Twenty-Three #2
Clement and Thumery exchanged a look and moved in that direction at once. It was a call for any available healers to participate in an unplanned array. In the courtyard clinic it usually meant something severe or interesting had walked in. Or been carried.
The latter was definitely the case today.
“How many do you need?” Thumery called, as they stepped into a widening circle of paved space; a large array could take place anywhere there was room for the floor to be chalked up.
Hospital orderlies were shooing onlookers back and helping the patient into a plain gown, stripping him out of his clothes with bored professionalism.
He didn’t look like he was in much of a state to care: prone on the ground and giving the occasional groan or twitch.
One leg was wrapped in a thick cloth which appeared to be steaming, even in the warm afternoon air.
At his side was an elderly man with a red cap and black robe, and a man in healer blue who didn’t look much healthier than the patient.
Hollow-eyed and swaying with exhaustion, his hand constantly fell away from and fumbled back into contact with the patient’s wrist.
“It’s at least a six-body problem, and I’d feel better with twelve,” said Labaste in reply, waving them over. “Yariz is coming down from the ward to take first position on the primary healing radial. They’ll let us know if we need to call for more.”
Twelve was a large number for something impromptu.
Healer Yariz was one of the Hospital’s niche specialists, and was famous for publishing arrays for the healing of injuries and maladies that didn’t occur naturally but were inflicted—deliberately or accidentally—by other kinds of mages.
Rare, but always fascinating. Clement had never taken part in an array like that before.
They tingled with anticipation as Yariz arrived, tugging off an apron to reveal their orange interventionist belt and gold seniority tassels.
Yariz spoke with Labaste and the two men currently at the patient’s side, then took the chalk and began to sketch out an array.
Labaste gestured for the attention of the gathered healers—including a scholar with a green belt, who made a resigned face when Labaste frowned and waved them out of the group.
Clement, with their fifth-year purple, was allowed to stay.
“This young man is a fire-mage,” Labaste said, “and a son of one of the old Palian ducal houses. Two weeks ago he was involved in a duel with a fellow student at the Accademia Amolfe, and it went badly wrong. He was hit in the right thigh by some sort of fireball spell. Healer Harcot has been doing his best to keep the injury at stasis and the patient dosed with tonics, but as the original spell has been prevented from running its course, it remains active and fighting him.”
Mathé’s blood, that was Onege Harcot. Clement barely recognised him.
He’d studied on one of the prestigious Palian scholarships and narrowly missed out on being Dux Scolaris himself.
And he’d been an energetic, bubbly young man, not this drained and drawn-looking person who surely had aged a decade.
It couldn’t only be the effort extended on this current patient.
“We’re not going to make them wait for a ward bed and a free theatre,” Labaste finished firmly. “Two weeks is long enough.”
Two weeks was almost too much, surely. The stress of the pain—a fire in the flesh, still burning, held at bay but never extinguished—
Clement’s arms itched hard and they had a strong, shuddering flash of memory. It would be a bad idea for any Ferue devouts to learn that this sort of injury was possible. Not that Clement supposed many of those devouts kept up to date with new arrays published in the healing journals.
Yariz talked them through the plan; it sounded simple, but they warned it would be a tedious, tricky piece of work and take a huge amount of magic.
Labaste stood at the patient’s head to coordinate.
Thumery left Clement’s side to take a position in the healing radial behind Yariz.
Clement was directed into place in the monitoring and life support radial, whose first position was being held by—they blinked—Dean Mathilde Brodier.
Here, in the clinic, Brodier looked no different from any of the other healers unless you knew the significance of the Academie’s coat of arms embroidered on her blue generalist’s sash.
She also gave a double look when she saw Clement there, but there was no time for anything more than nods before they began.
It was indeed tricky, and tedious, and took nearly an hour: to pour enough into healing the active burn, as it tried to burrow greedily wormlike through the man’s flesh, that they could pull ahead of the unfamiliar magic, surround it, and extinguish it.
And to keep the man’s heart from giving out after the stress of those two weeks of pain and drugging.
Labaste held the array in perfect shape, alert to any fracturing of power and purpose between the radials, speaking up with terse reminders and singing the notes to keep them all in harmony.
Clement, who always found support roles to be rather relaxing if the primary was competent, could spare some curiosity to pay attention to how Labaste did it.
Even in the worst moment, when it seemed like their grip on the fire-mage’s circulation had slipped fatally, Labaste was there: a calm stream of directed magic, slipping beneath Brodier’s, refusing to allow panic into the field.
When they were done, Clement was scooped-out with fatigue—their magic hadn’t had time to entirely regenerate after their work on Alys—but pleased.
It felt like another small redemption from the morning’s jarring disaster.
And once again, they’d managed to set aside their burden of grief in order to do useful and interesting work.
The red-capped man from the Accademia Amolfe was nearly weeping as he wrung Labaste’s hand, and the patient was swept off to recovery rather than having to wait at the back of the courtyard.
Someone had been told this was a Palian duke’s son, no doubt.
And the crowd of people who’d been watching had turned back into a crowd of people more interested in their own sickness and their own business. Clement turned at the sound of a sigh. Brodier was wiping sweat from her brow.
“Time was, that would have garnered a standing ovation in the theatres,” Brodier said.
“Now I’m sure there’ll be letters written to the Hospital’s governance committee, complaining that we wasted ten healers on a single patient while there were others in need.
” She appeared to notice, suddenly, that she was speaking to Clement and not a fellow senior healer, and made a face of wry fatigue.
“Still. It’s better than sitting around my office worrying if we’re going to lose anyone else during the week of the Grand Exam.
You’d think a murderer would have had the decency to wait until— No, I’m sorry, Scholar Savoye.
I don’t mean to make light of her death. ”
“We make light out of dark to keep from swallowing it,” said Clement.
It was more a Hospital saying than an Academie one; they’d picked it up from Ysabel’s mothers.
Healers did indeed make darker jokes than most. Clement could forgive the habit, if not the specific.
If anyone else I’m sorried them today they were going to scream.
They said, “Do you think Estiene killed that artificer?”
“I wouldn’t have thought it of him,” said Brodier.
“But I don’t know what to think, this week.
And it’s all created more work. Oh—there’s to be an emergency meeting of senior faculty tomorrow morning, about all of this, so I can’t examine.
Your exam group has had their time slot switched to the last one of the afternoon, for the final two cases.
There should be a note in all of your pigeonholes about it. ”