—I pledge my life to the practice of healing—
Marchey said nothing. Fist had summoned up the words he held as the one holy thing in his life. The Healer’s Oath. Based on the Hippocratic Oath, but further reaching; an ethical ideal he had upheld through thick and thin, and which had held him up as well. His vocation had become an empty shell. That Oath was the glue that held the fragile, cracked pieces together.
“I’m sick, my dear doctor,” Brother Fist continued, smirking as he tightened the screws. “Probably dying. That is why I had you brought to me. Now that I have you here, you will do everything in your power to cure me.”
“I won’t.” Marchey forced the words out, but they were no more than a hollow whisper.
Brother Fist’s mocking laughter made him feel like there were maggots slithering through his insides.
“Oh but you will!” he wheezed. “You have no choice. Keeping your ridiculous Healer’s Oath is the single fingertip that keeps you from falling into the abyss. It is the one tattered shred of self-respect you have left.”
He paused to catch his breath. “I have studied your kind. I know more about you than you do yourselves. Fail your Oath, and your entire existence becomes meaningless. You will have given up everything you hold sacred for nothing.”
Marchey could only shake his head from side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, trying to get away from the blows hammering into him and backing him into a corner.
—holding every life sacred—
But there was no escape. This terrible old man knew his situation too well, knew precisely which buttons to push.
“You cannot refuse to help me.”
—refusing none who seek my help—
“Welcome to my crucible, Dr. Marchey.” Brother Fist spread his thin hands. “You think I have turned up the heat beyond bearing, but I have really only just begun. After all, how hot can it be if your scruples are not yet burned away?” He gazed at Marchey with baleful pleasure, closing his hands as if he gripped Marchey’s life and fate in them. “Yet.”
His hands fell to his lap. “Do your duty. Begin examining me.”
—because my duty is to save lives, not judge them—
Marchey stood up, feeling sick and doomed, bile on his tongue and lungs clogged with choking despair.
“Scylla said you don’t believe in medicine,” he protested in a pathetic attempt to escape the nightmare swallowing him up.
His tormentor’s laughter hacked through his hopes for a way out like an antique bone saw, leaving them in raw, bleeding pieces.
“Please don’t demean yourself by pretending to such naïveté,” Fist said, his voice filled with the cloying sweetness of rotten meat. “I simply don’t believe in letting the sheep have it. It pleases me to hear their futile prayers. I so love watching them abasing themselves because their faith isn’t perfect enough to make them whole again. That is one of the brightest, sweetest-smelling blossoms in my little garden of pain.”
Garden of pain, Marchey thought with numb horror. And I’m supposed to give the gardener the renewed health he needs to continue tending his bitter crops…
Scylla hunched like a cast-silver gargoyle at the end of her pallet. Head down. Shoulders sharpened with tension. Teeth bared. Her one green eye glazed and sightless.
Brother Fist had—
Her talons were out, and she shredded the foam pad without even knowing it, hands rhythmically clenching and unclenching.
He had—
His own voice, the damning words coming from his own tongue, his contemptuous laughter as he turned her service to himself and to God into acts of willful cruelty. Turned Revealed Truth into proof that he had—
—lied to her.
This was no weakness. No deception sent to test her faith.
Brother Fist was sick.
He had sent her for Marchey because he needed a doctor.
Because…
God would not heal him.
The orderly walls of her world were shuddering and cracking, their concrete foundations turned to a quicksand of lies. In the chaos strange things that felt almost like memories surfaced like raw earth thrust up through split and buckling pavement. Faces. Feelings. Sensations. People and things she had no names for, but which seemed to know her as a sister.
Her mind reeled blindly, buffeted in a hundred directions, seeking solid ground, seeking escape, and all she knew for sure was that if she heard any more she would—
She lifted her arm, reaching out to turn the Ear off. To stop this before she went mad. Her silver hand hung there in front of the stud that would bring silence and safety and sanity.
Hung there. As if reaching for a lifeline.
Hung there. Between truth and silence.
Hung there, wavering—
—trembling—
—then fell.
Almost as if that were some sort of signal to thaw time and start the world moving again, Marchey’s voice came to her, breaking the silence.
Marchey had reviewed his options. It hadn’t taken long. They had been few, and equally grim.
His only choice was in mode of self-destruction.
Brother Fist had drawn him into a maze where the walls were built from his own moral strictures, and every turning led to darkness and defeat.
He couldn’t break his Oath without breaking himself. Brother Fist had seen that with the cynical clarity of a worldview uncolored by honor, ethics, or scruples. He could not bring himself to kill this pestilence masquerading as a person. He could not even let him die if it was in his power to heal him. Those might in one sense be the “right” things to do, but not for him.
He had long ago sworn to accept the precept that every life was sacred, had value. His entire life had been dedicated to that principle; it was the ability to save lives that might have been otherwise lost that had kept him from renouncing Bergmann Surgery and trading his silver arms for flesh. Even now he could not bring himself to abandon that vow.
Besides, even if he could bring himself to refuse, no doubt Scylla could force him to reconsider.
He would hold to his Oath, even though healing this monster would be such a rape of his skills that it would probably have the same destructive effect as breaking the Healer’s Oath. It would despoil the one thing of value and meaning left in his life.
There was no escaping the crucible unscathed.
All he could do was hope that maybe afterward he could find some opportunity to make amends for what he had done. Maybe he would get a chance to treat some of Fist’s subjects and begin redeeming himself. Maybe if he let himself be used and broken, he would be cast away and get a chance to escape on his ship and find help.
He took a deep breath. “Let’s take a look at you,” he said heavily. The heartsick resignation in his voice was no ploy. He climbed reluctantly to his feet and started toward his new patient.
Willing himself to walk deeper into the crucible.
Brother Fist produced a gun from a hidden pouch in the arm of his chair, pointed it at Marchey’s chest.
Marchey froze midstep, eyes on the weapon. He knew just enough about arms to recognize the big, blued-steel handweapon as an old-style Fukura “Spring Flower” pistol. The folded alloy projectile it fired would make a fingerprint-sized hole going into a human body. It would exit the other side like a whirling dinner plate heaped with gore.
Brother Fist hacked gleefully. “Think of this as Malpractice Insurance.” He gestured curtly with the gun. “Come on, get to it.”