Telmaine

Guillaume di Maurier’s close, overheated bedroom was fetid with the stink of blood and infection. The large young man lay gasping with agony and fever amidst disarrayed sheets on a bed whose ornately erotic carvings would have otherwise overwhelmed Telmaine with embarrassment. As a frame to his mortal suffering, they seemed merely pitiful and grotesque. There was a broad bandage over his exposed lower abdomen, where the sonn echoed crisp with sweat saturation; he’d been shot in the lower belly, and while he lay hidden through the day, peritonitis had set in. A stiff-lipped doctor rattled a dense clutter of hypodermics and bottles—a scene too uncomfortably reminiscent for her—and a starched nurse bustled by with basins and cloths. Both exuded disapproval that family had been banished to the antechambers while strangers were admitted to the sickroom. The stoic manservant, who seemed to have taken charge of all, acknowledged them, but ignored their mood.

Sylvide, who had insisted on coming with her, gripped Telmaine’s arm with her nails in silent distress. The manservant moved to the bedside and ordered the sheet decently, and firmly deflected the patient’s attempts to toss it away. “Lady Sylvide and Mrs. Telmaine Hearne are here, sir, as I told you.”

There was a long silence broken only by Gil’s harsh breathing. The bloodless flesh had sunk between the bones of his face. “Hearne,” he croaked at last.

“Mrs. Balthasar Hearne, sir.”

“Tell her . . . I . . . found . . . her.”

Telmaine pressed forward, pulling Sylvide after perforce. “Tell me!”

His hand came up, groping air, and then locked into a fist as a spasm of pain brought a new shower of sweat to his skull-face. The muscles around his neck stood out as hard and sharp as blades. The doctor stepped forward, hypodermic in hand, wrestling Gil’s rigid arm away from his side. With a fastidious finger he probed the entire length of the scarred, knotted vein. Telmaine muttered, “Get on with it.” The doctor jabbed with the needle. Sylvide whimpered and swayed on her arm. Telmaine steadied her, irritated at the interruption. “Go outside,” she ordered. “I won’t be long.”

The nurse helped Sylvide out of the room.

Forcing herself to use her burned hand rather than her teeth, Telmaine slipped her glove off, and, bracing herself for what she would feel, folded her hand around Guillaume’s clenched fist.

It was worse even than Bal, who though beaten and bleeding had been almost unconscious. Gil was in agony, consumed from within, fully aware he was dying. Prepared, she resisted an outcry. She released her magic, let it flood him, praying the witnesses would take the surcease of pain for the effect of the drug.

His gasping breaths steadied. “Lower Docks. Pier thirty-one. Lower level. Left-hand warehouse. There’s a door—”

“I know the place,” she said; from his memories she knew it.

“Shouldn’t have let them surprise me. I know better.” Voices behind him, a pile-driver blow in his lower belly, men kicking and taunting him as he writhed on the ground and then pitching him into the empty street as the sunrise bell fell silent. He’d dragged himself into a cleft that he could seal with rubble, and lain throughout the day beneath the burning flagstones—as he’d lain in the hot, dark place of his confinement with the rotting bodies of his dead sisters. Even with her vicarious experience of so many kinds of inner torment, she had never imagined torment like this.

“Tell . . . tell your husband”—the rictus of his smile was ghastly—“he saved me . . . for a better death than . . . the one I sought.” Through his memories, she glimpsed her Bal, a gentle and inexorable healer, banisher of monsters, hunter of demons, giver of hope. It wasn’t just for Florilinde that Gil had lived out the terrible day.

She lifted her head and sonned the doctor. He was no one she recognized, but she said crisply, “My husband is Dr. Balthasar Hearne. This young man is a patient of his. If my husband were here, I suspect he would tell you Baronet di Maurier needs much more of that than you are giving him. It does not matter whether you, personally, disapprove or not. You have a duty to relieve suffering.”

The doctor’s face was tight with disapproval and resentment. Gil croaked a laugh. “No use, there. He’s my family’s.”

Telmaine bore down on the doctor. “You took an oath, did you not? The same one my husband took.”

Grudgingly, the doctor began to prepare another syringe. “Is that enough?” she challenged, the moment he hesitated. Grudgingly, he yielded, drawing up what seemed to be a frighteningly large volume. She fervently hoped she had remembered correctly Bal’s explanations of addiction and tolerance.

She felt the needle punch through his scarred vein and, unnervingly, Gil’s rush of gratification at the sensation. She’d needed that dose to be given to cover what she was about to do. She had a sense that Ishmael di Studier was crouched beside her, his hand over hers, his awareness overlapping hers, giving her insight. The heavy bullet had torn the bowel on its entry, and lodged deep in the pelvic cavity; in its removal, more damage had been done. The bleeding had been severe and critically weakening, and the spilled bowel contents had started a raging peritonitis. Delicately, she knitted together the torn bowel, sealing its poisons within. Then, as she had done with Bal’s incipient pneumonia, she swept away the infection clawing at the raw membranes. That was all she could do; he was still dangerously weak, though the drug had finally eased his agony. An even more potent analgesic was his profound relief at having delivered up his message, at having not failed at his appointed task. She leaned over and brushed his burning cheek with her lips. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Tell Ishmael,” he rasped, his breath foul. “Bastard mage or no, he’s a great hunter. He’ll find her for you.”

“You found her,” she said, ignoring the chill that that “bastard mage” gave her. Gil di Maurier had better cause than most to hate magic. “And you’ll find and save others.” She straightened, laying his loosening hand back onto the covers. If he lived, they would simply call it a miracle, which suited her fine. If magic couldn’t ever return what it had taken from him, surely she’d added something to the balance.

For the first time, she truly understood why sixteen-year-old Ishmael di Studier, of high birth and slender talent, had exchanged his birthright for his talent and thought the bargain sound.

She found Sylvide in the sitting room, quietly sobbing in an armchair, the only one of the dozen or so there, men and women, who was. Telmaine acknowledged Guillaume di Maurier’s kin with the necessary civilities, but no more; she had no desire to talk to them, gathered like carrion birds at the deathbed of a son and nephew they had shunned in life. Though, she thought with a rising blush, if the carvings on that bed were anything to go by, Gil was hardly the blameless victim of social disapproval.

“Oh, Tellie,” Sylvide said with a hiccough as they climbed back into the carriage, “that was so sad. I know he was dissipated and a great disappointment to his family, but I knew him as a boy, and he was . . .”

“Rather horrible, I suspect,” Telmaine said, as her friend faltered. “Most little boys are, at least to little girls. Let’s pray for him, Sylvide. He’s had so much suffering in his life; surely there should be some redress.” She drew a deep breath. “I need you to take me to the prison.”

“To the prison?” Sylvide said, incredulous.

“Baron Strumheller asked Guillaume to search for Florilinde, and Guillaume found her just before he was shot. If the people who have her think he died before he could tell anyone, they won’t have moved her, and that’s our opportunity to get her back. But the man who knows best how to rescue her is in that prison.”

“Tellie, he’s held for sorcery and murder. They won’t let you visit him.”

“On false charges, Sylvide,” Telmaine said in a voice hammered hard with anger and resolution. “False, foul charges.”

“Tellie . . .” Sylvide wrung her hands. “You can’t go rushing off to the prison to visit a sorcerer. It doesn’t matter if you think he’s innocent; other people don’t. Think of your reputation. Think of mine, if you don’t care about yours. Your sister will . . . she’ll eat me alive!”

“I don’t”—care, she started to say. But she did care about the opinion of a society in which she had been embedded since birth. And about her friend’s safety and life. Gil di Maurier might be dying because Ishmael had involved him. Ishmael was in prison, surely, because he had been drawn in. Bal . . . She drew a deep breath, thinking swiftly, and then released it in a sigh.

“You’re right. I’ll go back to Merivan’s, tell the inquiry agents. But you must go to Bal for me. He should know about Guillaume. He’ll know someone he can send over there, someone who can treat his pain properly. If you set me down at Bolingbroke Circle I’ll be able to get a carriage from there.”

Sylvide argued, without effect. She set Telmaine down at the interchange, protesting still, while Telmaine reiterated the message she was supposed to give Balthasar. She sonned Sylvide’s worried, unhappy face, framed in the window of the departing coach, as she climbed aboard the hired carriage and gave her true destination, the Lower Docks.