The Warlord's Domain (14 page)

“Giorl, please—none of that matters now. Just do something…” The Grand Warlord of the Drusalan Empire lay on his back and panted like a dog with the effort of uttering coherent speech rather than the wordless whimpering which was all his mouth could usually form during these sessions. The woman he addressed— or more properly, pleaded with—paid him small heed and continued her gentle probing of his wounds. If her hands were gentle, the expression on her face was not.

“I’m doing it, damn you! But I still want to know what bloody horse-doctor put these bloody stitches in.” The voice was angry, yet curiously dispassionate, that of a skilled artist outraged by needlessly sloppy work. “And why they rotted out before the wounds healed. Because I have to find the fragments, good my lord, before you start to rot as well. Another. And this one needs to be cut free, too. Here. Swallow this; all of it.” The stuff in the cup was a liquid mingling of sweet and bitter, she knew, and knew how hard it was to choke the fluid down, and how long she had to wait before it took effect. Not long, that much was certain. “
Schü’ajn nahr kagh-hui dah

Her words became a soft monotone of curses in half-a-dozen languages as she selected something small and glittering from the flat metal case beside her. Voord braced himself, trying to blot out what was about to happen by staring at her clean white browband and the locks of red hair that feathered over it. He had always found Giorl attractive—the attraction of the unattainable since, being married and that unusual thing, faithfully so, she had invariably rejected his advances with more or less good humor—and never more so than when he watched her work. Perhaps because he had never been the subject of that work. Even today, filled with pain and soporific drugs, the sight of her preparations and the first chill touch of an instrument had brought immediate, blatant arousal. That drained away perhaps three seconds later when, despite the soporifics, he began to scream.

Giorl Derawn knew that she was many things to many people: a good wife with a good husband, rare enough these days; a good mother to her daughters and to the third child on the way which she hoped would be a son; a good—indeed indispensable—servant of the Grand Warlord whoever he, she or it might be; and never mind the good, she was the best cutting-surgeon in the city of Drakkesborg.

She had often wondered why. Most surgeons were men, nowadays, and the old freedoms for working women were being eroded by the military society in the Eastern Empire, but nobody had ever dared to question her skill. Maybe it was her ever-increasing knowledge of anatomy, or her ability to distance herself from the work in hand whatever that work might be—to filter out the reactions and the noises and see only the area of flesh on which she worked—or her lack of emotional concern about the pain involved. It was a part of what she did, that was all, and her customary response to questions, arguments and pleas was simply to remember and invoke what giving birth was like.

At least it was nothing like this. She had seen many, many human bodies reduced to glistening tatters; but she had never before seen wounds that refused to bleed, or heal, or kill. Giorl did indeed want to know which of the Bodyguard’s regimental surgeons had cobbled Voord back together; but this had little to do with her anger over what looked more like clumsy sail-making than sutured wounds. She wanted to find out what the injuries had looked like when they were fresh, and she had a suspicion that they had been no different from the way they appeared right now. At least he had stopped screaming.

At last Giorl finished and straightened her back, grunting slightly as her muscles made known their complaint right up her spine. Tweezering out the shreds and fragments of rotted sutures was not, perhaps, as noisy, nerve-racking or downright nasty as many of the things she had done, but she could still think of a great many things that she would sooner have been doing. Caring for her youngest daughter was one of them; the child had been unwell for the past couple of days, feverish and off her food. The instruments clinked faintly as she returned them to their padded clamps in the metal case.

And Voord groaned faintly as she stood up and turned to walk away from him.

Giorl froze in mid-stride, not wanting to believe the sound and yet knowing she had heard it. “
Teü-acht ha’v-raal
,” she swore, very softly. “Father and Mother and Maiden make it not so.” The prayer must not have been heard, for when she looked back over her shoulder it was so: Voord was still alive.

Any drug whose purpose was to induce the peace of anaesthetic sleep was a systemic poison which could, in a sufficient quantity, induce the far more permanent peace of death. That had been Giorl’s intention, anyway. The poppy distillate which she had given Voord had been of such a concentration that it should have stopped his pain and then his heart in a matter of a few minutes. However, it had done no more than render him a little drowsy, and that drowsiness was already wearing off to let the pain come back. Such a thing was medically impossible; but then, his continued survival of such obviously fatal injuries was just as impossible, and he had survived those for twenty days. Both impossibilities stared at her with agonized eyes and hoped silently that she could do something—
anything
—to help.

Giorl concealed her shrug and returned to Voord’s bedside, wondering what in the name of Hell she
could
do. The most obvious thing to do, she had done already; and it hadn’t worked. As for the alternatives… Giorl looked at the gaping holes in Voord’s face and body and wondered what the alternatives might be. And if there were any.

“The stitching helped.” Voord’s weak and shaky voice cut through her indecision. “When they were closed, the… the wounds didn’t hurt as much.”

“Stitches don’t work,” said Giorl gently. “You’ve seen already. If these don’t heal—and I’ve seen they don’t— then the severed tissue will just outlast the sutures the way they did today and you’ll be right back where you were when I came in… and facing the same prospect. Your choice.” Voord cringed visibly. “But maybe if you told me how these happened”—inside her head Giorl was smiling grimly as, like it or not, she slipped into the surgeon’s customary bedside manner—”I might be able to work out what to do about them.”

Voord met her steady gaze for a few seconds, then very pointedly turned his face away, stifling the moan that the movement provoked.

“That won’t help. Don’t forget, I’m good at getting questions answered.” Giorl saw a shudder raise gooseflesh on his naked skin. “I’m good even without using pressure, so why not talk about it? Eh?” She reached out one hand and laid it gently on his chest, absently noting the movements of heartbeat and respiration— both over-fast—as she did so. “Talking might help for all sorts of reasons, Voord Ebanesj.” The rapid rise and fall of his rib cage faltered as he held his breath, whether in reaction to the use of his full name or hearing a voice that had honest, if merely professional, sympathy in it. And then the words all came tumbling out.

Aldric and Kyrin rode into Drakkesborg late in the afternoon, through the main gate in the western wall, the Shadowgate, with the fast-setting midwinter sun at their backs stretching their own shadows long and dark across the snow. The guards at the gate seemed preoccupied with other matters than the searching of baggage, and after the most cursory of inspections were quite willing to accept impressively signed and sealed scholarly passes at face value, without any curiosity as to why two foreign “scholars” should be so well armed and armored. Or perhaps the guards knew perfectly well why anyone would want to have weapons and battle harness close at hand. Neither the Empire nor its cities were especially peaceful places, and right now Drakkesborg was no exception.

After a period of “not noticing” the riots in the hope that the outburst of initially justified protest would burn itself out, notice had formally been taken two days earlier by Authority in the shape of the city’s Chief of Constables. Warnings had been posted after the first day and read aloud by official criers at the height of the second day’s trouble. Nobody had paid the criers any attention, except to pelt them with offal and with serious snowballs—frozen, and cored with chunks of broken paving.

Notice had progressed to action fairly rapidly after that. Ten squads of troopers from the urban militia had moved out of barracks at first light, and by mid-morning they had restored order of a sort in their own inimitable fashion. It was only because of lenience promoted by the Midwinter holiday season that no lives were lost, but there were aching skulls and broken limbs enough to suppress the fire of civil disobedience in even the hottest head. So complete was that suppression that by the time Aldric and Kyrin were cleared to enter the city, Drakkesborg was restored to at least a veneer of normality— for all that the veneer was not quite thick enough as yet to make them feel entirely comfortable…

“I told you, didn’t I?” Kyrin’s voice was low; the things she was saying were not the kind of things she wanted overheard. “I said I didn’t like the sound of this place. And now we’re, here, you say that you don’t like the feel of it. Very perceptive, Aldric my love. But just a little slow.”

Aldric smiled to himself at her unease—a thin smile, without amusement. He had been wondering how long it would take to come out, and was too much the gentleman to make comment about how she had come to be in the city in the first place. “At least the passes worked,” he said mildly.

“They got us in, dear. I’d feel happier if I was convinced they’ll get us out again.”

“Marevna made certain that they showed no bias to either faction.”

“Meaning you get picked on by both, not neither. I for one would like to get in off the street, with a bolted door between me and whatever’s been going on here.”

“Faction fights or something. Tuenafen was like this and—”

“I don’t want to know what happened, Aldric.” Kyrin was growing more twitchy with each passing second, regardless of the way ordinary people went about their ordinary business around her. Or perhaps because of it, and because of the way it failed to ring quite true. “I want to find a place where I can avoid it if it happens again. Now, where?”

That was the problem. Neither knew much about Imperial Drakkesborg apart from their own preconceived opinions, and opinions were of small use in suggesting where to stay, much less how much they would be expected to pay for the privilege. Enough, and more than enough, most likely; the cost of a room for the night had increased steadily and steeply as they approached the city, and the risk that they no longer had sufficient coin to live on had become a nagging worry at the back of Kyrin’s mind. However, the problem seemed not to concern Aldric.

“I have no idea where. But first we need some cash money.” He spoke with nothing like the gravity their situation warranted, and Kyrin looked at him as if he had left good sense behind.

“Just where do you plan to find it? Buried in a snowdrift? Or will you just use the Echainon spellstone to conjure it out of a handful of gravel?”

“Don’t be sarcastic, love, it doesn’t suit you.” As he spoke, his face became an icy mask that warned her she was going just a little bit too far. “And don’t mention It. Not here. Just… don’t. I know the Imperial coinage isn’t worth a lot, but there are some limits.” Aldric reined Lyard to a standstill and glanced at the citizens walking past, looking for the mode of dress that would indicate the sort of person he sought. “There. That’s the kind of man we need.”

He indicated a passerby whose noble curve of belly and rich robes might have produced a cheerful demeanor, but whose face had more the appearance of someone who lived on pickled lemons. Kyrin followed the direction of his gesture, then pointedly raised her eyebrows as Aldric dismounted and began a brief, onesided conversation. He was doing most of the talking— none of which she could make sense of through the background buzz of other people—while the fat man’s responses were a mixture of monosyllables and silent head movements. His sour expression had deepened when he was accosted about his presumably lawful occa-sions by a complete stranger who had both a foreign accent and a sword, but as Aldric continued to speak in what, from his frequent grins, must at least have sounded pleasant, the man’s eyes became a touch less flinty. As he pointed out what were presumably directions, Kyrin could see the movement of facial muscles trying to assume the long-forgotten configuration of a smile, but only succeeding in suggesting that the last meal of lemons was fighting back.

Aldric saw the man on his way with a courteous half-bow and an inclination of his head that Kyrin noticed was covering a chuckle, then swung back into the saddle. His grin was very wide and white, and seemed somehow to be stuck in place. “Silly old bastard,” he said pleasantly. “You try to be charming and what do you get?”

“Do tell,” said Kyrin. The question didn’t really need an answer that she could provide.

“Information. Old vinegar-face wasn’t exactly chatty, but at least he told me what I wanted—where to find some money.” Heeling Lyard into a leisurely walk, he swung the big courser around in the direction his informant had indicated.

“How much money?”

“Enough,” he said over his shoulder, “to make the question of what we’ll have to pay for a room one we don’t need to worry about.”

“Are you feeling all right, Aldric?” It was only halfway to a joke, because there was nothing in the baggage they could sell except for the two ponies which carried it, and he knew as well as she how little else they owned that could be turned into coinage. As an urgent heel in gray K’schei’s ribs brought her level, Kyrin could see that his wide grin had relaxed to an ordinary smile.

“Oh, yes.” He stared over Lyard’s ears and kept on smiling. “I feel just fine—and so will you, soon.” He flicked one finger at the tooling of his saddle as if chivvying a fly—except that there were no flies in a Drusalan winter. “Listen: once there was a man who was asked to do a favor. It was the sort of favor that—”

“Come to the point, will you! What so-crafty scheme have you got to pull out of your sleeve this time, eh?”