Saverian, unfazed, pointed to a long low bench. Scuffed leather covered its thin padding. “I promise you will be no more dead using the sorcerer’s blood than you will be without it. You’ve an appointment in Palinur three hours hence, Mardane, which means you’ve little enough time for recovery. If we’re to do this, we do it now.”
Events swept past and over me like a flock of startled crows. Abandoning me at the door, where I held a drowning man’s grip on a much too low lintel stone, Saverian dragged a stepstool to one of her shelves and retrieved a small enameled canister shaped like an angel. She set the canister on a knee-high table in company with a silver lancet, a square stack of folded linen, and a bronze basin with an extended lip like that of a pitcher.
“Slitting your heart vein will be quickest, Lord Voushanti, though the blood loss will likely leave you weaker than you would prefer,” she said. “But delivering Magnus to Prince Bayard should not entail a fight, and the journey…you will marvel at its ease and, in fact, decide that you have bound yourself to a fine racehorse. We’ll hope he keeps his pace reasonable in deference to your recent demise.”
Like dust motes floating on the light, her macabre humor failed to settle. Voushanti’s pacing slowed. Perhaps he might refuse the enchantment…which seemed a vile and wicked hope.
Saverian paused in her preparations. “Do you wish a sleeping draft? I know Prince Osriel does not offer, but I could—”
“No!” None of his answers had approached the ferocity of this one.
Without further argument, the seething warrior removed his leather jupon, gray tunic, and wool shirt, exposing broad chest and shoulders mottled with ugly red burn scars, old battle wounds, and patches of black and gray hair. He laid his garments on Saverian’s chair and reclined on the leather bench.
At Saverian’s direction I moved to Voushanti’s side. He averted his face, and neither twitched nor fidgeted.
With a flurry of brusque steps and clinking glass, Saverian added a few vials, tapers, and small dishes to her supplies. Then she doused the magical lamp and brought a lighted candle to her table. Drawing her stool beside mine, she thrust a stained but clean wadded sheet into my sweating hands. “Be ready with this,” she said softly.
I could not think what she meant, but didn’t ask. My eyes would not leave the wide flat handle of the lancet that lay snug in her hand.
“Mardane Voushanti, is it your will that I take you past the brink of unlife and work this magic to restore your breath and blood?”
He jerked his head in assent, but fixed his eyes on the far wall.
“Speak your will, or I’ll have none of this,” she snapped. “No man will say I chose this way.”
Voushanti swiveled his head to glare redly at the both of us. “You’ve not bound me to this bench. Obey our master’s will. Take this life and give it back.”
He turned away again. Saverian probed his neck with two fingers and without hesitation jabbed her lancet in between.
Blood spewed from Voushanti’s wound like the liquid fire Aurellians discharge from their warships to set their enemies ablaze. Only by fortunate reaction did I hold up the wadded linen to catch this monstrous volley. Voushanti jerked and gripped the edge of the bench, emitting only a grunt.
Saverian, her hands gloved in gore, snatched up one of her smaller folds of linen and held it to the surging flow, channeling it into the long lip of the tin basin, a river of red that threatened to overflow the vessel. The chamber fell silent, save for Voushanti’s rapid, shallow breaths.
I rubbed my arms through the thin shirtsleeves, afraid to let myself feel anything. I had experienced a man’s death once. Saverian must wear steel beneath her plain garb.
As the pulsing flow of blood dwindled, Voushanti’s breath began to labor. The half of his face we could see was a morbid blue-white and sheened with sweat. His hands that had gripped the bench now lay flaccid on its cracked leather.
Saverian had me set the heavy basin aside while she wiped her hands clean. Then she turned the warrior’s head to face us and slipped another square of folded linen under the wound to absorb the waning trickle of his life. His scarred face was slack, his stare dull, even as his chest strained and heaved to draw each breath.
I labored with him. The walls bulged and writhed around us. The flat iron stink of blood wakened reminders of battlefield nights, of wails and screams and dread visions. The physician dipped a finger into a small jar and dabbed a yellow ointment on Voushanti’s eyelids, flooding the thickening air with the pungent perfume of ysomar that the Karish said would summon angels to carry the soul to heaven, and the Sinduri claimed would call the Ferryman to the earthly shore to transport the soul to the Kemen Sky Lord’s feasting halls or Magrog’s land of torment. But what if a man’s soul was “fused to his body” and could not journey onward? What if a man had no soul?
I had stabbed Boreas for mercy, drowned a pack of Harrowers to save other lives, and slain Navronne’s enemies for my king. None of these deaths rested easy in my mind, but at the least I had believed that those victims would be granted some existence beyond this life. Every god I knew promised a continuing for those who had a soul, so I’d never imagined I was sending them to endless nothing. But this…what was this we did here? A certain horror gripped my breath and bone. I could no longer sit still.
Grabbing Saverian’s arm, I yanked her off her stool and dragged her away from the couch so Voushanti could not hear me. Scarlet cheeked, she wrestled to get free. “Are you mad?” she spat. “I need to watch him.”
“Is there a chance this spell won’t revive him?” I said, harsh and quiet. “Have you done it before…you yourself?”
“I’ve seen it done. I know what to do.”
“But is there a chance? Could he not revive?” I shook her, unwilling to release her until I heard yea or nay.
“No spell is proof against failure,” she said. “I’ll do my best, which is better than most. Now let me go, lest his heart stop for too long, for then the magic will fail.”
I let her go, and she hurried back to her work, examining the blood that dribbled slowly from Voushanti’s neck. Briskly, she sprinkled herbs and powders from her vials into three glass dishes and used a thin brass spatula to dip blood from the basin and drip some on each dish. With thumb and forefinger she used one mixture to draw sigils on Voushanti’s forehead and cheeks. With another, she marked spiked crescents under her own eyes.
Wiping her lancet clean on another folded square, she beckoned me back to my place. “The time approaches. Stop now, and you murder him.”
Furious at myself for not questioning earlier, furious at Saverian, at Osriel, I returned to my stool. We might have already sent this man to his end. Alone. Before Saverian could stop me, I laid my hand on Voushanti’s spasming breast.
“Valen! What are you doing?”
So near, linked by touch and his blood on my skin, I existed with and in him. I opened my senses.
The cold of Navronne’s untimely winter was as nothing to the bitter hour of Voushanti’s dying. One gouge of fire seared my neck…one grating burn marked agonized lungs…elsewise, waking mind hung suspended in a world of freezing black. Utterly alone. Anger rumbled faintly in the dark like retreating thunder. No fear, though. No grief. Not his, at least.
One more straining breath and the body could do no more. The candlelight retracted to a pinpoint, only bright enough to serve as a reminder of loss. And as light and pain flared and faded, Voushanti and I shared one silent cry of such piercing hunger as tore the fabric of the descending night…
“Valen! Give me your hand. Now!”
I gasped, blinked, and snatched my hand from the clammy, flaccid body. Shuddering, wagging my head, I tried to clear out the morbid darkness, but patterns of light and shadow, more than could be explained by one small candle, shifted and wavered on the walls and in the very air itself, overflowing that chamber as the mardane’s blood did the tin vessel. Saverian’s cheekbones, flushed under the blood marks, and her green eyes, fiery with purpose, supplied the only sparks of color. The angel canister stood open on the table, whatever enchantment it had contained now released.