Seyun didn’t waste a breath questioning his sister’s cold and exact timing. Leaving his three copper needles seated in the passive boundary points around Halin’s wrist and collarbone to hold the boy’s resting line during the pause between intervals, Seyun slid backward across the chalk line on one knee. That kept his left elbow pressed tight against his two fractured ribs as he reached Osen Tal’s side behind the shattered granite screen.
Up close, the wound in the steward’s right flank was ugly and deep. Corvek’s crescent axe-spear blade had sliced through the thick wool of the Aperture Court service coat, the linen undershirt beneath, and three inches of muscle above the iliac crest. It opened a jagged six-inch gash that pulsed dark red with every panicked beat of the older man’s heart.
Working with the rapid, one-handed economy he had practiced for years in Mina’s back-lane clinic in Oran, Seyun used his teeth and his right hand to tear two thick, clean compresses of boiled linen from the medical roll at his belt. Scooping a handful of sterile grey reed-ash powder from the open tin beside Mina’s knee, he packed the coagulating ash directly into the bleeding muscular trough of Osen’s flank and drove the folded linen pads hard against the wound with the heel of his right palm.
