A Burning in the Bones (Waxways #3)

Chapter 22 Mercy Whitaker

22 MERCY WHITAKER

The hospital transformed into a battleground.

Her senior advisors vanished one by one. Two went home with the disease. The other two checked themselves into rooms in the basement—useless except for answering the occasional operational question. It didn’t help that their staff reached a critical shortage at the same time. Even working double shifts, there simply weren’t enough nurses. Normal protocol had to be abandoned. Everyone did the best they could to treat patients while maintaining a relatively sterile environment.

Down in the morgue, bodies were beginning to pile up. The city’s massive population was finally becoming more apparent. In Running Hills, there had only been one casualty. A deceptive result. Now the percentages applied themselves to a city with more than two hundred thousand people. More corpses arrived each day. The hospital was forced to hire runners to send out to the families. The deceased needed to be claimed to make more space. Of course, most were too sick to even receive a summons, which left them in a terrible circle of grim tidings.

Dr. Williams had not left the morgue. To her knowledge, he’d been sleeping down there. Safe Harbor’s normal coroner had never returned. The rumor was that he’d died in his flat. Grim word like that spread more and more. And it was made even more grim by the fact that none of them had time to mourn anyone. Mercy’s own mentor had died and she’d barely spared a thought for him. There was not time to fret or to sneak away for a good cry. Every person left standing had to keep their feet moving, or else the hospital would fail.

Their first ray of hope came when patients actually started recovering. Mercy began processing dismissals on the first floor. Bruises were fading. Not fully gone, but no longer causing pain. Other symptoms vanished. She prescribed rest, medicine, and continued hydration to every patient they discharged. More helpful news came from Brightsword. A paladin arrived to let them know that all water treatment facilities had been cleared. The city’s water was officially drinkable again. Mercy might not have been able to keep going if not for those two small positive turns.

She had dismissed nearly two hundred patients before a pattern began to emerge. Something curious that had not been visible to her at first. Two patients in a row made the same complaint. Just a coincidence, she thought, until the third patient echoed their words.

“I can’t do magic.”

The man was in his late forties. Sharply dressed. According to his chart, he was a structural engineer who worked for House Proctor. Mercy had given him the normal speech for discharge, but he’d stopped her before she could leave the room.

“None?” she asked.

“None. I’ve tried everything. Spells I use at work. Spells I use at home. I’ve tried magic that I’ve known since I was a boy. None of it works.”

Mercy nodded. “Sickness often dampens magical ability.”

“I don’t feel sick,” he said. “That’s why you’re discharging me. I’m better now.”

“That’s true, but how you perceive your health isn’t always a perfect indicator of what’s actually happening inside your body. There are likely remnants of the disease in there. You’ve won the battle, but that doesn’t mean your cells have finished killing everything. I’d expect your functionality to return after a few days. Give it a week. Try those spells again then.”

Mercy discharged him and moved on. The repeated details continued to prickle at the edges of her thoughts as the day wore on. Unfortunately, she could not do what she’d always done when a mysterious ailment presented itself. If Dr. Horn discovered something in the middle of a surgery, there had always been time afterward to visit the hospital’s library. She’d research there as long as she liked, knowing the next shift was days away. The idea of spare time for a bit of reading was laughable at this point. She was forced to pivot her inquiry to the patients themselves. Before each discharge, she began asking a series of questions.

Did they have their vessel with them?

If they did, could they attempt a small cantrip? Any spell at all?

Not one patient who’d suffered from the blight could perform magic. The current intensity of their symptoms didn’t matter. Time since infection was irrelevant. Not one patient could still access their arsenal of magic. Some complained they were too tired. Their minds too foggy. Others grew intensely concerned. Why couldn’t they remember the proper steps? It was as if the information had been cut away from their minds. Once she’d gathered a convincing amount of data, Mercy handed her duties over to one of the younger residents and headed for the basement.

Dr. Williams was there. Awake, this time, but surrounded by even more bodies than she’d realized were at the hospital. At a glance it looked to be at least seventy casualties. A number that she knew would only keep growing.

“Question for you.”

He opened his arms in welcome, briefly looking like the king of the dead.

“Fire away.”

“Do you know the occupations of the deceased?”

“Some of them,” he replied. “It’s on the intake form that the next of kin fill out. There are a few that haven’t been identified, but yes, I have that information for roughly half of them.”

“How many would you consider high-volume users of magic? People that go through a large number of ockleys each month?”

Mercy knew that most of the government allowances had to do with economic levels, but exceptions were always granted for specific jobs. If you simply needed more magic to do your duty to the city, you were often able to secure it through a quick petition. Dr. Williams considered her question. “You’d have to track down their allotment information to know for sure. But generally, I’d say… a lot of them? The first victim was a weaver. They use magic over long periods of time. There were a bunch of engineering types. People who are essentially walking around the city mending things all day. Most of them have high usage rates and get assigned extra ockleys to cover all the spellwork, but these days, who doesn’t use a lot of magic?”

“Gods,” she said, ignoring his question. “That’s the echo.”

Williams was watching her with concern. “Have you slept at all?”

“Not really, but this isn’t me losing my mind. I’ve finally landed on an answer. All of our patients upstairs, even the recovering ones, can’t access their magic.”

“Sickness dampens magic,” Williams supplied. “That’s well documented.”

“Which is exactly what I said—but all of them are that way. Every single patient. Without exception. And it’s not just a dampening. They can’t do any magic. We also know that many of the deceased are high-volume magic users. Think about that. In school, they teach that magic is… it’s this invisible substance, right? We can use magic because it’s in the air. It’s in everything. Including inside us .”

Williams was nodding. “We are conduits. Very powerful conduits.”

“Exactly. People have magic in their veins. It’s present. At all times. Even if you’re not actively using the magic, correct?”

“Theoretically, yes.”

“If magic is present inside us, then that means it takes up space, right? Even if that space is infinitesimal, there would have to be some physical space that it occupies inside each of us.”

“I suppose so?” Williams frowned. “This is all very theoretical.”

“Okay. Theoretically, what would happen if the magic inside you was destroyed ? Let’s say it’s burned out, for example. What would that mean for the space it previously occupied inside you?”

“That it’s… empty.”

Mercy banged one fist on the nearest table. “And that would create a damn echo!”

It felt wrong to revel in this moment, down here surrounded by the dead, but it was such a massive breakthrough to such a tormenting question. Magic was at the heart of all of this.

Why was there an echo? Because the absence of magic created space inside the body and that space produced a new sound in each victim’s heartbeat. Why the burning? That was likely what it felt like to have magic physically destroyed inside a person’s body. It was painful, but not so damaging that it caused a high mortality rate. Why the bruises? Well, magic existed throughout the entire body. It would naturally cause pain—and the evidence of that pain—to appear everywhere. And why did most of the casualties happen to be high-volume magic casters? They had more magic flowing through them. More to burn. More pain. More bruising. Put simply, they were more at risk. That also explained why the nurse in Running Hills had succumbed. She was likely the only one in the town who actively used magic every day.

It felt so good to finally have answers. But those naturally led to even more questions. How long would the magic be absent? Was the condition permanent? Or more like a ruptured muscle? Could it be retrained slowly in each patient? She also could not help wondering how she’d avoided getting sick. The initial exposure alone, back in Running Hills, should have been enough for her to catch the disease. Not to mention she’d been chugging contaminated water for weeks after arriving back at Safe Harbor. Was it that she’d followed protocols? Or was luck involved? Some sort of immunity?

All those curiosities eventually gave way to dread. It was impossible to forget that this was no normal plague. Rats had not boarded a ship and brought it to their shores. This disease had not festered beneath the skin because of some invasive, microbial bug. This had been deliberate . Engineered. It had creators—and its creators had a purpose.

Disrupt magic.