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matter how big he
was, he’d go down the same as anybody else. “You talk about my sister like that
again, I’ll tear your throat out. Akeere’s my Lady.” Dingus spread his right
hand on his chest. He didn’t know if they could see his leaf in the dark, but
he showed it. “I’m sworn to Her.”
    Orddot laughed again.
“We’re men. We make oaths to our whores all the time, oaths we’ve got no
intention—”
    “Push me,” Dingus said,
real quiet. “Insult my vow one more time, only one of us walks away from here a
man.”
    “That’s two threats
you’ve made against me.”
    Like that, just like
that, Dingus was right up in Orddot’s face. “You feel me now?” Orddot fell back
a step and Dingus sneered. He walked right past, back to the fires, where he
saw Vandis sitting—not quite like before, because he wasn’t next to Ingavi, but
between Kessa and Farid. His Master rose, and the grizzled head jerked,
indicating that Dingus should follow into the dark. Resigned, he trailed Vandis
away from the camp. It wasn’t like he wanted to get chewed out—but he’d take
it.

Doctor Droshky
    Fort Rule, Section Two
    The clouds hung gray, and
an unrelenting mist that sometimes broke into real rain but never really went
away drizzled over the Fort. Krakus could wish himself drier, but he’d put this
off long enough already. He could wish himself a little less nauseated—but he’d
put it off too long. He and Fillip worked in Droshky’s shed, clearing it out
for the next Director of Medicine. Interviews would begin in two days’ time,
and Krakus wanted to show the candidates their prospective quarters, which
meant Droshky could no longer inhabit the place.
    Just as well. Krakus
couldn’t deny the pleasure he took in stripping the shed. That morning, he and
Fillip had gone in with distant thunder rumbling a near-constant chorus. Under
Droshky’s rabid weasel gaze, they’d begun to clear the bookshelves into trunks.
Some of the books, though, the chubby doctor’s journals in particular, were so
blazingly objectionable that Krakus had started a “to burn” pile. It grew with
alarming speed.
    Droshky sat unspeaking,
perched in the chair that, just a few weeks before, Krakus had broken to take
Danny away. His stare followed their every move, and Krakus didn’t doubt he had
plenty to say, but—all praise to the Bright Lady—his jaw was still trapped
under a heavy bandage stiffened with egg white. He twitched, and his eyes
glittered every time Krakus tossed something onto that pile.
    Krakus didn’t care what
Droshky thought of it. Every time he flipped open a book, the pages inside
accused him, the cold anatomical drawings representing all the people he could
have saved, had he only looked. He hadn’t seen it any more than he’d seen his
toes. Now his breastbone cracked and split, and his rib cage yawned wide,
exposing his buried, beating heart to the scalpel’s slice like so many of the
people whose insides the doctor had drawn. However long they’d lasted
afterward, they had been living when Droshky had carved from their flesh the
things that made them different. When he saw his distorted reflection in
a bone saw that shone with loving maintenance, he packed it in its case,
snapped the lid shut, and put it aside for burning.
    It took all day. Once
they’d finished with the books, he and Fillip moved on to the jars that filled
tables and shelves. As quickly as they could, they transferred the jars to a
wheelbarrow and out to the broadest clear space in Section Two, a small green
where sometimes the doctors and nurses took the air. The job required several
trips. Krakus felt like weeping, and Fillip swiped at his eyes, when they
dropped off the first load: clawed hands and strange eyes, bleached pieces of
people suspended in straw-tinted liquid, their souls forever trapped in the
abomination of body parts that hadn’t gone up in the smoke of a pyre. The
drizzle dampened Krakus’s hair, Fillip’s blacks,