by John Daulton
“Take it to sick bay,” Doctor Singh rasped at the two men, who still stood ten feet away. “Quickly.”
The younger of the two men stepped forward and, pushing the lid closed again, grasped the handle. He looked back at his unmoving compatriot. “You heard the doctor,” he said. “Let’s go.” He turned to the two withered medical personnel standing near him and whispered, “Will it work?” There was a fear in his voice that belied his discipline.
“If there is a loving God, it will,” Doctor Singh answered. “So pray.”
Orli and Doctor Singh dosed everyone in their ward as soon as the crate was in sick bay, starting with the captain whose tremors had begun to subside as they came in, a sure sign that the last stages of the disease were near at hand. Doctor Singh administered the shot and shook his head in doubt. This was awfully late. He placed a hand on the captain’s sweating brow and whispered, “Good luck, my friend.”
Orli watched Doctor Singh as he went off to administer the experimental drug to the rest of the patients on his assigned half of the room. She lingered for a moment above the captain once Doctor Singh had gone. She peered down into his deathly pale face. He wasn’t near as intimidating in this condition as he usually was, and it was for the first time that she realized that he was just a man, no different than her or anyone else aboard the ship. Seeing him lying there gave her an unexpected clarity—in part, a sense of her own resilience for having survived long enough to maybe bring him back—but something more as well, a new respect for him, for the man, the flawed man who had somehow held the crew together, forced them together with that cold voice and disciplinarian’s grip. He’d saved them all from anarchy, and he’d done it with all the same frailties that he shared with her. All the same weaknesses. She decided that if he lived, she would try to show him more respect. He’d earned it, even if she knew she’d never like his personality.
“Don’t give up, Captain,” she whispered. “Keep fighting. Like you always do.”
With that she went to dose the other half of the room, fighting against the violent stomach cramps that tore at her insides all the while. If she hurried, she might be able to inject them all before she was too weak to press the plunger down.
Chapter 31
When Altin arrived back at the orc village, the entire canyon was filled with smoke. The village was utterly destroyed, and everything but the two log lodges, which still burned high and bright, was reduced to heaps of ash upon which danced the orange flicker of dying flames. Altin choked and gasped and had to run bent low as he scoured the ruins for signs of Taot. But there were none. In fact he found nothing left alive at all. He sent out a telepathic message, seeking his reptilian friend, but got no reply. Darting from ash heap to ash heap, up and down the slope, he searched everywhere, stepping over burnt orc corpses at nearly every turn. Taot was nowhere to be found. He wanted to tell himself that the dragon was fine, but there was no answer from his telepathic prod. There was nothing, as if the dragon had him blocked, which Taot never did.
He widened his search, cursing himself with every step for being unable to divine—it seemed that every moment of the recent past presented him with another reason for that particular regret. He ran out of the canyon and scrambled up the rocky slope that would take him atop the cliffs surrounding the village. It was a vast area, a plateau, heavy with growth both high and low. Startling deer and pigs and birds of every size, he forced his way through the brush and trees, clamoring over rocks and wading through several small streams, all the time calling out for Taot, calling for his friend.
An hour later, his robes hanging from him in tatters, he finally spotted the dragon lying in a heap, a swath of broken trees marking the trajectory of its crash. He could see that one of his huge wings was fanned flat on the ground at an impossible angle, broken and twisted out of joint. Arrows pierced the membrane of both wings like needles sticking through a sheet, and a huge nasty spear jutted out from between the dragon’s ribs. Dark patches of blackened flesh all over Taot’s body showed where scales had been blown away to expose the flesh beneath, such damage presumably the work of the shaman’s ice bolts and fireballs. Apparently the orc magician had not been such an easy egg to crack as Taot had assumed. And Altin had left his dragon to fight the shaman all alone.
He raced to where Taot’s battered body lay and put his hands on the dragon’s ribs, praying to all nine gods that there was some breath still moving there. There was. Barely. Tears burned his eyes as he blinked back relief he did not deserve. He knelt at the dragon’s head, which was lying in the dirt pillowed by the broken bough of a tree that had come down with him in the crash. Taot’s breathing rasped, a barely discernable, a bubbling sound telling Altin that blood seeped into the dragon’s lungs. That spear had probably been the telling blow. And Altin could not heal.
He cast a seeing spell straight into Doctor Leopold’s office and found that the doctor was not sitting at his desk. He cursed and moved his sight through the wall and into the doctor’s examining room. The doctor was there. Altin made a quick assessment, determining that the man lying on the examining table was not likely to move in the next few seconds and aimed his teleport spell to the furthest corner of the room. He appeared a moment later, much to everyone’s surprise.
The man, wearing nothing but his socks, was furious as he clutched desperately for the tablecloth and pulled it around his nudity with a gasp. “By the gods, man! I will have you arrested for this.”
“Tidalwrath’s fits, Altin, what are you doing?” demanded Doctor Leopold.
Altin could barely speak he was so out of breath from clawing his way up and down the mountain slopes, and he had no time for apologies. “I need you now. An emergency. I beg you come. Please.” The words tumbled out between gasps as he seized the doctor’s arm. His eyes flicked to the irate man who was still fuming arrest threats while tugging on his pants. Altin gave him a plaintive look, adding, “You can have me executed later; I truly do not care. But Doctor Leopold, I need you now.”
Doctor Leopold had never seen Altin so agitated before, and, albeit reluctantly, he looked the question to his patient hoping for a tolerant respite. The man glowered at the doctor for a moment then studied Altin for a pair of breaths. He too could tell by Altin’s ragged look and panting fervor that perhaps an emergency was at hand.
“Fine,” he said. “Go.”
Altin thanked him with a look of pure relief and gripped Doctor Leopold’s arm as if intending to drag him bodily away. A moment later found them standing at Taot’s head.
Doctor Leopold staggered back reflexively in fear. “Good gods, Altin, have you gone mad?”
“No, he’s mine. This is my dragon. I’ve told you about him before. Please, you have to help him.”
Doctor Leopold hesitated briefly before giving in to curiosity. “What happened to him?”
“Just look,” Altin replied as if it should be obvious, but he realized Doctor Leopold needed a moment to gather his wits. “It was orcs,” he added, forcing politeness. That was all the courtesy he could manage. “Doctor, there isn’t time. Listen to his breath.” He dropped to his knees near Taot’s snout and lowered his ear to the fist-sized nostril to illustrate his point. “You see. Listen.”
“I don’t know anything about dragons,” Doctor Leopold protested, eyeing the monstrous creature and clearly hesitant to get any closer than he already was. Altin gave him a withering, impatient look, and finally the doctor joined him on the ground. “You’re right, that doesn’t sound good,” the physician said after leaning down and listening for himself.
Doctor Leopold stood and, moving away from Taot’s dangerous looking teeth, went to the area where the spear had been thrust between the dragon’s ribs. The doctor felt a bit more comfortable having moved away from that enormous, toothy head. He placed a hand on Taot’s scaly side and began to chant a spell, the divination taking quite a while to cast. At length the doctor’s examination was begun, and Altin watched impatiently with only fear
for Taot keeping his nausea in check. He would kill himself if the dragon died. He was not going to take another life. Not like this. Taot would be the last to die at Altin’s selfish hand.
Doctor Leopold spent an agonizingly long time studying Taot with the divination spell, but at length he had enough information that he could attempt to stabilize the giant beast. “He’s got eight broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and a punctured lung. The lung’s the worst, he’s bleeding badly, and I have to stop it before he drowns.”
“I’ll empty Tytamon’s treasury; I don’t care if I have to steal it all. Anything. Please save him.”
Doctor Leopold paused and looked Altin in the eyes, straight on, an expression dripping with merciless reality. “It’s really bad, Altin.”
“Please.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
What followed was the longest eight hours of Altin’s life. He paced back and forth impatiently as the doctor worked well into the night. Each step Altin took renewed his hatred of himself, and somewhere around the sixth or seventh hour of self-excoriation, he swore off magic for good. He spent the last hour devising the plan that would burn out his mythothalamus and make his conviction permanent. Doing so would be simple with the Liquefying Stone.
Somewhere after midnight the doctor staggered back as he released himself from a long and wearisome healing spell. His face, doughy as it normally was, was even whiter than usual and his lips were almost blue. He was exhausted. Nearly collapsing to the ground, he sat with his back against Taot’s armored belly struggling to regain some small bit of strength. Even in the cool night air, sweat ran down from his brow and cheeks, over his corrugated chins and into to the collar of his shirt where the dark wetness had spread during the course of his work to join similar patches radiating outward in his tunic from beneath his arms. “By the gods these things have a lot of tissue to repair,” he said. “Damn lungs alone are bigger than a man. Bigger than me.”
“Did it work?”
“Yes, lad. The bleeding is stopped. Just. But I’ve got no more strength to give, so it will have to do for now.”
“But what about his wing? And the burns. And the arrows everywhere?”
“Altin, you’re a magician. You know what it is to be out of strength. And I’ve used up all the mana now. We have to wait.”
Altin sent his mind out into the mana stream and confirmed that what the doctor said was true: the pudgy physician had indeed emptied out the night. An incredible surgery. He sighed and moved to Taot’s head, where he knelt down and laid a hand upon the dragon’s snout. He caressed it tenderly. “How long until he wakes up?”
“I don’t know, Altin. I’ve done everything I can.”
They sat there in silence for a long time, the doctor leaning his head against the now rhythmic rise and fall of Taot’s belly, eyes closed as he tried to get some rest. Altin stroked Taot’s face and prayed to gods he hoped might actually exist, prayed that they would save the dragon’s life. Or else.
Perhaps an hour before dawn, Doctor Leopold stood up. “Altin, you need to send me home now. I have to get some rest. And I have patients to see in the morning.”
“But what about his wing… all the other things?”
“I’ll come by tomorrow afternoon and see what else I can do.”
“All right, I’ll come get you. What time should I come by?”
“I’ll send a homing lizard to let you know. Have you imprinted any in town?”
“No. Only Aderbury’s in Crown.”
“Good enough,” the doctor said. He paused, studying Altin’s haunted eyes and tattered robes. “You need some rest too, boy. You look like you’ve just watched a harpy eat.”
“I have,” he said. “In a manner of speaking, anyway. I’ve seen a monster do its work.”
Altin’s tone made the doctor stare at him awhile. But, too tired, he let it go. “All right then. Send me back, and then go get some sleep.”
“I’m going to take Taot back to my tower.”
“You shouldn’t move him.”
“I’ll place him exactly as he is.”
“It’s your dragon,” the doctor said, lacking the strength for argument. “Send me back.”
Altin sent the doctor to his office and then went about casting the spell that would place Taot atop his tower back at home. Resting normally, with wings folded in, the dragon would only have taken up roughly a third of the tower’s space, but with one wing spread out like it was, Taot was going to take up a lot of room. Altin had to be very careful how he oriented the dragon as he fixed the positions in his mind to cast the spell. But he managed it well enough, and a moment later Taot appeared on the battlements lying just as if it had been there that he had fallen rather than on the ridge above the orc town.
Taot appeared near the curving parapet not too far from the stairs leading down to Altin’s room. His shattered wing was spread across the flagstones, its tip curled up against the opposite wall, and his long tail wound halfway round the tower, circling the edge like a great, spike-backed snake. Altin went around the parapet carefully, checking to make sure nothing was out of joint or twisted in an uncomfortable way. The dragon had enough room to stretch his legs if it woke up, and Altin was satisfied that Taot was resting comfortably before he finally allowed himself to go lay down. The truth of the matter was, he was ready to pass out. He’d never been so depleted in all his life.
It is a rough day when one has to destroy four deadly space monsters; wipe out an entire orc village; nearly kill a little girl; and perhaps successfully end the life of a devoted and magnificent dragon who might have lived a thousand years were it not for one’s rampant thoughtlessness. Then, toss in the revelation that one is responsible for the death of both of one’s parents and one’s sister, and, well, one’s energy comes quickly to an end. Along with a few other things. But for those, he’d have to wait. He had nothing left for today.
Practically crawling to his bed, he collapsed in a tattered heap. Tomorrow was not that far away.
Chapter 32
Altin woke nine hours later, every muscle in his body screaming as he sat up out of bed. Rising stiffly and with a groan, he made his way back upstairs. Taot was still unconscious. Considering the horribly broken wing and the pincushion state of its arrow-riddled membrane—not to mention the giant spear still jutting from his ribs—Altin thought it was probably for the best that the dragon remained asleep. Letting Taot rest did little to fill the time, however, and empty time gave Altin too much opportunity to focus on his guilt, on the sense of helplessness that had begun to plague him since he’d brought the dragon home. There had to be something more that he could do. It occurred to him that the dragon was going to need something to eat when he finally did wake up. Procuring Taot’s food would distract Altin from his thoughts—and from the awful thing that he was going to do to make things right once the dragon was returned to health.
He went downstairs and nosed around the pig pen for a bit, but Nipper grew furious when Altin suggested slaughtering a prize hog to feed, as the aged steward had put it, “that infernal monster,” and so Altin decided that getting a deer was probably a better choice. He went to the stables and asked the groom to saddle up a horse, too sore to want to do the work himself. Happy to oblige, the groom set about the task, giving Altin time to go to the armory and select a longbow and a quiver filled with arrows suited for the hunt.
As he was choosing his weapon from amongst the dusty racks of Calico Castle’s ancient weapons store, a shadow moved into the arc of light beaming through the opened door at Altin’s back. Altin turned and looked up to see Pernie standing in the doorframe peering into the musty gloom. His stomach abruptly tightened; he wasn’t prepared for her just yet.
They stood motionless, looking at each other for quite a while, as Altin tried to make out the expression on her face. The light behind her limned her blonde hair in a white glow, like the silver that trims a cloud, and highlighted stray threads poking out from the fabric of h
er simple, homemade dress, making them shimmer like luminous hairs themselves and giving Pernie’s diminutive frame a soft and radiant air. He could not see her face. Backlit, her expression was lost in shadow leaving Altin to guess what was going on inside her mind. Guilt colored him and he had to briefly turn away.
He made an act of studying an old shortbow he lifted from a rack, but quickly set it back. He owed her more than that. He pushed past the awkwardness and forced himself to speak. “So are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Just a cut. Kettle stitched it up. You want to see?” She shifted her weight forward, prepared to come into the room.
“No, that’s all right,” he said, stopping her. “I was there when she did it. Kettle’s a good woman. She loves you quite a lot.”
Pernie shrugged. “I know.”
They stood there for another long moment, Altin wishing he knew what else to say. How does one explain to a child that the horror they just endured, the terror and the pain, was brought on by someone they trusted to keep them safe? How does one go about doing such a thing? He couldn’t even fathom where to start. Nervous laughter almost made a sound as he recollected Kettle’s accusatory words. “The brains of twenty men,” she’d said. What a joke. He couldn’t even talk to a little girl.
“So what’s the bow for?” Pernie asked, giving Altin a momentary reprieve. “You gonna shoot somethin’?”
He was able to get his breathing started once again. He hadn’t realized that it had stopped. “A deer,” he said. “Taot needs something to eat.”
“Why can’t he get it his self? I seen him do it a thousand hundred times.”
“He’s sick.”