A SPAGYRIC OF LIGHT
‘It’s a tincture,’ said Mehrigus, drawing out the little phial. He was speaking to Dormian, the watchman, but the man’s family clustered around him. ‘Just a powder, dissolved in alcohol and set beneath lenses shaped to capture celestial light.’
He didn’t tell them what the powder was made from.
‘A few drops, into each eye, morning and night. Do you understand?’ he said, turning to the man’s son.
The boy nodded.
‘I will return in a week.’
‘Funny thing, you coming by here unexpected,’ said the watchman from his chair as Mehrigus was turning to leave.
‘A fortuitous thing, I hope we shall soon see,’ said Mehrigus.
‘Yes, perhaps,’ said the man. ‘Though I shouldn’t like to get my hopes up. And, in any case, I was starting to think I was lucky, being wounded already.’
‘What do you mean by that, Dormian?’ said Mehrigus.
Dormian leaned forward in his chair. ‘The rot’s come,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Three days ago, there was an attack, a little way from here. More of the dregs, trying to force their way in through the east gate.’
‘What happened?’ said Mehrigus. He looked from Dormian to the woman sat beside him, to the boy. All were pale with fright.
‘The watch got up a militia and beat them off, but a lot of men were injured, and others are sick. They’ve tried to confine them, like,’ said Dormian, ‘but Brennia told me she heard it’s spreading.’ Dormian nodded his head. Mehrigus turned to the second woman.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘People are taking sick all over the place. They’re saying it’s the rot. And now people are hiding them for fear of what might happen to them otherwise, so there’s no one with any idea of how to help them…’
Mehrigus pulled his robes tight about his face as he hurried through the streets. He was hopeful, he was curious, but he had no wish to be his own patient.
So the rot had come. A plague was upon the town and people feared it heralded worse to come. By all accounts, so afflicted were those dregs who had assaulted the city that they should have succumbed long ago. No one could really believe this was some mere mortal malady.
As Mehrigus approached the east gate barracks, two men emerged from the sides of the road, barring his way. Watchmen.
‘Turn back,’ said the man on the left. ‘No one’s to go any further.’ He put his hand to the hilt of his sword where it hung by his side to reinforce his point – his mate held a cudgel, though both looked terrified.
Mehrigus calmly raised a hand as he approached.
‘I know the danger,’ he said. ‘If you won’t let me pass, please, go and tell your captain that Mehrigus the apothecary is here.’
The man with the sword kept his eyes fixed on Mehrigus. The man with the cudgel looked from Mehrigus to his fellow watchman and back again. Seeing that his comrade was unsure of what to do, he stepped closer, whispering, though he couldn’t prevent himself being heard.
‘Mehrigus. He’s the apothecary that saved Dormian,’ he said.
The man with the sword looked Mehrigus over again, as if weighing up the man when he was really weighing up the situation – he didn’t actually have any good idea of how to do either.
‘Alright,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll let you through, but understand this – I can’t be letting you back out without the captain’s say so. Go on, if you choose…’
Mehrigus offered a solemn nod, the collar of his inner robes still pulled up over the lower half of his face, and carried on towards the barracks.
Mehrigus watched the leeches writhing in the jars on his desk. Three generations, left to right. The first were grossly afflicted – they were the same leeches he’d placed on the confined victims in the barracks, allowing him to capture samples of the rot. He popped the lid from the jar and reached for his tongs. He lifted one of the rotten leeches from the jar, and dropped it into the next one.
This second generation of leeches were a slick, oily blue-black colour. They swarmed over the afflicted leech, their mouth parts rending chunks from it. The rot spread, appearing in buboes and boils on their skin, but died away almost as quickly. The leeches, at least, Mehrigus could make strong against the rot.
He collected another of the afflicted specimens from the first jar, and dropped it into the third jar, the one on the right. The leeches in this jar shimmered with purples and blues. As they feasted on the infected leech, buboes, boils and welts appeared across their flesh, sickly grey, green and yellow erupting on their shimmering, periwinkle flesh. But these marks of the disease didn’t merely die away. Where they erupted, they soon burst, birthing new leeches, oily and purple-skinned, free of the taint, which even then died away on their parent.
This was another step forward for Mehrigus – taking the disease’s vitality and turning its energies against it, binding them to the leeches’ own essence. But it was not enough. The leeches might feed on diseased flesh, but they could cleanse the rot only by stripping it away. Its victims would be stripped, scarred, mutilated. Saved, perhaps, but half-ruined by the leeches, killed by them if the rot went deep enough. It was more poison. Mehrigus would need more potency than this if he was to truly heal.
He returned the lid to the jar of infected leeches and turned back to the pages of the Book of Transformations.