[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

flare of a cold light sprang from between Dr. Dea s fingers, and Ma Karal was
struggling even now to light a lantern. "Dea, get that damn light over here!"
Miles demanded, and stopped to choke his voice back down an octave to its
usual carefully-cultivated deeper register.
Dea galloped up and thrust the light toward Miles, then gasped, his face
draining. "My lord! Are you shot?" In the flare the dark liquid soaking
Miles s shirt glowed suddenly scarlet.
"Not me," Miles said, looking down at his chest in horror. A flash of memory
turned his stomach over, cold at the vision of another blood-soaked death,
that of the late Sergeant Bothari whom Pym had replaced. Would never replace.
Dea spun. "Pym?"
"He s all right," said Miles. A long inhaling wheeze rose from the grass a few
meters off, the exhalation punctuated with obscenities. "But he got kicked by
the horse. Get your medkit!" Miles peeled Dea s fingers off the cold light,
and Dea dashed back to the cabin.
Miles held the light up to Ninny, and swore in a sick whisper. A huge cut, a
third of a meter long and of unknown depth, scored Ninny s glossy neck. Blood
soaked his coat and runneled down his foreleg. Miles s fingers touched the
wound fearfully;
his hands spread on either side, trying to push it closed, but the horse s
skin was elastic and it pulled apart and bled profusely as
Fat Ninny shook his head in pain. Miles grabbed the horse s nose -"Hold still,
boy!" Somebody had been going for Ninny s jugular. And had almost made it;
Ninny - tame, petted, friendly, trusting Ninny - would not have moved from the
touch until the knife bit deep.
Karal was helping Pym to his feet as Dr. Dea returned. Miles waited while Dea
checked Pym over, then called, "Here, Dea!"
Zed, looking quite as horrified as Miles, helped to hold Ninny s head as Dea
made inspection of the cut. "I took tests," Dea complained sotto voce as he
worked. "I beat out twenty-six other applicants, for the honor of becoming the
Prime Minister s personal physician. I have practiced the procedures of
seventy separate possible medical emergencies, from coronary thrombosis to
attempted assassination. Nobody -
nobody -
told me my duties would include sewing up a damned horse s neck in the middle
of the night in the middle of a howling wilderness...." But he kept working as
he complained, so Miles didn t quash him, but kept gently petting Ninny s
nose, and hypnotically rubbing the hidden pattern of his muscles, to soothe
and still him. At last Ninny relaxed enough to rest his slobbery chin on
Miles s shoulder.
"Do horses get anesthetics?" asked Dea plaintively, holding his medical
stunner as if not sure just what to do with it.
"This one does," said Miles stoutly. "You treat him just like a person, Dea.
This is the last animal that the Count my grandfather personally trained. He
named him. I watched him get born. We trained him together. Grandfather had me
pick him up and hold him every day for a week after he was foaled, till he got
too big. Horses are creatures of habit, Grandfather said, and take first
impressions to heart. Forever after Ninny thought I was bigger than he was."
Dea sighed and made busy with anesthetic stun, cleansing solution,
antibiotics, muscle relaxants, and biotic glue. With a surgeon s touch he
shaved the edges of the cut and placed the reinforcing net. Zed held the light
anxiously.
"The cut is clean," said Dea, "but it will undergo a lot of flexing - I don t
suppose it can very well be immobilized, in this position? No, hardly. This
should do. If he were a human, I d tell him to rest at this point."
"He ll be rested," Miles promised firmly. "Will he be all right now?"
"I suppose so. How the devil should I know?" Dea looked highly aggrieved, but
his hand sneaked out to re-check his repairs.
Page 31
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"General Piotr," Miles assured him, "would have been very pleased with your
work." Miles could hear him in his head now, snorting, Damned technocrats.
Nothing but horse doctors with a more expensive set of toys.
Grandfather would have loved being proved right. "You, ah... never met my
grandfather, did you?"
"Before my time, my lord," said Dea. "I ve studied his life and campaigns, of
course."
"Of course."
Pym had a hand-light now, and was limping with Karal in a slow spiral around
the horse lines, inspecting the ground. Karal s eldest boy had recaptured the
sorrel mare and brought her back and re-tethered her. Her tether had been torn
loose, not cut; had the mysterious attacker s choice of equine victim been
random, or calculated? How calculated? Was Ninny attacked as a mere symbol of
his master, or had the person known how passionately Miles loved the animal?
Was this vandalism, a political statement, or an act of precisely-directed,
subtle cruelty?
What have I ever done to you?
Miles s thought howled silently to the surrounding darkness.
"They got away, whoever it was," Pym reported. "Out of scanner range before I
could breathe again. My apologies, m lord.
They don t seem to have dropped anything on the ground."
There had to have been a knife, at least. A knife, its haft gory with horse
blood in a pattern of perfect fingerprints, would have been extremely
convenient just now. Miles sighed.
Ma Karal drifted up and eyed Dea s medkit, as he cleaned and repacked it. "All
that," she muttered under her breath, "for a horse...."
Miles refrained, barely, from leaping to a hot defense of the value of this
particular horse. How many people in Silvy Vale had
Ma Karal seen suffer and die, in her lifetime, for lack of no more medical
technology than what Dea was carrying under his arm just now?
Guarding his horse, Miles watched from the porch as dawn crept over the
landscape. He had changed his shirt and washed off.
Pym was inside getting his ribs taped. Miles sat with his back to the wall and
a stunner on his lap as the night mists slowly grew grey. The valley was a
grey blur, fog-shrouded, the hills darker rolls of fog beyond. Directly
overhead, grey thinned to a paling blue. The day would be fine and hot once
the fog burned away.
It was surely time now to call out the troops from Hassadar. This was getting
just too weird. His bodyguard was half out of commission - true, it was
Miles s horse that had rendered him so, not the mystery attacker. But just
because the attacks hadn t been fatal didn t mean they hadn t been intended
so. Perhaps a third attack would be brought off more expertly. Practice makes
perfect. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • szkla.opx.pl

    •