3.

 

As the carriage rattled over the cobbled stones to the hospital, Ayae was quiet.

In her mind’s eyes, she saw Illaan lying on a stained sheet, his skin burned black and cracking with his every movement. Blood—boiling blood—seeped through the worst of the wounds, the indents around her palm on his chest. She wanted desperately to push the image from her mind, but Heast’s silence offered no support. His metal leg acted like a bar before the door, though she could not decide if it was intentional or not. Not that it mattered: with her hands like lumps of ice in her lap she was moments away from an admission of guilt.

When the carriage stopped and the door opened, Heast’s leg moved stiffly, and he gave a short nod for her to follow.

Outside, there were no guards or chains, nothing but the sound of the birds in the cut-back branches, their lurid green bodies suddenly exposed when presented against the empty sky.

Wordlessly, she followed Heast and the Mireean Guard up the warm path to the hospital and inside. A middle-aged man sat at the front desk, but he did not speak. There was no sound until the three of them had passed through another door and Heast’s leg began to stamp loudly down the hall, as if to announce his arrival to those who stood at the end of it, Reila and Bau.

Both stood outside the final, closed door, their voices rising and falling in conversation. The handsome, ageless man said, “No,” repeating the word again before he said, “There’s very little that I can do.” He intended to say more, but was interrupted by Heast.

“Keeper,” he said evenly. “I’m surprised to see you here.”

“I am sure very little shocks you, Captain,” Bau replied easily. “My visits have no doubt been well documented by your men. I hope, of course, that they detail—”

“Your occupation of a hallway?”

“—my work here,” he finished.

Ayae tried to hide her reaction at Heast’s dry disregard for the Keeper, though she need not have bothered. Bau was neither surprised nor bothered: his casual, left-shouldered shrug was clear in its opinion of the Captain of the Spine.

“If it would please the two of you,” Reila said tiredly, “we might discuss our patient before we bicker.”

“What has happened?” Heast asked.

“We haven’t decided, yet.”

Beyond the door was a long dormitory of beds divided by narrow paths, similar to the one that Ayae had been in earlier. As it had been then, the majority of the white-linen beds were empty, except for one by the wall. Illaan lay covered in a single, light sheet. As she drew closer, Ayae could see that the cloth was weighed down by a dampness that showed his tall outline. He was sleeping, but fitfully, his lips twitching. At the foot of the bed lay a silver bowl. Around it were stains of blood.

No one spoke and it was not until their silence dragged out to become noticeable that Ayae realized they were waiting for her.

“Did I do this?”

“No, child,” Reila replied.

“I hit him.”

His armor lay behind the bed, a collection of burned leather.

“While I sympathize with the desire,” Bau said, “unless your touch now has the ability to cause a fever that also results in vomit laced with blood, you have nothing to worry about.”

Heast stepped past her and approached Illaan’s side. With a surprisingly gentle touch from his calloused hands, he rearranged the edge of the blanket. “You’re not going to tell me it is natural, either, are you?”

“No,” Reila replied.

“Saboteurs?”

“We know that they’re in the city.” Gently, the elderly woman eased herself onto the bed opposite her patient, a sigh escaping her as she settled into place. “When the sergeant first arrived he was fine, but for the damage to his armor and his pride. I examined him myself, and there was nothing to note of ill will. He took a drink of water and then, a minute later, he was vomiting with such force that I was forced to sedate him. The water he drank was fine—I had some myself, as did Bau, and neither of us could taste anything different.”

“You don’t look well,” he said bluntly.

Reila smiled wanly. “I am afraid I am getting too old for war, Captain—”

“She is merely exhausted from using her own blood for simple spells,” Bau interrupted. “If she used it as most others did, if she killed even the smallest creature, she would be fine. But rest will cure her. It is quite different with your sergeant. I believe this is the first sign that your guards are not as honest as you think.”

“There have been seven saboteurs in Mireea for three weeks,” Heast said, with his back to them. “We have watched them very carefully to know where they have been, and I have had no new reports. Obviously, this is evidence that suggests otherwise and I will look into that, Keeper. Why don’t you tell me what will happen to the sergeant?”

“We don’t know,” Reila said. “As of this moment, we do not know what afflicts him. Illaan looks like he has been infected by a poison known as semodyle, which is rare in this part of the world, but not fatal. On the other hand, there are diseases—”

“It is semodyle,” Bau interrupted. “I told you that.”

“And I told you,” she replied, “that it is a common poison with an antidote that has had no effect on him. If you keep insisting it is something that you clearly know it isn’t, I will have you removed.”

The Keeper’s smile was light, but strained.

“I see.” Heast straightened, turning awkwardly on his metal leg to face them. “Do you know how it was contracted, at the least?”

“Nothing, as yet.”

“You’ll find none, if it is semodyle as I have said,” the Keeper answered. “It is easy to use a dosage of the poison that is not fatal in one sitting. Its effect can be cumulative, having been digested over lengthy periods of time from, say, a water source.”

The captain glanced at Reila, and the small woman nodded. “He’s right, but ignoring all the other evidence.”

They continued to talk, but Ayae had nothing to offer, either in relation to the question of poison or those who might have used it. She found herself staring at the still form of Illaan, watching him shift and twitch, watching pain flit across his face for but a moment. A part of her wished that she felt more responsive to it. That would be proper, she thought. Despite everything that had happened, he had been a part of her life for over two years and she had loved him. But she felt only the sadness she would feel toward anyone in his situation, to anyone who was in such pain.

“Bau.”

The conversation stopped, and the Keeper met her gaze. “Yes?”

“Could you not just help him?”

“To do what I do requires a very extensive knowledge,” he said. “To know exactly how things react in the human body, to know what it does to blood, to organs, to all that is in the body. On the day you met me, I knitted a man’s throat together, but that was a very simple thing, for it was just tissue damage. If the diagnosis here is wrong…”

He let the sentence hang, but, wearily, Reila finished it. “If he is wrong, he will do more damage to Illaan than the poison itself. That is why it is important to know that it is semodyle first, before we do more harm than good.”

“Is that right?” she asked the Keeper.

Bau’s smile was faint, but without humor. “Sadly, even I have limitations,” he said.