Beautiful Blood

“Too right! We wouldn’t want it to degrade. I’ll put it somewhere safe, shall I?”

Arthur dropped to one knee and gripped him by the throat. An instant later the syringe bit into Rosacher’s left thigh. He cried out and tried to shake free, but Myrie kneeled and pinned his legs as Arthur pushed in the plunger.

The only immediate effect of the injection that Rosacher could discern was a sensation of cold that spread through the muscles of his thigh. Grinning broadly, Arthur dropped the half-empty syringe on his chest and stood.

“Well, now,” he said. “I believe my work here is done.”

He strode to the door and Myrie, after seizing the opportunity to spit in Rosacher’s face, hurried after him.

Ludie came to her knees and began working at his bonds, saying, “They forced me, Richard! I’m sorry!”

She continued to talk, prying at the knots, freeing his arms, his legs, asking if he was all right, her speech muffled as though she were speaking from inside a closet. The numbing cold that had followed the bite of the syringe dissipated and warmth flooded Rosacher’s body, attended by a feeling of glorious well-being. He thought he should sit up, but the impulse did not rise to the level of will. Everything in sight had acquired a luster. Spiderwebs glistened like strands of polished platinum; the boards gleamed with the grainy perfection of gray marble; his broken glassware glittered with prismatic glory, a scatter of rare gems; his possessions scattered across the floor seemed part of a decorative scheme, as if the apartment’s sorry condition were the work of an artist who, guided by a decadent sensibility, had sought to counterfeit shabbiness by using the richest of materials. Ordinarily he thought of Ludie as a lovely girl, but now she struck him as the acme of feminine beauty. Her hair, kept short like a skullcap, gave an elfin look to the clever, triangular face with its sharp cheekbones and large eyes and lips that, due to a slight malocclusion, lapsed naturally into a sulky expression. The hollow at the base of her throat that each morning she sweetened with lime and honey water; her breasts barely constrained by the lacy shells of her bodice…His cataloguing of her physical charms grew more intimate and, energized by arousal, he stood and swept her up and carried her to his bed. Startled by his sudden recovery, she asked what he was doing. He sought to respond, but his thoughts effloresced rather than developing in a linear progression, evolving into elusive, inexpressible logics and fantasies. Touching her skin was like touching warm silk and all the opulent particulars of her body seemed an architecture created to house a central bloom of light. Her anima, he thought. Her spirit. As he joined with her, their flesh glued together in an animal rhythm, he sought that light, plunging toward it, wedding his light to hers in a spectacular union that concluded with a shattering of prisms behind his eyes and a confusing multiplicity of pleasurable sensations that he did not believe were entirely his own.

At long last, leaving her drowsing, Rosacher threw on his trousers, went to the sitting room window and stood gazing out over the rooftops of adjoining shanties and the grander, slightly less ruinous buildings that spread in crooked rows up along the slope of a hill that merged with Griaule’s side. Of the dragon he could see only a great mound of darkness limned by the glow of the newly risen moon. The buildings were picked out here and there by flickering lights, and these lights appeared knitted together by golden lines that formed a constellate shape. Not the predictable shape of a bull or a warrior or a throne, but a complicated mapping of lines and points like an illuminated blueprint. He began to suspect that the pattern they made, like the patterns in Griaule’s blood, contained information that was imprinting itself upon the electrical patterns of his brain, translating its essentials into a comprehensible form. After staring at it for a quarter of an hour he realized that he had the solution to his problems in hand.