The Exorcist Doctor

Chapter 114 - The Crooked Saint // and the Magician

The next day, the prayer hall wore sunlight like a thin fever. Green-tainted light poured through the stained glass and puddled in the pews. Incense smoke crawled in the rafters as if it, too, were tired of being holy.

Half a dozen Saint’s Hands in clasp-patterned cloaks moved among the cots along the walls, voices low, hands brisk. Someone banged open the side door with a crate of boiled linens and apologies. Somewhere else, a child discovered the echo in his own cough and made a game of it.

Gael was just about to finish with his last patient for the day as well.

“List them,” he told the old man sitting beside him, draping one arm over his bench.

“Spine’s like a coiled serpent,” the old man said, eyes on the statue of the crooked Saintess as if she could take away his pain. “My ribs’re sharp in the night. Breath does… a whistle. Food tastes like rope.”

“Mm. Classic.” Gael palpated—four fingers, sternum to epigastrium—then listened to the old man’s chest with his stethoscope. The man’s lungs sounded like two burlap sacks arguing over gravel. “Ooh, you’ve got the whole fungus city living in you. Two tonics will do the trick.” He reached into his coat and withdrew two bottles: one bitter-blue and a jar of smoked-yellow. “Take ten percent of the blue before bed, and take twenty percent of the yellow on waking. Walk when you can, curse when you can’t. Once you run out of tonic, come back and Cara’ll give you a refill.”

The man fumbled out a few coins, and Gael took them as he slipped a flower cord bracelet into the man’s palm in the same motion.

While the man hurried out of the prayer hall, he leaned back on his bench and looked up the nave—past the lines of cots and to the statue at the end.

The Saintess’ marble head was still lopsided and crooked, chin forever tilted like she was considering a joke she shouldn’t laugh at.

He tilted his own head to match hers.

At this point, the crookedness had become heraldry. People called the clinic the ‘Church of the Crooked Saint’ without irony, which meant fixing it now would be a total betrayal of brand recognition. Besides, crooked things were honest about their injuries. He quite liked the peculiarity of the statue… even if the Inquisitors of the Church would kill him if they ever found out he was desecrating their Saintess as such.

Just don’t let them find out, stupid.

He sighed. Long day already, and the day had teeth left.

At the front of the prayer hall, behind the battered receptionist counter, Maeve was smiling that diligent, untireable smile she kept in a jar for public use. ‘Welcome’, ‘sit there’, ‘yes, we have water’, ‘no, the Raven doesn’t eat children’, and so on and so forth. Plenty of first-time patients needed a pretty face to even consider entering a building with a Raven, so he was pretty sure business was only half as good as it was with her at the front door.

She was becoming a proper Bharnish, the way she could smile for everyone that walked past those doors. He wasn’t sure whether to be proud or worried or both.

As he leaned back on his bench and relaxed, two people fell from the belltower’s shaft above him. One came down in a rush of wind, and the other skittered down like some rafter bug. Both landed beside him on the red carpet at the exact same time.

“Boss!” Evelyn said. She folded those big, battered wings of hers and readjusted her courier leathers, pulling her goggles off. Next to her was Fergal, folding his four spider arms behind him as well. The man dusted his shoulders and straightened the wrinkles in his cloak.

Gael glanced over. “What’s the report?”

Fergal spoke first, scowling as he struggled to straighten that one wrinkle on his sleeve. “It’s true,” he said. “My boys asked around their contacts in the other wards. Word’s the same everywhere: more and more Blight-Class Myrmurs have been popping up all over, and more Hosts are exploding after their Myrmurs either die or leave their bodies.”

“Mechanism of the explosions?”

“Physical. You have a better shot talking a Fisherman out of fishing than finding someone willing to do an autopsy on the corpses, but word is there were physical bombs planted inside most of the Blight-Class Myrmur Hosts that automatically detonate once the body sends out some sort of signal that its Myrmur is dead.”

Gael tightened his jaw. “No wonder the symbiote elixir didn’t do shit to stop the explosion. The bomb explodes only if the body is rid of parasites, which is exactly what the elixir does.”

Done with his report, Fergal looked around the prayer hall. “Where’s Cara?”

“Downstairs in the herb garden killing basil with mercy.”

“Thanks.” Fergal adjusted his collar as if it were a noose he’d chosen, turning to go downstairs. “I sure hope she—”

“She doesn’t like rings as jewelry,” Gael added lazily. “So don’t give it to her.”

Fergal’s hand froze halfway out of his pocket. There was a very small, very dignified click of a tongue—and then he shoved whatever it was back down his pocket and tried to look like a man who had never once contemplated romance, basil, or rings.

“I’m merely here to discuss supply lines,” Fergal lied, and hurried down the stairs behind the altar.

Gael watched him go and muttered, “Does the man have a job, or is he on salary merely to pursue my sister’s patience?”

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“Both,” Evelyn said, stepping closer. “You want news first or a nap?”

“News first.”

"Well, it’s just like Fergal said,” she went on, hitching her satchel higher. “It ain’t just Blight-Class Myrmurs. Wretch-Class Myrmur reports are up too, in the other wards. Plenty of whispers ’bout nests in Ghostwater and Ashlane, but…” She bit her lip, eyes flicking towards the stained glass windows on both sides of the hall, then back to him. “I heard most Symbiote Exorcists stationed in the other wards have been called back to Vharnveil, leaving the other wards a bit… exposed. You know somethin’ about what’s goin’ on?”

“Mm. Maybe.”

She waited for an elaboration, but when he didn’t say—because he wasn’t entirely sure—she simply sighed and shrugged carelessly.

“Lucky I’m in Blightmarch, I guess,” she said. “You and Maeve keep the ward a lot quieter and safe than it’s got any right to be.”

Then her gaze fell to the bench beside him. His gloam lantern sat there like a polite moon in a cage, its iridescent panes dull in tainted daylight, so she leaned in, squinting. “That the new elixir thing?”

“Yep.” He put a palm on it, possessive, and squinted back at it. “Not your toy. Not this one.”

She picked it up anyways—delicately, with that courier’s care she’d learn flying over the sharp roofs of Blightmarch—and turned it in her hands. “Looks… normal.” Suspicion pinched her mouth. “Feels cold as well.”

“It’s only the greatest invention of mine after the symbiote elixir,” he grumbled, “which means it will be treated like a saint and a bomb simultaneously. I’m gonna test it more, then figure out how to replicate it, then mass-produce it.”

“Cool,” she said. She handed the lantern back and scratched the bridge of her nose with a knuckle. “What d’you want me to do now, then?”

Gael thought on it—long enough to make Evelyn shuffle her wings against her back—and then he lifted a hand, casual, lazy, and waved her away.

“Back to your job,” he said.

Evelyn lingered. Her eyes darted first to Maeve at the counter, then back to him, worry stitched into the set of her jaw.

“... What about that man in the pipes?” she asked. “You ain’t gonna follow up? You hate lettin’ people die, don’t you?”

Gael tipped his head back and let the crooked Saintess stare down at him. “People die all the time. So what if some guy I barely know dies down in the pipes? As long as they don’t die here in my clinic, I get to maintain my—”

“Dying in front of you’s the same thing as dying in the clinic,” she said, stretching her wings wide and turning to position herself directly beneath the belltower’s shaft. “Least you could do is avenge him, right?”

He didn’t answer that.

With one last look, Evelyn launched herself up the shaft, disappearing into the belltower above.

And Gael stayed seated, silent, alone in the prayer hall’s dim breath as the Saint’s Hands and the rest of the patients filed out for the day one after another.

Eventually, footsteps scuffed behind him. Fergal ghosted back up from the stairs and cut straight for the front door, scratching the back of his neck with a face like a man who’d misplaced his dignity in the herb garden.

Without looking, Gael said, “No luck, huh?”

“She’s a tough lady,” Fergal tossed back without stopping.

“You just suck. Bring dresses next time,” Gael said. “She likes dresses more than jewelry.”

Fergal paused. Then he raised a single thumbs-up over his shoulder—a criminal benediction—and pushed out through the front doors. He waved at Maeve as he went, and she waved back from behind the counter without missing a stroke of her pen.

A half-minute later, Cara trudged up from the herb garden as well, apron smeared with a day of dirt and merits. Mud flecked her forearms. She didn’t announce herself—that would’ve ruined the peace and quiet—but she did plop down beside him on the bench with a sigh, cracking her neck to relieve herself of the stress.

They stared together at the Saintess.

“... So,” he said, “you’re not a yearner for romance.”

“No,” Cara replied. “Not after watching father turn to salt when mother died. I can’t imagine Fergal having a happy ending. No gangster—especially not a boss—gets a happy ending in Bharncair.”

“Nobody in general gets a happy ending in Bharncair,” he corrected.

“Well… true,” she conceded, which was as close to agreement as he could ever get her to admit.

“Is he just not your type?”

She didn’t dignify that with a response. Instead, her hands smoothed imaginary wrinkles on the apron as she continued staring up at the crooked Saint.

“When Saintess Severin was alive—when she led the Church for real—it was said she never turned anyone away from her doors,” she said. “Not the poor. Not the sick. Not the sinners, nor the old. The Bloodless Mandate didn’t begin as ‘don’t kill’. It began as ‘don’t let them die once they step inside.’” She let that sit with the incense. “So even though this is an abandoned church, unconsecrated and scandalous, I feel compelled to make sure no one dies under this roof.”

“So far, so good,” he said. “Hundred percent success rate on all of our surgeries.”

“For now.” Cara’s mouth made a thin line. “We are spreading our influence. People speak of us. But I still hear about deaths in alleys and bathhouses and stairwells, and I hear about them from wards beyond ours. I hear about the quiet ones who don’t even know we exist—can you imagine being so forgotten you don't even hear about us these days?”

Unwittingly, he pursed his lips. That was hard to imagine.

“... What’s it mean to make this clinic the greatest in the city?” she asked. “Will we be the richest? The largest? The one with the most tinctures? Or is it making sure that anyone that walks through our doors gets to live?”

He tried to find a joke. Humor, like morphine, was best administered before the pain peaked… but the crooked Saintess stared down with her permanent quirk, and every line of Cara’s face reminded him she’d cheerfully strangle him if he answered poorly.

So he opened his mouth—

“Gael?” Maeve called.

And he closed it again, pivoted on the bench, and saw Maeve at the reception counter with one hand up in a friendly signal. “This patient has a specific question,” she said. “Your sort of specific.”

Gael frowned, eyes narrowing at the figure standing before the counter.

The middle-aged man with wavy golden hair wore a cloak patterned like a field of blooming amber flowers. That was already strange enough to see. The only people that ran a pattern of flowers was the Heartcord Clinic, so Gael already knew he wasn’t from the city.

What caught Gael’s gaze most, though, was the staff the man carried—an elegant rod fashioned entirely from black chitin—and the fact that the man’s eyes were closed.

… Blind?

“Hello,” the man said, waving at Gael. “I’m Zora Fabre, and I have a rather peculiar request.”

Without further preamble, the man reached beneath his cloak, and a long sheet of parchment unfurled like a banner, spilling down and down and rolling almost twenty meters long to Gael’s feet.

At just a glance, Gael could tell the list was filled edge to edge with strange herbs and ingredients written in meticulous script.

“Do you sell all of these here?” Zora asked. “I can pay for them, of course.”