The educated eye would recognise bone drills, splints for setting jaws and limbs, and iron hooks for drawing back flesh during surgery. Leather straps hung coiled beside tourniquet belts fitted with wooden windlasses to tighten them. Cautery irons, their tips darkened from countless heatings, lay on a stone tray next to slender probes for exploring wounds, and lengths of smoked sinew for binding fractures.
Earthen jars and wooden boxes held dried poultices, powders, and herbal compresses, while other vials were stored submerged in clear bowls of shredded ice that glinted dully in the dim light of the orbs overhead. Elegant metal boxes held syringes made of horn and brass, intended for both irrigation and injection. Bigger boxes stored layers of folded linen bandages covered in malraw and crushed fusalis, while carefully distinguished rows of untreated cloth sat stacked near the door. The air was thick with the scent of tinctures, layered over the strong smell of various herbs and potent spirits; the guild’s pungent arsenal against frostbite, rot, and poison.
And amidst it all stood the shaman.
And the borman.
And Bubs, whom Yu had been told to assist.
Silently, Yu stepped across the threshold. His talon felt heavy on the stone. The thick air clung to his throat.
The three figures were gathered between five cots lined against the far wall. The cots were skeletal things, frames of hammered iron with joints blackened from fire. No two were alike. All were different sizes, one narrow and long, another wide, squat and more than a metre off the ground. At first, Yu thought them the mismatched fabrications of necessity, then he understood that they were built for bodies of various shape.
The injured travellers lay in the two smallest ones in the middle. Bubs stood perched on a low stool between them, while the shaman sat on a chair on the outside of the right-wing bed, further away from Yu than the borman, who stood crouched on the outside of the left bed.
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