Arrows of Desire 4.8

The faint smell of smoke accompanied shouting from the southeastern gate and the ringing of the Guildhall’s bell as I raced up and into the town proper.

People were running everywhere, civilians up the hill, and adventurers in various states of readiness towards the wall. I felt yellow fear in all of them, although more pronounced in the civilians, and mixed with green anticipation that I’d started to observe in my own aura the more I’d gone dungeoneering in the adventurers: the steely calm of the anticipation of a fight.

Down beyond the wall I could feel easily four hundred similarly anxious and ready auras. I had no way of knowing for sure who they were, there was no difference in aura between a Caith, a Beastkin, or a dhampir, but I had a fairly good idea who was attacking.

The Caith.

Which made sense. This was their homeland, and this town was a colonial one. More than that, even, one of their people had been killed in a stupid dispute over a goat. In their eyes we would be no different to the Mercians. At a structural level, I wasn’t even really sure we weren’t the same.

I’d hoped against hope that something like this wouldn’t happen, that maybe because of the unique economic imperatives of just hanging out around the dungeon that conflict might be avoided - perhaps even a treaty might be signed, but those hope, it seemed, had been overly optimistic.

I had no idea if we could hold them off, either. Adventurers were powerful, yes, but there were only a little more than sixty of us in town. Some of the other townsfolk could probably fight, but those didn’t seem like great odds, even with defences…

“Hey, Charlie, there you are,” said Nathan, appearing behind me. “Come on, the Greenskins are attacking-”

“Nathan,” I said, grabbing his arm. “You need to go back to the Guildhall, and stay there.”

He frowned at me. “What-”

“Think,” I said. “You look Caith; it’s going to be chaos down there, and you look like the people attacking this town. People will mistake you for an enemy.”

“I can’t- I can’t just do nothing!” he protested, easily pulling his arm free. “Vel is down there! I’m not going to abandon her!”

I pinched my nose. Fuck, this would have been much easier if he’d actually been a totally selfish piece of shit. I could mind whammy him, twist his emotions into listening to me, or just knock him out; all it would take was a touch and he'd be out like a light. But he’d figure the former out, and likely never forgive me for the latter—something I wouldn’t be able to blame him for.

“You want to help? I’m going to need all the hands I can get at my clinic when the wounded come in,” I said.

Nathan hesitated. “But-”

“Did you do some first aid in your schooling?” I asked.

“I was part of the cadets,” he said hesitantly. "We learnt basic stuff."

“Then you’re probably more qualified than some of my nurses.” I grabbed his arm again.

This time he didn’t resist, and I dragged him further up into town towards where I could already see Ritah, Nesvir, and Swithin getting set up.

“Wash your hands in between patients,” I told Nathan as we arrived at the long, half-tent structure which had some two dozen, very basic beds, a few tables covered in cloth, and lots of supplies stacked and ordered neatly along one wall. “Follow the other’s lead. Check and double check on people, listen to what they’re saying to you, and if they look in serious danger, or they're faint, or are in a lot more pain than you think they should be, you bring them to me, got it?”

“Yeah, yeah; got it,” said Nathan, nodding.

“Where is the healer!?” came a feminine voice. I looked up to see a pair of dhampir carrying a third who had a massive laceration to his neck. He was an adventurer, Iron rank, his name might have been Phildravar.

All thoughts of where I was and what the political implications of the raid were flew from my mind: I was a doctor, and I had a patient. The politics of the matter could wait.

“On the table, here,” I said, my voice taking on authority earned through years of study and practice.

I pressed my hands against his shoulder and focused. An awareness of his body bloomed in my mind. Lacerated artery, he'd be dead in under a minute unless I acted. I focused on the torn vein, ignoring the damaged tissue around it, visualising it knitting back together in the proper way. It hurt, and then my magic reacted, and the wound closed, stopping the bleeding. I checked the rest of his body, nothing else life threatening. I began to stitch the rest of the wounds back together.

“Healer!”

I opened my eyes to see another person being brought in, a beastkin woman, also bleeding copiously. Skills I’d picked up from nights spent in A&E kicked in, and I immediately began assembling the beginnings of a list: most critically injured with likelihood of survival at the top, someone who would be fine just in a bit of pain down the bottom. I took my hands away.

“I have healed the worst of it. He will be OK,” I said to Nesvir, even as I moved to the second injured. “Make him rest, and get him something to eat and drink, he lost a lot of blood-”

The female dhampir who had brought the man in grabbed my arm and pull me to a stop. As an adventurer, also an Iron Rank, she was damn strong, and I gasped at the force.

“He’s still hurt!” she said. “Heal him!”

“He is out of danger,” I replied. “And I need to heal her; please remove your hand.”

“Listen here you-”

Terror.

She screamed and fell back, and before she could recover Nathan had literally grabbed her by the back of her armour, dragged her out of the tent and threw her bodily into the street.

“And fuck off if you’re not hurt, dickhead!” he shouted at her as she scrambled away, the effects of my emotional manipulation slowly retreating.

Right. Security. I hadn’t thought of that. A seven-foot guy with arms like tree-trunks fit the bill, even against other supernaturally strong adventurers, it seemed.

I gave him a nod, and then turned my attention back to the beastkin woman.

I fell into a familiar rhythm as I worked. Sure, my miraculous healing ability was new, but the fundamentals were the same – healing was healing, and I’d seen similar injuries in Port Imperial: lacerations, crushing injuries, burns — both heat and electrical, likely courtesy of the spells I could hear being fired off further down the hill at the boundary wall.

More and more injured filtered in as the night wound on and the battle raged. I lost people: a dhampir and a dwarf who were dead before they made it through the door, and a beastkin woman who had some kind of curse I had no idea how to stop. I pushed down my sadness and moved on. No one could help the dead, but I could help the living.

Many of my patients I knew, either by name, or by sight, or from passing conversations I'd had, but it wasn’t until the moon was high in the sky that someone I knew quite well came rushing through the entrance-flaps, being carried like a baby in the arms of a bloodied and battered Jalver.

Tabbeeza, a vicious gash across her neck that was weeping blood. My Valorian teacher, who I hadn’t really spoken to since our last lesson a few weeks beforehand. Tabbeeza, who was strange and, literally, fey. Tabbeeza, who I liked very much.

My nurses waved him straight to one of the tables and shouted for me, but I already knew it was almost certainly too late, because I couldn’t sense anything from her.

“Charlie, please!” shouted Jalver as he set her down. “Please!”

I checked her pulse to be sure. Nothing, and unlike when I touched anyone else, my powers didn’t activate. Whatever spark that was necessary for me affect living creatures and heal them was gone. But that didn’t mean revival was impossible…

“How long?” I said as I crossed my hands and began to pump on her stomach, above where I thought her heart was based on the times I had healed Mousington. “One, two, three…”

“I- I don’t know,” said Jalver. “Maybe… three minutes?”

A chance then. A small chance.

“-twenty-nine, thirty,” I muttered to myself, before reaching up to open her mouth, taking a deep breath, and forcing air into her lungs. I checked for a pulse. Nothing. I tried again, and again, and again, until after the seventh cycle I stepped back and shook my head.

“I’m sorry, she’s gone,” I said, taking off my glasses and wiping tears from my eyes. “There’s nothing I can do. My powers can’t affect her, and… and I can’t get her heart started. CPR… what I did, it might not even work on Grimalkins. I’m sorry.”

Grey grief swirled in his aura, dwarfing my own, along with a hell of a lot of crimson rage. He gently closed her eyes, then stood back.

“You did your best,” he said in a strained, brittle, but controlled voice, despite the tempest inside him. “We’ll need to give her back to the Feywild. Please, look after her body.”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m sorry, Jalver-”

But he was already gone, drawing his massive sword as he strode back towards the battle, a beacon of crimson rage standing out even against the other anger, in part because unlike most of the others there was no yellow fear or orange anxiety. There was just pure, unadulterated rage.

He was going to kill someone, I knew. Many people, probably.

My stomach turned, and I had to force my gorge down. Focus. Focus.

“Fuck,” said Nathan from next to me, looking down at the cat-like wizard who seemed even smaller in death. “Tabz? I thought she was a super powerful wizard?”

“Please take her through to the back, and cover-"

“-her with a sheet, I know Char,” he said, reaching down and gently picking the small fey woman up. Some part of me was surprised to find the same grey grief in his aura as mine — more even. He had tears in his eyes too.

Of course he did. He was an idiot, not a monster.

I clamped down on my sorrow and turned to the next patient, a dhampir woman, the one who had grabbed me earlier even, who had a very broken leg and internal bleeding.

“Easy, easy, I’ve got you,” I said, making no comment as to her earlier behaviour as I took the pain away.

---

A.N. Like all my original work this is released four chapters ahead on my Patreon, and updates Thursdays.

I also have a finished fantasy novel that can be read on Scribblehub, Shattered Moon, and an episodic space-fantasy/horror/doctor-who-esque series, Mishka the Great and Powerful, that updates every Saturday.

I also have a new story, Marci of the Dreadfort, that I am writing as part of Sufficient Velocity's 'Global Novel Writing Month' challenge to get 50k words written and out there in the month of November. It will go up on Scribblehub at some point, but at the moment it is just on SV and my Patreon (where it is available to read as a free member, and isn't time-gated for any of the stuff I wrote in November).