Mage's Blood

38

Not Dead

Hermetic: Healing

Healing is surely the most blessed of the Gnostic Arts, yet so many scorn it as unmanly – until the day they take a wound!

SIMONE DE ROOP, ARGUNDY 793

It is better to die than to suffer the accursed touch of Shaitan upon thy flesh

BRANDED SCRIPT UPON THE BELLIES OF

CRUCIFIED HEALER-NUNS OF THE ORDO JUSTINIA,

LEFT BY HADISHAH ASSASSINS IN 908

Brochena, Javon, on the continent of Antiopia

Junesse 928

1 month until the Moontide

She wasn’t dead. Yet. This one thought rose from Elena’s mind, above even the desperate attempt to restart her healing, as Sordell stood over her, watching her shudder towards oblivion. It was primal: the need for survival entwined with the urge to strike back.

<Bastido! Cinque!>

On Sordell’s right, Bastido creaked into life and a faint sound warned Sordell, and he spun, somehow blocking the wooden stave that thrust for his midriff. But Rutt Sordell had never been a warrior and in his alarm he put all his shielding there, leaving him naked to the other blows. The chain-flail lashed his face, making him reel drunkenly, then the mace smashed into his temple from the other direction and his body left the ground, spiralling sideways, and blood sprayed, arcing across the chamber as he struck the wall in a pulverising crunch. His skull left a wet stain as it slid down the stone. He landed on his back, his head propped slightly. His face was slack and devoid of awareness. It had taken perhaps half a second.

Then she realised what she’d done. Lorenzo! Blood began to pump from his broken skull. No!

She reflexively flooded her own throat-wound with healing-gnosis, all that was left to her, sucking air into the wound, then sealing it. She vomited blood, gulped down oxygen, and her vision came and went. All she could do was lie there, staring at the other three bodies.

Gurvon had laughed when he found the deadliest killer in the Grey Foxes was also a healer. It makes me tough to kill, she had boasted in return. I just keep coming back.

<Bastido, enough,> she told the fighting-machine and it went still again, almost smirking. She had nothing left now. All she could do was crawl. So she crawled.

She began to pull herself along the floor, first to Lorenzo, though she knew already she was too late. His mouth fell open and a black scarab the size of a fist scuttled out and away, seeking the shadows. Sordell, gone again.

I killed Lori … Damn this! <Cera!>

No one came.

I’ve got to get help, or I’m dead. She groaned and jack-knifed her way across the floor to the head of the spiral stairs. Her legs were still too far gone to stand. She began to crawl down, head first, her mind churning as she went, barely holding spirit and body together.

<Cera!>

Every movement threatened to rip her open again. Her ankle was pure Hel, her shoulder-blades grated and her throat was a line of fire despite all her efforts. She kept coughing up blood, unable to get a clean breath, but she went on, contorting her way through the maze of pain, slipping in and out of consciousness, not rational – but not dead either.

Somehow she reached the landing and kicked at the door. <Cera! Someone!>

The door opened, and someone knelt over her. She knew it was Cera just from the smell of her.

‘Oh, Ella,’ she breathed, ‘you weren’t supposed to live.’ Her face was stricken, but her tones were measured. ‘I am sorry, but you were the leg the fox had to gnaw off to escape the trap. I’m truly sorry. I made a deal. Our lives for yours.’

Elena let the world fall away.

She woke on a linen-draped bed, half-naked beneath a sheet, swathed in bandages. Her neck was encased in cloth, as were her shoulder and ankle. Chains clamped down her arms and legs. It was a battle to breath, a war against all the pain and the crushing weight of failure. She tried to reach out with the gnosis and got nothing at all. I’ve been Chained.

The door opened. She did not need to look to know who it was.

‘Hello, Elena,’ said Gurvon Gyle, sitting on the bed. ‘I swear, you’re harder to eradicate than a cockroach.’ He removed the sheet. She writhed, but the chains held. Her former lover studied her body coldly, then met her eyes. ‘I wondered if I would still feel any desire for you, despite everything. But I feel nothing at all.’

She walled up her mind, though the Chain-rune left her with limited defences, but Gyle did not attack her with the gnosis; he employed words instead.

‘You never stood a chance, Elena. The attacker has all the choices. The defender can only react. Your little protégée came to realise that.’ He smiled faintly. ‘Thank you for ridding me of Targon – though the emperor will not be pleased.’

‘I hope he dismembers you for it,’ she rasped, startled by the hideous sound of her own voice.

‘Don’t try to speak, Elena,’ Gyle warned. ‘The throat wound is still raw.’

She coughed up blood and spat it at him, missing by some distance.

Gyle stroked her brow thoughtfully. ‘You trained your little princessa well, Elena. When the moment of truth came, she knew how to cut her losses. Ironic, isn’t it? The one who taught her how to be rational and self-serving became the pawn she sacrificed.’

‘Go to Hel, Gurvon,’ she grated.

‘While Mara led you a dance, chasing shadows in the canals, I was working on the princessa, poisoning her mind against you and the Kestrians. When you obligingly started screwing Lorenzo, it was the final proof she needed; from then on you were doomed. She herself sent Lorenzo into the trap we laid on his way back from the Krak. I was waiting for him.’

She cringed at the remembrance of Lorenzo. He loved me, and it got him killed. I saw Cera change – I should have known—

‘Oh, don’t be too hard on yourself, Elena,’ Gyle said mockingly. ‘You’ve done magnificently, if wrecking my plans is a criteria for magnificence. It couldn’t last, though. You got lucky, locking up Coin without realising who she was, but that only bought you time.’

Gyle paused, as a huge black scarab beetle crawled out of his pocket. He smiled thinly. ‘Rutt also says “hello”.’ The scarab ran down his arm onto her belly.

She felt a wave of desperate fear. ‘Get it off me!’

Gyle smiled as the scarab crawled up her body, its feet sharp on her skin. She writhed, trying to throw it off, but the chains held her in place.

‘Please, Gurvon!!’ she begged, truly terrified now.

The beetle paused on her left breast and its pincers teased her nipple. She screamed, ‘Please, Gurvon!’

‘The thing is, Elena, I’ve got a severe manpower shortage now – and there is so much to do to complete this coup.’

She shook her head mutely as the scarab crawled onto her collarbone.

‘Make no mistake, Elena: you and I are mortal enemies now. You betrayed me, and I can never forgive that. But I’m a practical man, and I can even bear to see you on your feet again, provided you’re under my control.’ His face became bleak. ‘I’d like to kill you, but Javon needs to see that its heroic Queen’s Champion is alive and well; that will reassure them when Cera starts making overtures to the Gorgio and suing for peace.’ He raised his arm and the scarab of Rutt Sordell crawled onto the back of his hand. ‘And of course, Rutt needs a new body.’

She clamped her jaws shut. <No!>

He grasped her jaw and nose with deft hands and pulled open her mouth. The scarab slithered down his hand and onto her cheek. ‘Of course, Rutt would prefer a male body, but beggars can’t be choosers, can they? If he wants a body capable of gnosis, it will have to be yours.’

<Please, Gurvon, no!>

Gyle’s eyes hardened. ‘You know, if you hadn’t screwed that Kestrian, not only would Cera have retained her friendship towards you, but I might have felt some sympathy now. But I feel nothing at all any more. Goodbye for ever, Elena.’

The head of Sordell’s necromantic scarab peered into her right eye, feelers waving, mandibles working feverishly. Then it turned and crawled inside her mouth.

There was a sharp pain and a hideous burrowing sensation in her palate.

Then nothing at all.