Dungeon Runner (Book 1 and 2)

Stepping Up, Chapter 84

Tibs watched the cleric work.

He found her in one of the worker's barracks after hearing about her going around and healing the workers who needed it. Only a handful of clerics left their quarters to work among the townsfolk. The rest only went to the dungeon's door and back. He'd learned that the guild's inability, or unwillingness—he hadn't worked out which—to go out and bring back the clerics who had been caught outside by Sebastian's siege had created a rift between the two groups.

He sensed how she moved the essence through the woman's injury, the shape she gave it, how much he thought she used, and where she concentrated the essence within the wound. She was healing a man with burns on his arms.

They weren't from a fire. Tibs could identify those by the way the essence of those burned felt afterward. The way it had been...eaten away.

He's reached the point with Purity where he had its influence under control and he wanted to figure out how to heal someone. He wished he could go to her, or another of the clerics and ask how she did it, but even if she had shown herself to be more like the Runners than any of the other clerics, he didn't trust her with his secret.

He wondered if she had a sense of her patient's essence the way he did. From the discussions with his friends, mainly Carina, he knew none of them sensed anything of other's essences within their bodies. Even when it was the same element, people did not register as having essence to them other than through the color of their eyes.

But Clerics worked closer to people than anyone else, worked with the essence flowing through them. Or that was how it felt to Tibs. Did she? Or did she use the burns on the arm she was healing to guide where she sent the essence? How did clerics work with injuries that left no clues on the body they existed?

She noticed him. "Hello." She looked thinner than when Tibs had last seen her at the inn before she and the others there had been taken back to the guild hall by a high-ranking cleric. She patted the man on the cot on the shoulder. "You will be fine, but the next time you work with lye, make sure you wear the proper protection."

The man wasn't fully healed. The burns on his arms were less intense, but still present, as were the injuries of the others in the large room. The cleric's essence was thin. If he hadn't known her to be at least Rho, he'd think she'd only just reached Upsilon. It was how the other Runners' essence-drain registered to him.

She staggered as she stood and Tibs caught her.

"Thank you."

"You look exhausted."

She gave him a strained smile. "Exhaustion is the price of hard work." She looked at the men and women on the cots. "It's a price I gladly pay to help these people."

Exhaustion could kill, he nearly told her; but remembered the demands Purity put on clerics. It wasn't like with the runners, whose influence wasn't even certain. And she wasn't like him, who could choose not to channel it; before he'd gained control over the influence. Some clerics—he thought of Hightower—seemed to have found ways around the aspects of the influence they didn't like, but she gladly gave in to all of them.

"Then, let me treat you to food and drink to replay your hard work."

"You don't have to."

"I know, but I'd like to." He smiled. "If you want, you can consider it payment for answering some questions"

"Alright."

The tavern, a few buildings from the workers' barrack, was called the Tired Ale, and it was busier than Tibs expected. Before he could offer they go to a different one, workers noticed them and stood from a small table. They thanked her profusely and, to Tibs's amusement, didn't seem to know who he was.