After the cabbie dropped us off, we wended through the Old Rail Yard with arms linked for support, Ash sandwiched between Faith and me. As we hobbled past one of Cortland’s lairs, Faith merrily flapped her free hand at a Lost runner, a young girl playing hopscotch seemingly idly along the rusty tracks. “Do be a dear and go to the Leaky Bucket and invite Sawbones to stay at our place for a few days, will you?” Without bothering to check if the runner obeyed, she remonstrated with Ash, “See? This is what happens when you don’t dodge the bullets! We have to host houseguests at the last minute!”
Having regained some modicum of coherence, Ash retorted, “No, I was electrocuted by your crazy – what exactly electrocuted me? I don’t remember.”
Faith nearly dropped him in shock. I hissed when the unexpected movement jostled my bad arm, and she unapologetically returned to formation. “You mean my lightning hook?” she gasped.
“Yes!”
“Those things are dangerous!”
“I am well aware of that situation!”
Helping him up the steps of our railcar, she reassured him condescendingly, “You’ll get better at it eventually.” He snorted and rolled his eyeballs (or maybe that was another convulsion). “But think not that I failed to notice your noble rescue. You have redeemed yourself as a daring, dashing adventurer, my knight in shining armor.”
In response, Ash flung open the door so hard that he nearly triggered one of my traps. It took him four tries, but eventually he managed to find the switch and fumble on the lights.
“Although – does armor shine in Doskvol?” asked Faith with exaggerated consternation, stopping right smack in the middle of the doorway. “It’s so grimy and grey here….”
I elbowed her out of the way so I could enter. While she struck a calculatedly contemplative pose, I hauled a chair over to the table, sank into it, and gingerly laid my broken arm on the table. From the tightness of the sleeve, I could tell that it had already swollen up, and I ran an experimental finger under the cuff, trying to determine if we’d have to cut off my shirt.
Ash’s voice interrupted my examination. “Are we supposed to hate the Hadrakin?” he mused, pacing back and forth like a jerky puppet. When I glanced up at him, I nearly yelped: His whole face was covered in red, blistering, oozing burns going black at the edges. He, blissfully, did not seem to be well aware of that situation. “They seemed to be here because they were afraid we’d invade them.”
“Totally unjustified,” interjected Faith. She straightened the bow on her chair and stepped back to critique the effect. “I mean, our crew is good, but I’m not sure we’re good enough to take on an entire vassal nation.”
Ash ignored her, although that might have been because his entire body spasmed for a good half minute. “In any case,” he continued when he could speak again, “those battle plans would be interesting. I didn’t see them on Ronia’s body, but I guess we didn’t have much time to look.”
Unless I’d missed something major, that was the rumor we’d spread to lure in the Hadrakin. I objected, “I thought we made that up.”
His chagrin provided all the confirmation I needed.
Faith, naturally, couldn’t resist rubbing metaphorical salt into very real physical wounds. “I’m sorry, young disciple,” she lectured, wagging a finger at him, “but once you start believing your own lies, you’re but a step away from a slow and inevitable descent into madness and despair.”
I eyed Ash. If anything, continued proximity to Faith would be what drove him into madness and despair.
“But never fear!” she exhorted him blithely. “Our sweet and gracious doctor friend will soon grace us with his sweet presence, and he will make everything better! That is – provided we ply him with plenteous portions of whiskey. I’ll go procure some!” This she proceeded to do, although given how quickly she returned, I had my doubts as to the quality of liquor she obtained.
A knock sounded at the door, tentatively as if the visitor weren’t entirely sure he had the right railcar and dreaded the reception if he’d erred. Which only went to show that he didn’t know Faith well enough yet.
She happily flounced over to let him in. “Oh, Sawbones, my old friend!” Standing on tiptoe, she pecked him on the cheek, making him almost blush under his weather-beaten wrinkles. “It is so good of you to call upon – ”
“Get in here,” snapped Ash with uncharacteristic rudeness. “We’re all terribly hurt.”
The poor doctor nearly tripped over a patch of carpet when he took stock of the lot of us. “What happened to you?” he exclaimed, which was a valid question given that I had an extremely broken arm, Faith was drenched in blood, and Ash looked as if he’d lost an argument with a lightning tower and a billhook.
“It was terrible,” Faith informed him passionately. “There was a demon with giant tentacles – wait.” She suddenly remembered that she’d already used that story and that, moreover, it did nothing to explain this new set of injuries.
As Sawbones laid out his instruments next to me on the table, we gave him a jumbled version of the night’s events:
“I was electrocuted – ”
“Faith was possessed – ”
“I was shot – ”
“I fell off a building – ”
“What! You mean you fell dramatically from the building?”
“No, I just fell off.” At Sawbones’s strangled grunt: “It happens.”
“You guys are no fun at all.”
“I thought it was quite dramatic,” Ash defended me.
“Okay, it is very important to do things in the appropriate order,” Faith proclaimed, cutting through the explanations and beaming at the very bemused doctor. “First, fix Isha’s arm so she stops complaining. I can’t abide her caterwauling any longer.”
“I’m not complaining!” I protested indignantly. “It’s just a broken arm! And I don’t caterwaul!”
“See?” demanded Faith. “See what I mean?”
Heaving a very long, very gusty sigh, Sawbones closed his eyes for a brief moment as if appealing to every single forgotten god for patience. “Right, then. It’s going to be a long night.”
Indeed.
Pursuant to Faith’s wishes, he bent over my forearm and began pressing it carefully with his fingertips, searching for the location of the break. I could have told him where it was: at the center of the semi-circle my arm now described. After a moment, he drew the same conclusion.
“Try to hold still, miss,” he ordered. “This will hurt.”
While I concentrated on locking every muscle in place, he braced my elbow on the table and clamped one hand over it, then raised my forearm straight up, seized my wrist, and yanked.
I screamed.
“You were saying something, Isha?” inquired Faith. “About not caterwauling?”
“Hold still,” Sawbones ordered. “Unless you want your left arm to be shorter than your right.”
Clenching my jaw, I willed myself to think of something else, anything else, while he interposed his body between my head and my arm, blocking my view as if cutting off the one sense would also sever the other.
“Hold still,” he reminded me one more time.
Not being able to see made it all the worse. My thoughts skittered like a beetle on a hot stovetop. My brother broke his arm too, my mind babbled. Remember, Isha? He was riding his first pony when the Patriarch’s hounds surged out of nowhere and spooked it, and it bucked him off and galloped for the stables. The fall broke his arm – his left arm, in fact. So now we matched, twins to the end. Maybe literally the end. If he ever found me….
An explosion of pain. I literally felt my arm start to pull apart, and then the ends of the bones grated into place.
“Hmmm, that’s unfortunate. You’ve broken both bones completely. I’m afraid this arm will be a little shorter after all, but I’ll do my best,” Sawbones promised. Bracing my arm against his, he groped for a length of wood and a roll of not-quite-clean bandages. (That hadn’t been what the healers used on my brother. Their starched bandages were all perfumed and infused with painkillers and hardened into a clean white cast. We’d had fun drawing on it.) Once Sawbones finished splinting my arm, he improvised a sling out of a raggedy half-shawl. “All set,” he pronounced with satisfaction. “Try not to take any jobs for a while, yeah?”
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“We’ll see.” Ash looked mutinous at the prospect of lost revenue.
Unsurprisingly, Faith seconded that. “I’m fine. I mostly dodged the bullets.”
Deliberately not huddling over my broken arm, I straightened up and tried to speak normally. “And I have an unbreakable contract to teach at the Red Sash Sword Academy.” Sawbones cocked a meaningful eyebrow at the splint, his expression spitting out unspeakable expletives. “You know Mylera,” I pointed out with some asperity. “Would she really accept a broken arm as an excuse?” A true scion of House Ankhayat, which ran the Vaasu School that trained our military commanders and leviathan hunter captains, Headmistress Klev had absorbed her House’s stoic philosophy a little too thoroughly.
Sawbones looked as if he’d love to disagree with my assessment but really could not. With a sigh, he moved on to Ash, checking his pupils and testing his reflexes. Ash’s hands still trembled alarmingly, and from time to time, his entire body spasmed.
“Speaking of the Red Sashes, Isha,” said Faith, “I’ve noticed that in the past, you’ve said a little too much about our extracurriculars to your students. I know keeping secrets isn’t your forte, so perhaps we should come up with a story and rehearse it beforehand. Let’s see…. Oh, I have it! You made a dramatic dive out of a tower to rescue a…hmmm….”
“A falling kitten?” I suggested sarcastically, readjusting the sling to find a marginally less painful angle for my arm.
“No, to catch me!” Now why would I want to do that? “Although – a falling kitten…I do like that one. It seems very – ”
“Out of character?” I asked even more sarcastically.
Ash chuckled, then winced when the motion pulled raw skin.
“Okay, so how was the kitten falling? Why was the kitten falling?”
“Because you threw it out of a tower!” Ash exclaimed as if it were obvious.
I burst out laughing, but cut off sharply when I jostled the splint.
Once Sawbones had bandaged the obviously scorched parts of Ash – there was nothing he could do about the convulsions, which should go away on their own (probably) – he ministered to Faith, who did, after all, have a graze from Na’ava’s bullet. She seemed much more worried about ministering to her dress before the blood stained it irreparably.
Surveying our little crew, Ash exploded, “This is unacceptably slow! It will take forever to recover! I’m going to try something else. If that doesn’t work, then, well, I guess I’ll have to deal with Sawbones.”
At his outburst, Faith yawned widely and addressed Sawbones (who looked as if he were trying very hard not to take offense), “Since, as my friend predicts, recovery will take forever, would you like to crash at our place for a few days? We do have a number of spare bedrooms.”
Ash was still ranting away: “We should use our assets if we have them! There are ways to deal with this sort of thing, and my family happens to specialize in them!”
Eyeing all of us dubiously, Sawbones agreed with Faith, “Yes, perhaps that would be best.”
“Isha, are you in?” Ash demanded abruptly.
I swiveled my head back and forth between him and my arm as Faith led Sawbones into the hallway so he could pick out his very own compartment. (Not that it made a difference – all of them were equally dark, dingy, and dirty.) Warily, I asked, “Will it involve demonic stuff?”
Ash looked incredibly irritated that I still got hung up on anti-demon racism when there was expert healing to be had. “We are from Tycheros,” he pointed out.
Faith’s head popped back into the common room. “Yes, of course!” she gushed. “Think about it, Isha! It probably involves human sacrifices and blood rituals – do you really want your cast covered in blood?”
Ash heaved a gusty sigh on par with Sawbones’s when he predicted how long this night would be. “You’ve seen the rituals it involves – although, don’t mention that to Mom.”
“Those weren’t demonic in nature,” I said cautiously, recalling the creepy, glowing blue runes his sister had clawed into Vhetin Kellis’s back.
“Well, no.” Ash sounded testy, as if that were painfully obvious. “That was a ritual for That Which Hungers. But we did test the medical procedures on demons before we…adapted them to more standard humans. In any case, I’m not the expert there but I know someone who is, so you’re welcome to come along. Tomorrow morning, of course. They’re closed now.” Turning on his heel, he started to hobble towards his own compartment.
I looked down at the dirty bandages of my splint. Waves of pain pounded through my arm, and I could practically feel the ends of my bones growing together crooked. I did not want one arm to be shorter than the other.
“Fine.” I grudgingly admitted defeat. “That’s acceptable.”
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First thing the next morning, while Faith and Sawbones were enjoying a cozy chat over tea (Faith) and whiskey-spiked coffee (Sawbones), Ash and I entered the demon lair. In addition to jerking like a marionette, Ash literally clinked with each step, since he’d insisted on filling four or five leather pouches with our shiniest silver slugs to show off to his mother.
Aforementioned demon den looked surprisingly mundane, like any typical, non-Tycherosi infirmary. The front door with its frosted glass window opened directly onto a waiting area decorated with tasteful potted fungi. At the far end, the Slanes’ secretary (a young woman with an open, friendly face and no obvious demon tell, probably chosen to avoid scaring off customers) received patients from behind a wooden counter. As soon as she recognized Ash, she sent us upstairs to Mistress Zamira’s office.
So far, so good. Everything seemed normal enough. I could do this.
I followed Ash into his mother’s office, hanging back by the door while I assessed the situation. At first glance, she had no obvious demon tell either, and I started to breathe a sigh of relief.
Then she glanced up from her account book, caught sight of her son, and leaped to her feet. “Ash! What happened to you?” she exclaimed, absolutely horrified. Hurrying around her desk, she gently touched his scarred cheek.
The movement revealed a scaly, muscular, black, snake-like forked tail.
Swallowing a squeak, I pressed myself against the doorframe.
If Ash heard me, he gave no sign. Instead, he produced purse after purse and weighed them in his palm, letting the slugs jingle merrily, watching closely as his mother’s eyes lit up. “I had a problem with an attunement ritual that went a little awry. In any case, it was all in the line of duty. Very profitable duty,” he explained with studied casualness.
“That’s good,” she replied, raising her voice over the music of hard coin.
“And I would like to convert that profit into dealing with this problem. Other healers in town are so tediously slow, and we – ” he gestured between himself and me – “are not very patient people.” (I might be willing to learn patience, just to avoid demonic infirmaries in the future.) “But we’re very wealthy people, and that is why we’re here.”
She glanced at me, pretended not to notice my little start, pulled down a speaking tube, and gave orders to prepare two rooms.
“This is Isha,” Ash introduced me.
“It’s always a pleasure to meet one of my son’s friends,” she said warmly, waving her tail in what might be a friendly gesture.
My parents had drilled manners into me. I pasted on an equally warm smile. “How do you do, Mistress Slane?”
Satisfied with the pleasantries, she returned to her desk to draw up paperwork for our treatment. Craning his head to read her handwriting upside down and make sure she didn’t overcharge us, Ash remarked, “Isha and I are surprised by all the dock space the Hive accumulated. Do you have any idea what they wanted it for? They don’t have a leviathan hunter, do they?”
Scribbling rapidly, his mother shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. I don’t know what they were planning on bringing in there, but Tess is working on it. I have every confidence that if there is anything worth knowing, she will find it out.” The pride in her voice was almost palpable.
Ash almost pouted. “We’ve been doing quite well for ourselves too,” he bragged. Tidily lining up the pouches on her desk, he gave her a quick rundown of our own accomplishments, painted in the best possible light, plus a detailed account of every sum of money we’d earned and how he’d bargained for payment. Then he added, “We can help you too. For a significant price, of course.”
Pushing the paperwork across the desk for his inspection, his mother frowned and spoke slowly. “Yeeees, actually. There is something. We should meet sometime to discuss it. Presumably with all your associates present, of course.”
“Yes, of course. Just let us know the time.” After perusing the documents, Ash initialed several times and signed the last page with a flourish.
“Ahazu will be ready for you downstairs in the second examination room,” she directed him. “And Isha, you – ”
I hastily interrupted. “I can go with Ash. I don’t mind waiting. I can see Ahazu after she finishes with him.”
That arrangment suited Mistress Slane just fine. She didn’t mind freeing up a healer to treat another (paying) patient. “Very well. Ash knows where to go.”
As we made our way down the stairs, Ash asked curiously, “Is it the demon part that bothers you?”
I pressed myself to the wall as one of the staff, a young man with coal-black goat horns sprouting out of coiled crimson hair, passed us in the narrow stairwell. He smiled and nodded at Ash, who nodded back.
“Yes,” I replied curtly when the part-demon had vanished around a corner.
Ash scrutinized me as if I were an account book under audit. “Surely you’ve seen other Tycherosi before.”
“They’re not very common in U’Duasha.” Off the top of my head, I could only think of a handful, all merchant class. They tended to live across the city from me, close to the craftspeople who produced luxury goods for export.
“Ah. Well, we’re really no more corrupt – or mad – than the average Doskvolian,” declared the part-demon assassin who harvested our murder victims for life essence for his family’s cultic rituals.
Diplomatically, I stayed silent as I followed him into the examination room. (I did almost tread on his heels in my anxiety to get out of the hallway and away from the Tycherosi nurses though.)
“Really, Isha,” Ash informed me impatiently, “I assure you it’s the gathering part that’s, well.” Mercifully, he stopped talking as Ahazu greeted him and got to work on his face. I perched uncomfortably on a chair in the corner while waiting for my turn.
Although the Tycherosi healer had eyes that were entirely silver – no whites, no irises, no pupils, just a uniform, flat silvery sheen – I had to admit that she worked wonders on my arm. Tsking at Sawbones’s handiwork, she cut off the bandages, realigned the bones, and cocooned my arm in a sparkling white cast. She even provided a clean, professional-looking sling.
As we left the Slanes’ infirmary, Ash told me smugly, “You see, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
My extremely intelligent response was, “Uhhhhhgrhhhh.” From time to time I poked my arm, reassuring myself that it hadn’t metamorphized into a scaly tentacle while I wasn’t looking.
----------------------------------------
When we approached the railcar, the sounds of Faith and Sawbones’s conversation drifted through the window.
“I swear,” the doctor was saying tipsily, “the three of you get more injured than my entire gang put together. And we’re at war! How did Isha fall off a building?”
Faith’s amused voice replied, “Well, you see, there was a kitten, and it was yowling in the most annoying manner. So I threw it out a window, but Isha, being her usual pet-loving self, dove off the tower to catch the kitten, curled up in a ball, landed on the street, and mostly – ” She stopped, giggling too hard to finish the sentence. When she caught her breath again, she assured him, “The kitten was fine. Although it did nibble on her a little bit. I think it was annoyed at having been caught.”
Tiptoeing up to the window, I peered in to see Sawbones nodding dubiously while Sleipnir pawed at his calves and begged for scraps. There was very obviously no cat of any variety in sight. “You all take care of yourselves, yeah?” the doctor instructed. “We’re fond of you.”
“Yessir!” Faith saluted sloppily. “There will be much care-taking. I promise that in the future, any kittens I toss out the window will be out of Isha’s line of sight – or on the first floor.”
Sawbones drained another shot of whiskey as if he had no idea how he’d report any of this to Bazso.