24. A Tainted Miracle (Vaye)¶
Major downpours were rare in Thelenza, so the curtain of rain that descended upon the clinic had taken the patients in the queue by surprise. They covered themselves as best they could, dripping water as they shuffled over the threshold. But even those so sick they could barely walk seemed content to endure the drenching, or perhaps they were simply adept at hiding how miserable they were.
Their misery was, of course, why these people were here. The patients, uniformly destitute and overwhelmingly Cantereian, had come to be Healed. The air was thick with the musical strains of their language, reverberating against the once-white tile walls and rows of tables crammed into the repurposed government office. The noise made it difficult to think, let alone make a diagnosis or suggest a course of treatment, but Vaye was trying.
To make things even more stressful, Tadevi Kenem had picked this particular day for a surprise visit. Any mistakes Vaye made would be directly apparent to her benefactor, a man who could crush her dreams with the effort it took to yawn. He’d winked at her as he walked in, a gesture that had been noticed by everyone in the room, and Vaye had been rattled ever since. At least she hadn’t botched any diagnoses so far.
And then, of course, there was Adranaya.
The Sarmalan had ensconced herself at a dim table in the corner, as far from Vaye as possible. However, that didn’t prevent her from pulling Vaye’s attention like a kite in a gust. Adranaya had become painful to look at, her beauty like a chipped tooth that Vaye couldn’t stop rubbing her tongue across.
Gadarien, who seemed even more bothered by the awkwardness than Vaye and Adranaya, had made several overtures toward reconciliation. But neither he nor Adranaya understood Vaye’s perspective. For her, circamo wasn’t just forbidden by law. It was seen as a flaw in the Anashi character, the thing that had allowed her people to terrorize the world. To be associated with circamo would confirm every fear and bias society held.
She returned to the present as an ancient man shuffled up to her table. He sat down carefully, tucking his long white beard out of the way. “What’s troubling you today?” Vaye said in Cantereian.
He worked his teeth for a while before answering. “It’s my back,” he finally replied, his voice as thin as paper. “I can’t lift heavy things any more.”
Privately, Vaye thought that might be because he was older than the concept of spoken language. But he probably had no choice, like everyone else here. Aloud, she said, “Well, let’s see what we can do about that.”
She came around the table and knelt before him. His limbs were wizened like sun-dried carrots, but she could tell they had once been powerful. Gingerly, she felt along the meridians of his arms. There was definitely something out of alignment, but she couldn’t tell which side it was on. She stood and came around behind him, his gaze following her apprehensively.
“It’s all right,” she said, holding up her hands. He relaxed and turned away, seeing she had no thorns. Healed involved undoing an old injury, often forcing the patient to relive the original pain. The person doing the Healing experienced an echo of that pain, which helped engender sympathy. Some novitiates struggled with that, making the clinic an unpopular assignment, but it didn’t bother Vaye. Knowing that the pain belonged to someone else allowed her keep it at a distance and made it easier to endure.
She placed her palm on the old man’s back and closed her eyes, sliding deeper into balance with each breath. Ah, there was the problem: a tertiary meridian along his right hip was constricted, blocking nerve signals down his leg. The other hip was compensating, causing tightness in his back and abdomen. A straightforward problem to fix, depending on how deep the blockage was.
Returning to face him, Vaye explained the issue as simply as she could. He nodded, but looked afraid as she led him to a booth along the back wall, guiding him onto the table and lifting the corner of his shirt to expose his hip. He trembled as she opened the clinic’s box of thorns, his fears confirmed. She tried on a reassuring smile, hoping he couldn’t perceive how much she felt like a fraud.
“Try to relax,” she said, as much to herself as to him. Closing her eyes, she did her best to shut out the cacophony and whittle down her awareness. The Balance Point approached, its center constantly slipping out of reach like a grape seed in a glass of water.
Deeming herself as close to balance as she was going to get, she opened her eyes and selected a number-four thorn, then thought better of it and switched to a five. She placed two fingers on the Cantereian’s hip and felt out the meridian. The blockage felt strange, root-like, as though entangled with other meridians deeper in his abdomen. Regardless, it needed to be released.
She pricked her tongue and loaded the thorn, allowing the wick-like fibers to suck up her blood. She was the only person she knew who drew blood from her mouth, but she found that it healed far faster than any other place on her skin. “Take a deep breath,” she said, guiding the point into place. The witchglass penetrated the old man’s primary lateral meridian and he shifted, humming almost imperceptibly. Vaye could tell he was holding himself still with great effort. She channeled a tiny bit of flowstream into his meridian, feeling out its contours. Usually, this would be enough to elicit a release, but the blockage sat in his hip like a boulder, stubbornly refusing to let go.
She wiggled the thorn ever so slightly. Although novitiates didn’t formally learn glassroot techniques until their third year, they’d already studied the theory. Innumerable hair-like spirals of witchglass, so small they couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, grew out of the central stalk of a thorn and anchored themselves in a subject’s nerves. Upon reading about it, Vaye had immediately recognized the technique as what she’d done to Musab. She had since begun secretly experimenting with glassroots, implanting thorns in her own arm and cautiously pushing out the tiny threads, which dramatically magnified the thorn’s effects. Aside from one terrifying night in which she had caused her entire hand to go numb, she now felt reasonably confident using them.
Vaye glanced up. Her gaze inexorably dove toward the far corner of the room, and she caught Adranaya watching her. The Sarmalan quickly turned back to her own patient, a flush creeping up her lovely cheeks.
Vaye didn’t have words to explain the feeling that came over her then. Through the witchglass, the old man’s years of suppressed rage flowed into her, the sense of being imprisoned in his own body. Vaye’s mind somehow translated this into a profound restlessness, part lust and part frustration, that urged her to throw all caution aside and just rip into something.
The old man looked at her with a mixture of shame and desperation, an expression she understood all too well. For months now, she’d been hiding her gifts, playing it safe. But she could help this man, she knew she could. She just needed to let herself.
She closed her eyes and returned to balance. With quick surety, she pushed out the glassroots, letting them penetrate the man’s tissues. It felt good, the connection to another soul seeming to draw her deeper closer to the Balance Point. The glassroots found his nerve endings, the connection growing stronger with each thread, and suddenly the blockage was clear to her, a thick lump in his flow. Breaking it was as simple as crushing clay in her fist. The relief was instantaneous.
But then came the flood.
As the old man’s blockage dissolved, it released something into the flowstream, something hidden and toxic, a pocket of despair that burst and began seeping outward through his meridians. The Cantereian jerked, pulling the thorn out of her grip, and began baying like a wounded dog. Vaye could barely hear him over the roaring sound that arose in her head, like she had been thrown into the Eyewall. A searing pain stabbed deep into her pelvis, whiting out her vision and dropping her to all-fours. But worse than either was the flood of shame, a sense that she had done something absolutely unforgivable, something that made her worthy of infinite suffering. It was the worst thing she’d ever felt. She clawed for her knife, desperate to end either the old man’s life or her own, anything to stop the intolerable feeling.
A hand grabbed her wrist, holding her fast. Still blind, dizzy with agony, she felt another thorn enter the old man’s meridian just above her own, bleeding off the flowstream and passing it back out into the room’s meridian. Gradually, her vision and hearing returned, the pain in her hip abating. The old man lay weeping feebly, snot bubbling from his nose.
Vaye gasped, realizing that hadn’t taken a breath in some time, and immediately began to cough, choking on the taste of blood. A searing pain told her that she had bitten deeply into her own tongue. She began to hyperventilate, wondering if she had bitten the end of her tongue off completely, until someone slapped her.
She looked up in shock. The Healer, still holding her wrist, was staring at her intently, ignoring the old man. “Open your mouth, girl, let me see,” he said sharply. He peered at the damage and sighed, shaking his head. “Well, you didn’t quite manage to sever it, and the mouth heals quickly. Still, you’ll be drinking your meals for a while.” He released her wrist and narrowed his eyes. “When you can speak again, I’ll have some questions for you. Starting with who taught you how to do that.”
Vaye was spared from the Healer’s attention by a sudden bark of laughter. Grinning, the old man stood up straight, his sunken chest suddenly no longer sunken. He looked a dozen years younger, a man suddenly capable of hard labor again, regardless of his age. He touched his fingers to his throat, staring at Vaye with a look of wonder, and began to sing, his voice as strong as his posture.
A patient at a nearby table rose, touching her fingers to her throat and joined him in harmony. One by one, the rest of the Cantereians joined in, creating a rich thicket of sound that filled the chamber and spread to the crowd outside. Every one of them was staring at Vaye.
She looked around, wishing she had a place to spit the blood that was filling her mouth. In the far corner, Adranaya stood with tears in her eyes and her hands covering her mouth. Vaye read shock and amazement on Adranaya’s face, along with something she had never wanted to see there: fear.
“It seems you’ve worked a miracle,” the Healer said. His smile died long before it reached his eyes.
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