Chương 83: 75. The Bargain

"I watched Sarah teach today. She turned an old pharmacist into a healer in a single afternoon. The man stood there afterwards with his palm open in front of him as if his hand had been replaced while he was not looking. The man who spent forty years measuring powders has a new purpose now." — The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr, Marsaxlokk The Bargain Sarah took half a step forward and put her hands behind her back. The Baron was standing easy in the morning light, his weight on the back foot.

He was in no hurry and he wanted them to know it. Behind him the seven civilians had arranged themselves into the loose half-circle of people who had been told where to stand and were trying not to fidget. Two older men, three women in their thirties, a boy of nineteen or twenty, and a grey-haired woman at the end of the line with her hands folded in front of her.

"Three days," Sarah said. Clear, professional, completely devoid of its usual warmth.

"I will work with them for three days. By the end of the third day, those who understand human biology and have a knack for it should be able to channel."" Mela, are you in a hurry to leave, Doctor?"

"I am only being accurate. We agreed to train, and three days is what the work needs. Beyond that, the gains would come from actually using and understanding the skill."

"Very well, Doctor. Captain Azzopardi will see to it that you have everything you need." He turned to a set of chairs set a little further away, in a quiet spot.

"Now. The Hypogeum." * Arthur sat down across from the Baron. He had been expecting the pivot from the moment the Baron walked into the camp, and he had spent the last ten minutes deciding what kind of debrief he was willing to give. Steve sat down next to Arthur and Donna stayed standing at Arthur's shoulder. Sarah remained near the trainees, not quite with them, not quite away." Ejja. Tell me what you found."

"The first two levels had caprids and bats respectively. Both were sensitive to sound. The third level had a guardian," Arthur said.

"Like the one you killed at Hagar Qim?"

"Yes." Arthur kept his voice level.

"We killed this one too. It should be safe for your people to access the chamber. Though expect other creatures to get in."

"Of course, but these creatures are also a source of strength, no? Risk and reward." The Baron smiled.

"What level did you manage to reach?" Arthur kept eye contact but said nothing.

"So distrustful. No matter, I will not push," the Baron said, waving his hand.

"What did you find in the lowest chamber?"

"A staircase leading further down," Steve said, glancing at Arthur.

"We were not expecting it. Once we reached the bottom we found a passage that came out at Tarxien." The Baron's expression remained still. He had known, of course. The party had come back from Tarxien on foot. He had men in the camp who would have noted that.

"And your portal, did you find it?" It was the question Arthur had been waiting for. He gave Steve the smallest fraction of a nod.

"Yes, that is where the staircase leads. The portal is in the chamber and the chamber has an exit at Tarxien."

"What did you learn about the portal?"

"Nothing. It is like the others we have seen. We won't know where it goes unless we step on it," Arthur said.

"My friends, you are not telling me anything useful. Nothing I can use to help my people. I thought we had a bargain that you would share knowledge," the Baron said after a long pause. Arthur was afraid of this. The information so far was nothing the Baron could not have found out for himself by sending men over. And they had promised to share useful information. He closed his eyes and steadied himself the way one does before doing something distasteful.

"We also learned that you get a new technique at level fifteen, and that you break a threshold when one of your attributes hits twenty-five." Arthur could almost feel Donna's displeasure from behind him. He went ahead and explained Thresholds to the Baron.

"Ah, good-good, now that is useful information. Stacking an attribute helps." The Baron smiled. He did not mention that now he knew that someone in the party was at least level fifteen. What they had going for them was that the Baron did not know how many of them were at least level fifteen.

"My friends." The Baron stood up.

"Thank you. Go rest. The doctor will have a lot of work. We will speak again before you leave. Captain Azzopardi has things to discuss with you also, when the moment is right." He inclined his head once at Sarah, then turned and walked toward the camp's centre with the easy gait of a man who had got what he came for. Two of his fighters followed at a distance. Archie, floating at Arthur's shoulder, had not spoken once. * Sarah set up in the clearing beside the medical tent.

Steve had dragged a long wooden bench across from the cooking fire and had set it at one end of the clearing for the trainees to sit on. Donna had stationed herself on the southern edge of the clearing with her sharpening stone and the axe across her thighs. Her eyes were on the camp rather than on Sarah. She had not put her axe down once since the Baron had walked into the camp. Sarah introduced herself by first name only and waited for them to do the same. The boy was Pawlu.

The grey-haired woman at the end was Rita Camilleri, a senior nurse from Mosta. The older man with the surgeon's hands was Anton Vella, a pharmacist for thirty years. The other four were two midwives from Marsaxlokk, a nurse from Sliema, and a younger nurse from one of the Three Cities.

"You are here," she said, "because you have some medical experience. The system rewards that, especially for healers. We have three days. By the end of the third day, those of you who can feel and move Ether well enough will be moving Ether through another person's body to accelerate the healing it already wants to do." She paused and brought her hands together at her waist. Arthur saw her eyes shine blue for a moment, and then a fine blue lattice ran from the corner of her eyes to behind her ears.

The trainees gasped and one fumbled and got up. Arthur suspected this was her new technique. She had just baselined all seven of them.

"Anton." She turned to him.

"Come here." Anton came forward from the half-circle. Pawlu, the boy, was the one she chose for the demonstration. He had a kitchen cut across his palm from the morning, half-healed and scabbed in a line. Sarah took his hand and turned it palm-up for Anton to see.

"Put your hand under mine," she told Anton.

"No, lower. There. Now feel your own Reserve."

"My—""The pool inside you, ejja. Steve will explain in a moment. For now, find it. It will feel like a small lake somewhere behind your sternum, or behind your stomach, or in your hip. It is different for everyone. Tell me when you have it." Anton was silent for a long moment. His brow drew together, then cleared." Iva. It is in my chest. Above my heart."

"Good. Now push from there, through your arm, into your hand, into Pawlu's skin. Push gently. The first push will go in larger than you intend. Your body has never done this on purpose before." You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Anton pushed. A faint violet luminescence appeared between Anton's palm and the boy's skin, brighter than Arthur had expected, and the scab on the cut lifted at one edge and curled away.

New skin closed under it in a slow ripple from one end of the cut to the other. The whole thing took perhaps twenty seconds. Anton dropped the boy's hand and staggered back in shock." Allura," he said after a moment. Pawlu was staring at the closed cut on his palm." Grazzi," he said. Sarah turned back to Steve at the edge of the clearing.

"Now. Steve will explain why what just happened works. After that I want each of you to find your pool, as Anton just found his." Steve talked about the Nadi-Matrix as the body's circulatory system for Ether. He talked about the difference between letting Ether flow passively, which the body had always done, and pushing it deliberately, which the system had now made possible. He covered Reserve depletion and fatigue. He talked with poise and clarity. Arthur smiled.

Steve was back in the university, delivering a lecture. When Steve was done, Sarah set the seven of them to finding their pools. Rita Camilleri found hers in under thirty seconds, with the small, satisfied expression of a woman confirming a thing she had suspected for a week. Archie spoke for the first time that morning. He floated closer to Arthur and pulsed once, as he did when he had decided to volunteer something rather than be asked.

"The Baron has gathered seven medically-trained candidates from a population of approximately seventeen hundred in this camp. Statistically improbable as a passive distribution. This is active recruitment."

"I would also observe that the older man, Anton, will reach Level Five faster than the others. His Nadi-Matrix took the first push without overshooting. The substrate in his case is unusually well-organised for a non-candidate."

"Why."

"Pharmacy." Archie pulsed once.

"Repetitive precise measurement, sustained across decades, organises Acuity-adjacent pathways in the Matrix even when the individual is unaware. Your species has been training itself for the system for centuries without knowing it. Some better than others, of course. The skills your species has been cultivating in the last two decades, by contrast, will not have meaningful Matrix expression." Arthur barked a laugh and Donna looked up at him with a questioning glance.

Across the clearing, Sarah was kneeling beside one of the midwives, talking her through the first push. * By late afternoon Sarah was sitting on a flat stone outside the medical tent with her eyes closed. Steve was beside her with a wineskin of water.

"How was your first day, Doctor?" Donna asked, walking up. Sarah did not open her eyes.

"Two of them are exhausted, four are functioning, one is exceptional. Anton."

"The pharmacy man. By the end of the third day he will be the one teaching the others."

"And the grey-haired one. She seems intense."

"Rita. She is steady." Sarah opened her eyes.

"She knows the work already. She does not need me to teach her. She needs me to give her permission to start treatment." Arthur came up behind Donna with his shield slung across his back.

"You guys want to take a walk?" he asked.

"I don't even remember the last time I just took a walk," Steve said, standing up.

"You three carry on, I need to lie down," Sarah said. Donna looked at her and nodded.

"You get some rest. We have been sitting around all day." Sarah smiled and ducked into the tent. * The three of them walked west out of the camp and up the slow gradient toward the cliff. The afternoon had thinned into evening and the wind off the sea had cooled. Steve had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. The cliff edge sat about two hundred metres beyond the camp's perimeter. The limestone was scoured smooth by the wind and dropped away to the water in a clean vertical face.

Arthur did not need to look down to feel the height. Two parallel grooves ran across the limestone toward the edge. They had been cut, or worn, in two near-identical lines about a metre and a half apart, deep enough to hold rainwater in places. The grooves continued straight off the cliff edge and into the air. Below, the sea was about ninety metres down. They had seen these before, and Steve had explained the mystery around them. No one had given a satisfactory explanation of what they were.

"I still find it unsettling that some of these just terminate at cliffs and into water," Arthur said.

"When these were cut, the sea was somewhere else," Steve replied.

"You mean sea level rising?" Arthur said.

"Partly." Steve crouched next to a rut.

"We still can't explain what they were used for, and some running off cliffs make no sense, but those going into the sea could be explained by the sea level rising."

"How much lower was the sea?" Arthur asked.

"At the last interglacial maximum, around twelve thousand BCE, the Mediterranean was approximately a hundred and twenty metres below where it is now. Malta was twice this size. The southern coast was several kilometres further out. These ruts ran across land for a long time before they ran into water." Steve had a faraway look in his eyes. His mind was trying to reconcile something that he did not have enough information for.

"The Mediterranean rose about twelve thousand years ago. Every civilisation that remembers anything from that period remembers it as a flood. Sumerian, Greek, Hebrew, Aztec, Chinese, Aboriginal Australian, Indian. The same story, told everywhere. Sometimes the same details. A boat. A warning. A small group who survived."

"It is uncanny, no." Steve corrected himself.

"It is impossible for multiple civilisations to tell the same story ten thousand years ago when they did not know about each other." The three stood for a while looking at the sea and the secrets it held. * The second day went faster. Sarah had four of the trainees on patients by mid-morning. The young man with the kitchen cut, now healed, had come back with two relatives. A man from the Three Cities had brought in a wife with a sprained ankle.

A child had been carried in by his grandmother with a fever and a chest that whistled. The medical tent had become what it was destined to be. Rita Camilleri was working on the chest case. She had her hands on the child's ribs and her face composed. Sarah was on the other side of the tent. Arthur saw her go still. She had been talking to one of the midwives and she stopped mid-sentence and turned to look across the tent at Rita and the child.

"Rita. You are going in too small. You corrected from yesterday and now you are starving the channel. Open it. Three times what you are giving."

"He is so small—""He needs more. The infection is in the right lower lobe and you are not reaching it. Three times." Rita pushed harder. Arthur could not see what Sarah's technique was telling her, but he could see Sarah's shoulders relax slightly.

"There. Hold that. The lobe is responding. Give it another two minutes at that intensity, then taper." Sarah stayed behind Rita's shoulder for the two minutes. Her face was tight. The cost of the technique was showing in her face. She was pushing herself to keep the technique going while she walked Rita through the correction. When the child's breathing had cleared and Rita had tapered the push, Sarah came and sat next to Arthur.

"Three minutes," she said.

"I think I've found the boundary of the new technique. It is heavier than I thought." * By the end of Day Two, Anton was teaching one of the midwives how to feel the difference between an arterial bleed and a venous one through her hands. He was using his own forearm and a needle. By Day Three, Anton was running the floor. He moved between the four trainees who were taking patients, watched their hands, corrected them, and called Sarah over only when something he did not recognise came up.

Rita was steady throughout the morning. The other four were competent. The two midwives had found their rhythm faster than the nurses had, which Sarah thought was interesting. In the late afternoon, with the last patient of the day walking out under his own power, Sarah sat down on her flat stone outside the medical tent and looked at the camp around her. Steve was beside her with his ledger open.

"Anton will be excellent within a couple of months," she said. They sat in companionable silence watching the sun go down. Finally Arthur and Donna joined them.

"I don't know what, but something is going on. There are too many fighters around that I don't recognise. These were not with the Baron or Azzopardi before," Donna said.

"Azzopardi told me today that the Hospitaller sword he promised me has been requisitioned away. He did not explain any further."

"Sarah, are these people trained enough?" Arthur asked.

"Yes. The deal is done."

"Then let's pack tonight. Steve, trade for a little more food," Donna said.

"We leave at first light." * The morning came with a lot of bustle. Donna had made a quick survey before dawn and was now at the tent flap.

"Someone is coming." Arthur came up beside her. The camp had been busy for an hour at least. Men were moving in groups. The southern approach to the camp was open and a column of men was standing on it. He counted. Fifty, give or take. Possibly more. Most of them were not the Baron's men. They were in Malta legionnaire grey. Walking toward the party's tent at the head of the column were Captain Azzopardi and the Baron.

"Pack quickly. I will find out what is going on," Arthur said, stepping through the flap. The Baron stopped at a respectful distance. Captain Azzopardi was a step behind him and to his left, which was a position Arthur had not seen the Captain take before. Azzopardi's face was composed and very quiet. He gave Arthur a small nod and said nothing." Mela, my friends," the Baron said. The performative warmth of his voice was gone this morning. What was left was direct and businesslike.

"Good morning."

"Good morning," Arthur said.

"Before you leave, my friends. We need you to come with us to the customs house at Mdina. The Compact requests your attendance." Behind him the fifty men looked alert. Their hands rested near their belts and Arthur could see Hospitaller weapons on them.

"The Compact," Arthur said." Iva."

"What is the Compact?" The Baron's smile did not reach his eyes.

"My friend. Malta has entered a new chapter in its history." Azzopardi made a motion towards the men and they parted in the middle to open a gap.

"Come. All will be explained."