Page 50 of Tending the Ache

The man wants out. On foot, alone, in a city that is hunting him, with the gates sealing right now, he has nothing. Unless he has a body in front of him. Somebody the guards know by name. Somebody they have watched the king walk home in the dark.

Then he has everything.

South gate. Closest to this street, and the approach is broad and open, so the guards will see the blade at the throat from forty feet out and will not be able to do one useful thing about it.

Eskil is already moving.

I will kill him. Whatever else happens tonight, that man does not see the sun.

Chapter 15

Indrie

Indrie hears something in the front room and gets out of bed to check on it.

The sound is small. A scrape, a shuffle, the kind of noise a body makes moving through a space it does not know in the dark. It could be a rat. It could be the wind pushing the door against its frame. It could be nothing.

But the door does not lock, and the alarm horns woke him twenty minutes ago, and the horns have not stopped, and Indrie spent five years sleeping in a room without a door and learned that every sound at night deserves investigation because the consequences of ignoring one are always worse than the consequences of checking.

He moves through the doorway in his sleep clothes. Barefoot. Rubbing his eyes with the heel of one hand, the other trailing along the wall for guidance because the lamp in the front room has gone out and the only light is the thin grey wash of moonlight through the tall windows. His vision is still blurred with sleep and his mind is still half-submerged, and the transition from asleep to awake is not complete when he steps into the clinic and sees the man.

There is an injured man standing in his clinic.

He is between the examination table and the door, half-turned, caught mid-stride, as though Indrie's appearance has frozen him in the act of moving through. Blood on his hands. A gash on his arm, ugly and open, the flesh parted and glistening in the moonlight. His knees a bloody mess that leaves him standing lopsided. His breathing is hard, the labored breathing of somebody who has been limping at speed, whose lungs are burning, whose body is operating at the ragged edge of what it can sustain.

Indrie's healer instincts engage before his survival instincts can catch up.

"Are you alright?" Indrie asks, already moving toward the shelf where the bandages are stored. His Rengaran comes out thick with sleep but clear enough. "Do you need help? Let me—"

He reaches for the bandages.

The man looks at him.

And Indrie sees his eyes.

Wild. Cornered. Desperate. The eyes of an animal that has been trapped and knows it is trapped. Eyes that have decided to do whatever is required to break free.

Indrie has seen eyes like this before. In Kalkoa, in the servants' quarters, in the faces of men and women who had been pushed past the point where reason operates and fear governs. He has never seen them in a patient. He has never seen them in somebody standing in his clinic at night with blood on their hands and the alarm horns screaming outside.

Something shifts in his understanding. The pieces rearrange themselves, the horns, the blood, the gash on the arm, the man in his clinic in the dark, and the picture that forms is not a patient who has come for help.

He turns to run.

The man grabs him by the hair.

The pain is immediate, a wrenching, tearing agony that starts at his scalp and shoots down his spine and turns the world white for one blinding second. He is yanked backward off his feet, his body snapping at the end of the man's arm. The back of his head hits the man's chest and there is a forearm across his throat and a hand still fisted in his hair and then.

Cold.

A thin line of cold against his neck. Metal. Sharp. Surgically sharp, because Indrie knows the weight and the edge of his own instruments and the thing pressed against his throat is one of his scalpels. The finest of them. The one Morgan brought, packed in straw, with the blade honed so fine he could barely see it in the window light.

He goes absolutely still.

His body knows before his mind does. Do not move. Do not struggle. Do not give them a reason. The protocol is written into his muscles and his bones and the pathways carved by five years of flinching.

"Don't make a sound," the man hisses. His Rengaran is rough, accented, strained, pushed through clenched teeth. Indrie can smell him, blood and sweat and the metallic reek of fear, an odor he has learned to identify in patients whose bodies are producing more than they can metabolize. The man is terrified. Terrified men are the most dangerous kind.

Indrie's training speaks before his fear does.