The thing sat, fumbled with its body where a hip joint might have been. Justinian put the tube into the opening and turned it a quarter turn. It made a loud snick, an emphatic dagger of sound piercing the utter silence. Down on the road, even the horses had stopped breathing.
The thing raised an arm. Firelight reflected from fingertips like knives. The thing turned toward the man in the white coat. Xulai tried to say, “Why, don’t, don’t let him . . .”
Abasio’s hand covered her mouth. He bent close to her ear. “Shhh. Don’t say anything. Nobody is supposed to say anything.”
The thing sat quietly, watching its own hand. It was trembling. “Maintenance,” it said. “Loop. Can’t get out of loop.”
“Doctor Hammond knows. Doctor Hammond will get you out of the loop.”
The creature closed its eyes. Justinian sat quietly. The thing did not seem to breathe. Perhaps it had never breathed. After a very long time it said, “Good. Out of loop. Good. Thank you, Doctor Hammond. Soon will go kill now . . .”
Justinian got up and . . . walked . . . away . . . down the road . . . in the silence.
The fire burned. The wolves watched. The archers stood, arrows nocked. After a while, a rather long while, the creature slumped and fell from the bench. It lay still in the road. Precious Wind and the wolves came closer; the wolves spread, watching. Behind them the archers moved forward, arrows ready.
Xulai whispered, “What was in the tube?”
“Something that stopped the hunger. Narcotic, I think. Something that went to the flesh parts of the brain and put it to sleep. If we’re right, it won’t be able to move for a while.”
Men emerged from the shadows down the road carrying one of the heavy nets. The creature was wrapped in the net. It struggled feebly. The wolves darted forward. Precious Wind recalled them. Another net came, equally heavy. Twelve, eighteen, twenty-four men fastened loops through the net, picked it up, and ran toward the north, a dozen to each side, the way they had come, a practiced lope that did not hesitate or stumble.
Xulai leaned out the window. The moon had risen; there were other men waiting to help anyone who faltered; torchbearers ran alongside. In the moonlight, she could see the bearers running, onto the way-halt, then downhill, toward the switchback below, where she had seen the footpath. Torch flame burned red against the dark, descending on the path, hidden at last by the slope. She watched until the men returned without the net, still running. She could hear their panting. Someone came into the room and closed the shutters over the window. Precious Wind.
“Come,” she said. “We need a barrier between us and the explosion. The pit is around the hill, down a bit. They’re about to blow it up, the way we did all the others.”
“Wasn’t he dead?” asked Xulai.
“All the flesh that was in him is dead. The only way we know of to kill the rest of it is to blow it up and collect the pieces and pour them into a concrete lump and sink it in the deepest part of the sea. It seems to work. None of the ones we fixed that way have ever come back.”
She led them into the village, into some lower floor at the very back of the village where there were no windows, no doors, and where every villager was taking refuge. Justinian was among them. Xulai ran to him. “Why did you do that?” she cried. “I thought it would kill you!”
“Not if we had learned the right words,” he said in a rather feeble voice with an even feebler chuckle. “The emissary told us he took books from that place, remember. Before they blew it up. The books were very, very old. Their pages were enclosed in stuff they used to preserve paper, stuff like glass, page by page. It was a record of what they’d done. The books had pictures and names in them. The names of the people, the real people they made into monsters. Volunteers! The names of the real monsters, the ones who created the slaughterers. Proud scientists, the ones who set out to make the world pure. Jacob was the last monster, the new, improved monster. Doctor Hammond was the real monster who made him . . .”
The building shook. Dust fell from the ceiling. A few children cried, a few others cheered.
“That was the bomb,” said Precious Wind. “Only a little one. Not lastingly deadly, like the one at the Old Dark House. When everything cools down, we’ll pick up any scraps that may be left. We dropped the creature in a pit and put a heavy cover on it before we set the bomb off. Chances are, not much will be left to find.”
The door opened. People began to leave.
Justinian said, “The emissary told me they found Doctor Hammond in the Old Dark House too. He was very well hidden in a subcellar, in a kind of coffin attached to a maintenance gadget. He had planned to wake up in a purified world, but he was very, very dead. There were pictures of him. He looked a little bit like me.”
“And that’s why you did it? Because he looked like you?”
“No,” he said. “Maybe a little. It increased our chances of success. I really did it because of your mother. I was quite willing to . . . take the risk so long as I put an end to her killer. Alicia was only a creation of the Old Dark Man, and even the Old Dark Man wasn’t as guilty as Doctor Hammond and his friends. They were the real ones.”
He had, at one point during the planning, actually wanted to die during the event, but he didn’t mention that. That was before he knew Xulai was expecting a child.
Xulai turned pale and gulped. Abasio helped her sit
