Dr. Veer Quel's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Dr. Veer Quel had cured six patients this week, and none of them had the disease he needed. Two years ago pneumonia took the woman he had loved since he was eleven. He swore then to cure the strain that killed her. But a plague doctor cannot fight a sickness he has never touched. He had never studied that strain. He had no sample of it. Without one, his oath was just words spoken over a grave. He worked in the great stone hospital that welcomed everyone. Tall windows lit the long halls. Veer moved between the beds, staying with the frightened ones, holding hands until fear loosened. Half of medicine was that. But holding hands cured no one. At his weathered writing desk each night, he read his old notes and found nothing. His last words to her still burned. He had told her she made him want to be a better doctor. It was true. It had not been enough. On the sixth day a coughing man arrived on a cart. His skin was gray. His breath rattled wet and shallow. Veer bent close and listened. The sound matched her final nights exactly. This was the strain. This was the sickness that had killed her. He worked all night. He cleared the man's lungs, warmed him, dosed him carefully. He crushed a bundle of scent herbs and held them near the man's face to ease each breath. He stayed through every scared hour, the way he believed a doctor must. By dawn the man's fever broke. The rattle in his chest went quiet. He would live. And he took the sickness with him. Veer understood too late. A living, cured man carried no fresh sample. The healthy body burned the strain away. To study the disease that killed her, Veer needed it raw, active, taken from someone the sickness still held. He had saved the one man who could have shown him the enemy. He had chosen the patient over the cure. He would choose that way again. He sat at his desk as light filled the tall windows. His hands shook. He wrote one line in his notebook: I must reach a body before it heals or dies. That meant the dead. The freshly dead, taken before the ground claimed them, before the sickness faded from cold flesh. He had never robbed a grave. He did not know who could bring him such a body, or what they would ask in return. But he knew now what his oath required. Veer closed the notebook. He stood, put on his coat, and went to find someone who dealt in the dead.