Michael Stackpole - Of Limited Loyalty

He turned the mirror around and smiled at his image. Ian Rathfield had died in the wilds of Mystria. With him died the sins of the past. And he had been resurrected. This new life shall provide everything I desire, and rain misery upon those who would oppose me.

Prince Vlad returned to the medical station, which had been set up on the very spot where he’d stood to oppose Rufus. He paused for a moment, reaching out, feeling the magickal energy coursing through the earth. He connected to it, adding that flow to the magick that was coming to him straight from the Norghaest Octagon. He should have been exhausted, and could feel fatigue nibbling around the edges, but the energy filled him and kept him going.

The wounded had been sorted long since, and those with minor cuts and bruises had been sent off to fend for themselves. The most serious had been brought to him immediately, but he found he could help precious few of them. Some had had limbs torn clean off. He knew no way to reattach them, nor to replenish their bodies with blood. For most, all he could do was to invoke a spell that dulled their pain and provided them enough lucidity that they could put their affairs in order and bid friends good-bye.

As much as men like Bishop Bumble had accused him of conducting “Ryngian studies,” he wished he’d done more of it, especially as concerned medical magick. His understanding of physiology, based on dissections of animals and men, did help him. When an obviously broken arm presented itself, it was relatively simple for him to invoke magick so he could practically see through the skin. He would hold the mental image of a healthy bone in his mind, then use magick to impose that image over the broken bone. Though such magick was not without pain for the patient, it did prove effective in knitting the bone together. Still, he had things splinted and urged the same cautions on them as any doctor might have.

As he progressed through cases, he refined his magick. He learned to confine spells to dealing with the broken bits of bones, not the entire bone. He did the minimal amount of work for the maximum effect. This worked very well on bones, and unfortunately less well on damaged organs, precisely because his understanding of their true function was insufficient to set things completely to rights.

A torn muscle presented little trouble. Using magick, Vlad could weave it back together as a tailor might have used to patch clothing. He could have done the same for cuts, but having someone else use a needle and thread saved him considerable work. Herniated muscles, ruptured bowels, and similar things which required stitching up, he learned how to do efficiently, but this didn’t always save his patients.

Only one of them died while he worked on them. A young man had come with his family. His mother sat outside the tent, weeping. He’d been struck in the head by a troll. Vlad’s diagnostic spells had found bone fragments driven deeply into the youth’s brain. Otherwise he was in perfect condition, without a scratch or bruise on him. He lay motionless, his breathing shallow and getting shallower as Vlad used magick to tease pieces of his skull back into their proper place.

The youth stopped breathing and something changed inside. When Vlad worked, the bodies responded. He found that initiating the healing process was almost like teasing a kitten with a feather. First you used magick to get the body’s attention, then you convinced it that it should begin healing. Yet with this young man, the body just quit, as if a stiff wind had snuffed a candle.

And as with a candle, a tiny ember still burned in the wick. Prince Vlad saw it, went for it, improvising. The same magick he used to tease the body into healing he used to tease that ember back to life. It brightened for a moment, and he had hopes, then it began to die again. He tried, shifting to other spells, to those he used to pull tissue together. He tried to grab that spark to hold onto it. He thought he had it and then a force beyond his comprehension yanked it away.

The Prince had stood there, staring down at the young man. Despite the grey pallor, he looked vital. Had he sat up, it would not have surprised Prince Vlad. In that one moment the Prince felt frustration over the waste of that life, and in the next he understood why Guy du Malphias had been willing to raise people from the dead. For Prince Vlad the act would have been one of compassion, so the boy’s mother could know joy, but for the Laureate, the boy would merely have been a resource, a means to an end that had nothing to do with who he had been.

Prince Vlad finished dealing with the last of the wounded. Over the course of the day more and more of them had come to address him as Doc, instead of Highness. He smiled at that, and knew others would have been offended. He was not. It was very Mystrian for him to be identified by what he did-and quite un-Mystrian for him to presume to be any better than anyone else. They’d looked at him with gratitude instead of any awe, and that warmed his heart.

Kamiskwa and Nathaniel entered the tent, along with a hobbling Count von Metternin. The Kessian seated himself on the edge of the cot that had served as the Prince’s examination table. “You would have time to fix my leg now?”

The Prince shook his head. “No. If I fix you now, you’ll be foolish enough to do other things that require fixing.” He nodded to Kamiskwa. “I’m very sorry your father is gone.”

The Shedashee frowned. “How…?”

Vlad scratched at the back of his neck. “You did your job well. Your magick redirected the Norghaest flow to me. It’s how I’ve been able to help so many. Your magick, however, bears a trace of you. I get a sense of your grief. I had it when I sent Nathaniel to you. I, too, wish your father were here, Steward Fire as well. What they taught me, they taught me well, but they taught me far too little.”

“Kamiskwa and me is going to take our leave at Fort Plentiful. The Shedashee have a powerful lot of jawing to be doing, then we’re finding Msitazi and bringing him back.”

The Prince nodded. “Yes, him and Ythsara.”

Kamiskwa’s eyes became slits. “Who?”

“The woman, from your dreams. Ythsara is her name.” Prince Vlad shook his head. “No, no, no, this is wrong. I should not know that. You do not know that. Which means, I don’t have that information from you.”

The Shedashee glanced back to the southwest. “You can only have it from the stone. Which means she helped create it.”

“Yes, she did. She did it to help us destroy Rufus.” Vlad pointed. “She did it so we have the power to stop the Norghaest.”

“I reckon that ain’t a bad thing.”

Vlad drew in a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. “It is, Nathaniel, a very bad thing. It was Norghaest power that seduced Rufus. It destroyed him and those settlements out west. It’s power beyond the imagining of any man, the power to heal and restore, to make bountiful what was barren. A wonderful and terrible power.”

Nathaniel gave the Prince a half smile. “I reckon you’ll be using the wonderful half of it. Rufus was weak, soes he used the terrible.”

“Rufus may have been weak, but no man is that strong.” The fleeting memory of his desire to pull that boy back from death flickered through his mind. “Before you go, I have one service I would ask of you, Prince Kamiskwa.”

“As you wish it, it shall be done.”

Vlad nodded toward the southwest. “Go back out there and destroy that stone. I don’t want the power. If we are to defeat the Norghaest, we will just have to find another way.”

9 June 1768 Fort Plentiful Richlan, Mystria

Prince Vlad returned General Rathfield’s smile as the Norillian officer entered the wurmrest. “You wanted to see me, Highness.”