So passed the days, and the days turned into weeks, as Anthusa healed. The chronic offense of the plague and the acute offense of Konrad Kolonn’s attack both faded from the mind, not gone, not irrelevant, but not of immediate concern. Konrad was ransomed back to his family in due time, and the city was untroubled by Kolonn forces for a time. The plague, which just weeks earlier ravaged the city and its environs and seemed poised to depopulate it entirely, just…retreated. All of a sudden the sick rallied, and new infections slowed.
Into that emptiness came the bustle of the city, convinced that the trial had passed: noble Anthusa’s defenders had seen off the foul invaders and God’s punishment had lifted. The time for fear was gone. The new moment called for bold action.
To Agatha, it seemed more like the plague was just taking a long, drawn-out breath, and she dreaded the day it would fall back upon Anthusa with renewed force. She had long since accustomed herself to thinking of it as a living being. It was her greatest opponent, invisible yet omnipresent, and only by tracing its activities and learning its true character could she put an end to it.
Her staff, many of whom were hired with Orczy coin, whispered that their mistress, for all her genius and dedication, had gone a little mad trying to fight the plague. It was true, her habits had turned rather superstitious. She held her breath when an animal crossed her path, for the possibility that it was infected and the disease was, as she suspected, airborne. She avoided cups and utensils used by others until she had polished them with a rosewater-infused cloth. For a time, she genuinely believed that aconite extract might function as a prophylactic, and when she bought far more of the flower than she could distill in short order, she placed reams of it on every door in her home and laboratory, and handed out wreaths to her nurses to wear under their robes, just in case it helped.
Later on, when she found no material effect, she hid it all away in embarrassment. Once, she had been a countryside witch, and had worked hard to ditch that old identity and recreate herself as a respectable healer. What a shame to get that suspicion going again by slinging wolfsbane for entirely medical purposes.
Yet for every plague-ridden patient that walked out of her clinic in full health, for every panicked client she diagnosed with a simple cough and sent on their way, she could not relax. Her old enemy was not defeated, because she had not yet discovered its nature.
It was only waiting, hiding, starving her of data, and the dread of an unseen enemy drove her into her research with more manic desperation than she had when the plague was at its peak.
She was glad, in retrospect, for Cato. Not only had he offered himself up as an invaluable test subject, not only was he providing her clinic with far more funds than she could ever scrape together before, but he brought Inna and Myshkin with him.
Agatha had really missed them. She took these two hardly-literate two shepherds under her wing when it was just her, a countryside shack, and a stack of pilfered books. Only much later, after she left for Anthusa, did she admit to herself that having them around kept her grounded. Considering the nature of her research, it was no exaggeration that their simplicity, their very basic and material concerns, kept her sane. Teaching them the rudiments of manipulating spiritual energy, even figuring out how to—it was ungenerous, but true—dumb down the principles until they could understand them, really did firm up her own understanding.
To have them back, whole and healthy and with a new purpose in life… it felt better than she would openly admit.
So they helped around the clinic, and she kept teaching them. There was always good work for a trustworthy pair of hands, and what it cost for them to cultivate to the first realm in body and soul was a rounding error to Cato’s requirements. Not to mention, just watching them learn helped Cato as well. Despite his considerable power and ability, it was clear that his fundamentals were full of holes, and accompanying them helped him patch those without raising too many awkward questions.
Having them around slowed her research down immensely, yes, but it kept her going. As often as not, her best ideas, real progress, came when she was away from her records and in front of other people.
This particular night in late summer was not one of those times.
Plague cases in the clinic were scarce, Cato had long since provided a wealth of data which Agatha struggled to interpret, and Inna was on the verge of breaking through to the first realm of alchemic transformation. She was in the stage of multiplication now, fully crossed over from xanthosis to iosis, and the active components of the reagents in her body were replicating themselves at great speed: she had to eat and drink a balanced diet at a much higher rate than she was accustomed, waking up twice a night and eating a square meal. Agatha needed to constantly monitor her state and address imbalances by feeding her toxins, and needed to ensure that she remained awake and passed those toxins as soon as possible.
It was exhausting work for stern stomachs, a delicate moment requiring constant attention that left very little room to think.
It was well past midnight, only once she was sure that Inna’s internal alchemy was balanced and she had enough food at home for an early morning snack, that Agatha left Inna to Myshkin’s care and sat down in front of her data.
She could barely read it. Her vision swam, and she could hardly concentrate, never mind find the subtle, hidden patterns she hoped existed within.
This was despite feeling much, much too energetic to sleep. In such a moment, Agatha could really only do one thing.
In her office, amid the astrological diagrams and crystal balls and other witchy accouterments she kept away from the public eye, was the one divining tool she put any real trust in: the World-Wheel of al-Sabti.
It was a tome of wide, thin pages, more like an artist’s sketchbook, dominated not by text but by diagrams: twenty-seven concentric circles divided by twelve spokes, and in each cell a syllable. These did not belong to the Vintic language, but to Abyssinian, each a unique combination of vowel and consonant. Beyond this wheel lay dozens and dozens of densely-written tables correlating letters and numbers to one another in dizzying combinations, and at the very back, a poem in Abyssinian, which Agatha had long since translated:
You possess the question of the grand natural form
Therefore, conserve the strange doubts that have been raised and which diligence can dissipate
She had first stumbled on this book, abandoned in a dusty shop, many years ago, not long after escaping from her nunnery. She could make neither heads nor tails of it, but it fascinated her anyway, and she acquired it for a pittance. She learned Abyssinian just to figure out what it was about. It proved stubbornly obscure, so obscure that she could barely find any mention of it in other texts. Then, one day, she found a description of it in the Prolegomena of al-Hadrami: a machine for divination, a tool for computing the wisdom of the heavens, one so vast and potent that it included the entire universe as one of its moving pieces, for which that poem was a cipher.
Agatha wrote down her question, and translated it, as best she could, into Abyssinian. From there, she employed the poem as a transposition cipher, turning syllables into numbers. She then queried the stars: the moon was ascendant, the bull in the sixth house. The cross-referenced the astrological data with her own numbers across the vast field of numbered tables. Briefly, Agatha was conscious that the weariness she faced with her own notes had passed, and the World-Wheel filled her, as it always did, with an unstoppable energy that pushed her forward, page by page, transformation by transformation, until she reached the end: there, the numbers became syllables once more, and the syllables formed words in Abyssinian, which she strained to translate.
Her original question: How should I progress my research into the plague?
And the World-Wheel answered, as well as she could make out: D O N O T F O R G E T H O S P I T A L I T Y.
Its answers were always short and cryptic. The first time she queried it successfully, it told her to G O W I T H T H E R I S I N G S U N. She had asked how to achieve her goals and become a great scholar.
Nevertheless, she woke up early the next morning, and left her accommodations for a morning walk. Later, a freak fire tore through the building. Only a few of her possessions survived; the very flammable World-Wheel was one of them.
Its divinations were true and powerful. The only catch, as far as she could tell, was that it rarely told her what she wanted. Instead, it most often told her what she needed to hear, though she might not know why for a while thereafter.
So she put the book away, back to its place of honor, and just as she was wondering what to do next, Agatha heard the baying of dogs.
Anthusa was not a quiet city, especially not at night, but this night the air was deathly still, and the cries of hounds from outside her window sent a chill up her spine. Agatha went to her windows, but just as she was about to lock them shut, she saw him: a tall, thin silhouette limping through the street, smothered in a long, hooded robe. The hounds, though she could hear them approaching, were nowhere to be seen.
For a moment, she froze. Best not to get involved, she thought. This man was a criminal of some sort. She had built something precious in her clinic, something she couldn’t jeopardize on a whim.
But the World-Wheel had never led her wrong before. More importantly, she remembered her own escape: running from everything she had ever known, faking her own death, and the lifesaving grace she had received from others because they had given her just a bit of generosity, just a little benefit of the doubt.
She threw open her door and hissed at the silhouette, “In here!”
He stopped, turned, and ran into the safety of her home, the heavy wooden door slamming shut behind him.
He collapsed on Agatha’s floor, his body almost totally covered in his ragged robe, and they both waited in silence as the baying of hounds sounded on the street. The sounds stopped for a moment outside the door, and Agatha heard the sound of snuffling and pawing on the cobblestones beyond the threshold. She once again felt an inexplicable, overpowering dread, and wondered what kind of dog could instill such fear in a third realm cultivator.
But with the passage of long moments, they passed by, and the confused cries of the hounds faded into the distance.
Both Agatha and her impromptu guest had been holding their breaths, but he was in much worse shape, and began gasping as soon as the danger passed. Agatha rolled him onto his front, and saw the wrinkled face, the thin, snow-white hair, all covered in sweat and grime.
He managed a “Thank you” between gasps and coughs, but his condition did not improve.
In some strange state between exhaustion and excitement, Agatha realized this man was ill.
His skin was hot, unbelievably hot. If she had been an uncultivated mortal, touching his face would have seared the tips of her fingers.
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Let it never be said that Agatha was not devoted to her craft; with a stranger having a deadly coughing fit on her floor, suffering from some disease she had never before seen, she sprang into action.
First, water, then snowberry leaves and hyssop. There was no time to distill the active compounds properly: she mixed handfuls in a bucket, and summoned her power: spiritual energy rushed from her hands into the mixture, disassembling the ingredients into their constituent parts. From the heterogenous muck she willed a handful of globules to form, containing the densest pockets of the active compounds. With a burst of heat, she rendered them into a fine paste, and with a burst of formless energy she stimulated the elements within.
Less than a minute after she started, the mixture in her hands was cold to the touch. She slathered it on his face first, then tore open his robe to administer it to his torso. She avoided contemplating the dense web of scars she found there, the marks of whips and clubs and blades. Those were old injuries. She had to address the acute symptoms first.
With the rising heat countered, Agatha called forth her soul: it was the same principle as the far-seeing eye she taught to Inna, but focused on the very close and nearby, a telescope turned into a microscope. Her inner sight rushed through this man’s body, seeking the source of his illness.
She found an iron nail lodged in his body, just underneath his left lung: it was white-hot, unleashing a tremendous amount of destructive, fiery energy into his body. Having just worked with Inna, the symptoms were familiar: this was an imbalance of the inner elements, deliberately induced by whoever left this accursed thing inside her patient.
She reassessed him as well. He was certainly not uncultivated, nor was he helpless: he was clearly very powerful, and working very, very hard to counter the effects of the nail.
The operation that followed was not graceful or sophisticated; Agatha cut open her patient with a scalpel, fearless of blood loss or other injury. If she failed, those would kill him slowly. The nail would kill him much more quickly.
The closer she got, the more of the blazing energy poured out of his body and into the surrounding room. By the time she pulled out the white-hot nail with a pair of tongs, she was standing in front of a wildfire, sulphurous smoke billowing out from this tiny piece of metal. Her tongs glowed and melted almost immediately, and the nail clattered to the ground just inches from her patient.
“Holy water!”
He spoke, spitting out mouthfuls of blackened blood as he went.
“Douse it in holy water!”
Agatha spun towards her cabinet, tore out a vial of holy water, and spilled it on the nail even as it was burning the stone floor and threatening to make her furniture combust.
There was no smoke or vapor. The nail sizzled on contact, but the water didn’t evaporate: instead, the nail melted into slag, its unbearable heat vanishing immediately. Where it had lain, there were only scorch marks and splatters of dirty blood.
The blood was less worrying than if she had been treating a mortal patient. The capacity of more powerful cultivators to stimulate their bodies and reconstitute their bodies was considerable, and while this was most obvious in the form of regenerated limbs, the creation of new blood could be accomplished very quickly. Agatha wasn’t quite sure how powerful her patient was, but without a doubt it was quicker to expel the corrupted blood and generate healthy stock in its place than to filter it through the kidneys. Such behavior gave rise to leech and bloodletting treatments among less educated mortals, which was very rarely the right choice.
Better not to move him, though. So she brought him medicine even as the wound she opened in his lung closed before her eyes, and spread salve on the wound. She very much doubted it would get infected with a mundane disease, but it paid to take precautions.
Just a few minutes after her operation’s climax, her patient lay in a gory, stinking scene, but hale and healthy. That wrinkled face grinned up at her, and his eyes sparkled with enthusiastic intelligence.
“What was in that salve?”
That was not a question Agatha was accustomed to receiving from a patient that ought to be reeling from an extraordinary illness, but she supposed some coped in different ways.
“Wine, ox gall, garlic, crofelac, and peat moss. What’s your name, sir?”
He completely disregarded that very reasonable question.
“Ox gall!? What century are we living in? Who is the Holy Son?”
Ah. He was delusional.
“Let’s get you onto a bed, sir. Can you stand?”
“Can I? Your mother!”
He sprang to his feet with a joyful mien that Agatha really, really hadn’t expected from someone who was just in such immense pain.
“Sir, you shouldn’t-”
“I’m fine! And if I’m not fine it’ll be your fault. Ox gall, the gall!”
Agatha felt her bedside manner crumbling.
“Sir. Let’s get you lying on a bed. You must be-”
“And what is the crofelac for? Two varieties of allium is redundant.”
“Complementary, not redundant. There are secondary compounds in both vegetables which interact with one another constructively to-”
“Secondary compounds? So you’re not even distilling?”
Let it never be said that Agatha was not dedicated to her craft. However, that dedication followed a tendency to be rather combative in the face of people who were being stupid. Quite without meaning to, Agatha began to treat this patient the same way she treated hack doctors who thought they knew better because they got all their medical expertise from a dusty, mistranslated book.
“Distillation is unnecessary when the active compound is abundant in the source. More to the point, garlic is cheap. There’s no need to forgo the benefits of secondary compounds in this mixture.”
He grinned.
“Good! Clever! But I’ve never heard of this salve recipe using peat moss. If anything, that’ll soak up half the effects of the allium. Who taught you that?”
“I added it myself. I know it reduces the effectiveness of the allium, but I’m not short of supply.”
“But to what benefit? That’s just wasteful!”
“I-” her protest choked. “I’ve been… I’ve been researching the plague. I thought that an infusion of peat moss might help build resistance, so I added some into my salves. I don’t know if it works or not, but-”
“Which plague?”
Agatha was stunned.
“The plague.”
“Don’t make me repeat myself!”
“From the Holy City! That has been ravaging the region for months! Have you been living under a rock?”
“Something like that. Hmph.”
He seemed to sniff the air.
“Now that you mention it, there is something odd about. Nasty thing.”
There was no way…
“Can you…smell it?”
“I smell something alright!” He sniffed himself. “And for once, it’s not me.”
One possibility: this man was insane. Delusional, half-sensical. Not worth listening to.
On the other hand… he clearly knew something about medicine. And he was a powerful cultivator, more powerful than Agatha was. Cultivators in the fourth realm and above didn’t go unnoticed unless they worked very, very hard to remain inconspicuous, and Agatha couldn’t remember any who matched his description in the region.
She rushed into her laboratory, pulled out two vials of blood, and approached him with both.
“Tell me, what do you notice about these?”
He looked at her quizzically, and sniffed at the vials.
One belonged to Inna, which Agatha took as a sample while helping her cultivate.
The other belonged to Cato.
He pointed at the latter. “That one is… odd. It’s clean. Like it’s repelling this damn bug. How fascinating! Get me some paper, I have to-”
A knock came at the door.
“Hide me!” he hissed. Before Agatha could say more, he vanished into the rooms beyond, out of sight of the door.
Another knock.
“Agatha? Are you awake?”
It was Cato.
She opened up, and found him standing outside, flanked by a pair of Orczy guards. He was only armed with a short sword, but the bailiff’s coat projected his authority to detain, arrest, and interrogate anyone against whom the captain had issued a warrant.
“Cato? What is the meaning of this?”
“Please don’t misunderstand. I’m hunting a fugitive, a slippery bastard. Last I heard, he was spotted around here, and I hoped you could be of some help.”
He produced a sketch: that same wrinkled face was menacing on paper, and the sparkling eyes were cold and hard.
“I see. Who exactly is this fugitive of yours?”
“A criminal from another duchy, I’m told, violent. The paperwork is incomplete, but his name must be Vitello, or Vincarlo, or something of the sort.Not his first time breaking out of prison.”
His eyes looked past her, and into the dark, stinking blood that still splattered Agatha’s floor.
“Is that-”
“Inna had a hard time earlier,” she interrupted. “I had to let out some toxic blood. Myshkin is with her at home now.”
There was no single motive for lying to him now. Her curiosity about her own guest contributed. So did the World-Wheel’s divination.
But Agatha also sensed something sinister. It crouched behind Cato, just out of view, like it was sitting in everyone’s blind spot. It was watching her.
Waiting.
Whatever it was, she did not want to let it past her threshold.
“Ah. Let me help you clean up then. My boys can help with the mess, and you can help with-”
Agatha put up a resolute hand.
“I’m tired, Cato. I appreciate the offer, but I haven’t heard a thing about this fugitive of yours, and I’m going to sleep just as soon as I clean up. If you haven’t caught him by tomorrow, it won’t be too late then.”
He was taken aback: she generally wasn’t so brusque with him. But he stood up tall, thanked her for her time, and went on his way.
Once she shut the door again, Agatha felt a cold sweat run down her back.
She had no doubt. There was something there, following Cato like a shadow. If she hadn’t been so on edge, it probably would have slipped by her as well.
“Thank you.”
Her guest emerged from the back rooms, and the enthusiastic, impish expression from before was gone. He was somber now, and filled with profound gratitude.
“It was nothing, I-”
“It was no small thing. That is the third time tonight you have saved my life, dear Agatha.”
“So you are a fugitive?”
He chuckled. “After a fashion. Rest assured, I have broken no law that would offend your conscience. If your friend looked into his warrant a little more closely, he would realize it was no more than dust and cobwebs; his superior will not remember issuing it tomorrow. In a few days, I doubt your friend will even remember this visit.”
Agatha had no idea what to make of that.
“But… he was the one from before, yes? The clean blood came from him?”
“.. yes.”
“Aha!” There was the impish expression back again. “How fascinating! This plague of yours, it is a very strange thing, an illness attacking the body through the soul, descending from the transcendent into-”
“Wait!” Agatha’s mind raced. “That’s right. It must enter the soul through some portion. I’ve been trying to figure that out for weeks. How did you…”
Her guest smiled, but gave no answer.
“An excellent question, and a fascinating line of research. But alas, my time here is short. Now that I’ve given Ol’ Scratch the slip, I must be away. But I do not forget good graces so easily.”
Despite being haggard, badly dressed, and covered in his own stinking blood, the figure in front of Agatha seemed to grow. He was authoritative, but also warm. Knowledgeable, and kind. Majestic, in his own way.
“Thrice tonight you have saved my life, Agatha of Velatri. I grant you one wish, if it should be within my power.”
There was so much she wanted to ask. So many questions. Not least, how she knew where she was from. There shouldn’t have been a single person in Anthusa who knew Agatha’s origins.
“But between you and me,” he said, eyes a-sparkle, “there’s really only one option worth mentioning.”
Agatha agreed.
“Teach me.”
His cheeks puffed up. He chortled. And then he laughed.
“Teach you? I could have plucked the stars out of the sky, if only you asked! Are you sure you want me to teach you?”
“Yes,” she said, “so long as you promise to stop interrupting me.”
“Excellent!”
A great wind surged up. The room filled with the scent of roses, and before her eyes Agatha saw the blood disappear, the scorch marks vanish.
“Agatha, I give you my name: I am Virgilio, and from this day on you shall address me as your teacher. Until we meet again, my pupil!”
He clapped his hands, a clap of thunder.
Agatha startled awake. The pages of the World-Wheel lay open before her, her final translation of its message written in fresh ink.
For a moment, she wondered if it had all been a strange, exhausted dream. But the scent of roses lingered in the air; she put the book away, back to its place of honor, collapsed in bed, and drifted into a dreamless sleep.