Perdido Street Station - China Mieville [267]
Derkhan had skirted its raucous arguments, its two-wheel cabs and resilient, decaying buildings from the side streets. She had tracked its length like a hunter, bearing north-east. Until finally, where the road kinked and bore north at a sharper angle, she had gathered her courage to scurry across it, scowling like a furious beggar, and plunged into the heart of Syriac Well, to the Veruline Hospital.
It was an old and sprawling pile, turreted and finessed with various brick and cement flounces: gods and dæmons eyed each other across the tops of windows, and drakows rampant sprouted at odd angles from the multilevel roof. Three centuries previously, it had been a grandiose rest-home for the insane rich, in what was then a sparse suburb of the city. The slums had spread like gangrene and swallowed up Syriac Well: the asylum had been gutted, turned into a warehouse for cheap wool; then emptied out by bankruptcy; squatted by a thieves’ chapter, then a failed thaumaturges’ union; and finally bought by the Veruline Order and turned once more into a hospital.
Once more a place of healing, they said.
Without funds or drugs, with doctors and apothecaries volunteering odd hours when their consciences goaded them, with a staff of pious but untrained monks and nuns, the Veruline Hospital was where the poor went to die.
Derkhan had made her way past the doorman, ignoring his queries as if she were deaf. He raised his voice at her, but he did not follow. She had ascended the stairs to the first floor, towards the three working wards.
And there . . . there she had hunted.
She remembered stalking up and down past clean, worn beds, below massive arched windows full of cold light, past wheezing, dying bodies. To the harassed monk who scurried up to her and asked her business, she had blubbered about her dying father who had gone missing—stomped off into the night to die—who she had heard might be here with these angels of mercy, and the monk was mollified and a little puffed at his goodliness and he told Derkhan that she might stay and search. And Derkhan asked where the very ill were, tearful again, because her father, she explained, was close to death.
The monk had pointed her wordlessly through the double-doors at the end of the huge room.
And Derkhan had passed through and entered a hell where death was stretched out, where all that was available to ward off the pain and degradation was sheets without bed-bugs. The young nun who stalked the ward with eyes wide in endless appalled shock would pause occasionally and refer to the sheet clipped to the end of every bed, verifying that yes the patient was dying and that no they were still not dead.
Derkhan looked down and flipped a chart open. She found the diagnosis and the prescription. Lungrot, she had read. 2 dose laudanum/3 hours for pain. Then in another hand: Laudanum unavailable.
In the next bed, the unavailable drug was sporr-water. In the next, calciach sudifile, which, if Derkhan read the chart correctly, would have cured the patient of their disintegrating bowel over eight treatments. It went on, stretched the length of the room, a pointless, informational list of what would have ended the pain, one way or another.
Derkhan began to do what she had come for.
She examined the patients with a ghoulish eye, a hunter of the nearly dead. She had been hazily aware of the criteria with which she gazed—of sound mind, and not so ill they will not last the day—and she had felt sick to her soul. The nun had seen her, had approached with a curious lack of urgency, demanding to know what or whom she sought.
Derkhan had ignored her, had continued with her terrible cool assessment. Derkhan had walked the length of the room, stopping eventually beside the bed of a tired old man whose notes gave him a week