Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [193]
“Damien.”
He was so sore it seemed he could hardly move. Someone was shaking him and it hurt. For a moment he cursed and tried to push the troublesome hands away, but they disappeared when he grabbed at them and reappeared elsewhere.
“Damien. I’m sorry. You need to get up.”
Damn. Damn. What was it now? He forced his eyes to open, and discovered that even his eyelids hurt. There wasn’t a part of his body that didn’t pain him, and that included his bladder. Clearly he had slept longer than certain bodily processes would have liked. “Karril? What the hell is it?”
When the Iezu saw he was awake, he leaned back on his heels, letting him get up at his own pace. “It’s Tarrant,” he warned. “Something’s wrong.”
Shit. He forced himself up to a sitting position, despite the complaints from all muscles involved. Not now, not after all we’ve gone through! “What is it?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid—” He stopped himself then, as if he was afraid that by saying the wrong thing he might make the matter worse. “You’re the Healer.”
He crawled over to where Tarrant lay. Like himself the Hunter had wound up sprawled across the rocky ground with his head upslope, the only position in which one could sleep without tumbling down the steeply canted slope. Even as he approached, Damien could see that the man’s breathing was labored, and his color looked bad, very bad. A day ago it wouldn’t have mattered, that ghastly pallor. Now it was a sign that Death was tightening its grip on the one man arrogant enough to defy it.
“What is it?” Karril demanded.
Damien raised up his veil a bit, braced himself, and drew in a deep breath. Nothing happened. Reassured that they were now above the level of Shaitan’s poisons, he freed Tarrant from his silken cocoon and watched as the man drew in short breaths, too quick and too shallow. He didn’t have to hear the faint wheezing sound at the end of each one to know what was wrong, or see the fear in Tarrant’s eyes to know just how wrong it was. The Prophet’s color—and his medical history—made that all too clear.
“Damn,” he whispered. “Not now, God. Couldn’t you let us get home first?”
“What is it?”
“Heart attack.” He could see Tarrant flinch as he spoke the words. “Or heart failure, more likely. He had the first incident right before he died, we know that.” And it drove him over the brink of sanity, so that he murdered his family andransomed his own soul to the Unnamed. Must this end the same way, God? Have you no better purpose for him than that? “Where’s the cause?” he demanded of Tarrant. “Do you know? Did you try to fix it?”
The Hunter shook his head weakly. “Doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “You can’t Heal here.”
“Just tell me, damn you!”
He shut his eyes and trembled: it was clear that every word took effort. “Congenital damage to the arterial wall,” he whispered. “Mitral valve . . .” He was struggling for each breath now, and Damien could hear the rasping wheeze behind each one. “Acquired. I tried....”
When it was clear that he had lost the strength for further speech, Karril dared, “Can you do something?”
What was he supposed to say? That there was nothing harder than Healing a beating heart, because if your every effort wasn’t perfectly attuned to that muscle’s natural rhythm, you could bring it to a halt altogether? That was all irrelevant anyway, wasn’t it? Damien couldn’t Heal here. The currents would fry him alive before he even got started.
Think man, think.There had to be a way. He hadn’t come this far to give up now. What tools were available to him? Tarrant was too weak to Work. He couldn’t do it with this much fae around. The lezu—
He drew in a sharp breath as it all came together. “Karril. Your kind can work with the fae, can’t it?”
The Iezu hesitated. “Not as you do. We can’t Work—”
“I know that! Sorcery’s not what I meant.” He struggled to find the proper words. “You can mold it, can’t you? Like you did to make a body.” He looked pointedly at the flesh Karril now wore, which he had used to support Gerald Tarrant.