Spear of Destiny by James Baldwin (room on the broom read aloud txt) 📗

went down. Something about being the Right Hand of the God of Darkness made me less inclined to sleep when it was dark, and that had been before I’d become at least fifty percent vampire. Fortunately for me, the Masterhealer of Vlachia was a fellow night-owl. When I dropped down from the last rung of scaffolding to the ground and oriented on the hospital, the lights inside the apothecary’s office were still blazing.

Five minutes later, I found Masha poring over notes at her desk, scribbling into a book as she peered at another, very ragged piece of parchment through thick crystal glasses.

“Sav, bulenn dizuh mon-jungu...” The tiny woman, barely five feet tall and wrinkled as a walnut, muttered to herself in a language that almost sounded like Tuun. She didn’t seem to hear me, until I cleared my throat from the doorway.

“Eh?” Her head shot up, and she reached reflexively for a knife beside her inkwell before relaxing. “Oh. It’s you.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I was hoping you’d come by some King’s Grass.”

“Oh, yes, yes. I vas able to order some. For the potion you must take to stay healthy, yes?” Her Churvi accent was much thicker than usual as she spoke, hopping from her boosted chair to the ground. “Give me one moment. Then I must get back to my vork.”

“What are you working on?” I couldn’t help but be interested. Alchemy and herbalism had caught my interest from my first days in Archemi. “Is that Churvi?”

“Yes. My native tongue, dialect of the Metok Tribe,” she replied, pulling over a stepstool so she could access one of the herbal storage drawers that took up the back wall of the apothecary. “I found it vil searching through the rubble of the castle library. Lord Bolza had many rare books in his collection... many rare books which were destroyed. But some papers, ve have been able to save. The clever Mercurion girl and I went there to recover what information we could. I found pages of medical notes written in Churvi. It is my duty to transcribe them.”

“New medicines?” I sidled over and glanced at the pages. My dyslexic brain was in no way capable of deciphering Masha’s handwriting. “What’s it say?”

Standing on a stepstool, she turned her head sharply. “You cannot read?”

“A bit. I mean, I can read Ancient Tuun okay, for some reason. With any other language... not really.” I admitted. “I’m better at it than I used to be, but still not great. Especially when it comes to cursive.”

“Oh. Then I must teach you.” Masha ferreted around in the drawer until she came up with a bundle of dried blueish strands. When I saw it, some of the tension in my gut relaxed. King’s Grass. “How have you become so skilled in medicine and herbalism without being able to read?”

“Practice,” I said. “I kind of picked it up in the field out of necessity. I’m sure there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“Hmm.” Masha returned to me. “Here. Take your herbs, first. This is all I was able to source from Litvy. You are dependent on a difficult medicine, Tuun. King’s Grass is only found in the marshlands of Ilia and Revala, marshlands that are being shelled into oblivion as the armies of this so-called Emperor clash with the forces of Queen Aslan.”

“That’d be right.” I took the small bundle and sighed. “Well, thanks for getting this in for me.”

“I need it too. There are several important potions that require it,” Masha replied. Her Vlachian was settling back into a more normal cadence, less accented. “I say you, me and Her Scaliness fly to Taltos and buy up every bit of it we can find. Gods know we will need the surgical potions it is used for.”

“Different herbs have different properties, right?” I folded it into my Inventory. “What’s so special about King’s Grass?”

“It is a powerful coagulant,” Masha replied, returning to her chair and climbing onto it. She had stacked it with cushions so that she was seated at a comfortable height. “That is, a substance which induces clots. Used in herbal potions, without mana, it is a Phlegmatic which helps to bind wounds and stop bleeding. But when combined with mana, it becomes a dynamic coagulant of the Water element, helping to bind and neutralize volatile components of Earth.”

My eyes widened. “Ohhh. That’s why it’s important for Bloodscour potions, right?”

“Yes.” She narrowed her eyes. “Do you know why?”

I thought back over the ingredients for Bloodscour. It was a vital toolkit for Archemi’s doctors: a potion that could remove even severe infections from very sick patients. In metagame terms, it removed the Blood Poisoning, Advanced Blood Poisoning, and Progressive Gangrene statuses. “I’m guessing it’s because of the troll flesh and stingcrab blood.”

She leaned her chin on her hands. “And why would you say that?”

I shuffled on my feet. “You’ve got two different kinds of monster products being mixed together. If you combine two different types of blood without a medium, they just curdle and turn gross. I figure the mana acts like a... shit, what’s it called? A substance you dissolve stuff into?”

“A reagent.”

“Yeah!” I snapped my fingers. “The mana is the reagent, dissolving all the ingredients, and the King’s Grass helps bind them all into a stable suspension. For about twenty minutes.”

“You are correct.” Masha gave me a short nod, then eyed me curiously. “It is strange to me that a man with your insight cannot read well. Come here, Tuun. Let me make an assessment of you.”

Nervously, I sidled over to her. “What kind of assessment?”

“I want to understand your struggle.” She gestured to the page. “This is scribe’s hand, Tuun. It is a style made to be neat, tidy, and easy on the eyes. You do not lack brains, so it must be an issue of education.