Chapter Fifty-Two: Decay
Two weeks.
Two weeks Tom had spent, carving a path through the forest, Sesame plodding along beside him.
Two weeks, although it felt longer.
Tom was a knot. He was an alloy forged of anxiety and frustration. He was certain he would’ve broken down if it weren’t for Sesame’s dependable presence.
He checked Val continually. At first, she didn’t seem to change. Her skin was ashen, waxen. Her breathing was shallow, and it felt like if he looked away too long, it would stop. A sheen of sickly sweat covered her forehead. Blood leaked in slow dribbles from multiple wounds.
An hour after they started, he called Sesame to a stop. He needed to bandage her wounds, to ensure she was keeping as much of her blood as he could manage inside of her, instead of leaking onto the forest floor.
He felt they were far enough away from the scene of the attack, now. He hadn’t wanted to try and deal with her wounds and fight off an attack from some opportunistic predator at the same time. He was ever conscious of the fact that they had just fought an orc hunting party, and that more could be anywhere, even if it seemed to be at the extreme edge of their range. He had no idea what passed for logic among their species, and wouldn’t bet Val’s life on it.
He gently peeled away her ruined shirt from the handfuls of small blades buried in her stomach, one on either side of her abdomen. As the torn, blood-encrusted fabric came away, he hissed in shock. The flesh around them was fever-hot, and grey as a winter storm cloud, where the rest of her ranged from merely washed out, to leaden.
She was dying. That much was clear. She was only managing to fight off the decay imposed by Honeyfield’s skills with the help of Smitten, who had curled up beside her on the litter.
He could do little about it. All the potions Harvey had given him were poisons, and could only heal with the help of his Sweet Suffering. He had various herbs and such, gathered over his time as a Hunter, and he knew some of them had restorative effects, but they were only mild, and he had no way to give them to her at present.
A problem for later. He had bigger problems now.
He ransacked his brain for any memories from his Academy medical classes. He remembered being taught that stab wounds often punctured vital organs or arteries, and if you removed them, the victim would bleed out. It was best to leave them in, and let a Healer deal with the injury.
He didn’t have any Healers on hand, though. There wouldn’t even be one at Corin’s Grove. If he was exceedingly lucky, one of the Guards there might have a healing skill, which they could hopefully use to stabilise her until help came from one of the hospitals in Wayrest. A long hope, but the only one he could think of.
He tried to weigh the pros and cons in his mind. Was it better to leave the knives in, or take them out and bandage them?
He dithered, then realised his dithering was achieving nothing. He couldn’t know what was best. He wasn’t a Healer. He had to be decisive.
He began pulling the knives from her stomach. As gently as he could manage, he tugged on them until they came free, one by one. The inflamed flesh around them was tight as a drum, and dragged on the lengths of metal hungrily as he pulled, like lurid, greedy fish sucking on silvery fingers.
As the last came free, he pulled out some spare clothes from his inventory, and cut them into strips with his belt knife. Any useless pieces he formed into a wadding, which he pressed to the wounds. Though they were numerous, he was helped by the fact that they were gathered in two small bunches. The wadding covered them easily.
He bound strips of cloth over the wadding, as tightly as he could manage. Then he repeated the process for the knife wound in her back.
As he checked that wound he was glad to find it more towards her shoulder than her lung. There was no bubbling around the wound either, indicative of a punctured lung. Just a little bit of luck, but it gave him hope.
He quickly scanned the rest of her, and bandaged a few more nicks and scrapes that he found.
Pulling the blades from Val’s stomach had triggered a momentary thought in Tom, and he immediately sent Sere on a small jaunt back to the scene of the ambush.
Then they began the long journey back.
The most concerning thing about his ministrations was that Val did not rouse or react even in the slightest. Her face was set in a faint frown, as if she had forgotten where she’d put something down. It broke his heart.
Smitten’s quiet, high whining was a constant refrain on their journey, piercing Tom’s heart like a dagger with each note. It was clear to him now that this was the healing ability that Val had mentioned the grey dog had. He had no idea how efficacious it was, but she hadn’t died yet. He put his trust in Smitten, that she would be able to keep Val in Goddess’ light for just a little longer.
Each day was a trial. Tom walked along beside the travois, keeping a nervous eye on Val, trying desperately to block Smitten’s whines out. Sere swept out in a great circle from them, to give them advance warning of anything approaching. Scorn sat upon Sesame’s back, he head on a swivel, searching the nearby forest. Sesame plodded along, always finding level ground, taking great care not to jostle his cargo.
Each night, when they stopped, he would set up their wardpoles with meticulous care, just like Val had taught him. He would not have her die due to his negligence. The only reason he stopped each night in the first place, was that he could hear Val’s voice in his head.
“Don’t be stupid, Tom,” she would’ve told him. “A tired Hunter is a Hunter that makes mistakes. And a Hunter that makes mistakes is a dead Hunter.”
Their nightly stops gave Tom a chance to try some other ideas of his. Each night he took a selection of herbs from his pack, ground them up, or mashed them, and then boiled them in water. The resulting liquid he slowly drip-fed to Val with a cloth.
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He had no idea whether it was helping or not. He knew that each of the herbs had some kind of beneficial healing, or regenerative properties, but each day when he woke, Val was in the same condition. She had never singled out any of the herbs as being particularly potent, so he could only assume they were not enough to overcome Honeyfield’s powerful debuffs, or whatever poison he had on his blades.
Still, he made her his herbal tea every single night. Each night only a single herb. He was no alchemist, but he knew enough to know that mixing random herbs together, even if each had beneficial properties individually, could result in deathly poison.
The first week, he worried endlessly that more of the Lord of Blood’s cronies would find them and finish them. The only reason he had managed to defeat Honeyfield was due to Sweet Suffering. The man had gotten overconfident, too.
If he had gone for a killing blow, instead of trying to toy with Tom with his debuffs, the outcome would have been decidedly different.
As it turned out, his worries were unfounded. Every day they rose, and every night they made camp, without another encounter. With other humans, at least.
Several times, Sere warned him that some predator was trailing them, or angling towards them, or lying in wait. The first few times he cautiously got Scorn’s attention, and then pointed towards the incoming threat.
Scorn quickly got the message. The second time Tom waved at him, and pointed through the woods, the little grey Tom turned and watched. Long minutes later, when a starving wolf exploded from the trees, it was immediately pierced through in several places by green beams of startling bright light. The dog was dead before it hit the ground.
Every single other threat was similarly neutralised the second it revealed itself. The slaughter Scorn wrought was utter and uncompromising. The cat would brook absolutely no threat to Val.
Tom helped, here and there, where a threat, another bear at one stage, an earth golem at another, was too big to be killed outright. He would move to intercept them, draw their attention, and let Scorn poke them full of holes while he distracted them.
During each encounter, he made his own contributions, but he realised his strengths were not in quickly finishing enemies. They didn’t have the time for delays, and couldn’t conscience any harm to Val whatsoever. For a week, now, she had looked as though any errant breeze might carry her off to Goddess.
Try as he might, his nerves ratched higher with each passing day.
He tried to distract himself, looking out for any herbs that might help along their path. There were some, but most of them he already had plenty of. He continually checked his spatial storage, hoping he would find that Hunter-Gatherer had deposited some miraculous panacea via its random gathering function. It certainly picked up some things, but none he could identify as being useful.
The most maddening thing was a single ring. When he had drawn the knives from Val, it had tweaked his memory. In his rush to save her, he had forgotten to check Honeyfield’s corpse. Unwilling to risk walking all the way back to the scene, he had sent Sere to check.
She had not found what he had sent her for after searching his pockets. He didn’t have one of Scriber’s miracle mice. Tom didn’t know whether he had used it, or whether Scriber hadn’t offered him any, but the result was the same.
Sere had come back with some rings, having laboriously worked them free of his fingers. Most seemed mundane. A few had enchantments on them, although not any he could discern the function of. One in particular was causing him grief.
It was a spatial storage ring. Upon slipping it on, and running a trickle of mana through it, he had found his consciousness directed to a decent sized extra-planar space. It was a few times larger than his own storage skill, which was the size of a closet, though it was relatively empty, for its size.
For the most part, it held blades. Many different types and varieties, ranging from near-copies of the enormous greatsword Honeyfield had wielded, to thin little numbers more similar to Val’s own blade, now safely stored in Tom’s own inventory. There were knives and daggers, hatchets and axes, and polearms of all types.
There were more eclectic weapons, those he had only heard of, and some he had never heard of at all. Bladed rings, and bizarre weapons with multiple blades sticking out at odd angles. Throwing weapons of all descriptions, in every shape you could think of.
Many of the weapons were enchanted, Tom could see at a glance. As he picked them over, occasionally taking one out to look at it properly, he began to get an estimation of the value of them all.
If he wanted, he would never have to work again. Even the value of the ring itself was absurd.
Aside from the weapons, there were a scant few changes of clothes, some spare cloaks, some foodstuffs and water, and other provisions. No mice in the ring, either.
But there were a few items in particular that drew Tom’s attention. Some potions, to be exact. And therein lay his dilemma.
There were eight potions. None of them were labelled. Tom took each one out of the storage, inspecting them closely, looking at them from every angle, sniffing them, even, but he couldn’t figure out what they were.
In each of these potions, did he hold death, or life, or something completely unrelated? He felt like a man such as Honeyfield would likely have some kind of restorative potion among his belongings, but he also knew without a doubt that he would definitely be carrying deadly poisons too.
When he had stabbed Val while Silenced during their fight, she had clearly been under the effect of some kind of debuff. It couldn’t have been an active skill. It could have been a passive one. It could simply have been an innate effect of the ritual weapons he was wielding, which was the most likely explanation.
But it also could have been poison wiped on the blades. Tom couldn’t decide.
He could try the potions himself, and if they were poisonous, Sweet Suffering would activate and he would know. But, if they were beneficial, he wouldn’t. This was the issue.
He thought back to the Thought-Painting Frog Venom. It hadn’t activated Sweet Suffering. If he drunk one of the potions now, and it also didn’t activate it, he could still incapacitate himself, or kill Val.
He couldn’t risk it either. He wouldn’t put it past a man as nefarious, as patently evil, as Honeyfield, to carry some kind of potion, a poison, that actually worked as a ‘buff’, technically. It seemed like his kind of thing.
It didn’t mean that Tom didn’t want to try them. To throw caution to the wind and just see what they were. But each time, he heard Val’s stern voice in his head, warning him against rash decisions, counselling him to caution and patience.
He oscillated wildly back and forth. Several times, he caught himself, pulling himself forcefully to a stop, with his hand on the tiny cork of a bottle, just about to wrench it free. He must have taken them from the storage and replaced them a thousand times.
Sesame could feel his pain, his worry, his anxiety over the conundrum. The bear sent him a steady stream of thoughts, each one as predictable and dependable as the great beast’s footsteps.
It’s okay, Tom. It’s okay. We’ll help Val. We’ll help her. Not long now. We will make it. It’s Val. We will make it. Don’t worry…
In the end, he agonised over the decision for so long that he didn’t notice right away when they had arrived. Suddenly, Sere was sending him images of peach and apple trees, laden with blossoms in the spring sun, and his heart jolted into his chest.
He checked Val, and found her in the same state, Smitten still by her side, still making piteous little whines.
“Hold on, Val,” he told her. “We’re here. Just a little longer.”
They broke the treeline, and stepped from the Deep onto the worn path to Corin’s.
“Just a little longer, Val. You’re gonna be fine. I know it.”