Lois Bujold - Passage

The jugular vein was only nicked, not sliced in two; this might not be impossible…The uproar of the cave faded from Dag’s senses as he descended, down and in. Felt with his ground projection, caught up the cut edges of the big vessel, and mated them one to another once more. A shaped ground reinforcement, not large, but dense and tight…would it hold against internal pressure, external jostling? Had the pallid young man already spent too much blood to recover? The soil beneath Dag’s knees was soaked in red, sticky and caking. He drew breath and backed out, evading groundlock, staring around in disorientation at the dire scene in the cave, unholy noises, men’s shadows leaping in the wavering torchlight.

Dag shook his head and swallowed, chilled and shaking. “You can let up now,” he told the bloody-handed friend, removing his own hand and wrist cuff from above. “Get blankets around him, get him warmed up any way you can. But don’t bump him, or that big vein will bust open again. That surface cut needs stitches, if you have anyone with a real light hand to do it. Not right away, but in a bit.” The jagged, ugly gash across the victim’s neck still gaped, but blood only oozed now, instead of flowing like some terrible spring. “Don’t try to move him yet.” Later, the Shoals lad would need as much drink as they could get into him, but he daren’t be made to swallow while still out cold. Choking could kill him.

Dag tried to remember what he’d been doing. Medicine making and captaining didn’t mix well, it seemed; each took all of a man’s attention. Chicory, yes, oh gods. He didn’t want to lose Chicory, and not just for his affable humor. He was exactly the sort of natural leader who could go home and make a difference in his village, and amongst a widespread array of friends, if he could be convinced to see things Dag’s way. If he lives.

Dag lurched half up and over to Chicory’s side, and knelt again. Watched closely by the fearful Bearbait, he cradled the hunter’s head in his spread fingers. The skull was cracked in spider-web-like rings around the blow, pushed inward, but no sharp shards had pierced the brain beneath. But atop that strange thin skin that overlay brains in the smooth goblets of their skulls, a pocket of blood was collecting, actually pushing the skull dent out again. But also pressing into the delicate tissue beneath, like a grinding fist. I’m pretty sure that’s not good. A real medicine maker or a farmer bonesetter might drill into the skull to let the bad blood out. At any rate, he was sure he’d seen such drills amongst Hoharie’s tools. Dag’s medicine kit included a fine knife, tweezers, needles and threads of gut and cotton, fluid to clean wounds, bandages, herbs, and powders. No drills. Do I really need one?

Dag recentered himself and ground-ripped a pea-sized hole in skin and bone. A spurt of blood trickled out, making a slippery mess of Chicory’s black hair, seeping through Dag’s fingers. As the pressure in the bulging pocket lessened, he found the bleeding inside starting up again. Not good. Groundlock, you’re risking groundlock… He drew back out, still holding Chicory’s head in his spread hand, and looked around woozily.

A few paces away, a man with a knife wound to his gut choked out his last breath and died. Bandit, Dag hoped, although he was blighted if he could tell the difference between bandits and boatmen from this confused vantage.

“Lakewalker…?” said Bearbait.

Dag shook his head. “Skull’s busted, but you knew that. It’s too soon to say if he has a chance.” He surreptitiously dropped another general ground reinforcement into the brain flesh around the blow, and blinked at his own dizziness. A big figure trod past; Dag called, “Wain!”

The boat boss wheeled around. “There you are!” He thrust out a suspicious chin. “What are you doing?”

“Best as I can,” said Dag wearily. “I can’t leave off here just yet. You find that Crane by now? If he’s not here, find out where he’s gone, and if there are any more bandits missing with him. Get exact numbers, get names. Don’t let them hold out on you.” Wain had wanted undisputed leadership of the boatmen—but to his credit, not at such a cost to his rival Chicory. The boat boss chewed his lip briefly but decided not to argue; he cast Dag a curt nod and moved off, bellowing for his lieutenant, Saddler. If Dag wanted questions answered, Wain was the man for the job, he was pretty sure. Most of the captives would be surly and hopeless, tight-lipped, but amongst a group this large, there were bound to be a few babblers. Beguiled or not.

Skink and Alder, blight them, had both claimed Crane was at the cave, and Dag would have sworn neither had been lying by that time. But they had been camped on their lookout for more than a day. Dag had seen good-once-but-too-old-now information devastate plans before this. Blight.

The little hole in Chicory’s skull was clotting off. With his ground projection, Dag teased the clot out, letting the blood keep trickling. Was this right? When would it stop? He wanted to go back in to find the source of the flow and pinch it off, but didn’t dare yet. One more of these deep ground-explorations, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up and walk, after. Let alone fight. This fight did not seem finished.

Whit had been drawn off to help the Raintree men secure prisoners. He returned to Dag’s side and draped a blanket around his shoulders. Dag smiled up gratefully. Whit stared wide-eyed at the gray-faced Chicory. “Is he going to die?”

“Can’t say yet. Can you find me Remo or Barr? Where the blight have those two gone off to?”

“Back of the cave, I think. I’ll go check.”

“Thanks.”

Whit nodded and picked his way through the rubble. Dag thought his young tent-brother was holding up well, thrust into scenes of such lethal brutality for the first time in his life. He wouldn’t have sent Whit to assist Wain, though. Dag grimaced at the ugly thumps and yells from the interrogation going on over at the far side of the cave, cutting through the moans and groans.

Whit brought Barr and Remo back in a few minutes. The pair looked black indeed, and not only from their first experience with putting down farmer bandits.

Remo held up a sharing knife. “Look what we found back there.”

“Yeah, there’s a cache piled to the ceiling,” Whit put in, sounding amazed. “All the most valuable stuff, I guess.”

Dag squinted. The knife was unprimed. “Could it be Crane’s?”

“I found it in amongst what has to be a whole narrow-boatload of furs,” Remo said. “Looks like Crane’s crew didn’t always avoid Lakewalkers.”

Dag carefully set Chicory’s head between his knees and raised his blood-soaked hand to take the knife. Remo recoiled to see Dag’s sleeve wet with darkening red, but he reluctantly released the knife to the gory grip. Dag held it to his lips. Unprimed, yes. And with a peculiar stillness in its embedded involution.

“Whoever this knife was bonded to is dead now.” So, probably not Crane’s, though Dag supposed he could hope.

Barr, startled, said, “You can tell that?”

“My brother is a knife maker,” Dag said vaguely; the two patrollers’ brows rose in respect. “Keep this aside.” He handed it back.

Remo slipped the bone blade back into its sheath and hung the thong around his neck. As he hid it all inside his shirt, his voice hushed in outrage. “They must’ve murdered a Lakewalker without even letting him share!”

Or her. Dag didn’t want to think on that. There would have been women amongst the boat victims from time to time, but there weren’t any around now. Can’t let any run off to tell, Skink had claimed. Should Dag hope that they’d died quickly, and were his hopes worth spit?