Twenty-One : Bed Rest
Sleep? Isn’t that a completely inadequate substitute for caffeine?
—programmers’ saying
A hospital looks like a hospital anywhere you go. At least this one smelled of sweet herbs and fresh cut hay instead of stinking of disinfectant.
Wiz was in no shape to appreciate it. He was asleep when they carried him in and he was still asleep when Moira and Bal-Simba came to see him.
Moira bit her lip to keep from crying when Bronwyn and Bal-Simba ushered her into his room. They had cleaned him up, but he was thin and drawn with new lines etched about his mouth and eyes. He looked as if he had aged a decade in the weeks he had been gone. He was still and unresponsive and for a terrible moment she thought he was dying.
But Bronwyn touched her arm when she moved toward the bedside. “It would be best if you did not wake him, Lady,” the healer said.
“What is wrong with him?”
“Shock, fatigue and starvation mostly. There was some sickness in his lungs but we cleared that up.”
“What happened to him?”
“We are not certain,” Bal-Simba told her. “He was kidnapped to the City of Night by what is left of the Dark League, but aside from that he has told us very little.” He frowned. “He was not in very good shape when we found him.”
“Best we leave now,” Bronwyn said softly. “He needs to sleep for as long as he can.”
“May I stay, Lady?” Moira asked. “I’d like to be here when he awakes.”
“It is likely to be a long vigil. He will doubtless sleep the night through and perhaps a good portion of tomorrow.”
“Please, Lady?”
Bronwyn sighed. “Very well. But leave him strictly alone.”
Moira nodded and settled herself in a chair next to the bed.
Pryddian hunched into the corner to get out of the freezing wind. The stones were like ice against his back and the chill crept closer around him. Overhead the clouds rolled low and slate gray, driven and torn to streamers. He felt a freezing drop on his face and realized it was starting to snow.
He had to find shelter. But there was no shelter to be seen. Behind him was the pitch black mouth of the tunnel he had stumbled from. The buildings on either side of the street had collapsed in heaps and the roadway was full of rubble.
Pryddian was not sure what day it was. At least one had passed since he had been left imprisoned in the workroom, but was it just one or had there been more?
He had been content to wait for the wizards’ return—until the lights went out, the wall of fire vanished and the heating spell failed leaving him alone with the demon in icy darkness. It took him a few minutes in the absolute dark to nerve himself to try the door and it took him hours more to blunder out into the wan cold day.
Pryddian shivered as he considered his options. The wizards had not returned from their confrontation with the Sparrow. That meant they were either dead or they had forgotten him in their victory. Remembering the way the light globes had flickered and failed and how the heat cut off suddenly, Pryddian did not think the Dark League had won.
He shivered uncontrollably and his breath puffed white. Now what? He could not walk the Wizard’s Way unaided; he did not know how. He could not sail the Freshened Sea back; he was not a sailor and there were no boats left in the City of Night. He did not even have a communications crystal to call the Council and beg for rescue.
Come to that, he could not find his way back to the Dark League’s workroom, not through that maze of darkened tunnels. Despair, cold and cruel as the wind, knifed through him as he realized he was probably doomed to dwell alone in the City of Night for the rest of his life. He did not allow himself to think about how long that might be.
He felt more snowflakes on his face, stinging now as the rising wind drove them against his exposed skin. No point in standing here. Somewhere in the city there had to be something to eat and a place out of the cold.