The Glass Wizard - The tale of a somewhat depressed wizard

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Bubs held one of the double doors open. It was enough for Deltington and the krynn to ease the stretcher through, with the krynn's back nudging the other door just wide enough to pass. Yu realised too late that he should have stepped forward to help. By the time he moved, they were already through. So he was left where he always seemed to end up; standing still and staring stupid.

As the right door swung wider, he caught glimpses of the room beyond. It was bare and cold, a surgery stripped to its bones. At its centre stood a massive slab of stone, hacked raw from the mountain except for its surface, which had been sanded to a flat, pale gleam. Its crooked base fused into the floor like roots. From each side hung broad metal plates, hinged to fold upward, so the block could be widened to hold even a borman.

The walls bore shelves heavy with tools that looked stolen from a butcher's stall or a battlefield. Some were shaped like weapons, others like farm equipment. Their purposes wavered between repair and mutilation. Some had no clear use at all. Yu's eyes flew over them and fled just as quickly; iron spreaders with ratcheting arms, bone levers wicked in curve, clamps wide as wings, tongs barbed like fishhooks — for pulling, holding, or tearing? As he spotted a whole array of saws, he forced his gaze lower, from the walls to the subtler things on the workbenches: kits of bone-handled needles, chisels as thin as quills, hammers with flat heads, wedges meant for splitting things apart, pincers that were nothing but angles and edges, and all right thank you that is enough.

The stretcher came down onto the slab. The leather straps creaked as the human's body curled weakly against them. Her thin voice rasped through clenched teeth. It was just so much whimpering. Yu tore his eyes from the writhing thing and fixed them on the unconscious selder instead, but that did nothing to unhear her. The dread in him only rose. Oh god, he did not want to see him wake. He did not want to be here when his pain came loose.

"I can't do it," Yu blurted. His beak clicked shut on the words, too late to catch them. "Bubs, sorry, I really don't —"

"You have your instructions." Bubs had already turned toward the surgery.

"Bubs, wait!"

Bubs halted, one hand still on the door, ready to pull it shut.

"Please, sorry. I mean, I don't know —"

A cry ripped from the human, raw enough to scrape bone. Yu's stomach twisted.

"What you do?" The borman barreled into the sick bay, charging straight for Bubs and the half-shut door.

Instinct drove Yu aside, all the way behind the outermost cod.

Bubs did not move. He held the door and, impossibly, stood in the borman's path. For an instant, his round eyes flicked at Yu. A glance, nothing more. But from how it stuck, he it could as well have thrown one of the hammers. Yu should not have stepped aside. Not as a guard. Not when something big came crashing through. It was the briefest of moments that gave him all the guilt, before his mind could raise its shield and protest, Well, what the fuck do you expect me to do? Panic swept the words away; the borman would plow right through Bubs —

"We will help her!" Bubs shouted.

The borman stopped short. His chest heaved. He loomed so close he could have crushed Bubs flat against the stone. His neck craned to peer past the door into the operating room.

Bubs stood his ground, a fraction of his size. "We will reset the bone. Take out the splinters."

"What means that?" the borman growled.

"We make the best of it." Bubs stared up at him. "You leave now."

"No." The word ground out like stone. "I help."

"You will be a hindrance."

The borman did not move.

Bubs did not wait. His gaze cut sideways, sharp and sudden. "Yu. What was it you wanted to say?"

Yu's tongue tangled in his beak. The borman's shadow pressed down, suffocating. "I — Sorry. I don't … I don't know how to care for people. Sorry. I mean, I don't know what to do with the selder, now or when he wakes —"

"Then do what the shaman asks of you," Bubs cut in. "If you're done here, serve dinner."

The borman stared down at Yu.

Yu stared back at Bubs.

He had braced for mockery, for the sting of a jab, for some barb about shirking again. None of it came. Bubs spoke to him, yes, but without the slightest flicker of recognition. It was the stark opposite of earlier in the day, when Yu had scrubbed under his watch and felt the weight of those eyes catching every missed speck and his criticism listing every flaw. Now, his words fell into the air with seemingly no awareness of the tension spilling into room. The change was so jarring, that Yu's mind caught on the tone and blanked out the meaning entirely.

"Serve the guests. You got that?" Bubs repeated.

That could not be right. Into the kitchen — alone? Handle food — alone?

Yu fumbled. "What?" His word of the day. Again.

"Are you deaf now?" Bubs snapped.

Yu's beak opened —

"Take. The food. To the common room. Bring back. The empty bowls." And with that, Bubs stepped into the surgery and let the door fall shut behind him.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Yu's beak closed shut with it.

And then he realised that he had pushed himself into a corner, literally, with the borman and the shaman between him and the only exit. He lifted his gaze up the borman, who was far too much bulk and height, and far too much next to him.

The borman still stared back. His eyes stayed fixed on Yu for a long beat, then they rose higher, peering through the little glass window set in the upper part of the doors. Yu, shorter, could only listen: Bubs giving Deltington orders to clean himself up. The splash of water. The uncorking of bottles. The human in pain. The room beyond shifted and moved, until the krynn emerged.

The borman shifted aside with reluctance, as the smaller beastkin stepped back into the sick bay.

"You stay not?" he asked.

"No," the krynn's eyes slid from Yu to the shaman and back. "They do it together." Then, to the borman: "We should go to the common room. Fetch our things to our rooms."

But the borman did not move. He lingered at the threshold, breath grinding in and out. His paws lifted and lowered, then flexed against the handles. Then he seized them, opening both doors all the way, and stepped into the frame.

"Get out," Bubs said. He did not raise his voice, but now, there was anger in it.

Yu could not see much past the borman, but what he did see was lit clear and sharp. Four orbs now flooded the surgery with white light. Bubs crouched low over the human's leg, pincers and fingers working in tandem to prise away the splint. One of the long iron plates already lay discarded, gleaming dark beside a heap of blood-soaked wrappings. The second was halfway free. With it gone, the wound bled openly. Despite that, the human's body no longer thrashed as before. She only twisted faintly against the straps, her cries frayed to thin, single threads.

Between Bubs and Deltington stood two trolleys of instruments. Deltington was in the midst of trading one for another: setting aside clamps slick with red, laying out finer ones with hooked ends, which Bubs picked up moments after. To trained eyes, the more intricate devices would stand out as screw-bar frames to bind bone fragments in place, and slender rods with tightening rings to hold alignment. To Yu, they looked like torture devices. Beside them, the simpler things sat waiting in neat order; rolls of bandage, layered compresses, stoppered vials, and a pot of tar-like salve.

Deltington's hands moved with practiced care as he took up and aligned a bracing frame against the leg. He placed it just above where Bubs still worked to prise away the last strip of splint and then began to tighten individual screws. It looked to Yu like a first attempt to hold the bone edges steady and slow the bleeding without blocking Bubs' work. Deltington appeared focused on precision, yet his right wing slowly curved outward and down, folding around Bubs' stool from behind. Bubs was closer to the door, which meant that Deltington's wing was between him and the borman, now covering the mianid up to his legs. Gradually, the dark tones on the membrane gained brighter hues. They flared with restless colour, deep blue giving way to streaks of biting yellow and orange. And then Yu heard him talk to Estingar.

"I watch," the borman rumbled.

"I want my workspace clean. You are not," Bubs replied, still bent over the human's leg, never looking up. Even standing on the stool, he barely reached the giant's hip. "You leave now."

"No." The voice was deep, immovable. "I stay here. Not in the workspace. I watch in the door."

"No. That is enough." Bubs pulled back. He withdrew his hands and instruments from the human's leg. He held them out in front, bloody fingers dripping in the orblight. The girl whimpered.

Deltington, too, halted. For a moment, the brace sagged loose between his claws, then he shifted his hold. One hand still gripped the leg, the other the frame. It was the only thing keeping the human from thrashing and tearing it right off. But the pressure slackened, and with it the wound gaped wide. Blood ran freely now, crawling across the stone and staining the gray suface in vivid smears of dying.

Yet Bubs and Deltington did nothing. They only stood and stared at the borman, while the girl withered in her straps, spilling blood and breath by the moment.

The borman's chest heaved. "What you do?"

"What are you doing?" Bubs snapped back. "I told you to leave."

"Why you wait?" the borman demanded, alarm splitting his voice. "You open, more blood come. You must help travellers! You must!"

"Is she your human?" Bubs' tone did not rise.

"Yes!"

"I am obliged to help travellers, same as any guard." Where the borman's words were fire, Bubs' were unmelting ice. "I am not obliged to fix anyone's things and toys. Another's property."

The borman —

Deltington's wing flared poison-yellow, the one stretched between the borman and Bubs. Yu stumbled back, struck the cot behind him, and fell onto the mattress. From there he stared, breath caught, chest locked, unable to grasp what rection, what danger Deltington had seen — only knowing he had missed it.

"If I let go now," Deltington said, "this leg will tear off. Do not make me."

It was a warning, dead-serious. But then, his teeth showed. Rows of needles gleamed beneath the beak-like overgrowth that carved his face into its ever-fixed rictus. In the stark white light, the grimace seemed to flare wider, a grotesque grin burning across a poison-yellow mask.

"Or do make me?"

No!" The borman's arms shot up, shoulders bunching.

"Deltington," Bubs' voice cut clean.

The grin vanished, but the poisonous colours still burned across Deltington's face. "She will lose it," he repeated. This time the words carried no dare, only threat.

"No!" The borman suppressed his roar, voice ragged, close to breaking.

"She may keep it," Bubs words sliced through the tension. "Maybe I try. Maybe I do nothing. That depends on you, borman."

Another mass of force burst into the sick bay and shouldered past Yu. Gurs. The second borman planted himself behind the first, who turned at once. Their eyes locked, and roll of growls and grunts passed between them — low, primal, older than words, heavy with rank and warning.

Yu's pulse skipped and stuttered as he counted the distance. One, two, three — shit. One, two, three — goddammit, get up! Just fucking move! But his limbs stuck fast. He knew too well how brutish bormen were, how impulsive, how often they turned from words to violence, and just how quickly they lashed out against all need for caution and common sense.

Yu's common sense screamed at him to get the fuck out of reach, but it was useless. If one borman was bad, more of them was worse, and the fina in him had declared him dead already. So the body froze, and the mind began to spin instead: How had Gurs known to come? Estingar must have told him. Deltington had alerted him, surely. What was that sudden flare on Deltington's wing, that flash of orange and red? And why, gods, why were they all so insistent on helping the human, as if —

"Go now, Kel-Khadar," Bubs said, at last. "That is your name, right? Go and rest."

The words made both bormen fall silent and turn towards Bubs. Yu could not see not past them, but from what he heard, Bubs and Deltington bent to the human's leg again, fixing the brace and the bleeding.

"I will do all I can to give her a chance," Bubs said. "I will call you if there is anything to worry about. If something happens. Go, and let me work. There will be food soon."

The borman's chest heaved once, twice, thrice, then eased by degrees. His breath finally settled. Calmer now, he stepped back into the sick bay. Gurs closed the door behind him and then issued a short grunt that made the borman leave for the common room. Gurs followed close behind, herding the krynn along with a curt gesture.

With each of their heavy steps, the commotion ebbed, and then everything thinned into silence. Only the muffled clink of instruments and the clipped commands from the adjoining room remained.

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And that meant that suddenly, Yu was left alone with the unconscious selder. And with the shaman.

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