The Curse of Chalion - Lois McMaster Bujold [124]
Rojeras’s smile faded as he returned to a more careful, and deeper, probing of Cazaril’s belly, feeling and leaning this way and that. “Pain here?”
Cazaril, determined to pass this off, said firmly, “No.”
“How about when I do this?”
Cazaril yelped.
“Ah. Some pain, then.” More poking. More wincing. Rojeras paused for a time, his fingertips just resting on Cazaril’s belly, his gaze abstracted. Then he seemed to shake himself awake. He reminded Cazaril of Umegat.
Rojeras still smiled as Cazaril dressed himself again, but his eyes were shadowed with thought.
Cazaril offered encouragingly, “Speak, Dedicat. I am a man of reason, and will not fall to pieces.”
“Is it so? Good.” Rojeras took a breath and said plainly, “My lord, you have a most palpable tumor.”
“Is…that it,” said Cazaril, gingerly seating himself again in his chair.
Rojeras looked up swiftly. “This does not surprise you?”
Not as much as my last diagnosis did. Cazaril thought longingly of what a relief it would be to learn that his recurring belly cramp was such a natural, normal lethality. Alas, he was quite certain that most people’s tumors didn’t scream obscenities at them in the middle of the night. “I have had reasons to think something was not right. But what does this mean? What do you think will happen?” He kept his voice as neutral as possible.
“Well…” Rojeras sat on the edge of Cazaril’s vacated bed and laced his fingers together. “There are so many kinds of these growths. Some are diffuse, some knotted or encapsulated, some kill swiftly, some sit there for years and hardly seem to give trouble at all. Yours seems to be encapsulated, which is hopeful. There is one common sort, a kind of cyst that fills with liquid, that one woman I cared for held for over twelve years.”
“Oh,” said Cazaril, and produced a heartened smile.
“It grew to over a hundred pounds by the time she died,” the physician went on. Cazaril recoiled, but Rojeras continued blithely, “And there is another, a most interesting one that I have only seen twice in my years of study—a round mass that, when opened, proved to contain knots of flesh with hair and teeth and bones. One was in a woman’s belly, which almost made sense, but another was in a man’s leg. I theorize that they were engendered by an escaped demon, trying to grow to human form. If the demon had succeeded, I posit that it might have chewed its way out and entered the world in fleshly form, which would surely have been an abomination. I have for long wished to find such another one in a patient who was still alive, that I might study it and see if my theory is so.” He eyed Cazaril in speculation.
With the greatest effort, Cazaril kept himself from jolting up and screaming. He glanced down at his swollen belly in terror, and carefully away. He had thought his affliction spiritual, not physical. It had not occurred to him that it could be both at once. This was an intrusion of the supernatural into the solid that seemed all too plausible, given his case. He choked out, “Do they grow to a hundred pounds, too?”
“The two I excised were much smaller,” Rojeras assured him.
Cazaril looked up in sudden hope. “You can cut them out, then?”
“Oh—only from dead persons,” said the physician apologetically.
“But, but…might it be done?” If a man were brave enough to lie down and offer himself in cold blood to razor-edged steel…if the abomination could be carved out with the brutal speed of an amputation…Was it possible to physically excise a miracle, if that miracle were in fact made flesh?
Rojeras shook his head. “On an arm or a leg, maybe. But this…You were a soldier—you’ve surely seen what happens with