‘My apologies, sellah,’ the leecher, Blemes, murmured, gently extracting himself from Draz’s clutches. ‘It is the high priest. He requires our presence.’
‘What hour is it?’ Draz asked groggily, sitting up in his cot. Blemes had come bearing a candle, its flickering light picking out the bare stone of Draz’s sleeping cell. There was only the faintest hint of light from beyond the window shutters.
‘Just after matins,’ Blemes said. ‘We have visitors, and they come bearing injuries.’
Draz pulled off his nightcap and swung his legs out over the side of the cot. The cold stone floor was a shock to his feet. The chill of the night still permeated the temple’s ancient, cracked sandstone.
‘They are in the infirmary,’ Blemes went on, turning his back to allow Draz to dress. He did so, wondering as he pulled on his robes and rubbed sleep from his eyes just who could have arrived in the night and been permitted to enter. Since explorers had started digging around the Eight Pillars there had been more and more instances of people travelling up the high gorge to the temple, seeking aid and supplies. Shal’ek, High Priest of the Lightning, had ordered them all turned away. Only Weiss, the pale-faced representative of the Order of the Azyr attached to the temple’s priesthood, had the power to overrule Shal’ek’s judgements within the temple itself, and he rarely roused himself from his reports or the celestial auguries that cluttered his office.
‘Lead on,’ Draz told Blemes, tugging his robes straight and pulling on his work smock. He followed the leecher down the narrow, dusty corridor that connected his sleeping cell to the temple’s infirmary.
The room was as small and spartan as the rest of the house of worship. It bore a washing stand, five sick cots, a cabinet of Draz’s chirurgeon supplies – tinctures and vials, crushed herbs and poultice pots – and several jars of Blemes’ leeches. It occasionally played host to a travelling pilgrim, or one of the temple’s priests or notaries if they fell prey to the ague. It had certainly never serviced as unlikely looking a trio as those waiting for Draz.
He saw the duardin first. But for a single lion-headed pauldron, he was naked from the waist up, and covered in the marks of Hysh – blistered, peeling red skin, evidence of days spent in the Bone Desert. Draz recognised the red crest of the Fyreslayers, though he seemed to bear only a single fragment of ur-gold, a bright rune buried into his chest. The thickly muscled warrior turned, and Draz gasped as he saw his face. Half of it was wizened and deformed, as though it had aged centuries ahead of the rest of the duardin’s body. The Slayer’s single eye was stony, but flickered with forge-fire as it fell upon Draz.
‘Chirurgeon,’ said Weiss. The corpulent agent of the Order of the Azyr had been standing just inside the door when Draz entered, alongside High Priest Shal’ek. He was a small, pugnacious man, forever sweating and red-faced in the desert’s heat, his embroidered, puffed sleeves, white stockings and starched ruff a garish contrast to the rustic sackcloth worn by the priesthood. He looked as though he’d dressed in a hurry.
‘These pilgrims require your skills,’ Weiss said, making a half-hearted gesture towards the duardin, who remained silent. For a moment, Draz thought he meant the Slayer’s arm – it was crudely bound in strips of linen, stained and crusted with blood. Then he realised that the bed directly behind the duardin was occupied. A pale woman – an aelf – was laid out on it. A man was sitting on a stool on the opposite side, young and wide-eyed, wearing the dirt-encrusted brown half-cape and cap of a merchant’s teamster.
‘This aelf is a servant of the Order,’ Weiss elaborated, sensing Draz’s fear and confusion. ‘She has been poisoned. The high priest and I desire that you and Blemes do all in your power to save her.’
Shal’ek, standing tall and lugubrious next to Weiss, nodded once. His sallow expression spoke volumes about his distrust towards the new arrivals, but clearly Weiss was in no mood to brook any argument – it was rare indeed to see him roused from his office.
‘You’re a healer?’
It was the duardin who had spoken, his parched voice like cracked desert rocks grinding together. Draz managed to nod. He had never heard of any form of close kinship between aelves and duardin before, yet the Slayer was standing over the stricken aelf like a guard dog. Draz eyed the wicked-looking edges of the heavy war axe slung over his back, glinting in the candlelight.
The duardin glared at him for what felt like an age, then finally stepped out of the way. Draz and Blemes approached, Draz kneeling beside the stricken aelf.
She was pale, even for one of her kind, her lips an unhealthy shade of blue. She was clad in tight-fighting leathers, though most of her arms were bared. Another strip of linen had been wrapped roughly around one, and was crusted with blood and yellow fluids.
Draz reached into his smock and pulled out a thin blade. He sensed the duardin tense at the sight of the naked steel, and he froze, but when the Slayer didn’t say anything he reached down and gently slid the tool through the stiff cloth, cutting it free.
The wound beneath was crusted with more blood. Draz moved to the washing stand and wetted a strip of gauze. Blemes was at the cabinet, fishing through his jars for his leeches with a long prong. Draz returned to the aelf’s side and began cleaning the wound. The woman stirred slightly.
‘What is her name?’ he asked, without looking up from his work.
‘Maleneth,’ the duardin said after a pause, giving the aelf name a rough Duardin inflection.
‘And yours?’
‘I am Gotrek Gurnisson.’
‘You are a Fyreslayer?’
The words came easier to Draz as he focused on removing the dirt from the aelf’s wound. They always did when he started his work. He had been a healer at the Temple of the Lightning all his life. No matter the patient, he was always willing to help those admitted by the priesthood. It was his calling in life, and he offered thanks to the Lightning every night that he had been bestowed with such a clear and simple purpose.
The duardin, Gotrek, hesitated before responding to his last question.
‘I do not know if I am a Fyreslayer.’
‘That is a curious answer.’
‘This is a curious place, manling.’
Draz washed the blood from the gauze and knelt once more to expose the bared wound. It was long but shallow, running up the aelf’s forearm. The cut was precise, the work of a thin blade expertly delivered. It was not in itself fatal, but it was clear enough that something else was seeking to push Maleneth through Shyish’s door.
‘Can she be saved?’ Weiss asked from over his shoulder. ‘She is an… agent that the Order would very much like to keep alive.’
‘I will do all I can,’ Draz responded. He placed his blade upon the bedframe then withdrew two vials from his smock. Unstoppering the first, he pinched the aelf’s nose, poured the contents into her mouth and massaged her throat until she swallowed the dark contents. ‘I have given her an antidote known to combat most poisons, but I must still take a sample of her blood in case the poison should be rare and beyond its reach.’
He unstoppered the second vial, then once more picked up his blade and made a shallow incision in the aelf’s arm, a finger’s width from the main wound. He collected a few drops of blood from the small cut, then stoppered the vial and dabbed the incision clean.
He rose, grunting slightly at the stiffness that had worked itself into his joints on the cold floor, then turned to Blemes.
‘Will you apply clean dressings? I must see to this sample as swiftly as possible.’
‘The leeches too?’ Blemes asked. He already had one of the fat, black creatures curled around his prong.