Comatose: The Book of Maladies

by D. K. Holmberg

  There was nothing they would be able to do to save him.

  “Alec?” When he didn’t answer, Bastan grabbed him by the arm. “Physicker Stross.”

  Alec shook himself. “The tail. That’s where the poison is.”

  “The tail?” Bastan asked, looking over at the eel.

  Alec nodded. “The bite isn’t contaminated. Look at it. The skin is macerated, but it would be painful, nothing else. Certainly not enough to kill him.” And not an arm wound, not like that. There were plenty of animals whose bite wounds could kill someone, but one like this would only maim a person. “But look at where the tail punctured him.”

  Bastan turned his attention to the belly wound, and his eyes widened as he stared at the blackening around the wound that continued to spread. “That?”

  “Look at the tail, Bastan,” Alec said.

  “It’s spiked.”

  “Barbed. I know of other animals with barbed tails, some poisonous, some not. The first bite clearly had no effect, and there is no sign of poison at the site. The second time, the eel nearly chewed through his arm, but no blackening, like where the tail impaled his abdomen. It’s whatever the eel has in its tail. That’s the key.”

  “You don’t have to seem so excited about it,” Orbal said, leaning over Tanis.

  Alec shook his head. “I’m not excited. Please don’t think that I am. If there were anything we could do to help him—”

  “Then you need to do it,” Bastan said.

  “Bastan, there’s nothing I can do—”

  “Nothing? I seem to recall a specific technique you and Samara have. We are here for all of us. Now, do you have that capacity to help him or not?”

  Alec breathed out. He shouldn’t resist, especially since Bastan was right, and they were here for both him and for Bastan. He could help, couldn’t he?

  “I need to have some privacy,” he whispered.

  “Where? We’re in the middle of a swamp.”

  His gaze drifted to the captain and then to Orbal.

  Bastan chuckled. “They won’t say anything. They work for me.”

  “Are you sure that’s enough?”

  “Are you sure I won’t push you into the swamp?”

  “You won’t do that.”

  “If you don’t even try to help this man, I certainly will.”

  The threat in his tone was crystal clear.

  Alec patted his pocket, feeling for the easar paper. He had only a scrap with him, not much, but enough that he thought he could provide some help. Hopefully, the vial of both his and Sam’s blood was fresh enough and hadn’t fully dried up.

  There were steps he took to ensure it didn’t, but they only lasted so long. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked for something he could use to write, but there was nothing. He couldn’t ask Bastan or the captain for fear of bringing attention to what he was doing.

  That left only his finger.

  It took more of the paper when he used his finger as he couldn’t write nearly as tightly as he would otherwise, but Bastan was right. He needed to do something to help Tanis.

  And in this instance, he knew exactly what had happened, which meant he should be able to counter the effect.

  Puncture wound to the abdomen. Poisoned with eel venom. Rapid onset of necrosis. Concentrated bardl leaves, hyph oil, and verr would help counteract the necrosis.

  Alec frowned. That would only counteract the necrosis, but what could he do to counteract the venom?

  Antivenom needed to counteract the effect of the eel toxicity. Maceration to the arm should be sutured.

  He added the last quickly, knowing that it mattered not nearly as much, but he felt better doing so. Alec waited, and when a slow wash of cold went over him, he was hopeful that he had been successful.

  He capped the vial of blood and put it, along with the easar paper, back into his pocket. Then he approached Tanis, looking to see if anything had changed for him.

  “If it’s going to work, we should see an effect soon.”

  Bastan nodded at him and continued to hold Tanis’s hand.

  As Alec stared at the man’s stomach, the black lines of necrosis began to fade. At least that much had been effective. That was more straightforward, using a combination of medicines that he knew could work on necrosis. The other part was less certain. He didn’t know whether there was an eel antivenom or not. He assumed there was—at least, he assumed there must be, considering what Ryn used—but he hoped the magic of the easar paper didn’t rely upon that.

  Long moments passed before Tanis took a gasping breath.

  “What happened?” Tanis asked, turning to look at Bastan.

  Bastan grunted and released his hand. “Nothing more than you got bit again.”

  “Again? I always knew I was tasty, but this is a little ridiculous. Where?”

  Bastan nodded toward Tanis’s arm. “Your arm,” Bastan said.

  Tanis held his arm up, but the wound had healed, leaving nothing more than a long scar. Tanis frowned at it. “How…”

  Bastan looked up at Alec, and Alec realized he had made a mistake. He shouldn’t have attempted to restore Tanis’s arm along with everything else. The injury was deep, but it would have healed over time. It would have invited fewer questions had he simply left it.

  “Maybe you weren’t bit nearly as bad as I thought,” Bastan said.

  Tanis grunted, and he shivered. “I feel… I feel like I just got in a fight.”

  “Be thankful that’s all you feel,” Bastan said.

  “What are we going to do with this?” Orbal asked.

  Alec shook himself, remembering the eel remained pinned to the deck. It continued to thrash against the spear, its tail flailing as it tried to strike anything.

  “We need the tail,” Alec said.

  “How much of the tale?” Bastan asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe all of it.”

  Bastan stood and unsheathed his sword, and in one fluid movement, he sliced the head of the eel clean off.

  The thrashing continued for a moment more before all movement stopped.

  “Now, Physicker Stross, let’s see how much your father has taught you.”

  19

  Dissection

  It was strange sitting in the apothecary without his father. Even stranger still was the knowledge that his father wouldn’t be able to return unless Alec was successful with finding a cure. Usually, his father was the one who would be responsible for finding the cure. Now, it was all up to Alec.

  A single lantern glowed on the table, giving a flickering light. He sat alone in the shop, the stench from the eel cloying in his nostrils. He picked at the flayed-open body, searching for a gland that might contain the venom. He worked carefully, the surgical skills that he had acquired with Master Eckerd coming into play. What would Master Eckerd have thought had he known that Alec would use these skills in this way?

  He probably wouldn’t have said anything. It had been weeks since he’d had any sort of conversation with Master Eckerd, even longer since he’d had a chance to spend time with him in the surgical suite. Now that he was a full physicker, would he even have those chances again?

  Did he even want to?

  Alec had some skill in surgery, but it wasn’t his passion. He much preferred thinking through and making the diagnosis and coming up with a treatment plan rather than cutting through flesh.

  The eel anatomy was interesting. A long, bony spine ran the entire length of its back, ending in the barb at the tail. That seemed to grow out of the spine, a part of it. Alec had carefully cut the barb free and found that it was hollow. He traced back from it, looking for where the venom would pulse out from.

  For a long time, he found nothing. Alec had to remove the entrails, discarding the intestine into a bucket that would need to be burned later. He wanted no evidence of the fact that he had dissected a canal eel within his father’s shop. He carefully extracted the spine also, wanting to have full access to the inside of the eel.
He identified the heart and the stomach, and was not surprised to find a few small fish partially digested within it.

  Where would the venom sack be?

  There was only one spongy section of tissue that Alec hadn’t identified. It was near the rear of the eel, but it wasn’t as spongy as what he would’ve expected for a fluid-filled sac.

  Working carefully, he cut into the spongy tissue.

  Yellowish fluid seeped out.

  Alec froze. That was it.

  How would he collect it?

  He cut the spongy tissue free and placed it in a shallow metal bowl. Somehow, he needed to extract all of the venom, at least as much as he could. He had been expecting a fluid-filled sac, but this was something else entirely.

  Alec worked carefully, squeezing out as much of the yellowish fluid as he could. He collected it in the bowl and then poured it into a metal canister. He chose not to use a glass canister, not wanting to risk the possibility that it might break.

  With that canister full and secure, he moved on to the next eel.

  They had captured five. After the fifth, Alec had told them he thought that would be enough. He wanted to allow for some margin of error, especially since he hadn’t been able to find the venom sac during his initial inspection on the barge, but that didn’t seem to be the issue any longer. It was a slow and tedious process, despite the fact that he now knew where to find the sac. Now all that was left was for him to test it.

  But what would he test it on?

  Alec didn’t have the experience his father had with experimentation, but he’d watched him a number of times over the years. He needed a test subject that he could try the venom on to ensure that it worked. When he did, then he could start looking for an anti-venom to counter it. He wasn’t sure what that would be, but the fact that he had been able to document it on the easar paper told him that an anti-venom existed.

  Alec stared at the pile of eel tails, or what was left of them after his dissection. But he hadn’t looked at the heads yet. Bastan had been nearly surgical with how he removed the heads, slicing them cleanly free, killing the eel quickly.

  He had only bothered to bring back a few of those. The rest had gone back into the water.

  Alec set one of the eel heads on a tray. Even in death, the black, beady eyes seemed to stare at him. There was something almost unnatural about these creatures. It had a terrifying-looking mouth. Using the knife, he pried it open as wide as he could. It had rows of razor-sharp teeth with two incisors that were long and pointed at the sides of the mouth.

  A drop of milky water dripped from one of the incisors.

  That was strange. The heads had dried out since retrieving them, so it couldn’t be from the canals.

  Unless… It wasn’t water.

  Could he have missed something? Alec had assumed that the yellowish substance he’d extracted from the spongy sac was the venom, and that still seemed likely, but maybe there was something else.

  He carved along the creature’s skull, carefully peeling back the flesh. On either side of the long fangs, he found two small sacs.

  Alec’s breath caught.

  Could he extract these?

  Doing so would be difficult, especially since he didn’t have the appropriate instruments. His father didn’t keep surgical instruments at the apothecary, since he wasn’t a surgeon. He slowly cut the flesh away, leaving only the sac attached to the fang. Once it was done, he tipped the head upside down over another shallow bowl and made a small puncture in it, just enough to let the fluid leak out into the bowl.

  It was milky, the same as what he had seen drip from the incisor.

  This was not likely to be the venom. Alec remained convinced that the venom was the yellowish fluid that he’d take from the other sac . That meant this was something else.

  But what could it be? What would its purpose be?

  He made delicate work of doing the same thing with the remaining eel heads that he had.

  When he was done, he sat back, staring at the bowl. He needed some way of experimenting with it, but on what?

  Maybe Bastan would have the answer.

  Alec grabbed the canister of the yellowish extract and stuffed it into his pocket. He then took bowl that held the small amount of milky fluid he’d collected from the tooth sacs and poured it into a smaller canister, covering it to ensure that the work he had done would not go to waste. He left the apothecary and made his way toward Caster. It was late, and Alec knew he should wait until morning to go for Bastan, but he needed answers now. He wanted to understand the purpose of these fluids. One was the venom—he was certain of that—but what was the other?

  Maybe it was nothing significant. Or maybe it was the key to understanding what had happened to his father and others. If he could understand the way the fluids from the eels were used, maybe he could finally figure out how to help these people recover.

  When he crossed over the canal leading to Caster, he got that feeling again that someone was watching him.

  Alec hurried forward. He didn’t like the sense of someone following him, certainly not here in a section of the city that he knew to be dangerous. He hurried forward and occasionally cast a look over his shoulder, but saw nothing.

  Alec hurried onward, keeping his hand over the jars in his pocket as he ran, racing toward Bastan’s tavern.

  When he turned a corner, there was an enormous man standing in front of him.

  For a moment, he thought it was someone who worked for Bastan, but it wasn’t anyone that Alec had seen before. Over the last few weeks, he’d been to Bastan’s tavern often enough that he recognized many of the people who worked for the man, and this wasn’t one of them.

  “Physicker,” the man said.

  “I think you have the wrong person,” Alec said.

  “Oh, I don’t think that I do.”

  “Can I help you?”

  The man grunted, and he lunged for Alec.

  He kicked, trying to get free, but the man was quick. He wasn’t a Theln, but he was similar in his massive size and speed, but there was something else—the strange, awful odor that Alec attributed to the Thelns.

  He hurriedly looked around him.

  There was no one else here. Had he made a mistake coming at so late at night? He knew he should he have waited.

  But then, he had been too eager. He wanted to share with Bastan—and have the opportunity to test—but now he would be captured.

  The man grabbed his cloak, and Alec tried to pull free, but he held on to it tightly.

  Alec spun, pulling his arms out of the cloak, keeping the jars in his hand as he did. With his arms freed, he raced forward.

  Two other individuals appeared at the other end of the street.

  Alec skidded to a stop.

  He couldn’t be captured, and even more important, he couldn’t be captured with the venoms. There may not be a way for him to get free, but there might be a way for him to ensure that he didn’t sacrifice everything they had worked for.

  It was possible for him to find more of the eels, but he feared he was running out of time.

  Alec lunged for the nearest alley.

  The figures chased him. The alley was long and dark, and there was no end to it. He would be trapped here.

  He hurried to the end of the alley and carefully set down the two jars. Then, he spun to face his attackers.

  The largest of them approached first. Alec should have taken more time to train with Sam. If he had, maybe he would been better able to evade them, and lose them in the streets, or maybe even if they did catch him, he would have been less injured.

  “What do you want?”

  “We are in need of a physicker,” the nearest man said.

  “There are plenty of physickers at the university.”

  “Ah, but we are not near the university. Besides, you are the physicker we need.”

  As the man approached, Alec understood. He had been targeted.

  But why?

  The man
grabbed him, wrapping him up. Alec didn’t even fight. There was no point in it. He cast one last look toward the wall where he’d set down the jars and hoped the natural darkness of the alley would conceal them. Somehow, he would have to get free and return to fetch them.

  As he was dragged away, his only thought was that he hoped Bastan had been keeping an eye on this part of the city as he claimed he did. He hoped Bastan had been watching over him as he watched over so many others. If he didn’t know and as a result sent no help, Alec wasn’t sure he would be able to escape.

  20

  Back to Caster

  Sam was exhausted when they returned to the city. There had been another way back, a looping path that led over higher ground, leaving the steam fields in the distance. Every so often, there would be a burst of steam nearby, and Sam jumped. She wasn’t the only one to do so. Marin’s Scribe had jumped just as often as she had, though the longer they went, the less he jumped. By the time they returned to the city, everyone had gone quiet, and Sam had abandoned attempts at using her magic the way Marin described. She wasn’t sure whether it would even work and had not been able to replicate the strange chill that had washed through her the one time she had managed. That seemed more a fluke than anything else.

  “Where are you going?” Elaine asked Sam. They entered the city through one of the southern sections, and it wasn’t one that Sam was all that familiar with, but from here, she knew she could make her way to more familiar parts of the city.

  “I think I’ve had just about enough of being around all of you,” Sam said.

  “We still need to return them to the palace.”

  “You mean you need to return them to the palace,” Sam said. “Or, more likely, you intend to take them to the prison.”

  Elaine held her gaze. “Now isn’t the time for this, Samara.”

  “You’re probably right, but considering that Marin isn’t able to escape, and that her Scribe doesn’t seem able to do anything more than walk, I think you’re okay.”