The smell of bright red blood in a freezing room was different from the smell of blood in daylight: it didn’t steam. It cooled in a heartbeat into a sharp, metal odor that stung the nostrils like salt and rusted iron.
Len kept his uninjured right hand pressed firmly behind Heth Ash’s neck. That kept her head tilted forty-five degrees to the left so that the frothy crimson fluid could clear her windpipe. Beneath his fingers, the tendons of her neck were rigid as dry pine roots, twitching with every strangled breath in.
“Hold the basin, Bram,” Len commanded. His voice dropped into the flat, steady beat of a courier managing an emergency on an isolated pass. “Don’t let her head drop forward. If her chin touches her chest, she suffocates.”
Bram Ash knelt in the frozen dust. His broad hands shook so wildly that the rim of the chipped tin washbasin clattered against the iron bedpost. His face was gray. His eyes were wide and vacant with the paralyzing terror of a man who had seen three hundred corpses hauled out of this ward on dead-house stretchers and was now watching his only child slide toward the same ditch.
