Shadows of the Scriptures

THREE: Song of Knife and Stalk

Sharp red lines were spreading like ivy across the girl's forehead. They were of a jagged, portentous nature, telling the approaching morrow that the horizon carried a silent thunder on its post.

Master Harl was knelt besides Aeri, examining the affliction with his phased eye.

"Is she going to be well?" a concerned mother asked.

Master Harl gave no reply. He hmmed and humphed, tilting his head for better vantage. Caressing the craggy red lines, which made Aeri flinch. Occasionally he rubbed at his stocky white beard.

"Well?" said Nayari. Addie kept a hand on her elbow to quiet her. "What? She's my daughter! Can the old man even see?"

"As a matter of fact he cannot," said Master Harl then, leaning heavily on his quarterstaff and grimacing as he stood up. "But in a much more real sense he sees more than many merchants do in their lifetimes."

Nayari stared at the half-blind man, assessing his statement. Finally, deciding either forceful coitus had ruined her sense or the sightless old man also happened to be insane, she bent and kissed her daughter on the cheeks. Aeri held her mother's hand, and the two embraced for a considerable amount of time. Master Harl, had he been born with eyeballs which obeyed him, would have deemed this moment fit to roll them.

At last Addie, who was looking at the scene with a smile hitched downward at the corners, broke the silence. "Worry not, Aeri. You're going to be right as rain before you know it."

What a wonderfully appropriate comparison to make, Addie's mageic nails spoke, in the presence of a Dassan citizen.

Nayari stared now at her, arm around Aeri, looking like a dragon from the Ytranar Era protecting its egg.

Addie's juxtaposition had, of course, been made in poor taste, because for the entirety of the southern Khad Dynasty rain was a rarity - and past several monsoons had been mysteriously absent for them altogether. As though the Quenchbringers had deliberately stolen vapors from the clouds to laugh their bellies out at them. Fortune-tellers declared this as an omen of war. But that much was obvious: war was already active in the form of scores of smaller battles, such as the one which was causing them to vacate the princedom of Dassan.

Augurs blamed the lack of clouds weeping, as they blamed it all, on pagans and heretics. And the Jen.

"It looks like a demon has infested her!" Nayari cried. "Bless the Seohrah, my little - "

"It is no demon, child," Master Harl informed her. "It is an infection."

"But it looks so horrible!"

"It is. Some infections are worse adversaries than many of the 'demons' you speak of. At least by the latter you are aware of the monstrosity you are dealing with."

Addie put in her copper scinti. "I knew a demon once who died of a small infection."

Nayari's eyes flashed with many prominent emotions. "Does this mean - does this mean my Aeri will die?"

The girl cringed in her mother's hold. Her braids shivered.

"No, child." Master Harl laughed. "Now whoever told you that?"

"You did! Just now!"

"I don't recall doing so. Pardon the senile memory. The infection is not so bad as to kill her, not unless we let it get to her neuroglia. Shren?"

"Uh-huh."

"Did you rub Sasmin on the wound?"

"Yes, master."