The bountier dropped a bloody man-shaped bundle on Oleth's doorstep with the terse announcement:
"One live werewolf -- seventy-five gold pieces."
Oleth glared down at him momentarily, frozen with shock and disgust; the bounty certainly didn't look lupine. He leaned forward slightly to peer around the lintel at the glittering sky, and realized that the full moon had been below the horizon for between twenty and thirty minutes. Diran eased past him and knelt to check for life signs.
"You're sure it's live?" Oleth asked drily. "It doesn't seem to have been ... lightly handled..."
The bountier, who was very nearly in the same condition as his prey, cursed a blue streak.
"For seventy-five gold, he's as lively as he's going to get!" the hunter vented. "He's much more lively than the two of my men he killed -- and the third we had to put down!" The other remaining huntsman behind him nodded and glowered.
"He's got a pulse," Diran reported quietly, where there was room for the words. Oleth's eyes narrowed.
"Pay him fifty pieces, Diran," he decided coolly. "If it lives till morning, give him the rest then," he added, stooping to gather up the unconscious werewolf. A large bloodstain was left on his front step. "Good night, gentlemen."
The subject was a young male, apparently between the ages of twenty and thirty. He was trussed in the sadistic manner men hesitate to use on animals, but never on their own kind. Oleth set him gently on the table in the basement laboratory, and quickly set to cutting him free. If none of his wounds were mortal, he'd be perfect...
Besides being saturated with blood, the werewolf's tattered shirt was quite threadbare, and tore away easily. Underneath, he wore a battered men's purse which seemed to have blocked at least two or three important spear blows. Oleth set this aside on the counter. Meanwhile, Diran had followed him in silently and was unobtrusively preparing all the necessities of surgery and laying them within his arm's reach: water, towels, gauze, blades, tweezers, antiseptic, et cetera.
"Here's a problem," Oleth noted, starting at the man's back: besides five arrow wounds, torn by the hasty removal of the arrowheads, one shaft had broken off in his lower back, leaving the angled wedge of silver in him. A pale star of poisoned tissue radiated from the wound. The healer pressed down with his thumbs and cautiously reopened the wound -- it did not appear to be as deep as he feared. Relieved, he braced the flesh open with one hand, and the werewolf spasmed in his sleep as he slipped the arrowhead free. Then he began the methodic routine of closing flesh wounds: disinfect, pinch shut, cast healing spell, bandage.
"He's developed a fever," Diran interrupted him, feeling the man's face.
"Well, that's to be expected," he admitted absently as he closed the last arrow wound.
The werewolf moaned. He stirred feebly, uttered a more urgent moan, and began groping for the edge of the table. Oleth had been a father long enough to know that that meant...
"Diran -- the basin, quickly!" he instructed, and shoved the patient's face over the edge of the table and the center of the basin, with a few seconds to spare before he retched up a few mouthfuls of blood and small chunks of flesh.
"hh ... blood," he whimpered, before lapsing unconscious again. Diran folded a pillow under his head, and left to empty and sterilize the bowl.
Cleaning away the gore and dirt as he worked, Oleth turned the subject on his back -- and was astonished at the quantity of scar tissue already present. In addition to a number of strangely placed burn scars, it almost looked as if the man had been mauled, at some point in the past.
Probably ... probably by the werewolf that bit him, the healer ruminated. Diran had returned to the periphery again, and Oleth pointed out a blurred, crescent-shaped scar over the patient's collarbone to his aide.
"That ... would be the original bite," he deduced. "Looks like it worried him a bit, too."
The werewolf had quite a few spear wounds in his front, but he'd taken most of them in his shoulders, arms and abdomen, and appeared to have little life-threatening damage. Methodically, the healer began to close the deepest cuts first.
"Diran," he called, nearly done, and of course the smaller man was there instantly. "Are there any of your old clothes you can spare? I think you're about his size, and his things just aren't fit to be worn..."
Diran left without a word. Oleth kicked himself for having overlooked the necessity.
"At least I have everything else I need," he muttered to the sleeping youth.
Sulos came awake very slowly, as his fever receded; his body felt incredibly stiff and too heavy to move.
Hey, I'm alive... Underground, someplace, he realized hazily. After savoring this for a few minutes, it further occurred to him that he was clean, his wounds already half-healed, and he was dressed in clothes cleaner and newer than his usual gear. He had no way of knowing whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. Wherever he was, he could easily make out the breathing and sporadic pen-skritching of someone writing, far off to his left.
Best not to look a gift horse in the mouth, he told himself, and pried his eyelids open.
Stone ceiling -- he was in an underground vault. But before the stone ceiling ... his eyes focused on a grid of silvery wire. Puzzling ... if he shifted his head a bit, he could see the seam where the horizontal grid met a vertical one of the same material. He stared at this junction a bit longer, until the rest of his mind woke up.
Oh damn -- I'm in a cage!
He tried to sit up, and fell back into the nest of pillows, panting. The events of the full moon had taken an even greater toll than he'd feared, and his half-healed injuries awoke and began to throb. The faint sound of the pen paused, and with his next attempt Sulos actually succeeded in turning over; then he lay on his face, gasping with exertion. He heard the writer approaching.
"Are you feeling better?" he asked (since it was a man, after all) clearly, standing just outside the cage -- it was about five paces by five, about the size of a small room, with a ceiling only slightly lower than normal. Sulos pulled his limbs in and under, and levered himself onto his hands and knees.
"Where am I?" he groaned, too exhausted to look up.
"You're safe," he was told. Then he said something else Sulos didn't catch, because all his attention was focused on his efforts to stand. Shakily, he reached out to pull himself up by the cage wall, and snapped his hand back with a small cry at the shock of pain: the cage was made of silver. It had bitten his skin, as silver nearly always seemed to, but this time more than it should have, after a full moon -- his hand was blistered.
"S-silver," he grunted absently, while his captor was calling for someone. He curled his injured hand in and let himself sprawl on his face.
"Diran, cover me," he heard the writer say, and then the cage was unlocked.
"My name is Oleth Greywords," Sulos heard, before strong hands lifted him from the floor and pulled his blistered hand out for examination. "Is this normal for you, after a change?"
"Silver," Sulos murmured again. "Silver poisoning -- "
"Ah..." The cool tingle of white magic washed over his hand -- a healing spell.
"You're a healer -- ?" Sulos muttered, and suddenly remembered where he'd heard the name before: Oleth Greywords, the renowned healer and exorcist -- the priest who'd finally drawn the line between disease and possession. He'd had textbooks based on the work of this man.
"Yes." Oleth himself was extraordinarily tall, and apart from that he was the exact opposite of what Sulos had imagined of a healer/exorcist. He was imposingly lean, with glacier-blue eyes; his hair was a color so pale it seemed to change with the light. It was thin and straight and he wore it down the center of his back in a ponytail.
"Can you tell me your name?" he asked, setting Sulos down in the bed of pillows again.
"What am I doing here?" Sulos asked weakly.
"I'm going to see if I can cure you," the hearler-priest answered. "But for now, I think you should sleep." And a gentle spell pulled him under like a riptide, to drifting dreamless slumber.