The green-sashed physician swayed out by the gate she’d entered. Pen and Rede still sat.
Watching her go, Rede asked, “Why are there so few Temple sorcerer-physicians?” His brows tightened in fresh mystification. “It’s becoming plain to me how valuable you can be. I’d think the Mother’s Order would be set on making as many more as possible.”
“And so it is, but candidates don’t grow on trees. Though they do have to be grown, even more slowly than trees.” Pen considered how best to explain this. “It takes at least one full generation, sometimes more, to tame a wild-caught demon to be fit for the task. Which is done by yoking it with a responsible Temple divine, one who can imprint or pass to it the necessary… knowledge of life, I suppose you could say, of living it well. And the recipient must be a strong-minded person, too, preferably already disciplined in the physician’s arts. Medical magics include some of the most powerful and subtle skills known. Handing that knowledge off to an innately chaotic demon that could ascend and run off with its possessor’s body is a very bad idea.”
Rede vented a thoughtful noise, taking this in.
Pen rubbed his stiff neck. “Many Temple demons are lost along the way, through time’s accidents. Some are taken back by the god. Some are spoiled by bad riders, or just unsuitable ones. Also, the transfer is tricky, since the candidate must be brought together with the old sorcerer exactly at their deathbed.” Or on a roadside… Pen had long wondered if his pivotal encounter with the dying Learned Ruchia and her demon had been as chance-met as it had seemed at the time, though it had certainly not been arranged by the Temple. “As you know, people seldom die to schedule.”
“So… why aren’t you working for the Mother? You could be brilliant. You could help so many!”
Pen smiled grimly. “Many turns out to be the problem. I did try my hand at the trade, back in Martensbridge. Des thinks the problem was that I was not well supervised, the Mother’s Order there being inexperienced with sorcerer-physicians.”
I think the problem was that the greedy gits ran you into the ground, grumped Des. And you refused to learn to say no, till the end.
“In any case, I found it was not my calling, so I declined at the last to take oath to the Mother’s Order.”
To put it mildly, said Des, shuddering.
“That seems impossible. It’s clearly your calling!”
“Many cases entailed many failures, especially as all the most difficult ones became funneled to me. Fine when I was credited with healing, not so when my losses outraged. You saved her, why not him? It grew wearing.”
Rede made a frustrated, negating gesture. “Every physician gets that.”
“To be blunt,” said Pen to his sandals, “when I tried to kill myself as the only way I could see to escape, I knew it was time to find another way to serve. Or Des did. I’m good at translations, you know.” Oh, gods, how had that admission escaped his teeth?
Because you are too cursed tired, Des opined. And because this one is a good physician. Remember how your patients used to confess to you?
“Sorry,” Pen choked.
Rede sat back, his arguments abruptly muzzled. “Ah,” he said after a moment. “That.”
He wasn’t baffled? Bless him.
Rede’s gaze lifted as if to count down the row of sick-chambers. His voice took on a new diffidence. “So… how are you holding up?”
“Oh,” said Pen. He straightened and waved a hasty hand. “That’s no longer a hazard for me. I had fewer attachments back then.” He’d still been reeling from the deaths of his mother and his beloved princess-archdivine in such close succession that year, Pen supposed at this calmer remove. His life in Orbas, his new family, held more hostages against him now, blocking that form of flight. He trusted he would not become so desperately pressed over this business that he’d come to resent that fact.
Past time to get off this subject. “How are your flea bites?”
“They itch.” Rede rubbed at his arm wrapping. “If anything else is going to happen, it’s likely too soon to know.” He glanced across at Pen. “Can you tell?”
“No. Which is either good or, as you say, too early. Let’s hope for the first, eh?”
“If I start turning purple, I’m not sure if I would be frightened or relieved. I want an answer, not this, this…” His fists clenched. “Any answer!”
“Only the true one, I daresay.”
“Well, yes.” He scowled across at the patient chambers, and his voice fell. “…What do we do if it doesn’t stop coming?”
Pen chose to take that as a rhetorical remark, because the answer, Then we don’t stop, either, was too appalling to voice. But Rede had the right of it. As long as they didn’t know how this disease was getting around so randomly, they were fighting blind. Pen needed an Adelis-brain, all tactical.
Except not actually Adelis’s, said Des, because the man is useless in the sickroom.
Howsoever. Pen grunted to his feet. “Maybe I’ll find some new clue in town tonight.”
“You will come back,” said Rede. Question, or demand? Or fear…
“It depends on what I find there. If this thing is loose in Vilnoc, my priorities could change.”
“Physicians can’t choose their patients.”
“Unethical, yes, I know. Between Amberein and Helvia and me, I’ve had the training three times. But I’ve never taken the oath to the Mother’s Order, and I’ve never been sorry. Apologetic, maybe, but that isn’t the same.” The white god’s more, ah, fluid approach to bestowing tasks upon Pen and his resident demon suited him better, despite its occasional seeming-lunacy.
…But was this one of them? He was ironically betrayed, if so.
Rede’s mouth opened, and shut, on some further protest. “Let’s hope you can learn something new in Vilnoc, then.”
“Aye.”
* * *
It was almost sunset by the time Pen rode the army plodder he’d been lent through Vilnoc’s western gate. The main chapterhouse and hospice of the Mother’s Order lay at the opposite end of town, and he looked around as he threaded his way through the winding streets. Nothing seemed amiss, residents drawing in to their homes for the night in the usual rhythm. He passed the corner of his own street, and shuddered with longing to be one of those contented residents. No.
The main marketplace was almost deserted, the last few vendors giving up and taking in their wares, apart from a few horses and mules tethered for the night at the far end devoted to livestock sales, heads down munching desultorily at a wispy drift of hay. One nickered in curiosity at Pen’s horse, who returned the greeting. Competing for their fodder, their unsuccessful owner was setting up his bedroll on a hay pile, ready to try again in the morning. A couple of other men camped to guard their more bulky goods, such as the large stack of ceramic storage jars.
Around a few more corners and small squares, up a slope, and the Mother’s Order hove into Pen’s view. The Vilnoc chapterhouse was an old merchant’s mansion bequeathed in someone’s will a generation ago, and its hospice the former warehouse, gradually refitted to its new purpose. Penric had not been inside before, his own household having no need to call on its services.
At the gate, he found the porter just raising the oil lantern that would burn all night over the open doorway. He recognized and respectfully saluted Pen’s vestments—new-laundered, but more frayed with every day of this crisis, like their wearer—took charge of Pen’s horse, and directed him on to Master Tolga’s lair.
He found the Mother’s physician in a writing cabinet she shared with several others of her Order, most of them evidently gone home for the night or to dinner—Pen’s dinner had been a handful of bread and meat jerky eaten while riding in. She rose at once when he knocked on the door jamb.
“Ah! Learned! You did come!”
“I said I would.”
She shrugged. “Things happen.”
“Aye. Have any more things happened here?”
“Unfortunate
ly, yes. Another feverish girl—I’ll take you to see her, too, if you would be so kind.”
“As long as I’m here.”
She nodded and led him out onto her second-floor gallery, down, and through an archway to the former warehouse turned holy hospice. It was laid out as another colonnaded rectangle around a central court, its own well dug new and deep; just the one level, as the old merchants would not have wanted to hoist their goods up and down stairs. The big gate at the end that could admit wagons was now closed and barred. The chapterhouse’s front door would remain open at all times, mark of the Order’s vow to turn no one away. This resulted, naturally, in the hospice filling up with the indigent sick and injured, such that anyone who could afford it preferred to engage a physician privately to visit them at home.
Every cot in the sick-chamber was occupied by more routine residents, although the bed of Pen’s prospective patient was shoved a little aside. A small barred window, pierced through the far wall as part of the conversion, let in air and, now, dusk. A dedicat lit an oil lantern hanging from a central hook, and Tolga took up a candle in a glass vase, holding it above the cot. Pen didn’t bother to tell her he didn’t need it to see his work, because the fellow laid out, feverish and restless, needed to see him.
A quick examination by sight and Sight told Pen that Tolga had not misdiagnosed; the tell-tale mottled flush in the man’s hands and feet was starting. Luckily, he wasn’t so far along that he couldn’t speak or answer questions. Struggling to prop his shoulders up against the headboard, he regarded Pen with fever-blurred curiosity.
The fellow turned out to be a merchant’s clerk from Trigonie, sailed into the port ten days ago with a load of mixed goods. He’d not been outside of Vilnoc’s walls since, and his sickness was too recent for him to be suspected as any sort of source; he must have contracted it after he’d arrived. His master had brought him here, not unreasonably preferring not to share his inn room with a deathly ill retainer, but paying in advance for his care, good man. So, not indigent, merely very far from home and unhappy about it. The clerk’s work had kept him mostly around the harbor, but he had walked all about the town to see it in his off hours.
As usual, he’d never met a sorcerer before. Though his expression betrayed bewilderment, he accepted Pen’s prayers and magic, again explained merely as a help against fever, like some sort of spiritual willow-bark decoction. Pen finished with a few reassuring platitudes about the excellence of the Mother’s Order in Vilnoc, which gratified both of his listeners and wasn’t untrue. Pen did not promise he’d come back.
“Well,” said Pen to Tolga, rising and shaking out the knees of his trousers. “Let’s see your other suspect.”
She guided him around to a chamber devoted to women.
The girl in the cot there, a servant much like Lin from a house in town, was very feverish and distraught. The fever had been the familiar sudden fierce onslaught. The distraction was from being turned out onto the street and told to make her own way to the hospice; summarily discharged, Pen gathered, more to save her employer the expense of her illness than to protect the rest of the family from infection. He bit back a scowl at this. She had not been outside the town walls in months, despite running errands hither and thither within them—she could not remember all the places, although the list she did give him was maddeningly long, and did not include the port.
Pen summoned all his charm for her, and also as much uphill magic as he could force her body to accept. For whichever cause, she was weakly smiling when he left. This was an early case; if he could come back for more treatments, her prognosis should be good.
Pen had hoped the new examples might offer him some clarity, but they only increased the fog. Also his worry for Nikys, but he didn’t need to discuss that here. “Let’s go talk somewhere,” he told Tolga.
They settled on a bench by the well in the darkening courtyard, the flickering candle-vase between them.
“Was she another of the same sickness?” Tolga asked.
“Yes. Well-spotted. You should see the flushing in her extremities by tomorrow, unless my early treatment helps push it back.”
Tolga nodded in a mix of satisfaction and frustration. “Exactly how is that working?”
“Have you dealt with a sorcerer-physician before?”
“Once, some years ago in the winter capital, but briefly, and I can’t say as I understood what she was doing.”
So, not quite as untutored as young Rede, but almost. Pen ran down the same account of the limitations and uses of his uphill magic that he’d given to the army physician, which made her frown, though not, Pen thought, from lack of understanding.
A burly male dedicat came out to draw up a couple of buckets of well water, by a clever foot-wheel mechanism which Pen would have been glad to examine. If he ever again had time.
“Do you think we can expect more of these fevered?” asked Tolga bluntly when the creaking died away.
“I truly don’t know, because I still have no idea how the accursed thing is getting around,” said Pen. “If it follows the same pattern as in the fort and Tyno, then yes.” A sprinkling, and then more, and then…
“Can you stay?”
“Of course not.”
“…Can you come back?”
“I don’t know. There seem to be more sick out at the fort every time I turn around.” And adding in a couple of hours of travel, even if he visited the Order only once a day, would put Pen further behind schedule for all the sick he already owned. At what point would his treatments, already slipping from optimum to minimum, become so attenuated as to be useless?
Anything to add, Des? His demon had been oddly silent, not even offering tart quips. Observations, memories?
Nothing helpful. Carry on.
Was she growing as wearied as he was? He’d been using her hard, and more continuously than ever before. He knew better than most that powerful was not the same thing as invulnerable.
Pen continued to Tolga, “Send a message to the fort describing them if you get new cases, though. I especially want to know where people have been, what they were doing, before they contracted this.” He huffed a breath. “Although I know quite a lot already, and it’s not helping.”
Tolga let him go with great reluctance, although she could hardly kidnap him. He could tell she was tempted, though. He didn’t tell her exactly how she might accomplish it.
He remounted his horse outside the chapterhouse’s door and turned its head toward Vilnoc’s western gate. He must write to Nikys again tonight, he decided, warning her of these new developments in town without the distortions of marketplace rumor. He’d fumigated his first note to her the other day with burning sage before he’d sent it off, but he wasn’t sure that the smoke had done anything other than make the paper smell odd.
He passed his own street again with a pang. The scholar’s life he had achieved with such trouble—the wife, the child, the peaceful study, the cat, the well-run modest household—could all be lost to him, he’d always known, any time he rode out for the duke or the archdivine, by some misadventure happening to him. He’d never pictured his refuge being stolen away from him while his back was turned, but his well-stocked imagination now supplied him with several versions of just how that could occur.
And it was not just his own immediate family at risk. Rybi and her son at the orphanage, Lencia and Seuka and the other young dedicats at his own Order’s chapterhouse, all his other Temple friends there and at the curia of the archdivine, right up through Duke Jurgo’s own household—in a mere three years of residence, how had he acquired such a huge array of friends vulnerable to fate in Orbas? And Adelis, well, Adelis was always at hazard by his choice of trade, but this was not any hero’s death he might have imagined for himself.
Pen rode out to the fort road slowly—he could see in the dark, his horse could not—and did not turn aside.
* * *
The next three days passed in an increasing blur for Pen. He looped back
and forth from the hospice to the kitchens, to Tyno, to the kitchens again, and a daily ride into town which qualified as his sole break. There, Tolga had acquired five more fevered people, none with any relation to another that Pen could determine. If there were more sick tucked away privately in their own houses, they’d not yet been brought to Pen’s attention, and he wasn’t going to go looking for them.
Arriving back from the most recent of these evening excursions to Vilnoc, he encountered Rede having an equally late dinner in the staff mess. Pen thought he recognized the dead-rabbit bits in the cooling hash Rede was shoving around absently with his fork. The page of scratchy notes Rede was studying was new.
Pen thunked down opposite him and tried to work up more enthusiasm for his own meal. He was hungry enough; just tired.
“Any more men arrive sick while I was in town?” Pen asked.
“Yes, two. But I moved one more man to the convalescent chamber, so he’s off your list.”
Two steps backward, one forward? It was still a march in the wrong direction. “What do you have there?”
“A roster of the sick, and when they arrived, stripped down to just days and numbers. Including Tyno and Vilnoc. There is something odd about the way they are progressing. It feels strange to say it, but they aren’t coming fast enough.”
Pen rubbed his neck. “Have you run mad? Any more, and I’ll be overwhelmed.” If he wasn’t already.
Rede waved his worksheet in impatience. “It’s just that if people were giving it directly to each other, cases should be doubling and redoubling, because that’s what contagions do. But after the initial burst, it’s settled in to a steady supply. Increasing, yes, I’m afraid so, but not… not in that way.”
“I can hardly be sorry, I suppose.”
“Yes, but d’you see, this suggests… I’m not sure what. That everyone is getting it from the same source?”
“In the fort, and Tyno, and Vilnoc, and that border town a hundred miles west?” The first three, maybe, but surely not the last. Pen glanced at Rede’s left arm, where the flea bites were almost healed. “But not from rat fleas, apparently.”
The Physicians of Vilnoc Page 8