The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [55]
The next morning, Travis had left while Grace lay on the bed, staring at the sagging ceiling and trying in vain to Touch the Weirding. He returned at noon with bagels and a fake social security card.
“Say hello to Hector Thorkenblat,” he had said, holding up his new card.
She had wrinkled her nose. “That doesn’t sound so much like a name as something you have to clean up.”
A few days later, once they felt more confident that his face wouldn’t be remembered from the night of their arrival, Travis had taken his new card down to Denver Memorial and gotten Hector a job as a night janitor. And that was how they had learned that Beltan was alive but in a coma.
Since he had started working at the hospital, Travis had been checking on Beltan every few days. Grace knew Beltan was getting the best care this world had to offer—which was considerably more than the last. All the same, she had to see him, to touch him for herself. Even here, there were things she could sense that no electronic monitor could detect.
Grace gripped the metal railing of the bed. It had been more than two months, and she knew what happened to long-term coma cases. All the same, a gasp escaped her.
“Oh, Beltan …”
In her memory she saw him tall and strong, clad in chain mail and holding his sword, a fierce grin on his face. The man on the bed bore little resemblance to that memory.
He looked old. The limbs that protruded from the hospital gown were white and thin, as if his sharp-edged bones had been stretched impossibly long. Beneath the gown, his muscles had atrophied, and the hands that rested at his sides looked like bundles of sticks.
Her eyes moved past the IV tubes and monitor leads—he was not on a respirator at least—to his face. They had let his scruffy beard grow. It seemed dull, brownish rather than gold, and it took her a moment to find the homely, cheerful face she knew beneath. She would have given anything to see one of his brilliant smiles, but he was motionless save for the steady rise and fall of his chest.
Grace pushed aside the gown and let her fingers dance along the mass of pink scar tissue on Beltan’s left side. She shut her eyes and concentrated. It was dim and murky—like a blurry X-ray with no backlighting rather than a computer-colored, three-dimensional scan—but Queen Ivalaine had been right. Even on Earth, Grace had the talent.
His old wound had healed well—far better than it ever had on Eldh. Abdominal surgery and antibiotics still had an edge on magic. However, his blood loss had been catastrophic, and it was this that had induced the coma. The doctors could repair his body, reinfuse his veins with blood, but no amount of surgery had the power to wake him.
Maybe he needs some magic after all, Grace.
She replaced the gown, then laid a hand on the high expanse of his forehead. There were more lines on his brow than she remembered. For some reason she felt like singing to him, which was very undoctorlike. Then again, didn’t research suggest that familiar voices could help coma patients to wake from unconsciousness? Words came to her lips, so old she had all but forgotten them.
“And farewell words too often part
All their small and paling hearts.
The fragile glade and river lain,
Beneath the hush of silent rain.”
She touched the angular metal pendant beneath her shirt. The song was a thing of her childhood, like the necklace. But where had it come from? Certainly no one at the orphanage had sung it to her. And there was no doubt in her mind that the words were wrong. She must have heard it as a small girl and, like children so often do, transformed strange sounds into familiar words. All the same, the song was comforting. To her, at least, if not to Beltan. She began to murmur the words again.
His eyelids twitched.
Grace drew in a hiss of air. It’s just an autonomic reflex, Doctor. Don’t read more into it than there is. All the same she pressed her hand against his brow and shut her eyes.
Beltan?
It was hard. The threads of the Weirding were so faint