1 Soul Bound
1.1 Finding her Feet
1.1.6 An Innocent Profaned
1.1.6.5 Fantastic epidemiology
Isabella, now used to interruptions from Kafana first thing each morning, was waiting for them in the Infirmary. She listened while they told her about the assassination victim, what the bandits were smuggling in and their fears about an epidemic getting out of control.
She nodded “Yes, given the books your vessel borrowed, and the question you asked me last time when I was about to go into a meeting, I thought you might want to talk about that. Luckily the issue that’s been taking up my time has now been agreed upon and passed as policy by the council, so I can walk you through the steps. Turn on your mage sight, please, and watch carefully.”
Isabella held her own Cov’s pendant in her left hand, and a patient’s pendant in her right hand. Both pendants started to pulse gently, and Isabella concentrated until they were pulsing in time:
“The first stage is to identify the fundamental harmony of the patient, so you can correctly identify everything that is not the patient. We’ll practice that bit first. You have a go while I watch. No singing, just concentrate on the feeling. Close your eyes, if that helps you extend your sensitivity to mana flows.”
“May I cast a learning buff upon myself first? It won’t target the patient at all, just my ability to understand stuff.” Kafana asked.
Isabella thought for a moment, then nodded. “That should be ok, but don’t excite the patients.”
Kafana did a stealth casting of her learning buff upon herself and Wellington, and then picked a patient. After a few moments, she got the hang of what she needed to listen for, and used altering her own heartbeat and breathing as a cue to get her own pendant pulsing in time. She could almost feel upon her own body each ache of the patient and flow of mana in their body as though it were her own. She could feel which bits felt foreign, but didn’t yet push on them. Instead she looked to Isabella.
“Good. Now the next stage is to make use of the body’s natural channels and not push too hard. You don’t want stuff to explode through the skin, when it should just be oozing out of glands in the armpits or other pre-existing orifices. A strategically placed bed pan, and an assistant who can comfort and hold the patient is often also a good idea, when available. Now watch while I remove the disease from the patient you are already in synch with. Don’t try to help.” Isabella moved over to her patients, laid her right hand over Kafana’s right hand, and kept her left upon her own pendant, getting them in synch. “Ready for stage 2?”
Kafana nodded, and felt Isabella push a very small flow of Light and Water mana into the patient’s body, in pulses that matched the pulsing of the pendants. Slowly at first, as Isabella cleared the body’s exit routes, then a bit faster but only a bit faster, the alien feel left the patient’s body and into waiting bedpans.
Isabella explained: “This is a natural disease. It takes more skill than mana. The problem isn’t so much killing the disease as it is not killing the patient. Now, you have a go with this man over here who has an abscessed tooth. Some healers use spells or potions to numb the patient’s pain or their own perception of it, but the best healers don’t, because doing so impairs your ability to accurately sense things.”
Kafana gulped at the implied warning, but screwed up her courage and stepped forwards to the man, who was trying not to cry. She could do this. Better she suffer a few minutes of agony than he end up permanently damaged or dead. She took hold of the pendants, and raised a silent prayer to Cov to guide her through the ordeal.
To distract herself she asked him his name, and got him looking at her eye to eye. She willed him to fall into her eyes, and let sharing his sense divide the pain between them lessening his while increasing hers until balance was reached. This time, instead of her doing all the matching, his breathing and heart rate seemed to strengthen as hers sped up. In moments they were in perfect synch, not talking any more just looking at each other, mind to mind, feeling to feeling. She realised that she must be making use of the purple mind healing stone.
She willed his body to make the possible exit routes from the abscess light up, and picked the one that looked sturdiest, using an overlay to place a strict limiter on her mana flow, and tying it into detecting stress on the surrounding tissue so she wouldn’t accidently overload it. The puss oozed out and she willed him to neatly spit it into a square of cloth. When the infection was gone, she searched with her mind for weakness in the area and detected a deep crack in the tooth above and soreness in the surrounding gums. She poured more mana in now, willing it to fully heal, trying to repair the tissue as though the abscess had never been.
She spread her awareness further, finding more and more; a subtle wrongness that might be cancer, and another concentration in stone form near his kidneys. She had the hang of this now. Map the routes. Crush and change the alien bits into forms that could most easily escape without causing damage, shepherd them out, strengthen the body’s natural defences, heal any destroyed tissue, pour in the healing, she could detect dead remnants in the genes of aging cells, skin that was old and could be revitalised, eyes that were losing the spring in their muscles. Fix. Fix. Fix.
She was yanked back to awareness by Tomsk and Isabella pulling her off the patient. From metal surfaces around the room, she could see electric sparks coming from somewhere. She held up a hand to her face, and it was bathed in flashing blue. Oh dear, was that coming from her own eyes?
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Bulgaria said, in a very serious tone of voice “Suor Isabella, for Kafana’s protection it is vital that the people in this room be sworn to secrecy. If word gets out to Alto of what she’s done today, she’ll be dead or enslaved within a week.”
Tomsk saw her face and gave her a hug. “You’ve done nothing wrong dear heart. Quite the opposite.” He turned her around to face the man with the sore tooth. He was now standing, looking at his own hands in wonder. He looked 20 years younger, in the peak of health and physical fitness.
Wellington: “Suor Isabella, you went out of your way to specify the disease was natural. Is the procedure different in the case that the disease is magical?”
Isabella collected herself. “Yes, when the disease has been magically enhanced then, depending upon what the caster did, it may detect that you are trying to get rid of it and fight back. In that case, you have to over-power it, like fighting an enemy. Even when you win, the damage caused by the high speed ejection may be so severe that you lose the patient anyway, unless you have speedy healing to hand.”
Isabella: “In the worst case, if you fail to over-power it, you may find it has infected you, or even that it can steal your mana to grow stronger while you fight it. In such cases you can’t risk the slow approach. You have to go in as hard and fast as you can, hit it by surprise and not give it time to react.”
Wellington: “Yesterday I disarmed a magical trap on a door by writing matching runes, setting up a harmonic, and using that to drain all the mana from their spell. Can something similar be done with magical diseases?”
Isabella: “In theory, perhaps, if you have a perfect example of the same disease that you could use to set up a resonance.”
Alderney: “As it happens, we do have some of the vials the bandits were smuggling in. Here’s one of them” and she handed a vial over.
While Isabella was examining it, and trying to see if it resonated with any of the diseases in the Sanctum’s infirmary, Alderney spoke to Bulgaria: “One of the vials was missing. Did you take it? I used my scout skills and after Vessel-Kafana placed them in there, none of us went near it, besides you and one other that I couldn’t identify but who was wearing the sort of sandals the priests here wear.”
Bungo, who studied this sort of thing as part of his degree in biochemistry, asked: “How bad is this disease? What’s the incubation period, what are the vectors of transmission, how infectious is it and how many survive getting it? Does it mutate? Are the bandits ramping up the numbers of places they seed it, or is the growth mainly organic from people being infected by other sufferers? Is anybody tracking how the geographical pattern changes over time and has anything been found that inhibits it, like some neighbourhoods or professions that stay mostly free of it?”
Isabella sighed. “There is no central body with authority to track that sort of thing, and people don’t talk to each other about it, because nobody wants to be thought of as possibly being infected themselves. If anybody would know, it would be Lord Pazzi, because he is the one who receives the reports about anyone who dies in Basso, so he can keep track for taxation purposes. Now, I’ve found several patients who contain something that resonates with the contents of this vial. How shall we proceed?”
Wellington: “I’d like to try three experiments. Firstly, Alderney thinks that one of your priests may have wandered into our rooms and taken one of the vials. I’d like someone to be sent to wander around to see if they can pick up resonance elsewhere in the Sanctum, and ideally identify who took the vial. Secondly, could you let Kafana put me in harmony with you so I can lend my expertise with runes, while you try using the resonance with the pure sample of the disease to de-power the disease in one of the patients. And, thirdly, if that works, I’d like to try making an item with the help of Rudolfo and then come back here and test, under your supervision, whether the item can remove the magical infection from someone.”
They left the Infirmary and went to the nearby still room so they wouldn’t disturb the patients. Kafana asked everyone to join with her in a group performance, and even got out all her gems including the diadem containing the stone of truth. She figured more aid never hurt, and this was Cov’s house. Running out of hands, she perched her stones in the braids of her hair, held there by the diadem. She queued up her sequence of buffs in the overlay, so the others would know what to visualise and the runes to add.
“Wellington, I’m going for long duration on this, so you’ll have the benefit when working with Rudolfo and Isabella on the cure items. So use touch to inscribe your runes for each buff directly onto each of us - I think it gives a stronger effect. Ready?”
Bulgaria gave a tuning hum, to which the others joined in, even Isabella. She checked her mana, and that of the ring. A little low. She tried her mana meditation but focused on drawing also from the ring. A whooshing sensation of filling up, as though she’d downed a full mana potion. Nice, it took just seconds. She split the last of her level buff food from Columbina between herself, Wellington and Isabella. When they’d eaten, she started:
Skill buff. Restore mana. Learning buff. Restore mana. Harmony buff. Restore mana. Skill buff. Restore mana. Prayer to Cov to protect all Covadan. Prayer to Zer to protect all NPCs. Restore mana. Group performance skill “Combine Senses”. A soft “wow” from Isabella. Reinforced high strength learning buff drawing from everybody’s mana and the ring directly, watching the mana flows with the 3D mage senses of their collective unity, regulating them, making the flows harmonious and optimising their combination with the now highly complex rune design glowing upon their bodies, drawn there by Wellington.
She willed everyone to re-trace the designs using their Cov’s pendant, which they did in perfect synch, sharing not just sight but also skills. She cast something else, not just calming, but more a centering, a grounding. Everyone else cast alongside her, their voices perfectly in tune with hers. Their eyes now glowed a pupil-less burning gold.
None of them realised, as they stood there in a circle, with light blazing out of all the stones in Kafana’s hair and rings, their bodies covered in glowing runes, moving in synch with perfect confidence. None of them saw, so distracted by their combined sight. Not until later, when Alderney viewed the scene at one remove, when looking for teasers to clip and post to the net. But the patients saw it, as the group moved back into the Infirmary in perfect step, and removed the poisons and diseases from the bodies of every patient in the room with little more than a wave of their hands. Rudolfo saw it briefly, as the group entered his forge, before they swept him into the Harmony, now little more than an agent of Cov’s will, finally given a fitting tool by Kafana’s prayer to act against the diseases sent by Bel’s agents.
What they glimpsed, and would remember the rest of their lives, telling it to grandchildren around the fire later in life, was not adventurers casting magic, but deities made flesh.