Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [145]
“Should we—?” Whit began uncertainly.
“Leave him for now. He won’t be running off,” murmured Dag. He would worry about men due to be hanged in the morning only after he had tended to the injured on their own side. If there was time or any of himself left over for the task.
“But I—which one did I hit?” Whit stared back over his shoulder.
“Yours was that brain-shot. Clean, very quick.”
“Oh.”
Whit’s expression teetered between triumph and revulsion, and Dag realized it wasn’t just Barr and Remo he ought to meet with when this was all over, to check for damage due to leaks from targets. And who will check my ground? Never mind, first things first. Reeling, disarmed bandits were already being passed out through a gauntlet of boatmen and tied to trees. Dag trusted the rivermen knew their knots.
The inside of the cave was arrested chaos. Benches and crates lay knocked over, bedrolls kicked around. Goods of all kinds were strewn across the floor, including an inordinate number of bottles and jugs, broken and whole. The cave seemed to be composed of two chambers, one behind the other, each about twenty feet high and forty across. The fire beneath the smoke hole spouted up around a broken keg, emitting a glaring light. Burning oil from a broken lantern spread and sputtered, but already a boatman was stamping it out. Some men lay groaning on the ground, others were being tied up; there seemed to be at least two boatmen standing for every live bandit left—good. Dag winced, trying to hold his groundsense open long enough to get an accurate head-count. He still couldn’t find the Lakewalker leader. Was Crane ground-veiled and hidden amongst the others? No…Remo was upright and uninjured, though, better still.
Bearbait sprang up at his elbow and grabbed him by the arm; Dag controlled a reflexive strike at him. “Lakewalker, quick! You have to help!”
He jerked Dag toward the cave wall, a little out of the way of the noisy mob. Two boatmen lay there on hastily tossed-down blankets. A kneeling friend held his hands frantically to the neck of one of them; blood spurted between his tight fingers. The other was Chicory, lying stunned, breathing irregularly, his face the color of cold lard. Oh, no! Dag let his groundsense lick out. The Raintree hunter had taken a cudgel blow on the left side of his skull, fracturing it just above the ear. Bad…
Bearbait wet his lips and said, “He’d took on two with his spear, see, when a third one got him from behind. I wasn’t quick enough…”
The one with the cut to the neck was now or never. Dag dropped to his knees, unlocked and tossed his bow aside, and let his hands real and ghostly slide over those of the frightened friend, one of the Silver Shoals fellows. “Don’t move,” he murmured. “Keep holding tight, just like that.” The man gulped and obeyed.
The jugular vein was only nicked, not sliced in two; this might not be impossible…The uproar of the cave faded from Dag’s senses as he descended, down and in. Felt with his ground projection, caught up the cut edges of the big vessel, and mated them one to another once more. A shaped ground reinforcement, not large, but dense and tight…would it hold against internal pressure, external jostling? Had the pallid young man already spent too much blood to recover? The soil beneath Dag’s knees was soaked in red, sticky and caking. He drew breath and backed out, evading groundlock, staring around in disorientation at the dire scene in the cave, unholy noises, men’s shadows leaping in the wavering torchlight.
Dag shook his head and swallowed, chilled and shaking. “You can let up now,” he told the bloody-handed friend, removing his own hand and wrist cuff from above. “Get blankets around him, get him warmed up any way you can. But don’t bump him, or that big vein will bust open again. That surface cut needs stitches, if you have anyone with a real light hand to do it. Not right away, but in a bit.” The jagged,