The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 108 - Operation // Expansion

Green sunlight washed onto the pews like someone had steeped the dawn in brine and poured it through stained glass. It dappled Gael in cathedral mold. It made his skull throb like a choirboy learning the drum.

Now that sunlight was falling right on his face, he had no choice but to wake up—and he found himself lying on a bench in his clinic’s prayer hall, his mask still on.

He blinked.

He had no idea how he got back here.

…Uhhh.

He lay still for a moment, trying to coax at least one memory out from his head, but nothing came out. He had fragments of last night: a fight in a mansion, a race to a vault, a flower, a book, and then lots of eating and partying and even more fighting when someone somewhere insulted someone else.

Also noodles? And alcohol. So much alcohol.

Fuckkkk.

Where’s… my hangover drug.

He sat up and the world sloshed. The prayer hall wasn’t quiet—never was, not since they’d basically turned the place into a walk-in apothecary for the entire southern ward—but morning in Blightmarch had its own tone. Low. Industrious. Pious only by accident.

Dozens of Saint’s Hands in clasp-patterned cloaks were already ferrying patients in and out of the rows of cots that lined the nave. A pair lifted a woman whose foot had swollen into a theological problem. Someone else shouldered a crate of clean bandages like it contained the moon. The front doors gaped, but the Vile wasn’t seeping in the clinic. The Vile wasn’t anywhere near the clinic, because he’d bought four more Vile Eaters the past year and placed them strategically around the neighborhood to clean up the entire area.

Slow cleanup, but the neighborhood will be completely rid of the Vile in another year or so.

He kept looking. Half a dozen apprentice physicians, all Saint’s Hands gangsters, worked bedside to clean cuts, check pulses, and apply poultices to some of the lesser injuries. He immediately recognized three of them: gangster boys who’d learned to tie a tourniquet before he taught them long division. They were good enough for light first-aid work, and praise whatever god specialized in triage for that; it meant it’d been a while since he had to waste his time on splinter injuries and self-inflicted kitchen tragedies.

Throwing his legs off his bench, he attempted to stand and steady himself.

“Up early?” Maeve said. She passed down the main aisle lugging two large boxes, green light glazing her cheeks.

He tilted his head, considered a greeting more eloquent than “urrh,” and downgraded instead. “Mnh.”

He kissed her cheek. Awkward, because the beak of his mask made intimacy a geometry problem, but there was a saying that intention was nine-tenths of romance.

“What happened after… last night?” he asked, voice scratchy. “After we both…” He wiggled his fingers at memory. It played dead. “Nah… can’t remember shit. Fuck, I’m going back to bed upstairs—”

“No you’re not.”

And Cara didn’t so much pass by as she appeared like an indictment. Her physician’s apron bore more blood stains than a confession, and her braided hair was pinned back into a ball, but she wasn’t in work mode right now. She grabbed his ear between two unbreakable fingers and yanked him away from his bench, dragging him down the aisle.

“Ow,” he muttered.

“Upstairs now,” she said. Then she looked at Maeve sternly and nodded as well. “You too, Maeve.”

Maeve gulped. Maybe Cara was going to kill them both for what happened last night. He didn’t remember Old Banks making a big fuss afterwards about the two of them crashing and derailing the Saint’s Hands celebration, but if anyone asked him, the Saint’s Hands were established only because of him and his efforts. He should have the right to crash any celebration he wanted.

… Not gonna say that, though, nope.

Cara dragged him down the main aisle for exactly ten seconds before his other ear caught a cry close by.

A boy sat on a bench near the altar at the end of the hall, hiccuping pure misery into his mother’s sleeve. Gael drove his heels into the carpet and grinned at them, asking what was wrong. The mother immediately spoke at speed—talking about curses and fevers and neighbors who were looking at them with the wrong color of eyes—and half her words were superstition, while the other half were nouns with nowhere to live.

He decided the mother was just as incomprehensible and looked at the boy instead, examining the obvious. The boy’s forearm sat at a weird, disjointed angle.

So he grabbed the boy’s arm and just pulled.

Bone and muscle argued, held a vote, and relocated with a sharp crack that made the surrounding benches flinch. The boy’s crying stopped in honest surprise. Pain drained. Shock remained. There was always that tiny, holy pause when a hurt ended—he could never get tired of it.

“See?” Gael said, reaching into his pocket and flicking a flower cord bracelet at the boy. “You just twisted your arm a little. Don’t be a ghoul and cry about it. Fix it yourself next time—”

Cara resumed dragging him down the aisle, so he winced as the mother flooded the hall with gratitude, while the boy stared at the bracelet like it was some medal from the moon.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Seeing as Maeve was waving saintly at the two with a pretty smile, he decided to do the same—but that made the mother shiver, and that made the boy shudder. The two immediately stood up and rushed out of the hall, bumping into a few gangsters on the way.

… Ah, well.

The Raven does not concern himself with the fear of the common man.

As Cara marched them both upstairs into the surgical chamber, she wasted no time with ceremony. She pointed at the two stools lined up behind the surgical table and snapped her fingers.

“Sit.”

Gael slouched into the first one like a condemned drunkard to the gallows. Maeve perched on the second with her back straight, hands folded neatly in her lap, as though the scolding would bounce off her with sheer dignity.

Cara turned her back to them, rustling through a cabinet of instruments, glass, and odds by the side of the chamber.

Gael opened his mouth. “Now, about last night—”

Maeve started at the exact same time. “It wasn’t what it looked like—”

“Shut up,” Cara said flatly. “I know why, but I don’t even want to know why.”

Both their mouths snapped closed.

“Sorry,” they mumbled in chorus, heads dipping.

Cara crossed back over to them once she found what she was looking for, and without another word, she slapped something down onto the surgical table between them. The clang echoed through the chamber.

Gael blinked. Maeve blinked. They both leaned forward in their stool, staring at the flat, rectangular slab of metal as though it might start speaking on its own.

“… What’s this?” Maeve asked at last, cautious, like she half-expected the plate to bite.

Cara flipped it over with two fingers, and the barely legible letters carved into the underside caught the sunlight in harsh grooves.

“It’s a Myrmur exorcism request,” Cara said. “Came in this morning. From the Gulchers.”

Gael raised a brow at the metal slab. “From the Gulchers? First, who in the nine polite hells mails a message as a frying pan with letters? Second, the Gulchers?”

“Mhm.” Cara tapped a fingernail against the corner. “Insignia here: gas mask circled by pipes. It’s theirs.”

He leaned in. The etching was crude, but unmistakable. “They never request anything from us. In fact, we’ve literally had zero contact with them since… uh…”

“Eight months ago,” Maeve finished helpfully. “When one of them got lost up here and couldn’t find the way back down. He wandered around until he found Liorin—except Liorin didn’t know the city yet, either, so the two of them got lost together trying to find an actual entrance into the pipes. The Saint’s Hands had to mobilize a third of their manpower to find them after they got lost for three days straight.”

“Ah. Yeah.” Gael couldn’t help a laugh. “The blind leading the doubly blind.”

“Whatever it is,” Cara said, unamused, “they need our help now.”

“Where’d you get the plate?” he asked, flipping it back over, letting the light skate across gouged letters.

“Me,” said a voice from the window. The shutters banged once, and Evelyn sailed in like a very opinionated bat, folding her giant wings with a snap. She had a delivery satchel at her hip and noodles still smudging her cheek like war paint. “I found it. One of the Gulchers must’ve climbed up and stuck it in a metal tree while I was out doin’ my mornin’ runs today, so I picked it up and—”

“No, I found it!” said a second voice, indignant and higher. Liorin scrambled in through the adjacent window like an offended cat, leaving damp footprints on the sill. He pushed up his wooden mask with a thumb. “I found it sitting in one of my trees while I was watering!”

Evelyn narrowed her eyes at him. He stared back at her. There were glares. Then there were small, carefully targeted shoves as the two kids started squabbling, so Gael coughed diplomatically as he turned back to the metal plate.

“But why would the Gulchers ask us now?” he murmured. “They’ve got their own doctors. They’ve got their own way of dealing with Myrmurs down there. I’d rather not go down to the pipes again, thank you very much, so let’s just turn this down and—”

“Ever since the Repossessors went away, we’ve been getting more and more… dependable.” Cara gestured vaguely towards the windows, shorthand for the entire southern ward. “Every day for months it’s been the same—patients in, patients out, the tables full and turning. We’ve built a reputation. We have more patrons. The southern ward trusts us. We even have legitimate outreach through the Saint’s Hands. It’s not blasphemy anymore to call Heartcord the safest place in Blightmarch.”

Maeve straightened despite herself. That pride—earnest, dangerous—lit her gaze. Cara turned that same gaze like a scalpel at Gael. “But our dream was never just ‘safest in the southern ward,’ was it?”

He looked down at the plate. The gouged grooves reflected a ghost of his beak back at him.

“There are still four other wards out there,” Cara continued. “And Vharnveil above. If we’re serious about what we say over dinner, then I think it’s time to expand our distribution outside the south. Help the Saint’s Hands function elsewhere, too. And the easiest way to move medicine and supplies between wards isn’t up through the streets,” she tapped the plate, right on the pipe insignia, “but through the pipes. The Gulchers run Bharncair’s underworks. If we want to reach the other wards, we need the Gulchers’ maps, knowledge, and grudging tolerance.”

“‘Grudging’ is generous,” Gael muttered.

“Do this job,” Cara said sternly. “For them. And then we can negotiate with them about the Saint’s Hands safe passage through the pipes to the other wards.”

He scratched behind his ear with the corner of the plate and flipped it over again. The front of the plate held a scrawl—a map carved with a knife by someone who hated curves. Landmarks were boxy symbols: three squares meant junction, two squares meant ladder, a squiggle meant ‘don’t drown here.’ There was also a single, long arrow that burrowed deep into a confusion of lines that might as well have been a tangle of intestines.

He grimaced. “They want us to go down. Very, very far down. It’ll take them to get there and back, and if we get lost—”

“Get un-lost,” Cara said, already walking away and beginning to clean the surgical chamber. “If we plan to expand, you two need to be comfortable leaving the clinic for days and weeks, anyways. That’s why we have the Saint’s Hands. You two gave them almost all of the points you’ve gotten the past year and a half for a reason: so they can defend the neighborhood without you having to be here.”

Gael still scratched at the edge of his jaw, staring down at the gouged letters.

This just doesn’t feel quite right.

The Gulchers… why would they—

“I’m down to go down.” Maeve shrugged, tilting her head slightly at Gael. “Cara’s right, isn’t she? Your dream isn’t just to be the best doctor in the southern ward, and mine isn’t just to be the best exorcist in the southern ward, is it?”

…

Damnit, she was right.

He sighed at last.

“Fine,” he muttered. “We’ll go.”

Maeve’s relief was quick and quiet, expressed only in the way her shoulders loosened as she reached for her umbrella, pulled it up from the side, and bounced onto her feet. “Then let’s go now and be back for dinner—”

He, however, raised a hand. “Wait.”

“What?”

He may not be half as excited as she was to dive down into the pipes again—if ‘excited’ was even the right word for it—but there was absolutely no way he was going down there again without a new bioarcanic equipment.

Fortunately, his wife had brought him just the ingredient he’d been looking for last night.

“Come down to the forge with me first,” he said. “I need you to help me turn a crank.”