“Easy, man!” Cerruti put a hand on his arm to restrain him. “Frederick don’t care for rifles much, so you’d do well to leave it here.”
Full of trepidation, Rosacher followed him out onto the plain, but saw nothing of Frederick. After the staleness of the house, the air felt fresh and cool. The sun was down behind Griaule’s mountainous body and, except for a faint redness in the west, the plain was immersed in a purplish gloom, resembling in that crepuscular light pictures of the African veldt in books that Rosacher had thought exotic as a child, yet now seemed, in conjunction with the scene before him, to prefigure some occult menace.
He scanned the plain, searching for any object or movement that might signal Frederick’s presence and saw in the distance a great dark shape flowing through the high grass, going very fast, much faster than a creature of its apparent size should be capable. It was speed without apparent purpose—the thing ran back and forth, and then in loops and circles, describing a variety of patterns that remained visible thanks to the flattened grass in its wake. Rosacher recognized that there was something playful about its exercise, like the running of a young dog that has been pent up for a while.
“You’re a lucky man,” Cerruti said. “Frederick’s in a good mood. There’s times he’s right intolerant of strangers.”
“That’s Frederick?” said Rosacher, pointing at the dark shape, hoping for a negative response.
“In the flesh.” Cerruti made a choking noise that might have been a laugh. “So to speak.”
Rosacher wondered at the cause of Cerruti’s amusement, but was so mesmerized by Frederick’s to-and-fro dashes across the plain that he failed to inquire further. “I’ll bring him over,” Cerruti said. He did not call out or whistle or wave, yet Frederick abruptly changed course and came toward them at a good clip, growing in the space of three or four seconds from a dark shape a hundred yards away to a black featureless mound half the size of a full-grown elephant that settled in the grass a mere twenty feet away. Rosacher stumbled backward, terrified by the thing, by the chuffing of its breath, loud as a steam engine, and by its size and unstable surface—its substance, the stuff of its body, appeared to be in constant flux, a glossy black like polished onyx flowing across who-knows-what sort of structure, be it only more of the same blackness or a skeleton of sorts or something else, something completely implausible. It put Rosacher in mind of those oddments occasionally thrown up by the sea, a glob of protoplasm, a relic of some obscure life unknown and perhaps unknowable to man, a shapeless fragment broken or bitten off from a greater shapelessness…and yet as its breathing subsided, reduced to the level of a smithy’s bellows, it seemed to flirt with a shape, to verge upon the animal, to assume for a fleeting instant the curves and musculature of an enormous sloth, or a bear with an elongated head and snout, and acquiring, too, a gamey odor that waxed and waned in accordance with the degree to which that shape was realized. Rosacher trembled before this monster, understanding death was near, but Cerruti, calm as ever, said, “Frederick wanted to know if that’s your horse out there by the tail. I told him not to eat it.”
Rosacher had neither heard nor seen any exchange between Cerruti and Frederick. In a shaky voice, he asked how they had communicated.
“I been hearing his voice in here…” Cerruti tapped the side of his head. “Ever since we met, maybe even before. Seems to me now like his voice was what led me to go back in under Griaule’s wing in the first place. I’m right sure Frederick had it in mind to make me his dinner, but when he found out I could hear him and he could hear me, well, I guess you could say we became friends.”
With a heavy exhalation, Frederick looked to sink lower into the grass, losing all hint of animal form, becoming as unstirring as a heap of dirt.
“This is the thing that lived under the wing?” Rosacher asked. “The thing everyone’s been frightened of for so long?”
Frederick rumbled and Cerruti said, “He don’t like you referring to him as a ‘thing’.”
“He understands me?”
Cerruti nodded. “Sure does. But to answer your question, way Frederick tells it, he was a man what lived around these parts back when folks were beginning to populate the valley. He worked the land, had a wife and children, but his true passion was for young girls, girls that had just bloomed. Thirteen, fourteen years old. Now and then he’d snap one up and take her in under the wing and do whatever he wanted. He must have done for a dozen or thereabouts. Came a day when one of the girls slipped away from him before he could drag her under the wing. She told her family what happened and they spread the word, and soon there was a whole mob searching for Frederick. He hid out under the wing, back in deep to where this kind of glowing moss lit up the space he was in, and there he stayed. Sometimes he’d sneak out at night to look for food, but he started losing his appetite and soon he hardly ever went out. And then he fell asleep. Wasn’t no ordinary sleep. Frederick says that while he slept he could feel his body changing—he could feel his bones splintering, his organs dissolving. He felt every ounce of pain it took to make him into what he is now. How long it lasted, I can’t say—but it was long. When he woke the pain was gone, but he was mad from the memory of it and he lashed out at people. Must have killed dozens…and that’s when the legend got started. People forgot about Frederick and took to believing that there was a dangerous creature living back under the wing. Of course by then Frederick had lost his taste for people and turned to killing animals.”
Rosacher masked his disgust for this murderer of young women, this once-human monster now become a monster in every sense of the word, and forced his attention to the problem at hand, thinking that if assassinating Carlos had been Aldo’s intention, Frederick might well be the proper tool.
“Frederick,” he said. “You can eat my horse.”
The black mound quivered and swelled in volume to half-again its previous size.
“You sure about that?” Cerruti asked. “How are you going to get back?”
“I’ll wait until morning and walk if needs be.” Rosacher waved in the general direction of his horse. “Go ahead, Frederick.”
The blackness swelled even more, nearly assuming an observable shape—giant sloth, bear, something along those lines—and flowed away toward the dragon’s tail. Moments later, the horse screamed, a scream of fear that evolved into one of agony, and then was cut short.
Cerruti gave him an incurious look. “Why’d you do that?”
“I want to learn if the cadaver displays the type of wounds that result from an animal attack.”
“You just wasted a good horse, then. You could have asked me. That horse is going to look like it was tore apart by lions.” Cerruti spat. “Why you want to know that?”
“To find out if Frederick could kill the king of Temalagua and make it seem as though an animal had done it.”
“What good’s that going to do you? Frederick ain’t killing no one without I say so. He’s sure not going to be killing no king.”
+
A sprinkling of stars pricked the indigo expanse above Griaule’s back and a cooling breeze came out of the north, drying the sweat on Rosacher’s face. He felt suddenly confident that Aldo’s intention had been to arrange the assassination of Carlos, and certain, too, that he would divine the next phase of Aldo’s plan…or that he could create a plan equally as effective. He had come to rely on moments of illumination like this, perceiving them as sendings from the dragon, but in this instance, with the fate of the nation in the balance, an apprehension of his foolishness, of the ludicrous posture of faith, undercut his confidence. Still, he had little choice but to trust his instincts.