could see some powerful advantages to dumping her endoparasite in a nest and incubating it, like those dragons. For one thing, she wouldn't have to keep running to the loo.
She studied the black lizard imprisoned behind a grid of stainless steel bars. "Are mammals an evolutionary mistake?"
{Shen hungry.}
"You're always hungry, love. And so am I. But I'll be rid of this thing in another day or so. The stars and planets will come to their convergence and foretell the spectacular deaths of Brian and Maureen. More to the point, your father will have lunch, and I'll pick up the scraps left over."
{Shen hungry!}
Fiona started to bend down to the refrigerator under her lab counter, discovered for the
