The stormy months passed them over with merely a groan of thunder and a handful of showers.
In all her life, Inez had never seen so little rain. Most of her garden, which drank little in a good year, stood in twisted, bronze husks lining the shade. She had to rely on fading preserves from the year before and send for stock all the way from Aurelia. Skies willing, the drought hadn’t spread its fingers that wide.
It was in the midst of this summer that her daughter dragged a sobbing caravaneer through the back door of the family clinic.
Before she’d gotten a good look at him, Inez didn’t suppose his situation to be too unusual. The dirt roads leading in and out of town had baked and shifted under relentless sunshine. Some cracks grew wide enough that she saw an influx of injuries caused by patients twisting ankles and knees.
But once the door shut and the blinding light of noon no longer obscured his condition, her concerns turned elsewhere. From cheek to heel, blood caked him in patches that had soaked right through his clothes. He hugged himself, shivering as if afraid he would die if he let go.
The blood was not his own, at least not all of it. There was too much for him to still breathe without it.
“What happened to you?” Inez asked, scouring his torso for signs of injury. There were no large bruises or lacerations, only minor scrapes. “Where are you hurt most?”
He pointed to his leg.
She examined a scraped and swollen ankle, carefully slipping the stained shoe from his foot. “Can you move your toes for me?”
The caravaneer shook his head and stared at the ground with a dazed expression.
Inez turned to her daughter. “Did he get separated from the rest of the caravan? Where did you find him?”
Camellia pointed beyond the back wall of the clinic with a trembling arm. Her face lacked its usual buoyant energy. “He limped up from the canyon road,” she said, her eyes drawn and darting every few seconds to the door. “He said he's the last one left after an attack.”
Ice dripped down Inez’s back.
Bandits were a serious threat, and she had only a little experience dealing with them in the past. The road between her outpost and the next had been calm for decades. “An attack? Did he say who attacked them?”
“Scorpions,” whispered the caravaneer. He looked into Inez’s face with a desperate shine to his eyes. “At least twenty of them. You must call on the Great Crab Slayer. Please.”
Scorpions?
Inez paused before she spoke again. “Did you say a group of scorpions did this to you?”
Camellia herself looked skeptical. Her eyebrows bunched together and she looked at Inez with a questioning gaze.
The sweltering heat affected many things. It could be the caravan had been set upon by bandits or mountain cats and, being stranded in the desert, this lone survivor suffered heat exhaustion on top of trauma that left his wits addled.
That was the most likely culprit. But Inez had always feared that canyon lurking near the West Road, and she had never been able to explain why. And the heat affected many things.
Who was to say giant scorpions couldn’t have emerged from underground the same way giant crabs had once rolled in on the coast from a storm?
But before all that, there were more pressing matters to address.
Inez tied her apron in place and donned a pair of gloves. “I’ll need to take a more thorough gander at your injuries,” she told the caravaneer. “But before that, tell me: How long has it been since you had something to drink?”
When she was ready to take a closer look, she turned to Camellia. “Go tell the watch captain what’s happened. He'll need to send a well-armed crew to investigate the canyon. He'd better telegram the next outpost and tell them to send some of their folks out there, too.”
Camellia nodded. Inez stopped her before she could run off. “And until this is settled, I don’t want you going anywhere near that road, even if you do have an escort. Stay in town.”