The spatula went in flat, and the iron-weed hit the open tissue before Vane had finished reading the red across his vision.
The burn climbed from the wound's center through the surrounding muscle in one fast, total wave. His right palm slammed down flat onto the table. Grygori's blood-soaked hand didn't pause. The spatula pressed the paste in a slow lateral stroke, packing the coarse grit against the wound's walls, pine-needle solids dragging across raw tissue like a file going against its grain.
[ SEVERE AGONY: CONFIRMED ]
[ STRESS METRIC: CRITICAL ]
TOLD YOU.
Grygori loaded the spatula a second time from the open tin, the blade coming up grey-green and studded with particulate along its edge, and angled it to reach the wound's lower depth. The second press went in past the first layer of paste, deeper into the torn muscle beneath. Vane's jaw clamped, every joint under his ear grinding forward and holding there. The sound the instrument made in the wound was grit against raw meat, the spatula's edge scraping the floor of it.
[ COAGULANT: ACTIVE ]
CLOTTING. THE GOOD NEWS. ALSO THE BAD NEWS. AT THE SAME TIME.
Grygori pressed three blood-dried fingers across the wound site and bore down with his full palm behind them, holding the paste compressed while the iron-weed bound. The resistance of it traveled up the length of the arm in a sustained signal. Vane's wrist locked rigid against the table in one hard spasm he hadn't ordered and couldn't correct, and Grygori held the pressure without adjusting his grip.
[ AGONY: SUSTAINED ]
HE'LL BE DOING THIS FOR A WHILE.
The shivering that had run through his chest since the tent flap dropped cut out somewhere in the first pass, the pain coming in at a threshold high enough to override it. What came after was stillness. The iron-weed had begun its clotting action in the second layer of paste, forcing the torn tissue to seal around the packed grit, and the whole forearm sat at a different level under Grygori's palm, deeper and fixed where before it had been climbing.
Grygori lifted his fingers from the wound. He wiped the spatula clean on the folded linen and studied the wound's surface with the candle's light straight across it, tilting his angle twice. Then he looked up at Vane's face for the first time since the work began, his own face unmoving.
The tin sat open on the table between them, reeking of iron-weed and reduced resin, its grey-green surface catching the candlelight. Sulfur vapor rose from the wound's mouth before Grygori had cleared his thumb.
It came thin from inside the packed tissue, the salve at the wound's base reacting against the raw muscle below the iron-weed layer. The vapor curled upward in a single thread and hit the back of Vane's sinuses with a burn: rotten, and underneath it the scorched smell of infection meeting coagulant, burning tissue and sulfur fused into one close, choking stench.
[ SULFUR REACTION: ACTIVE ]
[ WOUND STATUS: CAUTERIZING ]
THIS IS PROGRESS. UNFORTUNATE TIMING.
Grygori's thumb returned to the wound's lip and pressed down, seating the paste against the reacting tissue. He kept his eyes on the wound.
The burn in the forearm's floor was precise and deep. It started at the wound's center, the sulfur driving outward through the infected tissue in a tight, expanding radius, and his shoulder jerked up against the table's edge before he'd processed the first peak of it. While Grygori kept the paste seated under his thumb and his eyes on the wound, Vane took everything he had not to scream.
[ AGONY: LOCALIZED ]
[ CAUTERIZATION: PROCEEDING ]
WORKING. UNFORTUNATELY.
The thread thickened from the wound's mouth as the reaction built. Sulfur smoke over blood and iron, the combined stench pressing flat at nose height in the enclosed air, his eyes running freely from it. He turned his face sideways against the table and held his right palm to the wood.
[ STRESS ASSET: AVAILABLE ]
[ ARCHIVE: DRAGO. FACE. BLISTERED. ]
GOOD TIME TO REVIEW.
His jaw pressed, biting into the wood grain. The burning held at its outer edge for a stretch he couldn't have counted, then began pulling inward, the reaction consuming itself as the sulfur exhausted the infected tissue at depth. A dull, fixed glow stayed seated deep after the worst of it passed, and the infection had stopped moving.
[ SEPSIS PROBABILITY: DROPPING ]
[ WOUND STATUS: CAUTERIZED ]
[ CLASS TAG: UNREMARKABLE ]
COULD BE WORSE. WAS WORSE. TODAY.
Grygori lifted his thumb from the wound's edge. He studied the surface in the candle's direct fall, then pressed two fingers to the center, reading the heat in the tissue below. The edges had gone dark where the cauterization had taken hold, the paste set hard against the floor. He wiped the spatula clean on the folded linen. The sulfur had gone into the canvas walls by then, worked into the grain of everything alongside the blood and the vinegar-spirit astringent.
Grygori's thumb worked the brass tongue of the second strap into its worn hole, the leather coming flush against the skin above the first wrap. The first strap had gone on during the paste, when Vane's wrist locked rigid against the table. The second strap's brass sat cold on the inner wrist, and the bone needle was already in Grygori's other hand.
The first suture bite into the wound's closed edge sent up the arm the signal that the paste and the sulfur had spent the last ten minutes preparing the nerve to send: raw tissue meeting curved bone, in a place the coagulant had stripped to the layer beneath. His shoulder heaved up from the table and the leather bit into the wrist joint and held the arm flat.
[ AGONY: SUSTAINED ]
SUTURING AFTER CAUTERIZATION. CLASSIC.
Grygori pulled the thread through and seated the first knot before going back for the second bite. This one Vane's torso answered for him, driving sideways off the table before the needle had cleared the tissue, his throat finding the third strap, the one Grygori had cinched across his collarbone, the leather snapping up across the windpipe and slamming him flat against the surface with his air gone. His free hand clawed at the table's far edge and found only worn wood, and the needle's next pull went through tissue still locked rigid from the rebound.
[ RESTRAINTS: HOLDING ]
[ STAMINA: GONE ]
YOU'RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE BIG BOY.
His frozen left knee kicked up against the table's underside with everything four hours of road and bog had left in the muscle, and that turned out to be more than the rest of him. The table's far foot scraped across the ground cloth and the needle came out wrong and Grygori swore once, flat and specific, the first sound he'd made all evening. Both straps held. The knee found nothing. The whole effort ran up through Vane's frame and out across the canvas walls as vibration, and his vision gave way at the edges without asking him first.
[ STRESS METRIC: MAXED ]
[ CONSCIOUSNESS: DROPPING ]
FINALLY.
Red at every margin. Then red at the center, the candle spreading across it in a wide, flat bloom. The tent went dark above the table.
The dark had no duration. The green forced itself through it, the Alchemist's Fire exploding on impact and spreading outward, the bearskin catching in a slow, mesmerizing flow. The road ran away in both directions, the trunks showing silver in sourceless light, and then Vane was standing in the road rut with both boots on frozen crust that wouldn't move.
[ STRESS ASSET: DEPLOYED ]
[ STORAGE: BURNED GUARD. FACE. BLISTERED. ]
HELLO AGAIN.
Eight feet in front of him, Drago burned. The memory ran faster than Vane had time to move: clusters of skin forming and breaking forward from the mouth, the lower cheek going soft, the tissue beneath separating from the face with only the road's mud to obscure it.
[ STRESS METRIC: 7/10 ]
GETTING INTERESTING.
Vane turned away and could finally move. He walked. The frozen ground gave a little at the heels. Fifteen strides and the road stopped. No curve, no hedgerow. The trunks simply sealed tight across it in both directions. He put his hand on the nearest one.
Behind him the cursing had begun. Saints' names, in order.
[ LOOP: RESETTING ]
GOING SOMEWHERE?
The green folded into dark, then came through again. Drago was eight feet away, the fire in the fur cloak, his jaw blistering, slowly spreading.
[ LOOP: CYCLE 2 ]
He walked before the blistering reached the cheek this time. He counted the strides. The road ended at the same place and the cursing built behind him at the same pace. He turned at the packed earth. Drago had covered the ground between them by the time Vane turned, the jaw fully engulfed, the cursing filling all the space between them. Vane looked at the remaining road between them and crossed his arms. He stood there and looked at Drago's face until the loop reset. He'd put the man in the mud. Looking was the least of what that cost, and the only part of it he could still pay.
[ LOOP: RESETTING ]
[ UNEXPECTED. ]
ADJUSTING.
Cycle three brought the smell. It hadn't been there in the first two: burning hair first, then underneath it the deeper register of skin going in the Alchemist's heat. Vane had no control over how his lungs ran here. The System set the pace, and the smell arrived with each draw at a concentration Grygori's tent hadn't come close to.
[ STRESS METRIC: 8/10 ]
[ SMELL: ACTIVE ]
JUST ADDED THAT. NICE.
He crossed his arms and looked at Drago's face while the jaw went through its sequence, while the tissue moved in the flat green light and the smell filled the air between them. The loop reset before he said anything.
[ LOOP: RESETTING ]
NOT WHAT WE WANTED. RECALIBRATING.
No road between them in cycle four. The eight feet had been edited out. Drago's burning collar was at Vane's eye level, the jaw already at its furthest point in the sequence, and the smell arrived with nothing between them to dilute it. At this range the cursing ran as vibration through the bones of his face rather than as words.
His heels found the nearest trunk before he'd decided to move. He put both palms on the bark on either side of his hips. Drago's face was two feet from his own, the blistering at the throat running its sequence in the green, the eyes tracking him. Neither of them moved for the full run of the cycle.
[ STRESS METRIC: 9/10 ]
[ HOLDING. ]
INTERESTING.
The loop ran to its end before resetting. Drago's jaw finished its sequence. The cursing dropped to its lowest level, then stopped. The green burned without consuming. The road sat empty in both directions and the birch trunks kept their silver in the flat light, and for a stretch there was no sound in the dreamscape, and no count to put on it.
[ LOOP: RESETTING ]
[ TRYING SOMETHING ELSE. ]
Cycle five opened with a hand locking into Vane's collar from behind.
The grip had the weight and position of the grapple on the road, exact down to the coat fabric at the shoulder, and it turned him with the full committed force of a large man already in motion. His palms left the bark. Drago's face came around, inches from his own.
At this range everything the fire had done to the jaw was on show: the throat blistering, the tissue at the hinge, the eyes open and tracking at six inches. The smell was immediate. The cursing came at a volume that went directly into the bone of his jaw and held there without fading.
[ STRESS METRIC: 10/10 ]
[ CRITICAL. MAXIMUM. ]
THERE.
At four hundred yards it was a bright point going dark and nothing more. He'd seen one turn up close once, years back, across a crowded market, and he didn't need the distance closed to know what was happening inside the cage.
The System pulsed through everything it had. The green went up every surface, birch trunks and frozen road and Drago's coat, all of it taken in the same flat adhesive light, and the cursing went from words to volume to something that filled the whole space between the trunks. Vane's palms were out in front of him. The trunk was gone. The road was gone. Nothing behind or ahead of him, just the green holding at every surface, burning without consuming.
[ STRESS METRIC: 10/10 ]
[ LOOP: CONTINUING. ]
YOU CANNOT WAKE UP.
"Watch me," Vane said, into the green.