The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [98]
At the time she’d thought it had fallen back onto the physical plane when Evandar destroyed his etheric constructions. When she hadn’t found it, she’d assumed that it had somehow dissolved. Silver, especially enchanted silver, can be profoundly unstable during dweomerworkings. But it wasn’t pure silver, she reminded herself. The daggers are made of some sort of alloy.
She gave up trying to solve the puzzle. If Neb’s chirurgery retrieved the dagger from Rori’s side, she would have her answer then and not before.
Just after dawn on the morrow, a strange group of chirurgeons assembled out in the grasslands near camp: Neb with his implements, Dallandra with her supplies, and two dragons with their great strength and weight. After Dallandra bound Rori’s mouth with rope, he lay down on his side. Medea pinned her stepfather’s tail under her forelegs, while Arzosah arranged herself across his shoulders. Neb stepped up to the wound. He’d found a large boning knife, of the sort a hunter would use to draw and disjoint a deer, and sharpened it to a scalpel’s edge.
“Very well, Rori,” Neb said. “Brace yourself.”
When she’d known Rhodry in human form, Dallandra had always been impressed by just how indifferent to pain he could be. Apparently, the dragon shared this trait. Neb felt the splinter one more time with his left hand, then slashed the hide just under the wound. Rori never moved nor made so much as a grunt or mutter, though his wings, folded tight along his back, did tremble. Blood trickled out of the slash along with a gray thick ooze that stank worse than any excrement.
“It did form a cyst,” Neb said. “I thought so. I’m making a second cut.”
This time Rori’s tail tried to lash out. Medea threw her weight forward and held it still as Neb cut vertically up from the original slash at each end, as if he were shaping a flap out of leather for a pouch. Rori allowed himself a low moan, quickly stifled. More blood spurted out of the new wounds, and green pus followed. Neb made a gagging sound deep in his throat from the stench, but his hands were steady as he used the point of the boning knife to pry something free.
In a wad of foul matter a dagger-shaped object fell to the ground. Slime oozed into the grass.
“Got it!” Neb called out. “Dalla—”
Dallandra stepped forward with her kettle of warm herbwater and ladle. Neb picked up the disgusting object with a pair of tongs and carried it out of her way. While she washed the wound clean—and it took the entire large kettleful to get all the pus out—Rori sighed several times, perhaps in relief. Medea had to lie across his tail, however, to hold it down. Once Dallandra had cleansed the cuts, she packed them with clean linen strips, soaked in an astringent, to stop the bleeding.
Neb returned with a handful of thin gold wires. “The prince gave me an old Deverry brooch made out of woven wires,” he said. “He got it in trade, I think, but anyway, I unwound it. Thread isn’t going to hold this cut closed. Rori, my apologies, but I’m going to have to cause you more pain. I need to make holes and lace you up like a bit of leather work.”
Rori mumbled something which sounded, with his bound mouth, much like “Very well then.” He rumbled briefly, as if he’d made a jest. Medea shifted her hold on his tail to secure it, and once again Arzosah leaned over his shoulders.
“I must say,” Arzosah said, “that it gladdens my heart to have that awful stink gone.”
“Me, too,” Neb said. “Very well, here we go.”
Once again Rori’s self-control held him rigid and still. Dallandra pulled out the linen strips, then stepped back out of Neb’s way. With an awl Neb made holes in his hide, inserted the gold wires, and laced both the new cuts and the old shut. With the cyst opened and the irritant gone, Dallandra could hope that the wound would heal up properly at