Page 25 of Death’s Gentle Hand
“Your mistress can petition for an audience like everyone else,” Damian said, his voice carrying the calm authority he'd learned from years of dealing with desperate souls. “I don't make house calls.”
“Afraid you haven't got a choice, blind man.”
The first attacker came from his left, boots thudding against stone with the heavy confidence of someone who thought blindness meant helplessness.
Damian let him get close—close enough to smell the sour wine on his breath, to hear the wet wheeze of diseased lungs, to feel the displacement of air as a cudgel swung toward his skull.
Damian ducked and spun, his extended cane sweeping the attacker's legs. The man crashed to the cobblestones with a wet crack that spoke of skull meeting unforgiving stone. He didn't rise again.
“Damn! Willem!”
Two more rushed him from opposite sides, trying to overwhelm him with numbers.
But Damian's enhanced senses turned their coordination against them.
He could hear their hearts beating in tandem, their breathing falling into the same desperate rhythm—and he used that rhythm to predict their movements.
The one on his right favored his left leg, probably an old wound from the time wars. When he lunged, Damian drove his cane into the weak knee with surgical precision. Bone and sinew popped like overstressed rope, and the man went down howling, clutching his ruined joint.
The third attacker had learned caution from watching his companions fall. He circled at a distance, breathing hard through his mouth—broken nose, most likely. The scrape of steel on leather told Damian he was drawing a blade.
“You'll rue that, you freak,” the knife-wielder snarled. “Mistress said bring you breathing, but she didn't say nothing about bringing you whole.”
“Your mistress made an error,” Damian replied, his voice deadly calm. “She should have warned you what I truly do.”
The man lunged with his blade leading, steel whispering through the air in a clumsy overhead strike. Damian sidestepped and seized the attacker's wrist, his grip precise enough to hit the pressure point that would numb the hand. The knife clattered to the stones.
But instead of simply disabling his opponent, Damian opened himself to the man's pain—and there was so much of it. Years of time-debt eating away at his flesh, organs failing from temporal displacement, the constant ache of a soul being slowly consumed by forces beyond mortal understanding.
Damian absorbed it all in a rush that made his knees buckle, then weaponized it. He pushed the concentrated agony back into the attacker, amplified by his own magical resonance. The man's scream was inhuman, the sound of someone experiencing every hurt he'd ever ignored all at once.
The knife-wielder collapsed, convulsing on the filthy cobblestones, his nervous system overloaded by his own accumulated suffering concentrated into a single moment. Foam flecked his lips as he thrashed, trying to escape pain that came from within his own flesh.
“Gods preserve us,” one of the remaining attackers whispered. “What sorcery did you work on him?”
“Gave him back what he was hiding from,” Damian said, his voice rough with the backlash of channeling so much concentrated anguish. Blood trickled from his nose, but he wiped it away with steady hands. “Your turn.”
The fourth man broke and fled, his footsteps echoing off the alley walls as he disappeared into the maze of Veil Row's narrow passages. Wise choice.
The last attacker—the leader, judging by the quality of his cloak and the authority in his earlier voice—held his ground but kept his distance. His breathing had gone shallow with fear, and Damian could smell the acrid stench of terror-sweat.
“You're no natural healer,” the leader gasped.
“No,” Damian agreed, taking a step forward. His enhanced hearing caught the man's heart hammering against his ribs like a caged bird. “Not anymore. Now, you're going to tell me who sent you.”
“Can't do that. Mistress would flay me alive.”
Damian reached out with his magical senses, reading the man's pain profile like a physician's chart. Chronic headaches from temporal displacement. Joint-fire in his hands from handling corrupted time-crystals. The slow burn of his liver processing too much alchemical spirits.
“I can make all of that stop,” Damian said softly, his voice carrying the terrible gentleness of someone offering mercy that came with hidden barbs. “Or I can make it so much worse that you'll beg me to grant you the final rest. Your choice.”
The leader's resolve crumbled like wet parchment.
“Some noble bitch from the floating districts,” he whispered, the words spilling out like blood from a wound.
“Pays good coin for healers, but we ain't supposed to know her name. Got some manner of operation running in the old warehouses by the harbor. Needs your kind for... for something that requires fresh blood and steady hands.”
Damian nodded, filing the information away. Another wealthy predator harvesting the desperate for their own ends. Now they were collecting healers specifically. The implications made his stomach churn.
“How many others has she taken?”
“Don't know true. Maybe eight or ten? We just bring 'em in, don't ask what happens after.” The man was sweating freely now, his voice cracking with desperation. “Look, I told you what you wanted. May I take my leave?”
Damian considered the request, weighing mercy against necessity. These men had tried to abduct him, would have delivered him to whatever fate their mistress had planned. But they were also small prey, expendable muscle hired for a single task.
“Run,” he said finally. “Leave the city before the morning bells. If I find you in Varos on the morrow, I'll finish what I started.”
The leader didn't need to be told twice. He stumbled over his fallen companions and fled into the night, leaving behind the reek of his own fear and the groaning remnants of his crew.
Damian stood alone in the stinking alley, surrounded by broken men and the consequences of his own choices.
His hands shook as the battle-fever faded, but not from fear or exhaustion.
From the terrible realization that he was becoming something his patients wouldn't recognize—something that could transform healing into weapon, mercy into threat, compassion into calculated cruelty.
The man he'd subjected to weaponized pain was still twitching on the cobblestones, his consciousness scattered by sensory torment. He'd live, probably, but he'd never forget what it felt like to have his own suffering turned against him.
Whatever noble was hunting healers, whatever she needed them for, it was connected to the chaos consuming Varos. And now she knew he existed, knew what he was capable of.
The hunt had begun in earnest.
The Market Underspine sprawled beneath the city like a secret infection, tunnels carved from ancient drainage channels and expanded by decades of illegal enterprise.
The air down here was thick with moisture and the smell of too many people living in too little space.
Vendors hawked goods that couldn't be sold in legitimate markets—stolen time-crystals, forged identification papers, weapons that hummed with illegal magic.
But more valuable than any physical commodity were the whispered rumors that passed from stall to stall like viruses seeking new hosts.
Damian navigated the crowded tunnels with his white cane and enhanced senses, following familiar paths toward a particular stall where information was traded with the same care most people reserved for precious metals.
The vendor was a man called Lennar—not his real name, but names were fluid currency in the Underspine. His scarred hands, reminders of his former profession as a time-broker, shook slightly as he poured tea from a battered metal pot.
“Healer,” Lennar greeted him with genuine warmth, though his voice carried undertones of worry. “Dangerous times to be walking the tunnels alone.”
“Dangerous times everywhere,” Damian replied, settling onto the wooden crate that served as customer seating. “What are you hearing about the Hollow outbreaks?”
“Bad things. Worse than bad.” Lennar's voice dropped to a whisper that barely carried over the tunnel's ambient noise. “Someone's not just collecting stolen time anymore—they're weaponizing it. Building something that could rewrite the entire relationship between life and death.”
Damian felt ice settle in his stomach. “What kind of experiments?”
“The kind that trap souls between states until they go mad from existing in too many places at once.” Lennar leaned closer, his scarred fingers tracing nervous patterns on the wooden counter.
“Someone's figured out how to harvest the boundary between life and death.
Use it as raw material for magic that shouldn't exist.”
When Damian carefully inquired about soulcraft and deathbound anchors—theoretical research, he claimed, for a patient with unusual symptoms.
“Ancient magic, that. Dangerous beyond measure. If you've touched something divine, boy, it will want you forever. Even if claiming you means breaking you into pieces too small to heal.”
“Hypothetically,” Damian said carefully, “what would happen to someone bound to a cosmic entity? Someone who found themselves caring about a force of nature?”
Lennar was quiet for a long moment, studying Damian's face with eyes that had learned to read between the lines of casual questions.
“Hypothetically? They'd be fucked six ways to Sunday.
Cosmic entities don't love the way humans do.
They possess. They consume. They remake you in their image until there's nothing left of who you were before.”
“And if the entity was changing too? Becoming more human?”
“Then you'd both be fucked. Because something would notice the changes and move to correct them. Cosmic order doesn't tolerate anomalies, boy. It burns them out like infections.”