"Banks, Iain M - Inversions 2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain M)

'Is this really necessary?' the Doctor asked, looking at the blindfold held in questioner's assistant Unoure's grubby hands. He wore a long butcher's apron of blood-stained hide over his filthy shirt and loose, greasy-looking trousers. The black blindfold had been produced from a long pocket in the leather apron.
Unoure grinned, displaying a miscellany of diseased, discoloured teeth and dark gaps where teeth ought to have been. The Doctor winced. Her own teeth are so even that the first time I saw them I naturally assumed they were a particularly fine false set.
'Rules,' Unoure said, looking at the Doctor's chest. She drew her long jacket closed across her shirt. 'You're a foreigner,' he told her.
The Doctor sighed, glancing at me.
'A foreigner,' I told Unoure forcibly, 'who holds the King's life in her hands almost every day.'
'Doesn't matter,' the fellow said, shrugging. He sniffed and went to wipe his nose with the blindfold, then looked at the expression on the Doctor's face and changed his mind, using his sleeve again instead. 'That's the orders. Got to hurry,' he said, glancing at the doors.
We were at the entrance to the palace's lower levels. The corridor behind us led off from the little-used passage-way beyond the west-wing kitchens and the wine cellars. It was quite dark. A narrow circular light-well overhead cast a dusty sheen of slaty light over us and the tall, rusted metal doors, while a couple of candles burned dimly further down the corridor.
'Very well,' the Doctor said. She leaned over a little and made a show of inspecting the blindfold and Unoure's hands. 'But I'm not wearing that, and you're not tying it.' She turned to me and pulled a fresh kerchief from a pocket in her coat. 'Here,' she said.
'But' Unoure said, then jumped as a bell clanged somewhere beyond the flaking brown doors. He turned away, stuffing the blindfold into his apron, cursing.
I tied the scented kerchief across the Doctor's eyes while Unoure unlocked the doors. I carried the Doctor's bag with one hand and with my other hand led her into the corridor beyond the doors and down the many twisting steps and further doors and passageways to the hidden chamber where Master Nolieti waited. Halfway there, the bell rang again from somewhere ahead of us, and I felt the Doctor jump, and her hand become damp. I confess my own nerves were not entirely settled.
We entered the hidden chamber from a low doorway we each had to stoop under (I placed my hand on the Doctor's head to lower her head. Her hair felt sleek and smooth). The place smelled of something sharp and noxious, and of burned flesh. My breathing seemed to be quite beyond my control, the odours forcing their way into my nostrils and down into my lungs.
The tall, wide space was lit by a motley collection of ancient oil lamps which threw a sickly blue-green glow over a variety of vats, tubs, tables and other instruments and containers some in human shape none of which I cared to inspect too closely, though all of them attracted my wide-open eyes like suns attract flowers. Additional light came from a tall brazier positioned underneath a hanging cylindrical chimney. The brazier stood by a chair made from hoops of iron which entirely enclosed a pale, thin and naked man, who appeared to be unconscious. The entire frame of this chair had been swivelled over on an outer cradle so that the man appeared caught in the act of performing a forward somersault, resting on his knees in mid-air, his back parallel with the grid of a broad light-well grille above.
The chief torturer Nolieti stood between this apparatus and a broad workbench covered with various metal bowls, jars and bottles and a collection of instruments that might have originated in the workplaces of a mason, a carpenter, a butcher and a surgeon. Nolieti was shaking his broad, scarred grey head. His rough and sinewy hands were on his hips and his glare was fastened on the withered form of the encaged man. Below the metal contraption enclosing the unfortunate fellow stood a broad square tray of stone with a drain hole at one corner. Dark fluid like blood had splattered there. Long white shapes in the darkness might have been teeth.
Nolieti turned round when he heard us approach. 'About fucking time,' he spat, fixing his stare on first me, then the Doctor and then Unoure (who, I noticed, as the Doctor stuffed her kerchief back into a pocket in her jacket, was making a show of folding the black blindfold he had been told to use on her).
'My fault,' the Doctor said in a matter-of-fact manner, stepping past Nolieti. She bent down at the man's rear. She grimaced, nose wrinkling, then came to the side of the apparatus and with one hand on the iron hoops of the frame-chair brought it squeaking and complaining round until the man was in a more conventional sitting position. The fellow looked in a terrible state. His face was grey, his skin was burned in places, and his mouth and jaw had collapsed. Little rivulets of blood had dried under each of his ears. The Doctor put her hand through the iron hoops and tried to open one of the man's eyes. He made a terrible, low groaning sound. There was a sort of sucking, tearing noise and the man gave a plaintive moan like a kind of distant scream before settling into a ragged, rhythmic, bubbling noise that might have been breathing.
The Doctor bent forward to peer into the man's face and I heard her give a small gasp.
Nolieti snorted. 'Looking for these?' he asked the Doctor, and flourished a small bowl at her.
The Doctor barely glanced at the bowl, but smiled thinly at the torturer. She rotated the iron chair to its previous position and went back to look at the caged man's rear. She pulled away some blood-soaked rags and gave another grimace. I thanked the gods that he was pointing away from me and prayed that whatever the Doctor might have to do would not require my assistance.
'What seems to be the problem?' the Doctor asked Nolieti, who seemed momentarily nonplussed.
'Well,' the chief torturer said after a pause. 'He won't stop bleeding out his arse, will he?'
The Doctor nodded. 'You must have let your pokers get too cold,' she said casually, squatting and opening her bag and laying it by the side of the stone drain-tray.
Nolieti went to the Doctor's side and bent down over her. 'How it happened isn't any of your fucking business, woman,' he said into her ear. 'Your business is to get this fucker well enough to be questioned so he can tell us what the King needs to know.'
'Does the King know?' the Doctor asked, looking up, an expression of innocent interest on her face. 'Did he order this? Does he even know of the existence of this unfortunate? Or was it guard commander Adlain who thought the Kingdom would fall unless this poor devil suffered?'
Nolieti stood up. 'None of that is your business,' he said sullenly. 'Just do your job and get out.' He bent down again and stuck his mouth by her ear. 'And never you mind the King or the guard commander. I'm king down here, and I say you'd best attend to your own business and leave me to mine.'
'But it is my business,' the Doctor said evenly, ignoring the threatening bulk of the man poised over her. 'If I know what was done to him, and how it was done, I might be better able to treat him.'
'Oh, I could show you, Doctor,' the chief torturer said, looking up at his assistant and winking. 'And we have special treats we save just for the ladies, don't we, Unoure?'
'Well, we haven't time to flirt,' the Doctor said with a steely smile. 'Just tell me what you did to this poor wretch.'
Nolieti's eyes narrowed. He stood up and withdrew a poker from the brazier in a cloud of sparks. Its yellow-glowing tip was broad, like the blade of a small flat spade. 'Latterly, we did him with this,' Nolieti said with a smile, his face lit by the soft yellow-orange glow.
The Doctor looked at the poker, then at the torturer. She squatted and touched something at the encaged man's rear.
'Was he bleeding badly?' she asked.
'Like a man pissing,' the chief torturer said, winking at his assistant again. Unoure quickly nodded and laughed.
'Better leave this in, then,' the Doctor muttered. She rose. 'I'm sure it's good you enjoy your job so, chief torturer,' she said. 'However, I think you've killed this one.'
'You're the doctor, you heal him!' Nolieti said, stepping back towards her, brandishing the orange-red poker. I do not think he intended to threaten the Doctor, but I saw her right hand begin to drop towards the boot where her old dagger was sheathed.
She looked up at the torturer, past the glowing metal rod. 'I'll give him something that might revive him, but he may well have given you all he ever will. Don't blame me if he dies.'
'Oh, but I will,' Nolieti said quietly, thrusting the poker back into the brazier. Cinders splashed to the flag stones. 'You make sure he lives, woman. You make sure he's fit to talk or the King'll hear you couldn't do your job.'
'The King will hear anyway, no doubt,' the Doctor said, smiling at me. I smiled nervously back. 'And guard commander Adlain, too,' she added, 'perhaps from me.' She swung the man in the cage-chair back upright and opened a vial in her bag, wiped a wooden spatula round the inside of the vial and then, opening the bloody mess that was the man's mouth, applied some of the ointment to his gums. He moaned again.
The Doctor stood watching him for a moment, then stepped to the brazier and put the spatula into it. The wood flamed and spluttered. She looked at her hands, then at Nolieti. 'Do you have any water down here? I mean clean water.'
The chief torturer nodded at Unoure, who disappeared into the shadows for a while before bringing a bowl which the Doctor washed her hands in. She was wiping them clean on the kerchief which had been her blindfold when the man in the chair cage gave a terrible screech of agony, shook violently for a few moments, then stiffened suddenly and finally went limp. The Doctor stepped towards him and went to put her hand to his neck but she was knocked aside by Nolieti, who gave an angry, anguished shout of his own and reached through the iron hoops to place his finger on the pulse-point on the neck which the Doctor has taught me is the best place to test the beat of a man's vitality.
The chief torturer stood there, quivering, while his assistant gazed on with an expression of apprehension and terror. The Doctor's look was one of grimly contemptuous amusement. Then Nolieti spun round and stabbed a finger at her. 'You!' he hissed at her. 'You killed him. You didn't want him to live!'
The Doctor looked unconcerned, and continued drying her hands (though it seemed to me that they were both already dry, and shaking). 'I am sworn to save life, chief torturer, not to take it,' she said reasonably. 'I leave that to others.'
'What was in that stuff?' the chief torturer said, quickly squatting to wrench open the Doctor's bag. He pulled out the open vial she had taken the ointment from and brandished it in her face. 'This. What is it?'
'A stimulant,' she said, and dipped a finger into the vial, displaying a small fold of the soft brown gel on her finger tip so that it glinted in the light of the brazier. 'Would you like to try it?' She moved the finger towards Nolieti's mouth.
The chief torturer grabbed her hand in one of his and forced the finger back, towards her own lips. 'No. You do it. Do what you did to him.'
The Doctor shook her hand free of Nolieti's and calmly put her finger to her mouth, spreading the brown paste along her top gum. 'The taste is bitter-sweet,' she said in the same tone she uses when she is teaching me. 'The effects last between two and three bells and usually have no side effects, though in a body seriously weakened and in shock, fits are likely and death is a remote possibility.' She licked her finger. 'Children in particular suffer severe side effects with almost no restorative function and it is never recommended for them. The gel is made from the berries of a biennial plant which grows on isolated peninsulae on islands in the very north of Drezen. It is quite precious, and more usually applied in a solution, in which form, too, it is most stable and long-lasting. I have used it to treat the King on occasion and he regards it as one of my more efficacious prescriptions. There is not much left now and I would have preferred not to waste it on either those who are going to die anyway, or on myself, but you did insist. I am sure the King will not mind.' (I have to report, Master, that as far as I am aware, the Doctor has never used this particular gel of which she has several jars on the King, and I am not sure she had ever used it to treat any patient.) The Doctor closed her mouth and I could see her wipe her tongue round her top gum. Then she smiled. 'Are you sure you won't try some?'
Nolieti said nothing for a moment, his broad, dark face moving as though he was chewing on his tongue.
'Get this Drezen witch out of here,' he said eventually to Unoure, and then turned away to stamp on the brazier's foot-bellows. The brazier hissed and glowed yellow, showering sparks up into its sooty chimney. Nolieti glanced at the dead man in the cage-chair. 'Then take this bastard to the acid bath,' he barked.
We were at the door when the chief torturer, still working the foot-bellows with a regular, thrusting stroke, called out, 'Doctor?'
She turned to look at hire as Unoure opened the door and fished the black blindfold from his apron. 'Yes, chief torturer?' she said.
He looked round at us, smiling as he continued to fire the brazier. 'You'll be here again, Drezen woman,' he said softly to her. His eyes glittered in the yellow brazier light. 'And next time you won't be able to walk out.'
The Doctor held his gaze for a good while, until she looked down and shrugged. 'Or you will appear in my surgery,' she told him, looking up. 'And may be assured of my best attention.'