Chapter 14. The task of shortening

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The blood was pouring weaker than expected, probably because the swollen tissues had blocked some of the vessels. Lena had seen arms and legs torn off, but until now, she had always acted as an assistant - to fetch water, bring a saw, wrap a stump... Matrice always did the main work herself.

Now no one was going to help. And the man howling muffled from under the ropes would die in a few minutes. Bled out. That was Elena's first thought. The second was simple and practical. The problem could be solved without extraordinary effort. She could stitch up the stump, and that would be that. The third thought burned with the realization that this would not help. Santelli had chopped above the main lesion, but not enough, so the rot would move along the limb further, to the thigh. And besides...

A long time ago, a girl asked an old army doctor. Why amputations were not done by a simple cut-off? With some instruments like a guillotine. She asked quietly, of course, because her mother would not approve of such a question, thinking that her daughter was learning too many "wrong," cruel things from the old man as it was. Grandfather grinned and explained in a conspiratorial whisper that any chopping can cause (and most likely will cause) chipping as well as cracks in the vertical plane of the bone. This is harmful and dangerous and can even lead to death. Therefore, only saw the bone, no other way.

The dark red puddle, meanwhile, grew larger and larger, reaching Santelli's feet. The gangrenous patient was no longer howling but crying softly, very pathetically, childishly. One could only wonder what demons were tormenting his alcohol-soaked mind. Or not alcohol... Wine could not so fill the brain that even with a severed foot the patient did not come to his senses properly. And moonshine and vodka were not drunk here in their pure form.

The brigadier pursed his lips and put the axe behind his belt, pointing the blade back behind his back. Kai smiled for the first time all day, unexpectedly kind. Matrice sighed, without much disappointment, with an "I told you so" look.

In some romantic story, Lena would now experience moments of incredible mental torment, and then an invisible Grandfather would stand over her shoulder and say something encouraging. And the girl would have prevailed, experiencing a catharsis, one might say, rising above herself. It's entirely possible. In fact, if something like this had happened a couple of days earlier, most likely, Lena would have simply dropped her hands, even under the threat of cruel punishment.

But not today.

For a moment, she thought she saw a shadow in the shadows, Ranyan standing silently in the far corner of the barn. He was the same as he had been the day before, after his encounter with the "deceiver". A black cloak, his hair flowing down to his shoulders in black waves. Impenetrable black eyes, with pupils through which death itself stared. And this look, as if it gave the girl strength, strengthened her trembling hands, filling them with abnormal, unnatural strength. She, an alien from another world, cannot kill as deftly as a routine or a "tar" like Shena. But she has different talents. If one person can kill without pity or regret, then another can return life in cold blood just as well.

"Can it?"

If you don't check, you won't know.

Mama! squeaked weak city girl Lena, ready to faint at the sight of the red puddle.

"Damn," said journeyman Hel sincerely, kneeling in front of the bleeding patient.

There were many thoughts, but now they obediently lined up like sheep that are supposed to be counted at bedtime.

"The footlocker," commanded the master imperiously, not looking back at Kai and tucking up her sleeves.

Memo: You need leather armbands. Be sure to remember and then write them down. Well-waxed, so they can be wiped down with vodka and saline.

The Vietnamese footlocker was already standing nearby, and Kai flipped open the lid and slid the trays apart. The swordsman was sad again, but he acted quickly and precisely. The vial of "milk" itself fell into his hand. The patient refused to swallow, so she had to squeeze his nose with one hand, the second to lift his head so he did not choke, and the third ... Anyway, the murky-white liquid did get to its destination, but on the way, Lena spilled half a bottle at once.

Memo: you need a pillow under the head, a small one, more like a roller. And also leather, easily washable.

"A waste of product," commented Matrice.

"He's twitching and stirring," snapped Hel, not raising her head. "Water! Lots of it. Hot."

The killer dose of opiate (or not... who knows?) worked almost immediately. Now the medic had twenty minutes until he came to his senses. Probably less, even correcting for the overdose. And he can't take it again - his heart will stop.

The thought, stray and fast - it is now quite like "The Fastest Knife in the West End,"[1] the main thing is not to repeat his anti-feat with three dead men in one operation.

Here's the water. A whole cauldron, hot and steaming. Where did they get it from? Never mind. Kai seems to have decided to act as an assistant, standing next to the big mug, ready to pour on command.

Damn, the most important thing!

"Tourniquet, tighten above the knee," Hel ordered, jerking her head toward Matrice... And the apothecary silently obeyed, quickly and professionally twisting the tourniquet with a wooden stick turnstile.

This is what the lack of practice means. At the critical moment, only what is hammered into your head at the level of reflex works. You don't have the skill to cut off the blood immediately - and you remember it by accident. A couple more minutes and the blood loss would have killed the gangrenous one, so no more tricks would have been needed. Now the rule is to write the time of the tourniquet on your forehead... if anyone here had a watch and a marker.

Memp: invent some kind of clamps for blood vessels. Bulgakov wrote about them in his Notes of a Country Doctor, just in the story about the amputation of a crippled peasant woman's hip. She wishes she could remember what it is and what it looks like... a useless thought, to think about something else.

"Pour!" Hel stretched her arms out to fly away, placing her hands under Kai's mug.

Of course, she should wash her hands with soap and water, but there is no time... nor is there any soap. Another thing she had forgotten about, which must necessarily be put in the chest. And several pieces in separate boxes.

Rinsing her fingers thoroughly under a stream of hot - ouch, almost boiling! - water, Hel frantically considered what to do next and how to do it.

The easiest way is to cut above the knee, there is only one bone there, and it will be easier to saw. But no, it's better not to go to the thigh, the muscles there are too thick, and the femoral artery is in the middle of nowhere. So you have to cut below the knee.

Here are scissors to use, special ones, according to her drawing, with curved and blunted ends so as not to hurt when cutting clothes. They are wildly uncomfortable. Instead of two halves on a screw - something like meat tongs with blades on the inner sides of the staple. It's like a clamp. Only it doesn't grip. It cuts. The pant leg, however, gave way easily. Open gangrene looked and smelled even more gruesome. The stench of stale sauerkraut seemed to make her teeth itch.

That's it. Now she can assess the full extent of the disaster. Oh, how bad it is!

Treating the future operating field with "dead water," the master concentrated on her movements, literally reciting each of them. Everything to ignore the feeling of rotting flesh under her bare fingers. Like lard of a blue-purple color with black flecks, both slippery and hot-dry at the same time. How is this possible all at once? She better not think about it, lest she throws up straight on the patient with Mother Chahar's stewed vegetables.

And then Hel realized with stunning clarity that the classic "patchwork" amputation, where the stump is covered with a piece of skin, she would not be able to do. No way at all. There was no skill, and therefore the flap would have to be literally cut out by eye from a real living person, who would soon regain consciousness. So she'd have to perform a conventional excision, with all the consequences she'd seen before - a cone-shaped scar, protruding bones, easy traumability, high likelihood of sepsis, and most likely death.

Hel glanced to the same corner as if hoping to see the ghost of a routier there again. And, of course, there was nothing in the shadows. But the second distraction was a little mind-washing. Something was in her head. Something about acting when the flap for the stump could not be cut, but it had to be done cleanly... Damn it, and after all, Grandpa had gently suggested she go into medicine after school. If she had listened then, now she would have a couple of years under her belt at least theory. God, how it would be useful here normal, orderly knowledge of the basics of the same anatomy...

Here it is! Hel gently pulled out the memory, like a fish on a thin fishing line, ready to break at any second. There seemed to be a solution, and technically feasible. This, of course, she had never done either, but such a trick was easier to replicate than a flap. If only the gangrenous one had enough leg below the knee because she would have to cut high, well above the lesion.

"Help me," she tossed to Santelli and immediately realized that it was the wrong choice. Asking for such help should have been a different person or at least a different tone.

"What do you need?" The foreman asked briefly and businesslike.

Hel ripped at the pant leg, tearing it almost to her groin. The fabric gave way easily, with a nasty crack. It made the medic imagine the sound of the bone being sawn off, and she bit her lip. For a moment, because she couldn't speak with her lip biting.

"Hands right here," she pointed. "Below the knee, here. And hold on tight."

Santelli silently obeyed the order. Matrice leaned over the operating field, however, trying not to hang over the heads of the participants and not to obscure the light.

Memo: she must have a small magical flashlight. In case she operates in the dark or, like now, when it seems to be light but it wouldn't hurt to illuminate it. These flashlights are expensive, but you have to...

However, all this will be later.

Hel picked up an amputation knife, the same one that reminded Santelli of a knight's dagger. And then she remembered the name of what she was about to do. "Cone-circle amputation." Well, what a fucking useful and timely knowledge...

"Now I'm going to make a circular cut down to the bone," she said without raising her head. Not so much to the foreman as to herself, laying out the upcoming action in a series of elements, imagining them one by one in every detail. The blood and mucus began to dry on her fingers, pulling her skin down disgustingly. It was as if she'd been kneading rotten mincemeat for a long time and never washed her hands.

"The skin and muscles will tighten, pull on themselves," Hel continued.

"I know, I saw it," threw in the foreman.

Just to avoid hitting my finger with my own knife. It seems that people often died from this, even some Bazarov in the nineteenth century...

"And when I tell you, pull hard and pull on yourself."

"Pull?" The foreman didn't understand. "What?"

"Pull everything," Elena exhaled angrily, trying on the knife. "And harder. I'll cut as high as I can where you move the... meat."

"Pull the muscle off the bone," Kai realized before anyone else, even before Matrice, more adept at the surgery. "Away from the saw, toward the knee itself. Just move it really hard."

"So the meat would come back and cover the sawed bone," now the apothecary had figured it out. "Then you can sew up the skin on the stump, like the neck of a sack."

Hel did not raise her head, so she did not see the undisguised respect that flashed in her employer's gaze. From peer to peer. Only for a little while.

"Got it," the foreman responded, clenching his fingers. "Cut."

And Hel began to cut. Or rather, she chopped, butchering like a butcher, even though the tourniquet was above the knee.

Memo: Glasses. The most ordinary glasses without diopters. Here they were surprisingly deftly crafted from imported glass. "Tarred" empirically came up with the idea of a high-contrast lens for twilight, fog, and marsh. And Hel needed glasses to avoid catching a pus drop in the eye.

Only now she understood what absolute, ultimate concentration is. It's the state where you feel nothing when you do your work. Well, almost nothing. The most important thing is that there is no fear, only a cold enthusiasm, an understanding that "you can do it". Or at least you will try, without thinking about what will happen afterward if you fail.

She could. And she did.

Hel thought that the scariest thing would be sawing the bones, but it was easy enough, incredibly easy, considering that there were two bones. But the unanswered question gnawed at her was what would happen when the tourniquet was removed and the blood rushed into the freed arteries. Would the stump bleed again? How heavy will it be? Or will blood clots have already formed in the area of the incision by then? Or should we cauterize it? Ambroise Pare would not approve...

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Kai kept watering when and where he was told to. Santelli seemed about to rip the muscles off the bone; the foreman's fingers were truly iron. Matrice just breathed in the back of her head and watched. The sick man, meanwhile, was slowly coming to. He was pale, and the skin on his face was a waxy, almost lifeless appearance. Probably from the blood loss.

What was missing was a clock, an ordinary clock. Not only and not so much for controlling the procedure but for orientation in general. It seemed like at least an hour had passed, though fifteen minutes at most had passed.

Memo: in a "Vietnamese footlocker" you need an hourglass. At the very least, a water clock. You can't measure the minutes anyway, so you have to take the duration of the "milk" as a reference point.

God, so much blood... and disgusting slurry, which does not even look like pus. It is some wild melt of tissue with the inclusion of semi-decomposed lumps. This seems to be a case where the affected muscles can simply be removed without any knife, with a rag, layer by layer, down to the tibia bones. We need more water. It seems that wounds can be washed not only with saline but also with soapy water... or maybe not. She can't remember exactly now.

The severed stump without a foot fell on the slippery, blood-soaked wood with a thump that made her heart flutter and skip a beat.

"Let it go," exhaled Hel, feeling her fingers trembling with fatigue with a thread of plantain fibers. The medic used them to tie up the large vessels, the ones she could find. Her back ached wildly in the lumbar area.

Santelli let go, and it worked - the freed muscles went back into place, hiding the bone splices deep within the cone of soft tissue. The skin was more difficult, but it was enough to pull it over the incision with effort. Now to sew it up would be an intricate craft and shamanism.

Sew...

This time Hel had thought of Paraclete, the comforter of the afflicted. And she thought this uncovered stump, oozing red (at least it wasn't red-yellow, which was a good thing), was the same wound. And if you sew it up now, you'll get the same primary stitch. And with an increased risk of complications because of gangrene.

The main thing is that the bones aren't sticking out anymore, so she guess we could do with a tight bandage. You'd still get a scary granular scar. On the other hand, how did the real medics stitch it all up? It is possible to close the incision partially, leaving a hole for drainage.

But gangrene...

It's gangrene. You don't fuck with it, Gramps once said. Then he apologized to her mother for a long time and promised never to express such a way in front of the child again.

Lena looked at the patient. He was already teetering on the brink of awakening. His nostrils and eyelids twitched frequently, chaotically, and saliva flowed from his painfully curved lips in cloudy drops, staining his neck. The pain must have been terrible; a little more and the man would have come to such a sensation that he would have realized it even through the stupefaction. Yes, they were not just drugging him with wine...

Well, let's not... pussyfoot around, thought Hel. We'll disinfect it one last time and just bandage it up, no stitches.

"Hold him down," she said to the foreman and picked up the bottle of "dead water" again, which was about a quarter empty. The wet glass almost slipped from her fingers. Hel clenched her teeth and gripped the bottle securely with both hands.

Note: you need a clear bottle. In low light, you can't see through the brown glass how much liquid is left. Better yet, divide the disinfectant supply into several vials because if the bottle broke now, the entire supply would be gone at once.

Santelli remembered Codure's reaction to such manipulations, and he had been washing out small cuts with moonshine more than once since then. The foreman put his whole body on the patient. It was very opportune.

"Go away," said Matrice gloomily as the apprentice prepared a bandage, that is, a short, long strip of boiled cloth.

"What?" Hel didn't understand.

"Get off," the woman repeated. "I'll wrap it myself."

Her legs ached as if her kneecaps were about to break like bones had been dried in an oven. So without rising, Lena crawled to the side, helping herself with her wet hands. Straws stuck to her palms, mixed with the blood. She wanted to cry, from the fatigue, from the "sinking" after an absolutely wild ordeal. And from resentment at such an insulting attitude after the most difficult surgery.

She sat down and began mechanically scrubbing the dirt from her fingers. She thought in passing that it wasn't so much that the dress was ruined but that she would have to wash it long and hard. She couldn't do it on her own, so she'd have to pay the laundresses in silver. Only they get rid of blood without ruining the fabric.

"What's with the junk?" Kai clarified rudely. Elena's success seemed to upset him for some unknown reason.

"He'll lie here for a day or two. The guards will feed him. Then throw him out with the other cripples, and let him beg," Matrice sentenced him with her usual domestic harshness. Kai nodded silently, appreciating the generosity of the apothecary, who, though for her purposes, had done a good deed by giving another chance to the doomed sufferer. Whether he seizes the opportunity or loses, it is up to Pantocrator's will. People die in the wastelands. Often for nothing.

Matrice tied the last knot, critically evaluating the work.

"It'll do," she verdict. "Mouse and Saphir will collect and clean the healing box later. As for you..."

The gazes of all three of them-Santelle, Kai, and Matrice - crossed over Elena. The girl looked up and down at them, her eyes empty of anything but mortal fatigue.

"To the bathhouse," the apothecary concluded firmly.

"Shena's just about to make the heat," smirked Santelli, who looked as content as a meowr drunk on thick, fat milk.

"And then we'll talk," Matrice said, and she shook off the clinging piece of bloody bandage from her hand. "There's something to talk about..."

* * *

Shena splashed a ladleful of "hogweed" infusion on the stones again, in which a couple of spoonfuls of Weeping Root extract had been diluted. It was as if a steam bomb had exploded over the hearth, and Lena's breath caught as if she had inhaled the purest eucalyptus oil. The tears gushed out, but very "softly," without any rubbing in her eyes. It was as if she had looked at the world through the smoked glass before, and now her eyes were cleansed with each tear. Her pupils seemed crystal. Knock on them with a fingernail through a closed eyelid, and it echoed with an amazing ringing. It was a strange sensation, but it was pleasant nonetheless. Pure.

Lena had avoided experimenting with local herbs before, justifiably fearing allergies. If the ragweed of her native Earth caused her swelling and shortness of breath, then the alien active phytonutrients could well put her in her grave. But this time she gave up and decided to surrender to the will of the Paraclete. As it turned out, I was not mistaken. This bath turned out to be the best of her life.

"More?" asked Shena loudly, overlapping the angry hissing of rocks.

Lena nodded silently, then thought the gesture might not be noticed, and said: "Yes."

Unexpectedly she smiled broadly and boldly added: "Don't spare it!"

Shena seemed to smile, too (which she rarely did, usually the Valkyrie grinned angrily in obvious menace), and lowered the ladle into the barrel of herbal brew.

Elena spread her arms like Rose on the bow of the Titanic. She sucked in a chest full of dense, herbal-scented air. It seemed as if she could inhale endlessly-the healing vapor spreading down her nasopharynx, then penetrating further, stroking the branches of the bronchi with its soft warmth, and finally dissolving into the alveoli without a trace. Further on, further on, until there is nothing but bliss and a single thought in the entire universe:

Good... God, it feels so good...

Only a person who has to work really hard and hard soiled in mud and other filth, reaching the limits of mental endurance - is able to understand what a bathhouse is. Not an oxymoronic parody of the bustling city with the so-called "dry steam", but a real bathhouse, where in the semi-darkness the hot stones glow dark red. And of course, there must be steam, real "angry" steam, a lot of steam, which heats the exhausted body to the last bone, clears and opens the blood vessels to the tiniest capillaries, which without a magnifying glass is impossible to see.

In general, a proper bath is a supremely good thing. Whoever has experienced it, understands its essence. The unlucky ones... well, there's no use in describing it. There are things you just have to experience.

Matrice's bathhouse was built on a stone foundation of real imported wood. The logs were too thin, though, so they were coated on the outside with something else, like plaster. There was only one window, with the usual mica, so there was just enough light not to bump into another person washing or the heater in the middle of the steam room.

In her former life, it wasn't that Lena avoided the baths... rather indifferent to it. Well, yes, romance, old-school, gray-haired antiquity, physiological effect on the body. But the shower is still better. In the new one, she appreciated it and tried to attend regularly. Part of it was a far-reaching calculation, the understanding that there is no real medicine and no longer will be (unless the girl finds a way back home), so the body must be protected as a valuable, usable capital. But most importantly, without a magic faucet with endless hot water, the bath was the only way to wash normally, by the standards of the urban dweller of the twenty-first century.

Unfortunately, it happened less often than I would have liked. Lena tried to take her bath alone, which meant that she had to choose a time when the low as if grown into the ground, an annex to Matrice's apothecary warehouse was free. It wasn't often. The sinister aunt knew how to wash, steaming in two days on the third, and she regularly rented the baths to a select few like Santelli.

But today, the bathhouse was at the complete disposal of Elena and the unexpectedly good-natured Shena, who steamed herself and acted as a bath attendant.

A new cloud of steam hissed through the bathhouse like a thermobaric bomb. The tears flowed in an endless stream, so much so that it seemed as if not only her eyes but the entire skin of her face were being cleansed, "crying out" the notorious toxins. Shena's body in the clouds of steam seemed to glow milky white, except for her tanned face and hands. This was the first time Lena had seen the "tarred" one of the Santelli Brigade so close, so long, and naked. Usually, the Valkyrie with the spear shunned the apothecary's apprentice and generally "turned her nose up". Within tolerance, but still unpleasant. But today, it was as if Shena had been replaced; she seemed almost friendly.

Valkyrie crouched on the shelf, massaging her knee, while Lena surreptitiously examined her through her tangled hair, professionally reading the marks of a difficult life on her lean body.

Elena had long noticed that Shena was not a cripple but squatted only on her right leg. Now it was clear that her left shin had once been broken, hence the problems with her knee. The fracture must have been treated by a good bone surgeon, and the limb was nearly undamaged.

A vertical scar on her right thigh. It's very thin but long. She couldn't see the dots from the stitches, but Lena was sure they were there, just about healed. An unsutured wound would have left a much wider scar. A clear cut. Claws and teeth would leave very different marks. Like on the right side, where the clawed paw had gone through the ribs. This was serious, and I didn't even have to look at the subsequent surgical cuts and darning. Surely not without the "freezing" elixir, otherwise, the wounded lancer would not have been taken to the Apothecary.

Another scar stretched a whitish thread from the base of his neck to his left armpit. Well, everything was clear here. It had been cut from top to bottom in the hand-to-hand fight. Lena had seen wounds like that many times before and had even stitched them up from time to time under Matrice's supervision. Shena had clearly been lucky. The blow came from the very end of the blade and only cut the skin, barely touching the pectoral muscle.

The lancer's fingers and palms are covered in small dots, an inevitable consequence of camping life. No matter how careful you are, no matter how thick your gloves are, you can't avoid cuts and burns, especially if you regularly go down to the dungeon for Profit. Resin from the torch dripped, unfortunately burning the sleeve, and there was a new dot. Lena looked at her palms, already pretty rough, marked by the cuts of an apothecary knife. In a few more years, her hands would be just like those of the Valkyrie. Well, almost the same since she didn't carry a spear, so she was free of the specific blisters.

Generally speaking, it seemed that it was mostly humans, not monsters, who had tried to harm Shena. With the exception of her leg and side, all the other marks on her body screamed human weaponry. Especially the two parallel scars on her stomach, between her navel and her chest. They were nasty scars... too twisted, too bizarre. When they want to kill, they hit differently, straight and to death. These same marks suggested a thin blade that had been ornately and imaginatively drawn across a living body. Shallowly and long ago - the pattern of thin, pale lines had thinned with time - trying to inflict the maximum pain.

Lena felt cold, very cold as if an icy draught had inexplicably crept through the door, tightly locked and with felt upholstery on the outside. The girl distinctly shifted, the same way she had felt when she fell into her nightmares. The abundance of steam only increased the feeling of unreality of what was happening. Another nightmare seemed to persistently knock on the thin veil, ready to burst from her subconscious.

... The white dress. The wine mixes with blood. The knife. An unusual knife. In Elena's world, it would be called a "Craft" knife. The handle is not a rod, but a plate, in continuation of the blade, and is covered on both sides not by wooden cheeks but by soft leather overlays. Such knives are rarely made, usually for a lot of money, not for work, but to demonstrate the skill of the smith and the wealth of the customer, which can pay for useless work. But this blade sharpened like a razor - was used ...

Shena finished her massage on the oddly sore knee and glanced at Hel, who in turn stared at the Valkyrie's slashed belly with a vacant, paused gaze. The apothecary apprentice's pupils dilated to the edge of her iris, almost like the " deceiver's " and pulsed, contracting finely. Tears rolled in torrents, washing over the unblinking eyes. Hel mumbled something with whitened lips, and there was only one word she could make out.

"Pàtrean."

Pattern, "arabesque."

Shena flinched, a grimace of angry, unthinking rage literally cracking her face. Quickly grabbing the tub of cold water that still had ice floating in it, the lancewoman poured the contents into the face of Matrice's apprentice.

Lena shuddered, crouched down, covering herself with her arms like an animal waiting to be struck. The bottomless wells of her pupils shrank into thin dots, taking on their normal appearance. Her head was empty and ringing, the way it is when you stand up too sharply, and for a couple of moments, the brain is without a proper blood supply. Her memory, like a torn net, caught only a few of the twilight images from the roughly severed vision again.

Shena was looking down at Lena, and the lancer's eyes were literally blazing with a fierce rage. For a moment Lena thought for a moment that the Valkyrie was going to hit her. Not a slap in the face, but a full blow that would kill or at least maim. That was the look of people whose darkest, most shameful secrets had been extracted from long-standing oblivion and publicly revealed.

The apprentice realized that perhaps she had never been as close to death as she was at that moment. And quite intuitively, at one subconscious, she whispered:

"I'm sorry."

Now it was as if Shena had been plucked from the fog of blind rage. She exhaled and very carefully, exaggeratedly carefully, placed the empty bucket next to the stove. Elena sobbed and wiped away another batch of tears. Shena mechanically repeated her gesture. The weeping root worked on the lancewoman as well, only a little weaker because of the habit. And then Lena burst into hysterical laughter. She imagined what it all looked like from the outside and could not stop. Her laughter burst out in an uncontrollable wave, washing away her fear. Shena stared in bewilderment.

"You... Look..." Lena struggled, feeling her diaphragm cramp with laughter. "Two naked girls... in a bathhouse... fighting... weeping... It's a show! ... A fair..."

Of course, she'd overreacted about the "fight" part. Though Hel was a large and strong woman by the standards of the Wasteland, in a fight, Shenna could have tied the "girl from Earth" in a knot and broken her in any way she wanted. But ... the lancer frowned, then frowned even more, really trying to look at the whole thing from the outside. She carelessly tossed aside her bangs, which should have been trimmed years ago. The emerald eyes flashed yellow-green, like laser beams piercing through the thinning steam that should have been "freshened up" a long time ago.

And then Shena laughed, too, and clapped her hands.

"We can take the money!" It was her time to force the words out through a torrent of unrestrained merriment. "No more than five spectators at a time!

"No pennies or cut coins," Hel echoed. Her wet, dark red hair spread like liquid flames flowing down her shoulders. Full coins only!"

A new burst of laughter seemed about to explode the bathhouse from the inside.

"Our beauties are getting pretty excited, just like Gee's little fusspots," Matrice remarked sneeringly, raising her head. "They'll turn my bathhouse into a brothel."

"Let them turn," Santelli shrugged and pulled out a small bar from his belt pouch to fix the axe because the bones of the severed leg left barely visible jagged lines on the blade. "That would be even better. Shena will look after her even more diligently then. Personal interest. It brings people closer together and binds them together. But they won't turn. She's shy."

"You don't say," now the apothecary repeated the same gesture. "Did you see how she cut the leg? Just like your executioner, didn't flinch a finger until it was over. But... Yeah, she might be a flint in the medicine business... in time. But other than that..."

The apothecary sighed as if genuinely feeling her student's shyness. Santelli smiled at the edges of his lips, like a man who knows more than he wants to say. He slid the cleaver across the axe, making a thin, clinking noise in the steel. Then he spoke:

"I don't mean Hel."

After a good laugh, the women looked at each other more seriously.

"I don't know what you saw," Shena said very seriously. "But if you tell anyone, I'll kill you. You won't get any help from Matrice or Foreman. I'll kill you."

It sounded absurd, like, I don't know, but I'll kill for sure. But Lena took the lancer's promise without a shadow of a doubt as if it were true.

"I won't tell anyone," she promised just as seriously. "I promise."

"All right," agreed Shena. "I won't take the blood oath, but you said it. Now let's just pour one more drink, and then we'll call it a day. It's getting close to sundown. There's more to do today."

* * *