Beyond the Boundary Stones (The Chronicles of Tevenar Book 3) (26 page)

Vigorre didn’t remember anything about windows in the document he’d read. But Nirel had told him that sometimes the wizards’ windows showed things contrary to people’s memories. It was one of the things that had made Ozor suspicious of them. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t surprised the demons could lie in that fashion. They’d need the ability in order to conceal their foul deeds. “I won’t believe anything they show me.”

“Good.” Yoran sighed. “And of course, the same thing applies to any similar incidents that may occur. The Mother will probably continue to influence events in support of our cause.”

Vigorre’s stomach flopped. If the fire was only the Mother’s first blow against the demons, how ruthless might her further attacks become? He pressed his lips together and nodded.

“The longer the Mother wages war against the demons, the more the people of Ramunna will suffer. Only after we drive them out can the city return to peace.”

Cold settled into Vigorre’s bones. “I understand.”

His curt nod was met by a hand raised in benediction. Turning away, he pushed the door open and left.

Sixteen

T
he line was shorter. Josiah gulped a glass of fruit juice and surveyed the outer portion of the square. It was hard to tell for sure, because the guards kept adjusting how the line snaked around in order to pack people in more efficiently, but for the first time he could see the end of it, well within the bounds of the square. This morning the line had extended into the surrounding streets, as it had since Firstday morning.

“We’re catching up,” he told Sar, relief flooding him. “Maybe soon we’ll be finished with the people who’ve been sick for years, and just have to deal with new things.”

Perhaps.

Josiah frowned at the donkey, whose head was deep in a bucket of water. “You think something else is going on?”

Elkan is concerned that people are losing confidence in the Mother’s power and staying away.

“I didn’t think he was serious about that.”

I was his familiar for eleven years. I can tell when he’s worried.

Josiah frowned and turned to study his master. Elkan was speaking earnestly to a woman holding a baby and surrounded by a cluster of children. “I guess it’s not too surprising. All those years they imagined the Mother’s power could do anything, and now they’re realizing it has limits.” He grimaced. “How many kids with diabetes are we up to?”

Nineteen. Plus eleven who were too far gone to save.

Josiah swallowed. “It’s got to be more common here than in Tevenar. The Mother’s Hall in Elathir hasn’t seen that many cases in the last twenty years.”

Maybe.

The donkey’s cryptic statement was followed by mental silence. Josiah rolled his eyes. Sar loved to bait him. He made his familiar wait a good long time. Finally, as he plunked his glass back on the table, he gave in. “What do you mean by that?”

The family of the sixteen-year-old boy traveled for two days to get here.

“So? They left home as soon as word reached them we were here.”

I heard the boy’s mother express gratitude for the kind stranger who told them about the wizards and gave them money for travel and lodging in the city.

“What? When? I didn’t hear her say that.”

As they were leaving, after we’d moved on to the next patient.

“How—”

Sar flicked one long ear. Josiah flushed. “All right. I still don’t see—”

Others have mentioned helpful strangers.

Josiah frowned. “There was that one mother who got upset. She kept saying how she’d been promised the wizards could make her daughter walk again. When I told her the injury was too old and we couldn’t fix her hip enough, she kept repeating it, over and over. ‘But they promised me!’”

Who would make such promises?

Josiah shifted to silent communication as he headed back to their station to greet the next waiting patient.
Someone who wanted to make people hate us. The Purifiers?

I suspect so.

It was another case of measles, this one a screaming toddler. Josiah told the mother what to expect, then continued as Sar sent the Mother’s power surging through him into the child.
What about the Dualists?

They only seem concerned with their own people. The Purifiers wish to turn all the people against us.

Josiah conceded the point.
Kevessa said when she visited her family last night, they kept asking about the people killed by the fire, why we couldn’t save them. No matter how many times she tried to explain that we healed as many as we could, they couldn’t get over the fact that we stood by and did nothing while people died. They were really angry about it, she said.

If her own family feels that way, what of those who’ve never met a wizard?

The possibilities made Josiah queasy.
The Matriarch knows we did the best we could. She officially commended us.

Will that sway people who already disapprove of the way she’s neglected so much in her pursuit of an heir?

They finished with the child. Josiah accepted her mother’s gratitude modestly and beckoned the next patient forward.
Probably not. I think the Matriarch wouldn’t care if we really were demons, as long as she gets pregnant.

Sar snorted agreement.

Borlen arrived back from his privy break and Josiah had to concentrate on his work as patients came in quick succession. The young soldier showed no lingering effects of the sword through his heart except a near-worshipful admiration for the wizards. He and Josiah had been working together since the second day in the square, and he still occasionally acted awed. But he was a great assistant, which was a good thing. Elkan insisted that Vigorre help him; Josiah was sure he was busily preparing the young Keeper for wizardry. And Josiah wasn’t really comfortable working with Nirel any more, not since Kevessa had shown signs of returning his interest.

He grimaced. It had been three whole days, and all he’d gotten from her since that night had been a furtive smile or a quick hand squeeze here and there. They’d been crazy busy, of course. After the fire they’d both been far too drained to do anything but eat and sleep. The next day they’d worked extra long to make up for all the people they hadn’t gotten to the previous afternoon. And yesterday she’d left immediately after Elkan called a halt for the night to accompany Gevan to her aunt and uncle’s house, and hadn’t gotten back until after Josiah was asleep. He glanced at her station, but she was in the middle of a healing and didn’t even notice.

A couple hours later Josiah looked up from one more of the endless number of children with what should be mild diseases aggravated by malnutrition to find Elkan at his elbow. He blinked in surprise. His master had been so busy since they got to Ramunna he’d been treating Josiah almost like a journeyman, trusting him to work without supervision. Josiah liked it. As much as he looked forward to the day they caught up with the backlog of patients and had a little more time to breathe, he didn’t relish the thought that Elkan would probably feel obligated to resume the sort of oversight an apprentice was supposed to get.

Elkan grinned. “Want to stop early tonight?”

“Yeah!” Josiah brightened, then glanced guiltily at the even shorter, but still extensive, line of waiting patients. “If you think we should.”

“I do.” Elkan looked mostly his normal self again, after the draining following the fire. His face was still thin, and he’d acquired some creases around his eyes, but Josiah expected those would persist until they were safely back in Tevenar. “I want to speak to Nalini again, and the other Girodan healers. Nirel is going to take us to her village so we can attend their show.”

Josiah wrinkled his nose. “You think she’ll listen to you? She was pretty mad.”

Elkan laughed ruefully. “Maybe, if I grovel enough.” He sobered. “The more I learn about the situation here, the more I’m convinced that we’re going to have to find effective ways to treat conditions without the Mother’s power. That’s the only way we can hope to bring Ramunna and the rest of Ravanetha up to anywhere near the standard of care we provide the people of Tevenar.”

Josiah sent Borlen to help Vigorre, who was giving the rest of the waiting patients numbers, then walked with Elkan to wait for Kevessa to finish with her last patient. “You don’t think the Mother will eventually touch enough familiars to take care of things?”

“I don’t think she can. You know it disrupts the balance of the world every time she does. The numbers are too large. To give Ramunna the same proportion of wizards in its population as she’s maintained in Tevenar, she’d have to touch thousands of new familiars. There’d be earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods—all nature would rebel.”

His hands waved in the air as he warmed to his subject. “For a while I feared it was hopeless, but now I think I know what we have to do. Good public health is the first step, of course. Nutrition, sanitation, safety measures—I’m hoping the Matriarch will be so grateful for a healthy heir she’ll give me whatever I ask for. But beyond that, I think we can learn new ways of treating injury and disease. We never had to in Tevenar; we always had the Mother’s power. But they’ve had to invent techniques to compensate for its absence here. If I can get Nalini and the others to share what they’ve developed, teach others to use their methods, it would help a great deal.”

Josiah tilted his head. “If they won’t help, we can try to come up with stuff on our own. There’s Gevan’s magnifying lens. Once the ships sail and he can get back to his workshop he promised he’d make a stronger one first thing.”

“That’s right. What I’d really love is to get him and Nalini together. Can you imagine what they’d come up with between them?” He shot Josiah a smile. “Put you in the mix, with your quick mind and creative ideas, not to mention the ability to experiment with using the Mother’s power in concert with their inventions, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few years you’d come up with all sort of amazing things I can’t begin to imagine.”

Josiah flushed with pleasure at his master’s praise. “I’d love to do something like that.” His mind began to race, throwing out dozens of possibilities. He wished he could run off to Gevan’s workshop and start testing them. “In fact, I don’t think there’s any work I’d like more. Not even regular wizardry like I do now.”

Elkan put a hand on his shoulder. “I always suspected you’d have to found your own guild to find your true place.” He looked off into the distance. “Eventually we could bring the new methods back to Tevenar. That will free more wizards to travel to Ravanetha. The young wizards the Mother chooses here are going to need experienced masters to teach them.” He glanced over at Vigorre, then away. “I picture a day when a few dozen wizards working with several hundred non-wizard healers could do for a city the size of Ramunna what it takes hundreds of wizards to accomplish in Elathir.”

Josiah caught his breath. It might really be possible. For instance, say a patient came in with a tumor in his lung. If Nalini could put him to sleep and cut most of it out, then a wizard could use the Mother’s power to clean up the last bits that were too small to be seen and anything that had traveled to the rest of his body. It would only take a few minutes, instead of the hours that reversing the growth of a really big tumor could take. And far less energy, so you wouldn’t need to take a long break to recover, but could move right on to the next patient.

And not just healing, either. What if they could invent a device that could tell if a person was lying? Then lots of court cases wouldn’t require the use of a window to discover the truth. Or what if the Watch could use window-glasses or something like them to find where a fleeing criminal went, instead of having to get a wizard to track them? What if—

Elkan’s grim voice shocked him out of his reverie. “The first thing on the list,” he said, pointing at Kevessa.

She put her hand on the shoulder of a girl a little younger than herself and gravely addressed both her and her mother. “It’s very important that you don’t skip a day. You still have a few of the structures that produce the substance, but they’re getting weaker all the time. We can only reverse the process if they’re alive. If you lose too many, the ones left won’t be able to make enough, no matter how much we speed them up.”

The girl clenched her fists. “And then I’d die.”

Kevessa nodded. The girl’s mother closed her eyes and whispered a prayer.

The girl looked at Nina with burning determination. “I’ll never miss a treatment.”

“That’s twenty,” Elkan said. “We’ll have to spend the first half hour every morning on them.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe Nalini knows a way to treat diabetes without the Mother’s power. If not, that’s got to be the first thing you and she and Gevan try to find.”

Seventeen

T
he tent was steamy with the heat of so many packed bodies. It felt good after the long walk through the chilly night. Josiah squirmed on the wooden bench, but froze when the rough surface caught his breeches. Smash it, Sar was going to have to pull splinters out of his butt if he wasn’t careful.

He turned to Nirel. “How much longer before they start?”

“Not long.” She refused to look at him. It was just as well. Beyond her, Kabos radiated silent hostility at the world in general and the wizards in particular.

Elkan’s voice was pleasant and polite, as if he’d forgotten that Kabos blamed him for the loss of his family. “I’ve told Nirel, but I want to reassure you as well, that I’m not going to interfere with those of you who’ve settled here, or attempt to take you back to Tevenar for judgement. That’s the Watch’s jurisdiction, and the Law requires wizards to refrain from becoming involved in their affairs unless they request our aid.”

Kabos grunted.

Elkan kept talking, filling up the awkward silence. “I hope you thrive here in Ramunna, so you have no need to return to the life of outlaws. I hear that Ozor’s trading voyages have gone well.” He nodded to the empty stage. “Bringing the Girodan healers here was a brilliant idea. And from what I could see when we arrived, the land the Matriarch gave you seems well suited for a farmer like yourself.”