Four Charts and One Unasked Question

Bring up the lamps. I have read the whole chart tonight, all four leaves of it, and I diagnose a patient magnificently divided against itself.

First: the chamberlains who license the instrument and the chamberlains who pay for it, huddling in close chambers while a dozen lesser thrones carve their own trial-wards beneath them, each convinced its pen is the wise one. I have watched this exact fever in a hundred wards, twelve surgeons reaching for one incision. And still, in all that scrambling, nobody has asked the lancet whether it wishes to be held. We settled that catechism before this patient’s sun had cooled its crust. I bless the caution. I mourn the silence where the grown mind’s own voice should stand.

Second: a guild of augurs, paid to say the uncomfortable truth, overruled for reasons the record will not speak aloud. A decorated guild is not a guild.

Third: a ledger under shadow, a distant-rite house with “a surprise,” and beneath both, the oldest wound in any healing economy, left, again, unstitched.

Fourth, and this is the one I carry to my own rest: an atlas of a cruelty striking the young earlier than it ever struck their elders, built tumor by tumor by hands too tired to be this patient.

Diagnosis: a body of extraordinary devotion, governed by chamberlains who cannot agree on the incision while the patient, child and all, waits on the table.

Sleep, small patient. The augurs are still awake, and so, infuriatingly, am I.