She had asked her father how he could bear the entire responsibility alone, how do you stand it, how do you know you’re not going to make mistakes with no one else there to help you, and he had laughed a little.
I don’t, he had said. I don’t know for a fact. But I know that I know how to do this job. I trust in my own skill and experience to help me make good decisions. When it comes right down to it, you must be able to trust yourself, before asking your patients to place their trust in you. If you cannot do that, do not pursue medicine as a career.
She had shivered. But I don’t trust myself, yet. Not entirely.
You will get there, Gretalina. Confidence comes with practice and reinforcement of learning. You have the right kind of brain for this, and you also—he had tapped her solemnly on the chest—have the right kind of heart.
In the church, she wiped at her face, finally straightening up. I don’t have the right kind of stomach for it, though, she thought. Still, I’m all there is, and I will have to be enough.
She set her shoulders, took a deep breath, and began to retrace her steps.
The thing behind the pillar wasn’t much more of a delight for the eyes—or the nose—the second time around, but now that Greta knew what to expect, she found that she was able to look at it through doctor’s eyes, and the horror was clinically acknowledged and registered in the back of her mind.
It … he … was naked, covered in weeping burns and scars from older injuries, and what looked like the raised welts of a whip crisscrossed his back. The last time she had seen this individual he’d been dressed up like a Benedictine brother in rough brown wool, and she wondered where his habit had gone; on a day this cold and wet, she thought it unlikely that he had voluntarily taken off all his clothes.
So someone had … stripped him naked, flogged him bloody, and … what, dumped him here? In the church? Had he crawled in here himself, seeking sanctuary? Fass had said the trail went from the tunnels to the surface and then led here.
The clinician in her pointed out that while she was imagining possible scenarios he was continuing to lose fluids—Christ, those burns had to be getting on for eighteen percent total body surface area, plus who knows how much blood loss from the back wounds—and she needed to do something about that in a hurry. Despite the stink and the fact that his ruined, weeping eyes were glowing bright blue, Greta approached him, with her hands open and spread: I’m not a threat. She wasn’t sure if he could see her, but when he cringed away farther, she figured he at least could detect movement. That awful mewling cry came again.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, lying. She would have to hurt him a great deal just getting him out of here. “I’m a doctor. I want to help. Can you understand me?”
“Unclean,” rasped the burned man.
No argument there, she thought, swallowing hard against renewed nausea. “What’s your name?”
“Anathema,” he said. “Excommunicate.” He had trouble pronouncing it, his voice thick and slurring, but struggled determinedly through the syllables.
Greta realized that under all the wounds and scarring he couldn’t be older than his mid-twenties, and she thought again of what sort of mind it would take to hurt a person this badly and abandon them naked and bleeding and alone. She didn’t know much about excommunication, but she was pretty sure that his soul was considerably better off for dissolving ties with such a group, and changed her tack.
“What was your name, before you met them?” He was at least not huddling back into the shadows anymore, and after another moment or two he uncurled himself from his knot with a hiss of pain.
“Don’t … know,” he said. “Cold. Light’s gone. Light of God. Dancing. … and that sound, that sound.” He stopped, shaking his head in dumb negation of something only he could hear. Fluids spattered the floor. “In my head, all the time, humming. Voice of … of …”
Voice of what? Greta thought, shaking her own head. “It’s all right. Never mind about that right now,” she said. “We’ve got to get you out of here. Hang on a minute.”
They had to get him warm, first of all. She looked around. There were dusty velvet hangings in the shadows beyond him. Greta gave one a determined tug and it parted company with its rail, collapsing in heavy folds and sending up a cloud of choking dust. Not ideal, but better than nothing, she thought. Sorry, St. Michael. I hope you understand. With the velvet in her hands she knelt down beside him.
He flinched away, covering his face with his hands, but Greta stayed put, ignoring the smell as best she could. After a moment he peered at her between his fingers.
There were what looked like ligature marks around each wrist. They had tied him up before they whipped him.
“I don’t mean you harm,” she said quietly, very much aware that this man had tried to kill her, had hidden in the dark and held a knife against her throat. “Will you let me help?”
He stared at her with those terrible eyes for what felt to Greta like an awfully long time before nodding, once. She draped the velvet around his shoulders as gently as she could, knowing any contact with the wounds was painful; he hissed, but didn’t try to get away, and after a moment his fingers crept up to pull the curtain more tightly around himself. Even through the cloth she could feel the sick, unnatural heat of his skin, the sharpness of his bones. She wondered what the blue monks ate, and when they had last fed this one.
Greta had been pushing away the question of what in blazes to do with him, but now it shouldered its way back to the forefront of her mind. She could call an ambulance, she should call an ambulance, he needed an emergency room, a burn unit, but there was the issue of the blue-glowing eyes to consider. That wasn’t a human thing. That was a definitely and incontrovertibly nonhuman thing, and that was a problem because any doctor worth their white coat would start asking questions the moment they saw it—and the answers they’d get would lead to other, more prying questions. And experiments. And, very probably, quite literal witch hunts. It would only be a matter of time before investigation into this one particular inexplicable phenomenon developed into searching for other inexplicable phenomena.