Chapter 11. "The primary suture is not sewn" (Patreon)

Chapter 11. "The primary suture is not sewn"

* * *

Santelli was furious, but he did it calmly, in a controlled way, which made it doubly frightening. Even the plaits on his temples seemed to have risen high, his beard billowing like a woolly flame around his lower jaw. His eyes were bloodshot, and his hand was literally gripping the axe's headband at his waist. But his voice remained steady, exaggeratedly calm.

"Stupid prick..." the foreman said quietly, emphasizing the end of each word. "Stupid narcissistic prick..."

His fingers clenched so tightly on the axe that it looked as if the metal were about to shake and the axe would crack. But the flesh was weaker, and the foreman shook his whitened fingers in the air.

If the performance of rage had somehow impressed Matrice, you couldn't tell that from the apothecary's face. The stern woman did not flinch a muscle as she gloomily watched the tavern attendants wiping blood from the walls. There was a lot of blood, but it didn't interfere with the other customers.

The brether arrived with the new caravan of settlers before dark. Everything was as it should be - shoulder-length hair, mustache and beard, a long two-handed sword, and an arrogance that made the grass on the side of the road wither. The only thing unusual about him was an old leather pouch with a bronze badge stamped with the monogram of Paraclete. Battalion healers from the east used to keep all their gear in it.

The brether misbehaved from the get-go. Instead of going to the address and reporting (and receiving the agreed second quarter of the stipulated fee), he went to the tavern, where the sleepy servants were preparing for another day's work. This was not, after all, the Venerable Gee's tavern, where wine flowed all day long, from dusk to dawn and vice versa. There, in the tavern, the newcomer had behaved wrong, too. He bullied the early guests who wanted to soak their throats with a light beer early in the morning or warmed wine to make them stand warmer at the counter.

The serious people who happened to be in the place looked on with mild bewilderment but without much aggression, so the traveling dude had a good chance of making a fool of himself without repercussions. Well, except to earn himself a reputation as a bad-tempered, squabbling, and uncommunicative man, but who does anyone think that way? But the brether had the misfortune to mess with a gang of three petty criminals, the usual small-time pipsqueak who hang around the newcomers, pushing bad merchandise, trying to outbid the Profit, and, if possible, making a living from petty robbery. And the brether mess hard, to the point of pulling knives. That's where it starts...

What the brether was trying to achieve was unknown, for it was useless to ask him. Perhaps (and even more likely) he decided to put himself properly. Or maybe something else... One way or another, in response to being shown the knives, he did not cool down like a decent person and did not draw any conclusions about his behavior. Brether did not try to somehow resolve the conflict but pulled out his saber.

The first felon was cut down beautifully. One might even say, artistically. With a red fountain to the ceiling, not a single drop on the blade, and everything else, like in ballads. It was clear at once he had his saber on his belt by right, and he must have a real swordsman fraternity diploma stashed somewhere in his jacket. While the serious men were feverishly trying to figure out what to do with all this, the brether set out to put the other foe down and knocked the knife out of his hand, shortening several fingers in the process. The outlaw, sensing that the end was coming, plucked from his belt and threw at the brether only thing was under his whole, unchopped hand. That is a pouch of ground Mandrake. The same one that is then distilled into "liquid amber".

The brether was cool and dashing; he slashed the pouch gracefully in midair and stepped toward his opponent, swinging his blade for the decisive blow. He stepped straight into a golden cloud of Mandrake dust and collapsed in utter unconsciousness from his first breath. Because no man has ever been born who can withstand the evil plant in its pristine form without softening through elixirs.

The visiting duelist was hastily stabbed, and that was the end of the adventure, originally diversifying the life of the bored Gate. The weapons and other equipment, for lack of brothers and relatives, went to the tavern. The old gravedigger cleaned up the body according to his right, sanctified by years of tradition. The slain outlaw was gone, too, most likely dragged away by his accomplices to burn and scatter the ashes.

And that would have been all right. But the brether was ordered from the Kingdoms by Santeli, under great secrecy, and for very good payment, and not in "good," but "soldier's," it is one-third heavier than an ordinary gold coin. And who cares about the coins, Pantocrator gives, Pantocrator takes away, and then gives again. It is a mundane matter. Especially since the dead man received only a third of the total amount. But the brether and his bag were already tied up in a serious and imminent enterprise, and finding a full-fledged replacement for him in the remaining days seemed an absolutely impossible task.

So the foreman was in a state of quiet rage, and the Mistress of the Apothecary was in intense contemplation.

"Should we cancel?" Matrice finally offered.

"No way!" snapped Santelli sulkily, but he caught her disgruntled look and remembered he wasn't talking to an errand girl. "No, we can't," he said a little more calmly, without grasping the axe. "It's all been arranged..."

"But we don't have a healer and a fighter anymore," Matrice reminded her. "There's nowhere to get one."

"There are no stalemates, only limits of risk," the brigadier said unexpectedly to himself. Sometimes he uttered sudden aphorisms, vague but beautiful.

Matrice glanced with seeming distraction at the servants, who were smearing red puddles on the floor. The morning's revelers, not embarrassed by the recent bloodshed, were already clattering mugs of scraped pumpkins, the cheapest and most discarded utensils, on the tables. The more respectable crowd was sipping their pewter mugs in a dignified and imposing manner. Among them was Kai, who had missed all the excitement and was not imposing his society on the brigadier. The swordsman didn't drink as much as he waited for the commander to finish talking.

"No healer, no fencer," Matrice repeated. "Would you risk it without them?"

"Our secret knight will do for a fencer," Santeli said quietly, turning back to the wall as if casually covering his mouth with his hand.

"Discussed," Matrice grimaced as she covered her lips, her smooth face twitching with a grimace and discontented wrinkles like an old mural crumbling with dampness. " It won't work. Kai is good, but he knows knightly, martial combat, and that's not the case here. It takes a brether, a real, urban brether."

"For lack of..." The brigadier did not finish his famous and scabrous joke parodying the obscene customs of the South.

"No, that won't be okay," Matrice pursed her lips.

"And we have a healer, already," said Santelli, pretending not to hear his companion's remarks.

"Fuck you," Matrice twisted her fist and unashamedly showed it to her business partner. "The redheaded wench is going to come in handy."

"Didn't you complain the other day that she was useless?" reminded the foreman sneeringly. "And that you overpaid for the redhead?"

"I am," the pharmacist didn't wiggle. "So what? No matter how much milk she gives, it's all mine."

"Give it to me to raid," the foreman suggested bluntly.

"I won't," Matrice retorted. "The girl's not hopeless or armless. She's useful. What she's got is what she's got. But she's no field girl, you know. It still makes her face prickle when she puts the wool on her naked body. When pigs are slaughtered, she almost vomits. And when she found out why we don't have a cemetery and who lives on the Farm, she was shaking her hands all day and broke the measuring cup. She still cries at night, a day or two later, when she thinks I can't hear. She calls for her mother in her sleep, all in a strange language."

"I'll attach Shena to her," Santeli promised very seriously. "To stand over her day and night, to keep her safe."

"I won't," Matrisa repeated. "You'll kill the girl, and it won't do me any good or profit."

"Damn, you..." Santelli literally choked the curse that was bursting from his throat. "As if I'm the only one interested in this! The money is yours!"

"Yeah," Matrice agreed, looking at the scattering of red droplets that had managed to dry on the ceiling, among the sooty rafters. "And four coins have already gone by the..."

She wasn't finished. Santelli gritted his teeth. There was nothing to say.

"Find a fencer," Matrice advised me, suddenly very seriously. "A good one, one that will definitely be useful to our cause. Then I'll think about Hel. But I'll only think about it," she clarified at once.

The foreman judiciously assessed his ability to find a real brether with a certificate within two or three days. Quietly cursed and called Kai. More precisely, he waved his hand, showing that now he was free to talk. The swordsman greeted Matrice with a nod, leaned close to the brigadier's ear, and whispered briefly. With each word, Santelli squinted more and more, until his already narrow eyes drowned in a network of wrinkles.

"So you'll think about Hel if I find a fencer?" repeated the brigadier, looking sharply into the apothecary's eyes. And he said as if he had chopped with an axe. "Start thinking."

He came out of the joint sharply, shoving some inopportune man out of the way. He was about to shout indignation at the brigadier, but Kai, following him, glanced briefly at the suburban - judging by his clothes - man, and all the indignation was stuck in his throat.

* * *

Saphir had already opened the back door of the Apothecary, which led to the annex that served as the operating room. Well, that is, as... it would be more correct to say that it was a versatile room for droch obair, "dirty work". It was used to pile up flora for bulkheading and drying and to store excess oil shale. On occasion, Matrice would negotiate here, unbidden by outsiders' ears. Sometimes pork was cut and salted. And not only pork, for from the point of view of the natives, man, and pig are the same meat, so amputations were carried out on the same deck.

Six months ago, at Elena's insistence, a large table was set up in the center of the big barn instead of the deck, which she personally scraped and scalded with boiling water before any operation. Matrice had been skeptical, but the patients did heal more easily and quickly. Not by much, however, enough. So that the endeavor of "Master Hel" was tacitly accepted.

On the table lay the "tarred man," held by a couple of his friends; the fourth, the foreman, stood at a distance, grimly rolling a coin on his knuckles, a royal coin, green and incredibly false even in appearance.

The narrow and long windows, obscured by thin mica plates under the single-pitch roof, provided little light, so Saphir lit three additional magical lamps, "eternal lamps." Lena handed him the shopping basket and greeted the foreman sparingly, trying not to waver in her voice or face. She had not yet had the opportunity to do the treatment alone, and a man named Jan was strictly unpleasant. But the unwritten tradition required that treatment be given as soon as a patient was admitted. It was getting to the point where she would have to work alone for the first time.

For a while, Elena thought that all gangs of fortune-seekers (called "brigades" here) were the same - gatherings of bastards and scoundrels willing to risk their lives and souls (whether they existed or not) in search of Profit. Pretty quickly it became clear that this was not the case. The brigades were quite clearly divided by specialization, coverage territories, numbers, marketing, and so on. The Santelli Brigade, for example, was a solid and respected "middle class" that worked on gold and not-too-strong artifacts in the dungeons and was tied to marketing in the Gates.

But there was a separate category of brigades, few in number and questionable even in terms of the very flexible morality of the Wastelanders. Their name was "shepskate," which literally translated as "greedy," but it had a second meaning: greed that drove them to cannibalism. The "shepskates" did not seek the Profit themselves. They preyed on those who had already harvested it and carried it to one of the five main cities of the Wastelands for sale. And since an attempt on an ordinary "tar man" could be sent to the Farm, the "greedheads" were catching newcomers who had no one to intercede.

New people arrived on the Wastelands all the time, fugitives from the Kingdoms, ready to stake their lives in pursuit of fortune or escape from poverty. Some were settling on the land, which was plentiful and hard to work. Some bought equipment with their last coin and went into the dungeons. Most of them died, and no one cared whether it was the claws and teeth or the blade that cut the life of another poor soul. It was his incessant influx of fortune-seekers that a year ago saved the life of Elena, who, with the help of Matrice and Santelle, was simply lost in the motley crowd of the Gate. It was also the one who sustained the existence of the "greedy".

Jan, nicknamed "Meat", was the most famous, the most successful shepskate foreman. And the most cautious, because he had been practicing his craft for years, keeping his head intact. And he got his nickname for a perfectly performed tattoo all over his body, from his heels to his chin. The two-painted drawing very accurately reproduced the body with the skin removed, down to the tiniest muscle. It was said to be the hallmark of thieves' communities from the southeast.

"What's the matter with him?" Lena asked, tugging the bonnet tighter and tucking up the sleeves. The experienced Saphir had already brought a leather rolling pin with tools and was rattling the cauldron as he prepared hot water. Jan moved his jaw as if chewing the words before releasing them. His tightly pressed lips made him look like he was about to fold them into a puff and whistle, and his face took on the chronically disgruntled expression of a money changer. The "merchant" face did not match the tattoo that ran up his neck from under his collar or the shaved back of his head, the hairstyle of a warrior who lived by the blade.

"He cut himself," the foreman said sparingly while Lena put on a leather apron and wiped her hands with a tincture of "hogweed". This replaced spirit, which was called here "dead water", and cost a lot of money. The girl did not elaborate. It was very fraught. Attempts to make a precise diagnosis were perceived as dangerous sneaking.

Lena tied a mask of well-washed rags on the blindfolds and bit her lip as she cut the first knot in the bandage. As usual, she longed bitterly for gloves. Regular latex gloves, three rubles a pair which had no price here since there was nothing to make them out of except pig and lamb guts.

"Saphir, leeches," Elena ordered briefly before she had even finished unwinding the bandage on the sufferer's leg. The very faint pulse below the wound and the yellow pus drips already spoke for themselves. "Primary suture," damn.

In junior high, third or fourth grade, Lena read Benzoni's old book series Catherine for a while (until her mother put a stop to this activity, which she felt could be harmful to an immature child's psyche). The books were romantic and funny, and in one part, a character was severely wounded. The old Muslim physician had a long time to heal the wound while angrily condemning the Christian healers who rushed to stitch everything up.

When the girl shared the story with Grandpa, he suddenly became interested and said that, say, it is possible to find a grain of truth in a pulp book. And then, he gave a short but very emotional lecture on the "primary suture", i.e. the one that is applied immediately after the primary surgical treatment of the wound. And to this day, it is a big problem because being executed incompetently, with bad treatment, gives an ideal place to all kinds of evil germs, so that in the thirty-ninth year, it was even forbidden to sew in medical-sanitary battalions, so great was the percentage of complications.

And now Lena saw with her own eyes the consequences of hasty darning of an untreated cut - inflammation, infection, suppuration. The wounded man fell into a half-delirious state with convulsive muscle contractions, and while his partners held him tightly, the girl began to carefully open the stitch and Saphir brought leeches in a jug of clean well water, heated in the sun.

The Sleeping Leech was definitely Pantocrator's gift to the world. In nature, they grew continuously and could reach a meter or more in length. They injected a toxin into the bite area that combined the effects of an anesthetic and a hallucinogen. Since they usually attacked in packs, the victim received so much poison at once that he never woke up again, turning into a bloodless mummy, unfit even for the Farm. But if you take the risk and collect small things no longer than the palm of your hand, leeches served as an excellent painkiller. And a half-meter specimen allowed to do quite complicated operations, such as excising tumors and removing gallstones from the gallbladder. Several brigades earned very well on the supply of leeches from swamps, though they paid for it with "dry joints", i.e. chronic rheumatism.

Leeches could live long, but only within the Wasteland. So sometimes even wealthy aristocrats, suffering from stones and overgrown "wild meat," undertook journeys with their own medicine men to experience the miraculous properties of the marsh creepers (here, no distinction was made between amphibians, reptiles, and ringed ones). Or, at the very least, to "drain the bad blood," which had a tangible tonic effect.

Stitch by stitch, Lena bisected the thread of the suture with small scissors and pulled the scraps from the inflamed tissue with bronze tweezers. Her hands almost didn't tremble, even when her finger accidentally touched the watery skin. She wore a mask mainly so that no one could see the "master" breathing with her mouth, making grimaces. Lena never got used to the smell of the affected tissues. Fortunately, however, she did not feel the characteristic heavy stench of gangrene. This gave her hope that the operation would be easy.

Meanwhile, Saphir sucked two gray-green leeches behind the patient's ears and an equal number on his neck to the carotid arteries. The poor man was calming down before her eyes, falling into unconsciousness. Finally, Lena pulled out the last of the thread and pulled apart the edges of the swollen wound.

Yes... "сut," indeed. The wound bore all the hallmarks of a chop, but not with an axe, but rather with a long blade. It had been struck with force and pulling, barely reaching the bone and miraculously not hitting an artery. Whoever Jan's bandits robbed had sold his life dearly. Or maybe a fight among their own, easily...

Elena glanced at the patient's face, making sure the leeches had worked. She took out a bone-handled knife and small pincers with a predatory curved beak. She tried it on, carefully hooked the first scrap of grayish flesh, and lowered the blade of the knife.

Little by little, little by little. Piece by piece. Executive Saphir poured a thin stream of saline solution into the wound, washing away clots of pus and coagulated blood. The wound was bleeding again, but it was bearable for now.

"Take the belt," Elena ordered one of the tarred ones, cursing herself for forgetfulness. The hand trembled slightly, and the blade sliced through the capillary, adding the blood. "Wrap his leg above the knee. If the vein fails and bursts open, pull it over at once."

They knew how to make tourniquets, and they even knew not to hold them for a long time. Or, on the contrary, they could and should. In very remote places, they used to execute thieves and rapists by tying the instrument of crime tightly together, holding it for a few hours, and then letting it go in peace to a painful death from necrosis.

As usual, she began to feel nauseous. Lena hated surgery, or rather she hated the fear that overwhelmed her every time she had to cut into a living body. Fear of making a mistake because all teaching here consisted of "do as I do," and the nearest anatomy textbook was, by a very rough estimate, several hundred kilometers southeast. Fear of killing the patient. Fear of paying for it to Matrice.

At such moments, detachment from the process and primitive auto-training helped. It's not her doing everything. It's the manipulator of the medical robot. She's just observing. Clearly dead to cut off. Alive flesh to leave. The questionable one is gently poked with the tip of the knife. The healthy muscle will contract and let a drop of blood out.

"Sew red with red, yellow with yellow, white with white. It's sure to be good that way." Where did that come from, and why did it come to mind now? No, she can't remember[1]. To hell with it. Sweat came out in copious drops on her forehead, but the tight cap held back the salty sweat, keeping it out of her eyes.

So... it seems that's it. And some more saline. To be exact, a lot of it, it's not to be spared here. To think the salt, the usual penny salt, which her family used to cook chicken on a griddle, was now an expensive resource, which was measured with spoons and bought for a lot of money. Because it came from coastal saltworks. Without salt, it was impossible to preserve food. So Saphir essentially washed the wound with liquid silver. Though, it was still not the Apothecary who had to pay in the end, but the customer, i.e. Jan.

The full ritual demanded a final sniff of the wound, and experienced medics could make very accurate diagnoses that way, but it was beyond Lenya's strength. The girl feared she would vomit right into the open flesh, trembling with bluish veins. And it was not with her sense of smell to try to sniff out the smell of rot in the heavy, stuffy atmosphere of the "operating room".

Saphir took away the pumped leeches by splashing them with saline. He put them back into the bottle to release them into a special barrel with a weekly water change. In a couple of weeks, the creepers would be ready for use again. It remains to apply a compress of plantain. Cut a fleshy palm-wide leaf lengthwise, cut one part, and squeeze firmly, squeezing the juice directly into the wound. The other is gently bandaged over it with a clean rag.

That's it. The rest is in the hands of the Paraclete.

"Don't stitch the wound right away," the girl said forcefully, pulling the mask down so it hung around her neck. Her arms were tired. Her lower back was tired. Her legs in wooden boots cramped with little cramps.

"Other times, just bandage it up and take it into town."

"Yeah," Jan agreed vaguely. He looked at his man, who was still in a distant land of leech dreams. He asked. "How do you pay? How much for everything? We'll do the count right now."

He asked vigorously, assertively, demandingly. He even stepped close, trying to hover over Elena (which, with her height above the average female of the Wastelands, didn't work out so well). A familiar ploy, unsophisticated and sneaky. A member of the corporation no longer belongs to himself. They are part of the community. Accordingly, when they make a promise of a job, they answer on behalf of the entire corporation, which replaces the birth family of the disciple and apprentice. And who is she to discuss money matters bypassing the master? And how can she claim a wage worthy of a master when she is an apprentice?

Elena shook her head, wiping her hands with the towel. Her fingers felt sticky like they were soaked in warm lard. It was as if someone else's blood had seeped down to her bones and joints. And Jan kept waving his hands and demanding, offering, insisting. Saphir grimaced, but kept silent, for he did not do the work himself, only helped, and therefore had no rights, so his interference in the bargaining would be a display of blatant disrespect.

"Matrice. You have an agreement with her," the surgeon slowly and carefully chose her words willy-nilly. "You discuss everything with her."

"Who took the knife in the hand?" pressed Jan systematically. "Who did the job? Matrice? I didn't see her here! You were working. You came and worked yourself. Everybody saw it. Why should I decide our business with Matrice!"

Lena looked silently at the foreman. The day had just begun, and she hadn't slept through the nightmare, was dead tired from the operation, and then the insults of "greedy" pressed her brain. She wanted to go along with it just to finally get it all over with. Some stupid, incomprehensible state of sleep in the waking state drowned her thoughts, dissolving the will like a sugar cube with warm water. An inaudible bell rang in her head. That's how scams are made. The victim begins to be psychologically pressured and driven into utter hopelessness. So that the consciousness enters the "tunnel" when the only wish remains that all of this, finally, is over. And it seems the only way out is to agree with the aggressor.

Rage and indignation splashed over her soul like steep boiling water. And immediately burned into hatred, as if in a magical retort of an alchemist. She was a man of the twenty-first century who had adapted to life in the medieval, who had learned to understand herbs, to make elixirs and poultices, to cut living people without vomiting into open wounds, at last! She has been taken as her apprentice by the dreaded Matrix, who has her share in all the affairs of the Gate, even the Farm. She is greeted first by Santelli, whom everyone knows, and everyone respects! And who's in front of her? A damn yakuza with tattoos! A bastard who's too cowardly to go down into the dungeons for Profit, so he robs the bolder and more determined.

Keeping the blinding fire of hatred inside her like a flaming welding sting in a stream of oxygen, Lena lifted her head and looked directly into Jan's eyes. She clapped her hands loudly to break the trance they were trying to drive her into. That's what her grandfather had taught her. An unexpected action, a loud sound, anything to break the flow of well-considered aggression.

"Matrice," she pronounced clearly, separating the words. "All. Business. With Matrice."

Jan crushed her with a vicious stare for a few moments, but the girl easily withstood the rest of the hateful outburst. It wouldn't have worked with Santelli, but it did with the "greedy" one.

"Whatever you say," Jan rolled back quickly and easily as if nothing had happened. "I'll come by in the evening."

"I'll tell her as soon as I see her," Elena replied ceremoniously, realizing that her every word was still being watched closely. "It has been a pleasure doing business with you, herra - mister."

The operation had exhausted her, mostly mentally. And the psychological battle with Jan devastated her to the core, so much so that all she wanted to do was lie down on the nearest bench and fall asleep. At home, Lena would have done just that, calling in sick. And let the world wait! As long as there was a warm bed and a cup of Greenfield Summer Bouquet with cane sugar and a drop of Jagermeister or Angostura Aged 5 Years.

Only "here" is not "there," and depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental problems were replaced by one succinct word: "laziness". If you are not lying around with a fever, and your arms and legs are in place, you are healthy. And if you are healthy and not working, then you are lazy. And if you're lazy... Lena was already well aware of the methods used here to fight laziness and did not want to try them again. So she took off her apron, washed her hands again, rinsed her face with ice-cold water from the well, and went to open, at last, the drugstore. It was a long, very long day...

The apothecary really looked like a real apothecary from the nineteenth century. The black oak counter, the old double-winged cabinets, the drawers with vents for storing herbs. A reel of lever scales hung directly from the ceiling on a thin chain, and a bucket of measuring grains dangled from the chain and replaced the very small weights. On a separate table was a collection of jar-like pots of green and blue glass, handleless, with long curved spouts. In them were mixed elixirs for each particular occasion. Mouse grumbled but promptly removed the used jugs for rinsing. On the wall hung several worksheets, where Lena quickly scribbled down proportions and prices, multiplying in columns, another skill Matrice appreciated.

It's been a busy day. Spring is a time when winter supplies are exhausted, and summer greens have not yet filled the counters. Merchants sell off stale goods at high prices, and now and then, someone gets poisoned. Stomach pills, vomiting pills, and laxatives were selling well. Also very well sold as an ointment for bruises, made of vegetable oil, wine, and grinded worms,[2] a vile concoction with a corresponding odor that soaked into one's dress.

Pennies and coins fell with a muffled clang into the slotted drawer that replaced the cash register. It was not customary to give change. With few exceptions, the buyer knew exactly how much money was due, and if the coin was too big, there was always a money changer in the market. However, the cashier's task was not made easier by this because even if gold was not paid, there were five varieties of silver coins alone, not counting halves and quarters. Moreover, even within one class, the money differed in origin, wear, and year of minting, accordingly in weight and content of the ligature relative to the precious metal. It was also possible to miss a counterfeit.

The day seemed endless, and Matrice did not show up. Lena worked like a vending machine, measuring drugs and remembering that instead of the measure of manufacture, it was the measure of intake. That is, the patient, in most cases, would not take the drug according to the regime but guided by his well-being.

In the afternoon, Safir offered her a wooden bowl of porridge. The girl refused. Her stomach felt as if it had curdled into a knot after the operation, refusing to even think about food. The old servant shrugged his shoulders and, instead of the porridge, brought a large pot of tea, or rather an herbal brew, which really tasted like tea with currants and thyme. Saphir generously flavored the infusion with "watermelon" syrup, the local equivalent of sugar, which was extracted from the watermelon-like fruit that grew deep underground in the former winegrowers' tunnels. It was usually consumed on holidays - because of the price. Apparently, the old man thought the apprentice had earned it with her morning adventures.

Sugar supported the strength of the apothecary just enough to last until the end of the day, that is, until sundown. The thought that tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and all the foreseeable future would be the same made her want to hang herself. Lena counted in her mind her savings, hidden under the floorboard in the corner of the room, and estimated how much the escape could cost - a change of clothes, shoes, and some supplies for the road. It made her even sadder. Hunger suddenly gnawed at her stomach, reminding her that the apprentice had eaten nothing since last night.

Behind the mica windows passed a troop of guards, that is, thugs, who were paid to keep order by the best people in the city. The torch-bearer, who was to light a couple of dozen lanterns in the two main streets, strode through. The old man wheeled the cart, again bemoaning the immoral city, which had forgotten its traditions and was steeped in disgusting decency without fights and dead men. The late buyer stood on the lop-sided porch of two steps, crumpled, hoping that he will open, but Lena vindictively pretended that no one is home. As the tardy man stalked off into the darkness, Elena sank effortlessly onto a stool, feeling a sharp pain in her legs, cursing herself for refusing the wraps and wishing only that Mr. Cat would come as soon as possible. Without him, thoughts of the noose were becoming too intrusive. But the meowr was missing somewhere. So was Matrice, who, for the first time in six months, had not come to the sunset to "take the cash register".

Lena tore off the stale bonnet, stomped on her foot, and in a sudden fit of morbid enthusiasm, thought that today she deserved at least one little bit of joy. The girl decided to send a stern warning to her ass to never, under any circumstances, go out the door after dark. But first, the cash box had to be put away in a special trunk, shackled with iron, nailed firmly to the floor, and seemingly even slightly enchanted.

* * *