'What did happen, mistress?' I asked her.
'Where and when, Oelph?' she asked, moistening her scalp with the sponge and then scraping at it with a scalpel — of all things — before passing it to me to complete the job.
'In the questioning chamber, mistress. What happened to Ralinge and the other two?'
'They fought over who would have me first, Oelph. Don't you remember?'
'I do not, mistress,' I whispered, with a look round at the door through to her workshop. It was locked, like the one beyond and the one beyond that, but still I felt frightened, as well as a sort of anguished guilt. 'I saw Master Ralinge about to…'
'About to rape me, Oelph. Please, Oelph. Steady with that scalpel,' she said, and put her hand on my wrist. She lifted my hand away a little from her naked scalp and looked round with a smile. 'It would be too ironic to survive a false charge of murder and be delivered from the very brink of torture only to suffer injury by your hand.'
'But mistress!' I said, and I am not ashamed to say that I wailed, for I was still convinced that we could not be surrounded by such fatally cataclysmic events and such powerfully antagonistic personages without attracting extreme harm. 'There was no time for a dispute! He was about to take you! Providence, I saw him. I closed my eyes a heartbeat before… there was no time!'
'Dear Oelph,' the Doctor said, keeping her hand on my wrist. 'You must have forgotten. You were unconscious for some time. Your head rolled to one side, your body went limp. You fairly drooled, I'm afraid. The three men had a fine old argument while you were out of your senses, and then just as the pair who had killed Ralinge slashed at each other, you woke up again. Don't you remember?'
I looked into her eyes. Her expression was one I found impossible to read. I was reminded suddenly of the mirror mask she had worn at the ball in Yvenir palace. 'Is that what I ought to remember, mistress?'
'Yes, Oelph, it is.'
I looked down at the scalpel and the gleaming mirror-surface of its blade.
'But how did you come to be released from your bonds, mistress?'
'Why, in his haste, Master Ralinge simply did not secure one of them properly,' the Doctor said, releasing her grip of my wrist and lowering her head again. 'A woeful lapse of professional standards, but perhaps in a way a flattering one.'
I sighed. I picked up the soapy sponge and squeezed some more of the suds on to the back of her head. 'I see, mistress,' I said unhappily, and scraped away the very last of the hair on her head.
I decided, as I did this, that perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me after all, because looking down at the Doctor's legs, I could see her old dagger sticking out from the top of her boot as usual, and there, quite plainly, was the little pale stone on the top rim of the pommel I had been so convinced had been absent yesterday, in the torture chamber.
I think I knew already then there was no going back to the way things had been before. Even so, it was a shock when the Doctor paid a visit to the King by herself two days later and came back to tell me that she had asked to be released from the post of his personal physician. I stood and stared at her, still standing in the midst of unpacked crates and boxes of supplies and ingredients which she had continued to collect from the apothecaries and chemicalists of the city.
'Released, mistress?' I asked, stupidly.
She nodded. I thought her eyes looked as if she had been crying. 'Yes, Oelph. I think it is for the best. I have been too long away from Drezen. And the King seems generally well.'
'But he was at death's door not two nights ago!' I shouted, unwilling to believe what I was hearing and what it meant.
She gave me one of her small smiles. 'I think that will not occur again.'
'But you said it was caused by some — what did you call it? — some allotropic galvanic of salt! Dammit all, woman, that could-!'
'Oelph!'
I think it was the only time either of us spoke to each other in quite such tones. I shrank from my fury like a punctured bladder. I looked down at the floor. 'Sorry, mistress.'
'I am quite sure,' she told me firmly, 'that will not occur again.
'Yes, mistress,' I mumbled.
'You might as well pack this lot back up again.'
A bell later I was in the depths of my misery, repacking boxes, crates and sacks on the Doctor's orders, when you came to call, master.
'I would speak to you in private, madam,' you said to the Doctor.
She looked at me. I stood there, hot and sweating, dotted with little lengths of straw from the packing cases.
She said, 'I think Oelph can stay, don't you, Guard Commander?'
You looked at her for a few moments, I recall, then your stern expression melted like snow. 'Yes,' you said, and sat down with a sigh in a chair which temporarily had no cases or their contents balanced upon it. 'Yes, I dare say he can.' You smiled at the Doctor. She was just in the act of tying a towel round her head, having finished one of her baths. She always tied a towel round her hair after her bath, and I remember thinking, stupidly, Why is she doing that? She has no hair to dry. She wore a thick and voluminous shift which made her denuded head look very small, until she tied the towel round it. She picked a couple of boxes off a couch and sat.
You took a moment to seat yourself just as you wanted, moving your sword so that it was comfortable, placing your booted feet just so. Then you said, 'I am told you have asked the King to release you from your post.'
'That is correct, Guard Commander.'
You nodded for a moment. 'That is probably for the best.'
'Oh, I'm sure it is, Guard Commander. Oelph, don't just stand there,' she said, turning to look at me. 'Continue with your work, please.'
'Yes, mistress,' I mumbled.
'I would dearly love to know quite what happened in the chamber that evening.'
'I am sure you already do, Guard Commander.'
'And I am equally sure I do not, madam,' you said, with a resigned sigh in your voice. 'A more superstitious man would think it must have been sorcery.'
'But you are not so deceived.'
'Indeed not. Ignorant, but not deceived. I think I can say that if I had no other explanation I would be sorrier the longer the matter went unexplained and you were still here, but as you say you are going…'
'Yes. Back to Drezen. I have already inquired about a ship… Oelph?'
I had let drop a flask of distilled water. It had not broken, but the noise had been loud. 'Sorry, mistress,' I said, trying not to burst out crying. A ship!
'Do you feel your tithe here has been a success, Doctor?'
'I think so. The King is in better health than when I arrived. For that alone, if I can take any of the credit, I hope I may feel… fulfilled.'
'Still, it will be good to get back amongst your own kind, I imagine.'
'Yes, I'm sure you can imagine.'
'Well, I must be going,' you said, standing. Then you said, 'It was strange, all those deaths at Yvenir, then good Duke Ormin, and those three men.'
'Strange, sir?'
'So many knives, or blades, at any rate. And yet so few found. The murder weapons, I mean.'
'Yes. Strange.'
You turned at the door. 'That was a bad business the other night, in the questioning chamber.'
The Doctor said nothing.
'I'm glad you were delivered… unscathed. I would give a great deal to know how it was accomplished, but I would not trade the knowledge for the result.' You smiled. 'I dare say I will see you again, Doctor, but if I do not, let me wish you a safe journey back to your home.'
