Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic (27 page)

Tarc
looked up at Garcia who had been looking around, trying to figure out what had happened to their attackers. Tarc bent and jerked Daussie’s knife out of Garcia’s erstwhile opponent.

Tarc
turned and walked toward Daussie. He handed her knife to her, whispering, “It’s still bloody. I didn’t get a chance to wipe it.”

“That’s okay,” she said, matter-of-factly. “
Here’s your throwing knives. I cleaned them off.” She turned back to the two bodies, evidently intending to wipe her own knife off on one of them. Tarc bent over so the motion of putting his own knives away wouldn’t be visible to Garcia.

Standing back
up, he walked back to where Garcia had turned his erstwhile opponent onto his back and stood staring at him, “What the hell just happened?” he asked, almost plaintively.

Tarc
shrugged, though he wasn’t sure Garcia could see it. Looking with his real eyes, he saw that the man’s wound fell in the fold just above the eyeball and was hard to see in the dim light. It hadn’t bled much. “I don’t know, but we’d better get out of here before more of them show up.” He tugged at Garcia’s elbow, turning him towards the tavern. “Would you like to sleep in our cellar with Capt. Pike tonight?”

“Okay,” Garcia said, soun
ding stunned. He shambled alongside Tarc for a moment, then said, “I should be scouting ahead.”

Tarc
said, “I’ll scout ahead; my hearing’s really good.” He glanced back and saw Daussie trotting silently up behind them as if there weren’t a thing in the world to worry about. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed back to protect Daussie.”

Garcia simply said, “Okay.” He waited a moment for Daussie.

Tarc shook his head and trotted ahead, casting his ghost out widely to be sure they weren’t about to be surprised again.

When they arrived back at the tavern, Tarc first led them to the stable where he made a show of going inside to be sure none of the soldiers were there. Once he had cleared it, Daussie swarmed up the ladder toward her hiding place. Tarc led Garcia over towards the tavern itself. His ghost already told him that the rest of the soldiers had left the main room and he almost led Garcia directly in. At the last moment he remembered and said, “Give me a second to make sure none of the soldiers are in the big room.”

Garcia nodded.

Tarc stepped inside the door, glanced around, then stepped back outside, “It’s clear, you can come in.”

Arriving in the cellar,
Tarc moved the panel away from the hidden room. They found Eva crouched at Pike’s side. It didn’t smell very good in the small area. Pike was sweating and moaning. Tarc sent his ghost in to see what Eva was doing. He found a collection of thick liquid in the wall of Pike’s abdomen where he’d been wounded. The tissue around it was very hot and swollen. He watched Eva snipping out some of the sutures she had put in that first night. Some were already gone, suggesting that that’s what she’d been working on before they got there.

Eva glanced up and
nodded at them, “Hello Sergeant, Tarc. The captain has developed an abscess and I’m about to drain it. It’ll probably smell pretty bad, so you might want to go back upstairs for a bit.” She eyed Tarc, “On the other hand Tarc, if you’re going to be a healer, you’ll need to learn how to be around these kinds of smells.”

Garcia said, “I visited a battlefield hospital once.
I know infections can smell pretty awful, but I was able to stand it then.”

“Okay, we’ll probably need somebody to hold the captain still a
nyway. If you’d sit by his head; you can do that.” She turned to Tarc, “Push that bowl over here to catch the pus when it comes out.”

Eva wiped down Pike’s wound with cotton balls soaked in moonshine then deftly stuck the point of
her scissors right into the depths of the wound and spread the blades apart.

Pike rose up with a shriek
. Garcia had been ready and quickly got a grip on his upper body, murmuring in his ear as he tried to calm him. Blood and pus poured out of the wound. Momentarily, Tarc feared that the huge quantity of blood indicated his mother had stabbed the scissors into a great vessel. Almost immediately, however, he recognized that his mother’s ghost had told her exactly where to put the scissors’ tips.

Before
Tarc could give that much thought though, a horrid stench filled the air. Tarc’s eyes widened as the smell became so unbelievably disgusting that he thought
surely
he would retch.

Garcia had turned his head to the side
to bury it in the collar of his shirt. Sweat beaded his forehead.

Tarc
looked around desperately for something to throw up into. He had just about decided he would have to run up the stairs and throw up outside when his mother calmly said, “Tarc? Can you pour some of that bottle of sterile saltwater in the wound here? We need to wash this out.” She glanced at Garcia, “Sergeant, if you could turn him up on his side a little bit, that would help.”

Tarc
found that having something to do helped him repress his reaction to the foul smell. He picked up one of the bottles and opened it. As he made to pour it in, his mother looked up at him and said, “So, we want to slosh this around in there to wash out as much of the pus as we can.” She raised an eyebrow at him to make sure he understood she was talking about sloshing the saline around with his talent.

As
Tarc poured the saline into the opening he used his ghost to swirl it around in the cavity. Then Eva had Garcia roll the captain the other way to let the fluid drain out. They repeated this maneuver several times, then Eva folded some of her sterilized cloth up against the wound and put a wrap around Pike’s waist to hold it in place.

Tarc
frowned, “Aren’t you going to suture the wound back up?”

“Oh no! You suture wounds closed initially to try to keep germs from getting in. But once
an infection is established, you leave wounds open so the pus can drain out. Trapping pus inside makes you really sick like the captain is now.”

Garcia said that he would stay with the captain that night, though Tarc couldn’t believe anyone would be willing to stay down there in that stench. As they climbed the stairs, Tarc quietly asked Eva, “Does the Captain have
any
chance?”

Eva shrugged her shoulders grimly, “
I expect you’re wondering whether he’ll live. It doesn’t look good, but sometimes you’re surprised. We’ll just have to see.”

At the top of the stairs
they ran into Daum, “Tarc! Where have you been? I’ve been in a panic looking for you. I can’t find Daussie either!”

Tarc
made little calming motions with his hands. “Sorry, we made hidey hole for Daussie in the back of the stack of hay bales. She’s probably in there.”

Daum gave a large sigh of relief, “But where have
you
been?”

“Um, I saw a couple of soldiers going out to the stable and followed them because I had a bad feeling about what they might be doing out there…”
Tarc paused, uncomfortable about the story he was about to tell.

“And…?” Daum said.

“Well they were just going to assignments on the night watch, but they ran into Daussie, and she forgot to limp, and then they… figured out who she was.”

“Oh my God…” gasped Eva. “What did they do?”

“Well… they were going to…” he swallowed, “you know.” He shrugged, “So I killed them.”

“What?!” Eva’s hand flew to her face as she glanced in shock at Daum. She turned slowly back to
Tarc, “How?”

Tarc
also looked at his father who held his hands up for a pause. To Tarc he said “I hadn’t told her yet.” He turned to Eva, “Tarc can guide a thrown knife with his ghost… He’s…
impossibly
accurate. If it wasn’t for him we’d have been killed several times that first night.”

Eva turned to stare at
Tarc with wide eyes.

He wasn’t sure whether she looked amazed, or horrified.
She was a healer, so he thought probably—horrified. He looked down at his shoes and whispered, “Sorry.”

Eva stepped to him, and put her arms around him for a tight hug. “Don’t be sorry. It’s true, I don’t think healers should hurt people… but, if you hadn’t, everyone in my family, including
my son, would be dead.”

Concern in his eyes,
Daum said, “How’s Daussie taking it? She must’ve been pretty traumatized.”

“Oh, yes!” Eva said. “I’d better go talk to her.”

Tarc said, “Well, that’s the strangest thing. You know how she’s always been afraid of things? And I’m not just talking as the big brother who used to tease her. I mean, she had a horrible time during that day in the square. But, she’s been really different after… after I killed those two guys. Instead of freaking out, or screaming, she helped me load them on their horses so we could take them out into town.” He shrugged, “We didn’t want them being found dead here at the tavern.” He looked up at his gaping parents, and shrugged again, “So that’s where we’ve been.”

His parents simply stared at him for another moment or two
. Then Daum snorted and said, “Yeah,” he glanced at Eva and rolled his eyes, “It’s
Daussie’s
behavior that’s really astonishing, isn’t it?”

Before anyone said anything more, Sgt. Garcia appeared at the top of the cellar stairs. “Oh, there you are. I’ve been worrying. You know how those
four soldiers died there in the alley with us?” He shrugged, “Though what the
hell
killed them, I have no idea!” He looked at Tarc curiously, “I’ve been wondering if maybe someone shot them with poison darts or something, but where that person would have been hiding I don’t know.”

Tarc
shrugged.

Garcia’s eyes turned to Daum, “Anyway, I’ve been wondering how Krait might react. After what I heard he did that first day in the square, I’m
worried that he might kill a bunch of townspeople to ‘teach us a lesson.’”

Tarc
’s gut spasmed at the thought. He looked questioningly at his father.

Daum looked grim. After a moment he nodded, “Sounds
exactly
like how
that
son of a bitch would react.”

“What are we going to do?!” Garcia asked.

Tarc felt stunned. Garcia was the military man! Shouldn’t he be
telling
them what to do?

Daum said, “Did you ask Capt. Pike if he had any ideas?”

Garcia snorted, “I would, but he’s completely delirious.”

Daum turned to Eva, a question on his face. She shrugged and said, “He had a gut wound. He probably won’t make it, though I still think there’s
some small chance.”

“You don’t have anything that would
clear his head briefly to let him give us some advice?”

She slowly shook her head.

Garcia said slowly, “I had one idea…” he paused, eyeing Daum. “It’s kind of crazy though.”

Daum lifted his chin interrogatively.

“I was thinkin’ about some of those amazing shots you made with your bow last night,” he said slowly. “The Tornesson’s have a house with an upstairs window that looks out over the square. I’ll bet they assemble everyone on the square again if they decide to kill some folks. What if you were hiding behind that window?”

Daum looked appalled. “You’re thinking I could assassinate Krait from up there?!”

Garcia nodded, “If
he
dropped dead at the front of the square, I’ll bet the townspeople might rally to attack the rest of them.”

Tarc
said, “It’s pretty hard to attack when they have swords and you don’t even have a knife.”

“But they’d be outnumbered by a huge margin!”

Daum shook his head, “You still have to have someone to lead the charge, and that leader will almost certainly get killed.
I
don’t know anyone brave enough to do that. Do you?” He shook his head, “Besides, I was incredibly lucky last night,” he said glancing at Tarc. “And, you’re talking about a really long shot.”

Garcia grimaced, “The longer we wait
, the more beat down the town is going to be. From what I’ve been hearing they’re out to kill anyone that seems to have enough gumption that they
might
fight back.”

Tarc
turned to his father, “What if you shot a
lot
of them? If they were dropping one after the other, the soldiers might panic and run themselves. The townspeople could pick up their swords and chase after them.”

Daum stared at his son, comprehension dawning on his face.

When the door to the stable creaked open
Daussie drew her knife and quietly sat up, listening. She heard the groan that the ladder made when someone climbed it, then Tarc whispered, “Daussie, it’s me. Are you doing okay?”

“Yes, though my feelings are still hurt from you calling me
‘retarded.’”