Pain. White, hot pain. Her vision was blurry, but she was somewhere cramped and dark, and she could barely move her arms. She smelled of sweat and urine.
What happened…right. I almost killed myself. I hope my organs are still there. She tried to reach out to Enkidu, only to recoil in pain. Instead of his presence, there was a cold, dark box around her mind.
They’ve got me in silver bindings.
A light burned to life just beyond where she could focus, and a tall figure stepped out of the shadows. The prince? No, a woman.
“Can you hear me?” The voice was soft and sonorous, with an accent Anya couldn’t place, but there was an edge to it. Like a knife wrapped in velvet.
Anya tried to speak, only to taste hot, salty blood in her mouth. She spat it out and managed a croak.
“Good. Listen carefully.”
The woman raised something in her hand, and Anya felt something loom in the dark recesses just beyond her mind. Enkidu? No, Enkidu was warm, and this thing had no temperature at all.
It lunged, burrowing through her mind and wrapping around her thoughts like a worm within a carcass. Her vision wavered, and Anya barely suppressed a scream.
She’s using some kind of draugr.
“Get out of my head.”
The woman’s hoof collided with her skull, and Anya felt something shatter as she lurched to the limit of her chains. Blood welled up in her throat, and she dug her claws into her legs to keep herself lucid.
“Do not waste my time. Did you know General de Bouresse intended to kill Marquis Yvon Clary? If you cannot speak, shake or nod.” Even in anger, her voice was distant.
“Nhg…no.” The thing in her mind pulsated, each movement causing a wave of intense nausea.
“Do you know how de Bouresse obtained the dentures he used as a conduit?”
“No.”
“Were you privy to any other plan to harm the Marquis or the House of Clary?”
“No.”
“Do you intend to harm Prince Yvon or the House of Clary?”
“No. Why would I.”
The woman lowered her voice. “Why did the Patriarch of Rus give up his firstborn daughter as an imperial consort?”
Words began to form on Anya’s lips, but she was at her limit, and even the thing in her head could not keep her from oblivion.
—
Cannon boomed in the distance, and bonfires filled the winter sky with ash. Anya trudged through the camp, her hood pulled tight against her ears. It was nearly impossible to pitch tents in the frozen mud, so the soldiers around her clustered under tarps tied between trees. They had seen two days of combat at the Wistla Crossing before being ordered to the rear.
“Oi! Miss Anya! Vanya’s got a question for ya!”
“What is it, Dimitri? Are Vanya’s stitches holding up?” Against her better judgment, Anya walked over to the circle of young bucks, who quickly shuffled to make space for her around their campfire. They were conscripted tercios, trained to fight with pikes in formation with magi. Ivan flashed an embarrassed smile.
“You ask her, Dima! You called her over,” Vanya said.
“Listen, we’re all straight-ears, and you’re a lop, so Vanya was wondering what would happen if one of us shagged ya. I said that the kits always come out straight, but Vanya thinks it matters if the doe’s on her back.”
A few giggles, but Anya could tell their heart wasn’t in it. They had been twice number before the battle, and many of them sported jagged black scars from where Gaulish ice-arts had necrotized skin.
“The offspring would have a partial lop. It’s not all-or-nothing like coat color, and position has nothing to do with it. Anyways, you lot are changing your bandages like I showed you, right?”
Slow nods. These ones, at least, would make it to tomorrow.
“Miss Anya, you hear we killed their king?” A small buck, Pyati, spoke up. Anya didn’t know his real name.
“Pyati, that’s rotten hay and you know it!”
“No! Heard it from the messenger! Our mages planted a bunch of those honum-homunc-those little beasties just under the soil before we retreated, and when the king moved his camp up they burst out and killed the lot of them!”
“We came up with that trick over a year ago. Their mages know to sniff for homunculi now.”
“But what if-”
“Keep changing your bandages, and if your wounds start smelling off, get to the hospital tent as fast as you can. You’re tough, and with luck you’ll make it through.” Anya rose to leave. None of these bucks were dying, and she was needed elsewhere.
“Hey, Miss Anya,” Dimitri spoke up. “You’re a lop, and ya speak Rusyn a little too proper, so odds are you’re one of those noble twats. But you’ve done well by us, and we mean it.
Don’t say that. Not when half of you are corpses in a frozen ditch.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Thanks.” Anya gave them a last look, and rushed over to the cluster of long tents that held the field hospital. They had been pounded into a frozen lake, and while they stank of fear hormones, the stench of decay was mercifully absent. In this weather, the cold took the dead long before rot could do its work.
She pushed the doorflap aside. There were four rows of soldiers lying on rough wooden pallets, and doctors and junior magi swarmed like flies between them. Someone had set up a few fires under holes cut in the tent ceiling, and the air was thick with smoke. Somewhere, a soldier let out an animal scream.
“Princess Anna. You are here to train in blood arts, not encourage wanton behavior in bucks far below your station.” A magus with disheveled black fur stood up, her red hood and gold-tasseled apron indicated her status as a magus of the Crimson Court. Her focus, an old bloodletting needle, hung from a chain around her neck.
“They are good men, Reverend Mother Petrova, and I was seeing to their care.”
“They are good to you, because they know not to cross a blood-mage. The next poor doe they set their eyes on will not be so lucky. Now come, princess. I do not have all day to watch you play at arts.” The reverend mother grabbed Anya’s shoulder, and led her further into the tent.
They came to a tall soldier with heavy bandaging on his torso. Anya immediately recognized him as a blood-child - quasi-homunculi spawned from does altered by blood arts, birthed by the dozen and growing to adult size in just under three years. His features were lumpy, like unbaked clay, and he was hairless except for a few blood-matted patches of fur. His hands were in a vice-grip around a necklace bearing the holy leaf of St. Katerina the Merciful.
“You need to go back. You need to go back to the cold place, my brothers are there, someone needs to go back and get them before more bad men come,” the soldier murmured, rhythmically rocking his hands as if in prayer.
“Brothers? Which regiment were you-”
“Anna. Diagnosis.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Anya reached down, placing her hand on the soldier’s arm. Her clean white fur stood out against his frostnipped skin.
“I’m going to see what’s wrong with you, alright? Then we can make you better.”
His eyes rolled over to her. “Your ears. Like the people who come see ma in the nursery.”
“Please, just relax your arms. You’re going to be ok.” The Crimson Court had hailed the project as a great success for Rusyn war-arts, but the blood-children were only truly useful as bodies with which to slow down the enemy.
“Enkidu. Time to work.” She slipped the knife from her belt, making a small cut on her finger.
“Shut up. Overlay with the patient’s body.”
She felt Enkidu’s power flow through the soldier’s body, spreading out like roots along the major blood vessels. Phantom pain burned up and down her nerves as she focused on the damage.
“Fractured ribcage and heavy internal bleeding on the right side of the abdomen. Another magus sealed most of the bleeding, but it was done quickly and he’s still losing blood. It looks like a glancing impact by a large blunt object.”
“That would be called a cannonball, Princess.”
“May I continue, Mother?” Silence in response.
“Large portions of the small intestine and liver, along with the entire right kidney, were completely pulverized. Tissue in that area is starting to die off due to circulatory disruption. No major damage to the spine, heart, lungs, or brain. With arts, it’s repairable.”
“I did not ask if it was repairable. Perform an exaltation.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“As long as his heart beats, he may be of use to us. Do it.”
“But…yes, Mother.”
The soldier’s hands shook away from her. “You’re going to fix me, right? So we can go back to the cold place and find my brothers.”
“Yes, you’ll go back. I promise. Now close your eyes, and think about your mother.” She took the soldier’s hands again and forced them onto his chest. Half his fingers were crooked, and his right index finger.
“Less talk. More arts. Induce unconsciousness if you must.”
Her heart began to lose its rhythm as she raised the knife. No. If she was anything less than exceptional, her father would never permit her to study arts again.
“Enkidu, you know what to do. Start with the brain.
She touched the knife against his plexus and fixed her mind on guiding Enkidu to the soldier’s forebrain. The roots coiled into place under her fingers.
“Goodbye.”
Enkidu’s miasma burst into the soldier’s mind, instantly liquidating the parts Anya indicated. He hardly needed her guidance - this ritual was old, and her ancestors had performed it with him many times. Brain first, then down to the stomach, intestine, liver, the remaining kidney, at at last the genitals, each organ withering to nothing. The soldier’s face went slack the moment it began.
“Return the life you have harvested. Follow my lead.”
She began to trace her knife over the soldier’s now-hollowed body, sculpting its essence. She bade the cells in the heart, lungs, and diaphragm to proliferate, stretching out the ribcage as the organs engorged. Next, she carefully burned away the nerves responsible for sensing pain, before moving to the arms and legs - as they grew, she hardened the bones and weaved the muscles into new, more efficient forms. The soldier’s bandages tore, but the skin beneath was now whole, and covered in a thin layer of fresh grey fur. At last, she shattered his hands, slipping the necklace into her own sweaty palms, and grew his ulna into long blades piercing through the skin. It was easy, even enjoyable, as long as she could think of the body as nothing more than clay to be shaped by her craft. As long as she kept her eyes from the soldier’s unliving face, now far too small for his engorged body.
“It is done, Mother.”
Petrova stepped up to the soldier, pricking his own finger on his conduit before placing a hand on the soldier’s chest.
“Quick work, and no tumors. Muscles and bones are acceptable.” She turned to the caretakers. “We’ll need to get this one to the front lines. It will wake up soon.”
“Quiet,” Anya whispered. Her hands were shaking as she pried the necklace from the soldier’s overgrown hands.
The soldier - or whatever he had become - would soon awaken with a ravenous hunger, and be herded with others of his kind into the enemy lines, where it would blindly kill until its energy reserves burned up after a few hours. A biological automaton that felt no pain.
“How do you feel?” Petrova asked.
“What does it mean to you?” Anya’s voice came out as broken warble.
“When a mother’s body cannot nourish the kits it carries, it breaks them down so that the mother may live. War is likewise an act of survival. If you cannot see this, you are unworthy of that blade.”
“I’m fine. C…continue the evaluation.” Anya swallowed and placed the necklace in a pocket of her robe.
Petrova led her to a new patient, and then another. Some, she healed. Others were too far gone even for exaltation. The faster she worked, the more focus she applied to perfecting her arts, it easier it became to push down the rotten feeling in her chest.
It was dark when she left the tent, and amorphous shadows hugged the featureless grey plain beyond the camp. She stared out on the edge of the nothingness, and something in her head told her to run, run until her white fur was lost in the snow and the biting wind stole the warmth from her body.
She brushed frozen tears from her face, and tossed the necklace into the snow. Whatever mercy St. Katerina had to offer, it was surely not for her. The cannon still boomed in the distance, and tomorrow would be another long day.