The wounded and dying overran Grace and Mercy Hospital. Couatl swarmed about the roof, depositing wounded Wardens, then winging south to recover more. When Elayne arrived in the cab with Mina and a bleeding Caleb, the orderlies tried to turn her away. She shouted at them, name-dropped Dr. Venkat, and in the end walked straight past the orderlies’ desk toward the lifts. Mina followed her, tight-wound, silent. Caleb floated between them, wrapped in towels to stem his bleeding.
She found Venkat in the trauma ward. The doctor looked as if she hadn’t slept since Elayne saw her last. Blood stained her white coat. “Do you have any idea how much work you’ve brought us?”
“One more,” she said, and pointed to the boy. “He’ll die if without help.”
“So will twenty others in this ward.”
“His father,” Elayne said, “is the leader of the riot.” Mina made a strangled sound, which she ignored. No time for niceties. “He is valuable.”
“Everyone is valuable.”
“He is valuable to the King in Red, I mean.”
Venkat’s face closed.
“He’s my son,” Mina said. “Help him.” No emotion in her voice, anymore. On the ride over she hadn’t been able to tell Elayne the whole story, but the important elements came through. The boy scarred by his father’s knife. The old line carried forth into a new generation—the warrior-paladinate handed to a boy unready for the pain or duty the scars promised. Temoc’s last attempt to guard his son from a world that would grip him even tighter now he bore these scars. But Caleb had saved himself and his mother in the hotel. Maybe that justified the burden he would bear.
Venkat said, “This way,” and led them through a maze of blood and screams, past operating rooms where bells kept rapid pace with racing hearts, to a small white chamber with a white bed where she laid the boy, stripped off his makeshift bandages, dosed him for the pain, and set to work. Even through the drugs, her touch made Caleb writhe. Venkat shouted to a nurse, listing chemicals and talismans—some Elayne remembered from trauma tents in the Wars.
Elayne tried to pull Mina from the room, but Mina would not leave. “This won’t be short,” Elayne said, “or pleasant.”
“I’ll stay,” she said.
Elayne walked three circuits around the trauma ward. No one tried to stop her. Wandering without a child to care for, she made sense of the building, assembled the hallway maze into architecture, identified operating theaters and recovery rooms. She poured a cup of coffee from a pot behind the nurse’s station, and drank. The hospital smelled of blood and disinfectant and burnt fat. She was not Kopil’s warrior, or his general. His Craftswoman, only, his representative in a matter now settled.
The coffee tasted foul. Not the coffee’s fault. Ambrosia would have tasted the same.
She returned to Caleb’s room an hour later, found the doctor gone and the boy bandaged, stitched, sedated, and asleep. The room had a careful, neutral odor of bad smells scrubbed away by Craft.
Mina sat by the bed, and did not look up when Elayne walked past.
She poured two more cups of coffee, and returned. Mina accepted the cup without looking, drank, and said nothing.
Elayne sat beside her. A metronome ticked the beats of Caleb’s heart. She could have danced to that beat, though it lacked swing. A tube snaked down his nose, connected to a bag that inflated and deflated with his breath.
“They had to sedate him heavily,” Mina said, unprompted. “They use the tube because otherwise he might forget to breathe.”
Elayne drank her coffee and listened.
“They asked me what they should do. I’m his mother, so they asked. I didn’t know what to say.” She drank. “I carried him across the city. I fought for him. We almost died. And I couldn’t speak when they asked.”
“They know what to do,” Elayne said. “They asked you because you were there, to make you feel better. Don’t blame yourself.”
“Who else should I blame?”
“Temoc,” she said.
“I married him.”
“If not for that, this boy wouldn’t be here at all.”
“I know.”
“Caleb’s safe. No one will come for him.”
“Not more of those things?”
“Assassin golems,” she said. “Mechanical forms animated by bound demons. Expensive. We don’t like to give demons a mandate to kill—they stretch the limits they’re given. Hard to trace, but hard to replace, too. I don’t think you’ll see more of them. Anyway, this is as safe as you’re likely to be in Dresediel Lex, outside of the King in Red’s care.”
“I won’t go to him.”
“I did not suggest it.”
“He tried to kill us.”
“Golemetry isn’t his style. He likes a personal touch. And what would he gain by killing you?”
“He could get to my husband.”
“Which would just make Temoc angry. Trust me, the King in Red was happy to let him wait out the siege in your house. He wanted you and your boy safe. When he finds out about this, some Wardens will lose their masks.”
“Does that make it better?”
She checked herself. “No.”
“I’m tired,” she said.
Not for the first time Elayne wished there was a way to peer inside another mind without breaking the mind in question. Mina had seen Temoc go back to war, seen his face before he ran. So much depended on Temoc now—where he was, what he had done. She wanted to grill Mina until she wept.
“Would you like more coffee?”
“No,” Mina said. “A pillow would be nice. And a blanket. It’s cold in here.”
Elayne had not noticed. “I’ll find one. Sleep well.”
No response.
She left, and spent a quarter-hour searching for a nurse who didn’t look too busy to interrupt. As the clock ticked toward midnight, she decided that looking too busy to interrupt was likely a survival trait for nurses.
She returned to the station with the coffeepot, in hope someone there could point her to the linen closet. A graying man sat behind the desk, scratching incomprehensible words into the blanks of equally incomprehensible forms. She cleared her throat.
“Excuse me?”
Neither Elayne nor the nurse had spoken. The new voice, from behind, belonged to a sharp woman in a charcoal suit, who stood at rigid attention. The wheels of Elayne’s mind turned slowly. “I know you.”
The woman nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I work for Red King Consolidated.”
“Of course. From the meeting. The woman with the head for numbers.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She produced a thin piece of folded vellum sealed in red wax with a star-eyed skull.
“You’re a courier?”
“The boss wanted this delivered to you in person.”
“Thank you.” Elayne opened the seal with a narrowing of her eyes, and read the message there.
Read it again, and felt the courier watching.
The assault failed. They turned to human sacrifice. Tomorrow, we burn them out. Come see. Come help.
The signature, a skull in red ink or human blood.
“Thank you,” she said. “You can go. I’m sorry he sent you. It’s late to run errands.”
“What reply should I bring him?”
“Did he ask for one?”
“No.”
“Nothing yet,” she said, folding the letter. “Nothing, now.”
Behind her eyes, the fire fell.