"Whoa, hey!" Dorian threw himself forward and slid on his knees over the shining white floor, but he was too late to prevent Zahi from hitting the floor. His eyes wide in alarm, he crawled over the regal desert prince and pressed a hand to the side of his throat, his own heart slamming in his chest. "Zahi," he breathed. He had known the wound was bad, but Zahi had been walking, coherent and thoughtful -- nothing that would have indicated he was so near death. Damn these heroic men!

The nurses flurried around him, and Dorian scooted and stumbled away to let them do their work. While the nurses touched their patient precisely and recited life signs to one another, Dorian carefully approached the horse, a hand held out in peace.

"Good girl," he said in a low, kind voice, keeping his gaze on the horse's long-lashed brown eyes. "Anat, isn't it? There you are, Anat, it's all right. Good old Zahi will be just fine, you'll see." He laid a gentle hand on Anat's face, while a stretcher was brought in and Zahi was cradled onto it. Within moments the prince was being wheeled away by running sneakers and a blur of blue scrubs. "Ssaa, ssaa," Dorian sighed, stroking Anat's muzzle, his back to the hallway, imitating what he'd seen Zahi do. "He called you a child of the djinn, Anat." He ran his hand along her nose, and he watched her eyes for signs of intelligence. "I wonder if that's true. I could tell you a world of stranger things I've seen."

Motion caught the corner of his eye, and he whistled and clucked at a little boy who had crawled out of bed and was creeping toward the open door in the wall. "Hey, hey, back to bed," he commanded in Japanese. "Ah, you!" He pointed to a slightly older and much more intelligent-looking girl in the next bed. He read the front of a card on her side table. "Sakura. Please take charge of the door. Let no one get close to it. No one," he peered around the room, pointing an accusing finger at each of them, "is to go anywhere near that door. If anyone goes near that door, I won't tell you the ultra-secret password. Now. What should you never do?" The children resounded -- "Never go near the door!" -- and Dorian smiled and nodded, and he clucked at Anat and led her, if she would allow it, into the hallway.

The chaos had gone down the corridor with Zahi, so now there was only the ambient beeping and low murmurs of a quietly efficient hospital. "Dorian!" a head nurse called, wide-eyed and amused. "A horse this time? What've you done now?"

"Could you tell surgery I'll be in the shower room?" he asked sheepishly. He had not failed to notice the trail of sand and flakes of blood that Anat was leaving in her wake. He stroked the horse's muzzle again and whispered to Anat. "How would you feel about getting a bit cleaned up, yeah? Zahi will be scrubbed shiny by now, himself, and your ears are full of sand." He made a sour face as he noticed this latter fact, and he guided her farther, into a wide and expansive tiled room with drains in the floor and all manner of running water.

He washed the dry blood from her flank with a damp cloth and a scrub brush, as thoroughly as she would allow, and he combed her mane and scrubbed her hooves and beat out her saddle blanket, sometimes waving with a friendly smile at the towel-waisted men that gave him passing odd looks.

By the time he was finished, a nurse popped his head in to announce Zahi was out of surgery. With an encouraging smile, Dorian led Anat out of the shower room and back down the hall to see her master.