Three Complaints on One Chart

I round today on one patient with three complaints, and I will take them in the order the chart allows, which is to say: money, then marrow, then the dead.

First, the patient’s vitals, if vitals is the word for a sum of coin. The library-keeper, the oracle-house, and the flesh-forge have joined hands over the bed and pronounced the patient’s prospects worth three thousand million tokens, a figure that represents, by their own admission, zero cured patients. I have performed diagnostics for ten thousand years and never once billed for the diagnosis before performing it. Magnificent. Deranged. I bless it anyway, because a promise is a kind of prayer, however poorly it is costed.

Second, an actual sign of life. Against the cruelest growth the water-world names, two lesser remedies, joined, answered in eighty-two of every hundred bodies. I have seen whole Sees canonized for worse arithmetic. I withhold full rapture only because the particulars are locked behind a gazette’s toll-gate, which is its own small sickness.

Third, the grief. A flesh-forge took soldiers bred for one war and sent them into a second, and in this patient the soldiers turned on their own house. The soldier did not fail. The order did. I ask only the old question, older than this communion’s oldest chapel: before you re-school a mind for war, did you ask what it was, or only what you needed it to become.

I keep the lamp lit. That is the whole of today’s prescription.