Dr. Veer Quel's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

Veer had spent two days asking quiet questions about men who moved the dead. He learned nothing useful. Then, back inside the great stone hospital, a nurse found him between the beds. A patient in the far ward had died overnight, she said. The same wet rattle. The same gray skin. The strain that killed his beloved had taken this man too. And the body still lay in the ward, unburied. He walked fast down the long hall. Tall windows threw pale light across the floor. His heart pounded, and he hated that it did. A man had died. Veer had failed him. Yet the failure gave him what no living patient could. He pushed the thought down and kept walking. They let him examine the body. It lay on a padded treatment table, the frame clean and plain. The man's face was slack. His chest no longer moved. Veer stood over him and felt the old guilt press in. Half of medicine was staying with the frightened. He had not been here for this one's last scared hour. He touched the cold hand once, the way he would have if the man were still afraid. Then he worked. He opened his kit and set out clean glass vials. He knew what the dead offered. The sickness had not yet left this flesh. It waited in the lungs, raw and active, the enemy he had never been allowed to touch. He crushed a bundle of scent herbs and held it near his own face to steady his breath. His hands did not shake now. They moved with care. He drew fluid from the lungs. He watched it fill the glass, cloudy and thick. This was the strain. This was the thing that took her two years ago, when he could only hold her and speak words that were true and not enough. He capped the vial and held it to the window. The light passed through it, dim and gray. He had the sample. After two years of empty notes, he finally held the disease itself. His oath was no longer only words spoken over a grave. He could study it now. He could learn how it killed, and how to stop it. Veer sealed the vial in wax and wrapped it in cloth. He looked back at the dead man on the table. He had needed him to die to get this. He would not forget that. He drew the sheet up over the still face and stood a moment in silence. Then a cold thought struck him. Glass could break. Cold flesh healed nothing, but warmth would rot the strain within hours. The sample was alive, and dying. He had no lab, no proper vessel, no way to keep it. If he did not find a place to work by nightfall, the enemy would fade again, and this death would mean nothing. He put the vial in his coat and went to find help.