Chapter 20: Aftermath
“What does the Bloodsong say?” Master Eldras asked, one hand over his chest and the other tapping an expectant finger on the tip of his nose. He seemed not all too bothered that the patient who was lying over the stretcher was about to drown in his own blood.
A bullet had caught the man below the chin, carved a bloody path through the sinews, and got stuck there, half of it likely snapped off in the process.
Valens glanced at his Master, and then down at the patient, stretching a hand out toward the pair of Wards placed near the bullet that pulsed with mana. When he touched one of them, Resonance filled his mind with a gurgling, sloshing set of frequencies that lacked any sort of rhythm.
“I need some crystal water!” he demanded to the pair of assistant healers watching intently from the back. One of them bolted forward, swept a bottle of pure water from the counter, and presented it almost vehemently to him with both palms supporting the heel of the bottle.
Valens reached out to it and cursed when his Warded fingers trembled as he took it. He shaded it with a mighty frown, a foolish part of him hoping Master Eldras hadn’t caught his small slip even as the other, more experienced part knew how keen the Chief Healer’s ears were. His command over the Resonance was such that even an ant crawling beyond the shutters of the tent sounded like the march of a wild elephant to him.
“Steady,” Master Eldras said. A single word, which proved enough to force Valens to focus back on the operation.
He washed the wound with crystal water and wiped the Wards’s surface to get a clearer song this time, handing the emptied bottle to one of the assistants. He then grasped the Wards with both hands and closed his eyes.
The Bloodsong came right away.
It painted a rather disturbing picture in his sound vision. One that made little sense. The bullet had torn a good part of the main artery feeding the brain, lodged there into the blood flow like a set that blocked off the greater part of the stream. Most of the blood that should’ve gone up through the artery was now spurting out in waves that clouded the Bloodsong even though he’d just cleaned the wound.
By all means, the man should’ve been dead. In the brain and the body both, to Valens’s thinking. And yet his chest rose and fell in small waves. Breath wheezed weakly through his lips, like how air might leak out through a tiny hole in a giant air balloon.
“How is this possible?” Valens muttered, fascinated by the discovery. It seemed, rather strangely, that once they fixed the torn-off sinews the man could be whole again.
“How, indeed,” Master Eldras said, a small smile gracing his lips. He motioned for Valens to step back, and checked each Lifesurge - ring-shaped Wards - on his fingers before giving him a look. “Watch,” he said.