Rift in the Races (38 page)

Three men appeared, bearded, rough-looking men, the sun glinting off the metal of chainmail and rings of brass armor. A fourth came up opposite them, the group staring down at her as if she had fallen into a well.

“There y’are, missy,” said one of them. “We’ll have you out of there in no time. Jus’ you hang on.”

“Altin,” she managed. “Find Altin.”

Then the darkness took her.

Chapter 24

P
ernie found Altin three days later. In a tree. At first she’d thought he’d fallen into the tree when the tower came back, falling apart as it had, falling apart and falling from too high up. She’d seen the whole thing happen, watched it as it came in like a shooting star. She’d been out gathering water chestnuts when she heard the explosive gasp of air announcing its appearance in the atmosphere. A blur of gray, it smeared like a long stone streak across the sky, dropping huge granite blocks, books and bits of furniture as it shot across her view, and then it slammed with a crash into its place at the eastern corner of Calico Castle’s wall. What was left of it anyway. The rain of debris fell for several minutes after, chunks falling, stones thumping to the ground, quill pens fluttering like the remnants of vaporized birds, the tap and
tink
of smaller bits hitting the armor and weaponry of the soldiers bivouacked in the meadows outside the castle or rustling the leaves of Great Forest as they came down. Searchers from the camps were still bringing back magic books, reagents and scrolls—those that weren’t being sold on the black market of course.

The ruckus of the following two days had been stressful for Pernie. Kettle’s plans for a going-away party for her were canceled, and everything became chaos. Miss Orli was badly broken, they said. But would be all right in time. And Altin had not been found. All the rubble was gone now, and still he was missing. She’d overheard many soldiers declare he must be dead.

She thought Kettle was going to brain one of them for saying it—the tough old cook had to be pulled off an unsuspecting young recruit who’d said it within her hearing, or she would have done it too.

Many had given up the search. But not Pernie.

She’d been ferreting through the forest, back and forth, following a trail of stones here, bits of gravel there. An ivory comb. A swatch of cloth. She found each piece and followed it to the next, scoured the area around it, then followed its lead right to where it came to an end. Then she went back and sought another trail. Over and over again. She climbed trees, huge ones, clawed her way up, used her knife to get hold if she couldn’t reach branches. She tried, even, to summon that magic Altin said she had. Tried to teleport up into the trees, looking for bits of evidence, but she couldn’t make the magic work. So she did it the hard way, climbing every one. She crawled through hollow logs, slithered under giant rocks on her belly like a snake, swam to the bottom of ponds and pools like a tadpole. On and on she looked.

She would never give up. Altin was the greatest mage who ever lived. He had discovered space. He could survive anything. Everything. He had to.

So she swam and slithered and crawled and climbed. Mostly she climbed. For three days she’d clawed her way up an uncountable number of trees. She would find freshly broken limbs a hundred spans high, newly twisted branches or gouged-out chunks of trunk still seeping sap. She counted them all as evidence. She would find them, then look around below until she found the bit of debris that had done it. The crumble of stone, the wooden chair leg. She would find it, and follow it up.

And finally she found him.

He was folded over a branch high up in a giant redwood. Dangling there like someone had hung him out to dry. She saw the flutter of his gray robes and immediately she’d begun to climb. Halfway up, she could hear the buzzing of the flies.

She scrambled up the massive tree like a chipmunk, her little hands gripping the thick ropes of its fibrous bark, her little feet digging in to the give of it and sending out puffs of red bark like dust in the wake of a race horse.

She got to him and quickly looked to see if he was alive.

He was. His breath was ragged, hardly a wheeze.

She was afraid he would fall.

That’s when she realized his left arm was in the tree limb. Through it, really. From just above the elbow almost up to his shoulder, all of that was inside the giant branch. The rest of it hung from the underside, the skin there having already turned mostly gray with blotches of black. That’s where the stench was coming from. Flies were everywhere. Pernie was familiar enough with death to know that Altin’s arm was done.

She didn’t, however, know what to do. So she screamed. And screamed and screamed and screamed. She screamed for so long her voice began to fail, turned from high-pitched wail to barely a croak. A rasp. And yet she went on. She began whistling when her voice was gone. Put dirty little digits into her mouth and blew until she was so lightheaded she nearly fell off the branch. But she wasn’t going to leave him.

She scooted back, leaned against the massive trunk, stabilized herself, and blew. She got the pace of whistling after a time, got to where she could space it out so as not to knock herself out. And so she blew. She blew all through the afternoon and well into the night, afraid to leave, sure something horrible would happen if she went away.

The men that finally found her, found her because they were out looking for her, not Altin. But find her they did. And so they found him. Nearly as dead as his arm.

The operation to stabilize him, extricate him and get him to Leekant and Doctor Leopold was a complex mess of ropes, scaffolds, teleporters and healing spells. Finally they had him down and at the hospital, Doctor Leopold leaning over him and wheezing quietly, his eyes closed, lost in the meticulous labor of stabilizing the critically wounded mage.

Altin could have been worse, all things considered, the doctor thought. He hadn’t fallen, apparently, and there weren’t any broken ribs or internal injuries. Just dehydration and, well, the arm of course. That was a complete loss. He could not save it. All of it from about a hand’s span below his shoulder was gone, taken where they’d had to amputate it to get him out of the tree. They’d even had a Q-class teleporter come and try to get him out whole, but she could not. “He’s all in,” she explained. “I wouldn’t know which bits were him and which were the tree.”

And so they’d cut it off.

He’d be furious when he woke up, the doctor knew. He’d have to learn much of his magic again. The careful thoughts he’d learned to shape with gesture and with word—those gestures would be gone. He’d have only half of them, only carve half symbols in the air, shape half an idea. Altin was going to be furious.

The doctor spent the better part of six hours working through Altin’s body with his healer’s sight, moving through the aqueducts of blood, the canyons and fissures of internal intricacies, guided by the fine weave of a divining spell. Trailing along with that sight came tendrils of harmony, following like the tentacles of a squid, each licking along in the wake of the doctor’s investigation, touching everything, feeling for the flavor of disharmony, incongruence, illness or pain.

But there were none. Altin was fine. Or he would be. But his arm was gone. No amount of healing could replace an entire limb. Doctor Leopold couldn’t do that anymore than he could have brought Altin back from death. The best the doctor could do was urge the tissues to close, to stop the signals of agony screaming through Altin’s every nerve. He brought harmony back, made what was left of the arm seal up and be well. It was a long work of healing, a tiresome one, but at length it was done. What Altin needed now was rest.

Doctor Leopold emerged from the spell and had to lean against the bed for a few moments to steady the dizziness that often accompanied extraction from a procedure of such duration. He straightened, rubbed his back, which was sore from having to bear the burden of his immensely ponderous gut. He made a quick study of Altin’s complexion, checked his heartbeat at the lone remaining wrist.

Yes, he’d be fine.

The doctor went to the inner waiting room of his office, where he found the collection of those most concerned for Altin’s condition. Tytamon sat patiently reading a thick, weathered-looking old book that was nearly twice as big as his lap. Kettle sat next to him with Pernie asleep beside her. The girl’s head lay comfortably against the red-eyed woman’s ample bosom, her narrow shoulders held in the curve of Kettle’s protective embrace. Next to her sat Roberto with Orli, lying across the next four chairs as if they were a cot, resting her head in his lap like a pillow. Orli stared at the ceiling impatiently, making cloud-shapes of the bumps and curls of paint. Most of what she saw was horrible. Roberto’s head bobbed a little as if he were on the brink of joining Pernie in sleep.

They all perked up when the doctor came out, even Pernie waking at the sound of the waiting room door opening. “Well,” spoke the collective expressions on every face, “is he all right?”

They knew before he spoke that Altin was alive, and both Orli and Kettle immediately burst into tears as relief poured from them like sweet wine. Even Roberto had to wipe at the corners of his eyes once Orli got going like she did.

Doctor Leopold let them have a moment, taking the time to turn and mumble some quiet instructions to his assistant, Lena, who dabbed at her eyes as well, caught in the wave of released tension and grief that had washed over the room, and not without her own affection for the green-eyed mage.

When emotional order returned to some reasonable degree, the doctor faced them again. “He’s going to be fine,” he declared. “Remarkably, he’s in excellent shape.” He paused, then added, “But there’s nothing that can be done for the arm. Too much was gone, and for much too long.”

Pernie looked up at him and tilted her face, a quarter rotation of curiosity, as if she’d never considered such a thing. Kettle burst back into tears. Orli’s bosom swelled but she held her tears back.

“Hmmm,” muttered Tytamon, his tone grim and his old parchment lips shaping the arc of disappointment. The same thought had come to him that had come to the doctor. Altin would not be able to cast again. Not well. Not right away. And that assumed he had the will to try, to relearn almost everything, to discover new ways to do what he’d been doing reflexively since he was ten. A lot to ask. Few in similar situations had. Tytamon had read stories, but he couldn’t think of one.

Rarely did anyone lose limbs like this. Not now. Not since the Magical Revolution. Only in rare cases did such maiming occur—bites usually, a dragon or werebear or saber-toothed tiger attack. In those instances, the limb was gone and irretrievable. Those, yes. Sailors lost legs to leviathans and sharks, even emaciater-rays occasionally. Those were often irretrievable as well. But few instances beyond that.

Soldiers lost limbs all the time, but that was completely different. As long as all the body parts could be reclaimed before the decay was complete, they could be reattached—provided the wounded didn’t bleed to death, of course. Limbs could be reattached. But not this. Not re-growth. Tytamon was no doctor, but he knew it well enough. The thought of it brought a mist to his tired, ancient eyes; a single tear escaped and fell into the dried old pages of his book, forming a dark spot in the parchment.

He exchanged a look with Doctor Leopold that confirmed his fear, and he had to look away. He dreaded having to break the news to the young sorcerer.

Pernie was the one who spoke it aloud. Even she knew.

“So how’s he gonna cast spells if’n he hasn’t got a arm? He has to have two, right? Doesn’t he?”

The doctor looked down, almost ashamed to say it. Pernie looked to Tytamon. He couldn’t face her either.

Horror blossomed in Pernie’s eyes like a black flower blooming upon the grave of possibility. She turned to face each in the room, one by one, hope sinking further into the entombing darkness with each pair of averted eyes. Orli watched her and felt the same way.

“Why not?” Orli demanded then. She tried to stand, but gasped at the pain that shot through her still-tender leg. She had to sit back down. The muscle damage was still not quite healed. Her own fault. She’d been too impatient to be here, and so she didn’t let the doctors finish the last bit of repair. She didn’t care about the pain. “Why can’t you grow it back? That’s ridiculous. You conjure things from nothing for Christ’s sake. Just summon him a goddamn arm.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Pewter. Healing doesn’t work like that.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t work like that?” She made a face as she echoed back his words.

Roberto was nodding with her. “She’s right. If we can do it, why in the name of hocus-pocus can’t you?”

The doctor looked confused. He shrugged. Wrote it off to their grief for their friend. “I’m sorry. It can’t be done. Not by any magic I know.”

“Are you serious?” Orli snapped, incredulous. She stood up, ferocity steaming in her eyes. The doctor stepped away from her.

“Orli,” said Kettle, reaching across Pernie and Roberto, putting a hand on her arm. “Sweetheart. T’will be okay.”

Orli jerked her arm out of the woman’s gentle grasp. “No, Kettle, I’m serious.” She spun back to the doctor. “You really can’t do it?” She glanced back at Roberto. “Can you believe this?”

Roberto shrugged and shook his head.