My wounds are quite sore when I wake and I rise more slowly than I’d like. My exercise routine is also challenged, especially the squats and lunges. Even so, I manage to finish and move on to my morning meditation. I clear my mind and allow the wholeness of the universe to settle in my mind like a great basin filled to the brim with the purest, clearest water imaginable. My mind feels quite sharp when I come back from meditation and I open the language manual to confirm the epiphany I just had. Yes, there is an obvious and repeatable pattern to the grammar I had not noticed before. Learning Orcish will be no great issue.
Putting the manual down and thumbing through my spellbook, I memorize a utility spell for cleaning and repairing things in addition to refreshing the spells I spent during the night. I immediately put my magic to use cleaning the blood from the fabrics and floor. In a short minute, the room is magically clean of any signs of the struggle—perhaps even cleaner than I got it.
Hmm, I should probably start magically cleaning my rooms whenever I stay at an inn. Often the hygiene of the proprietor can tell me a lot about the cleanliness of the room, but it’s not actually a reliable assessment.
I admonish myself for not coming to that sooner in my life. I’m sixty years old; I should have thought of it years ago, back when I first learned the spell. Who knows what filth I have submitted myself to unnecessarily over the years?
As always, I gather my things despite the room being booked for another night. Breakfast is available when I get down in the common room and I am served a plate of eggs, cheese, bread, and potato sauce. I forgo the ale since I am still wounded.
I consider my options. The best places to receive healing are the churches, but they will probably require a donation and a prayer and I’m in no mood for pageantry at the moment. I decide to try Voella’Tien at the clinic. She is not comfortable around me but, perhaps, her charitable nature will see her not turn me away.
It takes around twenty minutes to reach the compound and my leg is beginning to ooze by the time I arrive, an obvious blemish on my trousers that has some people pointing. Yet another stain to deal with. No matter, I prepared the utility spell for more than one casting.
The clinic is bustling with morning rounds and breakfast. Many of the patients are crippled and require help to eat. I scout the facility and eventually find Voella’Tien changing the bandages on a patient.
She doesn’t see me approach, but she senses me looming and looks up. The look she casts is one of curiosity, rather than alarm, so I feel we are off to a good start. She looks me up and down and sort of nods to herself, still absorbed in the task at hand.
She doesn’t say anything, and neither do I, until she finishes with the bandages and steps away from the patient. “What can I help you with? You’ve been wounded, I see,” she says in her polite yet candid way.
I appreciate that she didn’t assume I was here about the wound, but still demonstrates that she is observant. The latter is somewhat less impressive since the blood stain on my trousers is the diameter of a small melon. Yet she demonstrates a high level of competency that is attractive to me. She is certainly dutiful, capable, and intelligent. It’s doubtful she would be amicable to helping me build an empire of domination and manipulation throughout all the nations of the world, but she seems an excellent ally to cultivate.
“I am in need of healing,” I say simply.
She nods and points me to a curtained-off area nearby so she can examine my wounds. She bids me to lower my trousers and sit, which I do without any fuss. She closely inspects the puncture on my thigh and presses around the area to check for fractures. Once satisfied, she lifts my right arm and does something similar, manipulating it around to check whether there is damage beyond what is visible.
If I hadn’t drained life from the assassin, there very well may have been. Even though the divine magic she will use to heal me cares little about the extensiveness of the wounds, I’m pleased to see that she is using modern healing techniques. Even a century ago in some regions it was believed that magical healing would reverse damage. That’s certainly true for certain types of advanced, arcane healing, where much study was put into the progression of injury and reversal of trauma—which some scholars have touted as a form of time manipulation—but it is not true for divine healing or more common healing magic. This simpler form is better thought of as reconstruction and there can be complications in the healing process if the body is not prepared beforehand. A broken bone can heal crooked or an organ can be misaligned, causing a lifetime of complications.
I recall a young man I met on the slaving ships. He had an odd gait which, he explained, had been caused by falling out of a tree when he was young. The leg was broken and not straightened before the local priest healed him. As a result, his left foot stuck out to the side by a fair angle, even when standing straight, and he had difficulty bending his knee. When he bent down to pick something up or scrub the deck, he performed an odd kind of curtsy that alights in my mind now.
Voella’Tien, satisfied with the condition of the wounds, lays her left hand on my thigh and right hand on my arm. She closes her eyes and her breath flutters as she whispers a prayer to Ard Agdawn. A soothing, white glow fountains forth from her body and travels down her arms, through her hands, and into my body. Divine healing always reminds me of standing in front of a fire on a cold day, feeling the chill melt away from outside to in—only this energy moves from inside to out. A moment later and the task is done. Arm and leg as good as ever.
She releases her touch and rises to her feet, “Is there anything else, Zer Khaldun?”
I pull my trousers up and begin fastening them, “No, that is all.” Affixing my belt pouch and securing the neatly rolled-up top-half of my robes with it, I add, “Thank you for your assistance. I will leave you to your patients.”
She nods politely at me and steps out of the curtained area.
Before I go, I clean the blood stains from my robes with the same magic as before. An attendant nearly speaks to me as I make my way out, taking a deep breath and opening her mouth in preparation to speak, but I avoid making eye contact and walk past without acknowledging her. She probably wanted to know what I needed, but I don’t need anything now so it would have been a wasteful interaction.
I return to my room and study Orcish for the remainder of the day. I take a leisurely lunch to allow my mind to relax. Perhaps I should find that frequenter of my apothecary shop, Ulsh, and practice conversation skills.
The Wordbearer Chronicles is a dark fantasy web series with new passages on Tuesdays.
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