Silver Blades: Dread Handed

Part 1, Section 3 - Body of Evidence

Riposte.

"Alright, hold on a second," I complained, "I can take my own shirt off..."

"Do it, then."

"Just having some trouble with the buttons.... My fingers are shaking."

"Are they?" he asked with habitual sarcasm. "You're probably in shock."

"Nonsense," I growled. I tore the top damned button completely off the shirt and pulled it open. "See? Blood wasn't mine."

The blood on both shirt and jack was concentrated around the area of my left kidney; more than I would have credited. It soaked the shirt crimson and stained the jack a dark wet brown along its bottom left edge.

But I wasn't hurt, and I was confident there was no wound to account for it all.

"I do not understand," he said, suspicion coloring his words. "You tussled with Di Bobra for mere moments before we pulled you apart—twenty drips, at most. There is no way that much of his blood soaked into your armor."

He flipped the jack over and studied its glossy surface. Leather was not meant to shine like that; unblemished since its polish earlier in the day and marred only by a small hole toward the bottom. Nicked in a previous duel, no doubt.

He looked back at my abdomen, which, aside for some dried blood, was in better shape than the jack. As he studied me, his eyes went wide. He pulled open my shirt.

"Rip, your shoulder!" he gasped, horrified.

"What of it?" I snapped, pulling my shirt tails free and working the buttons closed. "They were never able to get the scarring out."

"Those don't look like scars; they are inflamed! Have you seen healers?"

"Dozens," I exaggerated. "And they've vanished everything from cuts and bruises to a nasty cluster of smallsword punctures in my chest .... Obviously I'm still kicking."

Through the uncomfortable pause that followed, I watched the roots of deduction work their insidious way through Pertuli's mind.

"... more than a month has passed ...." Pertuli observed, the words surfacing from the middle of a conversation he was having with himself.

"Nearly two," I agreed with a wince. They were the ripples arriving ahead of a question as inevitable as the waxing tide.

"What did Bessik say?" he asked.

"Never saw him," I sighed.

"What?" He turned accusing eyes on me.

"I never saw Bessik!" I shouted. "I was vainly seeking an audience with you, fool that I was, for nearly a fortnight. Then I was so busy being robbed, stabbed, ridiculed and sober . . . . Every time I go near the cathedral I seem to fall in with assassins or have to answer for some imagined slight or other. When I did finally make it there, wrapped in a cloak so thick my bad fortune wouldn't recognize me, I discovered the Prior wasn't even there! He's left the country, did you know? Called back to Circepal for the foreseeable future."

"I was so hard to find," Pertuli lectured, with moderate falsehood, "because of the lengthy healing and cleansing process Bessik recommended. You should have seen him right away."

"That would have been lovely, yes," I agreed, snapping off each syllable in clenched teeth.

"Rip, I'm worried," he said. "The fights, the killing. You've been called out for your actions for years, but now you're seeking opponents and slaying them on pretext—you haven't been yourself."