Ancient Appetites

her head on his shoulder and put her arms around his neck and stayed there until the sobs subsided. It was an extremely compromising position for a young man to be in with his sister-in-law at this time of night, but it didn't seem as if much else could go wrong, so he didn't care.

When she had finally composed herself, she lifted her head and dabbed her eyes. There was a damp patch on his shoulder, but Nate said nothing. His mind was already on another track.

'Where did you see them at it?' he asked, and realized too late that he was being insensitive. So be it.

'In the forest on the south side of the hill,' she replied, heaving in a breath. 'I was following him again – that's why I'm wearing these clothes; I got the idea from Tatty.' She gave him a hard look. 'He met Hennessy on the road and gave him some money… and… and sent him on some job or other. I don't know what.'

'Knowing Berto, he was probably sending money to help those people pay their rent and rebuild their houses,' Nate mused. 'You know, the ones Trom rolled over. Berto's been doing that kind of thing for years – partly out of some misplaced sense of charity, but also because it's another way to have a dig at Father. I don't suppose you saw anyone else? Someone on a velocycle?'

'No,' she said. 'Just bloody Hennessy and his bloody horse. I ran off when I saw them… saw them kiss… and came back through the hidden passageways, but I got lost. I've been wandering around in there for hours. Why?'

'You do know Berto was attacked tonight, don't you?'

'What?' Daisy was visibly shocked.

'Someone ran over him with a velocycle. Everyone thinks it was me.'

'And was it?' she asked bluntly.

'What? No! Of course not!'

She didn't spare him another word. Jumping to her feet, she ran to the door. As she threw it open and hurried out, Nathaniel went after her.

'Put on a bloody dress before you go to him, for God's sake,' he called. 'He'll have a fit if he sees you like that!' He slammed the door and headed back to his bedroom, adding to himself, 'And if he doesn't, maybe you should dress like that from now on.'

XXV

THE WONDER OF INTELLIGENT PARTICLES

Nate started the morning with another madcap sparring match with Hugo. The old man was growing stronger and quicker by the day, but still seemed unable to grasp even the simplest rules of modern fencing. Nate came away from the bout with a bruised arm and sore shins, but strangely elated by the sheer excitement of fighting such an unpredictable opponent. The frantic combat stopped him from thinking about his situation.

He was supposed to go and see Silas after training, but he decided that if he was to be branded a traitor, he was no longer under any obligation to obey his father's wishes. It had been a while since he had seen Gerald, so he made for the laboratory instead. Hugo went with him to check on Brutus's progress.

Gerald was working on his toast-maker, which was sitting quietly as he poked around inside one of its slots with a screwdriver. The ancient giant was still showing no sign of waking up. Hugo knelt by his brother's bedside and, clasping his hands, lowered his head to pray.

'That's being very well behaved,' Nate said, nodding at the toast-maker. 'You get it trained then?'

Gerald shook his head but didn't look round. He got like this when he was absorbed in his work – as if the outside world no longer existed for him. Lifting his head at last, he looked at Nate with a feverish excitement in his eyes. Nate noticed the weariness in his face and wondered if his cousin was sleeping at all these days.

'I've made some incredible discoveries,' Gerald said softly, as if he didn't want Hugo to hear. 'Incredible. Look here.'

He gestured towards a microscope and Nate looked down through the eyepiece. Through the lens, he could see some kind of blood cells.

'What am I looking at?' he asked.

'Some of Hugo's blood,' Gerald whispered, looking warily over at the old man kneeling by the bed on the other side of the room. 'Now watch.'

He lifted the top slide and used a needle to deposit a drop of something on the bottom piece of glass, then he replaced the slide.

'Bacteria,' Gerald said. 'Watch it attack the blood.'

Nate kept looking and saw the small, spiky cells of the bacteria attach themselves to the concave blood cells. They didn't last long. A kind of haze spread out from the blood cells and coated the bacteria. Nate watched as the attacking organism was eaten up by the strange mist. In less than a minute the bacteria had been destroyed.

'I can't see properly,' he complained. 'What's the misty stuff? Can you make the magnification stronger?'

'It's on its strongest setting,' Gerald told him. 'That's all I've been able to see too, so far. But I've done other tests. This haze, whatever it is, reacts differently to different threats. And that's not all; it doesn't just destroy – it can rebuild. I think it may even have intelligence.'

He checked again to see that Hugo was not listening.

'We've never been able to observe aurea sanitas at work, other than seeing the results of the accelerated healing our family enjoys, but I think this is it. This mist in Hugo's blood is a cloud of particles that's thick enough to be seen. We don't have so many, so we've never been able to spot them before. Hugo and his brother and sisters are loaded with the little beggars.'

'Particles smaller than cells?' Nate asked incredulously. 'Intelligent particles? Is that possible?'

'Our ancestors rebuilt their bodies from scant remains,' Gerald replied, with something like awe in his voice. 'Something kept the seeds of life in them even after their corpses were mummified. Their brains were dead, but some part of them remembered… like drawing the plans of a machine or a building, so their physical forms could be recovered. Their own memories are not complete; but even so, the fact that Hugo and his siblings can move and speak after six hundred years… I think it was these particles. Something about the quality of gold acts as a stimulus or fuel for them, and using it, they have the power to regenerate life, almost to the point of granting immortality. But I don't think they are a part of life. I think we're looking at mathaumaturgy here – once upon a time, someone actually made these things and put them in our blood. I think this is evidence of a science beyond our understanding.

'You see, this isn't the only place I've seen this kind of healing action,' he went on. 'We've always wondered how the engimals healed. After all, they're made of inorganic compounds – metals and other elements. They have no lymph or circulatory systems, no capacity for producing new cells because they have none to begin with. And yet they can heal. I think they use the same mathaumaturgical particles to rebuild themselves.

'Just on a whim, I decided to see if these marvellous little mites were interchangeable; whether I could create a link with an engimal using the particles in my blood. That's the whole basis of my theory, after all – that they were created to serve. Normally it takes days or even weeks of work to bond with an engimal. I put a single drop of my blood in the toast-maker's drinking water and all of a sudden it obeyed my every word! Do you understand what I'm telling you?'

Nate understood completely, but he wasn't sure he believed it. Gerald giggled, as if he were on the edge of hysterics.

'Once a link is created with a master, they appear to be instantly obedient. Forget all this nonsense about breaking them in – this can override all that. And it proves once and for all that they were designed and built to serve by a race whose science was far beyond our own. I'll have to carry out experiments on some of our other engimals to get a better idea of how it all works.

'Imagine if we could find some way to communicate with them, Nate – perhaps with mathematics or some long-lost language. Imagine that!' He ran his hand through his dark mop of lank hair. 'I must write to Charles Darwin and involve him in this. I think these particles are the key to discovering who was