Beautiful Blood

Dismayed by what he had read, Rosacher relapsed into despondency and drank a bottle and a half of wine. His thoughts went once more to Amelita, and he was pulled back into a morass of guilt and desolation. But on the following morning, before he could sink beneath the surface of grief, he had a second look through the folder. There was no point in revisiting the assessments of their enemies’ martial potential, so he focused on Aldo’s marginalia and several pages from a journal kept during his foray into Temalagua on which Aldo had scribbled some notes. The notes made little sense to Rosacher, mainly consisting of groupings of two or three words, and sometimes only a single word, but his instincts told him to keep searching. One entry near the end of the journal came to intrigue him: a name, Bruno Cerruti, punctuated by three exclamation points. Written on the page close by the name were the words, “the hunt,” and lower on the page another name, “Carlos.”

The name Cerruti had some resonance with Rosacher, but though he racked his brain, he could not recall where he had heard it; and then, as he was settling in for an afternoon nap, he remembered Jarvis telling him about a scalehunter who lived on the plain near the dragon’s hind leg. The man had gone by the nickname of Oddboy, this due to his eccentricity. He preferred the company of animals to that of men, and so had constructed a thatch-roofed house on the plain where he dwelled alone except for a menagerie of pets, all creatures peculiar to Griaule. Rosacher had never met the man and had not expected to, since Oddboy was a confirmed recluse, but he seemed to recall that his surname was Cerruti. Chances were, the scalehunter was not the same Cerruti, but it wasn’t a common name in the region and Rosacher thought it might be worth a day’s expedition to see whether or not he could be found.