The Crow by Alison Croggon Read Free Book Online Page B

from the villages and hamlets of the Balkir Plains between Turbansk and Baladh, fleeing from the advancing armies. The forces of the Nameless One were burning everything in their path – house and vine and orchard – and a faint black smudge was visible on the eastern horizon, turning the sunrise the color of blood.
    The Healing Houses were not large enough to house all the wounded from Baladh, and so the empty School was used as well, and Bards in white robes moved between rows of beds in the cloisters where only days before students had run and shouted and laughed. Hem was asked to help the healers, and he threw himself into the work with goodwill. Even Ire was pressed into service, and when he was not on his usual perch on Hem's shoulder, flapped around the buildings bearing scribbled notes or messages.
    Hem saw a lot of grim sights. There were many people, including a dozen Baladh children, with terrible burns that had not been attended to properly in their flight, and they suffered excruciating pain. The healers used a strong drug distilled from poppies and exerted all their Bardic arts to dull their agonies; but many of them died.
    When Hem first saw the shocking burns, on a tiny girl who could not have been more than three years old, he thought his heart would burst with anger. She did not cry, but held hard to her mother, staring at her with black eyes full of a mute, unanswerable appeal. Even when she died, beyond the help of even the greatest healers of Turbansk, she still held on to her mother, and the woman's hand had to be gently untangled from the dead fingers, which grasped as tightly as a vice. It was then that Hem asked Oslar, the chief healer, what had happened to the burned children.
    Oslar was an old man even by Bardic reckoning, his hair very white and his skin very black, and his strong face was lined with a deep and patient sadness. Hem reflected that he must have seen a lot of suffering in his long life. "She was caught by one of the worst weapons of the Dark," he said. "It was the dogsoldiers."
    Hem had heard of dogsoldiers, but up until then they had been just a word.
    "What are they?" he asked, although he knew that Oslar was needed elsewhere and did not have time to answer his questions.
    "They are not human, and I do not know if they ever were," said the old Bard, speaking plainly and looking him in the eye, as one adult to another. "They are creatures of flesh and metal and fire, made by some foul sorcery in the forges of Den Raven, and they do not know what mercy is. They have heads like dogs with muzzles of blue metal. Their very bodies are weapons, from which they shoot a liquid fire. It sticks to flesh and eats into it. It's the strange fire, how it sticks, that makes the burns so bad."
    Oslar looked across at the other beds in that room, with their small victims, and Hem swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry. "Now, Hem, I have work to do. Excuse me." Oslar nodded courteously, and Hem followed him with his eyes as he moved slowly from bed to bed. Hem knew the old Bard had slept very little in the past two nights, and yet he showed no sign of weariness.
    He was grateful that his question had been answered, although the answer did not comfort him. Oslar, he thought, was a very great man. Then he felt surprised at himself: he didn't usually think things like that.
    As Hem ran around the School of Turbansk, bearing potions from the herbalists or new dressings from the weavers, bringing a beaker of water to a woman too weak from childbed to walk, or holding a broken arm for binding, his anger smoldered and grew bright. He hated what had been done so wantonly to these people with every fiber in his being. He was no stranger to rage, but for the first time his feeling was tempered by compassion, and he discovered a patience within himself that he had not known he possessed.
    Perhaps it was the example of Oslar and the other healers, including his mentor Urbika, who had stayed with most of the other