Page 12 of Hemlock & Silver
“How long has he been unconscious?” I asked.
The boy was keeping pace with me easily. He moved with the jerky whipcrack speed that most street kids seem to develop before they hit their teens. “He was like that when I found him. Couple hours, maybe?”
Worse and worse. No telling how long he’d been in the smoke den before they rolled him out. I tried not to let my alarm show on my face, but I picked up my pace even more.
Flint Way runs through the heart of Four Saints and serves as the main artery for carts and wagons entering the city. From there, smaller roads peel off to the various markets and plazas where goods are unloaded and sold. For our purposes, all you really need to know is that there are four lanes—I use the word loosely—on Flint Way, and at any given time, a lot of people and their horses are in a big hurry to get somewhere on it.
There are multiple pedestrian crossings that go under Flint Way. Unfortunately, they were all a couple of blocks away, and the temple was right across the road. If we went to a crossing, we’d lose a good ten or fifteen minutes, or, with steady nerves and a burst of speed, we could be there in under two.
I stood on the curb, waiting for a gap. The smell of manure assailed my nostrils. The street sweepers will only work on Flint Way after midnight, on the grounds that they are not paid enough to try cleaning the road while wild-eyed horses careen toward them. It is also extremely loud during the day: cartwheels on cobblestones, horseshoes on cobblestones, drivers yelling, drovers yelling, thecontents of the wagons squawking or oinking or rattling—all of it blending into an overwhelming din.
I saw my opening at last and plunged forward. The trick was to go in front of oxen instead of horses. Oxen are slower and rather more phlegmatic about humans suddenly turning up under their noses.
It worked, mostly. I made it across three lanes without incident. The boy outdistanced me and was up on the far sidewalk before I was even halfway across. That didn’t surprise me. Street kids were always darting across Flint Way and snatching things off the wagons, secure in the knowledge that the drivers couldn’t stop or turn around to catch them.
Unfortunately for me, a driver decided he was tired of waiting behind the oxcart in the third lane and cut around him at high speed into the fourth. I heard a shout and looked up, practically into the nostrils of a horse that was trying to stop but being pushed forward by the momentum of the cart behind him. Someone was screaming, probably the driver.
I flung myself at the sidewalk and got a foot up just as a pair of hands grabbed my arm and hauled. Between the two of us, I got out of the way about a second and a half before the horse and I became dangerously close acquaintances.
“Are you trying to getkilled?” Aaron snarled, not quite yelling but not far off. He was the one who had pulled me up.
“No,” I panted. “It’s fine.”
“It isnotfine! You could have been trampled! You know they don’t slow down—”
The street kid was suddenly between us. “Leave her alone!” he said. His voice cracked. It was ridiculous, given that he didn’t come up to either of our collarbones, but I didn’t laugh. Neither did Aaron.
Instead my guard exhaled in a whoosh and said, “Sorry, Mistress Anja.” He didn’t sound particularly sorry, but I accepted itanyway. It probably looked bad on a guard’s record if your charge got trampled.
“It’s fine,” I said again, starting for the temple again. “The horse didn’t want to step on me, I didn’t want him to step on me, we were both in agreement. Come on, we don’t have much time.”
The Temple of Saint Adder is a busy one, as He is considered to hold sway over medicine and healing. The sanctuary is large and airy and beautiful, lined with bells, and full of pilgrims praying for blessings of health. It is a place of harmony and earnest calm.
Having someone charge through, sweating and cursing under her breath, trailing a guard and a street urchin, would tend to disrupt the mood. Fortunately there are multiple entrances. I passed the main one, veered down a side street, and found the gate that led to the temple infirmary.
The main hospital is a good distance away from the temple, and most of the healers work there. But a few patients always come to the temple, usually at night. The ones who can’t make it to the hospital under their own power or can’t be carried any farther. They’re generally transferred to the hospital in the morning, unless they aren’t expected to survive the trip. I could guess which category my patient fit into.
Healer Michael saw us as soon as we came in and hurried over. He was a round man with a gentle voice and gentler hands, clad in the indigo robes of a healer. He gave the boy a smile. “Jonas. I see you found Healer Anja.”
Healeris a courtesy title at best when applied to me. For anything other than poison, I’m useless. A hangnail might as well be a broken leg. Still, it was hardly the time to argue.
Healer Michael—who deserves the title a dozen times over—ushered us to one of the small side rooms. I opened the door and saw a man on a pallet. Twenty, maybe, though illness made himlook older. His cheeks were sunken, and he had a scruffy three-day growth of beard, but the resemblance to the boy Jonas was stamped clearly on his face.
I knelt down and took his hand, laying my fingers on his pulse. There was muscle along his forearm, so his addiction to lotus smoke was likely not far advanced. But I knew immediately that it was too late, even so. The patient’s heartbeat was so weak that, if not for the shallow rise and fall of his chest, I would have thought he was already dead. He likely had minutes left, not hours.
Still, what else could I do? I had to try. Sometimes you get a miracle. Mostly you don’t, but you still have to make space for the miracle to happen, just in case. I began unpacking my bag.
I didn’t require much equipment for this. A vial of tiny crystals and another vial containing an inch of boiled water. A waxed paper tube about three inches long. I fished out three crystals and let them dissolve in the water, making a milky solution, and sucked it up into the tube, then popped my thumb over the end.
“Come on,” said Healer Michael. “Let’s let her work.” He took the boy by the hand and led him from the room. I heard the door close behind me. It was for the best. This next bit wasn’t pretty.
Sliding a tube as far as you can up someone’s nose is difficult at the best of times, let alone when you have to keep your thumb firmly pressed over one end. I wiggled it in, then wiggled it in even farther, wincing. The patient couldn’t feel it, but my nose itched sympathetically anyway.
I took a deep breath, bent over, and blew the solution up into the patient’s nose.
“What in Saint Sheep’s name are youdoing?” Aaron asked behind me.
I jumped and nearly put my eye out on the end of the straw. “Don’tdothat!” I said, sitting back. I hadn’t even realized he was still in the room.
