Chapter 16
At the mention of a "private consultation," Shiro had expected something else, what exactly, he couldn't say, but it definitely wasn't this.
The space the trio had brought to didn't even have a cot to lie down on, or anything at all, really, just two chairs and a table.
It looked less like a consultation room and more like an interrogation cell.
"Alright," Abel began the moment Shiro sat down. "What kind of ailment do you need help with?"
Relieved that at least no time was being wasted, Shiro nearly answered honestly, but two things stopped him.
The first was obvious. His condition wasn't exactly something he was eager to share with anyone, healer or not.
The second reason was pettier. Some part of him figured it would be a waste to just hand over the answer outright, given how the whole pitch from earlier had been built on this man's supposed brilliance.
If he really was the best in the building, Shiro figured, no harm in letting him prove it.
"Not sure," he said.
"Any particular physical symptoms?"
"Nothing I can point to. No pain, no fever, nothing like that. Just a sinking feeling something's wrong. I trust that feeling enough to come here and ask a healer to figure it out."
The healer studied him for a long moment, visibly recalibrating to the challenge he'd just been handed.
"You can figure it out, can't you?"
Shiro expected mockery, since in fairness his particular ailment wasn't easy to diagnose. He more or less picture this is the symptom of something possibly deeper so he wouldn’t blame the man for feeling offended by the challenge.
Instead, the man just offered a confident smile and said, "Of course. "
"Alright," Shiro nodded.
Abel raised a hand and traced a slow figure eight in the air, starting low near Shiro's navel and sweeping up toward his head, the whole motion carrying the practiced ease of someone who'd done it ten thousand times and was going for his ten thousand and first.
Shiro braced for magic. Healing magic. But dozens of seconds passed with nothing happening.
All he got to witness was the healer frowning, as if he'd gotten the angle of the figure eight wrong, then trying again.
Same motion. Same nothing. He glanced toward the door, where the other two stood watching, and got only a shrug in return. They looked just as confused as he was.
"A moment," Abel said, before stepping out with the others to discuss something in the hall. About a minute later, all three came back to take turns tracing the same increasingly ridiculous figure eight in the air.
Where's this magic?
"What's going on?" Shiro finally asked, where they'd clustered together again. He had to ask. Their whispering was starting to sound fishy.
They exchanged a look, and the leader tried, and tried was the right word, since Shiro caught the hesitation, "Your ailment seems to be quite sophisticated."
"Oh." He marveled at that, since it was true, but something about how Abel said it made Shiro narrow his eyes. "I'm curious, what's this ailment called?"
"It's, it's something I'm sure you wouldn't be familiar with. So..." one of them started.
"Even if we told you, you wouldn't get it," the other added, and the third nodded along.
"What does this ailment actually do to me?"
"It—you know what? Let's just do this," Abel said. "Lift your shirt, we'll show you."
Skeptical, Shiro obliged, letting them do whatever they were going to do. They didn't show him anything, despite promising as much. Instead they checked him over by hand. What followed was, by any honest measure, an embarrassment.
They pressed at his ribs. Checked his eyes, his tongue, the inside of his wrist. After a thorough but deeply questionable examination, Abel finally stepped back, exhaling a long, solemn breath and wiping his hands on his robes with as much gravitas as he could summon.
"It's just as I feared," Abel said, dropping his voice an octave into a well-rehearsed tone of professional sympathy. "You're suffering from an acute case of Grave-Soil Congestion."
Shiro looked down at his own chest, then back up. "A what?"
"Your internal spiritual humors have calcified," one of the others chimed in, nodding with intense, practiced gravity. "When Abel pressed beneath your lower ribs just now, did you not feel that sharp, heavy resistance?"
"Pretty sure you'd been poking at my ribcage the whole time," Shiro said flatly. "It's supposed to be hard. If it were soft, I'd have much bigger problems."
Abel didn't miss a beat. "Yes, the bone is there, certainly, but it's the density behind it that matters.
But let's look at the secondary symptoms. The tongue!
Did you notice the subtle, unnatural darkness of the tissue?
That's the unmistakable mark of Spectral Melancholia.
Your shadow is slowly digesting your vitality. "
"I don't know what my tongue looks like, but I did eat half a jar of preserved black currants for dessert on the way here," Shiro countered mildly, pulling out something he'd bought earlier in the market.
He'd gotten one for Chaska too. "Unless the fruit was haunted, I think my shadow's innocent of whatever you're describing. "
The healers, who Shiro was beginning to suspect were not what they claimed to be, exchanged another brief, panicked glance. He could practically see the gears grinding in Abel's head, hear his heart pounding.
After a moment of visible recalculation, Abel reached for Shiro's left wrist. Shiro instinctively pulled away, which seemed to baffle the man. One more chance, Shiro decided, after a couple seconds, and offered his wrist again.
The so-called healer promptly wasted it.
Instead of pressing two fingers along the artery near the thumb, he clamped his own thumb down over it, hard enough to cut off circulation entirely.
He frowned, adjusted his grip twice, then slid his fingers halfway up Shiro's forearm as if the pulse might have wandered off somewhere.
After roughly half a dozen seconds, he nodded to himself with completely unwarranted confidence.
Then his eyes flew open in theatrical horror. "By Lazare," Abel whispered. "It's worse than I thought. Your pulse... it's entirely too rhythmic."
Shiro blinked. "Too rhythmic…"
"Symmetric Pulse Inertia," Abel blurted, clearly inventing the term on the spot. Shiro figured someone less familiar with this particular con might have fallen for it, but he could only laugh at the sheer absurdity being fed to him.
"A very rare, very dangerous condition, where the heart forgets how to surprise itself. A healthy heart should skip, should leap, should dance. Yours is merely thumping. Like a dying drum."
"So, just to clarify," Shiro said, slipping his wrist free, "you blocked my pulse with your thumb, checked the wrong part of my arm, examined me for all of ten seconds, and concluded I'm dying because my heart's beating at a perfectly normal rhythm."
Shiro couldn't help but laugh, shaking his head as he stood and readjusted his clothes, a motion that gave the so-called healer a brief glimpse of what was hidden at his hip, something his cloak usually kept concealed.
The man met his eyes, and in that moment Shiro saw nothing but the frantic panic of a cornered con artist. Shiro reached toward him, unsure himself what he meant to do, before deciding to just leave instead.
"Wait!" the man called, as Shiro walked past the group.
"Nope. I’ve had enough. You three clearly have no idea what you're doing."
"What?!"
"How dare you?!"
They looked thoroughly insulted by that.
"It's not like that," one pleaded.
"Then what is it? Because despite groping me for the last ten minutes, you haven't gotten remotely close to figuring out what's wrong with me. Just admit it, you're not real doc—healers," he corrected himself.
"Of course we are, who are you to question—" the one called Matt cut himself off, something dawning on his face. "Unless, hold on. Unless you're not even sick at all." He turned to the others. Daemon frowned, but something shifted behind Abel's eyes.
"Could it be… You're an envoy. From the capital. Here to inspect our healing practice. That's why our powers won't activate. You're testing us."
Daemon's face ran through several stages of horror in quick succession.
Watching the trio spiral into yet another wildly wrong conclusion, Shiro found himself wondering what kind of system had let these three earn those robes in the first place.
He opened his mouth to correct them, then paused, and watching them keep digging the hole deeper entirely on their own, decided it was better to just stay quiet.
"Give us another chance, Senior," Matt begged, halfway to his knees.
"Our performance today was pathetic. We know it. We should have practiced the basics."
"Give us another chance. We'll do better, I swear it. We swear."
Shiro didn't answer, letting the silence do whatever work it wanted to. He turned to leave, then remembered something. "My money."
The healer holding it didn't seem inclined to hand it back. Without quite planning to, Shiro dropped his voice into something deep and cold. "My money!" he demanded.
"At once, Senior," the man stammered, folding instantly, shoving the silver coin back into Shiro's hand. "You really are that envoy from the rumors. Please, Senior, give us another chance. We weren't prepared for this inspection. We beg you!"
Shiro didn't answer that either. With his money secured, it was time to go. Unfortunately the trio, still begging, trailed him all the way back out into the main ward, drawing the full attention of everyone present.
He turned to them, since they clearly intended to keep following him wherever he went. "Enough of you three. I've seen and heard of you."
"Senior..."
They kept trying for sympathy. Shiro had none left for frauds and con artists.
"Abel, Matt, Daemon. What's going on?" asked another healer nearby, or at least someone dressed like one, approaching with an expression that told Shiro he was thoroughly enjoying the drama. Shiro decided to give him some.
"You," Shiro said, addressing him directly.
"Me?"
"Yes, you. For this much," he held up the coin, "what do you figure is wrong with me?"
"Erm," the man glanced sideways at the trio behind Shiro, who were clearly trying to signal something to him.
"Well? Can you?!" Shiro pressed.
"You want me to use my healing to figure out what's wrong with you? That's it?"
"Yes."
He glanced once more at his fellow healers, hesitated, but ultimately repeated the same increasingly familiar pattern, raising a hand to trace the same figure eight in the air. After a frown, he poked a finger against Shiro's forehead, closed his eyes, and promptly collapsed.
He didn't so much as stumble first. The man simply folded, knees buckling, waist snapping like a marionette with its strings cut mid-air, crumpling into an undignified heap on the ward floor.
"Harry!" the trio rushed to his side.
"Are you okay, dude?"
The man on the floor offered nothing but a faint, wheezing groan.
"Hey, what's going on?!"
If the commotion the trio had already caused hadn't drawn attention, this did. Healers, patients, and everyone in between converged on the scene, which, ironically, gave Shiro his window to slip out.
He didn't bother giving the ward a last look, walking out the way he'd come, past the long row of judgmental statues. Two of the trio tried to follow but gave up halfway. He made it nearly all the way to the front doors before a voice stopped him.
"Shiro?"
He didn't need to turn to know who it was. He kept walking anyway.
"Back already?" Antonein asked, jogging to catch up. Shiro ignored him, which didn't seem to discourage the man in the slightest. "Did they manage to heal you?"
"What do you think?"
"They couldn't heal you? Really?!" Shiro glanced back to find him genuinely surprised at his own guess. That surprise quickly curdled into something closer to glee. The priest was actually delighted they'd failed. "That's a shame," he said.
Shiro scoffed and picked up his pace.
"Shiro, my friend, why the rush? Let's talk for a minute."
"About what? I came here to be healed. Nothing more, nothing less. Your friends couldn't deliver, so there's no reason for me to stay."
"What if I told you there might be another way?"
"What?" Shiro stopped. He felt a little foolish giving attention to a man he'd been warned about, but then again, the people doing the warning weren’t the most trustworthy sort either, so he told himself this might just be his shot to finally shake the guy off.
"You're not about to tell me you can heal what I've got, are you? "
Antonein raised a finger, as if noting an important detail. "As I said, might."
Shiro met the priest's gaze and recognized the look immediately, with more than a little weariness. It was the same one he'd seen on Abel when handed a last chance by Shiro. But this time there was something else beneath it. Genuine conviction.
"How," Shiro asked, giving him his shot.
"Well," Antonein said, spreading his hands, "you'll have to tell me what's actually wrong with you first, so I know what you need, my friend. So. What is it?"
In retrospect, Shiro realized, no one in that entire ward had actually asked him that question. It had taken the man in the wrong-colored robe, the priest everyone had insisted wasn't even qualified to be there, to finally ask it.