‘You can’t just walk in!’ Doctor Kolding cried.
‘Actually, I can. This is an emergency, and I’m tired of trying to do this nicely.’
‘You can’t just walk in!’
The visitor looked back at him.
‘Are you the doctor?’ he asked.
‘I said I was. I told you that.’
‘You’re not an assistant or something? I wondered if you were the manservant or something.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘So you’re in charge?’ the visitor asked.
‘I’m the only one here.’
The visitor nodded and looked around again. He went a few steps down the hall, and peered up the stairs to the first floor. Then he bent over the rail and looked down the stone steps into the basement theatre. As the visitor turned his head, Doctor Kolding saw that there was dried blood on the right-hand side of his face and his right ear.
‘You’ve been hurt,’ said Doctor Kolding.
‘What?’
Doctor Kolding pointed to the visitor’s head with his free hand. ‘You’ve been hurt. Is this the emergency?’
The visitor touched his ear as if he’d forgotten all about it. His right hand was also, now Doctor Kolding came to notice it, covered in dried blood.
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not.’
At that moment, Doctor Kolding realised that the visitor had said something that had disturbed him more than anything else. In the confusion and tension, it had been passed over. Only now, with his mind painstakingly running back over the conversation again, did Doctor Kolding see it.
It was a single word, and the word was ‘us’.
What’s the matter with you, keeping us standing out here?
‘I’d like you to go, please,’ said Doctor Kolding.
‘What?’ the visitor asked.
‘I’d like you to go. Leave. Please leave.’
‘Haven’t you been listening to me? I need a doctor. It’s an emergency.’
‘I’d like you to leave these premises, now,’ said Doctor Kolding.
‘What’s that in your pocket?’ the visitor asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘What have you got in your pocket? There, in your apron pocket. You’re holding something.’
Doctor Kolding pulled the pistol out. His visitor blinked and said something like, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.’ Doctor Kolding wasn’t precisely sure what his visitor said because he was too busy falling over to listen. His visitor had somehow bumped into him and the impact, though gentle, had deposited Doctor Kolding on his back in the open doorway. He no longer held the pistol. This was a strange turn of events, and it disturbed him.
Doctor Kolding lay on his back and looked up. Two more men were standing on the doorstep above him, framed in the porch light and the falling snow. They were upside down to Doctor Kolding. One of them seemed to be holding the other one up.
‘Is this the doctor?’ asked the man doing the supporting. He was tall, with a slender face and disturbing eyes. Doctor Kolding couldn’t tell much about the man he was holding up.
‘I think it’s the doctor, sir,’ the original visitor replied. ‘He’s not being very cooperative.’
‘Is that why he’s lying on his back?’ asked the man with the slender face.
‘He had this pistol, sir–’ said the original visitor.
‘Help him to his feet, please,’ said the man with the slender face.
‘I’ll cooperate!’ exclaimed Doctor Kolding as he was helped up. He was feeling trapped. He wanted to scream. ‘I’ll cooperate, but I don’t understand what’s going on. The men usually only come in the mornings. The mornings, you see? Not at this time of night. Never at this time.’
‘Calm yourself,’ said the man with the slender face and the disturbing eyes. The other man had called him ‘sir’. He certainly exuded a sort of authority. ‘Please, calm yourself. We’re very sorry to have disturbed you, and we don’t mean to put you to any trouble, but this is a rather critical situation. What’s your name?’
‘Auden Kolding.’
‘Are you a doctor, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I need your help urgently,’ said the man with the slender face. ‘This man’s been shot and he’s dying.’
He led them downstairs to the theatre, once he’d made sure the street door was closed. They left snow-melt footprints on the hall floor and the steps, and that bothered him immensely, of course, but he reassured himself that he could take the mop to it just as soon as the wounded man was comfortable. A man’s life took precedence, of course it did. A man’s life was more important than dirty wet marks on a dark hardwood floor.
They got the man into the theatre. He wasn’t really conscious, and Doctor Kolding could smell blood. Doctor Kolding told them to get the man onto the examination table, to lay him back on the clean, red sheet he’d hung across the table at the end of his day’s work. The blood would stain, of course, despite the colour of the sheet. He would have to boil it later. He washed his hands in the counterseptic bath, and dried them diligently before pulling on a pair of surgical gloves. His hands were shaking.
When Doctor Kolding came over to the table, they had laid the patient back, and Doctor Kolding saw his face for the first time, starkly illuminated by the exam lamp.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Doctor Kolding asked in a small voice.
The man with the slender face looked at him. ‘What do you mean, doctor?’ he asked.
Doctor Kolding indicated the knotted scar-tissue that covered the patient’s head.
‘You come in here,’ he said, ‘you come in here and ask my help, and you’re bringing me some kind of animal. This isn’t a man, it’s an animal.’
‘I don’t have a whole lot of time to debate this with you, doctor,’ the man with the slender face said. ‘I need you to get to work on him. I need you to do everything in your power to save his life.’
‘He’s an animal! An inhuman thing!’
The man with the slender face leaned close to Doctor Kolding, and he shrank back because he didn’t like to smell another person’s breath, or feel it on his face.
‘We don’t have time to debate this,’ said the man with the slender face, ‘but if we did, it would run like this. I would tell you that I was an officer of the Commissariat, and that I had the authority, on pain of death, to compel you to carry out my wishes. I would tell you that it was vital to Imperial security that this man remained alive, and would instruct you to carry out your function without further issue or demurral. I might even produce a weapon, just for show, to emphasise my seriousness.’
Doctor Kolding stared back at him.
‘But I’m not going to do any of that,’ said the man with the slender face, ‘because we really don’t have the time.’
‘I see,’ said Doctor Kolding.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Doctor Kolding, and reached for his tray of instruments.
Something was going on, and Tona Criid didn’t need to be told that it was bad. Capital B A D.
She’d looped around to take a look at Section, but there had been nothing to see, so she’d gone to find the slice of lime soforso she’d promised herself. Then she’d wasted an hour or more sitting in the comforting silence of Saint Theodor’s sacristy, until her legs got jittery and told her it was time to run again.
She’d had a simple circuit of Engineer’s Mall in mind, just up as far as the memorial, and then the long, steady run home to Aarlem, but some force, like a magnetic impule, had pulled her back towards Section. This time, she thought, she might ask at the guardhouse, and see if there was a procedure that would allow her to visit a prisoner. Whatever this feth-storm was all about, if she could get Rawne’s side of things, or Varl’s, maybe, she could put in a good word and ease things along. Left to itself, the system would most likely chew them up. She’d seen that happen. She didn’t care who shouted her down, the First could not go around losing officers like Rawne, Daur or Varl. Meryn, obviously. No one cared about that rat-stool.