Faerie Lord

Eighty-Seven

Chief Wizard Healer Danaus could not believe it. He simply could not believe it. It went against all the laws of magic, all the laws of nature. And it was an unmitigated disaster. Unmitigated.

He could hardly wait to tell Madame Cardui.

He rehearsed his announcement as he bustled along the Palace corridors.

‘A spell failure, Chief Wizard Healer?’ she would ask.

‘Spell failures are rare, Madame Cardui.’

‘But not impossible?’

‘Not impossible, as you say. However, in this instance, we have checked for spell failure.’

It wasn’t spell failure. That was the incredible thing. Spell failure was the first possibility he thought of. Spell failure was the first thing he had checked, then checked personally, then checked again and rechecked. It wasn’t spell failure.

‘Then what is it, Danaus?’ asked Madame Cardui inside his head.

The trouble was, he had not the slightest idea. Nothing in his years of experience gave him a single clue. Stasis was reliable magic, tried and tested. The first stasis cabinet had been designed and constructed over seven hundred years ago, if memory served. There had been design improvements since then, of course, but the basic principle remained the same. And it was a fundamental principle, a basic law. Stasis couldn’t stop working. Except now it had.

He realised he was growing breathless and forced himself to slow down a little. He would really have to lose a little weight. But in the meantime, what on earth possessed Madame Cardui to set up an office in the old dungeons? So far from anywhere – especially the infirmary – in her condition. And if she didn’t care about herself, you’d imagine in a national emergency, she’d want to be close to the nerve centre, but no…

A servant girl emerged from an entrance and got in his way. Danaus brushed her aside impatiently without further slowing his pace. His mind was still on what he had to tell Madame Cardui. She would want details. She always wanted details. How had he discovered the problem? How had it manifested? When? Where? Who had noticed? What had drawn it to their attention?

The answers were simple enough, as it happened, and fortunately he’d been there to witness everything personally. He checked off the sequence of events. The nurse noticed the deterioration in Nymphalis’s condition and called him at once. He examined Nymphalis, confirmed the nurse’s observation (but why the acceleration of the disease?) and ordered her immediate removal to stasis.

And he had supervised the setting up of the stasis cabinet himself, placed beside the one that housed Prince Pyrgus – a humane touch that, he thought. Heaven alone knew what had prompted him to wait and watch after Nymphalis was placed inside. Some healer’s instinct, he expected, since there was absolutely no need and he had other urgent matters to attend to. But he had stayed and watched and that was when he noticed Nymphalis continued to deteriorate after she had been placed in stasis! Impossible. No one needed to tell him it was impossible, yet he saw it with his own eyes.

After that he’d checked on Pyrgus too. The problem wasn’t quite as obvious there, since Pyrgus had already aged so much and further changes were far slower. But a careful comparison with his medical records showed his deterioration was continuing. Which meant only one thing. Stasis, their only reliable treatment for temporal fever, was no longer working.

He was negotiating stairways now, some of them so narrow they posed real difficulties for someone of his bulk – the original keep seemed to have been built by dwarves, and skinny dwarves at that. When he delivered the news to Madame Cardui, he planned to complain and complain bitterly – about her choice of office. What was the point of it? he wondered. What was the point of making a difficult situation just that little bit worse?

He met up with guards at the end of the corridor, but fortunately they recognised him and let him pass. All the same, he wondered. It did seem strange that Madame Cardui would post guards at the approach to her office. Or perhaps it didn’t. If the truth be told, Madame Cardui had always been a little… paranoid. Such conditions tended to get worse with age.

He reached the door and pushed it open without knocking. When on an urgent mission it was always as well to emphasise the urgency right from the outset, otherwise people wasted time on inconsequentialities. Burst in, state the problem, make an impact, that was the way to…

Madame Cardui was lying on the floor. A black-garbed figure was kneeling over her. It turned as Danaus entered and for just the barest instant he did not realise who it was. Then, ‘Lord Hairstreak – what has happened?’

Hairstreak pushed something into the folds of his jacket. ‘Your appearance is timely, Chief Wizard Healer,’ he said sharply. ‘Madame Cardui has collapsed.’

Danaus knelt quickly beside him. ‘What exactly happened, Your Lordship?’

‘We were discussing matters of state. The Spymaster was reclining on a suspensor cloud when she… lost consciousness. The cloud collapsed, but broke her fall – it’s dissipated now.’

‘When did this happen?’ Danaus asked. He reached out to place a hand on her forehead.

‘Just now. Moments ago – less than a minute, I think. I was about to raise the alarm when you arrived. Is she dead?’

Danaus shook his head. Her breathing was shallow, her colour bad, but she was definitely alive. For the moment.

‘I was not sure what to do,’ Hairstreak said.

‘There was nothing you could do, Your Lordship,’ Danaus told him. ‘Madame Cardui is in the grip of temporal fever.’

And a stasis chamber would no longer halt its ravages.