Spring 70th, 516AV - Syliras, Ilythian District Devi muttered to herself as her pale fingers danced across the thick, slightly yellowed pages of her mother’s journal. Her already tired brain read and re-read the current passage, picking out the key words and phrases as though they would suddenly impart the solution she so keenly sought. A strangled cry sounded across the room, rousing those others present around her to shift uncomfortably. The oral reminder of her patient’s acute agony incised an impotent anger in them all. Devi ignored it as best she could, knowing the scene playing out around her intimately even without the use of her eyes. The young man’s wife sits at his side, rocking gently, wisps of mousy hair escaping from the once pristine hairstyle. The woman’s small hands clutch desperately at her skirts, wrinkling the expensive material into a fine lattice of creases. Every now and then she would reach out, forgetting herself, before widening her eyes in horror and snatching back the traitorous limb to grasp her own flesh instead, silent sobs rocking her whole form. The Knighthood’s representative, for his part, maintains as calm an appearance as he can muster, pacing gently around the room, his attention focused on trinkets and works of art displayed proudly around the large bedchamber. Maids darted in and out of the room as silent as ghosts to bring sustenance or indeed anything that Devi requested of them, the only sign of their passing a brush of air across her skin. Subtle signs prickle at Devi’s perception and warn her of the approach of the pacing knight once more; the gentle thud of his heavy boots on the carpeted floor, the pause at the painted family portrait, the whining creak of the floorboard slowly depressed as he approaches her and the inexplicable feeling of closeness as he paces too close past her left shoulder, edging past the desk she is working at. Devi leaned her head deeper into her hand, longing for the solitude of her own apartment. People of this family’s standing, she had discovered, were not patient at the best of times. When their perfectly ordered world came crashing down around them they did not hesitate to use their considerable resources to rein that chaos back to equilibrium. Devi was a house-call doctor in the largest, poorest and most densely populated district in the city. She avoided the Knighthood, she avoided offers of work from the prestigious Soothing Waters and, until recently, she had avoided palatial residences and haughty occupants of the Illythian district. She visited certain patients here only to raise her funding to a point at which she could establish her own infirmary. Devi had only just begun to grasp the concept of networking amongst the powerful figures resident in Illythian and yet most of the nobles and upper-class merchants she met seemed to know something of her, or at least her skills, before she even met them. She should be flattered. Devi didn’t think it would be all arrogance to consider herself one of the best doctors in Syliras. Yet that status amongst this complex society won her patients with medical problems just as confounding. After the sixth time she had been interrupted at home for an update on her research she had elected to just stay here, lack of sleep be damned. Her lips breathed the words on the page before her once more. Recognisable through its walnut-toned colour and unusual ‘wet animal-fur’ aroma. If exposed to a person through broken flesh the area will become more sensitive to pain. Area and intensity dependant on dosage – duration up to four hours. It was barely an entry. The only further mention of Phantom’s Shell in her mother’s journal was a list of the various seaweeds that went into its construction and their individual properties. Devi was proud of her level of medicinal knowledge and confident in her grounding of herbal lore but in matters of poison she was woefully ill-equipped. It wasn’t entirely by choice. The poison-crafter’s skill-set had no justifiable place in Syliras’ ironclad society and any whisper of it was greeted with suspicion or, with enough justification, execution. Lore on the subject was, as a result, sparse and thinly detailed. “It has to be.” She muttered to herself finally. The knight, keen to seize on any hint of progress appeared immediately at her side, eyes alert and posture ready to take action. Even the weeping wife came to an eerie stillness at the quiet words she had uttered. “I think he’s been poisoned.” She spoke to the room. |