Part 41 (2/2)
He went to bed. As he dozed off, a voice whispered at the front of his tent. He inched forward to twitch the tent flap aside. It was Raysia. Though he could only make out the outline of her form, silhouetted against the incandescent stars, he could feel it was her, knew it by the shape of her hair and the soft, clean scent she bore with her. She slipped inside. The walls of his tent shuddered in the unceasing wind, but otherwise it was silent. He fell asleep afterward with her draped half over him.
Only to start awake, hearing his name.
”Aleksi!”Tess, calling to him. She was not screaming, not yet, but panic swelled her voice.
He eased away from Raysia, and she woke, mumbling a question.
”Stay here,” he said, struggling to get dressed. He cursed himself for not sleeping with his clothes on.
”Aleksi! Oh, G.o.d.”
He grabbed his boots in his left hand and his saber in his right and crawled out of his tent and ran to hers. Tess was not in the outer chamber. A single lantern lit the inner chamber, and he found her there, rocking back and forth on her heels, staring, rocking, gasping for breath.
”Aleksi! Oh, thank the G.o.ds. Get Cara. Please.” Her voice broke.
Bakhtiian lay asleep on pillows, a fur pulled up over his naked chest. His face was slack, and his mouth half open. He looked rather undignified, sprawled out like that. Aleksi paused to pull on his boots.
”I can't wake him up.” She choked out the words. Then she began to sob. ”Oh, G.o.d, why did I do it? Why did I insist?''
”But, Tess-” Her complete disintegration shocked him horribly. ”Here, let me try.” He bent over her, daring much, and shook Bakhtiian gently. No response. Then, suddenly, losing patience and hating the terrible shattering condition Tess had fallen into, he slapped him. Bakhtiian's head absorbed the blow, moving loosely, but he did not stir in the slightest. And Aleksi understood: Bakhtiian's spirit had left his body.
He had seen it happen once before, with his own sister Anastasia, some four winters after their tribe had been obliterated. Except his sister had never come back. Her spirit had stayed in the G.o.ds' lands, and her body had withered and, at last, died.
Like a black wave, fear and anguish smothered him. He could not move. He could not move.
”He's going to die, Aleksi. He's going to die.”
Brutally, Aleksi crushed the fear down, down, burying it. Then he ran to get the doctor. Dr. Hierakis was fully dressed, sleeping wrapped in a blanket beneath one of her wagons. She rose with alacrity and hurried back with him, stumbling once in the dark. A thick leather bag banged at her thigh. The wind whined and blew around them. The walls of Tess's tent boomed and sighed as he went in behind the doctor and followed her in, all the way in, to stand silent just inside the inner chamber.
Tess talked in a stream of rapid Anglais. The doctor ran a hand over Bakhtiian's lax face, moved his flaccid limbs. She opened her bag and brought out-things.
Aleksi effaced himself. He willed himself to become invisible, but neither of the women recalled that he was there.
Things. Objects. Aleksi did not know what else to call them, so smooth, made of no metal he recognized, if indeed it was even metal. Not a fabric, certainly, not any bone he knew of, this hand-sized block that the doctor palmed in her right hand and held out over Bakhtiian's head. Just held it, for a long moment, doing nothing. Then she swept it slowly down over his body, uncovering him as she went. When she had done, she covered him back up again and took a flat s.h.i.+ny tablet and laid it on a flat stretch of carpet and said two words.
If Aleksi had not honed his self-control to the finest pitch, he would have jumped. As it was, he twitched, startled, but he made no noise. The tablet shone, sparked, and a spirit formed in the air just above it. A tiny spirit, shaped with a man's form but in all different colors, wavering, spinning, melding. Until Aleksi realized that it was Bakhtiian's form, somehow imprisoned in the air above the tablet.
He must have gasped or made some noise. Tess jerked her head around and saw him.
”d.a.m.n,” she said. ”Aleksi, sit down.”
He sat. ”What is it? Is that Bakhtiian's spirit?”
Dr. Hierakis glanced up from studying the slowly rotating spirit hanging in the air. ”G.o.ddess. I thought you'd stayed outside.”
”It isn't a spirit, Aleksi,” said Tess. ”It's a picture. A picture of his body. It shows what might be making him-ill-what might be making him-”
”But his spirit has left his body,” said Aleksi. ”I know what it looks like when that happens. That's his spirit there.” He pointed to the spirit. It spun slowly, changing facets like a gem turning in the light, little lines hatched and bulging, tiny gold lights stretched on a net of silvery-white wire, brilliant, as Aleksi had always known Bakhtiian's spirit would be, radiant and gleaming and surprising only in that it emitted no heat he could feel. ”I can see it.”
”No, he's just unconscious. That's just an image of his body. The doctor is trying to find out why he's fallen into this-sleep.”
”We know why,” said the doctor in a dry, sarcastic tone. ”I'm trying to find out how extensive the damage is.” Then she said something else in Anglais.
”Oh, h.e.l.l.” Tess burst into tears again.
”It isn't Habakar witchcraft,” said Aleksi suddenly. ”It's yours.”
The doctor snorted. ”It isn't witchcraft at all, young man, and I'll thank you not to call it that. But it's quite true that we're the ones responsible.”
”I'm the one responsible,” said Tess through her tears.
Dr. Hierakis shook her head. ”What can I say, my dear? The serum has metastasized throughout the body, and for whatever reason, it's caused him to slip into a coma.”
”You can't wake him up somehow?”
”Right now, since his signs are otherwise stable, I don't care to chance it. You knew the risks when you insisted we go ahead with the procedure.”
Tess sank down onto her knees beside her husband and bent double, hiding her face against his neck. He lay there, limp, unmoving. The walls of the tent snapped in, and out, and in again, and out, agitated by the wind. The doctor sighed and spoke a word, and the luminous spirit above the tablet vanished. A single white spark of light shone in the very center of the black tablet. A similar gleam echoed off the doctor's brooch.
Aleksi jumped to his feet. ”Where did his spirit go?” he demanded.
Dr. Hierakis let out all her breath in one huff. ”Aleksi, his spirit did not go anywhere. It's still inside him. That was just an image of his spirit, if you will.”
”But-”
”Aleksi.” Now she turned stern. ”Do you trust Tess?”
”Yes.”
”Do you think she would do anything to harm Bakhtiian?”
”No.”
”Aleksi. This slate, this tablet here, it isn't a magic thing, it's a-a machine. Like the mechanical birds that the amba.s.sador from Vidiya brought but more complex than that. It's a tool. It can do things, show us things, that we could not otherwise do ourselves or see ourselves. It helps us do work we otherwise could not do, or work that would take much longer to do if we did it-by hand.”
Aleksi considered all this, and he considered how many times he had wondered why Tess seemed ignorant of the simplest ch.o.r.es and duties that the jaran engaged in every day. ”Do you have many of these machines in Jeds?”
The doctor smiled. He saw that she was pleased that he was responding in a clever, reasonable way to her explanations. He knew without a doubt that she was telling him only a part of the truth. ”Yes. Many such machines.”
”Then why didn't Bakhtiian see them there, when he was in Jeds? I never heard Sonia or Nadine mention such machines either.''
”Tell him the truth,” said Tess, her voice m.u.f.fled against Bakhtiian. ”I can't stand it, all these lies. I can't stand it. Tell him the truth.”
Aleksi crouched down and waited.
The doctor placed her tablet inside her bag and followed it with the little black block. ”The truth is, Aleksi, that we don't come from Jeds, or from the country overseas, Erthe, either. We don't come from this world. We come from up there.” She pointed at the tent's ceiling.
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