Doctor Silas Blackwell's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

The guards came at midday. Six of them, spears out, boots loud on the clinic floor. Matthias went still behind the herb cart. Silas stepped in front of him, hands shaking at his sides. The captain read from a paper. A miracle worker had been reported. A wanted plague doctor had been seen here. Silas said nothing that would betray Matthias. He had built this place to heal, and now the law had come to tear it down. "Search it," the captain said. A guard knocked a shelf of jars to the floor. Glass broke. Bandages spilled. Matthias tensed as if to run. Silas caught his arm and held it. "Don't," Silas said quietly. "Run now and you prove them right." Matthias stopped. His breath was fast under the mask, but he stayed. Then two more guards stumbled through the door, and everything changed. One held his side; blood soaked his shirt. The other dragged a leg that bent the wrong way. They had been hurt on the road. They came to the clinic because it was closest. The captain turned. He saw his own men bleeding. He saw the broken jars his guards had made. "Can you help them?" he asked. Silas looked at his hands. They shook too hard to hold a knife. But he could still read a wound faster than any man alive. "Ashworth," he called. Cornelius Ashworth came from the back room. He was old, white-haired, and he did not flinch at the blood. He knelt by the bleeding guard and pressed a cloth to the wound. "Bone's clean through the leg," he said flatly, nodding at the other man. "That one first. He'll bleed out before the leg matters." Silas directed. Ashworth's hands did the work. Matthias forgot his fear and mixed a draught at the cart, pouring a measured dose between the wounded guard's lips. He tied the bleeding shut. He splinted the broken leg with a plank pulled from a bed frame. The three of them moved as one, the way they had learned to move in the long days of the patient line. Within the hour both guards breathed easy on two of the clinic beds. Dried lavender hung above their heads. The captain stood over them and watched the color come back to their faces. "These men would have died on the road," the captain said. He looked at Matthias for a long moment, at the mask he'd come to arrest. Then he looked away. "I saw no fugitive here. Only doctors." He gathered his men and left. Silas leaned on the doorframe, spent. They had not just survived. They had proven what the clinic was. "They came to close us," he said. "They walked out owing us their men." Ashworth wiped his hands. "Word of that will travel too," he said. "Same as the miracle did." Silas nodded slowly. The threat was gone. But the Council would hear that its own guards now owed the fugitive their lives.