“It's jus' an itch.”
“That's not an answer.”
They stared at each other, Enkhaelen with cold fixation, Cob just irritated. What was he supposed to say? Of course he was afraid the necromancer would hurt him—hurt them, hurt everyone. It was what this maniac did.
But here, now, with this offer? No.
“I don't like it when y'touch me,” he said, keeping his temper under control. “I figure you can understand that, since you don't like it either, and also with that one time y'opened up all my pikin' scars. Remember that? So I got an aversion t' you, yeah.”
Enkhaelen frowned, but nodded.
“If it's an emergency, sure, fine—and thank you,” Cob continued, patting his own arm. “I appreciate what y'did. But there's some pikin' big reasons I'm not snuggled up in bed with you.”
“Not that I invited you,” Enkhaelen said tartly.
These were jokes, too: little stinging ones, an outgrowth of what he'd learned from Fiora and Arik. Cob didn't do it to be friendly, it was just better than shouting, and it seemed to be something Enkhaelen understood. A way to distance themselves.
He couldn't imagine how they'd survive a two-hundred-mile trek with no escape from each other.
“Still, if it's a fault in my work,” Enkhaelen started, then cut himself off as the door-curtain drew back.
“My apologies for interrupting,” said the intruder as she stepped in, cold insincerity cladding her words like icicles. It took Cob a moment to recognize her out of armor: Sister Talla, she of the cropped grey hair and grim features, now dressed in a scarred leather apron over rough work-gear. Leather gloves stuck out from her tool-belt, which bore rather more blunt and bladed implements than Cob was comfortable with her having near Enkhaelen, even if they weren't weapons. Resting across one shoulder was a long blade in a leather wrapping.
Enkhaelen immediately tried to rise, only to drop back on the bed as his knees refused him. Grimacing, he tried again with the cane. “Is that her sword?”
Wordlessly, Sister Talla swung the blade down and gripped the leather-wrapped hilt, then bared a few inches of beaten silver. Enkhaelen froze, eyes locked to it.
A moment passed in silent tableau, then Cob cleared his throat. “Uh. So y'fixed it?”
“Yes.” Never turning her gaze from Enkhaelen, Talla sheathed the blade, then offered it hilt-first toward Cob. “Reshaped the melted portion. Built the scabbard as requested: treated hardwood and reversed fur, no metal.”
Cob drew it an inch out of curiosity and saw the layer of fur sandwiched between the outside leather and the wooden core. “What? Why?”
“Skin and hair are the body's boundaries,” Enkhaelen murmured. “Resist penetration by energies unless a sufficient amount is applied. Even works after death. It should keep the sword's emanations in—those that get past the wood.”
“So you can touch this and still cast spells?”
“Not quite. But I can be near it.”
Cob nodded slowly. He hadn't been there when the blade was handed off, or heard the reasons; he'd been stalking the hallways, trying to calm himself. Still, something had been bothering him for a while. “Can't you jus' undo the enchantment?”
Enkhaelen's gaze slid to him, expression gone from wounded to sardonic. “Like I could undo the Portal in my chest?”
“Well...”
“Some patterns are not made to be unpicked. Think of...sewing a cushion. You start inside-out, stitch it to shape, then reverse it so the threads don't show, only a thin seam. All else is fabric. To me, the enchantment that unravels my magic is the fabric, and I cannot get close enough to cut the seam.”
“It doesn't get its power from you?”
“No. The Portal did, but the sword… Even if I died, the enchantment would persist, because the metal itself provides the power. It is living silver. If there was more of it, she—“
Enkhaelen cut himself off there, looking away.
Cob swallowed his remaining questions. He could fill in that blank easily enough: if there was more, she would still be alive. Not that he knew how; metal elementals and the Muriae were still a mystery to him. But he didn't doubt Enkhaelen's belief.
“We should...make sure it works,” said Enkhaelen softly.
With a nod, Cob moved toward him. Enkhaelen cast the scalpel onto the bed, then reached out with his left hand, the silver band still glinting on his ringfinger; he hadn't taken it off even for the healing. For a moment, his fingers twitched above the leather-clad scabbard, a tremulous blue radiance limning them—then he lowered his hand to the scabbard and the glow went out.
“Good enough,” he murmured.
“If that is all?” said Sister Talla stiffly.
Enkhaelen made a dismissive gesture, then looked up as she started to turn, an odd expression on his face. “Wait, actually, no. Your Mother Matriarch—not the acting one, but—“
Talla froze in place. Cob, between them, saw her hands clench, and felt a sudden tension gel the air. “What about her?” came the Sister's crisp voice.
“She's sick, yes? In that way most Mother Matriarchs and high-ranking priestesses eventually get. I can smell it in the air. And she's your wife. Let me see her. I may be able to help.”
Surprised, Cob looked between them: Talla rigid, unmoving; Enkhaelen sharp-eyed and watchful. He remembered Mother Matriarch Aglavyn from his first visit, and how fragile she'd been even then. How Talla had been at her elbow as much as possible. Her hostility toward him after the failed unchaining of the Guardian made perfect sense now.
Not turning, Sister Talla growled, “What do you know of it?”
“I know it's a side-effect of your way of healing. I know that you can't fix it, because your faith forbids the only treatments. I know that I can, because that's what I do—and I've had a lot of practice with it in the last few years. My hands aren't quite mended, but I can steady them with magic. In fact, I can do most of it with magic, with only a bare amount of cutting.”
The last word stiffened Sister Talla's shoulders, and she glanced back with hatred etched into her face. “Wait,” said Enkhaelen before she could speak. “Understand, I offer this just once. Take some time to think on it.”
She stared for a moment, clearly burning to attack him. Then, with neither word nor nod, she stormed from the room. Enkhaelen exhaled.
“What was that about?” Cob hazarded, moving to retake his seat. Beside it, Arik lay with ears perked, eyes open to thin blue slits; his tail fanned along the floor as they caught each other's gaze.
Enkhaelen made a gesture of magnanimous dismissal. “They don't practice surgery. They have no understanding of the body, just a belief that all ails can be cured by their goddess's blessing. Which—many can, yes. Their treatments are by no measure 'bad'. Cleanliness, bed-rest, herbs and poultices, hydration, nutrition, education—they have all the trappings right, and their goddess strengthens the sickly through them, so that they can survive long enough to throw off their illnesses or mend their wounds. But not everything works that way. Sometimes, when you pour unfocused energy into a body, what benefits is not the body as a whole but the...aberrations within it.”
“I don't know what—“
“You saw my metastatics. By Akarridi, when you were foolish enough to provoke the wraiths. People in black robes, flinging foul fleshy globs...”
Cob swallowed thickly. He remembered seeing one of those globs eat through a pair of hounds like living acid. “Yeah.”
“What they used is a weaponized version of what afflicts the priestess. Not a disease, nor a parasite, but an error within the body that turns part of it against the rest. As it spreads, it converts more of the host's own flesh, until the host fails and they both die. Giving energy to the host just feeds the error and quickens the process.”
“How'd she get it? —How'd they get it?”
Enkhaelen's mouth curved lopsidedly, not quite a smile. “I studied the latter for decades. There was a pattern to it, related to t
he Shadowless Circle—the area that the Palace's tendrils reached. I'm still not sure whether it was something in the air or the land or the quality of the light, but people within the circle experienced these flesh-errors at a ridiculously inflated rate compared to those outside. The closer they were to the Palace, the worse it was. Most of them, when they got sick, went to the Palace for the 'blessing' of conversion—and in that, they were successful, more so than a healthy human. Perhaps because they were already mutating, so the conversion came easier.
“I gathered a few hundred who did not wish to be converted, and experimented on them. Tried to see how it could be cured, and if it couldn't, how to control it. I figured out how to coax the mutated flesh into absorbing and storing energy instead of just converting more tissue, and taught the metastatics how to access and expel that energy—how to put their afflictions to work. In most of them, it was too widespread to remove.
“In a Mother Matriarch…
“They attain their rank by being close enough to their goddess to have hosted her at least once. I'm not sure if that's what trips the mutagenic switch, or if it's the amount of healing they do—the amount of diffuse energy they channel—or if they somehow absorb errors from their patients. I've never been close enough to them to study it. But I know that it eventually happens in most Mother Matriarchs and high-ranked priestesses, and is usually what kills them.”
“And you have t' cut it out?”
“That is the primary method of treatment, yes.”
“Have you done it before?”
Enkhaelen's gaze slanted to the curtain, and he lowered his voice so that Cob had to lean in. “On less-afflicted subjects from my metastatic tests, and on Trifold cadavers. They don't come to me willingly.”
“So y'haven't—“ Then Cob stopped, blinking, and touched the arrowhead on its cord under his tunic. The cool crystal tingled as it pressed to his skin, and visions flickered behind his eyes: Geraad Iskaen's memories of a confrontation in the Palace, Enkhaelen against a priestess.
“Vriene Damiel,” he murmured. “She was a Mother Matriarch.”
Enkhaelen's pseudo-smile flattened away. “Yes.”
“So you—“
“No. I would have dissected her, but the Palace took the cadaver.”
“Is that why y'killed her?”
“Her goddess would not have appreciated Aradys taking her soul. I've killed many to keep them out of his grasp.” He patted the hip of his bed-robe as if seeking a pocket, then scowled. “Need my coat, pike it. I have beads. Strings of beads full of souls I was withholding from him. We all go to our gods or spirits or primordials when we die, or if we have none, we go to Death Herself. Now that the Portal is closed, he can't steal any more of us.”
“Why d'you care?”
“Because I hate him. I hate what I did for him. I hate what he turned me into.” His gaze was steady, grim—the most sincere Cob had ever seen him. “I did everything wrong, and by the time I learned better, I'd been imprisoned for eight times my entire free life. He triggered the worst in me and wouldn't let me stop. I couldn't leave anything or anyone in his hands.”
Cob could almost respect that, except for the trail of bodies he'd left in his wake.
“Get me some more lamp oil,” said Enkhaelen. “If I'm going to do this, I need to recreate my arrays.”
“Ask nicer.”
The necromancer gave him a look, then sighed. “Please get some more lamp oil.”
“Sure.”
As Cob pushed through the curtain, he glimpsed the effigies turning away—back to guard position. Two more were down the hall, watching through their expressionless face-plates.
For all that he disliked Enkhaelen, he was glad Arik was in there with him.
*****
Sister Talla came back within a few marks to accept Enkhaelen's offer, her face as blank as the effigies' masks. A brief discussion led to the surgery being scheduled immediately, one of the guard-effigies hustling off to inform the others while Talla stood rigidly by the door, watching Enkhaelen complete his preparations.
The oil had given Enkhaelen enough of a boost to start spinning spells around himself. Blue and orange sigils appeared and vanished as he scribed them on thin air, sometimes extending into geometric patterns, sometimes creating elaborate laceworks that then shrunk down to his skin. His eyes were distant, seeing into some other space, his brows permanently furrowed.
Beside him on the bed, one of his cases lay open, scalpels and saws and drills and other tools exposed to view. The arcane lights touched upon them sometimes, and when Cob squinted he could just make out fine lines running from them to Enkhaelen's hands like spiderweb strands.
A commotion of boots outside pulled Cob's attention away; the necromancer himself didn't twitch. Talla drew back the curtain to show the procession as it passed: four effigies carrying a stretcher between them, in which lay the wasted form of Mother Matriarch Aglavyn. The acting Matriarch and several priestesses followed behind, too dignified to glance into the room.
“Time t'go?” Cob murmured to Sister Talla.
She shook her head, still looking after the procession. “Let them settle her.”
He wanted to say something to her. A comfort or an apology or some assurance that Enkhaelen could fix the problem. But he didn't have words for any of it, so he just kept silent, watching her profile as the sound of bells and footsteps receded toward the bloodletting altar.
Finally, the cane's end clicked on the floor, and he looked back to see Enkhaelen heaving himself upright. “Bring the case, please, Cob,” said the necromancer, gesturing to it. “I'm as prepared as I will get.”
Cob closed it up and pursued the necromancer as he tottered from the room, Sister Talla in the lead, with Arik staying behind to watch the sword and the rest of their gear. Down the hall, the altar chamber glowed with multitudes of candles, but Enkhaelen flicked a pinspot of mage-light from his hand as they approached and sent it forward to cast a starker radiance over the altar.
Aglavyn lay there, a thin pad beneath her and an open-fronted brown robe draping her bony frame. Her dark hair had gone white at the roots, her features carved heavily with lines of wear that had not been there before. Cob averted his eyes as he came close, not wanting to see the strip of exposed skin or the sharp ridges of her ribs. A junior priestess rushed up with a folding table for him to set the case.
“Everyone keep back,” said Enkhaelen as he took up a position by the center of the altar and planted the cane. It remained in place when he released it, free-standing. “If I require assistance, I will call for it, otherwise stay away from the dais. And for pike's sake cover your mouths if you cough.”
The priestesses shifted backward obediently. Cob was more than happy to join them.
A few quick questions—was Aglavyn fasting, had she been taking any treatments, to which the answers were 'yes' and 'paincease and rashi as tea, for nausea and mood'—then Enkhaelen touched the altar and murmured something. A wave of orange runes rolled down the stone and along the dais. Several priestesses flinched, but the magic went no further than the last step; instead it arched up to create a bubble around Enkhaelen and his patient, bright for a moment then dimming to invisibility.
What followed was a long, unsettling procedure Cob could never quite follow. He saw the robe peeled back, saw several cuts, saw the light from Enkhaelen's fingertips change many times—from blue-black to icy pale, searing yellow to warm low orange—but had no idea what it meant, what he was doing. Enkhaelen picked tools from the case seemingly at random, applied them briefly, then hung them in midair to drip blood into a crescent of redness that hovered behind him like a trough. Blood drained to there from the pad and the altar as well, and the scent of it soon pervaded the room, accented by burning and an undertone of unknown foulness.
In ones and twos, the priestesses excused themselves, pale and queasy from the work. Sister Talla, at the edge of the warded sphere, never moved. Never looked away.
Bi
t by bit, something nodulated and fleshy began to grow above the Mother Matriarch. When Cob focused, he could see Enkhaelen adding to it—flicking fragments up from his incisions to join the floating mass—but looking too long made his stomach roil. There was no way not to see the strands of muscle and knobs of organ that composed it, nor miss the discoloration and deformation.
After a little while, the crescent of blood shifted, and Enkhaelen drew the Mother Matriarch's arm to the edge of the pad. He pierced it at the inner elbow with a thin bronze tube, and for the first time, Sister Talla jerked forward, only to be stopped by the ward. The trapped blood curved upward, narrowed its stream, then joined with the tube in a leisurely flow.
“No aberrations in the blood or marrow,” Enkhaelen said without looking back. “The rest of you can leave; she won't require a transfusion.”
A few did flee then, leaving Cob, Sister Talla, the acting Matriarch, three senior priestesses, and a small horde of effigies to watch until the end.
By the time Enkhaelen began making stitching motions, it felt like days had passed. The accumulated mass had grown to the size of his head, but the crescent of blood had emptied and the tube had been removed, Aglavyn's arm tucked neatly back at her side. Cob saw Enkhaelen's fingers tremble, but his magic did not, as with painstaking slowness he closed all the cuts he had made.
Finally, he placed both hands upon her, and the ward sprang back into view only to collapse against him, fire-colored energies flowing down his arms and into Aglavyn. She gave a little gasp, blind eyes going wide, then subsided into calmer breaths as he withdrew and began plucking his hanging tools from midair.
“You may approach,” he said in a rasp. “Cob...assist me, please.”
Cob moved in immediately, as did Sister Talla. The necromancer waved off his attempt at support, instead pointing to the tool-case then handing Cob a scalpel he had just burned clean. “Put them away, please. And you, Forge Matron, don't try to move her yet. Give her a mark or two of healing first. I had to force-grow a lot of flesh to cover the gaps. Then just treat her as any weak and sickly patient. I'm sure you can manage.”
The Drowning Dark (The War of Memory Cycle Book 4) Page 31
