Galdar took his place in front of the blankets, turned, hand on his sword, to keep an eye on the healers. They made a fine show of paying no attention, but they cast sidelong glances in the direction of the blankets and then exchanged those glances with each other.
Galdar listened to what was happening behind him. He could smell the stench of death. A look cast back through the curtain showed him seven men and two women. Some lay on cots, but others lay on the crude stretchers, which had been used to carry them from the battle field. Their wounds were horrendous, at least so Galdar perceived in that quick glance. Flesh cleaved open, organs and bone exposed. Blood dripped on the floor, forming gruesome pools. One man’s intestines spewed out of him like a string of grotesque sausages. A woman Knight was missing half her face, the eyeball dangling hideously from beneath a blood-soaked bandage.
Mina came to the first of the dying, the woman who had lost her face. Her one good eye was closed. Her breathing was labored. She seemed to have already started on her long journey.
Mina rested her hand on the horrible wound.
“I saw you fight in the battle, Durya,” Mina said softly. “You fought bravely, held your ground though those around you panicked and retreated. You must stay your journey, Durya. The One God has need of you.”
The woman breathed easier. Her mangled face moved slowly toward Mina, who bent and kissed her.
Galdar heard murmuring behind him, turned back quickly.
The healer’s tent had grown quiet. All had heard Mina’s words.
The healers made no more pretense of working. Everyone was watching, waiting.
Galdar felt a hand touch him on the shoulder. Thinking it was Mina, he turned. He saw instead the woman, Durya, who had lain dying. Her face was covered with blood, she would always bear a hideous scar, but the flesh was whole, the eye back in its place. She walked, she smiled, she drew a tremulous breath.
“Mina brought me back,” Durya said, her tone awed, wondering. “She brought me back to serve her. And I will. I will serve her all her days.”
Exalted, her face radiant, Durya left the tent. The wounded cheered and began to chant, “Mina, Mina!” The healers started after Durya in shocked disbelief.
“What is she doing in there?” demanded one, seeking to enter.
“Praying,” Galdar said gruffly, blocking the way. “You gave her permission, remember?”
The healer glowered and swiftly departed. Galdar saw the man hot-footing his way to Lord Milles’s tent.
“Yes, you tell Lord Milles what you’ve witnessed,” Galdar advised the man silently, gleefully. “Tell him and add yet another twist of the knife that rankles in his chest.”
Mina healed them all, healed everyone of the dying. She healed a Talon commander who had taken a Solamnic spear in his gut. She healed a foot soldier who had been trampled by the slashing hooves of a battle horse. One by one, the dying rose from their beds and walked out to cheers from the other wounded.
They thanked her and praised her, but Mina turned all their gratitude aside.
“Offer your thanks and your loyalty to the One True God,” she told them. “It is by the god’s power that you are restored.”
Indeed, it seemed that she was given divine assistance, for she did not grow weary or faint, no matter how many of the injured she treated. And that was many. When she came from helping the dying, she moved from one of the wounded to another, laying her hands upon them, kissing them, praising their deeds in battle.
“The power of healing does not come from me,” she told them. “It comes from the God who has returned to care for you.”
By midnight, the healer’s tent was empty.
Under orders from Lord Milles, the dark mystics kept close watch on Mina, trying to figure out her secret so as to discredit her, denounce her as a charlatan. They said that she must be resorting to tricks or sleight-of-hand. They poked pins into limbs she had restored, trying to prove they were illusion, only to see real blood flow. They sent patients to her suffering from horrible contagious diseases, patients the healers themselves feared to approach. Mina sat beside these sufferers, laid her hands upon their open sores and oozing pustules and bid them be well in the name of the One God.
The grizzled veterans whispered that she was like the clerics of old, who were given wondrous powers by the gods. Such clerics, they said, had once been able to raise the dead. But that miracle, Mina either would not or could not perform. The dead received special attention from her, but she did not restore them to life, though she was often begged to do so.
“We are brought into this world to serve the One True God,”
Mina said. “As we serve the True God in this world, the dead do important service in the next. It would be wrong to bring them back.”
By her command, the soldiers had carried all the bodies from the field—bodies of friend and foe alike—and arranged them in long rows on the bloodstained grass. Mina knelt beside each corpse, prayed over each no matter which side the person had fought on, commended the spirit of each to the nameless god.
Then she ordered them to be buried in a mass grave.
At Galdar’s insistence, the third day after the siege Mina held counsel with the Neraka Knights’ commanders. They now included almost all the officers who had formerly reported to Lord Milles, and to a man these officers urged Mina to take up the siege of Sanction, to lead them to what must be a resounding victory over the Solamnics.
Mina refused their entreaties.
“Why?” Galdar demanded this morning, the morning of the fifth day, when he and Mina were alone. He was frustrated at her refusal. “Why will you not launch an attack? If you conquer Sanction, Lord Targonne will not be able to touch you! He will be forced to recognize you as one of his most valued Knights!”
Mina was seated at a large table she had ordered be brought into her tent. Maps of Ansalon were spread out upon it. She had studied the maps every day, moving her lips as she went over them, speaking silently the names of the towns and cities and villages to herself, memorizing their locations. Ceasing her work, she looked up at the minotaur.
“What do you fear, Galdar?” she asked mildly.
The minotaur scowled, the skin between his eyes, above his snout, creased into folds. “My fear is for you, Mina. Those who are deemed a threat to Targonne disappear from time to time. No one is safe from him. Not even our former leader, Mirielle Abrena. It was put about that she died after eating spoiled meat, but everyone knows the truth.”
“And that truth is?” Mina asked in abstracted tones. She was looking again at the map.
“He had her poisoned, of course,” Galdar returned. “Ask him yourself if you ever chance to meet him. He will not deny it.”
Mina sighed. “Mirielle is fortunate. She is with her God. Though the Vision she proclaimed was false, she now knows the truth. She has been punished for her presumption and is now performing great deeds in the name of the One who shall be nameless. As for Targonne”—Mina lifted her gaze again—“he serves the One True God in this world, and so he will be permitted to remain for the time being.”
“Targonne?” Galdar gave a tremendous snort. “He serves a god all right, the god of currency.”
Mina smiled a secret, inward smile. “I did not say that Targonne knows he is serving the One, Galdar. But serve he does. That is why I will not attack Sanction. Others will fight that battle. Sanction is not our concern. We are called to greater glory.”
“Greater glory?” Galdar was astonished. “You do not know what you are saying, Mina! What could be greater than seizing Sanction? Then the people would see that the Knights of Neraka are once again a powerful force in this world!”
Mina traced a line on the map with her finger, a line that came to rest near the southern portion of the map. “What about the conquering of the great elven kingdom of Silvanesti?”