Chapter 179. The Leg (Patreon)

"You want to what?"

The second time that day, by Adom's count.

"To help you heal him." Sam pointed across to the guard slumped against the wall. "That one, with the leg. You do the mending, the way you always would, and Adom strengthens it while you work. With this." He nodded at Adom's bared forearm and the rune scored into it. "It makes things stronger. Healing too, we think. We want to show it."

The healer's gaze moved, unhurried, from Sam to the rune to Adom himself.

"With respect, Magus." She dipped her head. "I can't put unproven magic into a patient. Not for anyone, and no offense meant to you. The moment I'm channeling into a man's body and a working I've never seen goes in alongside mine, I've lost hold of what's happening to him. If it goes well, lovely. If it doesn't, he's the one who pays for it, not the two of you." 

She folded her hands in front of her. "When a life's on the table, we don't try new things. We use what we know. That's the rule, and it's there for good reason."

Sam let out a long breath as Adom dipped his head right back, granting her every word of it. Then he went to work.

"You're completely right. Which is why I'm not asking you to try it on him." He turned his forearm over, the fresh rune bright in the lamplight, and held it out to her. 

"Try it on me. Give me a cut, small as you like, wherever you please, and close it the way you'd close anyone's. I'll enhance it while you do. You'll have felt the thing work under your own hands before you go anywhere near that man."

He held her eye. "And if it goes wrong, it goes wrong on a magus who walked into your ward and demanded it of you, in front of witnesses, of his own free choice. Not on you or on the guard. I'll sign whatever you'd like me to sign to that effect."

"And nothing's going to go wrong," Sam put in. "We promise."

"Yes." Adom nodded. "That too."

The healer looked at the pair of them a long moment. Then she sighed, and her face eased.

"You know, I forget you're a boy." She said it half to herself. "All the stories. The Ghost of this, the youngest that. And then you stand here haggling with me like a lad at a market stall, your friend bouncing on his heels, and I remember you're, what. Nineteen?"

Adom only smiled.

She shook her head, and considered the offered arm a while longer.

"I suppose a magus's word ought to count for something. And it's your own arm you're putting up." Her mouth firmed. "So. We try it on you, exactly as you've said. If I don't care for what I see, that's the end of the matter, and you give me no argument. And if we go on to the patients after, every last one of them says yes first, in their own words, knowing full well it's never been done. Those are my terms."

"YES!" Sam's fist shot up. "WHOO!"

Heads turned down the ward, so he folded back in on himself at once.

"Sorry. Sorry, it's— sorry." He pressed his hands together and dropped his voice. "Thank you. Really. Thank you." Then, to Adom, already moving: "Let's go."

The room she took them to was small and clean, a side chamber off the main ward, with a narrow table and a tray of instruments laid out in a neat row.

"Sit." She drew a stool to the table and set out what she needed, then looked at him. "You're sure about this?"

"Certain." Adom rolled his sleeve to the shoulder and laid his bare forearm on the table, palm up, well clear of the rune. He opened his hand. "Wherever's easiest."

She chose a thin, bright blade from the tray, the kind meant for opening skin, and set it to the inside of his arm.

She pressed. Nothing.

She pressed harder, weight behind it this time. The edge dragged across his skin and didn't leave so much as a line. It might as well have been drawn over stone.

"That won't do it," Adom said, almost apologetic. "Ordinary steel won't break my skin. You'll need to lay a cutting spell into the edge if you actually want to get through."

She looked up, the blade still flat against an arm it hadn't marked. "...I beg your pardon?"

"His skin's as soft as yours or mine," Sam offered from the wall. "Feels completely normal. It just doesn't open the normal way. You have to cut him with magic."

The simplest answer sat right there. [Primordial Body], and the long road that had handed it to him. 

"It's a long story," was all he said instead.

The healer studied him a moment longer. Whatever questions she had, she filed them.

"...Right."

She set her fingers near the edge, and a thread of mana gathered along the metal, fine and bright. When she drew it across his skin this time, the skin parted.

A short, shallow incision, two inches, no more. Blood welled up in a clean line, and Adom's breath hissed in through his teeth.

"There." She lifted the blade away. "Now what?"

"Now the simplest mending spell you've got. The one you'd throw without thinking." Adom raised his other hand and held it near her wrist, not touching yet. "And while you weave it, I lay my hand on you, and the rune feeds into your working. That's the whole of it. You do exactly what you always do. I do the rest."

She looked at the cut, then nodded once. "All right."

She brought her hand over the wound and began. Adom felt the spell take its small familiar form, the healer probably threw it a hundred times a day. He laid two fingers against the back of her wrist.

And pulled.

The rune flared gold along his forearm. Through the point where they touched, he felt her spell catch, swell, take on far more than she'd ever poured into it.

Then the wound closed rapidly. The edges drew together and sealed in front of all three of them, skin knitting over the gap in the space of a single breath. The welled blood was the only sign there had been anything to mend at all. A few seconds more and even that faint pink seam faded, and then there was nothing.

The little room went quiet as the healer stared at the unmarked arm, her own hand still hovering over it, fingers slightly apart.

"...Law's beard," she said softly.

"Damn," said Sam.

She turned Adom's arm over, searching the skin for the cut she'd made herself a moment ago and not finding it.

"I barely did anything," she said. "That was a first-year spell..."

She seemed shocked. 

"I put in almost nothing. A thread. Whatever I'd have spent on that closing, I've still got near enough all of it." 

Her eyes came up to Adom. "Do you understand what this is? Half of what we could do, we never do, because there's only so much of us to go round in a day. The mana runs dry long before the patients do. But if a healer's spell could be carried like that—" She caught herself, and started again. "When did this happen? How long have you had it? Is it only you, or can it be taught, can it go on anyone, how far does it scale—"

"Miss." Adom gently raised a hand.

"Deidra." She stopped. "Sorry. Deidra."

"Deidra." He inclined his head. "You'll have your answers. All of them. I mean to write the whole of it up properly, the moment I'm able, and put it somewhere anyone can read it. Every healer in the world, if I can manage it. You have my word."

That landed on her. She hadn't braced for it.

"But right now," he went on, "I need you to hold up your end. There's a man out there with a hole in his leg, and we've a great deal to show one stubborn merchant before the day is out."

Deidra drew a breath and nodded, all business now. "Right. Yes."

They went back out to the wall where the two guards waited.

She crouched to the wounded man's level and introduced herself. She told him what they meant to try, that it was new, that it had never once been done on a wound like his, that he was free to say—

"Do it."

He didn't let her finish. His eyes were on Adom, glassy and bright with pain, his jaw barely unclenching for the words.

"It's Magus Sylla. I know who you are. Whatever you're selling, I'll take it." A short, ragged breath. "They gave me something for the pain when I came in. It's wearing thin. And the blade went into the bone. I felt it go in." His hand tightened against his thigh. "So please. Just end it. Do it."

Adom looked at him a moment, then nodded once. "All right."

He knelt at the man's side. Deidra settled in over the wounded leg and looked to him. He gave her a small nod, then she unwound the binding.

It was bad. Far worse than the stiff dark linen had let on. The blade had gone in deep across the thigh and laid the muscle open in a long parted line, the edges of it pale, the flesh beneath dark and wet and still slowly seeping through the packing. 

And at the bottom of the cut, where it ran deepest, bone showed through. White, and not whole. The edge had bitten into the femur and left a notch in it, a clean partial cut.

Sam made a low sound and looked away.

"He's right about the bone." All the wonder had gone out of Deidra's voice."If that breaks through, with the muscle this far gone, he doesn't keep the leg. It's why they had him sitting still. Nobody wanted to be the one who moved it wrong."

"Then we don't move it wrong." Adom set two fingers to the back of her wrist. "Whenever you're ready. Same as before. I'll give it more this time."

Deidra brought her hand over the ruined thigh and began to weave.

Adom felt the spell rise under her hands, broader and deeper than the little closing in the side room, reaching all the way down to the bone. He waited until it was fully shaped. Then he pulled, and fed it.

The rune blazed gold up his arm.

What had taken a single breath on his own skin took longer here, because there was so much more to set right. But it came all the same, and the three of them watched it come. 

The bone went first, the notch in the femur filling smooth and whole. Then the deep muscle drew together, the long line narrowing, shallowing, the edges rising to meet and seal. The seeping stopped. 

The skin came last, closing clean over the whole of it, until there was nothing but blood-slicked, unbroken flesh where a moment before a man had been most of the way to losing his leg.

This took only a few seconds. Start to finish.

The guard stared down at his own thigh. He pressed a shaking hand to it, then dug his fingers in hard, where the wound had been, and felt only whole muscle answer.

"...I can't feel it," he said. His voice cracked. "It's gone. There's— there's nothing there!"

The wounded guard then pushed himself up.

He stood. Put weight on it, careful at first, then less so. Bounced on it once. Then he was walking in a tight disbelieving circle, then a wider one, stamping the heel down hard as if trying to catch the leg out in a lie.

"It holds. Look at it, it holds. I'm walking on it!"

His partner, the one who'd put the blade in him, said nothing at all. He just took the man by the shoulders and gripped hard, staring at the leg like it might undo itself if he looked away.

Soon, word of it moved out through the room in a ripple of turned heads and half-risen bodies.

And at the long table, the healers had stopped resting.

They were on their feet, every one of them, staring. They were the only people present who fully understood what they'd just watched, and it showed. 

Then Sam turned around.

He looked out over the place, the long rows of the broken, the bleeding and the feverish, drew a breath, and cupped both hands to his mouth.

"WHO'S ABOUT TO DIE," he bellowed, "AND WANTS TO BE HEALED?"

On any sane reckoning, it was a horrifying thing to shout in a room full of the dying.

Yet it went over wonderfully.

"Me." A reedy voice from a cot by the window. "Me, over here!"

"Me!"

"Here. Here!" A trembling hand rose two beds down.

"Take me, I've a week left in me at best!"

"He does not, he's been saying that a month. Take ME!"

They came in from all corners, the weak, the pained and the perfectly sincere, a thin chorus of the doomed putting their names forward with rather more enthusiasm than the circumstances arguably called for.

Adom looked out over the lot of them.

"Right," he said. "Let's get to it."