Warsinger

by James Osiris Baldwin

  “Finally.” She dug her fingers in around my harness, clinging to it. “This sounds… like… really stupid. But please… tell me I never have to go back there again.”

  “Suri…” I wrapped my arms around her and buried my mouth against her hair, kissing her brow fiercely. “You never, ever, EVER have to go there again.”

  A shudder passed through her back, and she stayed where she was for a long minute. I’d have kept her there, but our reverie was interrupted by an irritated shriek. We looked up, startled, to see Cutthroat kicking out and waving her claws like an angry toddler in a booster seat. Karalti gave us both a long-suffering look.

  “I… I’d better get my bird before she accidentally cuts Karalti’s throat or something,” Suri said, sniffing.

  “For sure.” I kissed her one last time. “Welcome home.”

  “I… yeah.” Her eyes misted up a little before she turned and slammed the visor of her helmet down, striding toward her hookwing. Cutthroat strained toward her, honking with indignation. Karalti bent forward obligingly, and Suri took care of the snaps. The hookwing dropped to the ground and immediately began to preen, hissing like a tea kettle as she frantically combed her feathers back into place.

  Cocoa had been motoring around the courtyard with her nose snuffling in the dirt like a cross between a curious puppy and a shop vac, but when she saw Cutthroat, she stopped hoovering and happily waddled toward her. If hookwings could be placed on a scale, with one end being ‘sword-hands death machine’ and the other end of the scale being ‘giant toothy chicken’, Cutthroat and Cocoa were a 1 and a 10, respectively. Cutthroat was a Bugatti. Cocoa was a short bus.

  “Oi! What are you doin’?” Suri backed up as Cutthroat snarled and lurched forward, putting herself between Suri and Cocoa. She raised her arms and gaped her jaws wide, her feathers standing on end. Cocoa did not get the message. The old hookwing's whole body spasmed as she gave a great honk of delight and ran straight at her, short plump tail wagging rapidly from side to side.

  “Cutthroat! No! Down!” Suri tried to catch her reins, but Cutthroat was having none of it. She snapped around at her, drool streaming between her teeth, only to stop when Cocoa bounced up right between her raised arms and headbutted her under the chest. She cooed and chirped, and then – to Cutthroat’s confused rage – to tooth-groom HER feathers.

  “SKRREEEEK?!?” Cutthroat backpedaled, swiping out in front of her. Cocoa, through sheer dumb luck, bumbled underneath the slashing claws and began to earnestly attempt to jam her nose under Cutthroat’s tail. She reared her head up, every feather bristling with indignation, and demurely whisked her rump to the side. Cocoa wasn’t so easily deterred. She ducked forward, snuffling curiously, only to squawk when Cutthroat struck her over the head with the blunt club of her wrist.

  “Cutthroat! C’mere, you bloody old bitch!” Suri hollered.

  Cocoa seemed no worse for wear. As Cutthroat whirled around, heaving with the need to destroy, Vilmas slid down Karalti’s wing with Masha in his arms. The sight of her favorite human drove all thoughts of buttsniffing from Cocoa’s mind. She cheeped with excitement, absentmindedly dodging Cutthroat’s one-man slapfight and toddling over to the pair of them with her crests lifted high.

  “Ack!” Masha laughed as Cocoa began to lick her hair, slobbering all over it. “Oh, look at you! There’s a good girl! Who’s a good girl?”

  “Peep! Peep!” Cocoa wagged her entire body from side to side.

  Suri ran to Cutthroat and caught her by the rings, hauling her head around as she stalked Cocoa with menacing intent. “Nope, no you don’t. Come on, you big sourpuss.”

  “Lovely creatures, aren’t they? I’ve had Cocoa since she was a little ball of fluff. Dumb as a post, but this girl’s nearly thirty years old and can still haul a cart from Taltos to Czongrad.” Masha chuckled, pushing Cocoa’s muzzle away. Now that Cutthroat was contained, one of the stablemen ran up and took Masha’s mount by the mouth. The smaller, stubbier hookwing happily pranced away with him, her chubby thighs jiggling on every step. “Come on, Tuun. Let’s go and see this man of yours and glove up.”

  Suri dragged her irate dinosaur to the stables, while Istvan, Rin, and Ebisa followed Masha and I to the castle’s hospital. It was more like a small medical bay than an actual hospital, with room for six beds and maybe a row of stretchers. The chief medic of the Myszno Defense Force, Lazar Skalitz, was busy using a small mana-powered soldering iron to cauterize the inflamed, abscessed flesh of Vash Dorha’s upper arm. The Baru lay there as the machine sparked and hissed, stoic and sweating with fever, staring at the ceiling as the eye-watering stench of infection roiled through the room. As soon as we stepped in, his eyes darted across to us.

  “About time you wankers came back.” He leaned up just enough he could see us, and flashed the three of us a broad cheesy grin. Like all Tuun men, self-included, he had a Eurasian look: dark hair, well-lined eyes used to squinting against the wind, the ruddy, rosy cheeks of someone who had grown up on the steppe. He might have been roguishly handsome once, but at some point in his life, he’d had his face smashed in like a windshield. His nose, cheekbones, and mouth were crooked with thick scars, his skin weathered from hard years of asceticism and a life spent outdoors. It was good to see he was cheerful, but he was pale, fever-eyed, and visibly clammy. “Let’s see… we have my lovely Arshak walking with an honored elder of the Southern Churvi, if I’m not mistaken, and… who's this? Lord Dog, returning from his tour of pissing on every lamp post between here and Dalim?”

  Istvan looked aghast. “Vash!”

  “That's Voivode Dog to you, you dirty peasant.” I grinned back at him. “I just finished 'Your Gracing' Taltos after Ignas called us there.”

  “Hah!” Vash sunk his head back onto the pillow. He was fighting the fever, but his thin face was starting to look practically skeletal, cheeks hollow and unshaven. “Dirty peasant is right. This damn machine arm is rotting me alive.”

  Lazar was last to react. He looked up from his work and nearly jumped out of his chair, startled to see Masha glowering at him from the doorway. His eyes narrowed, then widened behind his spectacles. Then, awkwardly, the tall, crane-like man scrambled to his feet and bowed deeply. “By the gods! Masterhealer Masha of-”

  “Yes, yes, Master Masha of Taltos,” the old woman muttered, hauling her trunk on wheels behind her. “What has happened here? Ach, that stench... did you louts go through ALL of the surgical steps before attaching this Artifact to our gentleman's shoulder? Proper handwashing? Proper sterilization?”

  “Y-Y-Yes, Master Physician.” Lazar was as giddy as a schoolgirl at her first boyband concert. He watched her set up her station in awe. “I worked with the Master Artificer over there, and we properly cleaned, sealed, and dressed the wound, provided aftercare... antiseptics...”

  Masha sniffed, eyes narrowing. “Yes, but this castle was recently occupied by the undead, wasn't it? Mounds of shambling rotting flesh... you can only imagine the contagion they carried. Artificed prosthetics are always a gamble in the cleanest operating theatres of the land, let alone in a place where the dark humors of the dead hang on the air.”

  “Then we'd better just cut it off, or unscrew it or however you detach metal from a man.” Vash sighed mournfully. “I'll just have to learn how to play my whistle with the other hand.”

  “Vash, I swear on the Nine...” Istvan pressed his lips together and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  The monk leered. “I'd have you to do it, Arshak, but there's ladies present.”

  “Oh, you're a fiery one, aren't you?” Masha cackled as Istvan turned the color of a strawberry and sunk down out of sight in his chair. “That's good. Means you're more likely to pull out of this. Alright... Lord Tuun, you're studying the grand arts of healing. Let's see if you can diagnose what's wrong with our lecherous friend here and start the cure.”

  I swallowed. I'd been slowly learning the medical skill trees of Archemi since I arrived in the game, but I'd neve
r had to diagnose a friend before, and never in front of an audience.

  “Do you mind if we have a bit of privacy?” I asked them. “I, uhh...”

  “No, Tuun. Steel your nerves.” Masha clicked her tongue. “If you're nervous in front of others, how would you fare in a busy hospital? Make your assessment. Infections can turn fast, and this man already has fever bad enough to damage his brain if we aren’t quick about it.”

  “Too late for that, fair lady,” Vash sighed. “As Arshak here will happily inform you, my brains are only slightly less damaged than an apple in the bottom of a cider bin.”

  When she stepped aside, I got a better look at what had caused Vash to start slowly losing hitpoints in the KMS. The prosthetic limb had been fitted after he’d lost his arm punching a swooping dragon right in the face. The arcane blowback had shattered the limb to the high upper arm, so Lazar had amputated it just below the shoulder. The artificed limb Rin had made for him was easily as good as the sophisticated BCI prosthetics I'd seen in the Army, capable of very delicate motions and even possessing a sense of touch. However, something had gone seriously wrong. The flesh around the edge of the prosthetic was necrotizing, turning black. The muscle and tissue above that was inflamed and red. Lazar had cleaned out and packed several abscesses already.

  I ran through the basics first. I had enough levels in Field Medicine that I could take his temperature with my hand and know what it was: in his case, 104 degrees, which was bad enough to soon become fatal. I didn't even need the augmented reality assist the skill gave me to have a rough idea of what was wrong - he had a serious case of blood poisoning, and the only reason he hadn't gone into shock and died was because he was as tough as old boot leather.

  Archemi's healing skill tree combined some modern germ theory with the medieval system of the four humors as the basis for administering medicines. The NPCs had a basic understanding of germ theory and the importance of keeping medical tools and surfaces free of bugs, but no antibiotics. Herbal and alchemical potions took their place. The former were generally safe, the latter only safe for people like me, dragons like Karalti, or other creatures immune to mana.

  My AR highlighted areas of diagnostic interest on Vash's body with a soft blue glow. The glow was concentrated on his prosthetic arm, naturally, and more diffusely around his chest and neck. As I watched, the light crept little by little toward the center of his chest and up toward his face.

  I frowned down at it. “Okay… first things first. Istvan, I want you to go wait outside.”

  “No,” he said quickly.

  “Look at me.” I shot him a dark look, and whatever he saw in my expression made him blanch. “I’m the count now. That’s an order.”

  “You heard him. Go on, Istvan,” Vash croaked.

  Rin went and caught him under the elbow as Istvan hesitated. “Come on. We’ll go get something to eat. Well, for YOU to eat, because I like, can’t, but you know what I mean.”

  As we piled on, Istvan rubbed his eyes and grimaced. “Fine… I'll be back in ten minutes.”

  “Should be all we need.” Provided Vash didn’t have a heart attack.

  They left together, and when they were out of earshot, Vash grunted and lifted his eyebrows as he looked to us. “It's not good, is it?”

  “No. You've got a serious case of blood poisoning. The infection's headed toward your heart and you’re about five minutes away from it seizing up,” I said. “I'm surprised you're not dead.”

  [You gain 5 Skill EXP: Field Medicine!]

  “It’s coming.” Vash scrunched his eyes up and settled back against the pillows. “I can feel Burna's shadow starting to slide over me. Maybe I got too cocky, eh?”

  “Ai yai yai, why did you not use a Bloodscour potion: or even better, medicine to regrow the limb?” Masha asked, turning between me and Lazar.

  “None of us know how to make those,” I replied. “I'd planned to go to the university and pick up more recipes, but the Demon slaughtered most of the academics and physicians there.”

  “No! Even Masterhealer Porov?” Masha gasped.

  “Yes. The vampire targeted the university specifically,” Lazar said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “I was trained at the college, but we never covered alchemical medicines...”

  “Alchemical?” Vash scowled. “Mana?”

  “Perhaps.” Masha poked me. “Hector, I agree with your diagnosis. You're of a level now where you should be able to see what we might be able to treat his infection with.”

  She was right. Now that I'd worked out what was wrong, the Augmented Reality options had changed. The light was now in different colors - black around the dead flesh, and bright glowing red everywhere else. When I focused on each area, tooltips appeared. Some of them were specific, giving me potion suggestions - the fever-reducing Goldenseal Tincture, which looked like it would only temporarily bring his temperature down - and the list of ingredients I would need, but one of the potion recipes and name was obscured, and the surgical tooltip was just a row of question marks. I didn't have enough training in the Herbalism and Surgery to know what they were.

  “Goldenseal Tincture first, and then… do we have to remove the implanted parts of the prosthetic and take the arm off?” I asked Masha and Lazar, looking back.

  “No. Taking it off now will only make the infection spread faster. You must always treat infections before attempting surgery of any kind.” Masha poked a finger at Vash's arm, not touching him, but close enough that he preemptively winced. “All that exposed bone and blood and muscle, no no no. Garlic and Goldenseal aren’t strong enough for blood poisoning that has reached this advanced stage. We must brew Bloodscour to cure this mess, but there is a problem. It requires two rare ingredients I do not have: Cat's Eye Mushrooms, a fungus that only grows in Hercynia, and a herb called King's Grass.”

  “You know what...” Breathless, I checked my Inventory. In among the eighty pounds of old armor and all the other random shit adventurers hoarded - bits of cloth, pelts, string, leather - I still had some of the four herbs I'd collected for the Trial of Marantha. I actually still had a lot of the Cat’s Eye Mushrooms - over fifty of them, because I'd taken extra of everything just in case. “I have both of those. How many do you need?”

  Masha blinked in surprise. “Five mushrooms, and five bundles of King's Grass.”

  I only had six bundles of King’s Grass. It was an essential ingredient in the Dragon's Blood potion I needed to drink every week, but no way in hell was I going to let Vash die. I pulled both herbs from my Inventory and handed the weird bulbous mushrooms and the blue grass to Masha. “Here.”

  “Oh... how kind of you.” She clasped them to her chest, and tottered off out of the room. “Come with me, Lord Tuun. I'll show you how to brew this.”

  “Take your time, by all means!” Vash called to her.

  “Hush. I have to finish debriding this dead tissue anyway,” Lazar scolded, pulling his mask back on.

  Chapter 22

  I followed Masha out to a trestle table, where she had her trunk open and was deftly arranging her potion-making tools: glassware, a crucible - a thick metal dish on a burner - and a funny-shaped jar called an alembic. When she was finished, she unrolled a cloth full of clean, extremely sharp knives, set up a rack of ingredients in jars, and then carefully removed a large molded container the size of a small cannonball. She removed the straps and carefully opened it, revealing a small, sealed bottle of glowing blue mana. Even with the seal intact, I could feel the heat and energy emanating from the stuff.

  “Other than Karalti’s blood, this is the first time I've seen liquid mana up close,” I said, watching Masha set the bottle into a special stand. It was lighter than it looked, the mana inside swirling like brilliant turquoise mercury.

  “Well, feast your eyes. That is almost five hundred olbia sitting there in that bottle.” She snapped on a pair of safety goggles.

  “How does anyone afford to be a mage in this game?” I scratched my head, wincin
g.

  “Most new sorcerers only need green-grade mana, and at the more advanced level, sixty-percent bluecrystal is sufficient for all but the most complex magic. This is pure Mastercraft-quality liquid bluecrystal, eh? No adulterants, no copper, refined to ninety-nine percent purity. By comparison, Her Holiness bleeds mana that is about seventy percent, according to manuscripts I have read.”

  “Yeesh. It's got to be toxic.” I frowned. “What are Vash's odds?”

  “For those who can afford the rare ingredients, Bloodscour is one of the safer alchemical brews,” she said, pulling on a leather filter mask that covered her nose and mouth. “We only use a single drop of mana. Listen well, Tuun, because the ingredients must be mixed in a special order. Firstly, you must chop the herbs as finely as possible. Cat's Eye Mushrooms, King's Grass, and Holy Basil. They are macerated, meaning that they are mashed, in the order I just spoke. Then you add this.”

  She took out a jar, which looked to be full of mashed rotten meat.

  “That being…?” I grimaced as she uncorked it, and a smell not unlike decomposing beef wafted into the room.

  “Troll flesh paste, which is the regeneration component,” she said. “Believe it or not, this is how it smells when it’s fresh. So, herbs first, then this. After the flesh, immediately add the Stingcrab Blood, and then - quickly - add five drams of colloidal silver. You stir them until the mixture is blended, then add one single drop of mana. It is very important you add the Stingcrab Blood before introducing the silver and mana, eh?”

  “Why?”

  “Stingcrabs have a unique ability: their blood allows mana to mix with the living flesh of monsters and humans, even those that are guaranteed to Strange,” she said. “Mana can cause plants to mutate, but only if they are alive. Inert, dead flesh can Strange, but it is relatively rare in alchemy. However, some ingredients, like fresh blood or creatures that can regenerate, like trolls, are very likely to mutate into some nasty beastie, and the last thing you want to do is have to chase a dangerous homunculus around your laboratory.”