New Decameron Fifty-Two: Lois McMaster Bujold (Patreon)

THE PHYSICIANS OF VILNOC

A Penric & Desdemona novella

In the World of the Five Gods

Lois McMaster Bujold

2020

dedication

For all the practitioners through the long, long history of medicine who tried the wildest experiments, often failed, sometimes succeeded, and helped make our world.

"The gods have no hands in this world but ours. If we fail Them, where then can They turn?"

— Ingrey kin Wolfcliff, The Hallowed Hunt

The Physicians of Vilnoc

With four persons in three bodies competing for one infant, Penric mused, it was a wonder his new daughter Florina was ever allowed to touch her cradle. He tickled her cheek with one long, ink-stained finger, and smiled as she smacked her tender lips and turned her head.

“Give her over, Penric,” said his mother-in-law, Idrene, genially. “Or is that Desdemona doing the doting?”

“It’s me,” said Penric. “Novice fathers are allowed to dote, too. And Des is actually only about two-twelfths baby-mad.”

“True,” put in his resident demon Desdemona, necessarily speaking through Pen’s mouth as she shared his body—the sole way such a being of spirit could maintain itself in the world of matter. Parasitical was not the right term, as she gifted him with his powers as a Temple sorcerer in return. Renter was not just, either. Rider and ridden was the most common metaphor, with the implication that an out-of-control chaos demon could reverse the position of power if the rider-sorcerer was weak or careless. Penric usually settled person, which was both conveniently vague, and had the bonus of gratifying Des.

Desdemona gossiped on, “Litikone and the physician Helvia were always the baby-fanciers among us. Amberein and Aulia preferred children able to talk. Ruchia and Mira were indifferent to the nursery set. And Rogaska disliked everyone equally, regardless of age.” Not the full tally of ten women (and the lioness and the mare) whom Des had occupied and been imprinted by over the span of her two centuries in the world, but Idrene nodded understanding, while also taking the opportunity of Pen’s distraction to swoop in and snitch the sleepy Florina from his grasp.

“I don’t recall the old general as doting,” Idrene remarked, securing her grandchild on her shoulder and patting her fondly. “More daunted, really. Which is odd, considering how fearless he was about army affairs. But then, like you and Nikys, he’d waited a long time for his firstborns.”

“Thirty-three is not old,” asserted Penric. Well, not for him. Maybe for first-time-mother Nikys who, after a childless prior marriage ending in a premature widowhood, had feared herself barren. “Nikys’s papa was, what, fifty when she and Adelis were born?”

“Around that. There, there, little Florie,” Idrene cooed as the infant stirred and daintily burped. “I’m glad you and Nikys gifted her with that name. My Florina would have been so honored.”

Pen had been surprised to learn, upon his first acquaintance with Idrene, how cordial the much younger concubine’s relationship with her husband’s first wife had been, free of the bitter rivalry and jealousy reputed to be more common in such situations. Entirely to his benefit, as Nikys’s upbringing in that household had possibly prepared his wife for the complexities of living with two-personed Penric. Idrene as well, come to think.

“I’ll hold out for Llewyn next time,” sighed Pen.

Idrene’s dark eyes crinkled in amusement. Even on the high side of fifty, she was still a handsome woman, straight-backed, with warm dark copper Cedonian skin and black hair like her daughter, though her curls were salted with silver. “Next time, eh? I like the sound of that, but what if it’s a boy? I can’t always tell if those bewildering Wealdean names you favor are for boys, or girls, or both.”

“My late princess-archdivine back in Martensbridge was a woman, but in fact that name could go to either sex. So I’m prepared regardless.”

Through Penric’s open study door, a knock echoed faintly from the street-side entry downstairs. He relaxed as he heard their housemaid Lin answering it.

Idrene, by contrast, raised her head with the perky alertness of a cat sighting a mouse. “Is that Adelis’s voice?”

“Sounds like it,” agreed Pen as a low rumble, too distant to make out the words, wafted up through the atrium. Yes, confirmed Des, whose demonic senses left her in even less doubt than Idrene’s maternal ones.

“Oh, Nikys will want to know. Where is she?”

“Setting up her loom in her workroom.” Which had been how he’d managed to capture Florina, briefly.

“I’ll tell her,” said Idrene, marching out still holding her prize. “You can go down.”

“Adelis is more likely have come to see you two than me,” Pen protested. But, abandoning the mess of correspondence on his writing table that he’d been ignoring in favor of his much more fascinating daughter, he rose amiably and went to descend the gallery stairs. The stone-paved atrium in this leased row house was scarcely wider than the hallways in the wooden houses of Pen’s home country, but it served to let in light and air. And rain, which Pen had needed to grow used to, as it rather violated his notions of indoors versus outdoors. Snow, in the duchy of Orbas, was not a hazard.

The sturdy front door gave directly onto the street. Penric did not keep a porter to guard it, as the knowledge that the house belonged to a sorcerer was usually enough to buffer unwanted intrusion.

Lin ducked her head at him as he strode up. “Learned, General Arisaydia is here. But he refuses to come in!”

“Hm?” Pen poked his head out his doorway.

His brother-in-law, dressed in standard-issue tunic, trousers, and boots, but dispensing with his leather cuirass and the red cloak of his rank on this warm summer day, hovered at the base of the few steps gripping the reins of his horse. A younger man, aide or groom, stood holding the reins of two more, army-saddled likewise.

“Adelis, pray enter. Nikys and Idrene will be glad to see you. Your niece is awake, by the way.”

Adelis made an unexpected averting gesture, and said, “No!”

“…What?”

“I mustn’t come inside,” Adelis went on, looking very determined about it. Adelis being capable of impressive stubbornness, Pen didn’t argue.

“In a hurry, are you?”

“Yes. I need you to ride out to the fort and look at something. Now.”

Pen blinked, taken aback at this vehemence. The post that the young general commanded for the duke of Orbas lay about a mile inland from the town of Vilnoc’s own walls, up the valley and overlooking the main road west. It had once stood closer, Pen understood, centuries back when Orbas had been a province of the Cedonian Empire, and before the port had followed the slowly silting river mouth downstream. Duke Jurgo tried to maintain most of a legion there when at residence in his summer capital, although his main defensive interest lay on the harbor side with his navy. With several thousand men and camp followers, the fort was almost an outlying town in its own right.

Adelis would hardly be consulting Penric, with such urgency at that, on military affairs. This left something theological, unlikely; something to do with a translation problem, possible in light of his scholar’s command of languages; or some suspected magical problem, usually mistaken but, rarely, real, and thus interesting. Or…

“A number of my men have contracted a strange fever.”

Or that. Yes. Agh. “Don’t you have army physicians for such? Experienced with camp dysentery and so on?”

“It’s not that. Anyway, we keep our barracks and wells and latrines clean, and our rations fresh. My physicians can’t identify it. A couple have come down with it, and some of the orderlies, too.”

“You know I do not practice medicine,” said Pen stiffly. “Anymore.”

Adelis made a swipe of his fist, dismissing Pen’s aversions. “Four men died last night. More men. Six in the previous few days.”

Pen hesitated. “How long has this been going on?”

“Ten days for certain. How long before that, no one is quite sure. But it’s recent, it’s spreading, and it is much more lethal than dysentery.”

“Who survives it?”

Adelis scowled. “It may be too early to tell.”

That does not sound good, observed Des.

Truly. Any virulent disease that infected the fort was sure to jump to the port, and that included Pen’s front door, and the human treasures behind it. Adelis standing well away from that same door told its own tale.

“I’ll fetch my case,” sighed Penric.

He returned upstairs to the bedchamber that he shared with Nikys and, now, Florina’s cradle. The case containing the tools of his third, no, fourth trade—after learned divine, sorcerer, and scholar—rested in a chest out of sight and preferably out of mind, but should he want them at all, they were of finer make than army-issue. He shucked off the comfortable, threadbare old tunic he’d been sluffing about the house in this morning, and donned his second-best summer vestments for a divine of the Bastard’s Order.

Slim tan trousers. Sleeveless cream tunic split at the hips falling to panels fore and aft his knees, hems decorated with a frieze of embroidered holy animals; secured by the sash at his waist with a silver cord in its braid denoting, or warning of, his calling as a sorcerer. He left the silver-plated torc for the tunic’s high collar with his first-best togs, reserved for court ceremonies and holy days, in the chest.

He stuffed his old clothes, along with a change of smallclothes, into a sack. He hoped he wouldn’t need to be gone overnight, or longer, but one never knew. He could borrow clean army garb from Adelis in a pinch, but any trousers would fall hopelessly short of his ankles.

Upon reflection, he wrapped his long blond queue in a knot at his nape, fastening it firmly. He didn’t need it falling forward and trailing through the messes sick men leaked. He was just finishing this task when Nikys hurried in.

“Penric! What’s going on?”

“Your brother wants to drag me out to his fort to see some of his men who’ve come down ill.” Pen decided not to mention the death count.

“He knows better than to tax you with that sort of task.” Her frown deepened. “Which means this is something out of the ordinary, doesn’t it.” Swift deduction, not question.

“Well, I won’t find out till I—and Des—take a look at it. I’m rather counting on Des.” Who had much longer experience than he did.

Entering his arms, Nikys took a deep breath, pleasantly ample to hold—Pen allowed himself a moment of covert appreciation. “Then I’ll count on her as well.” She laced her hands around his narrow waist in turn. “Don’t let him get in over his head, Des.”

“I’ll do my best, love,” said Des through Penric’s mouth.

One of the many delights of his delightful wife was the ease she had developed in telling them apart, and she nodded without confusion. “How long will you two be gone?”

“Not sure,” said Pen. “An hour, a day, a week? I may need to intern myself for a bit before I come back here.”

“It’s that contagious?” Her deep brown eyes widened, looking up at him in alarm.

“Mm, perhaps not for me. I didn’t contract tertiary fever during my year in Adria, and it’s endemic there. I haven’t even caught a cold since I came to the Cedonian peninsula.” Being knocked on the head and tossed into a bottle dungeon or suffering magical attack from that out-of-control Patos sorcerer did not count as diseases, and Des had healed him of those injuries, too. But Nikys, nursing, was indivisible from their infant daughter in terms of exposure to anything chancy. He was confident she’d share his caution.

“So don’t fret if you don’t hear from me. It just means Adelis is keeping me busy.”

“Humph. Don’t let him treat you like one of his army mules, or I’ll have his ears.”

He kissed away her sisterly scowl, following up with kisses to her elusive dimples—ah, there, much better—and reluctantly took his leave.

*  *  *

Adelis kept them to a swift trot on the short ride, impeding conversation, just as well. He was a tactician, not a physician. His army medics would inform Pen of the messy details soon enough, in their mutual language of the healing arts.

Penric had only been out to the fort once before, for Duke Jurgo’s ceremony honoring his new general upon his successful return from the campaign against the incurring Rusylli. Devised to impress the assembled troops, no doubt, but Pen suspected Adelis had been more gratified by his witnessing family, small though it was: Idrene and Nikys and, yes, Pen and Des.

The fort spread over a low hill, with much less elevation than the castle-crowned crags of Pen’s home country, but then, the old Cedonian military engineers had always been keen to assure access to water in these hotter lands. They’d made up for it by digging a large fossa around the extensive perimeter, a ditch that had to be periodically cleared of silt, debris, and villagers trying to build right up to the walls.

They clopped across the drawbridge and through the main gate with its flanking stone towers. Inside, they dismounted and handed the horses off to the aide, who towed them away to the cavalry stables. The elite mounted troops and couriers lodged with their beloved beasts on this side of the fort, along with most of the workshops, the smithy, stores, and the armory, though the bulk of the remounts and draft animals were pastured down by the river. Adelis led Pen through to the open central space, more than courtyard, less than parade ground, used for mustering, returning salutes from a few soldiers along the way, a brief tap of the right fist to the chest.

As they strode past, Adelis spared a five-fold tally sign for the fort’s temple, which faced his headquarters across the square. Pen, belatedly, copied him, waving his hand down forehead, mouth, navel, and groin, but spreading it properly over his heart, as this temple was dedicated to the Son of Autumn, god of comradeship and thus, alas, war. And then Pen’s habitual extra tap of the back of his thumb to his lips, for his own god’s ambiguous blessing.

The activity under the sacred portico suggested preparations for a funeral. Not unusual, given the population here, but still…

They angled around the rows of barracks to the back corner of the fort given over to its hospice. It had its own small gate leading to a colonnaded court, and just inside a shrine to the Mother of Summer, patroness, among other things, of healing. Rather the opposite of the aim of an army, Pen fancied, but he glimpsed what seemed to be an unusual number of supplicants perched on the prayer rugs spread out before Her shaded altar.

Treatment rooms, stores, an apothecary, and its own bathhouse and laundry ringed the sunny court. The quiet far side, under its colonnade, was lined with chambers for patients, each door in the row made—somewhat—private by a leather curtain. Four to ten cots per chamber, depending on demand, so the place, Pen had been told, could accommodate up to two hundred sick or injured men at a time.

Adelis went to one of the leather curtains and pushed through, Penric on his heels, and the bright serenity of the courtyard was abruptly replaced with a shadowy scene of turmoil.

His eyes adapted quickly enough without Des’s proffered help, though the details were no reward. Six cots set up, all occupied, five by groaning, restless men, one by a figure gone too still. Kneeling at its side a young man bent weeping, his shoulders shaking as he choked his grief into silence.

“Oh, no,” breathed Adelis, stopping short. “Not Master Orides. I’d hoped you could save him at least, Pen.”

Pen suspected Adelis hoped for a lot more than that, and flinched in prospect.

Orides was the senior physician of the legion. Pen had met him but briefly at the campaign celebration last year, finding the officer level-headed as only years of experience could bestow, a trifle dyspeptic—possibly also from the years of experience—but with a sly wit. The crow-visage jutting up from its pillow bore no humor now, humanity fled with life’s warmth, the darkened flesh shrinking to its bones seeming prematurely mummified.

Des, Sight.

His demon lent him her spiritual perceptions only at Pen’s request, because the dual vision could be overwhelming, and his reacting to things no one else could see alarmed those around him. Ghosts, for example, although when he’d last been out here the fort had not been more rife with sundered souls than any other building of like age. But Orides, it seemed, was already gone to his goddess, gathered up like the valued child he must have been to Her. The scent of that passing divinity was fading like a whisper of perfume. That much grace, at least, in this graceless moment.

The young man looked up at the sound of Adelis’s voice and scrambled to his feet, visibly pulling himself together. He tapped his fist over his heart, and in a squeezed voice said, “Sir!”

There was this to be said for military garb; you could tell who a person was, or at least their function, at a glance. Temple robes likewise, Pen supposed. This one was a young medical officer, by his green sash and somewhat stained, sleeveless, undyed tunic. In his early twenties, perhaps? His coloration was typical of this region: dark coppery-brick skin, black hair, brown eyes; his build average, his height a little under Adelis’s muscular middle stature. His drawn, exhausted face was not standard-issue, nor his heartbroken whisper: “You’re too late.”

Adelis flicked his gaze aside at Pen’s wince and, perhaps wisely, elected to let this outburst pass unremarked. “Penric, this is Orides’s senior apprentice, Master Rede Licata. Our second medical officer.” First, now, apparently, and by Rede’s indrawn breath he was just realizing the full burden that had fallen upon him. “Master Rede, this is Learned Penric kin Jurald, Duke Jurgo’s Temple sorcerer. He and his demon, Madame Desdemona, have experience in medical matters, and I trust will be able to help us sort out this crisis.”

Adelis did not, to Pen’s relief, name him a physician outright. Though the general’s touch to the burn scars marring the upper half of his face like red-and-white owl feathers, which framed eyes that could again see out, suggested he was tempted to. Des just preened a trifle at the rare nicety of being separately introduced.

Only the continuing swipe of his hand through his hair betrayed how harassed Adelis was feeling. With a chin-duck toward the cot, he went on, “When did he pass?”

“Not half the turning of a glass ago.” Staring down at his late mentor, Rede rubbed the back of his wrist over his reddened eyes, and finally thought to offer, “It was probably already too late by the time you rode into Vilnoc this morning.”

Adelis hissed through his teeth. “I daresay.”

The smell of death was a misnomer, and really didn’t apply till a corpse was well along, but the stink of sickness here masked all else, despite the diligent efforts to keep the chamber clean. An orderly glanced up from holding a basin for another patient to weakly vomit into, and called to Rede, “I’ll help you lay him out next, sir.”

Rede waved him back to his task. “He’ll wait for us now.”

“That feels so strange. He was always hurrying us along.”

“Aye,” sighed Rede. He made to draw the stained sheet up over Orides’s face.

Pen raised a stemming hand. “I had better take a close look at him.”

“Oh. Yes.” Rede grimaced. “I think he would actually appreciate that.”

Adelis stood back, arms folded, face grim, as Pen, Rede looking over his shoulder, bent to examine this most notable victim of the mysterious malady. He folded the cover all the way down and studied the corpse systematically from the toes up, neglecting no part.

Alive, Orides’s skin had been the color of some warm wood or spice. It was darkened all over now to a grayish sort of blotchy purple. No external eruptions or lesions, though his pulpy flesh had started to break down at the pressure points where he’d rested on the cot, the bedsores looking like ones developing for weeks, not days. Eyes, ears, nose, and the inside of his mouth were traced with drying blood but not otherwise markedly different from any other dead man’s. No special tell-tale stenches. The sunken flesh was similar to the parched state of several common diseases that rendered persons unable to keep any fluids down.

Sight again, please.

His soul is taken up.

Yes. But give me everything material you can.

The room faded away, and the weird, familiar sense of descending like a disembodied eye into a miniature somatic world replaced it. So, the empurpling was bruising, of a sort; not from blows, but as if the tiny blood vessels had disintegrated from the inside out, leaking their contents to coagulate and darken. The effect was apparent all through the body, not just at the skin, including in the lungs and gut. Pen extracted his extended senses as though pulling himself out of a bog. The sense of sticky horrors clinging to his skin was illusory, he reminded himself firmly, though he wanted to wash his hands at his first chance.

Mindful of the sick men in the beds nearby, Pen lowered his voice. “The victims vomit, cough, and pass blood?”

“Toward the end, yes. It’s the sign.” Rede’s mouth tightened. “Master Orides knew.”

“Had he performed any autopsies on the earlier deaths?”

“Yes, the first two.” Rede’s glance also went to the wary eavesdroppers on the nearby cots. “If you’ve seen all you can, Learned, perhaps we should take this conversation to the courtyard.”

“Ah. Yes.”

Rede covered his master’s body once more, and made the holy tally sign with an extra tap to his navel. They shuffled back out to the bright courtyard, Adelis himself holding the curtain aside and exiting with alacrity. He was a brave man, Pen thought, but this wasn’t the sort of enemy he could face with a sword or spear, for all that it was killing his soldiers in front of his eyes.

Rede sank down on one of the stone benches under the colonnade, squinting through puffy eyelids. In this better light, he looked even more strained, and Pen wondered when he’d last slept. Probably not last night. Adelis leaned against the nearest pillar, head bent with the labor of listening hard—not to their low voices, but to what they conveyed.

“I suppose I should begin with the obvious questions,” said Pen. “What is the course of this thing? How does it first present?”

Rede shrugged in frustration. “At first, it appears as a common fever, the sort that passes off on its own with a few days of rest. Headache, and pain in the joints and muscles, loss of appetite. After a day or two, stomach pains start, with loosened bowels, again nothing unusual. The first certain sign is tiny spots under the skin, hard to make out. Then the skin starts to bruise, the spots growing to blotches and coalescing, as you saw. Then bloody or darkened stools and labored breathing. The descent into death is swift after that, three days or less. Altogether, from four days to a week.”

“Have any men recovered on their own, or had milder cases?”

“Some are still alive after ten days, though I dare not name it recovered. Half, perhaps?”

“Hm. So, contagion, or contamination, do you think? Plague, or a poisoned well or the like?”

Rede’s brows twitched up, as if the latter thought was new. By Adelis’s jerk, it was an unwelcome idea to him, too. “I… Master Orides thought contagion.”

I think Master Orides was correct, Des put in, thoughtfully. Or at least on the right trail.

Pen set aside the distracting memory of the famous possibly-poisoned well on the island of Limnos, which had historically destroyed an occupying army.

“Who were the first to fall ill? Is there any pattern?”

“Master Orides and I were puzzling over that. The first to die was our chief farrier, who’d been a strong man in excellent health. But the next was a quartermaster’s clerk. Four foot soldiers. A cavalryman. A groom. Just last night, a laundress, the first woman. One of our own orderlies. And, now, our physician.” That last seeming a heavier loss to Rede, and possibly to the fort, than all the rest combined.

“Any word of outbreaks in the village below?”

“The laundress was the first. I fear not the last. I’ve not yet had a chance to go down and ask.”

“Someone should be sent for a census.”

Adelis frowned, but nodded.

“So you… you are a sorcerer,” said Rede, looking Pen up and down in perhaps justifiable doubt. “What can you do?”

So much. So little. Pen muffled a distressed sigh. “Have you ever worked with a sorcerer, or a Temple sorcerer-physician, before?”

“I’d never even met one. …Master Orides mentioned doing so once, but he didn’t tell me much. Something about destroying the painful stones in the bladder.”

“Ah. Yes. One of the easiest and safest procedures, and among the first taught. Much better than that thing with inserting the horrible spatula.”

Rede nodded in a way suggesting he knew that ghastly technique first hand. Adelis, hah, cringed.

“The first thing you must understand is that my god-gift is chaos magic. It tends, and lends itself, most naturally to destructive procedures—downhill, it’s dubbed. Of which there are more in medicine than one might think. But those can only clear the way for the body to heal itself, as the bladder cleans itself after the obstructing stones are rendered powder. Sometimes tumors can be destroyed.” Sometimes not. “Intestinal worms also, though really, an apothecary’s vermifuge does just as well.” The wrenching urgent treatment for the fetuses misplaced outside the womb was the most delicate and advanced of all that downhill roster, and nothing Pen cared to discuss with the army physician. Or anyone else.

“So… is there then uphill magic?”

This boy is quick, Des purred in approval.

Pen nodded. “But it comes with a higher price than the downhill sort. A sorcerer can create order in, well, a number of ways, but then must shed a greater amount of disorder, somehow. If a sorcerer tries to do too much at once, or can’t soon shed the excess of chaos, he or she is afflicted with a sort of heatstroke. Which can be as lethal as any other heatstroke.”

“Oh. That, I had not heard of.” Although from Rede’s intent look, he understood and had undoubtedly treated heatstroke among the soldiers, no surprise in this climate. But then his nose scrunched up. “How in the world do you shed chaos? What does that even mean?”

Rede, Pen hoped, wasn’t going to be a man baffled by technical vocabulary. He wouldn’t have to water down his explanations.

“The area around the sorcerer suffers accelerated deterioration. Ropes fray or break. Metal rusts. Wood rots. Cups slip and spill or shatter. Sparks burn holes or set things alight. Wheels fall off, saddles slip, mounts go lame. The events aren’t, usually, inherently unnatural, just their concentration and speed. Which is why an untrained hedge sorcerer is ill-advised to travel by ship, by the way.” And then there were the tumors arising in the sorcerer’s own body, which probably killed more inept sorcerers, in the long run, than uncanny heatstrokes. “Half my Temple training consisted of learning tricks to direct my demon’s chaos safely outward to theologically allowable targets.”

Rede was still listening intently, not interrupting this flow. Pen took a deep breath.

“The first magic my demon ever showed me was how to kill fleas and other insect pests. It turns out that the swiftest, most efficient sink of chaos is killing: the fall from life to death is the steepest slope of order to disorder that exists.”

And the climb up it, as life built itself freely from matter in the world, its equally miraculous reverse. As Florina had just brought home to Pen most profoundly, but really, miracle was to be found in every breath and every bite of food he took, if he was mindful.

“So if I’m called upon to do much healing, I’ll soon need to find some better sink for the chaos than a few bedbugs. We can deal with that later. The point is, my uphill magic doesn’t cure or heal in a direct way. It fosters improved order in another’s body so it may more speedily heal itself.

“So the other limiting factor, besides the need to find a chaos sink and the hazard of heatstroke, is how much help a body can accept at a time. I can no more force an injury to heal all at once than a man can eat a month of meals in a sitting. Repeated small applications are required.

“It follows that if the sickness is progressing faster than the body can digest my help, my attempt will fail. If the disease has gone past the point of no return, my magic will be wasted.”

“You healed me,” Adelis protested uncertainly. Rede glanced up at his commander’s sober, scarred face, and his eyes widened in realization.

“I can heal a man. I can’t heal an army. If many people end up afflicted, rationing my efforts is going to be required.” Pen frowned unhappily at Rede. “We may be forced to choose my patients wisely and cruelly. As a legion’s physician, you must know how that one works.”

Rede rubbed his brow. By his matching unhappy frown, he was following this better than Adelis. “I’ve not yet attended on a battlefield, but Master Orides would sometimes speak of that problem, yes. If we could get him in his cups.”

Pen nodded. “From the outside, my results look random, even though they’re not. But when fears and hopes rule in such a hectic mash, it can generate unfortunate misunderstandings about my sorcery.”

“You sound as if you speak from experience,” said Rede. “Like Master Orides.”

Pen gave a capitulating wave of his hand. “Two of my demon’s prior riders were active physicians in the Mother’s Order. Counting their whole careers both before and after they were gifted with a Temple demon, it adds up to something like ninety years of medical practice.” Leaving aside his own fruitful, fraught five years of attempting the trade back in Martensbridge. “Given I’m only thirty-three, the effect can sometimes feel… odd.”

Adelis’s eyebrows rose at this. Had he never done the arithmetic?

An officer entered the far side of the courtyard, spotted Adelis, and headed determinedly toward him. Adelis shoved himself off the pillar to meet him partway; they conferred in low tones, then the fellow stood aside and waited. Adelis turned back to the pair on the bench.

“I need to attend to this. I’ll leave you two to get on with it, for now, but report to me as soon as you have something substantive to add, Pen.” For all the world as if Pen were one of his soldiers—score to Nikys.

Desdemona seized control of Pen’s mouth. “Adelis, a word before you go.”

“Hm? Is that you, Madame Desdemona?”

“Aye, boy.”

Rede looked startled. “The demon speaks through his mouth?”

“Yes,” sighed Pen.

Rede looked to his commander. “You can tell them apart? How?”

“Practice,” said Adelis wryly. “I grant, some days I just give up and think of them as my sibling-in-law.”

“Howsoever,” said Des, for once unamused. “I’m going to let you conscript him for this, because halting him now would be hard. But you have to make me a promise in return.”

“Oh?” said Adelis, with due caution.

“You’ve set him onto this road, so you have to tell him when to step off it. Because he won’t be able to stop, and then we’ll end up having another bloody argument about it. Shut up, Des.” Pen closed his mouth with a snap. But she muscled in for a codicil: “You’re the man in the saddle here, General Arisaydia, which even Pen must concede. This must be your load to lift.”

“I am not much inclined to let a chaos demon dictate my duty, but I do take your point, Madame Des. We’ll see.”

“Evader,” she muttered to his back as he trod off.

“But honest,” said Pen. “One of his better traits, surely.”

“Hah.”

Rede had watched this exchange with increasing… not mistrust, exactly, nor disbelief, but maybe the wondering air of a man waiting for more evidence. True to his trade, that.

Pen clasped his hands between his knees, contemplating what must come next. First. Next-first. “Des, in your two centuries have any of you, physician or not, seen this particular sickness before?”

“Plagues and contagions, yes, but…” She shrugged with his shoulders. “There are only so many ways disease can break a body down. So the array of symptoms are for the most part familiar. That dire all-over bruising is the one new thing. Very diagnostic.”

“The most urgent,” Pen began, “no, the most important is to find out how it passes from its source to people, or from person to person if that’s what it’s doing. Right now, I need to test how much simple uphill magic can do. Which we’ll only find out by trying it.” He unfolded to his feet, Rede, after a tired moment, shoving up from the bench likewise. Pen added to him, “When we go back in, don’t introduce me as a sorcerer. Just as a learned divine brought in by their general to pray for them. Which actually won’t be a lie. But it would be very bad to raise false hopes at this stage.” He added after a moment, “Or false fears. Some people have wild ideas about magic. And not just Quadrenes. I’m usually pleased to tutor anyone who will listen, but now isn’t the time.” And after another, “Except for you. You need to know.”

“Yes,” said Rede heavily, “I do. Show me.”

Rede led him to the door of the next chamber past where his dead mentor lay. Pen thought to ask, “How many men brought into your care do you have still alive?” How far was he going to have to stretch himself?

“About thirty, at last report. Two more brought in this morning. Less one, now.” His face set, doing this mortal summing.

Rede lifted the leather curtain, and Pen took a breath and forced himself across the threshold.

Six cots, again. One man was still able enough to be helped to the commode chair by two orderlies. Three of the afflicted were quite young soldiers, the others older but not old. Five times Pen knelt by cots and said, “Good day. I’m Learned Penric of the Vilnoc Temple, sent to pray for you,” which was accepted without undue puzzlement, and once with a feeble smile and thanks. He made the tally sign over them, laid a palm on each flushed chest, murmured more rote blessings, and quietly let as much uphill magic as Des could produce wash into them.

The sixth man, skin purpling, his breathing labored, was bleeding from his nose and swollen eyes, being sponged clean by worried orderly. He did not react to Pen’s greeting. After a brief glance within his rotting lungs and gut by Sight, Pen just knelt and prayed.

Sweat was trickling down his back and beading at his hairline when Pen arose and motioned the closely watching Rede to follow him out. He headed straight for the fountain at the end of the court, where he washed his hands with the lump of sharp-scented camphor soap and, after a dubious glance at the much-used towel on its hook, shook them dry. He likewise passed over the common ladle hanging beside it, leaning in to guzzle straight from the bright stream, heedless of the splash on his garments. And then stuck his head under it, letting the flow cool his scalp. He was still panting when he straightened up again.

“And now,” he wheezed to Rede, “I need to go find something to kill.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Stores. Grain stores would be good, or the stables. Or the midden. Anywhere rats or mice gather, or other vermin. Flies. Crows. Seagulls in a pinch, if any fly in this far from the harbor.”

“Sometimes,” said Rede. His stare was still doubtful.

“I don’t need help for this part, if you need to get back to your tasks. Or some sleep.”

“I… no. I want to see what you’re doing.”

To his patients as well, Pen guessed. “There won’t be much to see.”

Rede opened his hand. “Nonetheless.”

“All right, then. Follow me.”

Rede ended up leading, to the middens outside the most-downwind postern gate of the fort. The gate guard let the physician through without demur.

The manure pile lay to the left of the pathway, the kitchen waste to the right, both spilling down the slope of the fossa. The manure pile was much smaller than Pen would have expected for the number of horses, mules, and oxen kept within. He saw why in a moment—a villager at the bottom of the trench, shoveling up a load of good army rot into a hand barrow, to take off and spread on his garden or crops. Probably garden; if he’d wanted to manure a field he’d have brought a wagon. The flies were abundant on both piles, though no rats slinked about on this bright afternoon. He’d have to come back at night for those. Though a few crows and seagulls were picking over the kitchen trash, good.

Pen waited for the villager to turn away and start dragging his cart up the well-worn path on the far side of the big trench, then waved a hand. The faint buzzing over the pile died away. The flies dropped like, well, flies.

Rede stepped forward and stared down at the sprinkling of tiny, shiny black corpses. “That’s disturbing.”

“It took some getting used to for me as well, but I’ve had to feed my demon for fourteen years, now. It feels almost housewifely.” Feed was a misnomer, the directed shedding of chaos being more a sort of elimination, but Pen had discovered that term went over much better with listeners than more messy material metaphors, all just as inaccurate.

That had been a lot of flies, but their tiny lives were not going to be enough for this. Also, Pen was now fresh out of flies. Glumly, he selected and dropped a crow as well, which fell over in silence. And without pain, there was that consolation. A couple of its curious comrades hopped over and stared down at it, understandably perplexed. Did crows grieve? Their god did, Pen knew. He tapped his lips with the back of his thumb in apology, to what or Whom he was not sure.

“That will do for the moment.” Pen wiped his wrist over his cooling forehead. “But show me where the grain and food stores are, while we’re over here.”

Reentering, they were delayed by the gate guard demanding news of his sick squad mates. Rede, to his credit, gave a clear and honest, if brief, summation, though Pen wondered what distortions it would acquire when it came back off the soldier’s tongue in barracks gossip tonight.

“I hope those idiots will bring themselves to me at once if they begin feeling ill,” said Rede, looking back over his shoulder as they continued on to the grain stores. “The half who aren’t malingerers to start with tend to claim they’re just fine, no problems, sir, till they fall over. Master Orides says”—a hitch of breath—“said they annoyed him far more than the first sort.”

Pen made five more trips between the hospice and the middens and stores before the late summer sunset. He examined, treated, and prayed over every sick man once, but by the time he visited the first chamber for the second time, the courtyard was dark and he was reeling and famished. Without demur, he let Rede guide him to the hospice staff’s mess, where he wolfed down plain but abundant army food, and to a spare cot in the chamber where the orderlies slept. He wondered if it had belonged to the one who’d died.

“Is this helping them?” Rede asked bluntly as Pen flopped down on the wool-stuffed mattress.

“It’s too soon to tell. Though sometimes you can only tell if it’s too late. If a man dies, then it wasn’t enough. If he recovers, would he have done so on his own?”

“Mm.”

“I feel like a bucket brigade of one man, running back and forth from a well trying to put out a fire,” Pen complained. “I need a bigger bucket. Or a closer well. A pump and hose. More men.”

Could he get more men? There was only one sorcerer-physician he knew of in Orbas, serving the Mother’s Order at Duke Jurgo’s winter capital, but a more junior sorcerer might be conscripted for this, under Pen’s supervision. The treatment was simple enough; not like the insanely finicky reconstruction of Adelis’s acid-boiled eyes. Demons did not work well together, but they might be made to work in parallel.

I could manage to tolerate one, for this, Des told him. How the other demon would fare, I can’t guess.

Gods, that was right, Pen needed to send a report on all this to his Order, and to the Mother’s Order, in Vilnoc. It could be copied by scribes there and sent on to outlying chapterhouses. He should get up and go hunt quill and paper. He should.

“Has this thing broken out anywhere else, do you know?” he asked the shadowed ceiling. “Through army couriers or the like?”

“Not that I’ve heard. Master Orides was going to write to—oh, I should look through his papers. I don’t know what he sent out before he was stricken himself.”

Had Rede slept at all? Was he going to?

Pen compromised: “Have an orderly wake me at midnight. I’ll make another round.”

****************************************************

"Pen will figure it out," Maya says, confidently. "When does the rest come out?"

"Really soon," he says, "Tomorrow, maybe the day after. Very soon, anyway."

"Terrific," Maya says, "And they have a baby! Pen and Nikys. That's so great."

"Except for the lack of food. I'm starving," he says. "Next time we get some food, we need to save anything that will keep, all right?"

"All right! It isn't me that eats it all!" Maya pets the cat, who is curled up on her lap. "Let's read something with food."

"Here's Naomi Kritzer's A Star Without a Shine," he says, picking it up.

"Naomi Kritzer who wrote Catfishing on Catnet?" Maya asks, delighted, reaching for it. The cat twitches. 

'Yes, and that book just won an Edgar Award and a Minnesota Book Award. But this isn't related. This is a completely new original story just for us."

"We are so lucky," Maya says. And they read.