It was Raseed’s duty to pursue, but his eyes were drawn to the limp forms of Zamia and the Doctor. They needed him now. The tribeswoman had changed shape again in the space of a moment. He felt his heart would burst, seeing this girl of five and ten years with a grisly wound in her side. The Doctor moaned and sat up, coughing from the smoke around them. The flames blazed hotter, the wood of divan and bookshelf cracking and popping in the fires.
Zamia whimpered. Only her mouth moved, making pained, pleading sounds. His gaze returned to the street below. O God, is it wicked to let such a monster flee just to save the lives of friends? But even as his soul asked Almighty God for guidance, his body choked from smoke and moved to Zamia’s side.
Suddenly a glowing green light filled the townhouse. As he reached Zamia, he saw a hundred tiny hands the color of seawater stamping at the flames and waving away smoke. Magic. But not the sort of spell the Doctor worked. Whatever it signified, Raseed didn’t care. All that mattered was Zamia’s wound, which was bubbling and hissing horribly, as if with an alkhemist’s acids. Raseed felt tears filling his eyes and not only from the smoke.
He felt the Doctor’s large hand on his shoulder and heard that gruff voice in his ear. “Come, boy. Help has arrived.”
Raseed snarled at his mentor. “We should not have brought her here, Doctor! She’s just a child!” An incoherent cry escaped from his throat. “We should not have brought her!” He was startled by the sudden impulse to strike the Doctor.
The Doctor winced from the smoke and the pain of his wounds. “Snap out of it, boy! I said there is help here!”
Raseed saw, more than felt, a bony, red-black hand on his forearm. Dawoud. Litaz. The Doctor’s friends. The smoke filled his eyes and his mind. He let himself be guided out of the burning townhouse, only half-aware of what was happening.
The next thing he knew, he was standing in front of his ruined, soot-blackened home. The spell-fires were already dying, but they had done their damage. The Doctor sat on the street, his head in his hands. His Soo friends—the tall, bald magus Dawoud and his wiry little wife Litaz—stood beside him, gently setting Zamia’s unmoving body onto a litter.
“The fire’s been dealt with,” Dawoud was saying to the dazed-looking Doctor. “We got to it before it could spread to the neighbors. My magics keep them from seeing or smelling what has happened here. But what in the Name of God has happened here, Adoulla? And who is she?”
The Doctor stuttered, obviously trying to regain his wits. Raseed heard himself doing the same thing.
“Questions for later,” he heard Litaz’s voice say from somewhere. “Whoever she is, she’s dying here. We have to get her to our home, now. Raseed!”
He realized he’d been staring uselessly at Zamia’s unmoving form, her soot-stained face, and her closed, long-lashed eyes. Again he tried to speak, but his throat burned from smoke and tears. Ash caked his silks. “Auntie?” he finally managed.
The little Soo alkhemist’s voice was sharp, and her blue-black features were stern. “We’ve brought a litter,” she said, the rings in her twistlocked hair clicking as she nodded toward the wood and leather frame. “Help me carry it.”
His hands and feet moving without his seeming to will it, Raseed obeyed her command. As they lifted the litter, Zamia shrieked once in pain. Raseed felt as if the sound were tearing out his insides. Zamia grimaced and then fell silent.
“There’s hope here yet,” Litaz said. “Move, boy!”
Raseed blinked away more tears, and he moved.
Chapter 8
In the hour or so that was neither night nor morning, the Scholars’ Quarter of the great city of Dhamsawaat was quiet. The most indefatigable of the street people had finally gone to bed, even if bed was merely a bit of dirt lane. The first of the cart-drivers, porters, and shopkeepers would not hit the street for another hour or so. Litaz Daughter-of-Likami stared out her cedar-framed window, rubbing her temples and thanking Merciful God for small blessings—the soothing quiet had made the first part of her work a bit easier.
The busy, rough Scholars’ Quarter was usually so noisy that its name—a vestige of the city’s long past, Adoulla had told her—seemed an intentional irony. But Litaz prided herself that she, her husband, and their old friend Adoulla kept the bookish appellation from becoming a total lie. Ages after the neighborhood’s sages and students had been replaced by cheap shopmen and pimps, the three of them ensured that learning still lived in the Quarter. That their learning pertained to unnatural wounds and creatures made of grave-beetles made no difference.
Litaz turned from the window and considered the half-dead girl lying on the low couch before her, her coarse hair splayed across the cushions. The tribeswoman’s labored breathing was the loudest sound in the room. A sharp contrast to a few hours ago, when they’d come charging in with a dying, Angel-touched girl on a litter.
The wound was like none Litaz had ever seen. The tribeswoman had been bitten, though not so badly as to be life-threatening. But within the wound, it was as if the girl’s soul had been poisoned rather than her body. It didn’t fit any of Litaz’s formulae. Praise God that Dawoud—as he had in so many of their past healings—had intuited what to do. Her own tonics and wound poultices had stabilized the girl’s health. But it had been Dawoud’s powers—his mastery of the weird green glow that rose from within him as his hands snaked back and forth above the girl’s heart—that had truly brought her from the brink of death.
The smell of brewing cardamom tea brought her out of her thoughts. She could hear Dawoud in the next room, clinking cup against saucer for her. Making each other’s tea was half the reason they had such a happy marriage. It was one of the most important lessons of alkhemy, one that had stuck with her from the first days, when she’d left behind the stifling lifestyle of a Lady of the Soo court to pursue her training: Simple things ought not be taken for granted. She’d seen a horned monster from another world kill a man because of a small error in a summoning circle. She’d seen a husband and a wife grow to hate each other because they’d forgotten each other’s naming-days.
A shout came in the window from the street: a late drunk, or an early cartman. As if in response, the Badawi girl—Zamia, Adoulla had called her—made a pained noise. Litaz said a silent prayer for the girl and worried over the limits of her own healing-craft. She pulled a clay jar from one of the low visiting room shelves and scooped a handful of golden yam candies from it. The sweet, earthy flavor filled her mouth and calmed her. They were expensive, these tiny reminders of home, but there was nothing quite like them.
“You deserve the whole jar of them, hard as you have worked these past few hours. I think the girl will live because of it.” Her husband came into the room bearing a tea tray in his bony, careworn hands. Concern for her was etched on his wizened red-black face.
“Where are Adoulla and Raseed?” she asked.
He jutted his hennaed goatee at the stairway. “Both upstairs. The boy is in some kind of self-recriminating meditation. Adoulla is mourning his home and wracking his brain regarding this attack.”