The combat on the slippery granite terrace of Station Three was fast, brutal. Then he fought without room for maneuver.
As Dren lunged forward with his curved skinning knife, Tomas pivoted on his right heel. That brought his six-foot ash quarterstaff across his chest in a tight slanted block. The seasoned mountain ash caught the flat of Dren’s heavy blade, throwing the thrust wide.
Dren was an experienced trench-fighter. He didn’t overextend. As the staff deflected his thrust, Dren stepped inside Tomas’s guard, dropped his shoulder. Then he slammed his rusted iron brigandine wildly into Tomas’s breastbone.
The impact drove the breath from Tomas’s lungs in a harsh, whistling gasp, forcing him back three paces across the slime-covered stones. His heel struck the raised coping of the intake well, throwing him off balance.
Dren grinned, showing tobacco-stained yellow teeth, and reversed his grip on the knife.
With a vicious, downward back-slash, Dren drove the serrated hook along the spine of the heavy blade directly at Tomas’s throat. Tomas threw his left forearm up in a gut, desperate guard to shield his neck.
The steel hit like a cleaver.
The curved point sank two inches deep into the meat of Tomas’s left forearm, slicing through the wool sleeve, parting the skin, and tearing wildly through the deep grip tendons. With a cruel, twisting wrench, Dren jerked the weapon backward, engaging the reverse-pointing serrated teeth against the gristle.
A searing, white-hot agony tore through Tomas’s entire arm. A pain so total and violent that his vision flashed red and then black. He felt the sickening, grinding scrape of hardened steel dragging directly against the bare bone of his forearm bone. He was followed by the sickening snap of parting tendon cords.
Blood—dark, blood, and steaming in the cold mist—erupted from the torn forearm. It splashed across the granite flags.
Tomas’s left hand went instantly limp and numb, the fingers curling into a useless, trembling claw as the nerve and muscle connections were shredded. The ash quarterstaff slipped from his left grip.
“Got you, carrier!” Dren snarled, preparing to drive the point into Tomas’s ribs.
Suddenly, a massive shadow loomed out of the mist behind Dren.
Captain Sile Rook, his burned neck and shoulder weeping bloody serum through the lime dressings, had dragged himself across the terrace using his right arm. With a roar of feral, unbending defiance, the sixty-year-old warrior swung the heavy oak steering sweep with both hands, driving the ten-foot ash blade like a battering ram into the side of Dren’s helmet.
The impact was devastating. The iron helm crumpled with a sickening crunch. Dren was propelled wildly off the edge of the stone platform, crashing into the black, boiling sulfur water twelve feet below.
The chemical pool hissed and churned. Dren surfaced once, screaming as the packed sulfuric acid ate into his eyes and mouth, before the heavy iron brigandine dragged him down into the anaerobic muck of the canal bed.
The surviving mercenary in the flatboat didn’t hesitate. He threw his heavy club into the bilge, shoved his boat clear of the platform, and poled wildly into the yellow fog, disappearing into the reed beds.
Tomas collapsed onto his knees on the slick granite, his right hand clamped desperately around his mangled left forearm. Blood was pouring through his fingers in a steady, rhythmic pulse, pooling between the stones.
Nessa Vale was beside him in an instant, her face white as bone, her hands already stripping the leather survey strap from her case.
“Hold his shoulder, Sile!” Nessa shouted, looping the heavy strap around Tomas’s upper arm, two inches below the elbow. She pushed in her brass divider as a Spanish crank winch and twisted with all her strength.
The strap bit deep into the biceps. The violent pulsing of the blood slowed, then stopped. That left the torn wound gaping open like a dead fish’s mouth. Four inches of shredded muscle, cut white tendon sheaths, and glistening bone.
Tomas leaned his forehead against the cold granite, his teeth chattering wildly as the body shock washed through his nervous system in cold, nauseating waves.
There was no magical light. There was no warm divine warmth sealing the torn gristle. There was only the freezing marsh wind, the smell of blood and burning acid, and the cold, unbending reality of torn human muscle.
Nessa knelt in the blood, her hands steady as she applied clean linen pads soaked in boiled vinegar to the wound.
“The main tendon is cut, Tomas,” Nessa whispered, her voice cracking slightly. “The fingers won’t close. Do you hear me? You have lost the grip.”
On the lower landing step, where Dren had gone over the edge into the black lagoon, the yellow surface scum boiled wildly with blue static-electric arcs as a pack of feral marsh eels came together on the sinking weight of the sergeant’s iron-scale brigandine. A single rusted gauntlet and the broken shaft of a boarding pike floated briefly in the eddy before sinking into the four-foot bed of chemical sludge. That left only Dren’s dropped skinning knife lying wedged between two granite cut stone blocks on the terrace. Sile Rook leaned heavily on the oak steering sweep, his face gray and shiny with cold sweat as he kicked the serrated blade away from the well-mouth into a dry crevice where its burning acid-coated teeth could do no more harm.
With her linen cuffs soaked dark red to the wrists, Nessa used a curved razor-sharp needle from her field kit and a length of boiled silk thread to draw the gaping skin flaps of Tomas’s ventral forearm together over the exposed white bone of the radius. That left a narrow lower wick for the vinegar wash to drain. She didn’t pretend that field stitches could re-knit the retracted, chewed ends of the deep flexor tendon that had snapped back toward his elbow when Dren’s backward wrench tore through the sheath. Every porter in the South Ward knew what a parted forearm cord meant. A lifelong hook-fingered stiffness that turned every two-handed barrel lift into an asymmetric struggle of wrist-straps and iron hooks.
Tomas watched her knot the fifth silk stitch through a gray haze of nausea, focusing his mind on the cold, clockwork shape of his own joints rather than the throbbing fire in his flesh. The flexor carpi radialis gave way. Then, the pronator muscle and the thick palmar muscle tissue along the heel of the thumb still remained anchored to the wrist bones. Enough load-bearing bridge to lock a leather haul-loop across the base of the palm if the wrist was braced straight against cedar wood. The trade ring had sent Sergeant Dren into the sulfur fog to take his life and sink the water-pressure record of forty-two. Instead, Dren lay at the bottom of the canal bed, and the well shaft in the center of the platform still stood open.
Beside the landing steps, Nessa rinsed her blood-streaked brass dividers in a cup of boiled vinegar before easing the Spanish crank winch half a turn to verify that her silk stitches and pressure pad held the outward branch without weeping fresh blood red. She dusted the stitched seam with finely ground oak-bark tannin from her medical tin to coagulate the surface tiny blood vessels, then bound a clean strip of oiled bladder-skin over the dressing so the acid-burning marsh mist couldn’t reach the raw muscle during the well descent.
Tomas raised his head slowly, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. He looked at his ruined left hand—the pale, twitching fingers, the shredded flesh, the tight leather tourniquet.
“The thumb... Still moves,” Tomas rasped through bloody lips. “The strap holds the load. We’re getting that brass float out of the well.”