Shadowborn by Alison Sinclair

dexterity to reload, which left him with five bullets and a knife. “Stranhornes!” Ishmael roared at the top of his lungs. “To me! Ballroom roof!”

Balthasar
    Trouble on the roof, Balthasar had registered someone saying outside some time ago. Straus had cocked his head, listening; he nodded grimly and went back to itemizing the many faults of his son by marriage. He and Balthasar were repairing the muscular back of a young drayman who had used his carriage to ferry the weak and wounded in the retreat from Stonebridge, and shielded his last passengers from attack with his own body. With fixed concentration, the Stonebridge apothecary dripped chloroform onto the mask over the patient’s face. He had hardly spoken since he stumbled in the gate with the youngest of his brother’s children in his arms. His own oldest daughter was upstairs with the defenders, but none of the rest of his or his brother’s families had reached the manor, and no one could tell him whether they were alive or dead.
    The drayman was carried from the table alive, though neither physician thought well of his chances. They had washed the wounds extensively and cleaned them of shreds of cloth, but the tissue damage was so extensive that they could not completely debride them, and Shadowborn lacerations infected easily, Straus muttered grimly as they stood side by side, scrubbing the blood off their hands. “Likely be dead in days, even if we’re not overrun. . . . Y’any good with a firearm, city man?”
    “No,” Balthasar said.
    “So I take it you’ve not got one?” Straus, Balthasar realized, was armed: his sonn outlined the shape of a revolver under the other man’s surgical apron. Was the surgeon prepared to fight?
    “No . . . should I?”
    “Not if it makes y’more hazard to th’wounded.” Straus sonned him. “But there’s some would like t’have a bullet for themselves.”
    Rather than die under Shadowborn teeth or claws, Bal understood. He knew there were some to whom the manner of death mattered, who believed that some deaths profaned body and soul. He was not one. Most deaths were ugly. He shook his head.
    Straus said no more on the subject. “We’ll take th’scalp wound next, if there’s none worse next door.”
    Next door had been an intimate dining room for the baronelle and her circle. Bridal and naming-day cakes would have sagged under the weight of the decorative molding and piping. Rows of pallets held men and women waiting for surgery, recovering after surgery, or dying in the greatest possible comfort. Mostly now they were quiet, drugged or weak or resigned to pain, so that he could hear the sobs of the young woman rocking in a chair in the corner. Bal sighed. Her sister had gone into premature labor during the retreat. The child must have died. Perhaps the mother, too.
    “Hearne.” Stranhorne’s one-armed aide wove between pallets to accost him. “The baron—Strumheller—wants a word with you. They’ve taken him over t’the briefing gallery. Not bad hurt,” he added, as he registered Balthasar’s reaction. “Baronette Laurel is stitching him. Get her off her feet for a while.” Then he said, loudly enough to be heard by patients and helpers alike, “We’ve fought them off,” and, quietly, to Balthasar, “though it was a near-run thing.”
    In the side gallery, Ishmael di Studier was leaning back in one of the chairs, arm extended along a narrow table. Laurel di Gautier was suturing two oblique lacerations on his forearm. Ishmael’s teeth were set in a roll of leather and his sound hand was locked on the arm of the chair, but otherwise he endured without flinching.
    She had obviously done this before, by the speed and deftness with which she set the sutures. Possibly even to Ishmael himself, given the ease with which she touched the mage. Balthasar waited as she tied off the last few. “I’m done,” she said quietly, and began to clean the skin. Ishmael unclenched his teeth and removed the