Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

‘Not drugs so much as trinkets, innovations, a few get-rich schemes.’

‘What’s that have to do with Lessek?’

‘Well, this is all legend, mind you, but we have been led to believe that a Senator, perhaps Lessek himself, came back through the portal with something deadly.’

Steven slowed, his boots sinking to the heels in silt. ‘What was it? A weapon? Poison? Explosives?’

‘A virus.’

‘No shit,’ Steven frowned. ‘An unfamiliar viral infection with nothing in your immune system to battle it, I bet you lost thousands.’

‘And Lessek was killed.’

‘He died in disgrace? After all that he did for Eldarn?’ He looked at Gilmour, who shrugged. ‘But since then history has recalled his greatness and elevated him back to an appropriate position in Eldarni memory?’

‘It has,’ Gilmour agreed, ‘but what good is that to Lessek now?’

‘Just press down on it, rutting whores!’ Kellin said. ‘I’ll stitch it up, but we have to stop the bleeding.’

‘It’s not stopping, Kellin.’ Garec tried not to sound nervous. With his chin pressed against his chest and both hands pushing down on a broad flap of scalp that had been peeled back over part of his skull, it was difficult to do. ‘It’s been bleeding like this since I landed here.’

‘Just keep pressure on it; I need a moment to get some clean thread. If we use dirty thread, it’ll get infected, and we’ll just have to rip it out and start again.’

‘Fine, that’s fine with me.’ He took a deep breath. He could feel the blood running over his head, behind his ears, down the back of his neck, along his cheeks and even across his forehead into his eyes, and he could smell it too. ‘Demonshit, Kellin, just stitch it up with anything you’ve got. We’ll let it clot and then do it with clean thread tomorrow.’

‘You’ll be all right.’

‘I’m going to bleed to death!’

‘You’ll be all right.’ Her hands shook as she rifled through her pack. Her horse was dead, his head crushed against a tree on the riverbank, but her saddlebags and pack were still lashed to the corpse. Her ribs flared with pain and one collarbone throbbed as she searched for a clean needle and a length of sturdy thread, preferably a piece that hadn’t been stained brown with filthy river water so she could stitch up Garec’s scalp – it’s going to be a lot of stitches, great rutting Pragans! – and then see to her own injuries. From the way one arm was dangling numb and useless at her side, she feared she had broken her collarbone. As soon as her adrenalin waned it would start hurting; she knew that much. And the pain in her ribs could only mean that she had cracked at least one, if not more.

‘I’ve got it!’ she called and hustled back. ‘Now, I need you to let go for a moment. I’ve got to lift it up and make sure everything is cleaned out of there. If there’s any dirt left, it’ll get infected and you’ll be dead before we can get you to a healer. Do you understand?’

Garec whimpered a little. Now he was frightened.

Kellin took both Garec’s hands in her own, squeezed them tightly and guided them gently into his lap. ‘It’ll just take a moment, then we’ll get to stitching it up.’

‘Grand,’ Garec said. ‘It’s just that… it’s just a lot of blood, Kellin.’

‘It’s not that much,’ she lied; he looked as though someone had emptied a bucket of blood over his head, and the wound was still bleeding. She took a calming breath and wiped his forehead with the cleanest cloth she’d been able to find. ‘I don’t want you to worry; you’ll be in one piece again in no time.’

A hoarse cough followed by a prolonged wet wheeze reached them from somewhere in the underbrush. The sound was unmistakable: a death rattle.

‘What was that?’ Kellin asked.

‘I’m guessing that was my horse,’ Garec said sadly. ‘She took a branch in the chest; I guess it went into her lungs. It was just a matter of time.’

‘Great grettan shit,’ Kellin muttered.

‘No matter,’ Garec said, his voice wavering. ‘If I pass out – I’m about to; I can feel it coming – I want you to bind my head, tie it up tight, then go find a horse. With all this devastation, there’ll be plenty of them running about – I’d think a lot of the farms around here will have been destroyed, buildings damaged, topsoil stripped… find a horse, Kellin, and get us to Orindale. Are you hurt?’

‘Shut it, Garec,’ she ordered. ‘I know what I’m doing, but I need you to shut yourself up right quick; I’m trying to work.’

‘Find a horse, Kellin,’ Garec’s voice was weaker now, a whisper. ‘Bring my bow and quivers and Steven’s silver…’ His head slumped forward; his hands slipped from his lap into the mud.

Kellin was horribly nervous, working alone and against time. She tried to relax and focus on her work, muttering to herself, ‘There’s no need to rush, no need to hurry. He’s fine; he’s sleeping, that’s all. It’s better this way, he won’t be complaining and squirming around. Just clean the wound and sew it up. You have to find a horse and then clean water, but first things first – how does it go? Well begun and… some rutting thing.’ She peeled back Garec’s scalp to expose the layer of bloody muscle beneath.

The bleeding was astonishing, even for a head wound, but when she’d finished cleaning it, she couldn’t find see any evidence that the skull had been cracked. She’d never seen anything like this before, and had nothing with which to compare it. Were any major blood vessels severed? Were there any there? Yes, at least one, across the top of the head – but would the bleeding be even worse if an important vein or artery had been cut? Would it close up on its own, or should she try to cauterise it somehow, maybe in some sort of makeshift branding ceremony? But she didn’t even know where it was, never mind how to cauterise it. She supposed she could heat up an iron and singe the spots that were bleeding the worst, but she had no dry tinder, nothing to burn and no iron to hand for the task.

She sighed. ‘Forget it,’ she told herself, ‘just stitch him up and run like mad for Orindale. Keep him full of water and, hopefully, he’ll sleep the whole way.’

She rinsed the wound several times with the cleanest water she had been able to find, then, trying to keep the flap of skin in place by leaning on it with her numb arm, she stitched the wound closed as quickly and carefully as she could. Garec twitched and groaned each time she pushed the needle through his flesh, but she closed her ears to his cries and concentrated on making her stitches as small and neat as possible, thanking the gods of the Northern Forest it was the other arm that was damaged.

Several stitches along, Kellin realised that she was closing the half-moon tear crookedly. ‘Mother of a whore-!’ she growled, and thought about pulling out of the thread and beginning again. Garec moved restlessly. ‘No, toss it all,’ she decided, ‘I’ll just squish a bit of it up there in a small wrinkle. He’ll never notice.’ And pulling a tiny pinch of skin into a small fold, she aligned the rest of the injury perfectly and finished the job with deft alacrity, despite shaking hands.

A quarter-aven later, Kellin had managed to get Garec to drink nearly half a water-skin. It wasn’t the cleanest of water, and she was pretty sure he’d suffer for it later, but right now it was more important to get as much water into Garec’s body as possible. She prayed to the gods of the Northern Forest that she wasn’t killing him – dehydration and disease had accounted for more casualties than any war ever could.

Garec half-awakened, enough to repeat his orders to find a horse and get them both to Orindale.