"All right, 0 Mighty Magician, do you want my help or can you make it under your own power?" asked Gilla. In the full light of morning he saw clearly for the first time the new lines of anguish by her mouth and the bruise marks beneath her eyes. And yet her body was as steady as the earth below him. It was her strength that had got him this far.
"You are my power, all of you-" His eyes moved from Gilla to Wedemir, meeting his son's steady gaze, accepting him at last as an equal and a man. "Don't let me forget it again."
Gilla's eyes were suspiciously bright. She squeezed his hand. Lalo nodded and began to climb the staircase, and in his labored breathing they heard the whisper of white wings.
THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU by Diane Duane
The ephemerals have no help to give.
Look at them!
They are deedless and cripple,
strengthless as dreams. All mortalkind
is bound with a chain;
all their eyes are darkened....
The sound of screaming slowly aroused Harran from the mechanical business of pounding out the Stepson Raik's hangover remedy in the old stone mortar. Raik scrambled to his feet, his face ashen, staring toward the gates of the Stepsons' barracks compound. "Just a little more business for the barber," Harran said, not looking up. "More serious than your head, from the sound of it."
"Shal," Raik said, sounding wounded himself. "Harran, that's Shal-"
"Knew the damned careless fool would get himself chopped up one day," Harran said. He measured the last ounce or so of grain spirits into his mortar and picked up the pestle again.
"Harran, you son of a-"
"A moment ago you didn't care about anything, including where your partner was," Harran said. "Now you know... Mriga!"
Over in the comer of the rough stone hut someone sat in the shadows on the packed dirt floor, hitting two rocks together-grinding a third rock to powder between them in a steady, relentless rhythm. The hut's small windows let in only a couple of dust-dancing arrows of sun; neither came near the bundle of skinny arms and legs and filthy rags that sat there and went pound, pound, pound with the rocks, ignoring Harran.
"Mriga!" Harran said again.
Pound, pound, pound.
Another scream strung itself on the air, closer. From under Harran's worktable, by his feet, came a different sound: an eager whimper, and then the thumping of a dog's wagging tail.
Harran huffed in annoyance and shoved the mortar and pestle aside. "You start one thing around here," he said, getting up without looking anywhere near Raik's wild eyes, "and there's no finishing it. Never fails. -Mriga!"
This time there was a grunt from the pile of rags, though certainly not in response to anything Harran was saying- just a kind of bark or groan of animal pleasure in the rhythm. Harran reached down and grabbed Mriga's hands. They jerked and spasmed in his grasp, as they always did when someone tried to stop anything she was doing. "No more, Mriga. Knives now. Knives."
The hands kept jerking. "Knives," Harran said, louder, shaking her a bit. "Come on! Knives...."
"Nhrm," she said. It was as close as Mriga ever got to the word. From under the tangle of matted, curly hair, from out of the bland, barren face, eyes flashed briefly up at Harran-empty, but very much alive. There was no intelligence there, but there was passion. Mriga loved knives better than anything.
"Good girl," he said, dragging her more or less to her feet by one arm, and shaking her to make sure of her attention. "The long knife, now. The long knife. Sharp."
"Ghh," Mriga said, and she shambled across the hut toward Harran's grindstone oblivious of the disgusted Raik, who nearly kicked her in passing until he saw Harran's eyes on him. "Vashanka's blazing balls, man," Raik said in the voice of a man who wants to spit, "why're you waiting till now to do your damned knife grinding?!"
Harran set about clearing his herbs and apothecary's tools off the table. "Barracks cook 'borrowed' it for his joint last night," said Harran, bending to stir the fire and dropping the poker back among the coals. "Didn't just slice up that chine you were all gorging on, either. He used the thing to cut through the thighbone for the marrow, instead of just cracking it. Thought it'd be neater." Harran spat at Raik's feet, missing them with insolent accuracy. "Ruined the edge. Fool. None of you understands good steel; not one of you-"
Yet another scream, weaker, ran up and down the scale just outside the door. Shal was running out of breath. "Bring him in," said Harran; and in they came lean blond Lafen, and towering Yuriden, and between them, slack as a half-empty sack of flour, Shal.
The two unhurt Stepsons eased Shal up onto the table, with Raik trying to help, and mostly getting in the way. The man's right hand was bound up brutally tight with a strip of red cloth slashed from Lafen's cloak; the blood had already soaked through the red of it and was dripping on the floor. From under the table came more thumping, and a whine.
'Tyr, go out," said Harran. The dog ran out of the room. "Hold him," Harran said to the three, over the noise of the grindstone.
He pulled a penknife out of his pocket, slit the tourniquet's sodden knot, peeled the sticking cloth away, and stared at the ruin of Shal's lower arm.
"What happened?" Raik was demanding of the others, his voice thick with something Harran noticed but did not care to analyze.
"By the bridge over the White Foal," Yuriden said, his usually dark face even darker suffused with blood. "Those damned Piffles, may they all-"
"This isn't swordwork," Harran said, slipping the penknife into what was left of Shal's wrist and using the blade to hold aside a severed vein.
The paired bones of Shal's lower arm were shattered and stuck out of the wound. The outermost large bone was broken right at the joint, where it met the many small bones of the wrist which were jutting up through the skin; the smooth white capsule of gristle at its end was ruptured like a squashed fruit. Oozing red marrow and blood were smeared all over the pale, iridescent shimmer of sliced and mangled tendons. The great artery of the lower arm dangled loose, momentarily clotted shut, a frayed, livid little tube.
"No sword would do this. Cart drove over him while he was swiving in the dirt again, eh Yuri?"
"Harran, damn you-"
"Yuri, shut up!" Raik cried. "Harran, what are you going to do?"
Harran turned away from the man moaning on the table, and faced Raik's horror and rage squarely. "Idiot," he said. "Look at the hand." Raik did. The fingers were curled like clenched talons, the torn, retracted tendons making no other shape possible. "What do you think I'm going to do? Mriga-"
"But his sword-hand-"
"Fine," Harran said. "I'll sew it up. You explain matters to him when it rots, and he lies dying of it."
Raik moaned, a sound of denial as bitter as any of Shal's screams. Harran wasn't interested. "Mriga," he said again, and went over to the grindstone to stop her. "Enough. It's sharp."
The grindstone kept turning. Harran gently kicked Mriga's feet off the pedals. They kept working, absurdly, on the stone floor. He pried the knife out of her grasp and wiped the film of dirty oil off the edge. Sharp indeed; a real hairsplitter. Not that it needed to be for this work. But some old habits were hard to break....
The three at the table were holding Shal down; Raik was holding Shal's face between his hands. Harran stood over Shal for a moment, looking down at the drawn, shock-paled face. In a way it was sad. Shal was no more accomplished than any of the other Stepsons around here these days, but he was the bravest; always riding out to his duties joking, riding back at day's end tired, but ready to do his job again the next day. A pity he should be maimed....