He required all his mending skills for his lord. Methodically over the past eighteen days he had tended Baralis' ailments. Open wound were the most pressing problem and Crope cleaned them with alcohol and rubbed them with a salve made from aloe and sweet fennel. The ulcers and pressure sores had to be washed with a tincture of calendula twice a day, and Crope was careful not to let his lord lie in the same position overlong else the skin break up and become worse. There was deadnettle for the bladder, horehound for Baralis' weakened lungs, and butcher's broom for his enlarged heart. Ewe's milk so thick with cream it coated your hand like a glove helped restore his weight. Then came the potions that dulled the pain and dimmed the night terrors: blood of poppy, skullcap, devil's claw. Crope tried not to think too long on their names; they were a warning, he left it at that.
What he could not drive from his mind were the things wrong with his lord that could never be made right. Bone had been broken, allowed to partially reheal, and then systematically broken again. What was left was a body that would never bear its own weight, a spine riddled with bone spurs, vertebrae that had fused around the neck, a femur with a head so misshapen that it no longer fitted squarely in its socket, finger joints that would not bend, a wrist that could not rotate, a rib cage that lay like the collapsed hull of a shipwreck beneath the skin.
It was something worse than torture, something that went beyond the desire to disfigure and cause pain. Crope was not good with notions, and he'd had to puzzle the evil for a long time before he realized its purpose: the creation of absolute dependency.
Baralis could not have lived without the aid of his persecutor. He had been stripped of the ability to fend for himself. Everything required for survival—food, water, warmth and clothing—had to be brought to him by another. Unable to draw a cool glass of water to his lips or move to ease the pain of the pressure sores, Baralis had been forced to wait in the darkness until his persecutor brought relief. Crope had lived in the sulfurous darkness of the tin mines. He'd been locked up in root cellars, back rooms and cages. He knew what it was to be frightened and alone. What he didn't know was what it felt like to be helpless. He was a giant man, and when chains needed breaking all he had to do was take them in his fists and pull.
His lord could not have pulled; that was the thought that undid Crope.
Feeling the bad pressure building behind his eyes, he took a step away from his lord to calm himself. The giant's blood in him pumped hard when he got angry and he had to be careful to keep his chest from getting tight. One of the last times he'd given in to the giant's blood he'd brought down a tavern in a fortified town north of Hound's Mire. Bringing down buildings wasn't good.
The smell of hot grease distracted him. The girls downstairs were preparing supper: hare fried in duck fat, if he wasn't mistaken. The girls had set up a little stove in the hallway and cooked whatever Quill or their customers brought to the house. Crope's mouth began to water at the thought of crispy hare skin, which was mostly a good thing. Feeling hungry was better than feeling mad.
As he washed his lord's wounds, Crope noticed the sunlight begin to fail. The strange, circular marks on Baralis' thighs and buttocks didn't bother him so much now. Crope had imagined his lord being branded with hot irons and that made him mad, but Quill had said no, that wasn't the case. According to him, Baralis had lain on his chains for so long that iron had leached through his skin and laid down pigment like a tattoo. Crope thought that Quill was about the smartest man he knew—excepting for his lord, of course.
A knock on the door made Crope freeze. What was he to do? Answer it? Ignore it? Hike out the window and escape? Quill had warned him many times of the need to keep a low profile. "Keep you head down, your door locked, and your mouth shut You're in the worst kind of trouble: you good as killed a king" Crope had no argument with that. "Worst kind of trouble" could have been his middle name. Frowning at the little circular window set at shoulder height in the west wall, Crope decided escape wasn't going to be quick. Grease would be needed. Bulk of this magnitude didn't go through openings of that… similitude without a considerable amount of help. "It's me. Grant me ingress."
Quill. Stupid, scuttle-brained fool. Should have known it was him all along. Crope nodded softly, relieved. The bad voice was usually right. "A moment," he called out. Bending deep at the waist, he attended his lord.
Baralis was in the half-world between sleep and waking. Blood of poppy pumped through his arteries, slowing the workings of his heart and liver, and clouding his brain. The terrors had been bad last night and Crope had been frightened that his lord might injure himself. Baralis had writhed on the bed, arching his spine and clawing at the shadows in front of his face. No, he had cried again and again. No.
The blood of poppy had stilled him, but now, half a day later, he was beginning to stir. Crope knew his lord. He could tell from a few tiny movements—the flick of an eyelid, the contraction of muscle below the jaw—that Baralis was becoming aware.
Swiftly, Crope tucked pillows beneath his lord's head and straightened the sheets. With the little whalebone comb he had carried with him all the way from the diamond pipe, he groomed Baralis' night-black hair. There was no time to banish the sour smell of urine so Crope scooped a packet of dried mint from the table and crushed it hard in his fist. On his way to the door he scattered the pieces randomly about the room. It didn't disguise the sourness exactly, he decided, reaching for the door bolt. Just made it smell as if someone had drunk a bucket of mint tea before pissing.
It would have to do. One quick glance back assured Crope that his lord was now in possession of his dignity, and he was free to pull back the bolts.
"Took your time," Quill said, stepping through the doorway, his gaze shooting into all the dark spaces. "Sleeping is he?" Crope nodded, thought, then shook his head. Quill appeared to understand this and jabbed his chin in response. Medium height and lean as back bacon, he shrank to almost nothing when viewed from the side. His hair was dark and greased close to his skull and his eyes were an uncertain color that Crope could only describe as "murky." As befitted a thief, Quill's clothes were unremarkable in fit and color, offering no information worth repeating to a bailiff. Brown. Gray. Worn. It was his custom however to wear "a spot of cream." Cream was gold that was nine-tenths pure, Crope had learned, and it advertised Quill's status to others like him. Today he wore a heavy-gauge chain circling his left wrist at the cuff mark. You could see it only when he extended his arm in a certain manner … which was exactly as he planned.
Sliding himself against the far wall, Quill said, "Close the door. There's business to discuss."
Crope did Quill's bidding, hoping Quill wouldn't study the room too carefully while his back was turned. The rough plank walls had sponged up years of damp, and holes of varying sizes told of longstanding infestations: woodworm, termites, mice. A rug woven from bulrushes had partially unraveled on the floor, and overhead in the roof beams fiddlehead spiders had crocheted a killing field for flies.
Crope tried to keep the room clean, but no matter how much he swept and scrubbed the shabbiness remained.
"Watch'll be coming door-to-door tonight," Quill said, flicking his gaze away from the figure on the bed as Crope turned to face him. "A carter hauling tallow up Lime Hill swears he saw a giant as tall as two men heading east towards Rat's Nest at dawn."