Inversions

I was absent for all that passed over the next half bell. What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others. Even so, without having been there, I believe there was some quick thinking done in that chamber, principally by yourself, though Duke Quettil must, at the least, have calmed down sufficiently to consider things in a more rational ma

The brief of it was that Duke Ulresile was to be blamed. The writing on the note was his. The palace guards swore that Ulresile had commanded them on your authority. Later that night one of Ulresile's men was brought before the King, sobbing, to confess that he had stolen the scalpel from the Doctor's apartments earlier that day and that he had killed Duke Ormin, then run away and out of a back door of the Suitor's Wing shortly before the Doctor entered by the front door. I was able to play my part, averring that the fellow could well have been the man who had rushed towards me in the dim corridor in the Suitor's Wing.

The fellow lied about the scalpel, of course. Only one of the instruments had ever gone missing and that was the one I had stolen two seasons earlier, the day we had visited the Poor Hospital. Of course, I delivered it into your hands, master, though not in the literal sense in which it was later delivered into the body of Duke Ormin.

Duke Ulresile, in the meantime, had been prevailed upon to remove himself from the palace. I think a more mature mind might have thought this through and realised that to fly so was to appear to confirm any accusations that might be levelled at him, but perhaps he did not think to compare his predicament or possible actions with one so base as poor, dead Unoure. In any event, he was fu

The King made it very clear that he would take any further attempt to traduce the Doctor's good name very ill indeed. You promised that everything would be done to clear up the remaining points of confusion in the matter.

Two of the King's own guards were stationed outside our apartments that night. I slept soundly in my cell until woken by a nightmare. I think the Doctor slept well. In the morning she looked well enough. She completed shaving her head, making a neater job of it than Master Ralinge.

I assisted her in this, in her bedroom while she sat on a chair with a towel round her shoulders and a basin on her knees in which warm suds and a sponge floated. We were due to attend another meeting in the King's chamber that morning, the better to give our side of the events of the previous night.

"What did happen, mistress?" I asked her.

"Where and when, Oelph?" she asked, moistening her scalp with the sponge and then scraping at it with a scalpel — of all things — before passing it to me to complete the job.

"In the questioning chamber, mistress. What happened to Ralinge and the other two?"

"They fought over who would have me first, Oelph. Don't you remember?"

"I do not, mistress," I whispered, with a look round at the door through to her workshop. It was locked, like the one beyond and the one beyond that, but still I felt frightened, as well as a sort of anguished guilt. "I saw Master Ralinge about to…"

"About to rape me, Oelph. Please, Oelph. Steady with that scalpel," she said, and put her hand on my wrist. She lifted my hand away a little from her naked scalp and looked round with a smile. "It would be too ironic to survive a false charge of murder and be delivered from the very brink of torture only to suffer injury by your hand."

"But mistress!" I said, and I am not ashamed to say that I wailed, for I was still convinced that we could not be surrounded by such fatally cataclysmic events and such powerfully antagonistic personages without attracting extreme harm. "There was no time for a dispute! He was about to take you! Providence, I saw him. I closed my eyes a heartbeat before… there was no time!"

"Dear Oelph," the Doctor said, keeping her hand on my wrist. "You must have forgotten. You were unconscious for some time. Your head rolled to one side, your body went limp. You fairly drooled, I'm afraid. The three men had a fine old argument while you were out of your senses, and then just as the pair who had killed Ralinge slashed at each other, you woke up again. Don't you remember?"

I looked into her eyes. Her expression was one I found impossible to read. I was reminded suddenly of the mirror mask she had worn at the ball in Yvenir palace. "Is that what I ought to remember, mistress?"

"Yes, Oelph, it is."

I looked down at the scalpel and the gleaming mirror-surface of its blade.

"But how did you come to be released from your bonds, mistress?"

"Why, in his haste, Master Ralinge simply did not secure one of them properly," the Doctor said, releasing her grip of my wrist and lowering her head again. "A woeful lapse of professional standards, but perhaps in a way a flattering one."

I sighed. I picked up the soapy sponge and squeezed some more of the suds on to the back of her head. "I see, mistress," I said unhappily, and scraped away the very last of the hair on her head.

I decided, as I did this, that perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me after all, because looking down at the Doctor's legs, I could see her old dagger sticking out from the top of her boot as usual, and there, quite plainly, was the little pale stone on the top rim of the pommel I had been so convinced had been absent yesterday, in the torture chamber.

I think I knew already then there was no going back to the way things had been before. Even so, it was a shock when the Doctor paid a visit to the King by herself two days later and came back to tell me that she had asked to be released from the post of his personal physician. I stood and stared at her, still standing in the midst of unpacked crates and boxes of supplies and ingredients which she had continued to collect from the apothecaries and chemicalists of the city.

"Released, mistress?" I asked, stupidly.

She nodded. I thought her eyes looked as if she had been crying. "Yes, Oelph. I think it is for the best. I have been too long away from Drezen. And the King seems generally well."

"But he was at death's door not two nights ago!" I shouted, unwilling to believe what I was hearing and what it meant.

She gave me one of her small smiles. "I think that will not occur again."

"But you said it was caused by some — what did you call it? — some allotropic galvanic of salt! Dammit all, woman, that could-!"

"Oelph!"

I think it was the only time either of us spoke to each other in quite such tones. I shrank from my fury like a punctured bladder. I looked down at the floor. "Sorry, mistress."

"I am quite sure," she told me firmly, "that will not occur again.

"Yes, mistress," I mumbled.

"You might as well pack this lot back up again."

A bell later I was in the depths of my misery, repacking boxes, crates and sacks on the Doctor's orders, when you came to call, master.

"I would speak to you in private, madam," you said to the Doctor.

She looked at me. I stood there, hot and sweating, dotted with little lengths of straw from the packing cases.

She said, "I think Oelph can stay, don't you, Guard Commander?"

You looked at her for a few moments, I recall, then your stern expression melted like snow. "Yes," you said, and sat down with a sigh in a chair which temporarily had no cases or their contents balanced upon it. "Yes, I dare say he can." You smiled at the Doctor. She was just in the act of tying a towel round her head, having finished one of her baths. She always tied a towel round her hair after her bath, and I remember thinking, stupidly, Why is she doing that? She has no hair to dry. She wore a thick and voluminous shift which made her denuded head look very small, until she tied the towel round it. She picked a couple of boxes off a couch and sat.