The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [112]
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Do you see what I am doing with this bowl of holy sustenance?" said the healer, a locust leg sticking out of the right corner of his mouth. "It will eat out his soul."
"Will he die?" I asked.
"That's not the worst part of it," said the old man.
"What are these drastic measures?"
"Let me just say, once I have begun, you will wish you hadn't requested I do so," he said.
"Can you cure him?" I asked.
"That," he said, lifting the bowl to lick it, "is a certainty that has roots in the very first instant of creation."
Either this man was an idiot or so great a physician that his method and bearing were informed by some highly advanced foreign culture. His dress and the manner in which he ate did not suggest the latter, but my most recent glimpse of Ingess trudging like a somnambulist along the great hall was enough to convince me that the healer's diagnosis was correct. His Royal had shriveled miserably and was totally despondent. Even that blonde hair was now disintegrating into salt and floating away in his lethargic wake.
I feared the countess would lash me with her laughter when she heard of my decision, but I told the healer right then, as he set his bowl back on the table, "Do what you must."
Then the old man's lips moved into a wide grin to reveal a shattered set of teeth. He lifted the amulet from his chest and kissed the audacious ruby at its center. "You'll live to regret this," he told me.
"I already have," I said.
The next morning I had to address the assembled royalty of the court of Reparata on the subject of Ingess and his treatment. We met in the palace theater, all fifty-two of us. I took the stage, again dressed in the fine clothes of His Royal as a way of adding authority to my words. Miraculously, Frouch spared me as I apprised them of my decision, but the others were very skeptical. How could they not be ― they had seen and met the healer.
"He's a fake," Chin Mokes cried out, and this got the others going because who better to know a forgery than the Regal Ascendiary?
"Eats insects," said the Exalted Culinarity, spitting as the stories told he had once done on the foreheads of each of his victims.
The Chancellor of Waste went right for the jugular. "He's no physician, he's Grandfather Mess. He couldn't cure a pain in the ass unless he left the room."
"He is legendary even on the remote Island of the Barking Children," I told them.
"Probably for keeping the sidewalks clean," someone shouted.
All of the jewelry of the assembled members of the court dazzled my eyes, and my head began to swim. Perspiration formed along my brow, and for the first time since coming to Reparata, I had that feeling of abandonment which had haunted my wandering for so many years.
Then the countess stood up and the others instantly quieted down. "You've all had a chance to pass wind. Now its time to get on with the necessity of saving His Royal. Unless one of you has a better plan, we
will all follow the healer's advice and see his treatment through."
The Chancellor of Waste opened his mouth wide to speak, but Frouch, without even turning to look at him said, "If you don't want me to laugh at you, you'd better reserve that part of your title that is about to issue from your tongue."
The Chancellor relented and sunk down in his seat as if to duck a derisive giggle.
Before sunrise the next morning, the treatment was begun.
His Royal lay completely naked on a bare table in the palace infirmary, rocking slightly from side to side and muttering all manner of weirdness. Frouch and I were present to represent the court during the medical procedure. Beside the healer, the young lad, Pester, Prince of the Horse Stalls, was in attendance, sitting on a stool in the corner, ever ready to do the physician's bidding. We also called for Durst, the Philosopher General, to see if he could decipher what might be Ingess's last message to us. It was