Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [148]
Dag wet his lips. “Anyone on our side killed?”
Saddler looked dubiously at Dag’s two patients. “Not yet, seems. Nine of the bandits are goners. Twenty-one here left to hang, though there’s one that might not live for it.”
Dag stared in frustration at Chicory’s drained face. He must bring the Raintree man to a point where he could be left for a while, because Dag had to start moving after Crane. But in what direction? Haring off the wrong way would be worse than useless. He did know he wanted Copperhead under him to speed the search. Barr and Remo might be mounted on a couple of the bandits’ horses—they’d found a dozen or so hobbled not far from the cave.
“Saddler, go back and see if you can find out anything at all about which way those five fellows might have gone. Barr, take a turn around the perimeter again—they might be coming back, and we want to spot them before they spot us. Remo…stay with me. I need you.”
Whit, unassigned, tagged off after Saddler. Remo knelt beside Dag.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked quietly.
“Break me out if I appear to groundlock myself. I need to do some deeper groundwork inside Chicory’s poor bashed head, here.”
Remo nodded gravely. Trustingly. Absent gods, did Dag look like he knew what he was doing? Surely Remo should know better by now. Dag sighed and dropped down into that increasingly easy, ever more familiar level of ground-awareness.
The inner world expanded to fill his horizon, as vast and complex a landscape as the Luthlian woods. No wonder that, once a fellow had done this, any other sort of making seemed trivial and dull. A calling, indeed. But his elation was short-lived. These injuries were subtler by far than Hod’s knee, the groundscape deeper and much stranger. Far beyond Dag’s understanding.
I don’t have to understand everything. The body is wiser than I’ll ever be, and will heal itself if it can. Let him just start with the obvious, mend the biggest broken vessels. He’d done that before. Maybe that would be enough. It had better be enough.
He continued the inner exploration. This end went with that one, ah. A little shaped reinforcement would hold them together. For a time. Another, another, another. Ah! That torn artery was the main source of the trouble, yes! Dag brought it back into alignment, reinforced it doubly. And then blood was leaking into the pocket more slowly than it was leaking out, and then it was hardly refilling at all. This time, when the bulge deflated, it stayed shrunken. Another push to position the shell-cracked bone. The squashed brain tissue expanded back into its proper place, still throbbing. Another ground reinforcement quelled its distress…
In his exacerbated sensitivity, Remo’s little ground-bump felt like a blow to the side of Dag’s head. He gasped and fell, disoriented, upward into the light.
“Are you all right?” asked Remo.
Dag gulped and nodded, blinking and squinting. “Thanks. That was timely.”
“Seemed to me you’d been in that trance for an awful long stretch.”
Had he? It had seemed like mere minutes to Dag. Whit appeared at his side; he handed Dag a cup of something, and Dag, unsuspecting, drank and nearly choked. It was nasty, sickly sweet, but it burned down his throat in a heartening way. Some sort of horrible fruit brandy, he decided, from the bandits’ stores. His stomach, after a doubtful moment, elected not to heave.
Dag had done all he could think of for the skull fracture, for now. They were into the wait and see what happens part. He set Chicory’s head down gently, cradling it in a folded blanket, and clambered to his feet. His stiffened joints moved like chalk scraping over a slate. Bearbait reappeared—when had he gone off?—and earnestly took in Dag’s brief instructions about keeping his leader warm and lying still till Dag got back. For once, Dag had no objection when Remo grabbed his arm to steady him on his feet. Weirdly, the tiny