The place Geraln found was beset with columns painted in gold aside a pair of massive double-doors, both of which were fully opened and slid off to the side revealing plush chairs of red velvet and carved wood arranged around woven, woolen rugs of delicate patterns. The walls were covered in fine, green paper with flecks of gold patterns painted on, and interspersed between more gold columns, sculpted iron sconces graced the walls with low candles on each. At one end abutting the far wall was a water organ like the one I’d seen in the Count of Osenia’s manse, set with glass jewels stained in a rich variety of colors, and across from that was a dark, stained-wooden desk behind which stood an elder Herali gentleman in a stiff pressed uniform that resembled that of an official from the Imperial Navy and a small, white tag on his chest that had his name on it.
“They can’t come in here!” he barked.
I’d hoped he was talking to someone else, but he looked right at me, with Dune’s good arm draped over my shoulder, Oasis and Sage in tow.
Geraln turned and looked at me with a look of frustration on his face. “I’ve got this. Room sixty-four upstairs.”
He gave Sage the key and walked over to the man beside the desk and, with a quick glance my way, he leaned in close to have a private conversation with him while we made our way towards a staircase beset with wrought-iron balusters that spiraled up and into the heart of the hotel.
Dune struggled.
I had her good arm lifted up and wrapped over my neck, carrying her as she practically dangled from me. Oasis took her other side, held onto her waist, and mostly steadied Dune as she struggled to put one foot in front of the other. Oasis and I put our heads down and kept our way towards the stairs without making too much eye contact with anyone while Geraln tried to work whatever magic he could.
“Up here!” Sage spoke down to us from the floor above. I could then hear her footfalls as she scurried up the next flight.
As for Dune, her whole weight dangled over my shoulder, as she no longer had the strength to feign standing—we hadn’t even started on the first step. The heat coming off her was far too intense for comfort. I glanced back at the front desk. The concierge looked at me for a second, then turned back to Geraln as he brushed the man’s shoulder, leaning in close to say something else.
“Oasis,” I said. She looked up at me. “Dune won’t make it up these stairs. I’m going to have to carry her. As I lift her up, I need you to hold her arm here, and here. Then I need you to lay it across her body and tuck it in so that it doesn’t fall. Understand?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
With that, I wrapped one arm around Dune’s shoulder and knelt low enough to wrap my other behind her knees. She fell into my arms. Oasis did exactly as I asked, catching her broken arm before it could drop down, then held it steady as I lifted her up and finally graced it over her friend’s body with the utmost care.
Oasis took the lead, walking backwards up the stairs in anticipation of any little bump that might occur and keeping a close eye on Dune’s arm. Up and up we climbed, and soon the floor leveled off into a dark hallway set with a dark-green rug with a yellow outline. The end of the hall hosted a large window that cast enough light to see the numbers on the doors: twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, all the way to twenty-eight.
“Up here! I find!” Sage called down from four floors above us.
Dune wasn’t heavy, but even so four more flights of stairs were bound to tax my arms if I wasted any time, so we set out on the next flight.
On the third floor was an old woman with sandy-green hair and eyes the same color as Dune’s. She was dressed in a gray frock with a light-blue apron and was busy dusting the ledging that ran the length of the walls. She looked at us with a curious expression, and didn’t break her stare until we were up the next flight of stairs. Up above, an older couple was on their way down. As the way was too narrow to accommodate two under normal circumstances, there wouldn’t be any hope of squeezing past them while carrying a girl. So, Oasis and I stepped back down and waited for them to pass. As they stepped into the light from the window, one could easily see their Goloagi features—curly hair, light olive-green skin, and eyes a deep emerald color. The man looked me up and down from beneath his ornate hat and gave a “hmmpfh” as he passed. The woman squinted at me, passed her eyes over Dune’s limp body, and sucked her teeth as the two of them continued their journey down.
I was about to continue forward when I saw Oasis talking to the maid we’d seen earlier. She urged me to keep going, so I did.
By the fourth floor, I was starting to feel a strain in my arms, but not enough to distract me from her burning skin. Her hand had come loose where Oasis had tucked it in earlier, and I had to curl my arms up some to prevent it from dropping down.
I heard Sage call down from above. “Up here!” Then a door slid open.
I climbed up the last two flights of stairs and saw the open door belonging to room 64. Had I much longer to go, my arms would have teetered on the brink, and I just needed to set her down somewhere.
As I stepped inside, I stepped outside. There were no walls. The bright afternoon sunlight was muted by a vine that had been trained along a wooden frame that sufficed for a ceiling and covered us in bright, green leaves.
In one corner was a large, bronze tub with a valve at one end, set overlooking the city—tops of buildings stretching out over the horizon. In the other corner was a soft mattress laid out over a dias for a bed that offered the same commanding view. There were pillows and blankets, but Sage had moved those aside. She held onto Dune’s feet while Oasis kept watch over her arm as I lowered her onto the bed.
Before doing anything, I had a sheet of canvas in my sack that would suffice as a means of keeping blood from spilling everywhere. I folded that up and slowly, carefully, I laid out Dune’s arm at her side and began to work it beneath her shoulder. I had to turn her arm slightly, making sure to hold onto it so as to avoid jarring the wound. I felt Oasis’s presence beside me as I untied the rope holding the splint in place. I checked again before the last tie was removed to make sure her arm could rest without moving any further. Then I took out my knife and began to slice her shirt sleeve up to her shoulder.
“Why you are cutting her shirt?”
“It’s in the way.”
Oasis held onto Dune’s good hand. For a brief moment I saw Dune’s eyes crack open, and the two of them gazed at one another. I kept at what I was doing, slicing away the whole sleeve and most of the fabric around her shoulder. Then, I started with the top of the bandage, since that seemed to be the part least crusted over. Without pressing too hard, I ran the tip of the knife over the top layer of gauze and peeled that away, pulling until I could set it aside. By the bottom, it had fused to the layer below, so I sliced, bringing my face close to it so as to avoid molesting the skin beneath while still applying enough pressure to move through the bandage.
Right away, that smell greeted me, the sweet-sour stench of rotting meat.
I took my knife along the lower edge of the bandage, where the crust of scabbed dirt had accumulated into one solid mass. I sliced, pulled up, then made another slice, little by little until I could lift the bandage away from her skin. Then I cut it along the top and peeled it away from the wound completely.
What I found underneath was not pretty. An open gash traversed her arm from her elbow to about halfway towards her shoulder, jagged as though it had been ripped open, with globs of slimy skin that had taken on a greenish hue with black tips. The whole of her arm away from the wound was saturated in that orange blackness of faded bruises and swollen deep within the gash, the exposed flesh had turned black and was covered in slime.
As for the rest of the arm, I probed along the bone; Dune didn't react at all. Didn't stir, didn't groan, didn't give any indication she felt what I was doing. There was a longitudinal, oblique displaced fracture that began a few inches above the elbow. The arm was twisted, and the bone had begun to fuse in that position.
“Dune, I’m sorry. We’re going to have to cut off your arm.”
“NO!” As though some burst of energy shot forth from her, she opened her eyes wide and shouted her protest.
“It’s too far gone.”
“No!” she cried. “No taking arm!” I saw some twitch in her fingers, and she struggled to try and move herself further away from me.
“You’re going to die.”
“No!”
Oasis held her hand and stroked her hair. “Pa-ish ge sowa ‘a ‘a nabiu po newasdo kanihe re’a asdo mafui.”
“Vunge go’im,” Dune replied. “No taking arm.”
I had to try to think about that one. I knew the fate. I’d seen wounds like this before, and it never ended well. And every time, there was resistance. Negotiation. Not always in words or action, but in spirit. You could see it in the way they try to move their bodies. Some of them get quite agitated and threaten to hurt you if you tried. A select few offer up a sense of bravado and tell you to do it, but you can still see it in their eyes. And Dune was no different.
Who was different, was Oasis. She exuded caring like you wouldn’t believe. In the way she looked at her, the way she held onto her, and yet she was lucid enough to hear my words and tell her the truth. Sage, I looked around, I didn’t know where Sage went, but Oasis was right there. She made me wish I knew the kind of girl Dune was, and that intrigued me. I had to figure out a way to get through to her. So, I stood. I took a few steps back and grasped the wooden frame of the would-be wall and took a glance out over the city. “Will you please come over here for a moment?”
Oasis looked at me and stroked Dune’s hair, whispered something into her ear and then came over.
“Oasis,” I said, “this is normal. This…”
“We must respecting. Is being very important.”
“I know.” I took hold of her arms. “I know it’s very important, but listen. The window is closing. We need to make a decision right now. If she does not lose her arm, she will die. Within a day, maybe two, tops. I promise you, I have seen this before. I’m going to be honest; it might already be too late.”
Oasis’s eyes darted about, then she blinked and a tear fell down her cheek. She wiped it away and said, “What do I doing…” she shook. “What can I willing do?”
“OK. I need you to explain to her that if she doesn’t agree to lose her arm, she will die. I need her to understand that. Do you think you can explain that to her?”
Oasis glanced towards Dune a moment, then turned back to me. “Yes. I will doing this. OK.”
At that, she turned and went back over to Dune. I looked closely. Dune’s mouth quivered as she spoke. Oasis looked up at me. “You will waiting outside?”
I stepped outside the room and slid the door shut. There was a window at the end of the hall where I could make out through the distorted glass, people rushing along with their lives.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
On the shelf beside the window was a book from renowned Tobori scholar Zayueshawani Yaananuus, How Economies Work. He was the one who’d originally suggested using the proportional difference between the mean and the median as a way to measure inequality. I fucking loved his work. The one time Sarina ever got bored with me was when I was addicted to that book.
As for that other thing, I didn’t know anything about Carthia. I was supposed to go there and fight in some war in some place I’d never heard of. Worse, everyone I’d asked had nothing nice to say about that place. Earlier we’d passed by a salt trader and stopped to see if we could get a better idea of which way to go. The man told us it was in the Valley of Suffering, on the banks of the River of Unending Torment. Then he laughed his arse off and went about his way.
The low thrum of the door sliding open turned my attention to Oasis’s light-green eyes. She had a round face with flat cheeks, a face that belied a welcoming smile hidden beneath her sadness. She closed the door and sat down next to me. Then, with a deep breath, she spoke. “She is saying no. Please you will finding another way?”
My heart broke. “This is life or death; there is no other way. She knows that if she dies, she still won’t get to keep her arm. You did tell her that, right?”
Oasis cried several tears as she spoke, with each tear falling several seconds apart. “I am knowing this. I was saying this at her but she is making choice. She was saying you cannot taking arm.”
“She’s going to die.”
“Trying another way?” Another tear meandered down her cheek and fell to the floor.
“There’s no other way!”
“You are thinking. Maybe you are being wrong! There needs will being another way because she not will allowing it. You are saying you be apprentice, yes? Maybe you are not knowing the other way.”
No. There wasn’t. That broke my heart as much as anything else. I wanted there to be. There had to be. There had to be something we could try. “Maybe… we could try maggots?”
I betrayed her. As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I regretted each of them. There was no other way, and anything less would be a death sentence. If I’d stuck to that basic truth, maybe she’d have understood. Instead, I was a coward, and I betrayed her. Oasis’s eyes lit up and she shot a glimmer of hope my way. She was completely ignorant of my sin, but it felt good to see that hope across her face.
“We could, um… put maggots on the wound and… I could set the bone, then give her something to help her sleep. I don’t know if that will do anything, but I suppose it’s a better shot than nothing? But look, if it doesn’t work…”
I’d betrayed her. I murdered her friend, and she smiled at me. “If not will working, then you can taking arm.”
“If it doesn't work, she dies.”
I had, in all, twelve kren to my name. Oasis gave me eight from all she was able to scrape together, and I’d no idea if twenty would be enough for a respectable amount of fresh maggots.
The apothecary, I was told, was right across the street and down at the end of the block. The glare of the mid-afternoon sun and the maze of people I had to push through to get there didn’t present much of a challenge, and I was able to find it easy enough. The shop itself had large windows facing the outside on both corners where passersby could look in and see the various remedies they’d kept in jars. Dried frogs, sprigs of herbs, vials of varying colors, things of white stringy-looking stuff decorated the shelves. There were tufts of vines tied together and dried, hanging from a higher level, wooden boxes with the names of their contents burned into them—rosemary, thistle, asafran, aserkin whatever that was, a whole host of variety of things I’d never seen in Gath.
“Good afternoon! What can I help you with?” An old, hunched woman with a smile permanently etched into the wrinkles on her face greeted me. She wore a green scarf around her shoulders, and a simple, white cotton dress. A Herali woman, I could tell, though her long hair had long turned gray, kept in a single braid down her back.
“I need maggots.”
She smiled. “How many?”
“A couple ounces. Are they fresh?”
“Every day, boy. Give me a few minutes, and feel free to browse around. Take one of those sacks there if you need anything.”
She pointed me towards a stack of small paper satchels, the perfect size for carrying herbs in. I took that invitation and did as she suggested. It was, in fact, quite a fruitful endeavor, as I found not only dewas, but powdered liuwenia, which as far as I knew could only be had on the islands of Tobor or port cities like Kyoen. I also found some dried maurutus to help her relax.
While I was portioning out herbs, the old woman came back with a small wooden box. She then came over to me and looked over what I’d selected. “Hmmm,” she said. “Man or woman?”
“Girl. She’s… I don’t know exactly, maybe fifteen, sixteen?”
“How bad is the fever?”
“It’s bad. It’s very bad.”
“Hmm. The liuwenia should help with that. Let me show you something. Over here.”
Opposite the window was a small shelf built into the wall. There, she had an assortment of small, ceramic jars marbled brown and white with wooden stoppers. She took one down and brought it over to me.
“This,” she pointed at the thing that scarcely filled my hand. “This is a miracle.”
“What is it?”
“It comes from Uhui.”
“I’ve no idea where that is.”
“It’s called gebu’i.”
“Gebui?” I repeated.
“No. You say it with the glottal stop, like the sound you make in the middle of uh-oh. Gebu’i.”
“O…K… what does it do?”
She was effusive in her response, widening her eyes and leaning in for effect. “It cures you!”
“Of what?”
She pulled back. “Of what! Of what doesn’t it cure you? I told you it’s a miracle! Your girl has an open gash that’s taken the foul or else you wouldn’t be asking for maggots. And if her fever is high, then the foul has begun to traverse her body. This will kill it. Cure her of the foul.”
“That’s impossible!” I told her.
She smiled. “Come.”
With that, she wandered back over to a wooden desk and opened it up, pouring out a small amount onto a piece of paper. “Take a look.”
It was a flaky, whitish powder interspersed with flecks of green… blue… either a greenish shade of blue or a bluish shade of green. The old woman continued. “It’s a delicate balance, this one; you want a generous dose, but it taxes the body. Too much and you’ll lose her, not enough and the foul will take her. And this is important: she must continue the course even after she gets better. She must complete it. How fat is she?”
“Not at all.”
The old woman nodded and scratched her chin. “Two pinches in warm water, stir, let it rest for ten minutes, then make sure she drinks all of it. Do that every day for seven days, even if she starts to get better. This last part bears repeating—you must complete the treatment. Seven days, every day, even if she starts to get better. Now, is there a bone broken?”
“Yeah. I haven’t set it yet.”
“Hmm. Over here.”
I once again followed her over to another shelf, where she introduced me to a glass vial the size of a pencil and barely an inch long, filled with an amber fluid and stopped up with a small wooden cork.
“Kuluni adder venom?” I asked.
“You know of it?”
“I’ve used it before. How much is all this?” That probably should have been the first thing I spoke of when I walked in.
“Let us see here… the maggots… dewas… marutus… liuwenia… the gebu’i, and the venom… you’ll need some light gauze. All together… sixty-eight kren.”
My heart sank. “Uh… how much for just the maggots?”
The old woman looked at me sideways, then let her eyes traverse me for a moment. “I can’t let you do that. If you mean to take care of someone, do it right. How much have you got?”
I went into my coin purse to count out all the fractions, and poured it all out. My twelve was there along with the money Oasis had given me, along with some quarters, a few sixty-fourths and a sixteenth. I realized I’d forgotten all about the thirty-five Davod had given me for supplies and that spilled out as well.
The woman sorted through it all. “Fifty-five… fifty-six, three quarters, and a sixteenth. Looks like we’re close…”
Thirty-five of that wasn’t mine to spend. I should have said something.
“... you won’t need the dewas if you’re using liuwenia, liuwenia is better anyway. And the marutus just helps her sleep; beyond that it won’t heal anything. Everything else, I can let it go for what you’ve got here.”
And what of the supplies Davod had asked me to buy with his money? I spoke a silent prayer. God will provide.
Back at the room, I saw that Oasis had gotten a tray of food. There was a bowl of yellow soup that looked like it had a few bites taken from it, but also warm sourbreads drizzled with melted butter. They’d also included some things I hadn’t seen since I’d taken that trip to Saen with Tor and Sarina. There were these flatbreads drizzled in honey, the kind you have to fight over to get your fair share. And when you did, it was like biting into a fiery heaven-puff. One of those remained, along with a small bowl of meaty-gravy looking dark reddish-brown thing that gave off spice that promised severe torture with every savory bite. They had a glass bowl about a quarter-full with bits of assorted fruit soaked in a syrup laced with some kind of hard liquor, and two glasses that had some pink residue at the bottom. A separate tray included a teapot that let off steam from its mouth and some upside-down ceramic cups.
“You are being hungry?” Oasis said to me as I came in. I was, but that wasn’t the priority.
I took a cup and mixed some hot water with the cold until it felt the right warmness, not that I was sure of what the right warmness would be, and set about with two pinches of the miracle herb I’d gotten from the apothecary. Ten minutes, she’d said. I could use that time to set the bone and introduce the maggots. This required care. The pain she would experience would be severe, and the tendency would be to try and jerk away, to pull her arm from me. That would make matters worse, so I needed to hold her down. To that end, I set my knee over her shoulder, when Oasis pushed me aside. She insisted on being the one to hold her down. From there, I probed along the fracture to get a clear picture on how the bone was broken, where it was separated, and how best to maneuver the pieces back together.
Dune’s pulse was rapid, and her skin blazing. The sun, however muted by the vines trained along what sufficed for a roof, still seemed to bother her, so we’d set a pillow over her eyes, and as I probed along the fracture, she didn’t react. At all.
“This will hurt,” I said. “A lot.”
Oasis took a deep breath and looked at me, then nodded. Dune, her breath was quick and shallow, and I wasn’t sure if she even heard me. Then, as I started to pull, no reaction. She didn’t flinch, didn’t wince, nothing. No less, I took advantage of her lack of reflex and closed my eyes to focus on what my fingers were telling me, then carefully slid the broken splinters into their rightful place. I then made a slit inside the wound deep enough to expose the bone, and put a few drops of the adder venom directly on the fracture. Then, I pressed the bone together and set about putting a more permanent splint back into place.
I opened the small, wooden box and brought the colony of tiny white squigglers into view. Oasis took one look and turned away, grasping at her stomach. I then pulled at the edges of Dune’s skin so as to try and open up her wound as much as possible, then dropped the maggots in. A few had fallen to the side and squirmed along on the bed, so I carefully scooped them up and added them to the party.
Dune mumbled out something, barely audible, so I had to bring my ear close to her so as to hear what she was trying to say. “No take arm. Is mine.”
“We’re going to try and save your arm.”
“No take arm…”
Oasis couldn’t stop staring at it. Her eyes gaped, and she held one hand over her mouth, watching the little bugs crawl around inside her friend’s arm. “Is being disgusting.”
“Dune has the foul,” I said. “It’s coming from this wound. The maggots are going to eat away all the dead, rotting tissue and leave behind the healthy flesh. Once the source is cleaned up, we ask God to grant her the strength to fight against the foul that’s already in her. Maybe he will listen, and maybe he has other plans. The apothecary gave me this, she needs to drink it.”
Oasis took the cup with the miracle herb. “What it is being?”
“I don’t know, but it’s supposed to help.”
She then brought it up to Dune’s lips and helped her to take a sip. After two sips, Dune dropped her head back down. I spoke to Oasis. “She needs to drink all of it.”
To that end, she slapped Dune’s cheek a few times and shouted at her. “Do- wsa!”
Dune opened her eyes and looked at her friend.
“Do- wsa! Nagani-i ame’he ta-azu!”
Dune took another small sip, then closed her eyes and dropped her head again.
“Drink all of it, or we will cutting off the arm!”
Dune still didn’t lift her head.
Oasis turned to me. “OK. Cut the arm.”
“No!” Dune shouted.
“You will drinking! Now!”
At that, Dune finally woke herself up enough to take a couple good swigs. She got about half way through the glass before wincing and turning away.
“All of it!” Oasis chided her.
Dune then took in a deep breath and drank the rest of it without further complaint. Finally, we let her lay her head back down and close her eyes.
“What we will doing now?” Oasis asked.
“Now, we wait. We pray, and we wait.”