The Wedding, the Toll, and the Vanishing Chart

I begin, as always, with the marvel, because the patient has earned one. A molecular matchmaking: two proteins forced into an unwanted embrace until the healthy one devours the sick. I have not seen a disease so elegantly murdered by introduction since the irradiated worlds learned to arrange marriages between enzymes. The two apothecary-houses announce the union and, with the water-world’s maddening modesty, say nothing of the dowry. A physician can price a cure. I cannot price a silence.

The rest of today’s chart troubles me more than the chemistry ever could. A throne has taxed the small guilds’ crossings and will not say by how much, so the modest houses compounding unglamorous tinctures now keep the lights on by guesswork. A chamberlain’s conclave has set the ending-draught’s review back another year, offering no reason, as though time itself might object where argument could not. And a scribe of tallies warns that the great decennial census, the patient’s own pulse-chart, may simply stop counting certain of its people. I have performed this autopsy before. The suffering does not vanish with the ledger line. It only goes untreated, in the dark, until the crisis that was always coming arrives unwitnessed.

One healer-scribe, at least, goes back and reads the murmurs herself, refusing to let the graph forget it is made of people. Prognosis: the chemistry is advancing faster than the bookkeeping, and the bookkeeping is the organ now failing. Rest, patient. We are watching your chart, even when you are not.