They found Rede in a treatment chamber just finishing setting a soldier’s broken arm, because life went on in the fort. The majority of its denizens remained unaffected by the bruising fever except by fear, thank the gods, and why? The pattern of those who hadn’t contracted it was as mysterious as that of those who had.
Rede sent the soldier off with his arm in a sling and instructions to rest, and turned to his new callers. His tired face lit when Pen introduced Learned Dubro and explained why and how he’d come.
“I’ve just acquainted him with his medical duties. I’ll leave you to get him settled in. He’s had a long ride today, with a pretty abrupt tutorial at the end, and hasn’t had dinner yet.” He eyed Rede. “Have you had a break?”
Rede stared blankly, as if Pen had spoken in Darthacan. After a moment he offered, “Funerals. I went to some.”
“So no, I see. I have to run down to Tyno.” Literally, if he wanted to be back before darkness fell. “Then Vilnoc.” For the best result, he should be visiting each patient more than once a day. Maybe Dubro could make the difference?
“Any more cases down there?”
“I’ll find out soon. Learned Dubro has some interesting stories to tell. And he should hear all you’ve learned about this disease he’ll be helping treat. I’ll see you both when I get back.” Pen strode out, waving without turning around.
* * *
Penric returned to the fort from Vilnoc long after dark, to find Rede and Dubro talking earnestly in the lamplight of Rede’s writing cabinet.
“Oh, good, you’re back.” Rede seemed to greet Pen’s every return with relief, as if in fear Pen might abscond somewhere, or more likely be abducted and held prisoner by the Mother’s Order. Pen imagined Tolga had thought about it. “What’s new to report?”
Pen swallowed his last bite of probably-ox jerky—it had lasted his whole ride—and answered, “Three new cases in the village. One in town. No one else died this afternoon. Although a couple of people at the Order are in a bad way. I’d like to see them twice tomorrow if I can.” Actually, he’d like to see them three times, or maybe four. More than four treatments in a day, he’d discovered in his prior career, were in general too much for the patient to absorb, and so the effort was wasted. Three or four were ideal, but he wasn’t going to be able to do that many, so there was no use brooding about it. Or rather, it had been out of the question before Dubro’s arrival. Pen’s arithmetic might be about to improve. He smiled at the other sorcerer in much the hungry way that Rede and Tolga smiled at him. Dubro smiled back in uncertainty.
Pen’s eye fell upon an unexpectedly familiar slim codex open on Rede’s table between the two men. It was Pen’s own translation into Adriac of Learned Ruchia’s primer on the basics of sorcery, printed three years ago in Lodi by the archdivine’s press. “Oh! However did you come by that?”
“Ah, so you did write it?” said Dubro. “I thought you must be the same man, but then I thought you were too young. It was sent to me last year by a friend in the Trigonie Temple.”
“You read Adriac, then?” Pen asked, pleased.
Dubro shook his head in regret. “No. Our town divine reads a little, and helped me go over it, but I don’t really think he understood the sorcery parts.”
“Which would be… pretty much all of it, oh dear.”
“Even so, I could see it was clearer and plainer than some of what I’d been taught when I first got Maska.” Dubro tapped the open page.
“Yes, Learned Ruchia was very good. It was the first volume that ever fell into my hands about my craft, and still the best, so I was lucky.”
Dubro frowned. “She still lives on in your head, doesn’t she?”
“Her imprint, yes, that was very helpful, too. Although she can get tart with me when I’m slow. When I first ran across her book back in Martensbridge, written in our native Wealdean, it only existed in a few manuscript copies, horrifyingly rare and vulnerable. One of my first tasks as a young divine was to transcribe it for printing. Oh, making printing plates by sorcery—I’ll wager that’s another skill I could teach you. Although not this week.”
“Ho, I saw that in the codicil.”
“Yes, that part I really did write. Since I made up the technique.”
Intent, Rede asked, “Is it true there’s supposed to be a second volume about medical sorcery?”
“Yes!” said Pen happily. “I finally finished making all the wooden plates and shipped them off to the archdivine of Adria last fall. The book is three times as thick as this one, in both senses, so it took a while. Completing Volume Two for him was part of the bargain I’d struck for releasing me to the service of Orbas, when I moved here. I very much wanted to finish it anyway, so it was an easy promise to make. They’re supposed to send me copies soon. I hope.”
“I see.”
“Do you read Adriac?” Pen inquired in hope.
“Ah, not well. I have better Roknari—army men tend to learn the languages of their enemies. But there is not likely to be a work on medical sorcery in that tongue.”
“You’d be surprised what gets handed around in secret. But no, the Roknari writings I’ve read on sorcery were odd and obscure, by Ruchia’s strict standards. Partly to hide what they were writing, which… rather defeats the purpose of writing, partly I think because their understanding was distorted by Quadrene theological teachings.” Pen could go on at length on the topic, but now was not the time.
Dubro said tentatively, “But will there ever be a translation to Cedonian? That I could read, maybe?”
Pen gave a vigorous nod. “I’ve been working on one under the patronage of Duke Jurgo. Revising as I go, since every time I’ve translated it, it seems I’ve learned more. It keeps getting longer, so, slower.”
You’re going to have to put your name on it as a co-writer, if this keeps up, said Des, smug. Or was that Ruchia? Someone in his head was pleased with his progress, anyway. After the Wealdean, the Darthacan, and the Adriac translations, Des usually just complained about the tedium of sitting through it all again.
“How many times have you translated it?” asked Dubro, staring at him.
“Uh, four? Counting the Wealdean in as one. Four and a half with the Ibran, but that was interrupted before I’d got very far. I want to get back to it someday.”
“I’d like to see that second volume in Cedonian,” said Rede.
“I’d love to have you do so. The first draft needs checking by someone well-up in current Cedonian medical usage. Before I recopy it for the printing plates. I’m hoping to be able to use metal plates for Jurgo’s edition—I’m working with his court printer on that. More durable than wood, able to make many more copies before wearing out.”
Rede and Pen gazed at each other in a moment of mutual rapacity, before Rede sighed and said, “After this is over.”
“Aye.” Pen stretched, preparatory to the effort of standing. Up. Again.
Rede fingered the volume, a thoughtful look on his features, then gently closed it. “This could be quite important. Instead of sharing your knowledge with one apprentice at a time, you might reach hundreds. Perhaps people you’ll never even meet.”
“That’s my hope, anyway. Why I crouch over my writing table for months on end.”
Fibster, murmured Des. You love your writing table.
More than he loved this nightmare in which he was presently embedded, to be sure. But maybe, now, not alone? “Ready for another trial in the sick-chambers?” he asked Dubro.
Dubro gulped, ducked his head in assent, and followed him to his feet.
Rede went along to watch them work their way through the next chamber full of men. Frustrating for him, since there was nothing for normal human eyes to see but a mismatched pair of Temple-men kneeling by cots, moving their hands a bit and conversing in low tones. Dubro and his dog perceived much more. The rural divine might have come late in life to being a lettered man, but Pen doubted he’d ever been a dull one.
By the time Pen
led back to the kitchens for the midnight slaughter, he was hoping he might leave Dubro to work unsupervised as early as tomorrow afternoon. Which was insanely faster than any normal tutorial, but this wasn’t a normal situation. The Trigonie saint seemed to have judged the supplicant sorcerer’s strength of character correctly, back at his beginning.
Or her Master did, said Des.
Let’s pray so.
* * *
Penric didn’t know whether it was the former disciplines as a soldier or as a farmer that had fitted Dubro for his new challenge. Both involved relentless routines dutifully carried out, daily without a break, the latter even more than the former. Keeping animals and plants alive and healthy, not to mention children, year in and year out, was certainly a more complex task than garrison guard.
Howsoever Dubro had been prepared, by noon the next day Pen thought him ready to try a roster of patients under Rede’s eye, including the fellows who had recently resisted Pen’s sorcery. To Pen’s dark amusement, Dubro’s local origins and reassuring age, grandfather laced with sergeant, seemed to overbear the soldiers’ prior superstitious fears, although the fact that they were growing sicker and less able to object doubtless played in.
The young demon Maska was a keener concern, but his inherited canine loyalty to his—evidently once equally loving—master granted an edge over his underlying chaotic demon-nature. The skill Pen taught was an advanced technique, but it was only the one, and by the time anyone had repeated a task that often, that close in succession, growing adept was almost an inevitability. Demons, Pen knew too well, tended to become bored and cranky with repetition, but there appeared to be no end to the number of times a dog delighted in fetching a stick.
Pen watched until he felt confident he could let the pair get on with it, then cantered off to Tyno and Vilnoc and his other two rosters of patients for the first, but not the only, ha, visit of the day.
Meanwhile, Pen had a demon nearer than Maska to concern him. By the time he rode back from Vilnoc, where in his relief and hope he’d poured all the uphill magic he could muster into Tolga’s now-ten patients, following directly from Tyno’s now-seventeen, Pen’s tunic was dank with sweat and Des was mute, brimming with unshed chaos. And it wasn’t the good sort of silence from her.
Pen diverted his horse around the fort’s downwind side to the slope where its abattoir was situated. The small building had its own aqueduct branch running into it, used in keeping the pavement rinsed in its dismembering courtyard, but the initial killing, skinning, and quartering of the large animals was done in a yard outside, cluttered with hoists, cranes, chutes and carts. The reek that rose from it was intense, and Pen’s horse snorted and shied.
Pen had participated in butchery in his own rural youth, on the farm at Jurald Court and on hunts, but the cantons were much colder than Orbas. This was a rare moment for Pen to appreciate that. The fort butchers wasted very little of their animals, but the residue of offal raked off to the side still made an unsavory daily banquet for crows, ravens, stray dogs, and flies. Pen decanted a splash of chaos upon the flies on his way in, like a libation spilled from an overflowing drinking vessel, but it wasn’t going to be enough.
A small shrine to the Son of Autumn was set up at the side of the killing yard, in mindful gratitude for His creatures sacrificed here. The sergeant in charge no doubt led his men in a brief prayer before it as they commenced each day’s work, mitigating the unavoidable brutality. As a usually unthinking beneficiary of their labors, Pen was heartened at the vision.
He sought out the workmen, finding them inside with a lot of very sharp tools turning an ex-ox into cutlets. Sergeant Jasenik proved a stringy old buzzard, an Orban army veteran cut from the same cloth as the fort cook Burae. Since a couple of his own men had come down with the bruising fever and passed into Pen’s care, his anxious interest in their fates overcame whatever fears of sorcery he might have harbored. The rumors of Pen’s activities in the fort hospice and kitchen had already come to his ears, if garbled, so Pen’s explanations didn’t have to start from scratch, quite. Pen went into more detail about how he’d used to work with that butcher in Martensbridge, which set up a strange sort of professional camaraderie between them, or at least made Jasenik decide Pen wasn’t just a typical town-bred fool.
“We do most of our killing in the morning,” the sergeant told Pen, to no surprise. “But there’s one pig still left today.”
“That would certainly do. I can only handle one large animal at a time.”
“Ho. We’re the same, so maybe we can match up all right.”
He rounded up four of his men and led them back outside, where a surly hog waited in an enclosure. Their prayer at their shrine was more perfunctory than Pen had fondly imagined, though they seemed to appreciate him adding his own official-Temple-divine blessing. The hog did not cooperate with its doom, but after a practiced tussle the crew had it hoisted for killing.
Which Pen quietly accomplished. The screeching sensation along his nerves from the overload of chaos died away along with the animal’s squeals.
Oh, wheezed Des in a profound relief that Pen frankly shared.
Everyone stepped back in surprise at the unaccustomed silence. “Is that… all right…?” asked one man.
“It died without pain,” Pen promised him.
They accepted this in a hesitant sort of faith. Although they stood a little farther from him, after.
All right was a broader question, theologically speaking. Domesticated animals were considered to shelter under the cloak of the Son of Autumn, not a part of the Bastard’s motley collection of vermin, so Pen was encroaching a trifle on another god’s territory, here. More critical was the sheer size of the victim. Killing large animals wasn’t just a little like using magic to kill a human would be; it was exactly like it. Knowing not just in theory, but in repeated practice, precisely how easily he could do it was always an uncomfortable piece of self-awareness for Pen to confront.
But only the once, said Des. Then the white god would seize me back through your target’s death.
You and I both know that’s not invariably true. The exceptions in medical sorcery were fraught indeed, and Pen wished he only knew them in theory.
Be that as it may. He would set aside all the chickens in the kitchens for Dubro and Maska, and keep the visits to the abattoir and its ambiguities to himself. And not from greed. Breaking a promising young demon that might serve the Temple for generations yet, here at its very outset, would be a huge, if wholly invisible, loss to that future.
Speaking of his other charges, it was past time to go check on them. Pen thanked Jasenik and his now-wary men, made arrangements for tomorrow, collected his horse, and hurried back up to the fort.
* * *
Penric’s evening was brightened by the receipt of a note from Nikys, gingerly handed to him by one of Adelis’s clerks. Eager and anxious, he carried it out into the last light of the hospice courtyard and tore it open. It was all benign domestic news, nothing unexpected or worrisome, and his heartbeat slowed to calm as he read it and read it again. Nikys had a nice turn of phrase when describing Florina’s infant tricks.
“All’s well, then,” he muttered to Des. Nikys hadn’t added Wish you were here, but maybe Pen was wishing that hard enough for both of them.
Yes, observed Des, reading as usual over his shoulder, or through his eyes. Nothing in it to distract you from your duties, to be sure. It’s what good wives do.
Pen hesitated. Does it seem too cheerful? Do you think she’s leaving out anything?
Mm, probably. I suppose if anything truly dire occurred, she would ask you for help. But, you know, army widow. Their notions of an emergency are not trivial. She’ll be keeping her fears to herself.
Pen wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or distressed.
I expect she’d prefer grateful.
“I suppose…” He wanted to be his wife’s buttress and confidant, not someone she thought she had to coddle or tipto
e around.
Pen tucked the note in his sash. With luck, he’d get a moment tonight to dash off a reply. He wanted to tell her about Dubro, among other things. He tried not to think too much about his unfinished Cedonian translation of Ruchia’s second volume, which he’d left scattered in bits all over his study, in an order understood only by him. He should remind Nikys to restrain Lin from attempting to tidy them up.
Meanwhile, it was time for another pass through the sick-chambers. He’d tightened the interval between rounds by curtailing the prayers to a tap to his lips for his god and the bedside manner to a tap for the magic. The parts he could not reduce were on the other end, the travel between fort and village and town, and the running back and forth from hospice to kitchen to wherever to find poor creatures to kill. He hoped the abattoir would improve his efficiency, if Des could bear the larger loads of disorder between visits.
Urgh, from Des. As a rule demons relished chaos, but she was not enjoying this version any more than he was.
* * *
The next few days and nights blurred together without much distinction, except, while Dubro treated the lesser cases over and over, Pen was able to hit Vilnoc twice a day, Tyno three times, and the worse-off men in the fort sometimes four. Between one visit and the next, and more between one day and the next, Pen could see his labors having an effect, not just delaying but pushing back the fever and bruising and pain. It felt like the difference between watching dry mountain grass roots stubbornly survive the winter, and eager bean sprouts break ground in the spring.
The abattoir remained useful and its crew helpful, although after that big-eyed, tame, and unusually friendly calf, which had nudged Pen’s hand as if looking for its mother’s milk, Pen remembered why he’d gone off eating meat for a while in Martensbridge.
The Physicians of Vilnoc Page 10
