Christopher Buehlman - Between Two Fires

Come on, Delphine.

His ear’s off! His ear!

She closed her eyes.

What about Thomas!

She smelled flowers.

Another one.

Stronger than mine.

It would protect her.

WHAT ABOUT THOMAS?

Come on, little moon.

She rolled out the window.

Thomas still had his sword in his hand, though sheathed.

Something like a wing flashed near the window, a very large wing, and Delphine opened the shutter.

It had been dark in the room, and the bright daylight dazzled him.

An axe hit the door.

“I’m going to break your goddamned legs, do you hear me? I’ll drag you there by your balls if you make me chop this whole door up!”

Thomas drew his sword.

“Let them take you,” the girl said.

Her cheeks were wet with tears.

She turned her face from him.

She rolled out the window then, but he never heard her hit the ground.

He thought he heard wings.

Thomas launched himself into the man who came through the door, thinking to bowl him down, hoping to find a smaller man behind him. He hit the big soldier, but not hard enough.

I thought I had him

I’m in the comte’s body I’m not as strong

The man reeled back against the wall but gathered himself and gave the Comte d’Évreux the back end of his axe, breaking teeth.

His body but I feel it GOD

He fell.

He looked for his sword, but could not find it.

GOD

They hit him again.

He was not dragged to the papal palace by his testicles.

He was taken in a cart.

After they broke his legs.

The boy who served the pope’s physician woke from his little bed at the other end of the room and brought a candle over to his master, who whimpered and thrashed in the grips of another nightmare. How many nights in a row had he seen him disturbed by one of these? He knew the physician, Maître de Chauliac, to be a good man, and wondered what devils could trouble one so kind.

This was the worst nightmare yet.

He leaned close to look, but made sure he did not let the candle drip on the man’s full cheeks or big nose. That would be like a story he had told him about a curious woman who drove away an angel. Was it an angel? Maybe just a boy with wings. The maître told him too many stories to keep them all separate.

“Maître?” he said, but very quietly.

He had learned not to wake him in these times, but he dearly wanted to end this particular dream. Did men die of dreams? He would try to remember to ask the doctor in the morning. Not tonight, though. He stood with the candle ready to light him to whatever the maître might ask him for.

Wine, the boy thought.

The worst ones always wake him and he asks me for wine.

But if I pour the wine and he does not wake, I shall have to put it back in the jug and clean the goblet so the little bugs don’t get in it.

Pour the wine, Tristan.

He took a little enameled goblet from its shelf and poured wine from a pewter jug with three rooster’s feet. He was fond of that jug, as he was fond of the smell of wine. Not lately, though. Something was off, like a hint of rot. Had they waited too late to get the grapes in? He had worked as assistant to a baker, and thought to work his way up to being a butler and minding the pope’s fruit cellar at the foot of the kitchen tower, so good was he at ferreting out rottenness. His mother said he had the nose of a dog. But the great doctor had seen what a clever boy he was and pulled him from the kitchens to replace his former boy, who had died of the plague.

Actually, three of the doctor’s assistants had died of the plague, but the good doctor had not caught it himself.

Not yet, he would have corrected. Or he might have said insh’allah , a word he had learned from Arab texts. It meant something like So God be pleased , but Tristan didn’t understand why he didn’t just say that.

“Tristan.”

The doctor was sitting up now, his big, friendly eyes looking bugged and haunted. He rubbed a hand over them and they regained some of their reason.

“Tristan, help me dress.”

“Yes, maître . Are you sure? It is still long before morning.”

“Just get my clothes together, please.”

The man and the boy went into one of the grand, vaulted hallways of the palace, and the physician stopped, considering. He looked left, in the direction that led to the pope’s bedroom and adjoining study. The boy waited with the candle, looking very much like a small dog waiting for its master to open a door.

“Is the Holy Father well?” Tristan said.

“No, Tristan. I do not think he is, though I cannot say why. He seems in good health, but…he is changed.”

“Is it to do with the wine?”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought, perhaps the wine… it smells funny.”

He looked at the boy and narrowed his eyes, considering and rejecting this premise.

He turned on his heel now and went back into his room.

Tristan watched, fascinated, as the doctor sorted through the writs in his desk, many of which came directly from the pope. When he found one that seemed to suit his purpose, he fetched one of his chirurgical knives and, as delicately as though he were cutting live flesh, lifted the two separated parts of the wax seal from it. He then fetched a fresh sheet of parchment and wrote something in a very careful hand. When he had finished, he rolled it and, to the boy’s astonishment, heated his knife in the candle flame and used it to graft the two halves of the seal together again.

“I see your mind frothing with questions, and yet, recognizing the delicacy of the situation, you don’t ask them. Instead, you watch for yourself and come to your own conclusions. I think you have a future, Tristan. I think you will make yourself very useful.”

Now they left again, the boy hurrying to keep up with his master’s purposeful steps. He turned right this time and opened a door to a set of stairs the boy knew about but had been warned never to follow.

“I know you wonder why I’m going to this ghastly place, let alone taking you. The truth is I cannot say. Except that the people who work their art down here are the sort of men who might need two pairs of eyes on them to do the right thing.”

A man groaned in the darkness ahead of them.

The dungeon.

This is the dungeon.

They put thieves and sorcerers here.

It had not occurred to Tristan, who had the deepest confidence in Maître de Chauliac, to be afraid until just that moment.

“We don’t fix men down here, good doctor, we break them. I think you’re on the wrong floor.”

The dungeons, which had sat in such a state of disuse for the first years of the aptly named Clement’s reign that old carts and tools were stored here, had recently come to life again. Sournois, formerly a blacksmith, had been singled out specifically by this changed and un-clement Clement to head up the new “nether wing” of the palace, which was where the enemies of God’s peace would be stored and, when necessary, put to the question. The man hanging from his arms with his ruined legs dangling looked to have been asked a question of some gravity indeed—a question whose answer he could not or would not share.

The doctor noted, with some revulsion, that the man had neither nipples nor fingernails, and that his shoulders were out of joint.