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himself in to the emergency room. But he’s a Guild boss to his bones. He stayed awake long enough to call a couple of members of the Guild Council and issue some orders. Then he made the hospital call me. He was being wheeled into the operating room when I arrived.” Emmett shook his head. “And still giving orders.”
    “Wait a second.” Lydia sat up, pulling the sheet around her. “Wyatt got himself to the hospital? But I thought you said he was nearly killed with a mag-rez gun.”
    “He should have been dead. Someone put two rounds into him. Both shots were probably intended to hit him in the upper chest. But he evidently sensed something was wrong when he got out of his car and tried to dive for cover. The result was that both shots went low and to the side. Still there was a lot of damage, not to mention shock and blood loss.”
    “It’s a wonder he didn’t bleed to death.”
    “He was in the Old Quarter near the South Wall when it happened. He managed to summon a couple of small energy ghosts. Used them to partially cauterize the wounds and slow the bleeding. Then he got behind the wheel of that big Oscillator 600 of his and drove himself to the ER.”
    “He used ghost energy on bleeding wounds?”
    “No one ever said that Mercer Wyatt wasn’t as tough as they come.”
    She caught her breath, astonished. Most of the green radiation given off by unstable dissonance energy manifestations everyone called ghosts was psi in nature, and the effects produced were most pronounced on the paranormal plane. But some of the eerie glow took the form of thermal energy. Ghosts were frequently hot enough to scorch paper or wood or a bedroom wall, as she had discovered the hard way last month.
    Nevertheless, the thought of using one on an open wound was mind-boggling.
    “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” she said. “Theoretically, I suppose, it could be done. But the hunter would have to be able to exert an amazing amount of control in order to manipulate a ghost with the kind of precision it would require to staunch bleeding and not get badly burned at the same time.”
    “Hunters have some built-in immunity to the effects of ghost fire,” he reminded her. “Comes with the psi talent required to handle them, I guess.”
    She shuddered. “Even so, I can only imagine how much pain it would cause on both the physical and the psychic planes.”
    He shrugged. “It hurts but not as much as you might think, not if you use some of the ghost’s psi energy to distance your mind from the pain.”
    She frowned. “You’ve heard about this technique?”
    “Sure. You get instruction and a little practice in basic training. It was an emergency medical procedure that was developed by Guild field medics during the Era of Discord.”
    Every child was taught the history of the Guilds in elementary school. They had been established a hundred years earlier as combat units to protect the cities against the threat of the charismatic fanatic, Vincent Lee Vance, and his followers.
    Vance was a powerful dissonance-energy para-resonator—a ghost-hunter—who had spent his early years prospecting for amber. He had always been considered psychically unstable by those who knew him best but his eccentricities had not been much of a problem because for the most part he had shunned society to follow the solitary career path associated with the prospecting business.
    At one point in his life Vance disappeared underground into the catacombs beneath Old Frequency City. When he had failed to reappear after several months, he had been presumed dead.
    Eventually he had emerged, no longer a scruffy, half-daft amber man, but a visionary megalomaniac whose goal was nothing less than the conquest of all of the city-states. He claimed that he had discovered a great treasure house of ancient Harmonic secrets that would enable him to institute an ideal society. He promised that those who fought on his side would be rewarded with enormous power and