Robert Asprin – Thieves World 09 – Blood Ties

“I could stitch up a cut, maybe. Maybe get Thrush…. Shit on a stick. Zip-I can’t do anything for her. I’m not a goddamned midwife.” He stood up and took a step away.

“She needs a midwife,” another voice told him, the man he’d pushed aside who was no more a man than the girl in the comer was a woman.

“She needs more than a midwife. She needs a bloody miracle!”

“We’ll settle for a midwife,” Zip countered.

“You’re crazy. Zip. Three days she’s been here? Three days? Maybe two days ago; maybe even at sunset she needed a midwife. You can’t possibly move her; she’s half-dead already.”

“She’s not!” the youth shouted, his outrage turning to tears. “She needs a midwife-that’s all.” He turned to Zip, not Walegrin. “You said-you said you’d find someone.”

The PFLS leader’s facade of uncaring arrogance cracked a bit-enough so the garrison commander could recognize a familiar despair. You made your men trust you so you could ask them to do the impossible and get results, but then they turned around and asked you to do the impossible as well. Walegrin didn’t need to like, or even respect. Zip to sympathize with him.

“What about it? You know anyone?” Zip asked.

“Who’d come here? At this hour?”

Walegrin twisted his bronze circlet free, pushed the loose hair off his forehead, and blew a lungful of air through his teeth. The unborn baby chose that moment to send its mother into a back-wrenching arc of pain and terror. As she thrashed about Walegrin saw more than he wanted to see: a tiny leg dangling below the girl’s crotch. Even he knew babes were supposed to enter the world the other way around.