David Weber - Hell's Gate

The officer nodded dismissal, watched a moment while the crossbowman marched off to wherever he'd come from, then turned his own attention to Jathmar.

Jathmar clutched his stupid stick, panting and sweating in the supercharged swampy air, and the officer met his gaze squarely. He held it, never taking his eyes from Jathmar's, and issued what was clearly another order.

Another man appeared and shouted at the beast, and Jathmar's eyes snapped back to the towering horror. It looked down at the man who'd shouted, rustled enormous demon's wings, and hissed, but it also moved away. The soft ground sucked at its immense, clawed feet as it slunk off, if anything that size could be said to slink …

"Jathmar."

The sound of his own name whipped him back around to the officer. Aside from a long knife or short sword at his left hip, the other man wore no obvious weapon, but Jathmar had no doubt that he faced the commander of all the other armed men surrounding him and dared make no move at all. Then he frowned.

"How do you know my name?" he demanded.

The other man clearly didn't understand his question. He held up both hands in a trans-universal sign for "I don't have the least idea what you just said." Despite his own panic, despite the terror pulsing through him at the marriage bond's continued silence, Jathmar's lips quirked in bitter amusement. But then the officer in front of him said another word.

"Shaylar."

"Where is she?? Jathmar snarled, any temptation towards amusement disappearing into the suddenly refocused vortex of a panic far more terrible than he could ever have felt for himself. The club came up again, hovered menacingly between him and his enemy, and his lips drew back from his teeth in an animal snarl.

And then memory struck with such brutality he actually staggered, crying out in remembered agony. He was on fire, caught in the withering heat of an incandescent fireball, flesh blazing even as he fought to reach Shaylar, but he couldn't, and?

Someone moved toward him urgently, and the club came back up. A guttural sound clogged his throat, hot and hungry with primeval rage and a berserker's fury. He heard the officer saying something else, something sharp and urgent, and he didn't care. The club came back, poised to strike, and then it froze as his eyes focused on its target.

It wasn't another soldier; it was a girl. A slender, lovely Uromathian girl, taller than his Shaylar, but still small, delicate. She was saying his name, then Shaylar's name, pointing urgently to one side.

Its a trick! his mind shrieked, but he looked anyway.

The tents registered first. There was an entire encampment of them, in orderly rows, and more incongruously armed soldiers swam into view, their crossbows pointed carefully at the muddy ground. Then he saw the glassy tubes, and sweat and terror crawled down his back as he remembered the fireballs.

Then he saw the wounded. The brutal carnage of gunshot wounds registered in a kaleidoscope of torn flesh, shattered limbs, blood splashes on bandages, clothing, and skin. Someone cried out, the sound knife-sharp and piteous, as a wound was re-bandaged. The sights and sounds shocked him, horrified him … gratified him. And while those conflicting emotions hammered each other in his chest, he saw her.

She was literally so close he'd overlooked her, caught by the deeply shocking sights further afield. He fell to his knees beside her, barely aware of his own anguished moan, completely oblivious for the moment to the way her strange "cot" hovered unsupported above the ground.

She was alive, breathing slowly, steadily. But her face … His breath caught. One whole side of her face was a swollen, purple mass of damage. Bruises had nearly obliterated her left eye, and it looked as if her nose might well be broken. Cuts and scrapes along her swollen cheek and brow told their own story, and memory struck again.

The fireball exploded all around them once more, as if it had just happened. He could literally feel himself flying into the tangle of deadwood while his skin and hair crisped in unbearable agony. He groped for his own face, the back of his neck, shocked all over again by a complete and impossible absence of pain. He found no charred skin, no blisters, no burns at all, and that was impossible. His rational mind gibbered?he'd been burned, horribly. He knew it, and his flesh shuddered and flinched from the memory of it. Yet he wasn't burned now, and that simply couldn't be true.

He knelt in the mud beside his wife and literally trembled in the face of far too many things he couldn't comprehend. Then her eyelashes shivered, a soft sound?half-sigh, half-whimper?ghosted from her lips, and he dropped everything. Dropped the club he still held, his vast confusion, even his attention for the enemy, and swept her up in his arms. He folded her close, held her like fragile glass, rocking on his knees, and buried his face in her singed and scorched hair.

"Shaylar," he gasped raggedly. "Shaylar, gods. You're still with me, love!"

The silence in her mind terrified him. He could feel her slender weight in his arms, feel the steady beat of her heart, hear her breathing, but when he reached with his mind, she simply wasn't there. Fresh horror rolled through him as the savagery of her bruised and battered face coupled with the silence of her mind in nightmare dread. What if?

Her eyes opened. They were hazy, at first. Blank with confusion … until she saw him.

"Jathmar!"

Her arms were suddenly around him. Jathmar was no giant. Faltharians tended to be tallish, and he was, yet he was also whipcord thin, built more for speed and endurance than brawn. Shaylar, on the other hand, was tiny, even for a Shurkhali. She was a most satisfactory size for hugging, in his opinion, but she'd always said she felt like a kitten trying to hug a mastiff when she returned the favor. They'd laughed over it for years, but today she clutched him so tightly he knew her fingers were leaving fresh bruises on the miraculously undamaged skin of his back, and it felt good. So good.

She buried her face against his chest, weeping with shocking strength, and he brushed back her hair, smoothed the scorched tresses and tangles which would take shears to put right. When he could finally bear to let go of her long enough to sit back and peer into her eyes, she touched his face, wonderingly.

"Oh, Jath," she whispered, huge eyes still brimming with tears. "You're a miracle, love."

"I?" He swallowed. "I was burned. Wasn't I?"

"Yes." The single word was barely audible, and she nodded. "Their healer came. He?" It was her turn to swallow hard. "You were dying, Jath. I knew you were. But he gave you back to me. He touched you, just touched you, and the burns healed. Like the gods themselves had reached down to make you whole again."

The swamp and even her face wavered in his awareness. No Talent could do something like that. Even the most Talented Healers were limited mostly to healing minds which had been shattered, or encouraging the body to heal itself more effectively. They could work wonders enough, but none that came close to this.

The shiver began in his bones, and he turned his head almost involuntarily to stare at the man who stood watching them. Just watching. Not threatening, not intruding. Their officer looked like an ordinary man, they looked ordinary, and yet …

"I don't understand." He brought his gaze back to Shaylar. "If they could do this for me, why haven't they healed you? Or," he added, his voice turning harsh and bitter, "The men we shot to pieces?"

"I don't know." She shook her head. "None of it makes sense. But these people, Jath, they're not like us. Not at all. I think their Healers are more … more energy-limited than ours are." It was obvious to him that she was searching for words, trying to explain something which had puzzled her just as much as it did him. "I don't think they encourage the body to heal; I think they make it heal. When their Healer was working on you, you glowed, and there was this tremendous sense of energy, of power, coming from somewhere. I think they can do things our Healers could never even imagine, but they can only do so much of it before they … exhaust themselves. And they only have one real Healer, so I think they must be rationing the healing he can do, using it for the most critical cases."