Garden of Madness by Tracy L. Higley

her, so intent was he on his procedure. Tia should have been offended, but instead his work drew her to the bedside.
    The woman was not conscious—whether intentional or not, Tia did not know—and her breathing was labored, with a strange warbling on the intake.
    Seluku glanced at Tia, then indicated a thin lead tubing at the foot of the bed. She placed it in his extended hand.
    “Her chest is filling with a death demon.” He held a flint knife in his small right hand. “We make an incision here, in the fourth rib.”
    He spoke like one of her tutors and she watched, unflinching. The knife slit the woman’s skin easily. A trail of blood followed the incision. The woman’s body twitched, and Tia stepped forward to lay a calming hand on her shoulder. She seemed insensible to Tia’s touch, and Tia longed to relieve her discomfort.
    “We insert the tube.” He angled it downward, watched the patient’s face as he twisted it into position. “And let it drain.”
    Indeed, it did drain. A foul, yellowish fluid that must certainly be deadly. Tia stroked the woman’s hair, spoke softly. “And she will live?”
    He pulled two amulets from a pouch that lay across a chair and began to swing them over her body. “If the hand of the god wills it.” A gentle chant escaped his lips and Tia did not interrupt his prayers. Did the gods truly intervene on behalf of man? She found a cloth and jug of water and bathed the woman’s fever-flushed forehead.
    After Seluku finished and dressed the incision, he mixed a paste of some sort of powder and water and placed a small amount against the inside of her cheek. “For the pain.” He gathered his supplies, then asked, “You have come about Kaldu?”
    Perceptive little mouse. “Two questions.”
    His lips twitched in amusement and he secreted the amulets in his pouch.
    With her hand still on the woman’s brow, Tia plunged forward. “How long do you believe the body lay before it was found?”
    “And the next question?”
    “What kind of weapon did such damage?”
    Seluku watched the woman for a long moment, then turned and pushed past Tia, out of the chamber. Tia whispered a few words of comfort in the woman’s ear, then followed.
    He waddled along the darkened corridor and spoke without turning. “You have a healer’s heart and strength of stomach, Princess.”
    She glowed under his praise. “I am very interested in seeing those in pain healed. I do not care to see harm come to the body.”
    “Yes, and one body in particular.”
    She caught up with him as they emerged from the corridor into a courtyard and touched his arm. He slowed and turned. “Seluku, what can you tell me?”
    He worried his bottom lip with those two teeth and scanned the courtyard, as if to ensure their privacy. “No more than I told you last night. The wounds were inflicted by something other than any blade I have seen. The skin was torn, such as wounds from an animal. As to the time of his death . . .” He squinted up at the sky as though reading the hour. “I would say he was not long dead when you found him. The evening was cool but the body was warm. The blood had not yet dried. Certainly he had not lain more than an hour or two.”
    Tia took this information and fitted it into the facts she already knew. But Seluku was not finished.
    He drew close, his head reaching only to her chin, and his eyes darted right and left. “I have never seen an animal capable of this attack in the palace.”
    Was he probing for information, or did he have a theory of his own? The family secret was so well kept, she did not even know who was privy to it.
    Tia chose to misinterpret his comment. “I will be careful, Seluku, thank you.”
    Bony fingers gripped her wrist. “If this—animal—is loose, it will kill again. And it must be stopped.”
    He knows . By Marduk, he knew and he was serving Tia a warning. The words spawned a nausea his procedure had not. She extricated her wrist from his web of fingers, her