The Heavenly Host (Demons of Astlan Book 2) (47 page)

Fortunately, she could see perfectly well in the dark and so realized instantly that it was beggars that were accosting her; although not, she suspected, in the manner typical of beggars. Hilda stopped before the man in front of her, noting a fifth man coming up behind him with one eye covered in a patch, pockmarked skin, poorly dressed and limping. The beggar in front of her had a hook for one hand and a crutch under his arm on the opposing side. One of the men behind her had a peg leg, by the sound it made on the stone cobbles. Another man behind her had some sort of condition that caused his breathing to sound mucus-filled and quite unpleasant. The third she could not tell.

Sternly yet politely, she asked the man in front of her, “Can I help you gentlemen?”

“You can stop screwing with people’s livelihoods, bitch,” the man growled at her.

Hilda blinked in the dark. “My, that seems to be poor manners for someone whom I suspect is about to make a request of me,” she said, shaking her head even as she began drawing in mana from both her illuminaries and from upstream in Tierhallon. She had a good idea where this was heading, so she needed to be prepared. “However, I am but a simple healer, so I have no idea what you are talking about. Now if you’d please excuse me, I’m tired and would like to get home.”

“You know damn well what we are talking about!” the main beggar snarled.

“You destroyed Rathbart’s career!” The man—no, woman—behind Hilda who was not rasping, nor peg-legged, said.

“I’m not sure about this Master Rathbart of whom you speak,” Hilda said pleasantly, stalling for time and preparing herself for what was about to come.

“One of our guildmates. You healed him! You took away his livelihood. No one is going to give money to a healthy, able-bodied beggar!” the peg-legged man behind her stated.

“So the beggar meister wanted us to talk to you,” the lead beggar stated.

“Hmm, I think I know this Master Rathbart of whom you speak. However, he came to me begging for aid, so I gave it to him in the manner I’m best suited to give. I am a professional healer, so I gave him his health,” Hilda said innocently. “Typically, I charge a fair amount for the services I provided him for free.”

“You ain’t stupid, lady; we can tell that by your speech. You know’d damn well you’d be hosing his ability to beg!” the main beggar told her angrily.

“I’m deeply sorry that you feel that my well-meaning help was inappropriate, but it is my job,” Hilda said as her hands inside her wide-sleeved robes began the necessary semantic gestures to raise defensive wards about herself. As the beggar continued, she subvocalized the verbal parts of the warding ritual. Not strictly necessary, but it would strengthen the wards.

“The beggar meister has instructed us to bring you to Rathbert so you can undo your damage,” the main beggar told her.

Hilda shook her head. “I’m sorry; I’m under oath to do no harm,” she lied to them. All followers of Tiernon were allowed to do harm if it served the purpose of justice. Saints in particular were quite capable of doing vast amounts of damage, if necessary. However, she was pretending to be a healer, and most healers had strong vows against using their knowledge and power to harm others.

“The beggar meister thought that might be the case, so we’ve been instructed to teach you a lesson,” the principal beggar said menacingly.

Hilda sighed, rather theatrically, she felt. “And by
lesson
, do you mean grievous bodily harm?” she asked.

The main beggar smiled over Hilda’s shoulder to the woman behind her. “See, I told you she was smart.”

Hilda shook her head sadly. “And how do you propose to grievously harm someone who can easily heal themselves?”

Both men in front of her grinned evilly. “We’re betting you can’t heal without hands,” the second one said, brandishing a large dagger.

It was Hilda’s turn to grin and chuckle evilly. “I personally would not place a bet on that.” Her face turned very serious suddenly. “Since you have been honest with me about your intentions towards me, let me now be honest about my intentions towards you.”

The peg-legged beggar behind her snorted, and the raspy guy gurgled a laugh. The men in front of her smiled condescendingly. “Sure, you do that. It won’t matter much.” The first one chuckled.

Hilda shrugged. “Nonetheless, I feel I must give you this opportunity to flee, for I intend to make a very serious lesson of you five for the rest of the guild. Leave this alley now and you will avoid your fate.”

The beggars all chuckled.

“She thinks she can kill all five of us?” The woman laughed and the others quickly joined in.

Hilda let them cackle a moment as she locked her defensive wards into place. “Kill you? Oh my dears, I think you misunderstand!” She shook her head as if in disbelief. “Remember, I have a code against doing harm to others.”

“So then your lesson’s going to be pretty lame, isn’t it?” the second man in front of her said.

“Not at all, I’m just going to heal all of you, as I did for Rathbart.” Hilda said, and then her eyes and voice hardened. “After that you will go back to the beggar meister and tell him that if he doesn’t back off and leave me and mine alone, I will hunt down every single beggar in this city, heal them and then place a Geis upon all of the beggars in this city, to never willingly allow themselves to be harmed or maimed. I will then place a second Geis upon them that forces them to compulsively bathe and clean themselves daily, and a third Geis that will make them feel anxious and restless if they aren’t doing back-breaking manual labor every day while Fierd is up.” Hilda grinned. “Is that clear?”

The beggars had stopped laughing. “I think we may need to do more than hurt you,” the main beggar said.

Hilda shrugged. “You have been warned.”

The man in front of her whipped his crutch towards her legs, trying to knock them out from under her as he simultaneously lunged at her with his hook. Hilda adroitly leaped over the cane, easily seeing it coming in the dark and aided by her defensive wards, which redirected the crutches away from her. She grabbed the beggar’s forearm where the hook’s cup was strapped on. Hilda mouthed a quick prayer and healing mana surged into the man’s arm. The beggar leaped back as if struck by lightning, which in some ways he had been.

“Fraggin rat’s tails!” The man began screaming and cursing and shaking his hook. He dropped his crutch and began trying to get the hook’s cup off his forearm. “Midas’s nuts, it itches! It stings like a thousand scorpions!”

The gurgling, raspy man, formerly behind Hilda but now to her right, lunged towards her with a knife. Hilda batted the man’s knife arm away and palm-punched him in the chest, chanting loudly in Etonian at the same time, sending another shockwave of healing power into him. The man collapsed to his knees and began violently hacking his lungs out. All the pus, mucus and disease in his lungs were being violently expelled by his coughing and retching.

The peg-legged man glanced at his compatriot and came lunging at Hilda with a sickle. Hilda shook her head, dove under his poorly wielded sickle and grabbed his peg, pulling it and his leg up and to the side while infusing the leg with healing power. The man tumbled to the ground as she let go and started thrashing and screaming in pain, trying to get the peg unstrapped from his rapidly healing leg.

“Sorry about the pain, guys,” Hilda shouted. “This is healing combat, which is basically the opposite of combat healing.” She moved towards the woman who had unfurled a whip and had only been waiting for the peg-legged man to get out of her way so she could use it on Hilda.

This woman had a terrible case of—
leprosy!
What the…? Hilda shook her head. How in Tiernon’s worst nightmare were they allowing a leper to run around the city? It was a figurative miracle that there had not been a huge outbreak. But clearly it was leprosy; she could see the craggy skin nodules, the missing fingers from the woman’s left hand. She was blind in one eye, her right foot twisted and club-like. This one was going to need a huge rush of antibiotic mana to eliminate the bacteria and then some widespread regeneration.

This was going to hurt the beggar woman like crazy! Hilda dove and tackled the woman before she could bring her whip around. Hilda wrapped herself like a blanket around the leprous woman, essentially irradiating her whole being in healing mana while chanting multiple rituals of healing.

The woman screamed like bloody murder. “Sorry!” Hilda said, standing up to face the man with the big dagger and one eye. He was picking up his dagger from the ground; Hilda suspected he had thrown it at her and it had been deflected by her wards.

“Healing Combat,” Hilda told the man as they began to circle each other, “is like Combat Healing in that it has to be done in the middle of battle, but with Combat Healing I am rapidly healing one of my own, so while I have to work very fast and use a lot of excess mana, I can also suppress the patient’s nerve endings to numb the pain of healing too quickly.

“In the case of Healing Combat, I am in combat and don’t have the necessary links to my patient, so all I can do is shove out an excessive amount of healing mana very quickly. This leads to extremely abrupt healing and regeneration, which typically itches, tingles and overwhelms the nerves. It also taxes the body’s systems to a huge level, weakening them as their natural regenerative systems are forced into a very unnatural overdrive,” Hilda explained as she warily faced down the man with the dagger. She was not completely sure why she felt the need to explain why their healing hurt so much. Perhaps it was guilt about inflicting pain.

“In any event, you are going to be healed,” Hilda told the one-eyed man with the dagger. “You don’t have to like it, but it’s going to happen. We can do this the easy way or the painful way. Your choice.”

“Screw you, bitch!” The man lunged at her with his giant dagger, clearly mistaking a large target for an easy target. Hilda shook her head and stepped to her right, twisting sideways as he lunged forward and then away from where she’d stepped, deflected by her protection ritual. As he skittered by, trying to reorient after what must have seemed like a mystifying miss, Hilda brought her left palm around and slapped him hard on the eye patch, at the same time channeling a rapid ocular regeneration ritual into his head. He was about to have one nasty migraine.

The beggar dropped his dagger and grabbed his head and started screaming. Hilda quickly started chanting and extended a silence spell over the section of the alley they were in. There had already been a lot of screaming; with luck, the city guards in Freehold were as lax as they were in most cities.

The man started to stagger away; Hilda could not allow that. She quickly ran after him and grasped him by the waist while chanting a ritual to rapidly clear and clean his skin. Of course, that meant getting rid of some nasty bacterial infections and a few viruses. This was really going to hurt.

The beggar dropped to his knees, frantically scratching at his itching skin. This was not going to help skin regeneration. Hilda quickly performed a mild paralysis ritual to slow him down. It would not completely paralyze him, but he would not be able to scratch at himself effectively and disturb the healing.

Thinking better of her previous actions, she did the same for the other beggars, who were also writhing, the exception being mister hacking lung, who needed to continue to clear out his lungs. After they were stabilized, she cast a Ritual of Unnoticement on their area to keep prying eyes from seeing too much. It was time to roll up her sleeves and get to work properly healing her new patients.

When she was done, they would all have fresh, youthful complexions, perfect health, no deformities and no disease. Now it would be too cruel to do the Geis of manual labor, but she was not above a Geis of not allowing themselves to be willingly harmed. She had done no such thing to Rathbart, but he had not tried to harm her. These thugs needed more punishment. Thus, she would Geis them to stay clean and well-presented and to avoid allowing themselves to be willingly maimed or hurt. They would still be able to get hurt defending themselves or someone else; they just wouldn’t be able to sit still and allow themselves or someone else to wound or maim them for the sake of employment as a beggar.

It would be exhausting—she would really need that bubble bath at home, and then maybe even a short nap before her planned morning rooftop adventure—but it was fun. It was a great opportunity to do Tiernon’s work and unofficially take a bit of revenge on those who had sought to harm her. She felt she was allowed some small sin of satisfaction in this. She grinned and got down to the work at hand.

~

DOF +4/DOF +5

Late Period 6/Early Period 1 16-02-440

Tom closed the giant double doors behind them and waited to hear the two D’Orcs who had escorted them to the Master’s Suite, as they had called it, leave. Unfortunately, from the sound of their giant axes thumping to the right and left of the door, he assumed they had taken up guard.

He looked around the giant entryway to the suite. It was huge and quite opulent, if a bit heavy on the gold and silver for his taste. He spotted the double doors leading to the bedroom and gestured everyone to follow him through. He then shut the door behind them.

The place was rather dusty. Zelda had apologized profusely, but they had not known he was coming. He had assured her it would be fine. He just needed somewhere to rest and contemplate, even as he was sure they did. That
contemplate
line did not seem to sit well with her though.