Unsleeping Patron - Steed and Scalpel

Thick and grey under the stone pestle, the root paste exhaled, exhaling a sharp odor like wet wool and crushed mustard. Hester wiped her brow with the back of her wrist, leaving a smudge of dark pulp across her forehead.Her thumb was stained yellow to the knuckle. For four days, she had spent every hour between dawn and twilight grinding, boiling, and testing the flora the foragers brought in from the edge of the barrier. Most of it was garbage spongy fungi that dissolved into sour water or thorny stalks that turned black and blistered whatever skin they touched. But this dry, knobby tuber pulled from the shale hollows held promise. A tiny dab applied to a scrape on her forearm made the skin contract and go cold, deadening the ache within thirty seconds.Fifty yards away, beyond the row of newly thatched timber cabins, a heavy thud shook the gravel.Hester paused, her pestle hovering over the basalt bowl.Silas was in the paddock again.The horse wasn’t a normal animal. Wei’s envoys had brought it across the perimeter three days ago, dragging it behind a wooden cart like a piece of heavy machinery. It stood sixteen hands high, its hide so dark and thick it seemed to drink the flat amber light of the Relic without reflecting a single ray. Its eyes weren’t brown or black; they were two pale, milky globes that flickered with faint golden embers deep behind the pupil. Whenever the beast exhaled, a faint draft of warm ash blew from its nostrils, smelling of sulfur and burnt oats.Silas sat on its bare back, his long, canvas-clad legs pinched tight against the stallion’s ribs. He wore no bridle, only a thick leather strap looped twice around the base of the beast’s thick neck.The horse lunged suddenly, its heavy hooves tearing up two-inch chunks of slate and throwing them against the timber fence with a sound like pistol shots. Silas didn’t toss his head or reach for a handhold. His body moved with a fluid, unnatural balance, his golden-tinted skin absorbing the violent jerks as if his spine were made of tempered wire. He pulled the leather strap left, and the stallion wheeled around in a circle so tight its inner shoulder nearly brushed the dust.Gideon stood by the paddock gate, an ash pole rested across his knees, a whittling knife shaving long, thin curls of wood onto his boots. He didn’t smile. His grey eyes followed Silas’s every turn, measuring the height of the horse, the thickness of its legs, and the way Silas’s bald head caught the amber glare from the central vault.”He’s going to break its neck,” Samuel Wu muttered, leaning against the workbench beside Hester. He was holding a bundle of dried, needle-like grass he’d pulled from the eastern gullies. “Or his own.””He won’t,” Hester said, bringing the pestle down with a steady, grinding crunch. “Look at his knees. He isn’t holding on with muscle. He’s balancing before the horse even shifts its weight.””It’s not natural,” Wu grumbled, dropping the grass onto the slate table. “None of it is. He went into the mist looking like a corpse, comes back glowing like a gaslamp, and now he’s riding a black demon that eats dry lichen and doesn’t sleep.””It’s what’s keeping us alive, Samuel,” Hester said softly, though her own hand tightened around the heavy stone pestle.She turned her eyes away from Silas and looked toward the northern boundary fence.Two Fel-Cat scouts sat on a ledge of limestone just outside the golden line. They wore loose, emerald-green silk tunics tied at the waist with braided leather, their long, feline ears flicking in sync whenever a hawk circled in the grey sky above. Deer-like horns, small and dark, poked through their chestnut hair.They weren’t General Wei’s guards. Wei’s men stayed down by the central well, six heavy-set males in iron-mesh vests who spent their hours watching the human transmigrators dig irrigation ditches. Wei’s guards carried long, iron-tipped pikes and talked in rough, clicking barks.These two scouts were different. They belonged to Sharis’s faction. They sat fifty paces away from Wei’s men, never speaking to them, their long, fur-tipped tails twitching in short, rhythmic flicks whenever Wei’s guards stepped too close.Silas swung his leg over the stallion’s spine and dropped to the ground. His bare feet hit the shale without a sound. He didn’t pat the horse’s neck or check its hooves; he simply let go of the leather strap and walked directly toward Hester’s workbench, his amber eyes fixed on the neat rows of rolled linen bandages she had stacked near the mortar.The stallion didn’t run off. It stood in the dust where he’d left it, its heavy head lowered, its nostrils blowing grey ash across the gravel.”How many pouches?” Silas asked. His voice was smooth, resonant, carrying that peculiar metallic ring that made the hairs on Hester’s neck stand up.”Twelve,” Hester said, touching the canvas satchel at her hip. “Root paste for burns, dried moss for bleeding, and six vials of distilled river water. It won’t cure a broken bone, Silas, but it’ll keep an infection from turning green in the damp.”Silas picked up one of the rolled linen strips, testing the tension of the weave between his thumbs. “Pack eight more. The trek to the Hollow Canopy is eighty kilometers. If Gideon’s men stumble in the dark, they won’t have time to wait for a poultice to dry.””They aren’t soldiers, Silas,” Hester said, her voice dropping as she glanced toward the paddock where Gideon was still whittling his ash pole. “Wu can barely carry a forty-pound timber without his knees buckling. If you take them into the Miasma “”They need the Mind-Light,” Silas cut her off flatly. He turned his head slightly, his  -colored gaze drifting past her shoulder toward the northern fence where the two green-robed Fel-Cat scouts sat on their limestone ledge. “Look at them, Hester.”Hester squinted through her wire-framed spectacles. “The scouts?””The ones in green carry bone knives and silver thread,” Silas murmured, his knuckles golden under the skin as he tightened his grip on the bandage. “Wei’s guards carry iron pikes forged in the Citadel’s lower furnaces. When Wei walked past those two this morning, he didn’t look at them. He kept his hand on his sword hilt until he reached the well.””They’re from the same city,” Hester said, confused.”They’re from the same city, but they aren’t from the same house,” Silas said. “Sharis doesn’t want us slaughtered. Not because she loves humans, but because if Wei takes our Relic’s faith to feed his own furnaces, his elders will have enough power to crush her faction in the Coven.”He dropped the linen roll back onto the table.”We are the weight on the scales,” Silas said, his voice dropping so low only Hester could hear it over the scrape of Wu’s boots behind them. “Sharis knows it. Wei knows it. That’s why she sent the horse, and that’s why Wei brought the iron spades. They’re waiting to see if we’re strong enough to stand up, or if we’re just meat for the winter.”Hester looked at the black stallion standing motionless in the paddock, then down at her yellow-stained hands. “And if the seven candidates can’t handle the potion? If their bodies break under the Mind-Light like yours almost did?”Silas turned away, his canvas tunic rustling against his shins as he stepped toward the paddock gate. “Then Gideon buries them in the shale, and I go north alone.”