Chapter 211: Selling An Angel

Malik looked very different.

He had only recently returned to his young face, with a beard as a small bonus, but now it had changed again.

Everything gold about him had turned white, making him look hollowed out.

His hair, once a bright rat’s tail of aggressive gold, hung in a dry, colorless rope.

His eyes had lost their color, and the thin cracks along his skin remained, though they no longer leaked.

His body had lost its muscle. The towering frame that had stretched a tunic to its limits was gone, and what remained was a narrow shape of skin and bone, ribs showing through the cloth like the slats of a boat.

He was barely identifiable.

His own mother would have walked past him on the street.

But, of course, he did not notice any of it.

Malik was too far down in a world of pain, and the world above was very small and very distant.

Time passed.

Again, he could not say how much.

The fire had burned lower, or he had grown used to it.

The edges of the agony wore smooth, and in the gaps between one wave and the next he began to feel other things.

The blindfold across his eyes.

The weight of the cuffs on his wrists.

The soft, steady drag of the runes as they drank whatever Rukh his body tried to make.

His right arm had felt whole for a long time.

Malik had been so sure of it.

He could feel the elbow, the fingers, and the old scar across the thumb.

Then a cold draft touched the place where his hand should have been, and he understood that there was nothing there.

It was only the memory of an arm.

The ghost of it ached like the real thing.

’Hm.’

It was the only thought he had room for.

Somebody lifted him.

Right... suddenly he felt hands under his shoulders and knees, and then the sensation of moving through air, making his head lol and his long white hair brush the ground.

There was an ugly smell of oil and old blood, and the creak of a wooden wheel somewhere close.

Then his back struck something hard.

It was cold.

Oh, he so wished to be familiar.

The ever-cold Golden Throne.

But no, it was flat like stone, and it drove the breath out of him.

The cold sank through his thin clothes and into his spine.

Malik lay there with his mouth open, trying to understand it.

He could not.

His mind was too muddy for anything as simple as a table.

Thoughts came to him as flashes of silver and then nothing.

The cold was cold.

The dark was dark.

Someone was breathing near him.

Everything else was a long way off, behind a thick pane of glass.

However, eventually, the sound of voices woke him up a little.

At first, they were no more than noise, two low rumbles that rose and fell.

He could tell there were two of them.

One was higher and quicker, the other slow and dry.

They traded sentences back and forth the way people do who have worked together a long time.

Malik tried to focus.

He did try... gathering what little he had, reaching for the words, only for them to slide out of his hands.

With enough tries, a syllable came through.

Perhaps it was a name.

Then it was gone, and he was lying in the dark again with his heart beating slowly in his ears.

’Think.’

It was an old word.

He had once used it to keep his own lungs moving.

’Listen.’

He tried again.

His mind felt dull and slow; even the simplest sentence needed to be taken apart and put back together, and by the time he did it, the speakers had moved on to the next.

He caught pieces.

He lost them.

A few drifted in and sat there, clear, and the rest was fog.

"Hmmm, what about after we heal him?"

That one came through.

It was the quick voice, the higher one, sounding unbothered.

Malik held onto it, turning it slowly in his head, and the words did not quite fit together.

’Heal.’

He did not understand.

"That’s possible."

The slow voice responded.

"But it may take a couple of months for him to fully heal from these injuries."

There was a rustle of paper, or cloth, and a dry little cough.

"Perhaps if we use a high-grade potion, but..."

The sentence trailed off.

Malik felt the silence in it and knew, with the faint certainty that sits underneath thought, that someone was doing sums.

"I think that’s what we’ve got to do."

The quick voice again, brisk now.

"Waiting for him to heal naturally would only increase the risk. Anything could happen in a couple of months. We need to heal him now, and then we kill him."

The words dropped into the still water of his mind and sank.

’Kill.’

Strangely, it did not frighten him.

It was like hearing a stranger read a list of errands.

He tried to feel something about it, and found there was a wide gray space where the feeling should have been.

Malik had been burning for a very long time; a knife did not seem very important.

"Right..."

The slow voice sighed.

"It’s a pity, though. We lost his hand."

The words came to Malik through the fog, one by one.

"That alone would have brought us a lot."

There was a pause.

Something cold touched the stump of his right arm, and he flinched. A finger, he thought. It prodded the scorched end of it once and moved away, a butcher testing a joint.

"Mm. Clean cut, too. Whoever did it knew their work."

"Don’t look at me. It wasn’t us."

"I know it wasn’t us. I’m only saying."

They laughed like two men over a counter, sharing a joke.

Malik lay on the cold slab with his white hair spread around his head and listened to them. The cuffs kept humming against his wrists, and the blindfold seemingly tightened around his eyes.

It took him a long while to put it together.

Once more, he turned the pieces over, slowly, one at a time, trying to understand.

They were going to heal him using a potion, an expensive one, the high-grade kind that cost more than a farm.

Only when his every bone had mended, and his every wound had closed, were they going to kill him.

The thought settled at last.

Nobody was going to heal him out of kindness.

These two were not physicians or philanthropists, and the gold they were about to spend on that potion was no gift.

They were not trying to save a life.

They were tidying up the merchandise.

They wanted his body in good enough shape to sell.

Yes, these bastards were taking a page right out of his book.

They were selling him, an Angel.