clays, one stoppered, one not. She sniffed the empty clay and shook the stoppered one. It sloshed. Mrs Elund looked up, her eyes wide. She swallowed. I caught a whiff from the clay. The smell was the same as that on Mrs Elund's breath. The Doctor looked at the other woman over the top of the empty clay. 'How long has Zea known men, Mrs Elund?' the Doctor asked, replacing the clays under the bed.
'Known men!' the wild-haired woman screeched, sitting upright. 'She-'
'And on this bed, too, I'd think,' the Doctor said, pulling up the girl's dress to look at the bed's covers again. 'That's where she's picked up the infection. Somebody's been too rough with her. She's too young.' She looked at Mrs Elund with an expression I can only say I was devoutly glad was not directed at me. Mrs Elund's jaw worked and her eyes went wide. I thought she was about to speak, then the Doctor said, 'I understood what the children said when they left, Mrs Elund. They thought Zea might be pregnant, and they mentioned the sea captain and the two bad men. Or did I misunderstand something?'
Mrs Elund opened her mouth, then she went limp and her eyes closed and she said, 'Oooh…' and fell in what looked like a dead faint to the floor, folding herself on to the Doctor's cloak.
The Doctor ignored Mrs Elund and busied herself at her bag for a moment before bringing out a jar of ointment and a small wooden spatula. She drew on a pair of the rike's bladder gloves she'd had the Palace hide- tailor make for her and pulled the girl's dress up once more. I looked away again.
The Doctor used various of her precious ointments and fluids on the sick child, telling me as she did so what effect each ought to have, how this one alleviated the effects of high temperature on the brain, how this one would fight the infection at its source, how this one would do the same job from inside the girl's body, and how this one would give her strength and act as a general tonic when she recovered. The Doctor had me remove her cloak from underneath Mrs Elund and then hold the cloak out of a window in the other room, waiting — with arms that became increasingly sore — until it was saturated with water before bringing it back inside and placing its dark, sopping folds over the child, whose clothes, save for a single tatty shift, the Doctor had removed. The girl continued to shake and twitch, and seemed no better than when we had arrived.
When Mrs Elund made the noises that indicated she was coming back from her faint, the Doctor ordered her to find a fire, a kettle and some clean water to boil. Mrs Elund seemed to resent this, but left without too many curses muttered under her breath.
'She's burning up,' the Doctor whispered to herself, one graceful, long-fingered hand on the child's forehead. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that the girl might die. 'Oelph,' the Doctor said, looking at me with worry in her eyes. 'Would you see if you can find the children? Hurry them up. She needs that ice.'
'Yes, mistress,' I said wearily, and made for the stairs and their mixture of sights, sounds and smells. I had just been starting to think that parts of me were drying off.
I exited into the loud darkness of the storm. Xamis had set by now and poor Seigen, somewhere beyond the clouds, seemed to have no more power to penetrate them than an oil lamp. The rain-lashed streets were deserted and gloomy, full of deep shadows and buffeting squalls that threatened to bowl me over into the gurgling open sewer overflowing at the centre of each thoroughfare. I headed downhill under the darkly threatening bulk of the over-hanging buildings, in what I imagined must be the direction of the docks, hoping that I could find my way back and starting to wish that I'd taken one of the people in the outer room as a guide.
I think sometimes the Doctor forgets that I am not a native of Haspide. Certainly I have lived here longer than she, for she only arrived a little over two years ago, but I was born in the city of Derla, far to the south, and passed the majority of my childhood in the province of Ormin. Even since I came to Haspide most of the time I have spent here has been not in the city itself but in the Palace, or in the summer palace in the Yvenage hills, or on the road to it or on the way back from it.
I wondered if the Doctor had really sent me out to look for the children or whether there was some arcane or secret treatment she intended to carry out which she did not want me to witness. They say all doctors are secretive — I have heard that one medical clan in Oartch kept the invention of birthing forceps secret for the best part of two generations — but I had thought Doctor Vosill was different. Perhaps she was. Perhaps she really did think I'd be able to make the ice she'd requested arrive quicker, though it seemed to me there was little I could really do. A cannon boomed out over the city, marking the end of one watch and the start of another. The sound was muffled by the storm and seemed almost like part of it. I buttoned my coat up as far as I could. While I was doing this the wind whipped my hat off my head and sent it tumbling down the street until it fetched up in the street's central drain. I ran after it and lifted it out of the stinking stream, wrinkling my nose in disgust at the smell. I rinsed it as best I could under an overflowing drain, wrung it out and sniffed at it, then threw it away.
I found the docks after a while, by which time I was thoroughly soaked again. I hunted in vain for an ice warehouse, and was told in no uncertain terms, by the odd sea-faring and trading types I discovered in a few small ramshackle offices and a couple of crowded, smoke-stuffed taverns, that I was in the wrong place to find ice warehouses. This was the salt-fish market. I was able to confirm this when I slipped on some fish guts lying rotting under a windruffled puddle and was nearly pitched into the troubled, tossing waters of the dock alongside. I could have got wetter as a result of such a fall, but unlike the Doctor I cannot swim. Eventually I found myself being forced — by a tall stone wall which started sheer on a wind-whipped quay and extended off into the distance — to walk back uphill into the maze of tenements.
The children had beaten me to it. I arrived back at the accursed building, ignored the frightful threats of the foul-smelling harridan at the door, dragged myself up the steps past the smells and through the cacophony of sounds, following a trail of dark water spots to the top floor, where the ice had been delivered and the girl packed in it, still covered in the Doctor's cloak and now again surrounded by her siblings and friends.
The ice arrived too late. We had arrived too late, perhaps by a day or so. The Doctor struggled through into the night, trying everything she could think of, but the girl slipped away from her in a blazing fever the ice could not alleviate, and sometime around when the storm started to abate, in the midnight of Xamis, while Seigen still struggled to pierce the tattering dark shrouds of the storm clouds and the voices of the singers were carried away and lost on the quickness of the wind, the child died.
4. THE BODYGUARD
' Let me search him, General.'
'We can't search him, DeWar, he's an ambassador.' 'ZeSpiole is right, DeWar. We can't treat him as though he's some peasant supplicant.'
'Of course not, DeWar,' said BiLeth, who was the Protector's advisor on most matters foreign. He was a tall, thin, imperious man with long, scant hair and a short, considerable temper. He did his best to look down his very thin nose at the taller DeWar. 'What sort of ruffians do you want us to appear?'
'The ambassador certainly comes with all the usual diplomatic accoutrements,' UrLeyn said, striding onwards along the terrace.
'From one of the Sea Companies, sir,' DeWar protested. 'They're hardly an Imperial delegation of old. They have the clothes and the jewels and the chains of office, but do any of them match?'
'Match?' UrLeyn said, mystified.
'I think,' ZeSpiole said, 'the chief bodyguard means that all their finery is stolen.'
'Ha!' BiLeth said, with a shake of his head.
'Aye, and recently, too,' DeWar said.
'Nevertheless,' UrLeyn said. 'In fact, all the more so because of that.'
'Sir?'
'All the more so?'
BiLeth looked confused for a moment, then nodded wisely.
General UrLeyn came to a sudden stop on the white and black tiles of the terrace. DeWar seemed to stop in the same instant, ZeSpiole and BiLeth a moment later. Those following them along the terrace between the private quarters and the formal court chambers — generals, aides,
s'bes and clerks, the usual attenders — bumped into each scribes other with a muffled clattering of armour,
