Page 28 of City of Stone and Silence

7

TORI

“Help!” The boy sounds desperate. “Somebody help, please.”

His cry is nearly lost in the chaos. Grandma Tadeka’s hospital, never empty, is now packed to the rafters. The longer-term patients have been moved upstairs, crowding two or three to a sleeping mat to make room for the flood of new arrivals. They started turning up just after dark, a blood-drenched, mud-spattered horde, stumbling in on their own or carried by friends, family, helpful strangers. There are five of us helping Grandma tonight, Kosura and I along with three older women, and while Grandma has sent out a call, extra assistance has been slow to arrive. So far, all we’ve been managing is to sort out the deluge.

The boy’s voice nearly vanishes as I fight my way over to him, pushing through groups of men and women clustered around the injured. Kosura is trying to talk to a young man nursing a broken arm, while an older woman screams at her about her son needing immediate attention. One of the other assistants is pulling a man’s twisted leg back into place—he lets out a piercing shriek and flails at her, which she ignores as she wraps the splint.

When I reach the boy, I find him standing over the prone body of a girl in her late teens, holding her limp hand in his. I don’t see any injuries on her, but her robe is mud-stained, and she’s unconscious. Her lips are flecked with blood.

“What happened?” I try to sound comforting, but I have to shout to make myself heard.

“One of the horses kicked her!” The boy, close to my age, is fighting back tears. “She was trying to get me out of the square, and the Ward Guard rode in. The horses—”

The girl coughs, weakly, spraying blood across the mud-tracked floor. I bend over to listen to her breathing, and it bubbles wetly. Something’s badly broken inside her, and she’s going to drown in her own fluids. There’s certainly nothing I can do about it.

“Come on,” I tell the boy. “Let’s get her up.”

Moving her can’t be helpful, but there’s no choice. I pull her off the floor, trying not to picture the jagged ends of broken ribs shifting and grinding. The boy gets under her other arm, sniffling, his tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. Together, we walk toward the back of the room, where the curtains around Grandma’s office have been extended to separate a whole section of the hospital floor.

“I’ll take her from here,” I say, when we reach the curtain. The boy seems too numb to question me. I take the girl’s weight and stagger forward—she’s bigger than I am, and her feet drag on the floor—pushing through the curtain.

Beyond, there are more sleeping mats, with more patients. All of these are considerably worse off than the people out on the main floor, and the air smells of blood and shit. Grandma Tadeka, her arms bloody to the elbows, works beside one heavily pregnant woman, while burly Hasaka carries a man’s limp, bloodstained body to a mat in the corner with surprising gentleness. Giniva, the mage-blood girl whose sister I’d turned away from the sanctuary, is changing bandages, with the look of someone who’s about to be sick but is determined to press on anyway.

I find the nearest empty mat and let the girl down as gently as I can. I check, and she’s still breathing, though she seems weaker. As I straighten, I hear an infant’s high, piercing wail, and turn to see Grandma calling Giniva over. She hands her a cloth-wrapped bundle that must be the baby.

“Take her upstairs,” Grandma says, over the crying. “Find Menako, she’ll know what to do.”

Giniva nods, nervously, and hurries off. Grandma heads in my direction, wiping her gory hands on a rag.

“Is she going to be all right?” I can’t help but ask.

“The baby will be fine. The mother won’t. Too much blood.” Grandma’s tone is clipped, clinical, but I can hear the strain in her voice. If I dared to open my mind—which, right now, would be like inviting a hundred people to scream in my ears—I know I would feel her turmoil, in spite of her brave face.

As a ghulwitch, she can do more than any ordinary doctor. But her powers aren’t unlimited, and the more she has to intervene the better the chance of something going wrong. On a day like this, she has to ration her strength, and I know she must already be nearing her limits. I can’t imagine what I would do in her place, faced with so much pain, knowing that I could help some, but not all—

“Who’s this?” she says, looking down at the girl.

I shake myself. It’s been a long night. “I don’t know. A boy brought her in, said a horse kicked her.”

Grandma rips the girl’s robe open, and I have to fight an automatic urge to look away, out of modesty. There’s a mess of torn, bloody skin in the center of an enormous purple bruise. Grandma frowns, and lays her hand on the girl’s forehead. I feel a faint prickling across my skin as she invokes her Ghul Well. This is forbidden magic, the stuff that created the Vile Rot and nearly ended the world, but it never seems like much when Grandma uses it. Often it has no visible effect at all.

“She’s dying,” Grandma says. “Broken ribs punctured the lung. She won’t last an hour.”

I sit back on my haunches, feeling the weight of exhaustion. Grandma looks down at the girl for a moment, then sighs and closes her eyes. A faint purple aura flickers around her hands. The girl stiffens, and draws in a sharp breath.

A few seconds, and it’s done. The girl breathes out, without the awful wet sound. Grandma sits back, her shoulders slumping.

“Did what I could,” she says. “The ribs will have to heal the rest of the way on their own. Tell her people to keep her in bed.”

“I will.” I bow my head. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. We’re not done.” She gets back on her feet, a little wobbly, and gestures to Hasaka, who hurries over. “Take her out and give her a blanket and some water.”

I tug the girl’s torn robe so she’s mostly covered. Hasaka comes back with a sheet, and we put it around her shoulders. Together, he and I lift her, and carry her back through the curtain. For obvious reasons, only those who know Grandma’s secret—people from the mage-blood sanctuary, for the most part—can be allowed in the back.

The boy explodes into tears when I tell him the girl—his sister? I have no idea—will live, and we set her on a mat and give him Grandma’s instructions. He nods, frantic and sniffling. I turn to go back to the front, to see who else needs help, but Hasaka takes me by the shoulder.