The King in Red laughed avalanche laughs and directed the Wardens with the dramatic excess of a Schwarzwald nightclub impresario, movements swift and sweeping, orders delivered in thundering voice. Wardens ran where he bid.
“You’ll be all right?” Elayne asked before she left.
“I haven’t felt this good in years,” he said. “I should thank them.”
“Keep yourself under control.”
“I am always, perfectly, under control.”
“Listen to me.” She stared into the conflagrations of his eyes. “As your counsel, if not your friend. The Wars are over. Let the Wardens do their job.”
“The Wars are never over.”
“They are,” she said, with all the certainty she could muster. A few decades of death had not improved Kopil’s emotional intelligence in other respects. She hoped he still had a hard time telling when she was stating a fact, as opposed to willing her statement true.
“Okay,” he said.
Apparently so.
The King in Red continued: “Tell me what you find. And keep that briefcase safe.”
“I’ll file it after I check on Batac at the hospital.”
“Let me know what you learn.” Without further good-byes, he swept away to harangue more Wardens.
Captain Chimalli caught Elayne before she left. “Lady Kevarian,” he said—using the Quechal vocative of address to nobility. “You’re going to Grace.”
She nodded.
“If you don’t mind.” The captain took a sealed letter from his pocket. “Bring this to Dr. Venkat. We’ll need more first-aid supplies here soon. Nurses, too.”
Elayne accepted the letter. “How many?”
Chimalli ground his thoughts between his teeth, oscillating from over- to underbite. “As many as she can spare.” He saluted, said, “Ma’am,” and turned and left.
How old was he? Early forties, perhaps. She remembered that age. You thought you understood the world, and the limits of your understanding. You thought the worst was over.
She flew north, to Grace and Mercy Hospital.
Dr. Venkat was a round Dhisthran woman about Chimalli’s age, who Elayne found in an observation theater that smelled of alcohol, fake mint, and faker lavender. Venkat walked a pen through her fingers. The operating room below was painfully white. For all the times Elayne had wanted to strangle Tan Batac, or flay him slowly, she didn’t know how to feel when she saw him butterfly-pinned and bloody on the table. “Will he pull through?”
Pursed lips. A nod.
“Soon?”
“No.”
The voice took her by surprise: an alto soft enough to soothe burns. “Can I talk to him?”
Venkat shook her head.
“He might have seen who tried to kill him. We need anything he can give us.”
“If we wake him before he’s ready, he might never wake again.”
“I could walk into his dreams.”
“Ms. Kevarian,” the doctor said. “The Wardens who brought Batac said you applied first aid.”
She nodded.
“You stopped the bleeding, but your Craft drained his soul. There was hardly any apperception left for me to save by the time he got here.”
“I did what I had to.”
“And thanks to you, he survived. Barely. We have drugs to keep him under, drugs to help him dream. Exposure to starlight will help his soul regrow. But if you shove around in his mind before he’s ready, you might break him so badly that the person who wakes up won’t match the one who went to sleep. Which is why we don’t usually let necromancers operate on living patients.”
“I saved his life.” Even to Elayne that sounded plaintive.
“I’m sure his family is grateful.”
She resisted the urge to swear. “I have a letter for you, from Captain Chimalli.”
The woman’s eyes flicked away from the operation. The pen stopped its revolutions, rested on the railing. Neither of them spoke.
Elayne hadn’t opened the letter, or read it. She’d guessed. The captain had little time to write and seal a note. There were few messages a man in uniform might keep on his person, just in case—and a few people to whom he might address them. He wasn’t related to Venkat. Lovers, then, or close friends.
She didn’t like using such leverage, but she needed every lever she could pull.
Venkat slid the pen into her pocket. “Give me your card. I’ll tell you when he wakes.”
“As soon as. Please.”
Venkat nodded. Elayne passed her the card with the letter. “Thank you.”
Elayne was still human enough to give the other woman space, to let her stand and watch the blood and read the letter with her hand clenched around the railing. Elayne was still human enough to leave.
A small suited man stumbled into her by the lift. She recovered her footing, and helped him up. He wore pince-nez glasses, which she hadn’t seen anyone but skeletons wear since the thirties, and them only because skulls lacked ears. The combination of spectacle-enlarged eyes, narrow shoulders, and forward-sloping face made the man resemble an officious ferret. “Excuse me. Do you know where I might find Tan Batac? I understand he was admitted here.”
Assassin, perhaps? Elayne closed her eyes and examined him as a Craftswoman: no glyphwork, little Craft, soul leveraged with a few bad loans, folded contracts in his briefcase. No threat.
“I’m a business associate,” he explained. “Jim Purcell, from Aberforth and Duncan. I need to review some specifics for a deal, get a signature.”
“You’ll be a long time waiting.”
“It really is important.”
“Talk to Dr. Venkat in the observation theater. Give her a few minutes, first.”
The man blinked at her through his pince-nez, but at last he said, “Okay.”
“Good luck.” Elayne left him, and left Grace, too.