Excerpt: Warlock Stars

Warlock Stars
Golden Vanity #2

Chapter One

Shaken by the violence of their escape, high on just being alive and free, Susann melted into Tyntarion's arms, the perfect culmination of her months of falling for him. She no longer cared that she was just an invading ghost from another world. After this long, she could not believe the body was just on loan. A person would go mad living like she could disappear any minute.
Tyntarion offered a much sweeter madness.
They must have swayed too far in their hungry embrace. He staggered off balance to one side.
Susann did another fast sweep of him, just reassuring herself he still lived. The marble-pale skin contrasted with every bruise, the cuts crusted shut with dark blood. Still the gorgeously chiseled face despite the bruise on one high cheekbone, the lean musculature of the fencer and acrobat in the fighting dress of only breeches, boots, and gauntlets, his violet-dyed hair sweat-glued around his shoulders.
"Come on, you're for the surgeon." Susann backed away as his head sank and grey eyes fluttered shut for a moment. "You're ice-cold from the ride here."
"I feel bad enough to agree." He still pulled her in for another kiss, short, but setting her brain on fire.
He kept an arm around her, and snagged a blanket to cloak himself out of the tack room as they passed out of the horses' stabling area into the high arched steel-walled corridors of the Golden Vanity.
Bermany the surgeon waited, with Lastil, Tyntarion's number two. Lastil's tail was in high gear, switching back and forth in anxiety. Other than that she looked like any beautiful woman with long raven hair on her head, and short black velvet growing over most everything else but her palms and soles. Bermany looked so normal by comparison: just a well-kept middle-aged blonde woman who had learned her trade in the blood-buckets, as one of the professional fighters before she concentrated on her healing skills.
Lastil grabbed Tyntarion from the other side and put an arm around his blanketed back. "What happened to you?"
He laughed weakly. "You want that in how many hours of summation?"
"He was down in the Desperate Lark's surgery when everything broke loose." Susann spoke to Bermany. "He had a blood wager that turned out to be an all-in fight with this guy, Getigne Dovamirsk from—"
"I know him! Only one of the best," the surgeon said. "The boss is in too good shape to have lost."
"—then he had a challenge to the death with Lord Emeris. When Emeris went down, may he burn in Hell, Lord Wistavil picked up the mantle of king maker by sticking a gun in my side."
Tyntarion called him a name in words Susann didn't know.
"I told Tyntarion to get down to the surgery. Wistavil wanted to leave him behind—"
"I can imagine," Lastil said.
"—But Kiderr grabbed his gun hand and I was scared worse then I'd been all night when I thought he'd gotten shot. Where is—"
"Here." Kiderr's oddly palatized voice came from knee-level.
Tyntarion went slightly off-balance again when he looked down. "You're all right, little brother?"
"Rright." A fifty-pound marbled gray tomcat with too much head dome, Kiderr had his whiskers and ruff sleeked down, looking worried. "Just scorched."
"That's the charred fur I'm smelling!" Lastil swiped at her nose. "Get downwind, hey?"
Bermany prodded for the rest of the story as they got Tyntarion back in motion.
Susann said, "So I did like the boss told me. Yell when you know you're outnumbered. Don't wait 'til you're going down. I yelled, 'Hey, Rube!'"
"Isn't that how we met you?" Lastil laughed.
"All the ushers on the Lark go armed. The performers swarmed the box, too. You can imagine how long it took the top blood-bucket competitors to take out even a troop of Falkazaran Imperial Guard."
Tyntarion nodded. "I heard her down in surgery. Good lungs on the girl. I got her out of the box, down to the arena floor, and out the performer's ramp. They had their troops all over the ship, but Kiderr got us by. They had all else to do staying alive, from what I saw on the landing field. Who hung all the sheet metal on the zoubadars? Roamer looked like a steel glacier on that ramp."
"Kiderr's idea." Bermany led the turn into her surgery. "He and the Hallmaster plotted the rescue. She's flaming too hard to shut a ramp on about this whole business."
"Lastil!" Tyntarion pulled himself loose from her. "Thank you for getting me here, but you're not a healer. Would you get busy looking after the troupe? I need to know there's someone with a brain out there. I saw seamstresses with carbines. Get them all home, right?"
"Yes, boss!" Lastil shot her grin and words Susann's way, "That's more like him," and dashed off.
Tyntarion leaned about twenty pounds of his weight on Susann, counteracting any cheer from him turning back into the autocratic shipmaster of the Diversion Guild.
"In here." Bermany steadied him into sitting on the examination table in the first alcove.
Susan fiddled with the curtain, hoping the surgeon would forget to send her out.
Bermany started manipulating and checking—eyes, fingers, heart and lung sounds. "How many hits where? What are the cuts from?"
"Rapier and dagger."
"Oh, here I'd thought Susann had just torn half your clothes off."
"She's much too well-behaved," Tyntarion murmured. His eyes and a slow-smoldering smile, aimed at Susann, were all about misbehavior. Heat flashed from her shoulders deep into her body.
Bermany put her hands on his shoulders. "Why are you still sweating?"
"Must be out of condition." He shut his eyes and let his head hang again.
Quiet settled on the surgery. Abstracted, Bermany used whatever healers did to read someone's condition, help healing it. Susann stayed uneasy and fascinated by that contrast of this world of worlds: everyday magic, forbidden science.
Bermany drew up, her voice scalpel-sharp. "Who treated you?"
"The *Lark*'s surgeon! All he had a chance to do was start bandaging." Tyntarion started to breathe heavily. Crystal beads of sweat stood out on his face.
"Lay down!" Bermany picked up his feet and swung him. "Susann! There's a crank at that end. Get his feet up to twenty-five degrees." Bermany left at a run.
Leaden and sick, Susann put her shoulder into the handle. She had already prayed him through two duels tonight. *He's injured. Badly. I know it. Bermany's not in the least excitable. She's used to people sworded through and fallen thirty feet and gored by tchinfus.*
Gasping, Tyntarion sought Susann's eyes with his: the hard, wide stare of a frightened animal. She slipped her fingers in his, watched his darkened lashes shut away that small sign of weakness—but his grip tightened around her hand. She grew queasy with dread, weak and a bit faint herself.
Preceded by the rattle of a cart, Bermany trotted back in. She slapped cases open and twirled vials to double-check their contents. For the first time Susann saw a hypodermic needle in use here. If she can't fix it magically, it's serious.
"Tyntarion, can you concentrate any of your own abilities?"
"That's why—I quit—leaking."
"Something's in your blood. Pick up your circulation rate. Flush it through your liver as fast as possible."
"So that's why I'm—sweating. Flushing."
"You're body's already trying. Move it faster if you can." Bermany slapped Susann's hand out of his. The surgeon's left hand hovered over his torso and arm, from one cut to another, an inch above his skin. Her hand landed and the needle moved fast, as Susann turned away.
Kiderr crouched on a side table, ears down, making himself tiny. The fur along the sides of his nose glistened damply.
She dared look back. Bermany stood quietly, hands spread on each side of Tyntarion's waist, eyes shut, like his.
*No sigils of fire hanging in the air. No auras and glows, at least not to me. They don't even look tense. Nothing muscular. Nothing physical. All, all inside. The two of them are lost somewhere else, focused on some level of cells and organs, battling together for Tyntarion's life. The worse he gets the less he'll be able to help. I'm no healer—why can't I be one? I can't do anything to help!*
A memory flashed in, watching Shakespeare's Hamlet, battles for thrones between the legitimate and illegitimate, epees rattling off each other, not the clear chiming of rapiers—
"Laërtes," she whispered. "That bastard Emeris was ready for the fight. He was going to make sure of it. He poisoned his damned blades."
"Urrr." Kiderr's chir agreed. "Louse. Burrrn."
"In Hell forever," Susann filled.
"Rright."
She had killed a man tonight, stabbed Wistavil to death to save Kiderr and herself. No hyperbole: she wished she had Emeris right now, and a chance to work him over with a dagger for a few minutes, just to kill him all over again. She pressed her fingers against her lips and squeezed the tears back with her lids.
Bermany moved, rattle of the cart. Expert haste filling another hypodermic. Tyntarion's head lolled to one side limply, his skin drained to a faint yellow, even his lips pale. Her center fingers sought the pulse in his throat, needle waiting only for the right spot.
Susann reached for Kiderr and scraped empty table. A glance: no cat. Kiderr leaped up next to Tyntarion's shoulder and rubbed faces.
"Kiderr, get out." Bermany moved to backhand him, but halted to press both palms on Tyntarion's chest. She pulled a few deep breaths through her mouth, as if she could breath for him—
*Is he still breathing? I can't tell. Oh, God, don't let him die. Don't. Just don't. I love him too much.* Slowly Susann edged around, trying to see past Bermany. Kiderr purred like a generator, probably audible down the hall. *Is that good? No, he's trying to reach Tyntarion, wake him up. He's trying—*
The question of how she knew distracted her for a horrible second, as she knew every iota of her mind should be on grasping Tyntarion's last moments, but she had to ask, *How do I know what Kiderr's doing?*
For a moment, she felt washed with sunlight, warmer, the room brighter, though the lighting never changed inside the starships.
The scene froze forever. Bermany stood, hands brown against Tyntarion's chest, his abdomen beyond barely rising and falling, Kiderr purring, Tyntarion—
*Hanging. Fighting. The hardest fight of the night. If will and spirit can do it, he'll pull through. He doesn't know how to quit except to win. But he's out. Do souls see death—Death, an entity? If he does, he'll keep fighting, unconscious or not.*
Susann realized how long the fight lasted as her legs began to cramp from tense standing, she who spent most of her days moving about on her feet.