Page 59 of A Trade of Blood

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The medikker tentswere an astonishing construction, given that they’d been put together in but a handful of hours. Already the medikkers had arranged stations for those who’d merely suffered smoke inhalations, a second for those who had been burned, a third for those who had been injured by the debris, and finally a fourth station for more severe cases, who had often suffered all three.

It was in this latter station that we found Jalin Burav. The boy wasnot yet placed in a milky healing bath; rather, they had stripped him down and placed him upon a bed of sterile moss and had set burn mites upon his flesh.

I grimaced at the sight of these: the mites resembled tiny black beads picking their way across his skin, removing the dead, burned portion and slathering the wounds beneath with treated saliva. I knew they were a highly respected and valuable healing tool, but it was still a startling thing to see a human body crawling with thousands of insects pecking at his peeling flesh.

The only thing more disturbing than the mites was Jalin himself. He was, as Seriv had told me, terribly injured: the boy’s young face was blistered and bleeding, his arms and chest were a bright, furious pink ruin of scabbed skin, and his broken arm and leg, though black and swollen, were already set in a vine cast. A tiny pile of jewelry lay beside his head, including his tughra ring with the large, pointed Burav hawk upon it. Its band had been snipped in two: likely his hand had swollen so quickly that the medikkers had been forced to remove it to prevent losing the finger.

I relayed this to Ana in a hushed whisper. She waved a hand to silence me, then sat beside his bed.

“Jalin Burav?” she asked.

He cracked an eye, groaning, and peered through the churning pile of mites on his cheeks.

“It is Dolabra, from the Iudex,” she said. “We met recently.”

He swallowed, groaned in pain—his throat was likely scalded—but said nothing.

“You are likely going to be put in sedation while the medikkers tend to your wounds,” she said. “Before they take you, I must know what you saw of the fire.”

He blinked his pinkened eyes, then opened his mouth to speak. Air came out in a ragged, agonized sigh, and he struggled to shape it into words. “Are they…all…?” he whispered.

“Your family? We search the ruins still, sir, so…we don’t know for sure.”

He took a wheezing breath and whispered, “Yes…you do.”

Ana said nothing.

“I tried to save them,” Jalin murmured. His eyes grew wide, and I saw streaks of split skin on his eyelids.

“So we heard, sir,” said Ana.

“Again and again,” he choked. “I tried. But…they didn’t listen.”

Ana leaned closer. “What do you mean?”

His head fell back upon the mossbed. “You should…kill me,” he whispered.

“No matter how much you despair, sir,” said Ana softly, “that I cannot grant you.”

“You…should,” he said again, his voice dying to a tattered sigh. “I…am but flesh. And what else do we do…with flesh in this cursed place?”

Then he gasped and fell silent. Ana turned her ear toward his lips, then shook her head and muttered, “Unconscious. We shall get no more out of him.” She bowed her head for a moment, then said, “His treatment will be long and arduous, but—Iwould like to have a custodus sent to keep watch over him. Just in case.”

“You worry someone might target the survivors, ma’am?” I asked.

She waved a hand, indicating she wished to leave. Then she took my arm and I led her away.

—

We withdrew tothe south lawn of the estate. Ana stood there in the enormous swath of freshly cut grass—even after all the madness of the morning, I noted how odd it was to waste so much valuable land in this fertile place—gripped my arm tight, and shook her head.

“Well,” she pronounced. “Thatwas disturbing as hell, I must say! I’ve had folks ask me for death before, but none so swiftly, or with such earnestness! I feel that boy truly wished to die, Din. Yet what did you make of that bit—about how he’d tried tosavethem, but they wouldn’t listen?”

“I presume he meant how he tried to wake his family from the effects of the web, ma’am.”

Ana sucked her teeth. “I suppose you’re right. Still, I wish to learn more of young Jalin.Hishouse is still standing, yes? Go give it a look-over before some mad bastard puts it to the torch, too. I’ll have a custodus take me to where Tauri labors on our burned mansion. How useless I feel, lingering about this damned place like a ghost! If only Burav’s bookshelves had survived. Then I’d have something to do…”