"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 01 - The Black Gryphon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

"You'll do. Here!" Gesten snapped.
Gods, if he ran the army....
But the three Healers had begun their work before he spoke; Tamsin getting the clattering trays of
surgical instruments, Cinnabar calling for their assistants, and Amberdrake pushing aside the litter bearers
to get at the injured gryphon, heedless of anything else.
Amberdrake touched the Black Gryphon and felt Skandranon's pain as if it screamed through his
own nerves, striking him like a hammer blow to the forehead. This was the drawback of working on so
close a friend. He shielded somewhat, automatically, but that pain also told him what was wrong, so he
dared not block it all out.
As Cinnabar's assistants scraped and washed the mud from the tangled flesh and cut branches away
from broken limbs, Amberdrake took Skandranon's pain deeper into himself, warning the others when
they were going to cause more damage by moving something. He could feel his mouth agape as he
sucked in halting breaths; felt his eyes widen in double-Sight, his mind split between seeing the physical
and Seeing inside. It seemed an eternity before they got Skandranon's body free of the remains of the
tree he'd crashed into, another eternity before they got him washed down so that they could see the
external injuries clearly.
Wordlessly, the other two left the wings to Amberdrake and concentrated on Skan's legs and body.
Amberdrake was one of the few in camp who knew the gryphons' anatomy well enough to Heal wings to
be flightworthy again. Muscle, tendon, bone, vein, all were dependent on each other in living bodies—yet
in an avian's body this seemed doubly true. Alter this and balance and weight distribution and control
surface and a hundred other things would change.
The right wing had a crossbow wound, still bleeding sluggishly. The left was broken in several
places. Amberdrake directed Gesten to put pressure on the bleeding bolt wound. Gryphon wing-bones
tended to knit almost as soon as they broke, like a bird's, and the sooner he got to the breaks, the less
likely that he would have to rebreak anything to set it properly.
Skandranon whimpered a little and coughed, until a fourth Healer, still sleepy-eyed and robed from
bed, came to stand at his head, and with one hand on either side of the huge beak, willed the gryphon
into slumber. Skandranon's throat gurgled as his beak parted.
The wing muscles relaxed, and Amberdrake went to work.
He eased the shattered fragments of each broken bone together, then held them in place with his
bare hands while his mind forced the bits and pieces into the right order and prodded them into the
process of knitting, all the while drawing away the fluids that built up around the damage. When the bone
started healing, he called for splints and bandages, wrapped the section of wing tightly, and went on to
the next, pausing only to wipe the drying blood from his hands before it caked so thickly it interfered.
"Drake?" Gesten said, barely making a stir in his concentration.
"What?" he asked shortly, all of his attention focused on getting the final bone to draw together.
"I think you'd better hurry." That was all the hertasi said, but it was enough. He left the splinting of
the final bone and the binding of the wing as a whole to one of the assistants, and came around to
Gesten's side of the table.
He knew with a glance why Gesten had called him; the sheer dead weight of the injured wing was so
great that the bolt wound was tearing open, and the great wing vein was perilously close to the site of the
wound. A fracture under that pressure could simply break wide open and sever the vein as it went.
Quickly, he directed Gesten under the gryphon's wing, to take some of the strain off, and reached
out to hold the wound closed, being careful not to pinch. He closed his eyes and concentrated, Seeing
the injury, examining it with his inner sight, bringing together the torn muscle fibers, rejoining bleeding
veins, goading it all into the process of Healing at a rate a thousand times faster than it would naturally,
and providing the energy the body required to do so from within himself. Infection threatened; he burned
it away ruthlessly. He strengthened the rest of the muscles, taking some of the strain off the injured ones.
When they threatened to cramp, a finger's touch soothed them. He found smaller broken bones, wounds
and cuts he had not noticed in Healing the larger ones. He dealt with them all, searching out dangerous