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5

Sore Points

 

HE JUMPED ME two blocks short of the Widow Rupon’s house.

I hadn’t been paying attention—or rather, I had been paying attention, but not to the right things.

What I had been doing was walking home alone, after. Something I was not unfamiliar with; it comes with the lack of territory, so to speak. I’ve walked home alone, after, many times.

Above me, the night was full of winking stars, a silver crescent of moon high in the sky,- below, the street seemed a bit softer, easier beneath my feet than it had been before.

It was late, well past the hour of the bear and into the hour of the lion, and the streets were quiet and empty, save for the whistling of the wind through the jimsum trees, the clicking of fidgetbugs in the eaves and gutters, and the far-off taroo of a hairy owl. I had passed a cloaked nightwatcher in Ironway, and had returned his. raised hand of greeting, but I hadn’t seen any of the other watchers, which wasn’t surprising. I doubt that there were more than a dozen in the whole town, and they would tend to patrol on the eastern side of the town, downwind, where smells of smoke would be blown toward their nostrils, rather than away.

It was time for all D’Shai, good and bad, to be tucked safely in their beds asleep, and while troupers sleep late—very late, by peasant standards; peasants are up before the hour of the cock—I’d long ago learned that the hour of the hare does not wait for Kami Khuzud to finish with his dreams.

Something whistled through the air behind me.

I turned just in time to catch a glimpse of a stick or maybe a truncheon moving toward me, and ducked aside. He missed with the stick, but the back of his fist caught me high on the cheekbone, shattering the night into light and pain, and then the ground came up and slammed me in the back. The streets in Den Oroshtai are of cobbled stones—one of the larger ones caught me just over the kidney.

He kicked me hard in the ribs a few times, and then in the pit of the stomach. My hands flailing uselessly, vainly, I folded over like a damp towel, so much in pain that I couldn’t even try to move out of the way of the foot that snapped my head back, exposing my neck for a final, fatal blow.

It didn’t fall. I guess he couldn’t just do it; he had to work himself up to it.

I knew that it was Refle who stood over me in the dark, a bulk I could more sense than see. It was him, I knew it was him, but he was dressed in the black hood and cape of an assassin; I couldn’t have even sworn that it was a man, much less Refle.

I tried to gasp out something, but it was all I could do to groan.

He kicked me here and there—I don’t remember the exact order; I was too busy to take extended notes.

I do remember his finale, though: his eyes hidden in the folds of his hood and cape, he didn’t say anything; cleanly, neatly, balanced on one foot with an equilibrium I would have admired in other circumstances, he toed me in the testicles.

I gagged, hunched over on my side, my stomach purging itself, although of what only the Powers knew.

He lifted his foot again, then stopped, his head cocked to one side. I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of my own quiet groans and the red rush of pain in my head and ears, but I guess he heard something, because he raised a long gloved finger, as though in warning; then, balanced like an acrobat, he neatly spun and stalked off into the night, turning a corner and disappearing.

Footsteps pounded on the stones behind me as I lay there, the taste of sour vomit filling my mouth, cupping myself, trying not to inhale as I retched again.

“Who are you?”

I groaned out an answer, but I guess I wasn’t quite coherent.

“The acrobat boy, no?” he asked. Surprisingly gentle fingers pried at my shoulder, and at my side. “Kami Khuzud, is it not? I am Helden, the watcher. Lie still, Kami Khuzud—you likely have broken bones.”

The watcher had a keen eye for the obvious.

He cleared his throat as he knelt beside me, and raised his voice, a firm tenor piercing through the night, singing,

“Chief of Nightwatch, you are now called,

“A boy lies broken on Bankstreet,

“Watcher Helden bids you come now,

“Let your steps be sure and fleet.”

He cocked his head, listening, then nodding as the song was picked up far away, then was echoed, then quickly answered in a gritty baritone. “Good. He comes.” He shrugged out of his cloak, then slipped it under my head.

“Rest a moment, Kami Khuzud, and prepare yourself. When you are ready to rise, I will help you.”

 

There wasn’t much I could tell them.

I knew who it was, of course, but I was hardly in a position to swear to anything except what I had seen, and what I had seen was enough to persuade me that I had been attacked by Refle. Still, making accusations against a noble isn’t a way for a peasant—even only a theoretical peasant—to guarantee himself a long life.

So I was as circumspect as possible. Which wasn’t much; circumspection is one of the many things I’ve not picked up from my father.

“—I know it was Lord Refle, you know it was Lord Refle, let us not turn our faces away from it.”

“I look away from little, Eldest Son Acrobat,” the chief watcher said. “I do not waive warrants, as you will see if you swear one: if you produce it, I will present it.”

A spasm of pain washed over me in a red wave. Enki Duzun, kneeling beside me, gripped me hard around the wrist until it passed.

When I could speak again, my voice was ragged, frayed at the edges. “But I can not do that, Amused By Perching Redbird. I am sure of it, but I can not swear to it; the ordeal would probably kill me.”

Chief Watcher Verniem Dar Hartren didn’t look like somebody who had been ever amused by anything, much less a redbird; I assumed it was his baby name, and not a changed one.

He was a big man, almost as large and heavily muscled as Large Egda, but was both flabbier and somehow seemed tougher, meaner, which is not unusual for a firewatcher. I wouldn’t know for sure, but some say that more towns have been lost to accidental fires than wars have put to the torch. While the notion of armed peasants scandalizes lords of other domains, in Den Oroshtai the firewatch is both armed and allowed to do almost anything to almost anybody—bourgeois, middle class, (of course) peasant, and even a member of our beloved ruling class—to keep that from happening.

Still, firewatchers are kept in their place. A watcher going for the challenge sword was always met by a true kazuh warrior, his kazuh fully upon him.

“It might, at that.” He considered the matter for a moment, blunt fingers drumming against thick thigh. “Still, I’ve sent for the sorcerer; we shall see what he says.”

The rest of the troupe gathered in the parlor, hair and clothing disarranged, eyes puffy from sleep.

Sala, kneeling on a cushion near me, a flask of Scarlet Teardrops in her hands, had thrown her robe on too quickly: she had neglected a strategic tie, and the part of me that wasn’t preoccupied with aching and hurting and suffering was vaguely amused at the way both watchers tried to keep their gaze and minds on me and my injuries and off her and the way her right nipple tended to peek out when she sipped.

Fhilt fluffed a pillow and adjusted it behind my head. “Such a careless idiot,” he said. “Wake us all up in the middle of the night.”

I would have liked to hit him with a juggling stick. That was so typical of Fhilt, more irritated at being woken up than upset that a member of the troupe had been beaten.

Sala sipped at her flask, then tucked it away in her robes. “Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about a fall,” she said. A typical Sala comment: true, but not at all relevant to what was going on.

“He didn’t fall,” Fhilt said, not playing along. “I know you can’t pay attention to what’s happening in front of you, but he didn’t fall. Some misbegotten son of a pig mauled him.” His knuckles were white.

Enki Duzun laid her hand on his arm. “Be still, Fhilt; don’t snap at Sala. Kami Khuzud will be well.”

Large Egda sat apart from the rest, perched gingerly on the edge of a settee. He shook his head, his steak-sized hands gesturing aimlessly as though he wanted to reach out and help, but couldn’t. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking from the dull expression on his doughy face. Poor Egda; he didn’t know what to do.

I forced a smile. “I’ll be fine, Egda,” I said.

He just didn’t understand any of it. When you’re that large, you have to be either gentle or a warrior, and while Large Egda sometimes forgot his own strength, he was a mild man who didn’t understand violence.

My father brought me another mug of hot urmon tea, the rough stone mug cradled in his thick hands. He brought it to my lips, accidentally splashing some of the hot tea on my chest. That surprised me, in two ways: first, because I’d never seen Gray Khuzud clumsy; second, because it hurt. I didn’t think I could hurt any more.

I drank. It tasted like fur.

“Have some more,” he said.

“I’d rather have something stronger.”

Sala, her every move as always a step in a dance, rose; she then knelt gently beside me, tucking the hem of her shiny silk robes around her knees and clucking sympathetically. She reached into the front of her robes and produced her slim, filigreed flask, which she put into my hand.

“Easy it is, easy it is.” She gently bent my fingers around the flask. “It’s not a good idea, Kami Khuzud—so take only a small sip.”

I thumbed back the silver crown and tilted the flask back. It was hot, and from more than her body. The heat washed the taste of blood and vomit from my throat, and set up a pleasant warm feeling in my middle.

I could get accustomed to drinking a lot of Scarlet Teardrops. Quickly.

There was a firm, peremptory rap on the front door. Fat Madame Rupon, still in her bulky nightdress, scurried away to open it. She returned, momentarily, with Lord Arefai—Lord Toshtai’s seventh son, a young scowler too far down in the line of succession ever to be the heir apparent—and Narantir, followed by two servitors, each gently carrying a man-sized burlap bag.

Being woken in the middle of the night hadn’t had any visible effect on Lord Arefai, except perhaps to annoy him. His boots and tunic were of the same dark brown leather which contrasted properly with his blousy canvas pantaloons of just the correct creamy tan; his sword belt was pulled fashionably tight about his waist. His hair, black as his father’s, was pulled back in a finger-set queue, freshly oiled and tied; beneath his short-trimmed beard, his jaw clenched in irritation.

“Well,” Arefai said, “what is all this?” His hand flicked the air, as though to brush it all away.

“Lord,” Verniem Dar Hartren said, “it appears that young Kami Khuzud had been beaten by a brigand, mauled by a masked man.”

“But that is forbidden!”

“That doesn’t undo it, Lord Arefai.”

Arefai could have taken that as insolence, but he was used to the chief watcher dealing in sober realism, I guess. He didn’t rear back and chop off the chief’s head, which is always a good sign.

“I’m not used to Lord Toshtai’s laws being broken,” Arefai said.

They chewed on that for a while, while Narantir stuck the end of his beard in his mouth and chewed on that—wizards have few social graces. I kept as patient as I could, waiting for them all to spit it out. It’s amazing how patient I can be when I’ve got a vial of Scarlet Teardrops pushing the pain away.

I sipped at it again, and again, the warmth penetrating not only my middle, but my tired bones and mind.

Narantir gave up first. “Interesting as this all is, would it offend Your Lordship to take this discussion to the other room while I examine the patient and mend his broken bones?”

Arefai raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you simply move the peasant?”

“Because, Lord,” Verniem Dar Hartren said, “the boy has broken bones.”

The wizard looked at me as though he was unhappy that he hadn’t thought of moving me. I really didn’t like that much. Then again, I really didn’t like him much.

“Of course, of course. We shall wait in the kitchen,” Arefai said, dismissing my fractures with exceptionally good grace. “All of you, out of the room. Let the wizard work,” he said, gesturing abstractly at the rest of the troupe. Everybody left except for Narantir, his two silent servitors, and Enki Duzun. I guess the young lord didn’t notice, or hadn’t meant her.

Still in conversation with Verniem Dar Hartren, Arefai followed the rest out of the room.

The wizard shook his head from side to side as, with grunts, groans and creaking of limbs, he knelt down next to me, taking my right wrist in his surprisingly gentle hands.

He noted how I relaxed at his touch, then looked me in the eye.

“We may not like each other, Eldest—Kami Khuzud, that is, but this is a matter of mahrir. True magic, not this zuhrir of yours. I know mahrir, if I may flatter myself.”

Flatter yourself all you want, fat one. Just heal me. I didn’t say it; I’m not that stupid.

“The Ten Pulses first.” He felt at both wrists, at three spots on my neck, both elbows and armpits, and finally—with a clinical detachment that prevented any embarrassment—at my groin.

“Your pulses are adequate, although you really should see to your balance of forces, when you are up and about. Too much beef and butter in your diet, I suppose; I recommend carrots and whey. Clearly you have some broken bones. Let us see which ones.”

I had the impression that he was becoming so involved in showing off that he was forgetting that he didn’t like me.

That’s generally true about wizards, by the way: once you let them get going, it’s hard to turn them off.

He gestured at the two servitors. The first opened his bag to reveal what appeared to be a complete skeleton, wired together like a graveyard marker. The second pulled out a similar skeleton, except that—

“He’s in worse shape than I am.” It was a weak joke, but the best I could do at the moment.

“That can be changed,” the wizard said. “For one thing, he’s dead. For another, each and every one of his two hundred and six bones is broken, each once; for yet another, I did the breaking—this won’t work for somebody else.”

“How did you get it?” Enki Duzun asked.

“It was difficult, persuading Lord Toshtai to have two poachers executed by drowning instead of, well, instead of the usual, but it did keep both skeletons intact, as well as the sinew. There are many uses for sinew.” He clucked. “You wouldn’t believe how much trouble it is to bone a poacher, though,” Narantir went on, unfolding a strange device from his leather bag—it looked like a spike on a tripod, two coils of green-tinged copper wire projecting from the base of the tripod.

He set the tripod down between me and the skeletons, then strung a long wire to the spike. “We shall see. This may not work well; it’s possible that you don’t have the standard complement of bones.”

“Eh?”

“Well, the slant-eyed Bhorlani tend to have an extra pair of ribs, and some people’s wrists don’t fuse quite properly.”

Enki Duzun was getting interested. “Fuse? You mean, like what smiths do with metal?”

“Oh, yes. Babies are born with more than three hundred bones—they fuse as the baby gets older. There are just too many combinations—I don’t have a good set of baby bones, not yet. Still collecting, young death by young death—boning a baby is fairly easy.” He brightened. “Ever regret not being a magician?”

Enki Duzun shook her head. “Not really.”

“Pity. I can usually dispel that regret, but only where it exists.”

His wizard’s bag yielded two wooden boxes, a glass-stoppered bottle and a wad of cotton.

“Now,” he said, warming to the subject—wizards always like to talk too much, in both senses—“we’ll have to calibrate the equipment. For that, we pick an unbroken bone. Is there one you’re sure isn’t broken?”

“Several.” I tapped at my arm.

“Very good. We run wires from each of these two ulnas to their coils, and then from both to your ulna.” He opened one of the wooden boxes to reveal a row of shiny needles.

“My favorite part,” he said, fitting the needle to the end of one of the wires. He spat on a cotton ball and daubed both the needle and my arm, near the wrist.

Then he stuck the needle in my arm, and again, I learned something I’d have been able to work out by myself: that no matter how much you’re aching from broken bones and a bruised body, if somebody sticks you with a needle, it hurts.

“Ow.”

“You like that, do you?” Enki Duzun glared at him.

“Oh, yes.” The wizard smiled.

“That’s really disgusting, you know—”

“Shh,” I said. “He cares as much about me as Fhilt does.”

“Eh?” Enki Duzun raised a slim eyebrow.

“You heard Fhilt, complaining about the way he was being woken up at night.”

She snorted. “Sometimes, Kami Khuzud, I despair of you, I really do,” Enki Duzun said, with an angry toss of her head that flicked her short black hair out of her eyes. “Some days I think you’ll never be able to listen past what anybody says to what they mean.”

The wizard had left the needle stuck in my arm while he opened the second wooden box. Sitting inside, cushioned gently on purple velvet, was something that looked like a compass needle; he lifted it and gently set it on the tripod’s spike.

“Law of Similarity,” he said. “Once I start the device, phlogiston will flow from similar to similar, and back. Now, since the bone is unbroken, more phlogiston will flow through the wire coil between your bone and the unbroken skeleton than between your bone and the broken one. Understand?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Wizards never wait for an answer; I don’t know why they bother to ask questions, given that—at least, if you listen to them—they always know everything. He just pulled out yet another box, opened it, extracted a piece of ordinary-looking chalk and scribbled a few quick runes on the leg of the tripod.

“Now ...” he lowered his voice and whispered a few quiet syllables, and snapped his fingers.

The runes flashed into flame, and I felt a strange tingling in my arm—along with the pain. My arm jerked, flinging the needle away.

“I didn’t do that—” I started.

“Hush, hush. It was my fault; I will handle it, Kami Khuzud, I will handle it.” The needle—the other one, the one that looked like a compass needle—had popped off the spike and now hung in the air between the two skeletons, what looked like little bolts of lightning flowing between it and the two skeletons.

Narantir swallowed a curse; he muttered a quick phrase and snapped his fingers, and the compass needle dropped to the carpet. “That’s what you get for rushing me—”

“My brother did not rush you,” Enki Duzun snapped. “It’s your own fault; you were too busy talking to do it right.”

“And how would you know what’s right and what isn’t?” The wizard ran nail-bitten fingers through his beard, then wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “Never mind, never mind; I forgot to make the skeletons dissimilar to each other, and that’s just a matter of a moment’s work,” he said, his chalk at work on each of the white ulnas, scrawling a different set of runes on each before he traced over the ash on the tripod’s arm, then rewiped my arm and the needle, and reinserted it, again muttering.

Again, the chalk flashed into flame, but this time, the needle stayed on the spike; it pointed unerringly toward the unbroken skeleton.

“That seems adequate, doesn’t it? Now, let’s try your fourth rib.” He untied the wires, and re-tied them to corresponding ribs, then opened my tunic, felt down the side of my chest, wiped and speared me.

The needle swung, this time pointing toward the broken skeleton.

“Better than zuhrir and kazuh, eh, Kami Khuzud?” he said, shifting the wires again.

“Not really.”

“Better than zuhrir for finding broken bones,” he said. “Or do you think you can find your broken bones by balancing a ball on your buttocks?”

 

By the end of the hour, Narantir had completed his inventory, I had a couple of hundred pinholes to accompany my bruises and broken bones, and Arefai was back for the wizard’s report. “Lord, we have six fractures, as well as the bruising.”

“And you say that some masked man did this to you, lad?” Lord Arefai asked me. “Answer promptly when I speak to you.”

“Yes, Lord. I can’t swear who it is, although I wouldn’t mind if you questioned Lord Refle. He’ll deny it.”

The young lord looked over at Narantir. “That could be fixed, if need be.”

“Now, don’t be looking at me, young lord, don’t be looking at me. Truth spells are very unreliable, and, if the truth be known, which it usually is, one way or another, I don’t like doing them—they’re too ... subtle, they are. Take far too much energy, too. Law of Similarity, yes, but it’s not a precise application of it. I’d have to kill something for extra power, a rabbit, at the very least, and if I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again now: necromancy is a bad habit to get into.”

“I wasn’t thinking of similarity, Narantir. I was thinking of the Law of Contagion, or of Relevance.”

The wizard snorted. “Ah. Of course, how very foolish of me, Your Lordship. Yes, yes, just find me the stick that cracked young Kami Khuzud on the head, and the glove that held the stick, and the hand that filled that glove—”

“So, it would work?”

“No,” the wizard said sharply, then apparently realized that that wouldn’t do. “Begging your pardon, Lord, but it won’t work. You can possibly fit the glove to the hand, if the glove still exists, which I doubt. The odds are, though—and I’ll cast some bones on it if you’d like—that the stick didn’t interact enough with the glove for Contagion to apply. For a certainty, the crack on his head is barely relevant to the stick that made it; to amplify the relevance and make it measurable—if we can—we’re back to necromancy again, and again you have me squatting naked over a pentagram with a knife in one hand and a cute little bunny in the other.”

Enki Duzun cocked her head to one side. “It doesn’t bother you to bone a person, but you do mind killing rabbits!”

“Idiot child—those who I have boned were already dead; they didn’t mind. The rabbit doesn’t like it; I’ve asked several.”

“Father won’t like this,” Arefai said, lolling back in the chair, toying with a cup of urmon tea on a translucent, almost transparent bone saucer, which was probably the finest thing Madame Ru-pon owned. “He won’t have woken by now, but I will be prepared to speak to him when he rises. Yes, that is what I’ll do.”

Suddenly, decisively, he leaped to his feet, setting the cup and saucer very gently on the table at his elbow. “In the meantime, heal the peasant boy, good Narantir.” He turned and stalked from the room, calling out a loud thank-you to fat Madame Rupon for her hospitality. Not all members of our beloved ruling class constantly make an effort to mistreat the lower classes.

Narantir shook his head and pulled more apparatus from his wizard’s bag. “Waste of time and effort, and easier commanded than completed.” He clucked for a moment, considering. “Another Similarity spell, and now I have to fix this, too.” He produced a small steel knife and pried the lid off a clay pot. “Glue.”

“Glue?” My voice squeaked around the edges. “You fix broken bones with glue?”

“Not for you, idiot,” he said. “For it. Him.” He gestured at the broken skeleton. “Law of Similarity, like to like—I fix his bones, it fixes yours. I will have to get a new broken skeleton, mind, and poachers are hard to find.”

Enki Duzun raised an eyebrow. “Why not just break the bones apart and clean off the glue?”

“Ah. Everyone’s a magician.” Narantir chuckled. “Because you don’t want to have your brother’s bones break apart, little one. It won’t do your soft tissues any good at all, Kami Khuzud, but I’ll have you up on your feet and hobbling around by nightfall.”

 

I was.

But it was the strangest feeling: my bones felt like they were glued in place. Honest.