A Missing Piece in the Artificial Sun

I had been delirious with pain when they brought me into the apothecarist’s hidden hospital wing. Everyone knew his predilection for treating known maladies with his poultices, potions and salves, but few knew that during the war he had been one of the leading doctors on the front, and had saved not only lives, but limbs and minds as well.

So, they said, he barely flinched when he saw the blood gushing from the knife wound in my belly.

I was immediately immobilized on a cot in the backrooms of the underground network he shared with other healers in the area, one reserved exclusively for emergencies, so I was told upon awakening. I had been feverish, speaking riddles that only the insane and the infirm might understand.

All the while he had strained to stop the blood flowing, to remove the knife without adding internal injury to a gash that would undoubtedly scar terribly but had blessedly missed major organs or arteries, and packed the wound with medicine and gauze.

For days afterward, I lay in bed, sweating, trapped in what seemed to my saviors a hellish nightmare of attackers and shadow.

But now I was awake. Now I was capable of silence. So, my saviors had offered a hasty explanation of my surroundings and, satisfied that I would indeed survive my circumstances and that I understood their need for discretion, left me to think.

I looked around my small, dimly lit room and breathed through the biting pain in my torso, my mouth dry, my eyes hot with the strain of unshed tears. It was quiet and the air smelt deeply of rain.

I could scarcely remember the details of the attack, but there had been something strange I’d noticed just before I fainted from the pain. A piece of the memory that didn’t fit, like the reality had bent in upon itself as the darkness of the mortal wound took me.

The detail remained just out of reach, but a sensation of knowing kept bubbling up to the surface and dominating my thoughts. What had I seen?

The sound of footsteps clacking against the polished stone floor interrupted my brooding, and I resisted the urge to sit up in bed as the apothecarist appeared in the doorway, his assistant – a teen girl whose long hair was wrapped in a thin white cloth – trailing behind him.

“Ah, you’re awake. Very good,” he began with a calm smile, his fingers finding one of the drawn curtains beside the threshold and pulling it up into a leather strap. The slow movement revealed a window with a brightly lit yellow incandescent bulb, the sky blue of the painted wall behind it producing an instant calm in my tense muscles.

The apothecarist leaned his head against the makeshift wooden windowsill and chuckled good-naturedly at the illusion’s effect on me. “It’s meant to mimic the effect of sunlight on the patient, you know. Not much of that down here.”

He pushed off of the wall and walked to my bedside, his assistant following.

He pulled up a heavy, iron-wrought chair that screeched terribly against the floor then sat down while his assistant remained standing, and raised a hand to my forehead. “My name is Sir Arthur Yves. How are you feeling?” he asked finally.

My throat cracked from fatigue and lack of use, but I managed to find my voice: “Like hell.” I attempted a soft laugh that turned into painful coughing.

“Don’t strain yourself on my account,” Sir Yves smooth voice reprimanded gently.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I replied in a softer voice.

He clapped his hands against his thighs and said, “Well. Now that you’re awake begins the difficult work I’m afraid. Your nasty wound was quite the task to stitch up and I’m sure you’re in a great deal of pain which I can give you something for.

“More importantly, we’ll be needing to have a conversation about the attack. Anything you can remember will be of the utmost importance.”

I watched his face as he spoke, his expression slowly deepening into one of distress.

“It was a mugging, doctor, nothing more,” I reassured, speaking a lie that – it was immediately clear – neither of us believed.

After a beat, Sir Yves cleared his throat and looked about the dim room, his slow inhalation seeming to echo across the stone walls and out into the corridors beyond. “You see,” he continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “you were accosted by a group of people who attacked with a very specific knife, which was clear from your wound. The fact that they’d left the knife in when they could have escaped with their weapon – we believe that this attempted murder was their way of sending us a message.”

He leveled me with a gaze that firmly suggested the gravity of my situation.

I had questions before I could reveal my own concerns to the man whose real name – I was certain – I didn’t actually know.

“Do you know who they were by the knife alone?”

He pursed his lips, casting a brief look at his assistant, before replying. “Yes.”

“Well, I don’t,” my voice cracked and dropped to a loud whisper as I winced in pain. “I have no reason to believe I should have had any enemies before that attack, certainly none with special weapons or calling cards.”

“And yet here you are.”

And yet here I was.

“I don’t know, Sir Yves. There’s no one I could think of that would want me dead.”

He looked down toward my wound, then met my eyes with a placating smile. “We’ll return to that later then, I suppose.”

Sir Yves looked to his assistant then, and with a wave of his hand, she produced the knife, its blade wrapped in a thick wool cloth, and placed it in his waiting hands.

“That will be all, Evelyn,” he said in a quiet voice.

She inclined her head toward him, then with a quick curtsy, his assistant quickly disappeared from the room, her soft footfalls disappearing down the hallway and leaving us in a terse silence.

Sir Yves inhaled again then looked about the dim hospital room as though to calm himself. He bit his lip before opening the folds of the cloth and showing me the blade, which was still dark with my dried blood.

“We wanted to show you the blade before we had it destroyed,” he began, worry plain on his face. “Notice the darkness of the stain, my friend. This was no mere knife attack, but a deliberate targeting.

“The color is due to the poison that runs through the blade. We believe it is the reason for your – nightmares.”

“Y-you think they meant to assassinate me?”

“Yes. I know you said you have no enemies, but is there anything you’ve been working on, anything of value you may own, anything at all that you remember from the night you were attacked that may present some clue?”

I licked my lips and relaxed into the woolen comfort of the hospital cot, staring up at the stone ceiling with trepidation. I was no one. I had no secret worth killing for, no inheritance to covet, and there was nothing except –

“Sir Yves,” I said in little more than a whisper, the task of avoiding aggravating my wound making me sweat. “There is something, little more than a fragment of a memory from that night.”

“Yes, what is it?” he leaned in, grey-blue eyes widening.

“I can’t… quite remember. It is as though there is a fog cast over the memory. But I know I saw something, perhaps something they had dropped onto the street, something they hadn’t meant for me to see.”

“You can’t quite remember…” Sir Yves tapped his bearded chin, then stood in thought. After a moment’s pause, he reached into the drawer of a small table beside me and drew out an ornate golden bell, ringing it twice.

“I’ll have just the thing for that, yes.” Sir Yves nodded. “Excuse me a moment, my friend, I have some herbs to gather for that memory of yours.”

With that, he made for the open threshold to the room, disappearing into the dark hallway just beyond.

I thought back to that night as I waited for Sir Yves to reappear, trying to piece together the moments before the evening had gone to hell. I remembered I had been walking with a friend.

Yes, it was Georgette and I that had been walking down the cobblestone street from the baker’s storefront, four loaves of fresh bread between the two of us. Prior to that, we’d visited the fish monger by the docks and took from there two large, freshly cleaned sea bass. It was dinner time, the sun had just set behind the brick façades of the surrounding buildings, and all had been deceptively easygoing.

It had been my fault, suggesting the short cut. That was it. Maybe these ruffians that had accosted us had mistaken my identity. Maybe I’d looked like someone they had dealings with. It had been dark enough and the gas lamps of the streetlights had not yet been lit.

It had happened quick – we walked down the dark alleyway, evading the hungry cats eager to snatch our dinner, when the hooded men appeared. They spoke in loud murmurs and at first, I thought they had asked us something but now upon recollection it seemed more chanting than speaking.

I remembered then that Georgette had tugged on my arm, trying to guide us back into the fading sunlight of the main street. But by then, another of the hooded men moved to block our path.

We were surrounded. They closed in. My friend shouted and I threw a fish at the one standing behind us in a panic.

They drew their knives and then –

There was that blank spot again, like spilled ink upon the image of my memory – something was just missing. A brief, strange moment – as though the world had turned in upon itself.

There was the chanting. I threw the fish. The moment. And then I was on the ground, having been struck by the knife. Frozen in pain, watching Georgette run away for help.

I was lost in thought when Sir Yves reappeared, followed once more by his assistant, Evelyn. Evelyn held two cups and a large pot of what smelled like strongly brewed coffee, and in his hands Sir Yves held two vials, both fastened with lids connected to submerged droppers.

“Have you recalled anything, my friend?” Sir Yves asked in a soft but cheery voice.

“Nothing useful, I’m afraid. I remember the hooded figures surrounding us –”

“Us?”

“My friend and I, we had been shopping and were walking together.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, well I remember being surrounded, I threw a fish at one of them –” Sir Yves chuckled quietly but allowed me to continue, “and then right before I was struck there was this strange moment as though I had been drunk. The world seemed to turn sideways or to darken in an unnatural way, but the memory itself is fuzzy – and then I was on the ground with a knife in my gut.”

Sir Yves nodded, his gaze trained on the scar on my belly that had been packed with medicinal herbs and sewn shut.

He took the pot of coffee from Evelyn’s hands and poured some into each of the cups she held. Placing one on the table beside the cot, he then unstopped the two vials and poured a generous stream of the first liquid into the remaining cup of coffee.

“This is a rosemary tincture, good for memory,” he explained without looking at me. He took the dropper for the second liquid and carefully dropped four drops into the coffee.

“This second liquid is a strong Mugwort tincture. The Mugwort is to assist in the opening of your mind and to bring you very carefully back into the mental state in which you experienced that missing memory.

“It is my hope that this combination will aid us in our pursuit of the truth.”

“Well, let’s not waste any more time.” Sir Yves produced a silver spoon from his coat pocket and placed in what was to be my cup of coffee, stirring vigorously. Then, with only a bit of effort, Sir Yves managed to crouch down beside my cot and – spoon in hand – began feeding me the potion in generous sips.

The coffee had an immediate effect on me, the warm, familiar scent allowing me to relax in a way that the damp, faint mildew of my surroundings could not. Then there was the Rosemary, an earthy flavor that washed over my tongue and made me think of the green of forests, the simple pleasure of a homecooked meal. Finally, the floral bitterness of the Mugwort – I had a mind to ask for some sugar; it was unpleasant but not impossible to swallow.

As the combination of smells washed over me, I was suddenly struck by a clear image of the night of the attack, a gleaming symbol of a golden ram embroidered on the lapels of each of the hooded figures, the jagged silver knives they held at arms-length, the chanting, and then –

“Georgette,” I murmured, slowly inhaling. “Georgette what did you do?”

“Did you remember something?” Sir Yves asked.

I pursed my lips, my eyebrows furrowed. I remembered seeing Georgette out of the corner of my eye. She’d dropped her fish and loaves onto the cobblestone walkway right after I’d thrown the fish at the man behind us.

I’d turned my attention away from her just long enough that I might have missed it. She had held a small satchel, and I remember turning back to her as she threw some kind of powder into my eyes. It was such a brief moment and then I was on the ground bleeding, and she was running away.

“My friend.”

“Yes?”

“I think… my God I think she participated in it.”

“What did you remember?” Sir Yves pressed.

“She threw some kind of powder on me. Something that may have caused my hallucinations I don’t know. I remember it smelled sweet – may I, may I have some more?”

“Ah yes of course,” Sir Yves nodded, and began spoon-feeding me the coffee again.

In between sips, I continued, blinking back tears and focusing on the comfort of Sir Yves’ simple potion. “I think she betrayed me.”

“I think she did, my friend,” Sir Yves agreed with a soft sigh. “Do you think it would be too much to sit up?”

“Let us try,” I replied.

The next few minutes we struggled to right me into a seated position, and once we succeeded, he placed the cup of coffee squarely in my hand and stood.

“We had no knowledge of your Georgette before, but it sounds like perhaps you were the victim of an initiation ritual, my friend. Drink up, we will help you gain your strength back. Any victim of our enemy’s is safe with us and it is my belief that you may have more information on them than you know.

“I must leave you now,” Sir Yves continued. “But I will return. Please… it isn’t much. But do try to concentrate on our makeshift sunlight, the smell of the coffee and rosemary – it will give you some peace.

“Thank you for your generosity, Sir Yves,” I coughed softly, trying to acclimate to my new position.

“Think nothing of it.” With that, he refilled my cup, took the previously forgotten coffee off of the table, and took his leave with it.

Then, there was nothing but me, my medicinal coffee, and my thoughts. What dark dealings Georgette may have had with those hooded men, what reasons she had for targeting me, I didn’t yet know.

I slowly, cautiously lifted the cup of coffee to my lips, careful not to strain myself, and sipped. The warmth of the brew was what I most needed in this dreary underground room.

I licked my lips and tried to burrow deeper into my blankets. My eyes wandered to the incandescent bulb behind the decorative window, the “sun” of my underground sanctuary, and I wondered for the first time since I awoke what esoteric world I’d fallen into.