Nightfire | The Whispering Wall #1

Sixty One: A Loss

When Arlen woke up, he was convinced for a long minute that he was dead. It wasn't long before the panic set in, and with it came pain.

He groaned as fire surged up his leg and set his heart pulsing behind his eyes. The table he lay on was wet and the air was rank and stale. His face felt sticky and stiff, and he didn't recognise the coffered ceiling above him. He reached up with heavy, clumsy hands to claw at the itchy substance on his face, and someone grabbed them and put them firmly down on the table either side of his body. The big face looming over him looked familiar somehow.

"Is he going to be like this for long?" a heavily-accented voice rumbled. "Don't much fancy spoon-feeding tonight."

"He'll be back to normal in an hour or two," said a brisk voice that didn't sound familiar at all. "He'll be very tired for the next couple of days, but will be perfectly capable of feeding himself, you'll be relieved to hear."

"That I am," the man above Arlen's face muttered, still studying him. Arlen chuckled. Usk didn't look half so menacing from this angle.

"I can't feel my leg," he said. It was incredibly funny. He didn't understand why no one else was laughing. A minute ago he was sure there had been pain, but now his leg felt about as useful as a pillar of rock. "I can't feel my fucking leg."

"That'll be the drugs," someone said nearby, which somehow only made it funnier. Usk sighed and rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

"Let's put him out again before he shits himself laughing," the brute muttered. "Gods, man, if your boss could see you now."

Arlen tried to stifle the spluttering and failed. It was just so dark-damned funny, and he didn't know why. He hoped his leg was still there, at least. Losing it would be a real bugger.

A small man wearing tiny pince-nez replaced Usk's face looming over him. The tiny little frames were threatening to slide off his nose, and he looked far too respectable to have let Arlen into his house. The symbol of the physicians' guild was stitched into his breast pocket, a bone crossed with a needle and suturing thread. The table rattled with his laughter. By the night, it was starting to hurt. It only peripherally occurred to him that under normal circumstances this should have been a very serious situation.

He didn't struggle as the cloth came down over his mouth. He was swimming, and pain was a distant memory.

Then there was nothing.

His second awakening was much ruder. Through the foggy darkness of sleep, the pain began as tingling, then burning, and then a searing agony that jolted him into cruelly sharp consciousness.

For the second time, he couldn't work out where he was. Then the cracked plaster on the ceiling, the exposed brick, the smell of sweat and mould clued him in that he was at home and in his room. Someone had laid a musty blanket over him and closed the door without latching it. It couldn't have been him, because he always locked it and slept in his clothes. Anger and apprehension warred in him when he realised someone had taken off his trousers.

It had been a long time since he'd been able to say that.

With great difficulty he levered himself onto one elbow. His shirt was covered in sweat and he had an unpleasant bitter taste in his mouth, throbbing pain all over his body, and his brain was full of wool. He flipped the blanket back and stared dully at the bandage-swaddled lump attached to his knee. He curled his lip. Nict's balls, did the damn thing hurt. He tried to wriggle his foot to no avail. Something seemed odd, but he was still too foggy to work out what it was.

"Fuck," he muttered. He was even more immobile than when he'd had the crossbow bolt hanging out of it.

The floor juddered, and then someone knocked on the door. Arlen's hand flew to his hip, and he was relieved to find a dagger there. He gripped it hard. "Come in."