The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (18 page)

‘I’ll be there. Who should I ask for?’

‘Blaze. Blaze Halfbreed.’

He nodded. ‘In half an hour.’

###

I made my way to the fishmarket, every sense alert, but I smelled nothing of dunmagic. I didn’t have any trouble finding the cantina Niamor had described. It was about as sleazy a place as I’d ever seen in all the Isles of Glory, and it stank worse than any. The large bouncer on the door didn’t want to let me in: I was the wrong sex, it seemed. Only males went in by the front door. The females used the back, and they all belonged to the local pimp.

If it came to that, I didn’t particularly want to go in anyway.

I raised one hand to my shoulder to finger the sword hilt on my back, and held up a coin with the other. ‘Is there a man named Bloyd inside?’ I asked.

The bouncer guffawed. ‘Yeah. He’s here.’ He plucked the coin out of my fingers. ‘You wanna talk to him? I’ll call him out; this I gotta see.’

Bloyd proved to be a huge man with an impressive combination of fat and muscle that normally marks a wrestler. He looked clean enough, but he smelled of fish. He looked me up and down in disbelief. ‘I don’t have nuttin’ to do with halfbreed muck,’ he said.

‘Aw, come on,’ the bouncer protested. ‘She’s just about your size, Bloyd.’

‘I want your service as a butcher,’ I said. ‘And I’ll pay. You are a butcher?’

‘The best in Calment Major—once.’

Just then, some more customers arrived and the bouncer’s attention was diverted. I drew Bloyd away. ‘You got your tools still?’

‘What’s a butcher without his choppers?’

‘Do you know how to joint and truss a sorgret carcass for Calmenter stuffed roast?’ It was one of the most complex things I could think of that would ever be asked of a Calmenter butcher, and it involved both deboning and some delicate stitchery.

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll pay you twenty setus for a special job. But it’s got to be good.’

‘Twenty setus
?
What in all the island do you want me to butcher—a sea-pony?’

I told him.

###

Half an hour later we were at
The Drunken Plaice
, having called at Bloyd’s house for his butchering equipment first. I had glanced inside his master-butcher’s case; his knives and choppers and saws were Calment-made, and that meant quality. He looked after them well too: they all had an edge that could have split a sea-urchin’s spine lengthways.

Garrowyn Gilfeather was already at the inn, and the three of us went upstairs together. Halfway up the steps, Garrowyn grabbed my elbow. I turned to look at him. In the dim lantern light, I could see that his nose tip was twitching in agitation. ‘What is this,’ he hissed. ‘What are ye playing at, girl?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I can smell it,
’ he said. ‘The wrongness.’

‘You’re Syr-aware?’ But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. If he was one of the Aware, I would have sensed it.

‘Charnels, no. This is
dunmagic
I smell?’

‘It is.’ I was muddled: how could he smell dunmagic, yet not be aware?

Now I had the two of them glaring at me. I said quickly, ‘A dunmagic sore that needs removing, that’s all. There’s no dunmagicker here.’

They were only partially mollified. I went to Flame’s room first, leaving the both of them outside the door, eyeing each other, a mindless shark and a scheming octopus sizing one another up, even as they wondered what was going on.

Tor and Ransom were both in the room; Flame was lying on the bed. The swelling in her arm had started to go down but her eyes were beginning to glaze; she could hardly focus them at all now. ‘I’ve brought a doctor,’ I said without preamble.

‘A doctor? No doctor can help me.’ She gave a gesture of defeat. ‘Surely you know that. Not even a halfbreed is that dumb.’ She turned her face to the wall.

A Dustel on the bedpost, presumably Ruarth, glared at her and snapped his beak.

‘It’s the dunmagic talking,’ I told him. I jerked my head at Tor, and he took the hint, ushering Ransom out of the room with him. ‘Flame,’ I said, ‘the poison’s still mostly in your arm. If we could get rid of it, then you have a chance of destroying what’s got into your system, of destroying it with your sylvmagic.’

She twisted back to me, eyes widening. ‘You sadistic bitch! You want to
amputate
my arm?’

‘Why not? Flame, with your sylvmagic, you have a chance. Most people who die after amputations, die because of infection. But your sylvmagic can deal with that. And just to make certain, I’ve brought a Mekaté medicineman along as well.’

She was silent.

‘Would you rather be dead?’

There was an agitated chatter from the bedpost. Ruarth hopped from foot to foot and flapped his wings.

She listened, the dunmagic temporarily subdued, and tears rolled down her face. ‘He says I must.’

‘The Mekaté man will drug you so that you don’t feel anything while the doctor does it. At least for a while.’

She nodded, trusting still. ‘All right. After all, what’s an arm or two?’ She gave a ferocious smile. ‘Ruarth says
he
does without.’

I blinked hurriedly.

It seemed that every day in this place was bringing me closer to shedding tears I’d once thought I didn’t have within me anywhere.

Bloyd played up to the doctor role with a lofty dignity that was only spoiled when he opened his mouth: his accent was pure artisan. He spread his equipment out on a table we had brought up from downstairs, laying out each implement on its own white cloth, while I carefully blocked Flame’s view. Four knives of varying sizes. Two choppers. A whetstone. Thread of several thicknesses. Four curved needles of different lengths. A bottle of whisky. Two saws with differing teeth sizes. A number of clamps. A pile of muslin cloths. Everything reassuringly clean and sharp… Ruarth, however, showed considerable agitation until I frowned at him. Ransom, who had come back in with Tor, wasn’t much calmer. Garrowyn’s hedgerow eyebrows shot up to meet his thatch of hair when he saw the array of butchering tools. The look he gave me was one of both amusement and mockery. ‘Are we dining, lass, or amputating? Are ye wanting herbs then, not drugs?’

‘Do your job,’ I snapped at him. He grinned, then opened up the pack he had brought with him and took out his pots and bottles.

We dosed Flame with Garrowyn’s pain-killing herbs and sleeping draughts, while Bloyd rubbed his hands together. ‘Well, now, lass,’ he said cheerily. ‘The last arm I chopped off was actually me wife’s. And I promise you, she niver felt a thing. Niver missed it neither… Now let’s see the problem.’

We lifted Flame up onto the table and he examined the arm distastefully as she began to drift off. Then he looked at me. ‘Thirty setus
,
and not a copper less.’ His voice was as hard as the muscles of his arm; he knew what he was looking at and he knew how much trouble interfering with a dunmaster could bring him.

I made a show of quibbling, but my heart wasn’t in it.

My heart wasn’t in what followed either.

The drugs dulled Flame’s pain, but she wasn’t entirely unconscious. We had her strapped down, but each slice into her flesh made her thrash about and give vent to moans that had me wincing as if I were the one being operated on. It was awful.

‘Be quick,’ I told Bloyd. ‘And you
do
realise that this is
not
a carcass. She can bleed to death.’

His relish for the job was undisguised. He had made the first cut even while I was still adjusting the last of the ties and thereafter kept up a running commentary on what he was doing and why, directing Tor and myself to do this, hand him that, put pressure there, press here. For reasons which I didn’t quite understand, he said he had to take the arm off just above the elbow, not at the joint. He made the first cut in her skin much lower down so he would have sufficient to fold over the stump later. Ransom fainted while he was explaining that bit.

I couldn’t afford the luxury of passing out. I had to watch every move Bloyd made, scared all the while that he’d forget he was dealing with living flesh. When Flame began to groan and surface to a waking state, Garrowyn dropped a cloth over her face that was wet with one of his bottled concoctions. The smell of it was sweet and nauseating. Even so, Flame screamed when Bloyd took the saw to the bones, but then, mercifully, she seemed to sink deeper into unconsciousness. Garrowyn felt for her pulse, but gave me a reassuring nod. ‘The beat’s strong,’ he said. ‘She may be bonny but she’s as strong as Sindur’s Crags.’ I’d never heard of the place, so it wasn’t a particularly reassuring remark.

Bloyd was a good butcher, I’ll grant him that, and his blithe callousness was possibly an advantage, because it meant he wasn’t nervous. The fresh blood didn’t faze him in the least and he tied knots in blood vessels with casual calm, as though he knew exactly what he was doing; even his sewing up afterwards was deft. Garrowyn watched him with sharp eyes and gave a running commentary of his own. ‘Well now, that must be the main tube for the blood. Hadn’t ye better staunch that flow then, mun? Hey, wee fella, I wouldn’t touch that, if I were you—rather tie that one off there, there’s a wee laddie. Eh, now that’s a neat stitch, sure it is.’ I wanted to scream at him to shut up; it wasn’t until much later that I realised the success of the operation probably owed much to his suggestions.

I paid Bloyd his money, warned him to keep his mouth shut (I had no fears that he wouldn’t; he knew what was at stake if the dunmaster found out what he had done), and ushered him to the door. Then I turned back to help Garrowyn and Tor bandage the stump and return Flame to the bed. She was already surfacing; and pain was making her draw in breath in shuddering moans. Yet she needed to be conscious; she had to rid her system of the residue of the dunmagic and she had to banish any infection from the operation itself, so when Garrowyn suggested some more sleep medicine, I shook my head. ‘Not yet—she has to deal with her own healing first. Mix some pain-reliever instead.’

I spared a glance for Ruarth on the end of her bed. Birds were just birds to me and little ones all looked alike anyway, or they did until I met the Dustels; but I would have had to be blind not to see the utter dejection felt by this one. Poor Ruarth. He sat huddled, his iridescence muted, his wings hunched, his head drooping, those deep blue eyes so filled with misery I wanted to comfort him—but I didn’t know how to go about it.

Flame moaned again and vomited. We cleaned her up and I took her right hand, the only one she had now. ‘It’s over,’ I said. ‘But now you have to fight some more.’

Her eyes opened and the pain hit her, almost sending her back where she had been. I watched as she fought it—and won, as I had known she would. She even managed a smile of a kind. She was quite a woman.

Garrowyn gave her the pain-reducing draught from his medicine kit and went to stand near the window. My place by Flame’s side was taken by Ransom, now conscious and eager to make up for his earlier display of squeamishness.

‘You need to rest,’ Tor said quietly to me. ‘You too have wounds. I’ll look after things here.’ He waved a hand around as if to encompass everything: the blood, the amputated arm, Ransom, Flame.

I nodded. ‘Thanks, Tor.’

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’

I nodded again and touched his arm in gratitude.

Then I looked across at Garrowyn where he was propped against the wall, watching us all with those calculating eyes of his. His nose still twitched. I couldn’t help thinking of rabbits; they had noses that always seemed to be quivering. ‘I
really
don’t like blood,’ he said.

‘We owe you our thanks,’ I said as I counted out the money I had promised him, and I added gravely, ‘Especially if you don’t like blood.’ In truth, I was inclined to believe him; he looked quite pale.

He took it, saying, ‘I’ll leave the bottle of painmask. Give her two spoonfuls every two hours.’

‘Will you come back tomorrow?’ Ransom asked.

He shook his head. ‘Nay, not me. I’ve too much respect for me own safety.’ He hefted his pack and made for the door. I picked up my lantern and followed on his heels.

Tor thought I was going to my room, but I had one more thing to do before I could allow myself to rest, so I walked downstairs with Garrowyn.

‘No frets,’ he said. ‘She’ll be bonnie.’

‘I don’t know what we would have done without you… Tell me, why is it that Mekaté medicines are so much better than those of other islands?’ I’d seen a man have his leg cut off without the benefit of such drugs; it was not a scene I liked to remember, and that had been in one of The Hub’s best hospitals.

‘Because selver-herders think with their skulls instead of their superstitions.’

It was the second time he had used that expression, selver-herders, and it meant nothing to me. ‘Who are they?’

‘The people of the Sky Plains. The Roof of Mekaté. Ye ever been to Mekaté?’

I nodded.

‘And yet ye’ve never heard of us. Ye visited the dross, Blaze, and missed the gold.’

‘If it’s so wonderful, then why did you leave?’

‘The trouble with paradise is that there’s no room for devils.’

‘You weren’t a devil to us tonight.’

‘Ask any man about his devil and ye’ll get a different answer. Ask a Fellih-worshipper, and he may tell you tis a woman who speaks her mind. Ask yon young mun upstairs, and he may tell you tis the dirty beggar in the gutter who would gut you soon as plead your charity. Ask ye, Blaze Halfbreed, and you may say tis the man who denies you a birthright.’

He was far too sharp to be a comfortable companion, Garrowyn. In petty revenge, I asked: ‘And if I were to ask your fellow selver-herders who their devils were, what would they say?’

‘They’d say a man who is different. No more, no less. Paradise must have rules, y’see. And one man’s paradise can be another man’s hell.’ We had reached the outer door to the inn, and he turned to me, the lines of his aging face furrowed into a mocking smile. ‘If ever ye find what ye’re looking for, ye’ll probably hate it. Life’s made of ironies like that. All I ever wanted to be was a chirurgeon, and then I found the smell of blood makes me want to chuck up.’

I changed the subject. ‘How can you smell dunmagic and not be Aware?’

He smiled, mocking me still. ‘I have an excellent nose, lass.’

He signalled a lantern boy to come and light his way, and then he was gone, swinging down the street, clad in that strange garment that seemed to have no form, his hair a circle around his head like a clump of unruly dune grass.

Once he was around the corner, he threw up. I heard him.

###

I turned my attention to the reason I had come downstairs: I had to find Tunn. I had not forgotten what Tor had told me of the tapboy’s dunmagic whipping.

He wasn’t in the fuel shed.

I found him huddled with his dog behind the fish boxes. It was the smell that led me there, the smell of a dunmagic whipping that conquered even the stench of fish. He cowered away when he saw me, and his speech—if he was indeed trying to speak—had degenerated into utter gibberish. What I saw by the light of the lantern made me want to retch.

He had weals all over his body as if he had been beaten. But I knew that physically he hadn’t been touched; those welts had been raised by spells and were designed both to give maximum pain and to heal slowly. What had been done to his skin was sick; the effect it’d had on his trust and on his mind was worse. I tried to reach him but he wouldn’t let me near. Every time I extended a hand to him, or even spoke, he cringed in fear. The only living thing he was going to trust was his canine pet. He wouldn’t take the ointment I had brought for him. In the end I left it there on the ground, hoping he would make use of it; it wouldn’t heal the wounds any faster, but it would deaden some of the pain, which I tried to explain.

Then I went back to my room to suffer my guilt. I ought never have involved the lad in the affairs of a dunmagicker.

That’s enough for today, if you don’t mind. Some things just to remember, even after all this time…