Entry Point 8 - by L. Blankenship
The portal of woven kir let me pass, tearing like cobwebs across my arm held before my face. Fresh snow on paving stones crunched under my boot. And the moment my ears reached this new world, this place that had begged for help, the crashing and shouting of battle filled them.
I stood in a small square, at the foot of a snow-covered statue of a knight on a rearing horse, within sight of city walls and a barred gate. The battlements stood above the timber-and-shingle houses, full of men fighting and surging back and forth.
A shadow fell across me; I turned and saw a riveted brigantine over a mail shirt. Shoulders wrapped in bear fur. Above that, a scowling, scarred man in a battered helmet.
“Who else comes?” he demanded, glaring at the green cloud of kir I’d stepped through. It faded now, shedding tiny stars. “Who else! King Yadi begged for aid and you —” The knight gestured at me, half shrugging. “Who are you?”
I gripped the strap of my medicine bag, across my chest, in both hands. That steadied me. “I’m Kate Bockmann.” I straightened as much as I could, but I still didn’t reach his shoulder; he was a huge man. “Saint Qadeem heard your call for help and sent me.”
A second knight, striding across the square from a formation of some hundred, looked puzzled by me, but not so angry. “Vess, what do we have?”
“We have a girl,” Vess answered, stepping aside and presenting me with a sweep of his arm. “Fifty thousand Orcs at the gate and they send us a fucking handmaid. One with — what the hell are those?” He pointed at my Blessing ridges, which parted my blonde hair in two lines across the top of my head.
My resolve quavered as the shouting on the walls above drowned in a rising, inhuman howl. No; Qadeem and my teacher had seen fit to trust me with this, as they had the secret mission.
“I’m a Blessed of Saint Qadeem and the student of the Elect, sir, and I’ll aid you however I can. These are my Blessing.” I ran my fingers over the ridges where they pushed up through my scalp. Being so tall, Vess must have a good view of them. “I remember every moment of every day since I received them. All my skill, all my kir, are at your service. We face invasion, as well, and Wodenberg could hardly spare me, let alone — Prince Kiefan, or…”
The howling on the wall broke and men’s voices surged. I glanced up and saw a red banner with gold crowns advancing across the battlements. Who were they fighting, up there? Orcs — what manner of men were those?
“And what do you do, miss?” Vess asked.
“I’m a Physician.”
His brow furrowed in a frown, then he threw up his hands and turned away.
“We begged for aid,” the second knight told him. “King Yadi begged, and you know what that cost him. If her people face war as well, that they sent anyone at all — oh, have a little faith, will you?” His reasoning tone slid toward anger. “We’re all to die under the sword, if we fail, and your hangman’s humor only feeds the men’s fears.”
“Watch your tongue, lieutenant.” The bigger man took a sharp step toward him, pointing.
“Sirs!” My standing there was poor use of my healing skills. They both looked to me, the scarred officer scowling, the lieutenant — well, he looked doubtful, but far kinder. “You must have an infirmary?”
Across the square, metal clashed, rattled. We all startled; I whirled around. A grate bounced, among the paving stones, and then flipped open. A drain, it was a grate covering a drain. Up leaped a stocky, mail-shirted man with a heavy spear in both fists. With a roar, he charged as his brothers followed him.
Straight at me. The man, the… Orc had tusks. Piggish ears sticking from his helmet. Dusky grey skin. I froze for a heartbeat. They’d brought me to the Winter Wood itself, to face kobolds?
The spear plunged at me and I threw up my arm, kir spinning out. The stubby green shield I knit stopped the iron blade. The blow threw me to the ground with a numbed arm. The Orc raised the spear again and a sword took him through the ribs. Blood spurted when the lieutenant kicked him off the blade, and the dying monster fell. He met the second Orc head-on — and I was scrambling away, out from underfoot.
The knights rushed across the square before the stream of Orcs could organize. I pressed against the statue’s pillar, watching them cut the monsters down. True enough, I was no knight. Surely Kiefan or Anders would’ve been better suited to this.
But surely I could help, too.
Vess carved through the enemy, sword slinging off blood with each stroke. Soon enough, they’d fought their way to the open drain, and the big captain threw a dying Orc down the hole. Two men flipped the grate back into place, and a third jammed a spear in to wedge it shut. A cheer went up.
I was already slipping from my safety, running to the first fallen knight. Touching his bare cheek, I called his kir-pattern but it didn’t answer. He was dead, bled out on the trampled snow. The second was weak and wilting, the whorls of kir in his flesh stumbling and fading as I watched. Among the whorls, the bright lines of his meridians pulsed, fighting death and losing.
Kir powered all charms, and all flesh was kir bent into shape and set to dancing — life was its own charm, my teacher had said. Wounds and sickness broke the flesh’s patterns, sending the whorls and threads into tangles and jumbles. Too much confusion, and the patterns lost their dance. Died.
The third was the lieutenant. The spear jammed through his gut wobbled in his hands as he gasped for air. Knuckles white, he tugged at it, and the pain curled him on the paving stones.
“Don’t touch it!” I pulled his hands away. His pattern, whirling up in all its dance, frothed around the blank space of the spear shaft. It had missed his prime meridian, along his spine, thank Mother Love. And the cruel thing held in his blood, for now. “The infirmary! Where’s your infirmary!”
“Del! Fucking whoreson—” Vess dropped to one knee beside the lieutenant, catching his hand and gripping it. “I shouldn’t have let you stay, little cousin — you had to sign up!”
“Who else is wounded?” I glanced around the other knights, seeing some blood. None too serious; they were still on their feet. “Come with us. Where’s your infirmary?” I dared shove big Vess, to get his attention. “Let him lie here, and he’ll die.”
Vess blinked at me, as if I’d told him Del would sprout wings and fly. Then he scrambled up and hoisted his cousin by the shoulders. A second knight took his ankles and they carried him between them. I had to run to keep up.
The tavern was just a block up from the square.
Its main doors stood open, as did full-length shuttered windows, to let in the clear, winter sunlight. The bustle of wounded soldiers and goodfolk pressed into service for them was dense, but my Blessed memory recognized it. I’d seen as much while assisting my teacher in the surgery during the battle at Ansehen.
When the knights slowed, uncertain what to do, I strode ahead of them toward the man by the door. By how the traffic swirled around him, he had triage duty.
He saw me coming, and the spear through Lieutenant Del, and put up one hand. “Light bless you, child, but he’ll not last the watch. Pray with him till he passes.” He pointed toward the open doors of a chapel across the street.
“I can mend him. Lend me a table and a pair of hands, no more,” I said, stopping before the man. Past his shoulder, I saw the large common room arrayed in a fair infirmary, if over-stocked with patients and thin on physicians. The goodfolk served as orderlies and nurses.
“Miss, you can’t know what to—”
Enough of this. I put some kir in my voice, to strengthen it. “Your King Yadi begged my saint for aid, and I came. Now let me save what lives I can. Who has charge, here?”