Two more burglars – bandits? Kidnappers? – held the Yanweian up and muzzled him while a third punched him in the stomach. Blood dripped between the bandit’s fingers and down the Yanweian’s chin. Agna yelled against the glove over her mouth, and got an elbow in her side in return. She gasped and choked. She tried to catch the Yanweian’s eye, to find the closest thing she had to an ally. He didn’t see her; his gaze was empty and glazed.
Agna struggled against the hold on her arms. The bandit behind her twisted her arms harder. She relented as her joints reached their limit. Panic danced through her blood. This couldn’t happen. They were on a mission for the Benevolent Union, a peaceful organization known for its good works. They were healers. No one would dare. Didn’t they know? Didn’t the Yanweian tell them who they were?
“It’s locked.” One of them kicked her trunk.
“It’s heavy. There’s got to be money.”
“I got this.” One of them held up the Yanweian’s valise.
“Tch. Take it if you want.”
One of them grabbed the Yanweian’s discarded lute, and the pinioned medic revived, struggling against his captors. The bandit covering his mouth let go so that another one could backhand him in the face.
“Not that.” His voice cut through the ongoing muttering about how to open the trunk. “Not that. Please.” His lip was split and bleeding. The blood soaking into his shirt had sheeted from a long diagonal cut along his neck. From this distance and in this light Agna couldn’t see it very well, but she hoped it wasn’t deep. He wouldn’t be standing if it were, she told herself.
Agna twisted, trying to get her mouth free, and the thief allowed her to speak. “I have the key. To the trunk. Take it. Leave his lute.”
“Nanbur,” the Yanweian corrected tonelessly.
“Isn’t that sweet,” one of them sneered. “The foreign girl says she has the key, Boss.”
“It’s around my neck. Just take it. I don’t care, just – take it.” It was a lie, a desperate lie. She cared. Her life depended on that trunk. But if they hit the Yanweian any more they might kill him, and she could not watch her partner die in front of her. She half-hated him, and her daydreams of violence against him boiled in her gut now – but she could not bear this. Not in reality.
She could not beg them to leave him alone, because if she begged she would break. If she begged, she would remember that they had all the power. She would remember that there was nothing she could do to make them listen to her.
Someone pawed her neck, the rough leather scraping hard against her skin. The hand entangled the chain and yanked it hard to snap it. Her mother had given it to her before she’d left – just a thin, plain gold chain from her collection. If they just took the trunk and the key and let them go – most of her money was in the trunk, and her books, and the letters from her sister and from Rone. But they would live.
The thieves opened the trunk to rifle through her belongings. Their attention was focused on the money box that they had found. They hadn’t muzzled her again. Agna took a deep breath. “Guards!”
“Shut up,” one of them growled, and twisted her arm fiercely. Something cracked, and her world went white. She cried out, and through the worst pain she’d ever felt, she remembered. She had trained for this, three tense weeks every year that the healers never told their friends about. The swordmastery students and the priesthood students assumed that the healers went through some kind of midterm testing, a traditional and convenient fiction.
She had sat frozen to her seat with her fellows in a civilized practice room, listening to their trusted professors calmly explaining how to violate every precept they’d ever learned.
Our power is life, and it is also death. You know the human body and all that drives it. It is our responsibility to use this knowledge to heal. But in our defense, and only in our defense, we can also use it to harm.
Moving her right arm almost blinded her, but she forced her terror and sickness and panic through her skin and into the hands of the bandits that held her. The energy connected with theirs, jangling, unwelcome, reverberating back into her like a strike of metal on metal, but she shifted it through their arms and clenched it like fists around their tracheas. They choked and dropped her, whistling and gasping.
Agna dropped to one knee. The bandits holding the Yanweian had turned, watching her. Not watching him. She dragged herself to her feet, tears leaking from her eyes, and shoved her spread hand in the face of the bandit on the Yanweian’s right side. Her shoulder felt like an infinite well of pain, a sun lit by despair. She forced her rage through his skin and set fire to the nerves behind his eyes. He dropped the medic’s arm and staggered back, clutching at his face.
As Agna wavered and fell, the Yanweian snapped back to alertness and grabbed a knife from the incapacitated bandit’s belt. He slashed at the bandit on his other side, quick and efficient. Agna’s vision was blurring. Someone grabbed her by the throat. She couldn’t find the Yanweian among the flashes of steel in the torchlight; she couldn’t see how many bandits surrounded her; the guards hadn’t come. Her fingers scrabbled against his wrist. She paralyzed every muscle around his lungs until he went away.
It was too much. She had spent too much forcing her will through their resistance. Though her shoulder felt like an infinite well of pain, the rest of her body was finite. She collapsed from the ground up.
Keifon: The Long Night
We are the right hand of Darano, the shield of the motherland. We strike for gods and country.
We are the right hand of Darano, the shield of the motherland. We strike for gods and country.
We are the right hand of Darano, the shield of the motherland. We strike for gods and country.
Keifon was a disembodied force. It was not his knife in his hand. He wasn’t sure it was his hand. But the strikes were as true as he could make them. He was bleeding and dizzy, and everything hurt. The night thundered with booted footsteps and Kaveran shouts. A warning shot cracked over their heads. Some of the bandits had scattered. They had taken his valise and the Nessinian’s money and they might have choked her to death right in front of him. He hadn’t been able to push past in time. Keifon had kept everyone else away from her body, but he would not check her until they were all gone. It was cowardice, doing this. It was easier to fight, to risk dying, than to turn over her lifeless form.
I don’t have any money.
How about in the tent, you lying northern bastard? – Search it.
We’re with the Benevolent Union. We’re a charity. Don’t—
She’d screamed, and he’d tried to call to her to run. They’d taken the knife away from his throat and muzzled him instead. They’d dragged her from the tent, and his days and nights of rage and resentment became meaningless. She didn’t deserve this. Even heathens deserved better than this. Keifon was a disembodied force. He was vengeance. He was fear.
We are the right hand of Darano, the shield of the motherland...
The caravan guard pounded into their clearing, stomping through the ashes of the fire, training their muskets on the bandits, wrestling them to the ground. The bandit nearest him turned and fled. The knife slipped from Keifon’s hand. The dam holding the terror back shivered. He focused on the pale shape at his feet. She might not be dead. Keifon was the medic. The medic shored up the wall.
The Nessinian had collapsed face-down in the dirt. He knelt by her side, shaking her shoulder, praying that he wouldn’t make it worse. “Agent. Agent Despana – Agna. Hey. Can you hear me? Agna?”
She cried out. He let go and pushed his arm over his eyes. Alive. Wounded, but alive. “I’m sorry – can you move?”
She lifted her head, convulsed, and crashed over onto her back, clutching her right shoulder. He found enough space between her fingers to press gently against the bone, to determine that it hadn’t been dislocated or broken. Sprained or torn, more likely. She kicked and sobbed out loud, and he shushed her, closing her spasming fingers in his. Keifon
was the medic, and the medic saw her as another patient. Not his partner, not a member of his squad, not his responsibility. Only a broken human being that he had to mend.
His soothing had some effect, or maybe her system couldn’t register all the pain at once. She took a couple of deep breaths and opened her eyes. He focused, because she did not. Almost immediately she began to slip out of consciousness. A stab of panic pierced the medic’s calm. Head injury. “Hey. Stay with me. Hey.”
She fought back out of the fog, looking cross with him. Her accent was slippery, thicker than usual; he could hardly follow. “Stop it. You – are all right?”
“I’m fine. Did they hit you in the head? Look at me.”
“Stop. Didn’t. I just... you aren’t...” She slipped under again, and he squeezed her uninjured hand.
“Hey. Come back. Talk to me.”
“...s’posed to the power too much – use – the power like that... too much. Tired.”
Keifon made himself back off. He knew first aid; he was a soldier. He was not a Tufarian priest, and he did not know about energy healing. “All right. If you say so. You should get inside, though.” He looked around. The guards inspected her ransacked trunk and surveyed the tent, their silhouettes cast against the wall. Torchlight had engulfed their section of the camp. A string of guards had encircled the area, keeping a few onlookers out. “...I’ll help you. Come on.”
The Nessinian pushed herself up on her left elbow and struggled to her feet. Keifon arranged his arms for a proper one-man support, but she didn’t know how to accept it, and the two of them stumbled toward the tent. Two guardsmen looked up when they shouldered through the tent flap. One muttered an oath under her breath.
“She needs to sleep. Please go.”
“Yes, sir.” They vanished. The Nessinian collapsed on her bedroll, panting for breath, but before long she had lost consciousness again. She was breathing, at least. She was alive. That was the important thing. They were alive. He had been there this time. They had stopped it. Keifon wiped his arm across his eyes. He couldn’t rest yet. If he rested, it would catch up with him.
He dragged himself back out of the tent. The bandits – or the guards – someone had kicked over their water barrel, diluting a spatter of blood in the dirt. His brain laboriously traced the process to get more water. Down to the stream. Back. Light a fire. Boil the water. But out there it was dark, and the bandits were out there. The part of him that could remember how to get water chided him for the thick surge of terror in his throat, but it could not make him go.
One of the guards approached him, and he jumped. She glanced back and forth along his line of sight. “Oh – can we get you some water, medic? You’re to wait here for the guard captain. He should be here in a minute.”
Too many thoughts, at once. He stared, putting everything together. She had offered to do him a favor. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Why don’t you sit down? We’ll get you patched up, too. We’re not medics, but we can do that.” She smiled, and he thought he should acknowledge it, but something got lost on the way. He sat down, and she picked up their overturned water barrel and went. There were plenty of other guards, though, armored and not. Keifon knew many of them by sight, and knew some of their names. He rested his head on his knees. The guard captain would be there soon, and the other guard would help him clean up and get bandaged. The medic was there, fading, reminding him that he was in pain and half-soaked in blood.
The guard returned with their water barrel. He had seen her in the clinic for a checkup. Nita was her name. She was a few years younger than Keifon. She was reserved, compared to most of the other guards. He didn’t know much else about her. She set the barrel back where it belonged and placed a small box by the fireside, then looked around. “Do you have cups?”
“Um. In the chest, there.”
The bandits had opened it and knocked it over. That had been the second thing they’d done, after grabbing him. Nita set it upright, fished a cup out of the interior, and dipped out some water. She held it out to him. Keifon stared at it before taking it. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s from our tank, not from the stream. It’s safe.”
Keifon couldn’t figure out how to apologize. He hadn’t been thinking about that; he wouldn’t assume that she would hand him undrinkable water. He hadn’t been thinking about anything at all. “Thank you.” He drank it, and she nodded. That, at least, was the right thing to do. Nita held her hand out for the cup, and he returned it. She dipped out more and set it on the ground by the box, but a commotion behind her distracted her. Keifon looked over her shoulder, his heart racing. The guards straightened up and saluted. Nita scrambled to her feet and did the same. – Not the bandits, then. The guard captain.
The guard captain was dressed in civilian clothes, but his bearing and the sharpened attention of the other guards left no question about his authority. He turned aside to speak to the knot of guards around the Nessinian’s trunk. Keifon stood and waited to be addressed. The guard captain approached him, and Keifon stood straighter, trying not to weave. He was a trained soldier of the Yanweian National Army. He would not disgrace his country.
“Ah yes. At ease, soldier,” the guard captain said with a trace of irony. Keifon fell into the proper position. It gave him somewhere to put his hands, a way to stand, things to say when he was addressed. The soldier knew his place, and that made it easier.
“What happened here?”
“Sir. I was sitting there–” he turned to point out the spot next to the fire – “practicing the nanbur. Someone...” He was breaking out into a sweat. “...someone – must have come up behind me and put a knife to my back.” He swallowed and clenched his hands behind his back to keep them from shaking. “They asked me if I had any money on me. I said no. They pinned me and hit me.” They’d put a knife to his throat, too, but that was too vivid, too detailed. If he felt anything he would crack. “They looked in the tent and brought out Agent Despana. She gave them the key. To her trunk. Then she – did something to hurt them, with her healer’s skill, I think. I don’t mean to speculate, sir.”
“That’s all right, medic. Go on.”
Keifon nodded. “She freed herself and freed me. I took a knife and fought back. She fainted. The guards arrived. I checked her for injuries and helped her into the tent.”
“That’ll do. So you didn’t see where they came from.”
“No, sir.”
The guard captain sighed. “Well. Can’t be helped. We saw where they headed, and we’ve got some of our better runners on their tail now. Give Virin a description of any of the culprits that you can remember.” The guard captain motioned over another of the guards. “That’s all we’ll need from you tonight. I’ll post a couple of my people here with you till morning. Get some sleep and come to talk to the Captain in the morning. We’ll have to keep riding, but she’ll want to talk to you.”
The morning was an abstract thought, one he couldn’t quite believe in. “Yes, sir.”
“I hear you fought well. You probably saved both of your lives. Stopped them from getting someone else, too.”
“She did it, sir. I couldn’t have...” He had to stop. “Thank you, sir.”
“Dismissed.” The guard captain saluted in his Kaveran fashion, and Keifon returned the Army’s salute, a closed fist over his heart. Then he left, and Keifon was neither the soldier nor anyone at all. He sat by the burnt-out fire. The other guard, Virin, talked to him for a while. Keifon recalled glimpses of faces, heights and genders, clothing. No names. Virin took his notes and his sketches and went.
Nita eased up next to him. “Can I help you get cleaned up?”
“Hm?” He touched the cut on his neck and looked at the congealing blood on his fingers, surprised by the pain. “Oh. Yes. Thank you.”
She opened the box she’d left by the fireside and unpacked some bandages, a bottle of something clear, and scissors. A first-aid kit, then. Keifon remembered his valise and felt seasick. He could
never afford to replace all of that. Most of it – his tools, the first round of medicines, the valise itself – had been given to him in the Army, and the rest he’d bought with his earnings since then. Piecemeal, when he had enough to spare.
Nita dabbed at his face with a wet cloth, and he flinched. “Sorry!” she yelped, pulling back.
“...Sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”
She handed him the cloth, and he sponged off. Most of his face was sweaty and dirty, not bloody, though the action broke open the cut on his lip. Nita gave him the water cup, and he rinsed his mouth and spat into the fire pit to no real effect. It felt good to be even a little bit cleaner. Nita poured more water onto the cloth, and Keifon swabbed his neck, wincing. The bleeding seemed to have slowed, as long as he didn’t tilt his head the wrong way. He wished he had a mirror, but his was in the tent with everything else, with the sleeping Nessinian.
Nita bit her lip. “...Do you want to get a clean shirt, maybe?”
His hand touched the drying and stiffening shirt front before he could remember why she might ask that. “Hm. Yes, I...guess so.” His clothes were in the tent, too. But that was his only choice. Keifon got to his feet. His nanbur lay on the ground at the edge of their campsite. He reached for it, his head reeling. It was unbroken. He resisted the urge to hug it against him, owing to his bloody shirt. The case had been kicked alongside the tent, flapping open. He bent to it and clumsily replaced the instrument in its place, then latched it shut. He could put this away, and get a clean shirt. He could remember two things.
He forgot to warn the Nessinian. She shuddered awake when he entered, scrabbling backward in her bed, crying out as she put her weight on her injured shoulder.
“It’s me. It’s me – it’s me. Ssh. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She whimpered in the dark. His throat hurt. He never wanted to hear that sound from anyone. But her breathing slowed, and she seemed to slump back into bed. “...Keifon?”
She said his name like she didn’t want to trust that it was really him. He wasn’t sure he’d heard his name in her voice before. Keifon sank to his knees and set his nanbur aside, where he would have slept. “It’s me.” He cleared his throat and found more of his voice. “Yeah. Just me. I’m sorry I didn’t knock.”
The Healers' Road Page 7
