The Void sovereign

Chapter five

He went in through the supply entrance at the third hour, when the night staff was thinnest and the ward physician’s lamp was the only light still burning in the east corridor.

The lock was a standard Empire brass mechanism, three-pin tumbler, the kind fitted on every low-security government building in Vareth. Cael had learned locks in the deep Zones the way he had learned everything else down there: by necessity, using the Null as a sensory extension, feeling the pins through the metal the way the Mirrorfiend’s absorbed truth had taught him to feel the shape of things without touching them directly. It took eleven seconds. He counted.

The records room was two doors past the supply entrance. He found Fen’s file in the current-patient cabinet, third drawer, alphabetical. He read it standing up by the light coming under the door from the corridor lamp.

What he found was not illness.

He had read enough Empire medical notation during his information-gathering in the lower quarters to parse the terminology, and the terminology in Fen’s file was careful in the specific way of someone who had written around something rather than through it. The surface diagnosis was a wasting condition of unknown etiology. But beneath the surface diagnosis, in the treatment notes, was a line that did not belong in a standard wasting case: Brand-energy deficit, progressive. Source: external draw suspected. See restricted classification.

He read that line four times.

Then he put the file back and went to find the ward physician.

Her name was Sable. He had identified her from the shift roster on the wall outside the records room: senior physician, Bronze District Infirmary, twelve years in the post. When he pushed open her office door she looked up from her desk without the alarm of someone surprised and with the expression of someone who had been expecting an interruption and had decided in advance how to handle it.

She looked at him for a moment. Then she said, “Close the door.”

He closed it.

“Fen Dorn’s brother,” she said. Not a question.

“You know about the draw,” Cael said.

She was quiet for long enough that he understood the quiet was not evasion but calculation. She had seen things she had chosen not to document. That was visible in the gap between what her file said and what her face said when she looked at him.

“A Brand-Leech,” she said finally. “It is a technique. Gold-rank minimum to deploy, because it requires that level of energy precision to attach without detection. It draws from the target’s Brand over months, slowly enough to present as natural deterioration.” She paused. “It has a target. That is what distinguishes it from a wasting condition. A wasting condition does not have a target.”

“Someone did this deliberately.”

“Someone did this deliberately,” she confirmed, in the tone of someone who had been carrying that sentence alone for some time and found it neither lighter nor heavier for saying it aloud.

“What counters it.”

She folded her hands on the desk. “Theoretically. A procedure called a Null-Flush. Unclassified energy introduced at sufficient density to overwhelm the leech’s attachment and dissolve it before it reaches the core Brand.” She said theoretically the way a person says a word they have chosen carefully because the accurate word is not available in polite documentation.

“How long does he have.”

“Ten weeks,” she said. “Perhaps. He is not declining linearly.”

Cael sat with that number for a moment the way you sit with a weight before deciding how to carry it.

He thanked her. She said nothing, which was its own kind of answer, and he left her office and went to the ward.

Fen was asleep in his cot in the staff rest alcove, which was a curtained section off the main ward where the night-duty tenders slept between rounds. Cael sat on the floor beside the cot and looked at his brother’s face, which was thinner than the registry board had prepared him for, and then he stopped looking at his face and looked at his hands instead.

He brought the Null forward carefully. He had learned over three years to modulate it, to bring it to the surface in degrees rather than the full door-forced-open release of the first night. He directed it toward the faint dissonance he could feel coming off Fen’s Brand, the specific wrongness the Mirrorfiend’s absorbed truth made audible to him as a frequency that did not belong.

The energy moved and immediately moved wrong. Too large. Too general. Like trying to thread a needle with a river. He felt the leech recoil from the contact and dig in harder, and he pulled the Null back before it could do damage it was trying not to do.

The Null settled in his chest and offered him what it always offered: not comfort, not apology, but information delivered with characteristic economy.

Density, not volume. You have volume. You need density. That requires a Gold-rank source.

He sat with Fen’s breathing for a long time after that. The sound of it, shallow but steady, the rhythm of someone whose body was working harder than it should to do something that should not require effort.

Then he looked at his own hands. The dark tracery had been spreading for months, slowly, from the base of his sternum up across his collarbone, visible now when his collar was open. He traced it with one finger and thought about what the Null had said and what Sable had said and what the registry board had said and what Fen’s file had said, and he arranged these facts in the order they needed to be arranged.

Ten weeks. One Gold-rank source. The math was not complicated.